Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2023-07-21 21:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | rosario ortiz |
WHO Rosario, with a few cameos
WHEN Late October, ending Monday 31 October 2022
WHERE NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
WHAT A year is just an arbitrary length of time. There is no flaw in this logic.
WARNINGS Hospital stuff, an infected bedsore, last-Halloween flashbacks
She wasn’t bothered about the date. She wasn’t bothered at all. She’d already talked it through with Lyra. Well, they’d talked about it. Well, Lyra had brought it up, an offhand comment during their last, too-infrequent rooftop hang, ‘bout how was almost a year since Rosario Found Out, and Rosario had said yeah, crazy, right? And maybe her breath had hitched on a not-quite-laugh, but only because it’d caught on the jagged memory of least I’m tryna achieve something, ‘stead of making stories up for fucking attention, same way the needless hush of Lyra’s tone was shrinking from some shitty fucking scientist you are, no wonder you’re this close to flunking. Here on the roof, their roof, a bag of M&Ms and a ten dollar bottle of red sat between them, the horror of the mountains and the forest was a far-off thing, but some other things were too close for comfort. But that was the point, sort of. The date was arbitrary to begin with. It was— okay, look. The whole world didn’t just suddenly change in one moment of rot and revelation, it didn’t work that way. It was dozens of moments; hundreds, maybe thousands— a whole chain of tiny collisions and warning tremors, one into another into another, building heat and pressure, and when the volcano finally went, the eruption could go on for months, years. (On the Jovian moon Io, the lava flows never stopped. The consequence of being forever trapped between the tug of its peers and the inexorable pull of its god.) Tiny collisions, like when Rosario had let Lyra wheedle her into setting foot in a frat party on purpose, or the moment a drink-buzzed teenage Carla had drifted into the eyeline of the Greek god of white boy privilege. You didn’t even notice the rattle in the windows, not at first, not till the floor gave a lurch beneath you: The moment of horrified recognition in forty-something Carla’s face upon meeting Rosario’s classmate. The moment Lyra had been ripped through a hole in reality and discovered the power in her blood. The moment Orion’s arrow had cut an arc across the sky and led Rosario to— That is, caused her to find— (no.) Led her to— Meet her aunt. She’d met her aunt. Under some gross circumstances. Just— one collision in a chain. (Rosario had run into Artemis on her last clerkship – almost literally ran into her as she’d powered through the glass sliding doors, intent on making it out of there ahead of Apollo. Artemis had caught Rosario’s arm in the instant before they collided. Her hand had been callused, and there’d been dirt under her fingernails, and her skin hadn’t been cold to the touch, hadn’t smelled of rot at all. She’d sloped a smile of recognition. “OB/GYN?” she’d guessed. Maybe she knew from Apollo. “Cool. Look me up if you ever wanna learn the real shit.”) But anyway, she wasn’t bothered about it. Just so long as she didn’t, like, think about it. Which she didn’t, you know, for the most part. She had patients, and rounds to prep for, and shelf exams to study up on. She had a half-completed lit review she should’ve finished weeks ago, oh, and an insufferable god who wouldn’t stop following her around. Most of the time, her brainspace was fully maxed out. Most of the time. The night shift worked some hell on your sleeping patterns, but it had its upsides as well. In a lot of ways, Rosario actually kinda preferred the hospital after dark. During the day, it was nonstop noise – literal, metaphorical, sometimes practically physical – but at night, as the staff thinned out and admissions slowed, you could actually begin to hear yourself think. There was time to check and double-check things. She could scrutinise her patients’ charts the way she never had time to do on a regular shift. She could work her way down the list of questions she’d accrued over the previous days, crossing each one off in turn with a satisfying stroke of the pen. She could study – on a quiet night, without even a whole lot of interruption – and feel something like control just within her grasp. But those last couple hours before dawn played tricks on everyone’s minds. That was the time when your brain got dopey. You’d catch yourself reading and rereading the same sentence without taking in a single word of it. You wrestled with what shoulda been basic mental math, and that fourth coffee just wasn’t enough to fool your body into alertness anymore. The quiet lulled you and your eyelids drooped and before you knew to pull yourself back, you’d drifted in a direction you shouldn’t— —a line in a chart blurred, came into focus wrong, became a snake that twitched once, twice, and stilled— —a flickering TV in a darkened room, a brown bear reared back on its hind legs, and neither it nor the camera seemed aware of the spear slicing towards it— —and Rosario would recoil with a gasp, feeling like she’d caught herself on the edge of a ravine, feeling gravity’s inexorable pull and the terrible awareness of the rocks so far below her. It wasn’t something you could shake off with a brisk splash of water to the face, or a fifth coffee, or