Demons (15 page)

Well, said Abbie, once the chicken wraps and chips were on the table, where was I?
Yes, the gang of four. I’m not boring you, am I? I shook my head—but I couldn’t help
thinking how different this trip would have been if I were still in my car, listening
to my talking book, eating my trail mix, stopping when I felt like it to take shots.

Abbie took a big bite out of her wrap and stared chewing. Because, you know, she
said, the funny thing is, telling it all to you, it sounds so stupid. Do you know
what I mean? Six women coming up with this scheme, let alone having the balls to
go through with it. Who does that kind of stuff any more? We felt like we had to
stick it out—if we were smart there’s no reason, we thought, why we couldn’t keep
adding phantom patients to the elective-lists for years. We’d jumped ahead too quickly,
that was all, and needed to pull it back. Lisa and Ange were out of the group but
we felt like we could trust them; nurses are loyal to their kind. But you should
eat your lunch.

I took a bite and put it back on my plate. Abbie pushed the bucket of chips across.
The woman behind the counter called to say our coffees were ready and Abbie got up
to get them. I’m trying to remember everything, said Megan, all the detail. She sipped
her tea. Pscht, that’s cold, she said.

So, said Abbie, all the best-laid plans. When we started our shift together the following
Monday the game had changed again. Our four ward doctors had been replaced—we’d seen
none of these new ones before and it seemed as if they’d been selected to be as up
themselves as possible—and an auditor was assigned to ‘study our work practices’.
He shadowed us for most of that afternoon and then appeared out of nowhere again
on Tuesday. We played things carefully, dropped a few extra patients onto the lists
but did nothing else to arouse suspicion. On Wednesday the auditor called a few of
us into his office to ask questions; we handled them okay but things were getting
hot, we knew it, and we needed a new strategy.

That Friday at the pub we started brainstorming ideas: we either had to come up with
something new or close the project down. We went through a whole list of scenarios,
but still hadn’t come up with anything inspiring when Beckie, in her call-a-spade-a-spade
sort of way, said: What we need are some
actual
patients, to put them off the scent.
If we could have one or two
actual
people pop up in the beds we’ve assigned to phantom
patients, just when the auditors come looking for them, they’ll start to think that
maybe these patients
are
real, the lists
are
growing and these nurses
are
working
beyond the call of duty to clear them? Then, said Beckie, we might be able to get
them off our backs and start bumping the numbers up again.

And that’s when Keely mentioned the actors.

Keely was the one, said Abbie, continued Megan, taking the fresh cup of tea Lauren
had poured, who was doing the writing course, remember? She’d met a girl there, Simone,
whose boyfriend, Hayden, was an actor, and he’d been making some money on the side
doing med-student patient simulations—stroke, pancreatic cancer, or whatever. He
also did psychiatric stuff. He’d get a worksheet a couple of days beforehand with
a list of symptoms to study and rehearse and a list of questions that the students
might ask towards diagnosis. Then, on the day, for an hour and a half, sometimes
two, Hayden would moan and groan, clutch his stomach, limp, whatever, and in role
answer the questions the students then put to him. The pay’s great, said Keely, better
than hospitality. Hayden and a few of his actor friends had been doing it for a
while.

If we could offer these guys a bit of money, she said, I see no reason why they couldn’t
play patients for us, at short notice if we needed, on the day for example when we
had our ward inspections. We’d give them a name, age, background, ailment and a list
of symptoms and ask them to swot up, then we’d ‘admit’ them and have them on display
when the ward doctors or auditors came around.

But how do we pay them? I said. From the Christmas fund, said Beckie. What Christmas
fund? said Keely. The Christmas Fund, said Beckie, that we get all the other guilty
nurses to contribute to—the Christmas fund that will ‘pay for dinner and drinks and
a visit from Santa’ at the end of the year. Keely, Heather and I took a while to
catch on. We’ll let the others who know what we’re doing but who don’t want to be
involved ease their consciences by contributing: it’s a small payment, we’ll explain
to them, for the benefits we’re bringing to your wards. They won’t disagree, trust
me, said Beckie. To the Christmas Fund! she said, and we all raised our glasses.

