Chapter 8: Shrewsbury Clock
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Miraculously, the rice resurrects my trusty phone. Even the jagged crack bisecting the screen seems to glisten under a light pearly dust. I scoop it out of the bowl, and it proudly displays a single QuidNunc message from Ben.
Ben T [00:05:28]: Put it in rice! I think itll be ok—alcohol is better than water. And yes it was a wonderful night. Let’s do it again sometime :)
I call Aunt Didi early on this Sunday morning and suggest Finkelstein’s for breakfast.
“Oh, what a treat,” she says. “I haven’t been there in a hundred years.”
She insists on picking me up in her chunky beige Saab, which she keeps immaculate, and we drive the twelve or so blocks to the deli. The parking lot in the back is packed, as usual. Aunt Didi has to maneuver the stolid old sedan onto a sloping asphalt hump with several seams of lank grass shellacked to its surface like unwashed hair.
“This is a parking spot, isn’t it?” she asks.
We amble around to Finkelstein’s cantilevered awning entrance and into the legendary bakery, unchanged from my turning. We are hailed by a hipster man sporting a rainbow tie-dye bandana and aviator glasses conspicuously bereft of corrective lenses. He disappears behind the glass display cases brimming with treats, organized, if memory serves, exactly as they had been forty years prior, cookies piled on plates and potato-based savoury nosherai packed snugly in shallow trays. We have beaten the Sunday morning throngs, who tend to wait at least until mid-morning before they descend like Passover locusts onto Bonneville’s last bastion of Jewish breakfast.
Aunt Didi grasps my wrist with a gentle, cool hand. “Oh, look at those black-and-white cookies,” she says. “When I was younger, I would eat the whole thing.”
“We could grab one on the way out,” I say.
She scrunches her gnomon nose. “Oh, we should, but we shouldn’t,” she says with a little shimmy. “God, you know, when your dad and I were younger, we would split a loaf of their rye and sit on the promenade, tossing crumbs of crust at seagulls.” She squeezes my forearm and smiles sombrely. “You know what, I think we’re supposed to seat ourselves.”
We head into the deli, whose anachronistic dining area was concealed to me in yesterday’s turning. Kitschy headshots of flash-in-the-pan celebrities and antique posters from mid-century musicals span the walls. Each one is signed with a glitzy gold pen wishing the owner, Schmaltzie, extravagant success. We choose one of the booths and slide onto the stiff red vinyl cushions.
“I’ve missed you,” says Didi. Her wide-set, mossy little eyes crinkle with a doleful smile, identical to my father’s but for the slenderness of her smooth face. “But I know you’re busy at the hospital. They run you ragged there.”
“I’m OK, Aunt Didi,” I say. “It’s clinic this month, which is better.”
“I suppose we have to be OK,” she says. “And you know, I had thought about joining Sophia and Prateek and the boys on the ranch. Maybe it would have been ‘restorative.’ That was Sophia’s word. Restorative. But I just couldn’t leave the city. Not while I’m grieving.” She taps an exposed bit of table between my slack hands. “But you’ll be proud of me. I’m not just sitting on my tush. They asked me to teach a class this semester, and I said why not? “She seems to look past me for a moment, and then she gives me a crooked, mischievous smile. “Doesn’t restorative sound like a laxative?”
I can muster only a faint smirk at this feeble bit of schtick shot through with woe. Aunt Didi’s jocularity ebbs quickly, revealing a mask of muted melancholy. I change the subject. “I wanted to ask you, Aunt Didi, about a photo I remember,” I say. “You and my Dad were, I don’t know, late teens. You both have a hand sort of perched on the other’s head. Do you know the one I’m talking about?”
Her lips part and she rubs her forehead. “I do,” she says with a chuckle. “Karina, I don’t think I’ve seen it in sixty years. We were mimicking an old movie, The Beast with Five Fingers. Do you have it? God, I’d love to have a copy. We could use the computer to make it digital.”
“I don’t,” I say. “Perhaps my dad has it somewhere.”
“Those photos are priceless,” she says. “Like solid memories. God, I have albums and albums of old photographs in the attic.” She pauses. “And you know, now I’m wondering why I don’t make a collage on my walls. Sometimes, you can find twenty-five packs of frames at Cheeps.”
We both order small breakfasts, a toasted bagel and lox for Didi and a honey bran muffin for me. I pepper her with sly questions meant to measure the fidelity of my turnings. The last of these odysseys was different, of course. It was several interlinked memories, concatenated without any apparent thematic connection, held together by enigmatic knots of narrative thread.
