Medical Fiction: Kewin and the Vaping Room

Aug 11, 2023

This 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 more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near-fatal) 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. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack.

Kewin James Christopher Bundy III was not comfortable in his own skin and found his life a poor fit. He had been brought up in a family that was uncomfortable with its own history, its place in the world, and its future. The family had come to America, transported as the jetsam of England, to escape imprisonment for crimes that didn’t warrant either a quick stint in the stocks or a flogging… or, on the other hand, execution.

His father was an angry man, addicted to sports, outrage, and a sense of fury borne of undeserved entitlement. His mother seemed devout to the point of pathology, but she was actually just escaping the grim reality that she had married poorly and her every expectation and hope had come to nothing. She harbored a rage-filled desire to stab her husband to death in his sleep. She felt an overwhelming burden of guilt for her frequent murderous pangs and sought a form of intellectual oblivion by embracing religion and taking enemas. There were times when Greg was in the bath and Doris felt a nearly overwhelming urge to throw her hair dryer in with him. There were also times when it took all her willpower not to set him alight while he snored in front of the TV. At those times, she memorized a page of scripture and purged her bowels with a strong coffee mixture.

There had been two offspring in this connubial paradise. Where Kewin was deficient in an ineffectual way, his sister Sarah had blitzed a path through life and left home for a big city in another state the day after she received her high school transcript. Sarah had waited for neither graduation nor prom and had sought nobody’s agreement or approval to sign up for an apprenticeship as a jeweler, pack her bags, and scoot. She had taken some tools, samples, her well-thumbed copy of “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir, and only the clothes she really wanted. Father had thrown a pink-canary fit, but since she was already in the air by the time he came home to find her gone, he could rage all he wanted as far as she cared. Plus, there was the fact that neither of her parents knew where she was going. Mother had memorized two pages from the Bible and locked herself in the bathroom with vodka, a large pot of coffee, and a rubber hose. While they were each dealing with the event in their own dysfunctional way, Sarah was cruising at 35,000 feet, sipping tea, and reading DAME magazine. She shared the same spirit: unrepentantly progressive, fiercely fact-oriented, and strongly intersectional. Sarah browsed, sipped, smiled, and then snoozed as she slid through the freezing altitude to New York City.

Kewin was an aimless sort of boy. Where Sarah had known for years exactly what she wanted to do in life, had collected a large portfolio of jewelry designs, and had built skills and a sizable social network of people in the industry, Kewin had no specific ideas, passions, or ambitions. In fact, he felt rather put out by all the questions his parents, teachers, and the school counselor kept asking him. He liked gaming, but it was not a passion. He liked vaping, but he wasn’t really into it; it was just a way to get a rise out of his dad and make his mother bury her nose in the Bible. All in all, he just didn’t want to be bugged by his dad’s politics or his mom’s Bible stuff.

After he graduated high school, Kewin listlessly flopped about the house, but after much nagging from Mom, and snarky remarks from Dad, he started hanging out at the local job center. The second week of his job search, he was sent to the job fair. After filling in forms at several booths, he found himself with a job offer from the local hospital. The job was for a trainee billing clerk and it paid better than flipping burgers, was a lot less effort than working construction, and would get him out of the house.

The inherently tedious nature of the job soon became apparent, and while he enjoyed being in the thrumming bustle of the hospital and the sense of purpose that ran through it, his own job was crushingly boring: bundling bills, adding reminder sheets and payment notices, and dropping them into the huge plastic bins of outgoing mail. The most exciting thing the office had to offer was the pneumatic tube spitting out the odd bit of paperwork to be added to one of the thousands of billing folders. Kewin took every opportunity to leave his workstation just to see something other than bills and people wearing rubber fingertips. Even a trip to a storeroom seemed like a reprieve. His mind screamed with boredom by the end of each day, and he vanished the instant the big railway clock above the department doors marked 5:00.

His lack of enthusiasm for the work had not escaped attention. It was obvious to his supervisor that his listlessness and indifference miraculously transformed the instant it was time to go home. She therefore piled him up with as many menial jobs as she could, and was sure to point out any mistakes and comment on any slacking. She felt that if his work hours were tedious, they may as well be busy, and if he was already bored, he may as well be miserable too.

