Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 21

José Aragon sat in the hard plastic chair of the waiting room, fidgeting, biting back tears as he clamped his lips together. He looked at his watch and saw the second hand travel in slow motion from one tick mark to the next. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

The center of his right hand burned, as if someone had fired a laser through it. His lower lip pushed out in a pout, Aragon kept rubbing the circular spot with his thumb. But the pain kept getting worse and worse, drilling through his skin to his bones, crawling up his hand and arm. He felt that it would never end.

He had taken pain pills the night before, moaning to his wife Rona, who looked flustered, unable to help him. He had soaked his hand in cold water, wrapped it in ice cubes. Rona had bathed the oddly pale and discolored spot in the center of his palm with medicated cream, but nothing seemed to help, not hand lotion, not ice cubes. Now in the medical center, as usual, they were making him wait all morning.

He knew it didn’t sound like much on their list of patients: burning sensation in the right hand. But José Aragon had never felt agony like this before. “Please hurry,” he muttered, all alone. “Please hurry.” He looked down at his hand again.

Rona had driven him to the Kaiser medical center the moment it opened. He had refused to let her take him to the hospital emergency room, and now he regretted that decision.

Rona had called him in sick, asking his administrative assistant to cancel his meetings. Rona had told the people in his office only that he had a medical appointment. Aragon didn’t want to raise any alarm until he knew what the problem really was.

Aragon had been sitting here for over an hour, staring at the other people, all of whom squirmed waiting for their turn; he wished they would just go away, so the next available doctor could see him.

He hated taking days off of work when he couldn’t plan ahead for it. His job was very important, and he had a great many meetings to attend, luncheons to arrange, memos to write. Granted, every worker thought he or she was indispensable, but José Aragon was the Associate Director for Technology Transfer and Defense Conversion! He couldn’t afford to miss work just because of a sore hand — and it was his writing hand too.

He stared down at it again and flexed his fingers. Oh, it hurt!

The med center intercom played a soothing Barry Manilow song, but none of the other patients in the waiting area seemed to be listening. Aragon leaned back against the hard plastic back of the chair. His breath hissed between his teeth. “Come on, come on,” he muttered and looked at his watch again.

Finally, a nurse emerged from the bowels of the clinic and read his name from her clipboard. Aragon fairly leaped out of his chair and hurried after her. His heart pounded with anticipation, relief of knowing that finally somebody would fix his hand.

But he found himself sitting in a doctor’s examination room with the door ajar, his personal manila folder stuck in a plastic bin outside. He waited fifteen more minutes for the doctor to come in.

“This will sting a little,” the doctor said as she popped off the plastic protective cap from the hypodermic. “It’s a topical anesthetic, but the needle might hurt going into your palm.”

Aragon sweated and looked up at her with a pleading expression. She had shoulder-length gray-brown hair, a soft face, and a quiet voice that gave her a gentle bedside manner. He couldn’t remember her name. Every time he went to Kaiser, they assigned him a different physician. Right now, though, Aragon wouldn’t have minded even Dr. Frankenstein if he could just make the pain go away.

“I’m not going to notice a horse needle right now,” he said. “Just give me that pain killer, please!”

She jabbed the needle into the skin of his palm like a knight in a jousting contest. Despite his assurances, Aragon did feel the sting in addition to the burning. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together, waiting for the medication to take effect.

“I’ve taken a biopsy,” the doctor said, “and we’re going to send it to the lab. I’d rather you stayed here, because if your skin is deteriorating as rapidly as you say, we’d better find out what this is.”

Aragon opened his watery eyes again. “Yes, you’d better find out what it is! And quick. I can’t take this much longer.” He didn’t feel any effect from the pain killer yet.

The doctor tossed her head, shaking her loose mane of hair back behind her shoulders. “Now, Mr. Aragon, your chart says that you work at the Livermore Lab. You’re sure you didn’t spill any chemicals on yourself or pick up radioactive material, or…?”

“I’m an administrator,” Aragon said. “I don’t work inside the actual labs. I can’t imagine where I would have come in contact with anything hazardous. The things I handle all day long are pencils and telephones.”

She pursed her lips and prodded the flat colorless skin of his palm with her fingertip. He winced. “Still looks like some kind of acid burn,” she said. “Well, if you’ll go back out to the waiting area, it’ll be an hour or so.”

Aragon hoped by that time the pain killer would have taken some effect.

It actually took closer to three hours. Every time he pestered the receptionist, she didn’t seem to know what was going on. Aragon had read all the magazines in the waiting area, even Highlights for Children and Modern Maturity. If it hadn’t been for the returning pain, he would have noticed his boredom even more.

When the nurse finally called him again, she and a companion whisked him back to one of the larger rooms with more of an air of importance. Aragon was glad to see their concern, but as he thought about that, he grew even more uneasy.

When the nurse left Aragon in the room, he saw not only his own doctor but two other consulting physicians already waiting for him. What a switch! he thought. One of the doctors, an older black man with a full moustache, stood up and said without preamble, “Let me see your hand, please.”

Aragon held out his palm, then looked to the doctor he had spoken with earlier. “Have you figured it out?”

“It’s very serious, Mr. Aragon,” she answered in her soft voice. “I must say you’ve given us quite a puzzle here.”

“Yes, yes,” the older black doctor said, pointing to the second physician. “Just what we suspected. See the liquefaction necrosis of the soft tissue? It’s probably spreading, and you can be certain the invisible damage is far worse than what we see here.”

Aragon stiffened, feeling a shiver run down his spine. “What are you talking about? What have I got?”

“It seems you came in contact with a very nasty substance, Mr. Aragon,” his own doctor said.

“It’s hydrofluoric acid, or HF. It has a delayed but severe reaction because it eats down through your skin and begins to do nerve damage. You don’t even feel it until some time after the exposure. Do you know where you could have come in contact with this?”

Aragon stammered. “Acid?” He looked wildly around the room. “Acid! But I don’t handle any chemicals whatsoever. Can you give me something for it, treatment or—?”

The black doctor interrupted curtly, placing a hand on Aragon’s shoulder. “We’re going to inject you with calcium gluconate right away. That will arrest the continuing damage in the main area. But I suspect if you came in contact with it primarily here”—he tapped the center of Aragon’s palm—“it may also have spread elsewhere. Do you feel burning sensations on the rest of your hand?”

At the mere suggestion, Aragon felt the skin on his entire body tingling and itching and burning.

“We’re going to take some more biopsy samples,” the black doctor said, “and I’m afraid the treatment is rather severe and painful — but necessary.”

“Treatment?” Aragon said, relieved that at least there was something they could do. “What treatment? I need to get back to work. Can’t you just give me another pain shot? That one seemed to work for a little while.”

His own doctor shook her head. “That merely stopped the pain, Mr. Aragon. The damage is continuing.”

“There’s only one way to remove the acid,” the black doctor said. “We must excise the surrounding tissue.”

“What?”

“Get rid of it, cut it out.”

“How do you do that?” Aragon said with rising alarm. “Do I need to schedule an operation?”

All three doctors looked at him with narrowed eyes. “We need to get you to surgery as soon as possible, Mr. Aragon. Today.”

The black doctor seemed to take glee in watching his expression. “We must excise the skin from your entire hand.”

For a moment José Aragon did not feel the pain from the acid burn in his palm as his vision turned into a closing funnel of black fuzz. He fainted.