The Refugee Sentinel (4 page)

The scanning gun chilled Sylvya’s palm with its steely weight. The infrared beam bit into Mr. Bormann’s middle finger then marched north, over the knuckles and the rest of his palm: a textbook MRI. Once the scan reached the wrist, Mr. Bormann’s identity flashed on the screen: seventy-two, colon cancer survivor, and a varsity discus athlete from the mid-seventies. The rest of the man’s personal data – preferences, finances and affiliations – hid behind a digital ULE moat her nursing credentials couldn’t access. She was only seeing his medical records.

Digging through a patient’s medical past reminded Sylvya that everyone’s information, hers included, was out there: naked, digital and in real-time. Mr. Bormann’s fingers touched her hair. In thought, she had not noticed him waking up. “You remind me of a daughter I have back home,” he said.

Sylvya pulled back and smiled at him, more out of courtesy than candor. He smiled back. People didn’t smile as much, she thought. Not like her early years, when the Vegas Strip wasn’t covered in mud and Earth still had a functioning South Pole. Back then, she taught herself to sleep on her feet, in ten-minute increments, and scoffed at concepts like weekends and time off. Saving lives came at the price of one’s personal comfort and she wanted to be the best in the business. Wasn’t that what nurses were supposed to do? Then the ice caps melted and even the workaholics like her had lost faith they could make a difference.

In the interim, Mr. Bormann had transitioned into a full attack. “My daughter tells me she can’t find an eligible man her age. Not right, I tell you. Beautiful creatures like my daughter and you living alone. What’s the world coming to, I say?”

Sylvya wished she could rewind time and go back to being that young nurse from Mountain View once again. When had she started hating her job? She sprung to her feet as soon as the scanner’s ding announced that her patient’s condition was within norm.

“Don’t forget to finish your dinner tonight, Mr. Bormann,” she said.

“You try finishing that goop.”

“It’s a nutritious meal designed to bring your cholesterol down.” She had to go. “See you tomorrow.”

She had one more patient left on her round before she could go home. Curfew had simplified her life into binary morsels. Run to your home station to scan your right palm. File an explanation with the local precinct if you scanned an hour late. Scan three hours late and pay a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine. Scan later still, and spend the equivalent amount of time in jail. She couldn’t afford any more curfew infractions. Truth be told, she couldn’t afford a single one, the way her marriage stood with David.

Sylvya entered the room of her last patient for the day, two rooms down the hall from Mr. Bormann. An oxygen pump filled the cramped quarters with a faint hum. A thick bandage covered the patient’s eyes. The machine hum reminded Sylvya of crickets singing in the yellowing grass of her childhood Septembers. She smiled at the thought then examined the patient’s chart. His name was Colton Parker and he’d been going through bouts of wakefulness and stupor. She wondered how much alcohol it had taken to knock out his eyesight for this long. He seemed awake tonight and she decided to give it a go.

“Good evening, Mr. Parker. You came to us quite inebriated.”

“Great, another genius deducing that vertigo, temporary blindness, and a migraine constitute a hangover,” he said.

“You ought to stop drinking,” she pressed on. “Another bout of this may kill you.”

“You’ll tell me Santa isn’t real, next.” He attempted to lift his head, but couldn’t. “On the bright side, not being able to see isn’t half as scary as I’d thought. There’s always a bright side to things if you look hard enough, Doc. No matter how screwed up the original side looks.”

“I’m Nurse Timmons, Mr. Parker, and you’re in the Mountain View Hospital in Las Vegas. ER admitted you four days ago with alcohol poisoning and performed a minor abdomen surgery to stop internal bleeding before transferring you to us.”

“In my condition, Mrs. Timmons, no surgery is a minor surgery and a minor one is a disaster. How did I get to the ER?”

“A West Summerlin sanitation worker found you unconscious on the street and drove you over in his dump truck. Without him, who knows if you’d be alive now.”

“Good info. But I am alive and ready to check out.” A coughing spasm ripped through his chest and Sylvya wiped his face with a moist towel. He sneezed. “Did I get you, nurse? They say tragedy plus time equals comedy, so if you’re not laughing yet, you will be soon.”

She wasn’t laughing. “You’re not in a comedy, Mr. Parker. You’re diagnosed with a broken collarbone, two STDs, a Grade Three concussion, a laceration wound to the abdomen and failure of both kidneys.” She sounded like a ref announcing a roughing-the-passer penalty. “Your right kidney is out of commission and your hemoglobin is fifty-three percent below normal due to the blood loss from your abdomen laceration.”

“Are you impressed yet?”

“You can forget about discharge for another week. And you better have a good insurance policy.”

