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Chico was at work when the hack came to get him. Lopresti said Dr Nathan wanted Chico to ditch work and come to the infirmary.
That was the first sign that something was wrong.
When he got there, the doctor was sitting beside a patient's bed. She stood up and came over.
Dr Nathan shook his hand and said "Carmén, right? But people call you Chico?"
That was the second sign that something was wrong.
Till then, he would have guessed that she didn't know his name. She'd probably had to look it up in the patient records, which meant she was making an effort to be considerate, which meant Chico must have a flesh-eating disease or typhoid or incurable gonorrhea or something.
And then there was the third sign, the one that meant Chico was really fucked. She asked him if he wanted to come and talk to her in her office.
Chico said sure, whatever.
Dr Nathan's office was only for the real big ticket diagnoses - cancer, HIV, hepatitis. Shit you didn't want to find out in front of the whole ward.
Sure. Whatever.
He played it cool, but as he followed Dr Nathan to her office the feeling of dread started to hit him.
She fended off Lopresti, who wanted to sit in - probably wanted the gossip, Chico thought bitterly.
Dr Nathan shut the door behind them. He almost expected her to lock it as well.
"Chico..." she said, like they were close, like they were on first name terms.
She wasn't smiling anymore. There was an uncertain look on her face, like she didn't know how to say what she needed to say.
Chico didn't want to break the silence: he didn't want to know what could be this bad.
In the end, though, he couldn't hold himself back. He'd rather know than let his imagination run riot.
"Shit, Dr Nathan, what is it? Just tell me."
"You can call me Gloria," she said.
Yep, there must be something wrong. Something really, really fucking wrong.
Chico's mind raced. He went back to his list of big-ticket diagnoses, ticket-home diagnoses, running through them in his head as fast as he could. Cancer, hepatitis, HIV. He didn't feel tired the way cancer was meant to make you feel: he wasn't coughing and spluttering like O'Reily had. He hadn't been fucking around or doing anything with a needle, and anyway, he'd been tested a couple years ago and come up negative.
He really did not know what this was all about.
"Just tell me," he repeated.
"Chico," she said, looking grave, "You know you went for those x-rays?"
"Sure," he said.
Some of the cons who'd been in the Em City riot back in '97 were suing the state for brutality and neglect and general shittiness, and one of the points on their list was inadequate medical care. That meant the higher-ups were hastily trying to cover their asses and do everything by the book, so the hacks could pretend that they always did everything by the book, even though anyone could tell you that usually the book had pages torn out so they could wipe their ass on it.
The upshot was that Chico had got to take a day trip to Benchley Memorial to get his health checked out.
Chico had never got a physical like he was meant to when he arrived to Oz. Things had been kind of crazy back then (though they hadn't got much calmer since) and he'd got lost in the mix. They could have done the checkup in Oz, but Dr Nathan insisted on Benchley; said they had more room and more staff and better equipment.
"Come sit down," she said now, and she offered him the chair in front of her desk.
He sat down. Dr Nathan went hunting in her desk drawer for some files. He thought she might be trying to avoid eye contact.
Chico didn't like hospitals - did anyone like hospitals? You'd have to be some kind of pervert - but going on a trip to Benchley had meant he got to go outside. Got to ride in the bus and look out a window. He'd appreciated that.
You had to enjoy the little things; that was Chico's philosophy for surviving prison. Fresh fruit. Clean laundry. Seeing the sky; feeling the sun on your face, just for a few seconds. Nothing good was going to happen to you in here, so you had to try and enjoy what you did get.
The medical had been okay. He still didn't like hospitals - sitting there waiting for the doctor made him feel edgy, he'd had paranoid fantasies that someone was going to come by and grab him and stab him with a syringe full of Haldol, that he'd ticked the wrong box and they were going to put him a straightjacket and haul him off to the Connolly Institute. Once he got past the jitters, though, it had been an enjoyably boring afternoon. Lots of weird questions ("have you ever been paid with money or drugs for sex? have you ever visited sub-tropical Africa for longer than six months?"), and a blood test, and spit samples. They'd weighed him and measured his height and told him his blood type. The nurse took his blood pressure: could be lower, apparently. He hadn't tried to explain that prison was always kind of stressful.
The nurse had been really nice to him, sweet on him maybe. When he asked for a drink, she got him a Pepsi from the vending machine, and even found a straw so he could still drink it with the handcuffs on. Nobody had given any indication that any of the test results were bad.
