After wasting all his life trying to gain the recognition of his father and everyone who later stood in for his father he was finally enjoying the kind of freedom that comes with giving yourself over to real purpose. He was going to reveal at last the creature he had been smothering for years, who desired to become a God for a few minutes as something living stopped breathing. That was who he had been all along. Besides, It's what Margot wanted. 

He had caught himself almost telling his coresident about Margot the other night.

“I'm really thinking of applying to interventional cardiology. Margot would respect that.”

“Who's Margot?”

“Margot Robbie,” he blurted, wishing he could cram the words back in his mouth. 

His co-resident let out a burst of laughter, then cocked her head as if to ask, Is this an inside joke I'm not in on? 

He missed his cue to play it off but instead behaved the way one does when an embarrassing secret was revealed. Later he abused himself horribly in the call room, letting waves of embarrassment roll over him.

“You almost let the cat out of the bag.” Margot said.

“I know. I'm so fucking stupid.”

“We've worked really hard to get this far, and I know you can do this!”

“I can. I will.”

“I want to be with you. But you've got to take one for me.” Margot looked deep into his blunted brown eyes with her own round expressive ones. “Now chop chop!”

He picked the girl up on Goldhut Drive in front of the Salvation Army shelter. He knew she’d be put out today. It had been ten days since her discharge from the ER and she could only stay there ten days. There was a single vehicle on the block, parked with one wheel on the sidewalk and not in operating order for some time. The wheels were dry rotted and windows knocked out, contents long ago raked through.

The block was a humid desert of broken asphalt rusted corrugation and giant padlocks on broken chain links where weeds struggled through any possible soil. Life barely intruded on the stillness until the shelter dwellers emerged from the windowless shed and hit their varied strides and trajectories. Some made no hurry to get to the perimeter they were allowed to loiter upon. Others made a loping pace as if late for an appointment and wanting to travel as fast as possible without breaking into a run. He waited for her to separate from the staggering ranks.

She looked just like he thought she would outside the hospital, a ready target for abuse, if she could even perceive abuse at this point through her dense layers of neurological damage.

She already understood why he was there. She’d noticed his attention in her repeated visits to the emergency department, his eagerness to start her IV and insistence he give her the first push of Dilaudid. 

She’s a hard stick, I got this, she would hear from the hallway and he’d come in with his pocket ultrasound. She knew it was strange but his eagerness to keep her fucked up made it easy to ignore the tiny sirens. 

“I’m a doctor and this is the safest way to do something you're going to do anyway.”

Despite her demi-stupor she stopped at the decaying truck to coo at the baby birds nested in the sun visor which was wrenched all the way through the window by looters.

“Maybe it's not a fetish. Maybe I'm in love with you.”

“You don't mean that. I mean I can play along but that's not a thing, we can't be confused about that.”

“Of course, of course. I don’t mean like that, I just guess I can’t explain without sounding crazy.”

This is the one Margot wanted. It was time.

She laid flat on the itchy lumpy motel bed with an expertly placed IV. It never hurt when he did it but it throbbed just knowing it was there. She was afraid of needles and preferred smoking but he only frowned when she suggested he just watch her hit the pipe. She didn't want to be too fucked up with a john but he held out a life-changing roll of cash. Sounds too good to be true said the voice in her head and now she felt panic rise and hated herself for ignoring the voice and the tiny sirens that had never once been wrong.

“It hurts. I don't want to do this no more.”

An edge came into his voice when she twisted slightly. 

“Just a second you'll ruin-”

“My fucking chest feels like it's going to explode man sto-”

He quickly pushed the plunger down and watched the screen flicker grey on black. To the unpracticed eye it was a supreme abstraction but he could see the muscle quiver like spilled worms then shudder uselessly and stop.

Part of him squirmed away from what he had done but that was just a remnant of programming that had been mostly quashed and would soon be erased completely. He attended the dead body and opened himself to pure white gnosis. It was cleaner than any hospital death he had witnessed without the leaking and spewing and broken ribs. She was beautiful and he thought when she was cold and pallid she would be more beautiful still.

He supposed it was a merciful end to the miserable rat maze of trying to find crack then smoking, panicking that her chest was on fire, running to the ER to sleep it off, lying through her teeth that she wanted to stop, then fleeing only to find herself back at the entrance to the maze. Mercy meant nothing to him though. This was about grace, not mercy. This was for her. 

“Oh my God, baby! You found just the right one! I'm so proud of you.” Margot said.

He wept.