It worked a treat. We gave Hayden cholelithiasis, gallstones, a mild attack. We
called him Callum Broadbent. We brought him in through the back door, doctored the
records to show he’d come in the night before through Emergency, marked up his chart
to say he’d been given morph on arrival and endone since and that he seemed to have
settled down. We had him set up in bed watching telly when the ward doctor came through
that morning around eleven. The doctor was in a hurry—they are always in a hurry.
He checked the patient’s chart, asked him a few questions, pulled the curtain around
and lifted Callum’s gown and pushed down here and there. Callum winced, as rehearsed,
and said it was still a bit sore but nothing like last night when, he said, he’d
been doubled over with pain and couldn’t walk. The ward doctor said it seemed to
have settled—he’d send him home that afternoon with painkillers and instructions
to go back to his GP in the next couple of days. If it flares up again, said the
ward doctor, he may need to do something about it. The doctor left, and Keely, shadowing
him, texted Beckie and me:
Gallstone patient all clear.
That afternoon we gave Hayden
his payment and sent him on his way.

The next day, and each day after that for two weeks, we moved about half-a-dozen
of these ‘performance patients’ through. We never gave them anything too complicated,
an hour’s preparation at most and nothing that was likely to get them rushed off
to surgery. We’d email the actor their patient name, age, condition; they would do
the performance and we would pay them thirty dollars an hour cash on discharge. Pretty
soon we’d got our numbers back up to the same level as before but now we had
real
patients in our beds and doctors as eyewitnesses to it. It was going well. The auditors
came back sniffing occasionally, like a dog who’s left something behind, but we always
had new patients ready to shut them up.

One day, an auditor came down to do the rounds accompanied by a bigwig supervisor
woman with a lanyard and reading glasses on a chain. I had the great pleasure of
showing them around one room in the ward where
every bed had an actor in it
and every
performance was pitch perfect.

Well, said Abbie, standing up, I suppose we should get moving. We walked outside,
the heat was like a wall, the car door handle burning to the touch. And it was funny,
I remember, said Megan, when we got back in, there was a moment of hesitation: what
was I doing with this woman, listening to this story? Because all the while I’d been
listening, in the car, in the roadhouse, I was actually having more and more trouble
believing it—I mean, it was far-fetched to begin with but now it just seemed crazy.
Did all this really happen, I was thinking, actors playing patients in the public-hospital
system to dupe money out of the authorities, or was it some kind of kooky fantasy
of Abbie’s that she was telling me to pass the time?

It’s bullshit, said Marshall;
no-one could pull off something like that, not with all the checks and balances in
place nowadays. You think she was having me on? said Megan. They all shrugged. Tch,
I knew it, she said, almost to herself.

It was still pouring. The pot bell went off. Leon got up to empty it.

All right, said Evan, fuck this. Anyone? Yeah, said Marshall. Yeah, said Hannah.
Beside the fridge, said Lauren. Yeah, said Adam. Yeah, said Megan, all right. Half,
said Lauren. Evan was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. And the San
Pel, said Leon.

I can’t believe all that was a lie, said Megan, falling back into the cushions. I
so believed it when she started. It probably was true, said Adam, to some extent;
they probably did add some phantom patients to the lists early on, but then she got
caught up in the storytelling. We’ve all done that: does it matter? No, said Megan,
I suppose not.

Ah! said Marshall, without sitting up from his slump, so when a politician tells
a lie it’s a hanging offence but when anyone else does it and says it’s a story,
that’s fine! Yep, said Lauren, that’s pretty much how it goes. It’s a harmless lie,
anyway, isn’t it? said Hannah. But politicians’ lies, Marshall, they can hurt people.
Megan’s hurt, said Marshall, look at her; her driving companion pulled her leg and
now she’s hurting. Megan gave him a wincing smile. Evan came back from the kitchen
with two bottles of wine, a bottle of mineral water and seven glasses on a tray.
Can you bring some cheese and crackers too? said Lauren. Jesus! said Evan. And take
the empty cups back? said Megan. Jesus! said Evan, again. He’s a good boy, isn’t
he? said Megan. He is, said Leon, grinning.