Didi is impressed with what she believes to be my eidetic recall, a photographic memory. She confirms everything she can, from Shecky the baker-cum-racketeer’s errands to my parents being mugged in the outdoor garbage area of their old apartment building.
“It was horrific,” she says, her mossy little eyes straining to widen. “But your mother.” She grins at me knowingly. “Your mom—I don’t know how else to put it, really—she beat the shit out of that young man,” she says, enunciating the swear in a half-whisper. “The police officer who heard the commotion from the street was quite impressed, I remember.”
“What were they like?” I ask. “I mean, as a couple, before me.”
Aunt Didi sighs quietly and then gives a sort of honking half-laugh. “They were lively,” she says. “Your dad came out of his shell when he was around Mona, and I just—"
She coughs once and puts a hand to her throat. “They—" She takes a large sip of water from the tall red, dimpled diner cup and hocks daintily. “Oy,” she says. “A frog jumped into my throat. Must be the bagel dust.” She blinks out a few tears before continuing. “Anyway, before you were born, David and I would bring Sophia over, and we would all cook together in that funny little apartment they had in that decrepit white building. They had installed these hanging metal baskets for fruit and vegetables in that skinny kitchen that looked like it was designed for a submarine. Your mom would sing to Sophia, old Beatles songs and that wonderful Rafi.”
She smiles and traces the dimples of the red cup absentmindedly. “Forty years ago now,” she says. “Where did it all go?”
I reach across the table to grasp her hand. “Tempus fugit, as dad used to say. Time flies.”
She rolls her eyes. “The only thing worse than a proverb is a proverb recited in a dead language,” she says. “Your dad always had one for every occasion. Time flies, go fast but slow, and, oh, I don’t remember. And who cares?” She rolls her eyes again and chuckles. “I always thought it was silly to fill your brain with little sayings. It all sounds like Gregorian chant to me.”
“I miss them all the same,” I say. “Here’s another one for you. Vive memor leti. Live remembering death.”
She squeezes my hand with what I interpret as gentle reproach. “I remember when you were born,” she redirects. “Did anyone tell you about that bit of excitement?”
“Something about a postpartum hemorrhage,” I say cannily. “I don’t know much about it.”
Aunt Didi shakes her head. “No, not quite,” she says. “Though I suppose you are the doctor. Maybe there are hemorrhages that happen with C-sections? That would be bad. I always assumed they cauterized as they went.”
“I thought I was a vaginal birth,” I say.
“Oh, no, dear,” she says. “You did not want to come out that way. They tried and tried. And your mother was in labour for—oh, God—24 hours at least. And the doctor was a very experienced and sort of sage woman, Doctor Dubrovka. She delivered Sophia before you, believe it or not. But she made the call to do a caesarian and performed the surgery herself.”
“Are you sure?” I ask quizzically.
Aunt Didi blinks at me. “Of course I’m sure. I was there.”
A cannonball drops into the depths of my abdomen, splashing my insides with dread. I am somewhat more subdued for the remainder of our breakfast together, but Aunt Didi does not seem to notice. She fills me in on the rest of her news, which I take in distractedly. Sophia and her family are coming home next week, I log distantly. They would like to see me, but they understand that I’m busy. The boys are asking for me, though, so if I can find some time, they would jump for joy—I process this cloaked request, too. And there is more, of course, hums of exhortation. I am sure I have been voluntold to do something, possibly important, but it is incinerated in the fire barrel of my brain’s outer reaches.
How can it be that I transported to a false memory? Last night was not the first time, come to think of it. There were the muggings, which came as a pair, one after another, like funhouse mirror reflections of each other, with the same dialogue and rough sequence of events. Aunt Didi confirmed the melee near my parents’ old apartment building, so the incident by Shecky’s must have been a confabulation, a misfire of encoding.
After all, what are the odds of two muggings occurring sequentially, separated by twenty years, and starring the same thug, ageless and unchanged in the flow of time? There is an explanation for all of this, aside from the ever-present possibility that I am descending into madness. Perhaps the barrier separating my life and my father’s recollections is now so porous that even a glancing touch of a manuscript page can occasion a turning. And the glitches in the rendering of his memorial tableaus could be more feature than bug, distortions coated with the residue of dementia, an enduring reminder for a hapless grieving daughter, who now wanders through her father’s memory city like a lost ghost. Somehow, his fractured consciousness has left its traces in the world he left behind. And now, it is a seemingly irrevocable part of my reality.
This theory haunts the rest of my Sunday, which is anything but lazy. Aunt Didi drops me off at my apartment with the suggestion that we make Sunday morning breakfasts a new Bergson tradition.
