Impuls

She remembers: she is seventeen, a dusty path to the tops of medicine, dozens of books and bitten pencils ahead of her. Becoming a doctor, Emily dreams, saving people, deftly wielding a scalpel, saying "dry" to the head nurse, and having dinner with her colleagues in some quiet place in the evening, pouting cheekily, and stretching the words, "Let's not talk about work?"

Bites her lip: the tuition bills, the failed exams, her mother's sneers, "Daddy's very unhappy," George's dark red uniform: equality, they said, is the foundation of the basics.

Emily remembers the numbers: ten thousand dollars a year; one loan; two jobs; three hours of sleep. Pathetic attempts at self-indulgence: this is not the worst thing that could happen to a dream.

And the realization: no, it's much scarier than that.

She doesn't even have a pass like everyone else – you can't use it to get benefits, to brag about it in front of her family, to put it in a nice cover or wear it proudly with a ribbon around your neck. St. George is not a place to be proud of, and four years is too little for a doctor and too much for a nurse; just as the next forty thousand is another stepping stone on the way to quite the wrong place to be.

Sigh.

Emily knows: this is going to be one hell of a fall.

* * *

When she returns with her cherished papers back to neurology, the door to room three hundred and thirteen is unlocked and the bed itself is empty, with only the sheets carelessly wrinkled and the recliner somehow pushed back in.

She should have handled it without leaving the girl unattended, but failed here, too. Now there's no use looking all over the hospital for the patient: she could be anywhere from the treatment room to the exam room. So Johnson sits back in his chair, tucks his legs under him, and taps his fingers on the table – he has to pull himself together and do something.

Fear should have possessed her by now, but Emily feels only endless fatigue weighing on her shoulders. Her own burden, as it turns out, weighs and presses her to the ground worse than someone else's.

My thoughts do not leap, do not rush, they stand still, frozen in space; and somewhere in the margins of consciousness a simple thought emerges: there are so many staff in the hospital that a blind and probably panicked patient would not be left without attention. So she is either in another room, or indeed taken to…

Dr. Higgins enters the room just as Emily prepares to fly out of it in search of him – sandy jacket, crumpled shirt, silver-tinted hair. They'd seen each other once before, Emily recalls, perhaps in the emergency room or in the lower therapy rooms.

– Good afternoon!" Mark salutes in greeting. – I took your Miss Anonymous to the next ward. Glad one of us thought to do the paperwork. – A nod to the pile of directions and a smile. – I don't like all that… By the way," he doesn't wait for an answer, "the angiography showed no vascular lesions. Now she's on an EEG and an Echo. Just give it to me, don't be shaky. – He reaches for the papers.

Emily obediently hands over the forms, filled in Moss's fine, cursive handwriting, and looks expectantly at Mark: the general practitioner, in his sixties, looks forty-something thanks to his light clothes and some inner, radiant smile.

– She likes you. – He takes a pen out of his breast pocket and signs. – Our Jane Doe*.

– Where did she come from? – Emily mechanically unfolds the bedspread. – I mean," she corrects herself, "how was she found?

– Oh," Mark sits back in his chair, "it's a very interesting story, Miss Johnson. All she remembers is that she was found by the paramedics. They themselves say someone called 911 anonymously to report the girl.

– But the police…? – Emily frowns.

– What about the police? – Higgins splashes his hands. – They came, talked to someone from the emergency room, and left, didn't even take her chart. Don't you think they've got enough of Jane's kind? Though maybe Donald or his secretary will fax them all the data, but that's when it's-" He shrugs. – You know, Miss Johnson, there may be something you can do for this young lady…

– What?

The ringing of an old gray Nokia interrupts the professor. The standard message tune cuts to the ear, then abruptly cuts off by the incoming call. Higgins frowns as he listens to the caller, nods without asking anything, and then just tosses the phone back into his jacket pocket.

– Change of plans, Miss Johnson. Forget about Jane, her namesake is waiting for us. – Mark stands up abruptly. – The other doe has a complication and needs to be prepped for surgery. A cyst.

– The other doe? – Emily's looking blankly into the void. – Professor, wait!

* * *

– What the fuck?! – Moss is furious as hell, and the air around him is saturated with electricity, threatening to turn into a storm. – We looked at his labs this morning, they were clean, did that crap come out in two hours?

– We looked at his head, not his back," Mark corrected him gently. – And we thought the pain was from hitting the pavement.

– There's a sack of shit for half the picture! – Andrew turns around so sharply that the flaps of his robe fly into the air. – How can you not see it?!

Higgins only shrugs his shoulders:

– It's been too little time, Andrew. We haven't even finished the general tests yet, and a new pain has arisen. It's no use blaming the poor orderlies.

– I'll get Neal to pump out the fluid and put in his miracle patches. – Moss signs the papers one by one and almost throws them at Emily, who is standing next to her. – Take this to Ray later. Where the hell did she come from?" The neurologist puts the scans back in the envelope. – Give this to our surgeons. And take care of the patient… – he yells again and storms out of the room before Emily can say okay. Mark follows, not even glancing at Johnson, holding a pile of unstitched files.

The other Doe, in Emily's opinion, needs no preparation: he sits perfectly still and doesn't take his gaze off her. His chart was almost blank-no test results, no allergies, no-whatever, as if they'd forgotten to fill it out, and there was no time to gather a medical history. Especially since he'd already been to some kind of procedure-the nurse sees a couple of cotton lumps glued on with a Band-Aid, a fresh IV line, a fresh bandage on his head, too.

Emily knows: it's just under an hour to surgery, which means that now we have to figure out what he's been doing and eating before; and when you consider that this is another memoryless man, the level of difficulty doubles.