The crime beat reporter opened the morning roundtable: “What are we thinking for the in-depth hospital piece? ‘Inside the Tragedy at Memorial’？”
“Possibly. How do we feel about the word tragedy?”
“We’ve had this debate before. Didn’t we decide it should be based on the number of deaths? I thought someone said that it had to be ten or more deaths to be called a ‘tragedy.’ This was fewer than ten.”
“I think we called that home invasion two weeks ago a ‘tragedy,’ and only one person died.”
“Yeah, we probably shouldn’t have done that. Personal tragedies aren’t the same as news tragedies.”
“Well, this was a mass shooting, and those are always tragedies.”
“Did this one definitely qualify as a mass shooting?”
“If we’re using the criteria of at least four victims, then yes.”
“Of course it’s a tragedy. Shootings like this can usually be prevented. The sick bastards are almost always bragging online about their fucked-up beliefs beforehand. Something’s a tragedy if we could have stopped it.”
“We’re getting lost in the semantics here. This isn’t some neo-Nazi shooter with an online manifesto. The real story here is the strings.”
“It sounded like the hospital refused to admit the shooter, even though he claimed he was about to die.”
“I heard they just couldn’t afford to keep giving CT scans to every short-stringer showing up looking perfectly healthy.”
“I wonder if the hospital could’ve predicted that something bad was about to go down if they had known that the waiting room was full of people at the end of their strings.”
The table was silent for a beat.
“Look, the only winners here are the gun lobbyists and the politicians in their pockets,” someone said. “It’s the first shooting in this country that they can easily wash their hands of: Don’t blame the guns, or the laws, or the health care system. A short-stringer did it. Blame the strings.”
“That’s our angle,” Deborah finally interjected, after quietly observing her editors argue about the nature of tragedy and the number of human lives lost to satisfy a legal definition. Deborah had once confided in Nina, after her third drink at the holiday party, that whenever the team discussed a shooting or a natural disaster, she was struck by how lightly their words were tossed about. In her three decades as a journalist, as the headlines seemed to grow ever more grim, Deborah had seen the words shed their weight a little more with each occurrence, until they barely resembled the dense nouns and heavy adjectives that once pressed upon entire rooms. But that was the only way to continue working, Nina thought, to shield your soul from breaking.
“This is the first mass shooting in the new world order,” Deborah said to the table. “How does that make it different? How does that change our response to it?”
She stood to leave the room, then turned back briefly.
“And five people died,” she said, sounding exhausted. “You can call it a tragedy, for fuck’s sake.”
At home that night, Nina stared at the open page on her laptop, the article she was supposed to be editing. But she was thinking, instead, about Jonathan Clarke.
What would happen if Maura went to the hospital now? The two of them often rented bikes and cycled along the river. What if Maura collided with a taxi and was rushed to the ER? Would the doctors be allowed to ask about her string?
Nina knew that her girlfriend, as a Black woman, was already at a heightened risk in a medical setting, that women’s pain and Black people’s pain had a long history of being misdiagnosed or ignored. And now this? The injustice never failed to astound her.
Of course, Maura wouldn’t have to tell them about her string. She could lie and say she had never looked. But would they actually treat her differently, if they knew the truth?
It might not be a conscious decision, Nina realized. Surely, if a doctor had to choose between saving a patient who was eight or seventy-eight, they would save the child first, right? Maybe this was the same? Help the long-stringer first?
Nina was terrified by the thought that Maura might be abandoned as a hopeless cause simply because of her string. But the part that really created chaos in Nina’s orderly brain was the question that emerged from it all: Did a patient receive less care because her string was short, or was a patient’s string short because she received less care?
It felt like the world’s most fucked-up version of the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.