Quoted By:
>HIRE
07 – 09 – 1999 | SOUTH SIAM | WEEK 2
You end up hiring Natcha. The daughter. Her English was quite poor, but she spoke Thai and Tagalog fluently, as well as a smattering of Mandarin. There was a certain acuity to her bearing – less naked desperation than most of her fellow refugees, less mental inertia than the languid ease of the long-time locals. You have worked here long enough to become wary of both attributes.
She arrives at your clinic the following morning, her face draped behind a lignin-fiber raincoat pigmented with bright yellow sunflowers. Her dark eyes are marginally less guarded than before. You recall that her mother’s fever had receded a few nights ago, though she retained a dry, scratchy cough that kept her voice below a whisper.
“How is she doing?” you ask.
“Better.” She responds, “Not well enough to work, Dr….Ris…”
You nod plainly.
“Just R is fine. Blood on the paper please,” you say, peeling off a contingent work application from a stack you had retrieved from the Ministry of Foreign Labor.
Natcha does so without complaint, lancing her thumb before smearing her blood on the print-circle. Microcapillaries embedded in the thick paper siphon her blood into a grid of lyophilized reporter enzymes and conjugated antibodies. A genomic barcode slowly develops at the bottom of the page as a cocktail of restriction enzymes digest her DNA into short fragments.
You turn over the page, reviewing her values against the colorimetric reference. Natcha begins to fidget in the same way that her mother does.
“Can you show me your gums?”
She complies after a moment of hesitation. You refrain from asking her whether she felt tired or lightheaded – neither question had much diagnostic utility in a city like this.
“You have anemia. Do you know what that means?”
A quick shake of the head. “No.”
“You don’t have enough red blood cells. Eosinophils are high too. Are you eating enough?”
“...as well as we can.”
“Fair,” you reply, stamping the work permit with your own blood print to override the medical denial mark resolving over the approval section. She perks up after realizing that you aren’t denying her permit.
“Antihelminthic. Once a day until you finish the pack. Iron Sulfate. Twice a day, with meals. You can start working here the day after tomorrow.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