"Is it TB?" he asked Dr Nathan. She shook her head.
When the doctor at the hospital had finally turned up, she'd ordered him some X-rays. A couple years ago he went home to visit his mom's people in northern Mexico, and the doctor said there was tuberculosis down there. Chico had figured that if he had TB it would have been obvious by now, but they'd said some stuff about how he could be carrying it anyway, and an X-ray was a good way to find out for sure.
"It should show up any other nasty things, too," the doctor had said. He didn't remember her name. She'd talked to him like he was a child: he wasn't sure if she was trying to show she wasn't afraid of him, or if she just talked to everyone like that.
Anyway, Chico hadn't complained. Another hour out of Oz.
And it had been kind of nice in the X-ray room. Quiet. Soothing. Kind of dark in there, too, so the X-ray machine could work. You never saw real darkness in Em City, the city of glass, not even at night.
Now, Gloria opened a file folder and pulled out a stack of X-rays, floppy and heavy and dark. She spread them out on the desk, then picked one up and showed it to him.
A skeleton - Chico's skeleton. He recognized the pins in his left arm, from when he slipped in the winter slush while he was getting on the bus and smashed his elbow on the kerb.
In the X-ray, he could see the ghostly outline of his organs. He stared in disgusted fascination. His stomach was a lot smaller than he'd thought. Everything was, all squashed up in there inside the ribcage.
As he looked, he noticed that there were these little dark spots in the middle of his chest - around the faint shapes of his stomach and his lungs.
Dr Nathan pointed to one of the dark spots in the X-ray. "Chico, the lab sent me this after they referred it to a specialist. There are these abnormalities. Now, these aren't the typical signs of TB, and you don't show any of the signs of carrying tuberculosis. The other tests came back clear. Maybe this could be something else - cancer, some kind of fungal infection, but the specialist doesn't think so. You'll have to go back for another X-ray to confirm it, but this pattern, and the relatively low density of the objects...."
She put her finger on some other dots that were barely visible, disappearing into the darkness around his bones. "These are very distinctive, Chico."
Another pause, her eyes brimming over with that unbearable compassion.
Chico wished she would be rude to him: he'd feel more comfortable.
"We - we think it's Hanahaki disease."
"Hanahaki?" Chico asked.
"We'll need to do some more tests, but yes, it seems so," Dr Nathan said, and she sounded very sure.
"I thought Hanahaki was wiped out years ago," Chico said. He felt lost.
"Not everywhere," Dr Nathan said. "Not in prisons. It's rare," she explained - she must have been able to tell he was shocked - "but I've seen it before, multiple times. It's two to three times more common in prisons than in the general population. You were probably exposed to another infected prisoner."
She kept talking, and Chico tried to listen. But he was too surprised.
Hanahaki was a big disease, but it was also kind of fantastical. Bigger than life.
People died of Hanahaki in old movies, or telenovelas, or on the front covers of tabloid magazines. It wasn't the kind of thing that happened to real people in real life. It wasn't the kind of thing that happened to people like him.
Chico couldn't say that he'd felt great recently, he had to admit that. But he hadn't thought much of it. If he'd thought about it at all, he'd have put it down to all the craziness - Alvarez escaping, and El Cid dying, and getting shuffled around different units and pods in Oz, and that crazy French guy pulling a gun and shooting all those people. Oh yeah, and being in fucking prison.
No wonder he felt kind of tired and run down.
He'd thought that was just another thing to be endured. He hadn't thought he might be dying.
He tuned back in to what Dr Nathan was saying.
"We caught this early, Chico," she said, looking all earnest. "You have options. Let me explain?"
He nodded, unable to summon any words.
Hanahaki. Christ.
She seemed more comfortable now that the worst part was over. Now she was all businesslike.
He thought she might be grateful that he hadn't cried, didn't need any comforting. Dr Nathan's bedside manner was always kind of for shit.
"I should start by telling you the first and best treatment for Hanahaki is to pursue a relationship with the object of your unrequited love." A beat. "That happens to be true, but also, I'm required to tell you that."
"Required?"
"It's state law," Dr Nathan sighed. "One of those weird things. The church had a lot of opinions...look, it doesn't matter. Sister Pete can facilitate some meetings between you and whoever it is, if you know who it is. Now, it doesn't work out for everybody, but..."
