Fatal Reaction

coffee.
    “It’s me, Stephen.” He was calling from atop his exercise bike. I could hear the babble of CNN over the whirring of the gears. “I was thinking it would be a good idea if you sat in on the ZK-501 project council meeting this morning.”
    “The what?”
    “The weekly research meeting. I’m going to announce the Takisawa visit and I think you should be there.”
    “What time?”
    “It starts at seven.”
    I groaned.
    “I take it that’s a yes?”
    I groaned again. Usually I make it a practice to at least be civil to my clients, but then again my clients usually don’t call me at home at five o’clock in the morning.
    “I hope you had a chance to look over that material I sent you.”
    I muttered something under my breath and was relieved that Stephen chose to interpret it in the affirmative. I’d stayed at the office until nearly midnight and still hadn’t had time to read through the box of materials that Stephen had messengered over to acquaint me with the ZK-501 project. I’d taken them home and tried to read them in bed, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that of the dozens of scientific abstracts I’d tackled, I’d hardly understood a single word.
    I let my face fall back into my pillow, but the reality that Stephen Azorini was now my boss was enough to prevent me from going back to sleep. I rolled out of bed and padded down the long hall that ran down the center of the apartment I share with my roommate Claudia Stein.
    I live in Hyde Park, which most people know as the home of the University of Chicago. For the last fifty years it has been a neighborhood poised on the brink of gentrification. Socially, racially, and economically diverse, it is exactly the kind of community that social progressives invariably call for and yet inevitably flee as soon as it gets dark. My partners at Callahan Ross assumed I lived there in order to be close to Stephen, whose apartment a few blocks away was one of his ways of keeping close ties to the university. My parents had no such illusions. They just thought I’d chosen the neighborhood to piss them off. The truth was actually much more straightforward. Claudia was a surgical resident at the University of Chicago and she got withdrawal symptoms whenever she was more than ten minutes away from the mayhem of the emergency room.
    Claudia was in the kitchen when I got there, pouring herself a cup of coffee and looking out the window through the steel bars of the burglar grille. She is a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, who wears her dark hair in a single braid that falls down her back like a schoolgirl’s. In spite of her size she manages to convey a brand of instantly recognizable toughness, the kind that surgeons get after a couple years of sewing up bullet holes. She was dressed for work in her usual green scrubs and running shoes, but in her hurry to get to the hospital she’d managed to put the top on backward so that the label was in front and the V neck revealed her vertebrae.
    “What are you doing up so early?” she demanded ungraciously. “Are you sick or something?”
    “I have an early meeting,” I growled, helping myself to coffee. “Did you know your shirt’s on backward?”
    “Yes. I turned it around on purpose,” she replied. “I caught one of the anesthesiologists looking down my shirt yesterday in pre-op.” She shot me one of her you-couldn’t-possibly-be-naive-enough-to-find-this-surprising looks.
    “So what’s happening on the fellowship front?” I asked. Claudia was due to complete her residency in June and was going through something of a career crisis. Having decided to specialize beyond general surgery, she had applied to fellowship programs in two wildly different areas: eye surgery and trauma. Since then, she could have learned a foreign language in the time she’d spent debating between the two.
    “Stanford ophthalmology has invited me to come out for a visit and I’m going to spend a day at Northwestern trauma next week.”
    “Are those your two top choices?”
    “I think so.”
    “So which one do you think you’ll pick?”
    “They have to pick me first.”
    “Assuming they both do, which one will you choose?”
    “I don’t know.... After last night I’m thinking of switching to pediatrics and signing up for the Peace Corps. Diarrhea and ear infections are sounding pretty good to me today.”
    “Why? What happened?”
    “The paramedics brought in a fifteen-year-old kid from one of the