The more his work became a drag, the greater became his need to find ways to escape the drudgery, and the more he wanted to find a quiet spot and vape. By chance, one of the tasks he was given involved moving dozens of boxes of paper documents from a storeroom in the basement up to level three. The people on level three received the documents; they got them ready for scanning and digitization by removing paper clips and staples, straightening out the individual sheets, and feeding them into a giant scanner. Apparently, the digitized copies would be added to the electronic records system and would be retrievable from any of the facilities. Kewin was initially very interested in the new technology, but swiftly got bored and found another angle. Since there was no real supervision of this task, he could sit on a pile of boxes propped against the heavy storeroom door and listen to music on his Bluetooth earphone while he enjoyed a vape or two. There were so many boxes and folders piled up that the doors couldn’t even close properly. To his delight, the storeroom had an air extraction vent of its own, so he could vape away without much fear of anyone catching on. Judging by how long it took the people on level three to get through the piles of records that he brought on his trolley, he figured that three trips a day, with an hour to vape, snooze, or listen to music, would fill up an entire day. A rough count of the shelves and piles suggested to him that this gig would last at least a week. This was Kewin’s idea of work, and he was almost purring with glee. He lay back on the boxes and sent a white vape cloud up to the ceiling, watching it spread and slowly vanish.

On the fourth day, Kewin got to the boxes that were stacked against the door, and as he lifted the last box away and onto his trolley, he heard the door click into place. It was probably the first time in 10 years that this particular door had been able to close. It was pleasing in a funny way to see the storeroom almost empty. He fired up his vaping pen and took a drag. It was 30 minutes before home time, and given the choice between one last trip to level three and listening to music, he didn’t find it hard to decide.

When he had finished vaping, he swung the trolley out of the way and pushed on the door. This time, however, the door was not budging. A tiny twinge of claustrophobic panic rippled through him, but he remembered that the room had good ventilation. Kewin tried shoving the door harder and kicked it a few times, but it was shut solid. He unsuccessfully tried ramming it with the trolley, but all that happened was a few boxes tumbled to the floor. One box split open, and folders full of paperwork slid across the cement floor. Kewin looked for a buzzer or intercom, but found nothing. He tried using his cellphone, but as he had so gleefully told his supervisor at the start, there was no cellphone reception in the storeroom. Banging on the door would probably achieve nothing, he had thought, but he banged for several minutes anyway. When his fists and feet were too sore to keep banging, he sat on one of the boxes and fired up his vaping pen.

It was then that an idea came to him. The storeroom had a fire detector, and if he triggered that, someone in the 24×7 security office would come to investigate the source of the alarm, freeing him.

It took Kewin about 10 minutes to build a pile of boxes stacked three high so he could reach the fire detector on the ceiling. Luckily, like many vapers, he also smoked cigarettes and routinely carried a lighter. Swaying on the boxes, he could just not get close enough to the fire detector. He positioned the trolly under the sensor, and stacked boxes on it to get closer to the ceiling. This time the height was good, but the trolley kept moving. After several attempts at wedging the trolley wheels, the folders brimming with documents, Kewin was finally able to keep it steady. The lighter flame was getting a little low, and he was worried that it would die before triggering the detector. He shook the lighter energetically, then rubbed it rapidly against his trouser leg to warm it up and help increase the internal pressure. He wasn’t a religious person, but sent some sort of prayer up to whatever spirit looked after people locked in basement storerooms, clambered to the top of the boxes, and applied a nice fat yellow flame to the detector.

There was an audible click, as something in the detector woke up to the flame, and Kewin watched expectantly. A thought suddenly occurred to him that if this thing set off water sprinklers, he might be in a lot of trouble about waterlogged documents. He shrugged it off after a moment’s thought. It wasn’t his problem, and if they weren’t smart enough to put an intercom in the room, or a way to open it from the inside, that was on them. Hopefully, it would just flash a light in the control room or something and not spray water.

He was in luck. A lamp and alarm buzzer did indeed light up on a control panel, and a puzzled security guard looked at a display that announced a fire in Records Vault #2. Kewin was also in luck about the water. The fire system dropped the dampers in Records Vault #2 to shut the air vents, picked a solenoid that opened a valve in the basement, and sent 50 pounds of CO2 rushing down the pipes. When a shrieking and banging noise announced the arrival of the gas, Kewin was startled, and he watched the plumes of CO2 crystals pouring from ceiling nozzles with a mixture of surprise and alarm, but also curiosity. It certainly was pretty. With no idea what he was looking at, his thoughts went in the direction of stage theatricals and smoke machines or a giant puffing at a huge vape pen. He was taken by how the white billows poured from the nozzles like liquid smoke and covered the entire floor. He was soon submerged up to his waist in thick white clouds, and the initial surprise at how cold it was gave way to a sense of panic as he panted for breath. He felt like he was spinning.

Mercifully, death came swiftly. Only 2 minutes after dropping to the floor in a faint, Kewin was gone and would never again have to wear a rubber fingertip, stuff another billing envelope, or listen to his dad rant about sports or politics.

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