INITIUM NOVUM: Part 1 (7 page)

“You said ‘go right’ and I go right. Now you
have problem,” the taxi drivers argues back in a thick, Punjabi
accent.

“No, I said ‘go right to the West Side
Highway.’ Not take a right, here,” he corrects the
cabbie.

“Well, my friend, you need to speak clearer
English,” the cabbie advises.

“Oh, my English needs to be clearer, does it?
How’s this? You’re a piece of shit,” Will curses at the
driver.

“No, you are the shit; you, not I,” he
responds defensively, much to Will’s amusement.

Keep irking him.

“Bitch-ass,” Will says coolly, insulting him
without the slightest effort.

“No, you! You are the ass of a bitch!” The
cabbie barks, screaming at him with ferocious intensity. Will only
snickers at his weak of anger. This angers him even
more.

It was not his initial intention to pick a
fight with the man. Will had only been expressing, albeit in his
own tasteless fashion, his disdain for the cabbie’s decision to
take the streets instead of the highway. But now, Will sets purpose
to deliberately offending the man.

“Fucking cock-sucka,” Will manages to get out
in between series of chuckles.

“I have never sucked a rooster. You are liar
of a man,” he says, the essence of the insult becoming lost in his
understanding of the translation.

“Dick, man. You suck dick,” Will elaborates,
shaking his head in disbelief over the fact that he actually has to
explain to someone what sucking cocks mean. “Shit, man, should I
draw you a diagram?”

“No, you can keep your pornographic
illustration to yourself! You are a bad man, a very bad
man.”

“Suck a cock,” Will repeats, this time in a
sing-song voice.

“You! You will suck the cock!” The cabbie
screams loud enough that the pedestrians passing by give him dirty
looks.

“No, you are,” he lazily continues his side of
the argument, rapidly losing interest in the squabble with the
driver

“No, You!” The cabbie says as he pulls up to
the curb near Union Square. “I don’t need a passenger like you. Pay
and get out.”

“Fuck you, Aziz. Take me where I need to go,
bitch,” Will demands.

“My name is Omar. And fuck you!”

After about two minutes of their disputing,
the cabbie drops the demand for a payment so long as Will agrees to
leave the vehicle. He’s not too far off from his desired location
so he takes the free ride as a win for himself.

“What a nice cabbie to give me a free ride,”
he says to himself and to the air around him, half sarcastically,
half sincerely. “There really aren’t enough nice people nowadays,
it’s really a shame.”

A sudden realization sees William reach into
his pocket for his wallet. He looks inside and sees that it is
pretty much empty. There was no way that he was going to be able to
pay for that cab ride, even if he had been willing to do so. To
Will, this means that seemingly all-knowing voice has yet to fail
him. As more and more time elapses, Will increasingly warms up to
the idea of the voice in his head. However, an important question
remains: what, or rather who, is that voice? And why has it been so
helpful to him?

Pushing the questions in his mind aside, Will
marches to where he feels he needs to be. When he arrives, he finds
himself unsure of how to proceed. He walks into the building and
directly towards the security guard. The tension is thick. Each
second is slow and laborious.

“Sir, where would I find the patients arriving
in ambulances?” He asks, very politely so as to not arouse
suspicion.

The security guard does not answer right away.
Instead, the guard stares at him blankly, raising the tension which
fell upon Will almost instantly as he walked into the Beth Israel
Hospital. After a few moments of the guard’s uncomfortably piercing
gaze, Will ponders inventing a story explaining why he’s looking
for the ambulatory care unit.

Wait.

“Sir,” the guard begins dryly as he slowly
raises his arm and points a finger at the sign right behind Will.
Will turns around to see what the man is pointing to. It’s a sign
which illustrates the directions to the different care units within
the hospital. Will thanks him, feeling a tab bit dumb that he did
not notice the sign himself.

He walks deeper into the hospital until he
reaches the E.R., then the trauma center, then the I.C.U., and
finally the ambulatory care unit. Both patients and hospital staff
members toss curious glances at him as he peers behind curtain
after curtain looking for the elderly woman from the
subway.