So, Adam, said Marshall, you’re the lawyer: why do we think this Abbie woman was
lying? We believed her at first, for a while, and then we didn’t. Well, said Adam,
I guess in the first place because we are hearing her story via Megan and as Megan
became less convinced that the story was actually true, something in her demeanour
started sending out signals to us. We began to read not the tale but the teller.
Adam lined the glasses up and started pouring the wine. In law, he said, we have
this ancient principle called ‘legal fiction’. It basically means that something
can be considered true even though it might not be. For example, a man, A, finds
a bag of money in the woods; another man, B, comes along and says it’s his and takes
A to court to have what he says is his bag of money returned. I was riding through
the woods on my piebald horse with the lame off-hind, says B, on my way to my sick
brother’s house to offer help to his poor wife and children and it must have fallen
out of my saddlebag. The judge finds in his favour. There is no evidence, there are
no witnesses. The judge just
believes
. Under the tenet of legal fiction, said Adam,
a story no matter how unlikely can sometimes seem most true—and so will become, for
legal purposes,
actually
true. Many anthropologists, he continued, believe we are
the only animals capable of lying and that this is in many ways what distinguishes
the human species and probably played a large part in our evolutionary success. So
is it right to hold against us the very trait that separates us from the apes? Our
ability to fib? We have Art, said Nietzsche, said Adam, so that we may not perish
from the Truth.

He put the bottle down. Evan came back with the cheese and crackers: he had another
bottle dangling from his fingers.

Where do you get all this shit from? said Marshall. How do you remember it all? I
guess because it’s worth remembering, said Adam. Evan put the things down. Not everything
is worth remembering, said Adam, in fact, you could almost say that most of what
people concern their heads with these days is not worth remembering at all and should
be allowed to slip unnoted into history’s abyss. But that’s not the way it is, is
it? He sipped his wine. Actually, most of us remember the stuff not worth remembering;
the pointless, trivial stuff. But there’s always a few swimming upstream, Marshall,
trying to hang on to what might be useful.

Woo, said Evan, sitting down. Yeah, said Megan. I like listening to this, said Hannah.
Go on, said Leon. Yeah, said Lauren. Well, said Adam, taking up a cracker and spreading
it with King Island brie, I think we’re living through interesting times, so far
as truth is concerned. And one of the main reasons is that we have confused it with
facts. Facts, to my mind, are as little to be trusted nowadays as lies, because there
are so many of them. Call it data, if you like. But just because there are all these
facts doesn’t mean we should listen to them. In fact (ha!), when so-called truth
comes at us in an avalanche like that, a thousand tiny bits, shouldn’t we be more
inclined to distrust it? Mightn’t we be better off cutting through all the crap and
like the judge in the case of the bag of money in the woods actually trust our instincts?
Believe the unbelievable, even if—or because—it is a lie? Mightn’t we be better
off looking to get our truth these days through an artifice that truthfully says
it is one?

Leon started clapping, a wry smile on his face. Art is going to save us, said Lauren,
flatly. Maybe art can, said Adam, with a flourish of fingers, for the reasons I’ve
just said. Reason, logic, science—they’re exactly what got us into this mess in the
first place.

That’s a pretty sweeping statement, Adam, said Marshall, sitting up slightly, especially
coming from a lawyer. That everything since Plato and Aristotle—reason, logic, law,
government, civilisation—has been a waste of time and we ought to ditch it and start
making up stories and plays and songs instead. When you put it like that, said Leon,
actually, I’m with Ad. Me too, said Hannah, politics is fucked. It’s a power trip,
she said, it’s got nothing to do with making the world a better place—sorry, Marshall,
but it’s not just me; ask half the world and I’m sure they’d agree. What Adam’s saying,
she continued, a slight flush to her cheeks, is that the great enlightenment experiment
has failed, reason has not saved us, and we’re no closer than ever to understanding
why we’re here and what we should do, how we should get on, live with each other,
communicate, share. All the systems we’ve put in place have failed. It’s like that
Japanese nuclear plant:
we have systems in place
,
it’s all under control
—then along
comes a giant wave. Global capitalism:
we have systems in place
,
the market can absorb
the shocks
—and then. All that logic of systems starts to look pretty shaky, doesn’t
it? And all Adam’s saying, I think—sorry Adam—is that in this kind of truth-poor
environment maybe we need to look somewhere else to figure out how we should live?