In this medical fiction, an ED physician grapples with the haunting memory of Bruce, whose method of repossessing homes takes a dark turn and results in a legacy of pain and remorse.
This medical fiction tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies that appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. The technical details surrounding the event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are therefore entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish.
I’ve never stopped imagining Bruce’s final day. Since Nurse Wilkes told me about Bruce’s fate, a year after that fateful ED visit, I often think about the painful reckoning of his death—the drooling, the gnashing teeth, the eventual coma. This was made all the more painful, of course, by Bruce’s knowledge that he brought his end upon himself.
I was first introduced to Bruce through his handiwork. As an emergency medicine physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, I had frequently treated his wife for a sickening array of trauma—everything from a split lip to a broken finger to a cut over the eye—and, once, broken ribs. I saw the yellowing edges of old bruises and the raised purple lumps of fresh ones. Bruce took to his job of repossessing distressed houses as naturally as an eel takes to being slippery.
When Jeff slid on slick cement and fell off the loading bay at the meat packing plant, Jane was left with children, debt, and overwhelming doubt that bound her to an impending bankruptcy as tightly as her wheelchair tied her to the ground. She held onto the house as long as she could, but as a widow on Medicaid, she struggled to find work that paid enough to cover the mortgage. It was vermin that finally pushed her off the precipice. During a routine inspection of the property to check that she was keeping the required amount of groceries in the house, and not taking illicit drugs or entertaining male lodgers, the inspector had found mouse droppings in the food cupboard and spotted one disappearing behind the shelves. One thing led to another, one condition piled atop the other, and soon the loan was called in. She was forced to sign over the house and move out.
I’m sure Bruce was rather proud of the trick with the mice. He was given the paperwork to seize Jane’s house and contents and ready the property for auction. His reputation for dirty tricks was one of those things that everyone knew but nobody talked about. Everyone knew that the foreclosure of the place on Elm Street after drugs were found in the resident’s car was Bruce’s handiwork. Everyone knew it, nobody could prove it, and nobody wanted to get involved and attest to it. When a barn burned down at the McPhee place and they lost their farm, the grapevine said it was Bruce that torched it, but who could prove it? Who in this low-income town wanted to risk Bruce turning his attention to them?
This time, though, people muttered a bit, and one of the nurses—Wilkes—blurted out that she wished Bruce would come to a sticky end. She apparently knew Jane from the church group and felt strongly that Bruce was responsible for Jane’s misfortune, had been behind the mice himself. The irony, I suppose, was that she was right, but also wrong. It was certainly true that his hand was involved in the whole mouse thing, but it was also true that there were already vermin in the house. Bats had nested in one of the walls, and regulations being what they were, it would have taken a lot of paperwork and representation to get the bats out.
On the day that Bruce reached in the faded green siding of Jane’s home for the key, I was in my last week of rotation. I would soon leave town to take up a role in another state. Bruce had fumbled around in the hole before his fingers found the cold brass keyring where Jane always left them. I can imagine his surprise at discovering that a mouse, maybe one of his own, had made a home there. It sunk its glistening yellow teeth deep into his thumb. Whether he cursed and screamed in astonished pain, I don’t know. I know that I divorced my mind from what I knew of him and focused on Bruce the patient. I examined his wound after a nurse cleaned it and administered a tetanus injection. He whined a lot about getting the shot, I recall, and at the end of an exhausting 18-hour shift, I had to really bite my tongue. I eventually convinced him that tetanus was a truly awful way to die and that the vaccine was safe, painless, and effective. I might have described how tetanus was once a rampant disease and a leading cause of death, I don’t remember.
I heard from Nurse Wilkes that a year later, Bruce had been brought to the ED complaining of a blinding headache and sensitivity to sunlight. I kept in touch with some of the staff, and occasionally they passed on local gossip. Nobody gave specifics, but they said enough for me to know that his wife was still a frequent visitor, her body bearing witness to the ample signs of abuse.
It wasn’t until Bruce’s difficulty swallowing that a bite on a persistently numb hand was explained. When Wilkes described this to me, I had a flash of realization that his mice had obviously cohabited with the bats in those walls for long enough for another pathogen to be shared, one I had not considered at the time. Bruce apparently took his terminal diagnosis badly, disconsolate at the news that symptomatic rabies is largely untreatable, irreversible, and terminal. Wilkes relayed with some degree of gleeful irony that Bruce had wept and begged for a cure as though there was some magic to be had. By all accounts, the disease progression was pretty swift from there on, and within days of admission he was delirious and hallucinating. Shrouded in a halo of pale light in the ICU, Bruce had sunk into a coma and died because of that repossessed home and his mouse trick.