some intense stretching exercises while blasting Ill Niño through her earphones, though she’d tried all three. It shadowed her, that feeling— till just after dawn, when the patient whose chart she’d been reading unexpectedly coded; till sometime around four, when the patient who’d been watching the nature documentary was rushed to an emergency C-section. She hadn’t said anything to Merlin about it. She hadn’t even told Lyra yet. Telling somebody meant she’d have to admit that it was more than just a coincidence. Rosario’s five-day stint on nights ended at 7am on a Saturday, which left her with a little under forty-eight hours to wrestle her sleeping pattern back into something resembling normal before Monday and a return to the usual predawn start. In typical bullheaded Rosario fashion, she decided to treat it like jet lag (a thing Rosario hadn’t experienced for herself, having never been on a plane or crossed time zones, but she’d read things) and keep herself awake till the sky got dark. She repeated this insistence to Cathal with growing obstinacy before falling asleep on his chest ten minutes into a movie. In her defence, Cathal was an excellent pillow. She drifted through Sunday on autopilot, half-sleepwalking, till the moment her head hit the pillow in the evening and her confused body clock decided it was time to start the day. Sleep did come – eventually – but only in restless snatches. Mostly, Rosario lay awake in the dark, staring at the yellow seep of street lights across the ceiling, and not thinking about the date. She was already on her second coffee by the time she shuffled into the hospital lecture theatre. Most of the seats were already occupied – Rosario had slept through her first alarm – but from the centre row, Apollo raised his hand in a wave and nodded to the empty space by his side. Rosario gave him a glower and kept on walking. The only other spots still free were in the front row, the seats of last resort (because every med student knew there was a difference between putting yourself forward and, well, putting yourself forward), but so be it. She was nowhere near caffeinated enough to contend with Mister Sunshine. It was a dumb choice, but that realisation didn’t catch up to her till after Doctor Fritchman had brought up the PowerPoint and turned down the lights. Her pen was in her hand. In a detached part of her mind, Rosario was conscious of the scrape of the ball point across the page, the blank white space becoming muddy with words, so she must’ve taken in some part of the lecture, but it slid through her brain like water. In that moment, in that place, there was only room for one thought in her mind, and she held onto it with a white-knuckled grip: Rosario Ortiz, you are not gonna fall asleep right now or so help you. She shoulda realised then that she was coming up on the danger zone. Overtiredness, when she was hanging over the edge of sleep, and in the late-early hours between the end of today and the beginning of tomorrow, that was when prophecy mostly caught her. Merlin said it was because fate favoured liminality. Rosario thought it was because when she was tired, her concentration took a hit. When you forgot to focus on the real, you left the unreal space to slip through. Either way— she should have realised. She looked up at the projected slide, and the dim orange glare of the overhead lights made her eyelids heavy. She hunched over her notes and found her chin drooping low, too low. Her eyes seemed to have forgotten how to focus and she kept having to squint and blink to clear them, and try not to be too obvious about it because she was sitting right in Doctor Fritchman’s eye line and these people could scent blood in the water a mile away. The jagged lines of the EKG on screen swam drunkenly in her vision. Rosario rubbed her neck, tipped her head back toward the ceiling— She squeezed her eyes shut, not soon enough. The image had burned itself onto her retinas like a photo negative, vivid green phosphenes fluorescing on the inside of her eyelids as stars in the void. Two bright spots marking the shoulders, another two for the knees; between the pairs, a distinctive line of three forming the hunter’s belt. When she opened her eyes, it hung there an instant longer, a fading ghost image that paled from blue, to white, to yellow, to red. Then it was gone, leaving Rosario with only Fritchman’s gaze bearing down on her. She got off lightly. Some attendings thrived off humiliation. They’d stop an entire class dead to zero in on the girl who’d checked her phone at the wrong moment. They would belittle and they would yell and they wouldn’t be satisfied till they saw tears. Fritchman only threw the one question at her, only made her stammer for an interminable minute round an answer she would’ve known if she’d been paying full attention, before he addressed the rest of the class. “Anybody else want to help her out?” Of course it was Apollo’s voice that swept in to fill her abashed silence. Apollo loved helping. When the lecture was over, Rosario was the first out of her seat. She cut a brisk path for the door, ahead of a stream of students, while Apollo was still caught in conversation with the girl beside him. (Sometimes – it was happening more often lately, since she’d met Marcie panicking in the stairwell – she wondered whether she was actually evading him, or whether he was just indulging her. She was pretty sure she knew the answer, so