Vicious Grace

There wasn’t much. Eric hadn’t stocked the place with anything that wouldn’t last more or less indefinitely. Some canned beans. A few boxes of antiquated tea. The only thing in the cupboard was a box of Twinkies. None of it looked appealing. My cell phone said it was already after midnight. I’d woken up in Montana, and now, looking out over Lake Michigan as lightning arced over the water, I let myself feel a little tired. A hard gust of wind bowed the dark glass of the window, and in its dim reflection, the door opened behind me. Kim stepped in.



“Hey,” I said, turning to her.



“Is there any tea water left?” she asked.



“Can be,” I said, scooping the kettle off the stovetop. As I filled it, the tame water from the tap like a parody of the falling rain outside, Kim stood behind me, her arms crossed.



“How have you been?” she asked.



“Busy as hell. You?”



Kim pushed a lock of hair back from her eyes and I lit the fire under the tea kettle.



“The same,” she said. “Half the time I’m writing grants. I got on a good study with some guys I know over at UIC’s public health department tracking Toxoplasma gondii strains. The data’s not all in, but I think we’re going to have some pretty good papers coming out of it. I’m linking the extent of behavior modification in the host with the virulence of the strain. The correlations are pretty nice.”



“Sounds good,” I said.



“It’s kicking my ass,” Kim said. “And the politics get old fast. Everyone’s jockeying for money and attention. And there’s a more or less constant war between patient care and research at the hospital. I get tired.”



“Yeah,” I said.



“And . . . and it’s good to see you again. All of you,” she said. “There’s really no one in Chicago I can talk to. I slipped a few times when I first came here. Said things about riders. I’m still paying for it. Getting to let my guard down is . . . it’s nice.”



It struck me harder than I’d expected. Standing there, her arms across her chest, her lips just slightly pinched, her shoulders tight and unmoving—this was Kim at rest. Unguarded. Relaxed. I wanted to ask if she was seeing anyone, but that was answer enough. I wondered how I would have met someone new, knowing all that I’d learned about the secrets of the world. Would I have brought them into the fight too or kept it secret or given up the attempt and accepted my own isolation? I could see it going any of those ways.



“How about you?” she asked. “What have you been doing?”



I ran down the past few months. Kim listened. The flow of words relaxed me, slowly. By the time I caught up to the present, I felt almost like we were just two old friends, catching up. And maybe gossiping a little.



“Does Ex have a little thing for you?” Kim asked.



“Um,” I said, glancing at the door. Then, quietly, “A little one. I think it’s little anyway. We don’t make a big issue out of it. Is it obvious?”



“A little,” Kim said. “Aubrey looks really good, though. It’s nice to see him happy.”



It was the olive branch I’d been unconsciously asking for. My chest felt warm and softer, and laughter I didn’t expect bubbled up out of me.



“Christ, I’m glad you think so,” I said. “I can never tell with him. It’s like if I was driving him crazy, I think he’d act just the same. How would I know, you know?”



Her smile was pure sympathy, and she reached out to press her fingertips briefly against my arm.



“Makes you crazy, doesn’t it?” she said. “About two years ago, I made the mistake of sleeping with a psychiatrist a few times. Whenever we had a disagreement, he’d start his active listening routine. Half the time I didn’t know whether we were fighting.”



The kettle made a soft plopping noise and steam began to wisp up from the spout. I turned off the fire.



“It’s good seeing you too,” I said.



“Good,” she said, and grinned. When she did that, the extra weight looked a lot better on her.



We went back into the living room together. Ex, Chogyi Jake, and Aubrey were all busily talking over one another, each of them apparently keeping track of what the others had said and responding even as new points were being made. Their excitement spilled over into me as I sat down.



“Hey. Hey!” I shouted. Anything more gentle would have been whispering in a windstorm. “Have we figured anything out yet?”



The three men looked at one another.



“There’s not enough here. We need more information,” Ex said, as if he was delivering a challenge. “I’d like to examine the site.”



Maybe my relief at having a little ice-breaking moment with Kim blinded me. Maybe I was tired and careless. Or maybe I was too comfortable being who I had always been, rushing in again where angels feared. I didn’t think. Didn’t ask or even consider what the risks might be. I didn’t feel a moment of apprehension or fear.