I prepare food for the week, a baked pasta with cashew “cheez,” and study distractedly, trading texts with Rhiannon and Ben in my self-mandated hourly breaks. Rhiannon is again on service. Ben, however, seems to always be free.
Ben T [15:16:56]: Hey why don’t you come over this weekend. That way we won’t have to split the bill ;)
Karina [17:35:22]: Har har. Friday?
Ben T [17:36:59]: Perfect. Come for 6 pm and you can even help. Apt 4H 622 Whitehead St.
Karina [17:37:29]: What should I bring?
Ben T [17:37:43]: Your presence is my present
Karina [17:38:06]: Come on
Ben T [17:38:58]: If I ask you to bring a bottle of wine does that mean I’d have to drink the whole thing?
Karina [17:39:30]: I will have a quarter-cup
Ben T [17:40:04]: I don’t know, dessert?
Karina [17:40:25]: OK, will do
Ben T [17:40:45]: Looking forward to seeing you again
The next day, a morose Monday, I arrive at clinic early, as usual, to review my charts for the morning. To my surprise, Dr. Fossal is already there, stooped over her monitor, pecking out an e-mail.
“Dr. Bergson,” she says without looking up.
“Morning, Dr. Fossal,” I say, and hang my bulging backpack on my chair. “You beat me here today.”
Dr. Fossal smirks with uncharacteristic amiability. “I’ve got the after-hours pager this week. Let’s just say I was already up and thought I’d mosey on down here early.”
I approach her workstation and she clasps her hands over the keyboard. “And also, Karina,” she says looking up, “I thought we might do our mid-rotation evaluation a bit early. Last week was—eventful. And besides, I’m in meetings all afternoon Thursday and Friday and you’re away on Wednesday. So we might as well get it over with.”
My palms are already clammy. “Sure, Dr. Fossal. Now? Before clinic?”
She glances at the wall-mounted clock. “Oh, twenty-five minutes should be plenty, don’t you think?”
I trail her down the clinic hallway to her small trapezoidal office, which seems to be permanently jumbled. Dr. Fossal has to tip her computer chair onto its rear legs to close the door. “As you know,” she says, “these mid-rotation evaluations are essentially a formality. We have to do them. You know the drill. You and I can talk, and then I’ll write it up formally and you can sign. Same procedure as usual.”
She smiles saccharinely, which I cannot help but read as an augury, a portent of ambush.
“Is this about Vera?” I ask. In the cramped room, my voice groans and creaks with the stickiness of foreboding.
Dr. Fossal groans with the effort of crossing her legs underneath her cramped desk. “Well, Karina, it’s interesting you mention it,” she says blithely. “How do you feel that went?”
“Well, it went as well as it could have,” I say. “All things considered.”
She narrows her eyes at me and juts out her sharp, witchy chin. “There’s nothing that, I don’t know, could be improved upon?”
My hands and feet are vibrating under a steady current of galvanic fear. “I’m sure I could have done better,” I say quietly. “In retrospect.”
“For one thing,” she continues. “You could have booked her in for a follow-up when you were in clinic. I saw that you scheduled her for this Wednesday, in fact, when you will be at an academic session, far, far away from the clinic.”
My head lolls forward. I feel like a child who has been caught sweeping dust into the heating vents. “I know she’s not well,” I murmur. “But I can’t see how anyone could do real medicine with someone that hostile. Every time I see her, she attacks me or finds a way to sabotage the appointment.”
“Not anyone,” she says gratingly. “It’s a you problem. I don’t have any other residents turfing patients they don’t like—or can’t handle.”
Even through the queasy weight of mounting dread, my hackles rise. “It’s not that I can’t handle it,” I say sharply, looking up into her sneering face. “I shouldn’t have to. What happened last week was crazy. A lot of my patients have a history of trauma, and my heart goes out to them, but even on psychiatry, I don’t know if I’ve seen someone that emotionally dysregulated. I mean, she was screaming so loudly in there that I was afraid someone would call security.”
Dr. Fossal folds her arms in front of her. That dripping little sneer of hers deepens into naked contempt. “Maybe you’re just not cut out for the job, Karina,” she says. “Have you thought of that? All I’m hearing from you is excuses, excuses, excuses and complaints up the wazoo. And let’s not forget, you tried to pull one over on your colleagues—and me.”
This last volley knocks the wind out of me, and so I sit there, dumbfounded and wooden, and submit to the flagellation.
