The Anesthesiologist

Dr. Colin Marsh arrived at two in the morning, which was what Jace had known he would do, because Marsh was a man who could not let a phone ring unanswered, and could not let a friend in trouble face the night alone, and had been that way since they were boys, when Marsh was the kid who carried the first-aid kit on every school trip and knew, before anyone else, who was going to faint.

He stood in the doorway of the house on the hill, a tall, tired man of thirty-eight in a sweater over pajamas, with the careful, watchful face of someone who has spent his life around the moment when bodies fail. His wife had wanted to come. He had told her not to. He did not know why he had told her not to, except that something in Jace's voice had been the wrong color, and he had wanted to keep that color in one room.

"Jace," he said. "It's two in the morning. What's happened?"

"Come in. Close the door."

Marsh came in. He closed the door. He stood in the living room with the city burning below, and he looked at his oldest friend, at the young, untouched face that the whole city talked about, and he said, "You look terrible. You always look like this, you always look twenty-two, and tonight you look terrible. What did you do?"

"I need you to see something."

"What something?"

"A body."

The word sat in the room between them. Marsh's face did not move. He was, after all, a man who had spent fifteen years with bodies, who had seen them at their worst, who had held the hands of the dying and the charts of the dead. But he had never once seen a body that had been brought to him in the middle of the night by the boy he had grown up with, and the difference between those two kinds of bodies was the difference between his life and whatever was about to happen to it.

"Whose?" he said.

"Theo Brandt."

Marsh closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a long moment, and when he opened them, they were different eyes. "You killed Theo Brandt. The painter. The man who made you famous. Why, Jace? What could Theo Brandt have done to you that you had to kill him?"

"He saw something he shouldn't have seen."

"What did he see?"

"Nothing that matters anymore."

"Jace." Marsh's voice had gone low and careful, the voice he used in the operating room, the voice that preceded bad news. "You're my friend. You've been my friend since we were twelve years old, when you were the only kid at the school who didn't treat me like a janitor's son. I have loved you for twenty-six years. And I am telling you now, as the closest thing you have to a family, that you need to call a lawyer, and you need to call the police, and you need to tell them what you did, and you need to do it tonight, before it gets worse."

"I can't do that."

"You can."

"I can't, Colin. You don't understand. Theo isn't—this isn't a thing I did tonight. This is a thing I've been doing for seven years. This is the thing my whole life has been made of. Theo found out, and now Theo's dead, and I need you to make him go away, and I need you to do it tonight, and I need you to never speak of it again."

Marsh looked at him. "You need me to dispose of a body."

"Yes."

"You need me, an anesthesiologist, to make a dead man disappear, as if this were a film, as if you were a character and I were a plot device."

"Yes."

Marsh laughed, a short, broken sound. "No. No, Jace. I'm not doing that. I'm going to call your lawyer, and then I'm going to call mine, and we're going to do this the way it has to be done. I'm not going to help you bury this."

Jace had been standing very still, and now he moved, and he went to the sideboard and took something out of a drawer, and he came back with a photograph and a piece of paper, and he held them out.

"Before you decide," he said, "look at these."

Marsh took them. He looked at the photograph first: a woman in a hospital bed, young, pretty, asleep, with the particular stillness of the deeply sedated. Then he looked at the paper: a death certificate, signed in his own hand, in a handwriting he had practiced for exactly one purpose.

"You remember her," Jace said. "The night in the club. The girl who overdosed."

Marsh said nothing. He was looking at the photograph like a man looking at a room he has been in and cannot remember leaving.

"You signed her death certificate," Jace said. "You wrote that she died of a heart condition. You let a senator's son walk out of that room a free man, and you took the money for it, Colin. I've had this photograph and this paper for five years, and I've never used them, and I've never told anyone, because I thought you were my friend."

Marsh's face had gone the color of the wall. "Where did you get this?"