instead she told herself what did it matter so long as he wasn’t in her face, and tried not to think about the last time he’d cornered her on her roof, or what he might demand from her the next time.) A dull thudding reverberated in her ears as Rosario’s feet carried her down one corridor and into another. The sight of the constellation, glittering darkly in a corner of the speckled-patterned ceiling panel, had tugged loose the thread of a memory of frost-tipped grass and billowing breath, a meteor streaking outward from Orion’s bow, wonder on the precipice of becoming horror. If she let herself worry at that thread, if she really focussed on it, Rosario had the alarming feeling the whole tightly-wadded ball might come unravelled. She quickened her step instead, matching her feet to the thumping in her head, till the noise took on a form, resolving into a single repeating word. Asshole asshole asshole asshole. She didn’t know who the resentful chorus was for and it didn’t really matter. There were plenty of candidates. Orion was an asshole. Fate was an asshole. Fritchman was an asshole. The day was an asshole. Apollo was definitely an asshole. The stupid physics-breaking reality of gods and visions: an entire, black hole-sized buttload of ass. It helped, somehow. By the time she found the greasy sunlight of the hospital courtyard, Rosario’s shoulders were taut and the germ of a headache was pressing on the back of her eyes, but something in her throat had thawed. She sat, changed her mind, stood again and began a slow pace of the square. Okay. Okay, so maybe she was a little— preoccupied by the date. Just a little bit. And seeing Orion was— (an instant of sickening unreality, sitting inside the heated classroom but breathing in frigid mountain air god oh god it’s all happening again it’s) —unhelpful. But that was projecting. She’d seen him other of times, plenty of times. The days after last Halloween, when she’d been trying to fit together the pieces of Archer with the fresh shards of gods are real. Orion had been there then, in Google ads for telescopes, a soccer t-shirt on the L train. And later on as well, round the time Apollo decided to buy the building: a constellation in grease spatter, the title of a book wedged down the back of one of Merlin’s shelves. Not a warning like the Crow, grabbing her full by the shoulders, just a… tap. The paving stones were broad, grey things. Without thinking about it, Rosario landed each step in the centre of the slabs, assiduously avoiding the cracks. Even the first night, if you left aside the— details— Orion had just been there to point the way. Nudge her to take notice of the truth that was there in front of her. So— there. Not an emergency. Just crappy timing, and something to dissect later with Merlin. Nothing to it. (Or maybe, the afterthought tickled her mind as she legged it for rounds, maybe Fate was hung up on the date, too.) If the long hours and frenetic workload ever wore on Dr Kaufman, she never showed it. No matter the time of day, she carried herself with a straight-backed confidence. She was not a woman who bent; no, she saw to it that the world bent to her, whether it be the boys’ club of NewYork-Presbyterian or a complex congenital heart disease or her own curly hair, which hugged her scalp in glossy black waves, ending at the nape of her neck in an immaculate bun. Rosario craved that level of self-assurance. When Kaufman had grilled her to a cinder the first day of rounds, she’d taken it as a challenge, and, set on rising to it, she’d begun setting her alarm earlier, revising harder, raking through every detail of her patients’ charts in preparation. Then one morning, Kaufman had taken Rosario aside and advised her in lowered tones of almost-but-not-quite-concern that she wouldn’t get taken seriously as a physician if she relied on a boy like Goldenhawk to open doors for her. For once, it wasn’t actually about Apollo. Rosario had figured that out eventually, once she stopped fixating on giving Kaufman the right answers long enough to pay attention to how Kaufman was doling out the questions. To which students were getting the merely tough questions and which ones were getting the gruelling cross-examinations. To the looks of tight-lipped sympathy from residents, and to the gossip of loose-lipped nurses. Put simply: Dr Kaufman was the only woman attending in the cardiology department, and that was how she liked it. The absolute unfairness of it burned. Rosario had been busting her ass for the last two years trying to keep her grades up, but three rotations into clinical year and it was starting to feel like nobody cared about merit at all, or at least not so much as they cared about how much she smiled or what connections she had or whether she had tits. She felt stupid for thinking med school would be somehow different from the rest of the world, and feeling stupid made her angry. This morning’s rounds brought a barrage of questions from Kaufman about another student’s patient and Rosario could feel her face slowly reddening as she strained her uncooperative memory. Her fellow students’ eyes slid away from her, either in sympathy or second-hand embarrassment – all except Apollo’s, which watched her steadily. When Kaufman finally turned her back, Rosario speared him with her dirtiest look. At lunch, her phone pinged with a message from Estella. It wasn’t anything major, just a link to a new paper with an added note