The whereabouts of Dr Fraud

 Glass double doors opened into a wide but shallow space with some dirty floormats and another set of double doors beyond.  It was intended as a kind of airlock: people entering the hospital were expected to wipe their feet while the doors behind them closed and the doors in front of them opened, and there was an additional benefit of not letting the frigid winds of a November evening howl through the waiting room beyond.  Naturally the second set of doors opened as soon as the first did due to an overenthusiastic sensor and an underenthusiastic maintenance team so, while the two uniformed police officers were carefully scuffing the soles of their boots on a carpet that seemed likely to make them dirtier than they already were, the night wind tore into the waiting room, ruffled the papers at the reception desk and made the various clumps of people around the room shiver and huddle.

Marco, who was the more senior of the two very junior officers, led the way.  Even they, heavily dressed in kevlar vests and heavy cotton stab-resistant trousers and jackets, were glad when the doors slid shut again and blocked the wind penetrating search of the room.  He paused, looking over the waiting room.  This was an element of professionalism that he was trying to instil in his colleague, Andrew, who bumped into him because he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Wait a moment,” said Marco putting a gloved hand on Andrew’s wrist.  “Look around, tell me what you see.”

The waiting room was laid out in columns of chairs that led up to the reception desk, which was wide enough for three people to be on duty.  At this time of night there was only one, and she was watching them both with bright eyes with dark circles under them that suggested her alertness might have more to do with coffee than how long she’d been awake.  The room was set out so that each column consisted of back-to-back chairs except at the two walls where a single line of chairs backed the wall.  There were four aisles between the chairs in total and there were few enough people waiting to be seen that there were clear spaces between groups.  Fragments of conversation reached the two police men as Marco waiting for Andrew to answer.

“…I’m prolapsing is not our safe word, Jeremy…”

“…didn’t think it wouldn’t come out mummy…”

“…ouch.  Ow.  Oh god, oh god.  Ow…”

“…only when you do that!  Stop it!”

“A waiting room, Marco,” said Andrew.

Marco sighed, feeling put upon.  He’d been feeling put upon ever since getting the roster that had assigned him to work with Andrew for six weeks and Andrew wasn’t doing anything to alleviate that feeling.

“There are four aisles,” said Marco, gesturing.  The receptionist narrowed her eyes slightly, watching him carefully.  “That one,” he pointed, “has the fewest number of potential hostiles along it, so we walk up that.  If they decide to mob us, they’ve got to run round the ends, or climb over the chairs, and that gives us either time to retreat, or an advantage in knocking them down.”

“…safe words are how I know there’s a problem…”

“…I’ll break it off if you don’t stop it…”

“… ow ow ow ow ow…”

Andrew’s brain seemed to finally engage enough to produce words.  “I don’t think most of these could mob us, Marco,” he said, sounding sullen.  Marco tried very hard to treat it as an observation and not a protest by the slowest person in the room.

“If you view every room as something you need to be able to leave in a hurry,” he said patiently, “then you’ll be able to leave almost every room in a hurry.  Get into good habits before you need to rely on them, right?”

“…prolapsing shouldn’t need a safe…”

“…it back in, no, don’t!  The doctor…”

“…if you don’t stop it I’ll break yours too…”

Andrew gazed around and then pointed to the aisle with fewest potential patients.  “So we walk up there, right?”

Marco nodded, hoping that wasn’t going to be the greatest success of the evening.  “You go first,” he said, “watching everyone, including that receptionist who’s been watching us the whole time.  I’ll bring up the rear, making sure that no-one’s going to try and jump us.”

“What receptionist?”

Marco made himself count to ten, pushing aside the desire to groan and punch his partner in the face.

“The one behind the desk,” he said, pointing.  The receptionist stood up.

“Oh!  I see her!” said Andrew, not seeing Marco’s hand tighten into a fist.  “Let’s go talk to her!”

He set off, walking up the nearest aisle, while Marco, cursing under his breath, took the aisle with fewest people along it.  He arrived at the receptionist first as she was already watching him intently.

“What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Dr. Fraud,” said Marco.

“This is the emergency room,” said the nurse.  “We’re understaffed as it is.  If it’s not a medical emergency then you can wait till the doctor’s finish their shift and then talk to them.  If it is a medical emergency then you can sit down and wait your turn.”