She looked at Chico expectantly, like it was time for him to leap in and tell her who it was and how much he wanted to see her.
But Chico said nothing: he just gestured for her to go on.
"Okay," she said. "Other than that, there's symptom management. There are two main treatment protocols for slowing the progress of the disease," she said, pulling out some photocopies. "The psychological approach and the medical approach. Most patients respond best to a mix of the two."
She handed him a packet of photocopies. The words leapt out at him: AMOR y MUERTE: HANAHAKI EN TU VIDA.
"The psychological approach is about coming to terms with your feelings, in order to reduce the symptoms and the spread of Hanahaki." She fixed him with a hard stare. "I know it sounds kooky, but multiple trials have shown that it can significantly reduce the progress of the disease, buying time for other options to work. Combined with the new medication, it can be really effective. It puts off any need for surgery."
"Why don't I want to get surgery?" Chico asked.
"You might die," Dr Nathan said, flatly.
His eyes scanned over the information sheet. Meditation, journaling, self compassion, learning to understand your emotions - was he dying or was he going to the fucking spa?
"Look, doctor, I'm gonna fuckin' die anyway, right? So what's the difference?" He snapped.
"There is a difference," she said. "Thirty years ago, people used to think that surgery was the answer to this disease. A miracle cure. But the outcomes just aren't good enough. I won't use a sledgehammer to crack a nut."
"It's my nut," Chico said. "Figure of speech."
"Yeah," she said, "I gathered." She looked tired. "Of course it's up to you. But the surgery isn't always successful - it's a very delicate procedure. Often there are unpredictable side effects, complications. Even if the surgery is successful, many people experience amnesia, anhedonia - that's loss of feeling," she explained to Chico's confused face, "Difficulty accessing memories, especially memories related to their condition... they forget who they are. Chico, we've got to take this seriously," she said.
"If it's so serious, then cut it out of me," Chico said.
He didn't even really mean it: at least, he didn't think so. Really, he just didn't know what to fucking think.
"Are you taking this all in?" she asked.
Chico closed his eyes and put his head in his hands.
"Why the fuck are you telling me all this," he said. His voice sounded weird and echoey, even to himself.
"I think you need to know," Dr Nathan said.
"I'm not a fucking doctor," he said. "Just tell me what I need to do."
When he opened his eyes and looked up, Dr Nathan was looking at him kind of skeptically.
"You don't have any next of kin listed in your file," Dr Nathan said.
He sat back and crossed his arms.
"So?"
"Is that correct?" she asked, starting to sound a little sarcastic.
"Is there a point to this?" Chico replied.
Always answer a question with another question was the first rule of fucking with the staff, and he felt like fucking with her a bit. She'd certainly fucked with his head.
"Yeah, you know what, there is a point," Dr Nathan said. "If you don't got a next of kin, you don't have anybody else looking out for you. That means beating this thing is up to you and me, but mostly it's up to you. Every day new patients roll in here with new things wrong with them, so I am not gonna be able to help you as much as I want. If I give you all this information," she said, "It becomes easier for you to manage your own care, and to make good decisions, and to feel good about those decisions. You got it?"
Chico didn't say anything.
"You're strong, Chico," she said, "You're a survivor. You can survive this."
He still didn't say anything.
"Look," Doctor Nathan said. "We don't have a lot of time. Let me try and explain what you're up against."
She pulled a pen out of the pocket of her lab coat and drew a circle on the back of an envelope.
"See this circle? It's the group of people who have Hanahaki."
He leaned in to see, interested despite himself.
She drew a line down the middle of the circle until it reached the centre, then took a sharp left turn and drew another straight line to the circle's edge.
"One third of people with Hanahaki reach conciliation - the person they love falls in love with them." She drew an arrow out and labelled it: CONCILIATION. She tapped her pen on the other part of the circle.
"Two thirds of people don't."
"Why?"
Her mouth twisted. "Could be any reason. Could be you're too old or he's too young, could be she's your brother's wife or she lives on the other side of the country now, could be she's gay or he's straight. Sometimes there is no reason - it just doesn't work. Love is funny like that."
She tapped her pen on the circle again, on the people whose unrequited love stayed unrequited.
"Of this group," she said, "Two thirds will die."
She drew more lines, dividing up the pie chart.
