Ghosts Caught on Film

New Careers in Science

We can save ourselves, my grandson bellows, holding up a yellowing lipoma the size of shoulder meat, by understanding what kills us. Here, at the incinerator behind St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, my grandson’s hair stands on end in the places he’s forgotten to apply styling gel. Somewhere in the basement near Radiology is a photograph of my Vance at age seven, dancing shirtless with a burning marshmallow around a campfire. Behind him now, a quick tympani of pressure booms out from where the incinerator sits, next to the hospital’s oversized garbage bins. While the huge machine thuds in the nighttime, and while Vance lectures us about the importance of correct diagnosis when we pull shifts in the Pathology lab, we look across the quick dips of land around Bristol and watch as lightning streaks across the horizon around Rhode Island, as bolts spark gently over capsized sailboats in Narragansett Bay and its mangled bridges. Where cars have been left to rust, plastic has dripped from their insides to the ground below, mixing in with the vulcanized rubber of the tires.

But we can also learn from the dead, Vance says over the hum of the incinerator. There are three of us in his audience. The two other indoctrinated Pathology assistants—a teenager we picked up from the emergency shelter a few days ago and her mother, forty-something and five months’ pregnant—turn away from the heat once Vance, the only pathologist left in our state, opens the door to the fire behind him. I stare through the warmth of the incinerator’s open door on my eyelids and corneas. I watch as Vance turns the ball of tissue over in his hands, looking through the clear plastic. He takes a step toward the teenager. She’s holding her cellular phone even though we haven’t had reception since the last of the storms.

Biohazard waste comes in red bags. Lab samples this size come in clear bags, he says, stopping and glaring toward the girl and her pink phone. I know if this is superficial or intramuscular, says Vance, holding the bag closer to the girl’s face. Do you?

The teenager is trying to sound less unsure. No, she says, but I feel hungry now.

I laugh at the girl. Her mother, patting her belly, looks back at me and smiles to be polite.

Study what you remove from your patients, Vance barks as we finish our rounds outside. He throws the bag of tissue, blood, and fluid into the incinerator, shutting the door behind him. The fire grows in a place just below where we can all see. Don’t just dissect it in the lab, he continues. Spend time with it before it’s burned.

And we disperse back into St. Bartholomew’s, through the ER doors lined with makeshift-rubber pads and toward the elevators that will take us up to Pathology. There are burn marks from random lightning strikes along the exterior walls where ambulances used to haul in bleeding and unconscious patients. Throughout the long days of storms, in weather that should have involved a blend of rain and wind, all we received were burn victims. Out past the safe places we’ve mapped so far around Bristol’s harbors, in thin peninsulas and alongside beaches where fog rolls in, thick with static electricity, occasional drifters will stumble up the hill into St. Bartholomew’s parking lot, their skin raw from the burns that have lit one side of their bodies up before finally ripping into the ground. More than likely, they’ll see Vance as they’re nursed back to health. If they perish, Vance will definitely see them, their tissues and organs being salvaged if possible. He tells me he rarely does autopsies anymore, not like he did those first couple of weeks.

As Vance, the girl, her mother, and I walk inside the hospital tonight, I see a few remnant glass shards from where someone forgot to pick up all the shattered and melted pieces from last week’s rolling fog of ball lightning. As we pad through the corridors of the ground floor, the pregnant mother and her daughter stop to sit on a filthy gurney while Vance and I wait for the elevator. I can hear the mother’s stomach churning—Vance calls this ‘peristaltic action’—and I point the woman and her daughter toward the broken vending machine near the CCU and hand them quarters from my pockets.

When I was much younger, I dreamed retirement would involve a bakery. My husband, Vance’s grandfather, and I would punch out ovens of monkey bread: Bundt pans of hot biscuit dough, all lined and baked in drizzled masonries of cinnamon, sugar, and butter. Warm and sweet banana slices would be served on the side with black coffee. We would tally the books, fry up bacon, and smoke marijuana after our shifts. I had told him this explicitly. We would buy clear plastic baggies of pot from our grandchildren’s shadier friends, and we would welcome glaucoma as easily as we would liver spots, crow’s feet, and arthritis.

Later, when Vance’s grandfather died while we were getting quotes from banks and contractors, retirement involved a cruise to the Caribbean, the plans made two years in advance, with a group of people I saw only in bowling shirts down at the lanes. I would drift around Jamaica and Bermuda with septuagenarians, some still together after decades of marriage, others alone, like me, their houses needing warmth more so than their hearts. Three months into widowhood, a veteran with a semi-functioning hip asked me out on a date to his gun club. He’d leaned in close and said, I’ll let you fire my .38. And then he had winked and started up a new frame.

When Vance came to get me from the emergency shelter, I think I welcomed a new retirement that would involve the soft mysteries of lab work. It’s only every so often that I receive a yeast specimen to stain, but I still smile each time and daydream of Bundt pans.