"I have my sources. That's not the point. The point is that you're not a clean man, Colin. You've never been a clean man. You've just been a man who was careful about which dirt showed. And I'm telling you now that if you walk out of this house without helping me, this photograph and this paper go to the medical board in the morning, and your career, your marriage, your whole careful life, goes with them."

"You'd destroy me."

"I'd destroy you to save myself. Yes. That's what I'd do. I've learned a lot in seven years, Colin, and the first thing I learned is that there is no depth I won't go to, and no one I won't take with me."

Marsh stood in the living room of the house on the hill, in the dark, with the city burning below, and he looked at the photograph in his hand, at the girl he had failed, at the paper that was his sentence, and his hands were shaking, the hands that had put a thousand people to sleep, shaking over one piece of paper, and he looked at his oldest friend, at the young, untouched, impossible face, and Jace watched the life go out of him by degrees, and waited.

"How did it get to this?" he asked.

"I made a wish."

"A wish."

"I wished to stay young," Jace said, "and I got what I asked for, and this is the price, and the price is everything. That's the whole story, Colin. That's the only story there is. Now come upstairs. I'll show you the body, and you'll tell me what you can do with it, and then you'll do it, and then we'll both go back to being the men we were, and neither of us will ever speak of this night again."

Marsh followed him up the stairs. He did not know why. He knew only that the photograph was in his pocket, and that the girl in the bed was real, and that his whole careful life had been standing on the paper in his pocket for five years, and that it had been about to fall the whole time.

In the locked room, in the gray light of the single window, Theo Brandt lay on the floorboards where he had fallen, and the painting hung on the wall above him, and Marsh looked at the painting, at the old, terrible face in the walnut frame, and he looked at Jace, at the young, untouched face in the gray light, and he said, in a voice he did not recognize, "That's you. That's the boy you were."

"Yes."

"And it's old."

"Yes."

"Jace. This is—this is beyond anything I know how to do. I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep. I don't make bodies disappear."

"Then learn," Jace said. "You have a hospital. You have access to things. You have a life that depends on your learning, Colin, and I'm giving you the night to learn it."

Marsh knelt beside Theo's body, the way he had knelt beside a thousand bodies, and out of thirty years of professional reflex he put two fingers to Theo's throat and checked for a pulse, and found none, and let the hand drop. Then he did the calculations as he had done them a thousand times, and the calculations came out the same as they always came out: there was a way, and it was terrible, and it would work.

"I need my car," he said. "I need my hospital badge. I need the manifest book from the loading dock, and I need six hours, and I need you to never call me again, and I need you to know, Jace, that when this is done, there will be nothing left between us but this, and that I will spend the rest of my life wishing I had let you burn."

"Then you'll have a long life to wish in."

Marsh stood. He looked at the painting once more, at the old face in the frame, and then he looked at Jace, and he said, "You know what the terrible thing is? I've known you twenty-six years, and I've watched you become the most loved and the most feared person in this city, and I've always thought the whole thing was a mystery. And now I see it. You're not young, Jace. You're frozen. You're a boy who stopped, and everything you've done since has been done by a boy, and a boy will do anything, because a boy doesn't know what anything costs."

They wrapped the body in the tarp from the studio, the two of them, working in the gray light of the locked room, Marsh's hands doing the work while his voice shook through the rest of him, and they carried it down the stairs, the old friends, one holding the shoulders and one holding the feet, and the trunk of Marsh's car closed over it with a sound like a door shutting, and the house settled around Jace like water, and the painting hung on the wall in the locked room, keeping its terrible ledger, and the city burned on below, and nobody in it knew that Theo Brandt, who had painted the most honest thing in Los Angeles, had just been carried out of the house on the hill in the trunk of an anesthesiologist's car, to be fed to the hospital's clinical waste incinerator under a forged manifest, to become, by morning, a line item in a book that would never be questioned by anyone.

And Jace sat on the bottom stair in the dark, with his young, untouched face in his hands, and he did not feel horror, and he did not feel grief. He felt the familiar relief, and he knew, with the whole weight of the seven years, that the account had been settled, and that the painting, upstairs, in the walnut frame, had not changed at all.