"That's two-thirds of two-thirds - so, about forty percent of all the people who display symptoms."
Chico stared at the pie chart.
"That's not good," he said.
"No shit," said Dr Nathan. "One third of the dead get full-blown, stage IV, terminal Hanahaki - you know, coughing up flowers, spit and blood, the classic symptoms. Another third die from surgery or after surgery. Most of them don't actually die on the table anymore. It's those complications, those side effects. Maybe they got the surgery too early, or too late, or their body rejects the double lung transplant..."
Chico looked at her in horror.
"Memory loss is a common side effect," she said, "Even after successful surgeries. That kills more people. You think someone wants to take their antirejection drugs and do their breathing exercises when they don't even remember they have a disease? And even if you get surgery and survive, the Hanahaki can still come back. The odds aren't good."
Chico stared at the circle.
"What about the people who do survive?" he asked.
"Some of them fall out of love," she said, sighing. "Some of them have a successful surgery, and continue to comply with treatment after, and they live. Some of them manage their condition with medication and therapy for ten years or more - that's considered to be remission. And there are a couple examples in the literature of someone with early stage Hanahaki who recovered after the one they loved died. One case of someone who murdered the woman he loved, and recovered."
"Damn," Chico said. "I thought that was a myth." It's like that old movie from the Fifties, Las Flores Del Mal.
Dr Nathan shrugged. "For a long time, nobody knew if it could really happen - nobody wanted to know if it could happen, back when Hanahaki was a lot more common. They thought it might give people bad ideas, cause more problems, you know."
Yeah, he could imagine.
"Anyway, he got caught and he went to the chair, so he only bought himself an extra six months."
"That's fucked up," Chico said.
"Everything about this is fucked up," she said. "For now, all you got to do is to start learning more about the disease, and start thinking about your care plan. I think, this is my advice as a doctor, that you should take the medication, and start it as soon as possible," Dr Nathan said. "Cleeraflor is a relatively new drug, but it's been put through a lot of trials and the results are good, especially for young men in the early stages of Hanahaki. Effective symptom management also gives you more time to make contact with your loved one."
Right. This was the part Chico didn't want to talk about, didn't want to think about.
"Chico, do you know who it is?"
His silence must have betrayed him, because she barrelled on.
"If you think there's any chance, any chance at all....."
"I don't think it can happen," he said.
"The most successful route to recovery is to try and reconcile with your loved one," she said, and she sounded like she was quoting something, but she also sounded like she really meant it. "Sister Pete can facilitate special extra visits, you might even be able to get day release..."
Gloria was right: everything about this was totally fucked up.
Chico looked at her, really looked at her, while he tried to decide if he could trust her.
Chico has been around: he's been in juvie and a couple low security prisons. He's been given medical care by the worst of the worst, and compared to most prison doctors, Dr Nathan was downright competent.
Well, there was the "getting a crush on a prisoner who fell in love with her and had her husband whacked" thing, but let he who is not sitting there with Hanahaki flowers curling through his guts throw the first stone. Or something.
Dr Nathan didn't sell pills to junkies, or hit on patients, or ignore sick prisoners if she didn't like them. She didn't gossip with the hacks about who had an STD. Her personal life might be fucked up, but she took her job seriously.
That was why Chico decided to say what he said next, which was this:
"He's not in Oz. Not anymore."
He watched Gloria as she took that in. He was as important a detail as not in Oz.
"Chico..."
"I don't wanna hear what you think about it," Chico said, voice hard. "It's my life, not yours."
"I don't care about that," she said, her voice gentle. "Chico..."
He looked away. Brown eyes. Chico was always a sucker for brown eyes, and Gloria's big brown eyes were full of pity and other things he didn't want to see.
"He's not dead," Chico said, still keep his face turned away from her. "At least, nobody told me."
"And he wouldn't come -"
"No," Chico interrupts. "He won't. He can't." Couldn't, wouldn't. Same thing.
He met Gloria's eyes. She could give him that pitiful look all she wanted, but it wouldn't make him want to talk about his feelings. He'd said more than he'd meant to already.
He blinked.
"We can put you on the medication," Gloria was saying, all business again. "We don't have to tell anybody for what, if you don't want to. We can tell people you're having trouble sleeping and it's melatonin. You'll have to get x-rayed every couple of weeks: I can come up with some reason."