Unsurprisingly, no one so much as attempts to
stop Will from snooping around. The only resistance that he has met
thus far can hardly be called resistance at all. Say what you will,
but the apathy of health care workers can only be attributed to the
poor state of health care in the nation. There are simply too many
sick people in the world, and only a small percentage are
privileged enough to never have to deal with the indifference of an
underpaid nurse or a med-student-in-training in a public medical
facility. The fortunate ones can afford veteran doctors and nurses
who project the delusions of care, both medical and emotional, unto
them. The rest end up in place like Beth Israel, or even much
worse, Bellevue.

It isn’t until Will has peered behind more
than a dozen curtains that he finds his target, for lack of a
better word. The old lady, whose chart reads Beverly Caine, lays on
a bed in critical condition. There are tubes in her nose and a
complicated looking IV machine connected to the crook of her arm.
She appears sedated, as evident by the euphoric and blank look in
her eyes and the drool leaking from her mouth.

Slowly and carefully, Will approaches the lady
and seats himself on a foldable chair right beside her bed. He
reaches out, but draws his arm back due to timidity. Overcoming the
insecurity of his softer sentiments, Will gently takes her hand in
his.

“I’m sorry. I really tried to spare you the
pain of hot coffee. If I could take it all back…”

Will’s last sentence trails off as he is
reminded of the phrase which Heather said could turn time back for
him. As crazy as it sounds, Will gives serious consideration to
starting over, if it’s even possible.

He finally decides to go forth with it, in
hopes of saving the old lady’s life.

No,
s
he’ll die whether you’re to blame
or not.

For the first time since Will began to hear
the voice, it speaks in a complete sentence, giving him a reason to
carry on and not begin anew. The voice also adds authenticity to
the gypsy’s claim that he can start over simply by uttering a
phrase. Whether or not the claim is truthful is another matter
entirely. All that is important is that it is a reason in a world
without reason, which happens to be reason enough for
Will.

There’s a shuffle of footsteps behind Will.
The curtain separating him and Beverly from the rest of the unit is
drawn back so quickly that Will has no chance to react. Literally,
in the blink of an eye, a tall, slim redhead with watery eyes
stands before him accompanied by a physician.

Will lets go of the lady’s hand and prepares
to answer, what he can only assume is, a series of uncomfortable
and difficult questions. However, Will is wrong. Only a few
question are asked and it’s the tall redhead who inquires. The
doctor, on the other hand, checks on Beverly with indifference, as
if he’s inspecting a motor vehicle of sorts, pulling a tube here,
pressing buttons there, his actions are all very mechanical and
cold.

“Who are you?” She asks, wiping her eyes with
a piece of tissue.

Concerned church
member.

“I am member of Beverly’s church,” Will
answers. “I saw her being loaded into an ambulance and I became
concerned.”

The redhead smiles at Will before taking one
of his hand in her own.

“Thank you for caring,” she says. “It makes me
happy that she was in the company of a friend. I was at work when I
got the call and rushed right over.”

“Where do you work?”

“Veniero’s Bakery,” she answers. “I’m sorry. I
didn’t catch your name.”

“William Freeman.”

“Jessica Caine,” she says, extending her hand
to shake his. “Will you be attending service anytime
soon?”

“Service?” Will questioningly
repeats.

“Yes, you are a member of my grandmother’s
church, are you not?”

“Yes, of course. Service, as in attending
church service. Yeah, um, no.”

“Why?” she probes, confused as to why a man
who said he was a member of her grandmother’s church would not be
attending service anytime soon.

“I won’t be in church anytime soon. I’m
actually having a bit of a crisis in faith at the moment,” he
offers Jessica as his excuse.

“That’s understandable. I’m not much of a
believer either. My grandmother was though. And if she were
conscious, she’d have a fit over our weak faith.” Tears fill the
girl’s eyes as she glances over at her bed-stricken grandmother.
“Grandma always used to tell me that everything that happens to us
in our lives happens for a reason. I just can’t see how her falling
down in the subway is reason for anything.”