Sylvya headed to the door but turned. “Your medical condition is not the only reason you’re here. The circumstances of your check-in have made you a suspect in unreported crimes in the Summerlin area. A Las Vegas Police Officer is stationed outside your room. Not that it’s any of my business, of course.”

“So, whose supervision am I under, Nurse Timmons?” he said. “Yours or our armed friend outside?” Then in a more serious tone, “I hope my jokes don’t offend you.”

“Call me, Sylvya.” She smiled.

“No flirting, nurse. I’m a criminal with a busted kidney and a bunch of pee-hole warts to boot.”

“First, you don’t sound like a criminal. Second, you don’t have genital warts. Third, I’m married and fourth, you’re not my type.”

“You’ve got me all figured out, haven’t you?” He raised his arms. “But I’ll bet you rose oil to catheter fluid I’m not the good guy you think I am. Once upon a time, I might have been. It might have been the only thing I ever wanted to be.”

Then he slumped his head into the deep pillow. “And Sylvya?” he said, “Please, call me Colton.”

Colton wandered in, alone and sober, past the frosted glass entrance. Then the human bark hit him. “Where to, chief?” A shaven head attached to an overweight torso, no neck in-between, unpacked itself from the check-in booth. “It’s a hundred to get in.”

“Didn’t know about the cover,” Colton said. “Sorry.” Music blaring from the inside and around a corner drowned out his words before they had made it to the shaved head’s ears. The ears would not have cared, regardless. “Here’s an ID, too.” Colton handed a one-hundred-dollar bill folded around his driver’s license, like he was ashamed of how his DMV picture had come out.

“I just need the cash,” the bouncer said, ripped a crumpled receipt from the cash register and shoved it in Colton’s hand. “And, welcome to Déjà Vu.”

A sanitizer smell with a sweet aftertaste hit Colton’s face. The smell of sweat and semen hit him a second later. He stopped after taking a few steps in, as the dark corridor spilled into a large room. What was his plan for the night? Hire a stripper and have her read him Hemingway? The cheap sanitizer drilled deeper inside his nostrils. Colton exhaled, how could anything associated with this type of smell even begin to replace his Sarah?

“Move, dude,” he was shoved to one side as a group of men poured inside the joint. He looked around the room – several rows of chairs, lined with librarian-like precision, faced a beige stage. A black female, wearing nothing but her skin was hurling herself at an aluminum pole. Countless neon dots, like butterflies, bathed her supple tattooed body.

Was it ten years? He couldn’t place the last time he was at a place like this.  The tattooed girl molesting the aluminum pole had to be in physical pain from the exertion, but she didn’t look it. On the other hand, what did he know? Maybe the current generation of strip-club goers required athleticism from their dancers or maybe he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate tonight’s performance and accompanying sweat. A waitress materialized, invisible until she got within inches of his nose. Her uninvited palm rested on his shoulder. “What would you like to drink, honey?”

“Do you have Sprite?”

“Yes, honey, we do.” The palm caressed his cheek and twirled away.

“Hey, hey - come on fellas,” a DJ’s voice rose from beside the stage. The black dancer scurried off, arms cradling oversized breasts. Another stripper took over and struck a pose, expecting a cue to allow her to move. “It’s three dances for the price of one, guys. Our lovely ladies will ride you senseless, if you know what I mean… here they come. On your right, you have the lovely Fiona…” The pole-bashing black dancer had returned, now wearing a white bikini. “…and on the left? Yes, the lovely Melody.” Fiona and Melody waved with enthusiasm fitting for an Independence Day rally. “Come on, you, guys. Six hundred bucks gives you three songs with a gorgeous lovely lady.” The women stepped down and two different dancers jumped onstage. “And the lovely Amber comes purring on your left then the lovely Summer is on your –” The humid line of female nudity filed on, with each pair taking stage for less than a minute, a quick break before returning to their next lap-dance. The DJ’s barrage of “lovelies,” the same word describing all girls, annoyed Colton. But he also smiled at the thought that in a room full of nudes, lazy grammar grabbed his attention the most.

A hand squeezed his shoulder, firm yet not too much. “Are you taking dances tonight, honey?”

A petite girl in her early twenties leaned on his chair. She wore a long wig and green contacts with black pupils that made her eyes seem as cold as alligator’s. Nonetheless, her small bra and frail frame reminded him of Sarah. Underneath the makeup, the girl might have been pretty. He wasn’t sure where to put his eyes.

“I charge four hundred, not three – that all right?” Through her alligator eyes, Colton saw how out of place he must look. A nube or not, he wasn’t going to let a girl half his age take him for a fool.