“What if it’s urgent?” asked Marco, distracted by the idea that he should wait hours just to find out if Dr Fraud was in the building.

“Then you better hope it isn’t,” said the nurse.  “Wait time is a little over three hours.  And you are not making it worse by jumping the queue!”

Marco hesitated.  He clearly couldn’t sit here all night waiting just for the answer to a question.  He opened his mouth to ask when the doctor’s shift finished and then an idea struck him.

“Andrew?” he said as casually as he could manage.  Andrew looked at him and smiled, reminding Marco of the cows on the farm he’d grown up on.  “Andrew, you’re going to have to sit here and wait for the doctors to finish their shift so we can talk to them.  I’ll carry on with the rest of the job.  Call me, say half an hour before they finish, and I’ll come back.”

“Right!” Andrew ambled off to sit down near the man complaining to a woman about safe words.  The nurse looked at Marco.

“You’re the clever one?” she said.  Marco nodded.  “Fine state of affairs,” she muttered, and sat back down.

Dr. Verfuegbar

Instruments clatter in the tray, the kidney-shaped tray.  The nurse is holding it an angle, an angle slightly less than thirty degrees, and the instruments have obeyed the implacable law of gravity and slid to one side.  They have clattered together as they have done so.  Dr. Verfuegbar looks angry, and I wish he didn't.  He's holding a marker pen.
"Nurse!" he says.  She starts, and I wonder how she can look so unsexy in a nurse's uniform.  The fabric is cotton, and it's stretched in all the right places, but yet it does nothing for me.  Then the doctor's pen comes back into my eyeline.
"Try to be quieter," he continues, now that he's got her attention.  "I am drawing on the patient.  These will be incision lines, and it is important that they are in the right place."
The nurse looks at me, and there's something cold and alien in her eyes.  She looks like she thinks I'm not real.
"Dr. Verfuegbar?"  Her voice is glutinous, like the words are caught in mucus in her throat and have to pull themselves free.  "Dr. Verfuegbar, you're half-way through drawing a copy of 'Portrait of the Artist as a Spoon'."
That would explain why he seems to have been using the marker-pen on me for ages.
"What?  Oh.  That can't be right," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "How invasive is the surgery this patient is having?  Am I removing a particularly difficult tattoo?"
"No-o-o-o."  There's a pause while the nurse finds my notes; she'd put the kidney-shaped dish down on top of them.  "Ah.  He's here to have a verruca removed."
"Really?"  Dr. Verfuegbar looks puzzled.  "Why have we given him a general neural block then?"
"We haven't," says the nurse.  "It's a partial block from the neck down.  He's still awake, just insensate."
"Hmph.  Makes me feel like a vet when you do that," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "Do we have any of those worming pills left?"
"I'm afraid not," says the nurse.  "The last delivery was blown-up a half-mile from the hospital."
"Land-mines again?"
"No, just shelling.  It might have been bad luck."
"Everything's broken here, nurse," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "Do you even remember why the war started?"
"I can't remember why the war's continuing," says the nurse, and things beneath her tight cotton jacket shift.  The wrong way.
"Do we have an eraser?" asks Dr. Verfuegbar, staring at me.  "I think it might be wise to remove some of these incision lines in case I don't perform the surgery.  It would be bad if we removed healthy tissue."
"What's so unhealthy about a verruca?"  I suddenly realise that I hate the nurse.
Dr. Verfuegbar stops looking on the tables for the eraser and stands very still.  I hope he's thinking.
"That's a very good question," he says slowly.  "Perhaps we should be removing the patient from the verruca?  After all, keeping the verruca alive is cheap and easy, whereas the patient is costly and will take weeks to recover."
I really want to say something now, but my throat won't work.  I can just about breathe fractionally more heavily if I try very hard.  No-one seems to notice.
"How big is the hospital incinerator?"
"I'll have to go and measure it, Dr. Verfuegbar," says the nurse.  She sets my notes back down, unfolds an extra pair of insectile arms from the front of her nurse's shirt, and leaves the operating theatre.  Dr. Verfuegbar looks down at me, and his eyes are cloudy with cataracts.
"What was I doing?" he asks to the room in general, his hand reaching out for a scalpel.