A wet lasagna of abnormal tissue—Vance calls this a ‘neoplasm’—comes in early the next morning, roughly an hour after it’s been excised from a colectomy patient three floors up. By this point, blood vessels will have been refitted, two portions of a colon will meet for the first time, and, fingers crossed, blood and mucus will be pumping smoothly and correctly to keep the surrounding tissue alive and mostly unaffected. But the sample the three doctors have sent down is still a map of ham-colored folds with two polyps and a neoplasm the size of a land mass.

I stare at the courier, a babyish man in his twenties who’s scrawled the name ‘Sheffield’ onto a conference-grade sticky badge he wears over his left shirt pocket. By the looks of his pale skin and the limpid veins running below the dermis, I imagine he didn’t see much of the outdoors even before we were warned of potential areas of static charge and surprise storms. He has a wen on his neck that’s filled with spongy tissue discharge and fluid. I want Vance to show me how to dissect it.

This is from Dr. Stenner, Sheffield says. He says he’ll be down for lunch in a bit.

I let Sheffield leave with a nod. Later, Vance tells me—so much like his grandfather—over the lunch of MRE chicken stew that they know it’s a good prognosis after GI surgery if the patient begins to fart. Vance says this word in a whisper while reconstituting his soup: ‘fart.’

He looks tired, my Vance. He’s busy each day with a dermatologist in the operating theater, holding back fat flaps and wiping away sweat from the forehead of one of the two surgeons still living at St. Bartholomew’s. He tells me it’s like career musical chairs up there: one day an ophthalmologist is trying his very best to repair the sinoatrial node of a hydroelectric engineer we’ve kidnapped from Delaware. Another day the pulmonologist begins to gag as he saws into the temporal bone of a computer technician’s daughter, stifling back nervous sobs as he remembers that we need the technician to reconfigure our LANs and troubleshoot the PET scan system in the basement. Even Vance, who spent years as an intern and resident, always on call and up all hours of the night, working to finally get to a point in his career where a day on the job meant showing up at 9 a.m. and leaving by 5 p.m.—even my Vance is pulling double and triple shifts on top of teaching several of us about pathology, about the strictly vital information he received in this field from medical school and from the hospitals in which he interned.

He reminds me so much of my husband. He parts his hair the same way, gels it down and across his temples, left to right.

Back at the slab of red and gray and pink turkey burger in the Pathology lab, I begin to miss television.

The weather girl’s face first went to black as they were about to show me my local radar for Portsmouth: a splash of blues and greens all pockmarked with intense centers of red and orange with yellow halos off the coast. After a day at the commissary and the post office to mail my Vance a care package of caramels and the business card of my salon friend’s daughter, I’d just put my feet up when the breaking news music thundered on the TV.

There was excitement in the forecaster’s voice. She was saying what anyone with a window could say: There are storms coming. Stay indoors. Move away from windows. Determine if you are living in a domicile below the calculated tide level and evacuate if necessary. Her hair was perfect; it was high and feathered like mine was back in the ‘70s, and I remember thinking that the hair of any weather forecaster wasn’t likely to change over the course of a viewer’s lifetime. But in that same lifetime, it was doubtful if a person would ever see this many storms coalescing at once: swaths of hurricanes off the coasts of Florida, Texas, and the rest of the southeast; blankets of fog along the eastern seaboard; windstorms from the original 13 colonies that ripped through the Midwest; and everywhere lightning. In Rhode Island, we were consistent about checking for hurricanes and high winds, with an eye on the rickety boat every resident would tie up to a tree in the backyard. By themselves, they weren’t much beyond news stories. Together, it was a big, entertaining mess. And I was still on the couch, my feet up and comfortable and warm below two quilts, and I was looking at an old photograph of Vance’s grandfather.

When I told Vance about this, he asked if I had my couch up on those special coasters, the ones with the rubber inserts for extra comfort and support.

I had.

He asked if my couch was a sleeper sofa, riddled inside with metal, or if it was just wood, upholstery, and the occasional staple.

It wasn’t a sleeper, I said. It isn’t. And I couldn’t help but think about the needlework next to the couch.

When the babyish courier, Sheffield, comes back the next day, the one with the cyst on his neck, I can’t help but touch the patch of skin where I had a mole removed last year. A plump nurse in puppy-dog scrubs had toddled into the room with a petite canister of liquid nitrogen. She smiled as she sprayed the mole into a tiny, painful blister. The clumps of the dark skin above it grew brittle and flaked away after several days. I remember that the visit to my own dermatologist the week before had been to schedule a biopsy of the tissue. For a full week, I wondered if it was benign or malignant, if I had more spots on my body that I couldn’t see, and if this would mean a short lifetime of chemotherapy and headscarves or just being more careful out in the sun. Like I imagine Sheffield would have lived, I began to spend less time in my garden. I began to look up to the clouds for sparks or flashes, to see if it was safe to fetch the paper each morning.