“Sorry,” he said with a short stammer, “I can only do three.” The girl didn’t flinch, maybe she didn’t hear.

“But it’s a three-for-one deal, honey.” Each honey-ending sentence slapped Colton’s face like a dead fish.

“Plenty of other folks here would take you up on this.”

She rolled her eyes and moved to the next table – a rowdy group wearing orange hardhats. Colton stood straighter in the chair. His Sprite came back accompanied by another “honey,” this time from the waitress. He held the paper cup with both hands, sipped on the diluted soda and looked in the eyes of the next dancer to come on stage, wishing she weren’t naked. Why did he think strippers could replace Sarah? Another squeeze on his shoulder, same place and strength. He turned.

“What if I do it for three hundred, honey?” Alligator eyes must have struck out with the Home Depot crew.

“Wouldn’t do that to you.”

She grimaced. “Then how come you haven’t taken a dance from anyone else?”

So Déjà Vu monitored his dance orders too? He wondered what analytics system they must have installed here. “You’re the first one who asked.”

“You want me to send another girl?”

His head shook. “No. I was leaving.” Colton gulped the last of the Sprite from the sweaty paper cup and rose from the plastic chair. What would Sarah have said if she saw him here? What would she think? Yet another “honey” hit him within two steps.

“No refill,” he said, “I’m leaving.”

“I wasn’t offering one and didn’t mean to stop you.”

Colton turned and saw a blonde with a pierced lower lip.

“Or I could talk like this if you prefer,” she said with a fake British accent, then pulled two chairs and sat in one of them.

Sylvya hung her scrubs and shut her locker for the day. She pressed the down button on the elevator and looked down the quiet row of patient rooms along the corridor. All doors closed, no clattering of heels or squeaking of equipment wheels. The fifth floor was dozing off like a senior taking a long nap.

David and the kids were waiting at home. Dallas was going to babble about how he was adjusting to the new grade at school and Sadie was going to pester her to knit together, before Sylvya had taken off her shoes, and cuddle at her side with eyes gobbling every turn of Sylvya’s knitting hooks.

Sure, Sylvya would have to tolerate David’s presence for five minutes and hide in her study, as if doing chores, until he left the apartment. But on a positive note, since moving out of their old house, both David and the past were loosening their grip on her, one day at a time. Sylvya had spent too much of her precious life in that house. The furniture dings, the colors when you walked in, or the fast food in the fridge had served as constant reminders of the years she would never get back. She hated that house, even with the kids, and would take them to Chuck E. Cheese or hunker down at the Starbucks across the street, after work. But she had started to heal in the new apartment.

As the hospital elevator buzzed open, she hesitated and didn’t walk in. What if she checked on the patient in Room 34 one last time? Just a quick scan of his vitals. She could still catch the last Bunker Hill train, if she hustled. She liked spending time with the Room 34 patient. At first, she thought it was because his alcohol poisoning and the guard at the door tugged at her motherly instincts. Whatever… she didn’t want to overthink it and she’d have plenty of time to narrow it down on the train tonight.

The cop was playing some video game on his smart watch. He glanced at her long enough to die on the level he was on then stretched his back and, with the level lost, gave Sylvya a short nod.

“Quiet shift, I hope?” she said.

“The best.”

“I’ll be a couple of minutes.” She sailed past, her shoes playing cymbals against the quiet linoleum. Room 34 was heavy with dusk. The man’s name was Colton, she recalled, and he was sound asleep. Sylvya walked up to his bed and stood over his pillow like the Tooth Fairy looming over a sleeping child. His breathing was firm and his vitals were solid. She cracked a pleased smile, the type that didn’t show her teeth. She had salvaged this ship. The first day they had brought him in was like playing “Wheel of Fortune” with his life, where all spaces, except a couple, read “Certain Death.” A goner. A creep too, if she looked at his charts: a broken body, busted internals and a few STDs for good measure.

Against these odds, she had nurtured him to life, like a mother. But unlike the kids, whom she shared with David and their grandparents, this Colton was her sole creation. Years after the floods had drowned her desire to give to others more than she gave herself, he had proven to her she was a capable nurse and a good woman, too. And she had birthed him, all on her own: her primal right. Sylvya’s breasts felt tender and she locked the door. Still and quiet. His unshaven face swelled in her eyes and she unbuttoned her coat and rested a hand on her belt. She stretched her other hand over his sleeping face, an inch from the parted lips. His breath caressed her palm with billows of warmth. She stood erect and motionless by his bed but in her imagination she held him with unspeakable passion. The hand on her belt travelled lower. Sylvya closed her eyes.