“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”



FOUR



Two hours with a strong cup of morning coffee, Google, and Wikipedia yielded this:



When it was built in 1921, Grace Memorial was the second largest hospital in a city that was thick with them. Cook County Hospital was only a mile away, and Grace’s redbrick towers and colonnaded walks, cathedral-style entrance, and massive network of wards and offices were a response to the older hospital’s preeminence. But the original buildings changed fast; almost as soon as Grace opened for business, the construction crews came in.



In 1929, the Bureau of Prohibition raided the hospital, recovering enough gin, rum, and beer to feed Chicago’s speakeasies for a week. The men responsible for building the network of smuggler’s tunnels and secret warehouses fled or were arrested, and the hospital itself almost didn’t survive the scandal. All through the 1930s, Grace Memorial had a reputation as Chicago’s hospital of last resort. A prostitution ring ran out of it from 1936 to 1939. One whole wing was demolished as structurally unsound.



The Manhattan Project came to its rescue in 1942. While Fermi conducted the first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago, the Army Corps of Engineers quietly took control of Grace Memorial, retooling it for research on the effects of radiation. When, in 1946, that project ended, a new group stepped up with the stated intention of making Grace Memorial a functioning hospital again. President Truman himself signed the documents that transferred control of the buildings away from the army. Over the next half decade, Grace Memorial became a cause célèbre among the highest ranks of Chicagoan society. Mies van der Rohe and Declan Souder—the two great lights of Chicago architecture—competed for the chance to redesign it, with van der Rohe dropping out at the last minute to go work on the Farnsworth House.



In the 1970s, it entered into partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago—one of the largest medical schools in the nation—and became a teaching and research hospital with the joint missions of serving the poor and supporting cutting-edge medical research. If that particular pairing sounded a little ominous to me, no one else seemed to blink. The worst scandal it had been involved with since then was a 1998 report about failures to conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act.



Nothing online mentioned ominous dreams or boxes in dark earth. None of the graphics were of weirdly staring eyes or improbably jointed hands. I hadn’t really expected the Internet to deliver all the answers, but there was nothing there to give me traction. My little spate of research did give me enough background to understand what I was looking at when, after a half-hour drive through the rain-scrubbed streets, we got there.



“Wow,” I said. “Ugly.”



Ex craned his neck as Aubrey drove us all past.



“It looks like ten other buildings that got in a car wreck,” he said.



“It’s worse inside,” Kim said. “When I was interviewing for the job here, they asked how well I read maps. I thought it was a joke.”



She was understating the case. After we stuck Kim’s permit to the window and found a space in faculty parking, she led us to her office. The public areas of the hospital were pleasant enough—well lit, with living plants and relatively humane paint jobs—but as soon as Kim used her key card to get us past the wide metal Authorized Personnel Only doors, things got weird. We passed through two long, looping hallways to an elevator that said we were on the second floor even though we were still at street level. Then up three levels to floor 5-East (as opposed to 5-West, which was actually the floor below). Kim led us through two more sets of locked doors with bright orange biohazard markers on them, and we stepped into a cramped area wider than a hallway but too narrow to be a room where three desks huddled together. A black man with thinning white hair nodded to us as we passed.



“This has got to be a joke,” I said as Kim unlocked the final door. “Who designed this place, and where’d they put my cheese?”



“All hospitals are like this to some degree,” Aubrey said. “My postgrad research was a collaboration with some MDs at the University of New Mexico. I always had to meet people at the front of the place and guide them in.”



“I remember that,” Kim said. “Grace is worse.”



The office was too small for all of us to fit comfortably. There wasn’t even space to put down the backpack I used as a purse. A thin window had wedged itself in one corner, daylight spilling across one wall. Kim’s computer hummed and whirred, a screen saver cycling through images that I assumed fit in with her work: X-rays of skulls, bright pink-and-white pictures of what might have been flesh, drawings of complex microorganisms with joke labels on them like “extra cheese” and “On the Internet, no one knows you’re infectious.” The air smelled of oil and old carpet.



“We do our actual lab workups down in Pathology or over on the UIC campus,” Kim said as she dug through a small metal filing cabinet, “but the paperwork’s all here.”

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