Dr. Stenner says to run an ELISA on this? Sheffield says, handing me a tube of serum. I look at the sample and see that a patient’s name has been blackened out by a pen, and that a number has been written on the side instead.

HIV? I ask him. I think about how much my Vance has taught me over the last few weeks. Many patients’ samples will be coded in numbers alone if they’re to be checked for STDs. Sheffield’s cyst seems to have gotten bigger since yesterday. I notice the hair sticking out of it now and wonder if I’d just missed it before.

He nods and shrugs, thanks me, and lumbers out of the laboratory. While I have other samples to process, I always make a place for Vance’s specimens at the front of the line, and I start my wash of a fresh microtiter plate in the corner.

Later, while waiting for the sample to react and start glowing—Vance calls this fluorescence—I look over at the blender we use to break down the bulkier samples that come in for western blots. I remember how, when we first came here from the emergency shelter, Vance showed me how to cut up a chunk of a cow’s spinal cord. Before we ate steak that night from farther inland—our first fresh meal in weeks—I remember that Vance had told me that we had to check for mad cow disease. He had called it ‘BSE.’ He smiled as he opened the top to a new bottle of A1 sauce, gingerly pouring a tablespoon’s worth on my plate. I remember being so proud of him. I remember the medium-rare pull of muscle between my incisors and canines that night.

Since then, we’ve survived off the industrial-sized cans of tomatoes, corn, and chocolate sauce stored up in the hospital’s kitchen. When we first dared to venture over to the naval base back in Newport, we found the inlet mostly empty. While their kitchens were stocked better than our own, it was the trove of MREs that made the day seem special, with so many different flavors and combinations. The pregnant Pathology student’s baby even seems to enjoy the chicken burrito packet. The woman herself, though, says she suffers from indigestion and heartburn.

We’re working for the future, I tell her, her teenage daughter distracted all the while, still glancing down at her watch occasionally, still clutching to her cellular phone at times.

After I print out the ELISAs—all negative, the patient clean—I decide to search out Vance. When I pass the doors to the ICU downstairs, a high schooler with ravenous acne whispers out to me from behind one of the tiny rooms’ drawn curtains.

Hello? he asks. I pull back the curtain farther, and I can see the boy’s shoulder propped up, the Lichtenburg burn pattern racing down under the covers near an IV line. For a few days after a burn as light as this one, in these instances where the lightning victim is still around to tell his story, a pattern of red discoloration washes over the skin in ferns and fractals from the origin site.

Have you seen your chest yet? I ask. Have you seen it in a mirror?

The boy gets up and pulls off his hospital gown. His arms are thin and long and emaciated. His underwear sags as he wheels along a pole with a Lactated Ringer’s drip attached, and I can see his skin is pulled tight over his ribs. He stands with his chest to the mirror near the rear wall of his room, with his head arched back as far as it can stretch.

It’s not until he turns like this that I see the gauze strips that blanket his back and the anterior of his left thigh. I start adding percentages from the Rule of Nines and figure he’s well past the 20% mark for all likelihood of a fatal injury. But the flow of the lightning onto his chest is beautiful, like henna ink or a painting left out in the sunlight.

Cool, he says.

It’s how the electricity dissipated, I tell him. You would have died if you were touching or standing near anything metal.

With one finger reaching as far it can the boy traces the outline of the burn from his shoulder, up toward his neck where one branch of the electricity thought about going before it died out in a blink.

Will it stay like that? he asks. Like a tattoo?

I shake my head. No, I say, it’ll be gone in a couple of days if it’s not gone by tonight. You should come up to the board room this evening after dinner if you’re feeling up to it. We have a newcomer orientation once a week on Mondays. I think about this. Only if you’re feeling up to it, though.

It’s still cool, he says, playing with the rip of crimson up by his clavicle. A nurse gave me something earlier for my back. How bad does it look?

I can’t answer. It’s not until I gently touch his other shoulder that I know I’ll hear him scream when the nurse comes back to debride the large track of skin that’s losing fluids and electrolytes at an unstoppable pace, his skin swelling with edema as we make small talk in the tiny rooms of the ICU.

Mrs. Stenner? Sheffield asks. He’s laid a hand on my shoulder. I’m daydreaming again in the lab, remembering the path the lightning took across the boy’s back and the fire he must have been caught in for so much damage to be made. I don’t startle until I see the red and raw cyst on the Sheffield’s neck again. From what I can tell in the moment I sneak a look, he’s plucked the hair from the center. Dr. Stenner is looking for those serum results, he says.

I resist the urge to squeeze the man’s wen between my fingers, like a blueberry. Like a grape. Like a pearl onion in sauce.

When I catch Vance through the glass at