that Rosario might find it interesting, but reading the words she was flooded with a brief, complicated warmth, as though she’d taken too big a gulp of cocoa and her oesophagus had clenched around it, stinging her chest on the way down. When she went to call on Mrs Clay, Rosario found her patient’s bed empty, the covers pushed back. In the armchair beside it was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve, legs sprawled out in front of him, head buried in a library book. Rosario hovered uncertainly at the threshold. “Um… hi.” She smiled at the kid, reaching for the friendly warmth that seemed to come so easily to all the peds residents and achieving only an uncomfortable sort of rictus. “Is your—” she hesitated on the assumption, unsure if she was about to put her foot in it, “—mom…?” “MOM!” The kid was bellowing it out before Rosario’s mouth was done forming the first ‘m’. A woman’s voice, muffled by the closed bathroom door. “Is that the doctor? Tell her I’ll be a minute, honey!” The boy gave Rosario a wordless look and a shrug: You heard that, right? So Rosario waited, and the kid waited too, and the seconds stretched out like taffy between them till Rosario felt she had to say something, just to break the silence. “So um, what are you reading?” With another, unenthusiastic shrug, the kid held up his book to show her the cover. She immediately wished she hadn’t asked. She recognised it, not because she’d read it – Rosario had never had a whole lot of patience for fantasies – but because it was impossible to go through an American middle school anytime in the past fifteen years and not see those covers. Chicky had mainlined all of them a few summers ago and for a while it’d been impossible to have a conversation with her that hadn’t veered into Greek mythology and demigods. But she made some sounds of interest (the boy’s disinterest couldn’t be more plain) and tried not to look visibly relieved when the bathroom door opened and her patient emerged, one hand wrapped around an IV stand. It was only afterwards, as she was leaving the room, that Rosario’s eye caught on the book’s title: The Blood of Olympus. “Nursing home keeps bouncing him back to us,” Morgan explained as he strode along the corridor. Rosario lagged a step behind the resident, rolling a pen between her fingers. She’d begged it off the nurses’ station when her own had crapped out, and been waved away when she tried to hand it back. The silver metal pen clip was shaped like an arrow. Fate’s nudges were beginning to feel a little bit like a slap upside the head. “This time’s sounding like another infected pressure ulcer.” Bedsores. Rosario’s stomach gave an involuntary twist. She hadn’t meant to let the apprehension bleed into her expression, but it musta done, because Morgan glanced back over his shoulder, met her eyes with a smile of understanding. “Believe me, they’re nobody’s favourite. I’ll lead on this one, but I want you observing.” The first thing the patient said was, “Took you long enough.” He gave them a milky-eyed glower from beneath a wiry thatch of brows. The smell of faeces and unwashed laundry lingered in the ward. “Hello, Mr Bowman—” “What??” The man boomed over the top of Morgan, cupping a hand to an ear. Morgan gave it another try, louder and a little slower. “Mr Bowman, I’m Doctor Gray. We’re here to take a look at—” “What happened to the other doctor?” If it’d been Rosario, her shoulders would’ve been creeping towards her ears, but Morgan was the people kind of doctor. Nothing ever seemed to get to him. With each rumbling interruption, he simply pulled himself back, listened, then picked up again without any indication of hurry. It took a few minutes of this to communicate to the old man that they were, in fact, his doctors, and that they had come to look at his wound. With gloved hands, Morgan peeled back the dressing. His wide shoulders blocked Rosario’s view of the bedsore and his expression told her nothing much: it was perfectly neutral as he examined the site. After a moment or so, he waved Rosario closer. “See what you think.” She was already holding in her breath, steeling her stomach for the sight of it, but it was the smell that hit her with a brute force. A smell like— god. Like meat gone bad. Rot mixed with shit mixed with spoiled eggs, and— and a sickening kind of sweetness that— (don’t) that reminded her of— (maggots wriggling in the eye sockets, a grey and bulging tongue, the slimy spill of intestines stop stop stop STOP) She wasn’t aware of taking a step back till she didn’t feel the crunch of leaf litter underfoot. The fluorescent lights of the ward swam around her, too bright. “I,” she rasped, “I need to—“ She fled. Morgan met her when she came out of the bathroom. The back of her throat burned with bile; her mouth still tasted of rot. He didn’t look pissed. Rosario had been bracing for pissed, tensing her shoulders for the chewing out she knew damn well she deserved, but all he said was, “You okay?” She nodded, not managing to meet his eyes. “You can’t let that happen in front of a patient.” He spoke quietly, seriously, and the sympathy in his face pinched her. “I know you know, but I’ve gotta say it. Patient doesn’t know what’s going on, they gotta take their lead from you. They see you panic—” “I know. Sorry. It won’t happen again.” She said the words, heard them come out of her mouth. But she tasted putrid-sweetness, and she wasn’t sure she believed herself. |