CHAPTER 1 #3
At four o'clock I run a chart down for the broken-nose second-year and on the way back I take the freight elevator by accident.
The button I press is the right button on the wrong panel. The doors open. I step in. The car descends. Three stories. No buttons for the intermediate floors. The car stops in a corridor that is not the corridor I came down to.
The air is colder than the hospital above by maybe eight degrees.
It is drier. Industrial dehumidifiers run somewhere up the corridor.
The walls are poured concrete with overhead cable trays.
The hum here is a different hum than the autoclaves on Floor 9 — lower, slower, a centrifuge spinning down somewhere along the east wall.
A man is at the corridor's far end.
He is tall — six-four, six-five — in charcoal trousers and a black roll-neck and a white coat heavier and longer than the surgical coats upstairs, the kind a research director wears when he stands in a room of negative-eighty freezers.
His hair is shoulder-length, black, tied back with a black elastic.
His skin is olive-tan. His left hand is flat on a door he is closing with the right.
His attention lands on me. The look takes nine seconds. I mark them. He is not in a hurry. The silence between us is not uncomfortable for him; the silence is a thing he is using.
"Wrong floor, Ms. Rossi."
His voice is quieter than any voice I have heard in this building today, Italian-cadence English with a clip in the consonants like a man who learned to speak in spaces where sound carried.
"Yes, sir," I say. "The freight, I — sorry."
"No apology required. Press eleven. The elevator will return, and so will you."
He stays at the door at the far end of the corridor with his left palm braced on it, fingers slightly spread, with his hand spread on the wall as if he is about to speak from it.
I step back into the elevator. I press eleven. The doors close. The car rises.
I file the wing. I file the hum. I file the corridor's length and the unnumbered door at the far end and the look that lasted nine seconds and the precise consonants of Ms. Rossi.
I do not yet know his name.
---
At five forty in the cafeteria there is a second teabag in a small white bag on my tray. The note is one word.
Welcome.
The hand is the same. The bergamot is the same. The hunter-green is not in the room. I drink the water. I take the bag with me.
---
At eight forty I am at OR-1's anteroom sink scrubbing my hands at the end of the shift. The autoclaves are still going somewhere I cannot see. The hum sits at the sternum where it has sat since nine.
The day has put me in front of three of them.
Nikolai across the dark walnut desk, his right thumb on the crown of the watch, the silver at the temple covering half of the graze.
The cardiothoracic surgeon at the head of the table in OR-3, the four-strand cord at his left wrist, the four-tap of his right index finger against his thumb, as he found me through the glass on the count of four.
The man at the door at the end of the cold corridor in sub-basement two, his left palm braced on a wall, his quiet voice, the nine seconds.
Three pairs of eyes today.
The fourth pair I have not yet been put in front of. Beatriz mentioned a trauma attending at rounds tomorrow; I will meet him in the bay.
I dry my hands.
---
The Murray Hill walk-up is on East Thirty-Third between Second and Third. The radiator clanks twice when I open the door and twice again when I close it.
I take off the coat. I unclip the lanyard. I set the pediatric pin face-up on the small table by the door so I will see it in the morning. The medallion stays on.
The phone on the kitchen counter has a notification I have not read.
One missed call from the St. Margaret's pediatric supervisor's office.
Sister Mary Catherine has called once at six forty-seven to check on my first day.
Sister Mary Catherine leaves the line clean; if it matters, she calls again. That is her mercy and her discipline.
I will call her tomorrow.
In the bathroom the basin is small and white and chipped at the rim in a way the basin in the OR-1 anteroom was chipped at the rim.
I run the water hot. I take the bar of soap in my right hand and lather and wash; thirty seconds; rinse.
Again; thirty seconds; rinse. A third time, because the chlorhexidine smell is the kind that has to be worked out of the cuticle, because the bone hum of the autoclaves is still in my sternum at nine in the evening, because washing the hands three times is the count I have given my hands.
The chrome above the taps shows me my own face, and the auburn knot, and the medallion at the V of the camisole I have changed into.
Instruments first. Exits second. Breath last.
Instruments — none, the toothbrush, the bar of soap. Exits — one, the door behind me. Breath — long, on the third.
I turn off the water.
I counted four shadows under the lamp. I counted them again. There were still four.