Chico just nodded.
"If you wanna talk-" Dr Nathan stopped. "I'm not really that kind of doctor," she said reluctantly, "But I get it. Talk to me, if you don't want to talk to Sister Pete. Or try the Hanahaki support group. They meet on Sundays."
"Sure," Chico said, knowing he had no intention of going.
The X-rays were still scattered across Dr Nathan's desk. He reached out to touch one.
"Do you know what kind of flowers they are?" He asked.
"Rosebuds," she said. "That was what the specialist thought, anyway."
And Chico thought of Miguel's hands and nodded.
Because Chico knew what it meant, when she said Hanahaki: knew that there was only one person on his mind like that.
Miguel Alvarez, that crazy white boy, that infuriating, whiny, devious motherfucker. A guy with all the bad luck in 7 broken mirrors and as many lives as a cat. Chico didn't know when it started, and it made no fucking sense, but he loved him. Just a hair more than he hated him.
Dr Nathan made Chico promise to come back, promise to review the literature, promise to consider his treatment options. Chico agreed, even though he didn't really know if he would be able to hide that he has this disease.
He thought about the lies he was going to have to come up with, the fictional people he would have to invent, and he just felt so tired.
In Las Flores Del Mal, Jorge Mistral is in love with María Félix, but she doesn't even know his name. She's a singer or an actress or something like that, and he's a nobody from the poor part of town. He loves her, but he hates her, because when he tries to get close to her she just walks by him. So he pretends to be rich so he can get close enough to her to kill her, because it's the only way to save his own life. At least, until she starts to fall in love with him.
In the end, Mistral dies in her arms. Or does she die in his arms?
Maybe they both die. Chico couldn't remember. He saw it in black and white on his grandmother's old TV when he was a little kid, and he hadn't seen it since.
Work time was almost over, so a hack escorted him back to Em City early.
Chico walked slowly on the way back to his pod, savouring the unusual sight of Em City empty. Nobody in it but him.
At least he got time off work, he told himself. It's all about the little things.
He wished he could sleep. You couldn't sleep in here, not really. It's never dark enough, not even when you close your eyes. Not like the darkness he remembered from when he was a child, staying with relatives in the countryside. At night, the darkness was so heavy that you couldn't tell the difference when you opened and closed your eyes. He had never slept as well anywhere else as when he was there. Not before, not since.
As Chico sat down on his bunk in his pod, he wondered what he was feeling. Sad, he decided. Sad, and a little bit afraid. Everybody was born to die, yes; sooner or later everybody's time would come, yes; but that didn't mean he had to be thrilled that it was his time and his turn.
Chico couldn't always tell what he was feeling, because he tried not to feel too much.
He hadn't realized he loved Miguel until he escaped. He'd watched the chaos at count after they realized Miguel was missing, and he'd felt so strange. It had taken him a while to be able to put a finger on what it was.
He'd felt happy for Alvarez, when he shouldn't have been happy for anything good that happened to that son of a bitch. And then with the joy had come a pang of sadness, even grief.
He'd realized sometime during that long, long night after Miguel escaped that he was going to miss him. Miss him, even though they'd hated each other; miss him, even though he should hate him still. And he knew himself well enough to understand why.
Chico was not even going to think about what might happen if Miguel could love him back, because that was never gonna happen. Miguel had a girlfriend, he'd had a son: was not going to suddenly become somebody who could fall in love with Chico. That didn't happen to people like him. That shit was for romance novels, and dumb movies on HBO.
Anyway, Miguel couldn't fall in love with him no matter what, because Miguel was gone. Gone for good, hopefully.
Wherever he was out there, Miguel might not be safe - fuck no, he wasn't safe, he was a fugitive - but he was safer. He was safe from Oz, the place that nearly killed him. He was safe from El Norte. He was safe from Chico.
It occurred to him that Miguel could be dead by now.
It also occurred to him that it would make everything easier if he was.
If Chico ever sees Miguel again, he doesn't know what he might do. What he might have to do.
So Chico hoped against hope that Miguel was free, and that he was safe, and that he would never come back to Oz. Even if it meant Chico has to take pills: even if it meant he might have to be cut open like a turkey at Thanksgiving so they can rip out his lungs and put in new ones.
Stay free, he thought. He's not a very religious guy, but he'll say a prayer for Miguel.