Will looks away due to the uncomfortable
implications of his own underlying guilt. Jessica notices the
change in his demeanor right away.

“There’s nothing anyone could have done to
prevent this,” she says, comforting Will.

“I beg to differ,” he responds as he replays
the incident over in his head.

“Look, some piece of shit litters in the
subway and my grandmother slips and falls. It isn’t anybody’s fault
except the person who opted against disposing of his trash
properly. As worried as I am about my grandmother, it won’t help
her to play the blame game and point fingers all
willy-nilly.”

“Willy-nilly?” Will breaks his streak of
solemnity in order to tease Jessica about her choice of
words.

“Yes, willy-nilly is a proper dictionary
term,” she lightheartedly defends her vernacular. They share a
polite chuckle together, the type strangers share when one or more
of them desperately needs the moment to be funnier than it really
is.

“Listen, I should be getting out of here. I
have a prior engagement that requires my attendance,” he says
cryptically, referring to the imminent meeting between Laura Cohen,
now in the company of police officers, and himself.

“Well, it was nice meeting you, Will. Please
come by and visit again, anytime you like. I’m sure grandma will
appreciate the love.”

Will turns and begins to head out of the
opening in the curtain when he’s interrupted by Jessica’s phone
going off. For some odd reason, this catches his complete and
undivided attention. He steals a glimpse of the phone’s home screen
just as Jessica is about to answer it. The name of the contact
calling her is Hector S. Will doesn’t know why he’s interested in
her personal business, but a gut instinct tells him that he should
be paying attention.

The doctor also takes a look at the ringing
phone. Apparently, the phone is enough to get him to talk to us,
but the injured, senior lady isn’t.

“Hey, I have one of those. My boyfriend too,”
he adds, revealing that he’s gay, a tidbit of information which
flies over Will and Jessica’s heads as they are a bit too
preoccupied with their current situations to care. “Anyway, great
sale recently, two for the price of one. I brought my lovey-dovey
one to match the one I got myself. Now, we’re phone
mates.”

Will looks at the doctor, confused as to why
he believes that either himself or Jessica are interested in
hearing about the cell phones he purchased for himself and his
lover. Although he is very tempted, Will does not voice his opinion
on the matter. Instead, he disregards it, brushing it aside, away
from the focal center of his thoughts. The task proves to be more
difficult than Will had anticipated as the doctor continues his
impulsive and unprovoked dialogue.

“Got it just a few blocks away at Union
Square. The sales person was incompetent and immature, but the
manager was very helpful. Very heavy too. I wanted to tell him that
he should exercise more and go on a diet, but I didn’t want to be
rude.” The doctor reaches into his lab coat’s pocket and pulls out
a syringe and vial, preparing it so that he can administer a dose
of the substance to Beverly. “Besides, he had just given me a deal
on the accidental handling insurance.” He inserts the syringe into
the vial and extracts the substance. Then, holding the loaded
syringe in his mouth sideways, like one would if they were chewing
on a pencil, he cleans a small segment of Beverly’s arm, near the
crook of the free elbow, with an alcohol pad before thoughtlessly
thrusting the point through the old lady’s arm flesh multiple times
until he finds the vein. “You know, in case I drop my phone because
I’m such a klutz sometimes. I mean, like, majorly
clumsy.”

When Jessica answers the phone. She greets the
caller very warmly before telling him where she’s at. As Jessica is
beginning to explain the events – as she thusly understands them,
of course – which led her to Beth Israel, the voice instructs Will
to do something completely off the wall. Upon hearing the
instructions, Will’s initial reluctance quickly concedes to the
voice’s command. Generally, when the word “eventually” is used, it
is in regards to an elapsing period of time which is of
considerable length. Will “eventually” performs the action, but his
eventuality transpires in a mere moment – as actions such as these
are quick, unthinking, unflinching, snap decisions – lasting the
span of a few seconds. His reasoning for going through with it: the
voice has yet to lead him astray.