Wendy Knows
Usually the guy would do everything on his computer, which was no good for me. But sometimes the nurse or whoever would give him a sheet and he’d have to peck in the order himself. I did a walkby with my box, then another with an extra box on top. I was proud of that, really going with it. I saw enough: the sheet was a big scrip, like I’d guessed. You can’t say things like holy grail because everybody says that, but, for me, really, it was. I wouldn’t kill anyone, I wouldn’t hurt anyone, but for a scrip pad there are some people who would. I know exactly what literally means, and I mean literally.
The back area was empty but too clean, and the ER wasn’t someplace you could hang around and pretend to be busy. I walked through quickly and grabbed as much paper as I could then went into the bathroom and sorted until I found a chart signed by RA Banerjee, MD. I dropped the rest of the papers on a hallway chair—Oh, how’d they end up there?—because I’m not a bad person.
“Doctors are the biggest pushers,” Tony always said, and it really was like that for him, he got a crazy number of pills when he totaled his bike and that did it. “I should have been a doctor.” That’s true, too. If any junkie could have been a doctor, it was Tony.
It didn’t look so difficult, anyway. Everyone in the ER moved a little more slowly than they could, talked about TV shows that were just something to talk about, some speaking Spanish like what they had to say was a big secret. I felt like I was in one of those stupid shows with a countdown clock. I went down one corridor and another, as confusing as any hospital is. Then there it was, a tiny office with Dr. Rajiv Banerjee on a door I knew wouldn’t open, except it did.
I heard he got in trouble for that, and for having the scrip pad out. But how bad was it, really? The scrips were only good in that hospital, it said that all across the top, and I only took one sheet. Tony had said, “You’ll know what to do,” and I hadn’t believed him. But it was as if he’d been guiding me the whole way, whispering in my ear like it was a techy action film and the brown sofa was his blacked-out control room full of beeping screens.
I slapped down the sheet with its pretty-good copied signature right on the counter’s edge, like I didn’t care. But the guy knew something was up. “Who’s that for?”
“The doctor.”
“Which?”
“Bannerjee.” And then, because why not, because I wanted to be interesting, too, “You know, Ban, Ban, I wanna be sedated.”
That got him to pick it up, at least. “This isn’t for sedatives.”
“I don’t know, man, whatever it says. I can’t read it.” I gave him a look like we’d been joking forever about doctors’ handwriting.
“He planning on killing a horse?”