“Is this because you’re grieving?” she asks. “I just can’t figure out what’s wrong with you. I’ve never had a resident behave like this. And you know, I find myself wondering, what happened to this girl.”
“What happened,” I intone. “I’m just trying to do a good job.”
“And I am concerned,” Dr. Fossal continues. She taps an elbow with an impatient finger. “In general, I’m concerned. I’ve also noticed you use the hand sanitizer quite often. Much more than is normal.”
“How can there be a too much?” I say.
“It’s not just the sanitizer. There’s also the issue of clinic masks. You use them for every query cold. Now, if we were in the hospital, I would say, sure, that’s reasonable, and of course, it fits with their policy. But haven’t you noticed you are literally the only person, trainee or staff, who masks and gloves to assess the sniffles? Do you think that, I don’t know, that’s a red flag?”
I stare at her, aghast.
“You’re kind of a germaphobe,” she continues. Her snaggletooth is just visible between her pale lips, like the head of a mummified yellow worm. “And it’s pretty, you know, out there.”
I am waylaid here, trapped in an evaluative prison. I can feel dampness in high-friction places and so I readjust myself in my chair to try to ventilate. “What do you want me to do?”
“Be better,” Dr. Fossal replies. “Rise to the expectations of a physician.”
“Is that what you’re going to put in the eval?”
Her eyebrows knit together and she scoffs. “What are you asking me?”
“I don’t—” I stammer. “I just—look, Dr. Fossal, I don’t know what you want me to take away from this meeting. I’m not cut out for the job. I’m a germaphobe. I must be having an adverse grief reaction.”
She looks at me like I’m an irredeemable moron. “Just do a better job.” She turns toward the computer to jostle the mouse. “You’re on track to pass this rotation, so if that’s what you’re worried about, you can take a chill pill.”
“I thought—".
“Part of training is learning to take feedback,” she interrupts. “Maybe you expected to just come into my office and be showered with compliments. But that’s not the way it works.”
She glances at the clock on the wall behind me. “And anyway, it’s time to get to work,” she says. “But before we do, why don’t you tell me three concrete, measurable goals you’re going to focus on for the remainder of the rotation. I’ve got to put something in this evaluation. All I’ve got so far is, ‘resident is average and has performed adequately.’”
Nothing crystallizes despair like ritualized humiliation. And I don’t mean the quotidian experience of fleeting futility or the helplessness that comes with a flummoxing challenge. There are moments in life in which a human being comes face to face with the void, the great yawning maw of cosmic indifference that hides, like a patient snake, in the crevices of experience. Despair is a reminder of something that was always there, a sense we have, when our brittle little carapaces are cracked by cruelty or tragedy, that the human soul is exquisitely delicate.
A determined person, animated by malice or pain, can puncture another in the most furtive of places, the inner reaches of the spirit. Try as one might to scab over the wound, life provides plenty of thorny reminders that this sort of injury never fully heals. That’s a shame, too, because the hobbled trainee doesn’t perform as well as she should. And she learns early to keep the wound hidden, even from herself. Should she find herself bludgeoned and mangled, it is best to bleed out in the woods somewhere, a silent martyr exsanguinating alone and pious, giving the last of herself for her calling. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll emerge a zombie, insensate and ineluctable, impervious to further trauma.
My encounter with Vera Borsuk exposed a kind of intolerable weakness. I should never have expressed any sentiment at all. Rather, I should have just documented the appointment narrative in dispassionate, bloodless reportage and purged it from my memory. Perhaps then, Fossal would have thought nothing of Vera’s follow-up appointment occurring on my academic day, when I would be out of the clinic. It would have been just another appointment with one of the hundred or so patients I see each week. Had I just kept my mouth shut and sucked it up, maybe instead of today’s bloodbath, my evaluation would have taken form as an apathetic, vacuous attagirl huddle squeezed between patients.
It is my fault, ultimately, all of this. At least, that is how it would be framed, if I were obtuse enough to report what just happened to the teaching clinic’s director, Dr. Fenne, an extravagantly malignant man whose breathtaking callousness was on full display earlier this year at our fall research conference when he admonished the assembled residents for “Millennial entitlement.” In prison, snitches get stitches, but in medicine, complainers become pariahs. Formally, trainee bullying and mistreatment are verboten in our new age, but the lip service has fallen on deaf ears and the window dressing is lying in a heap with filthy bootprints on it. To blow the whistle or make a clarion call is to invite ostracism and the malignant glare of the gaslight. Few things are worse than the Scarlet W of weakness, which emblazons in the perception of colleague and supervisor alike that you are a liability, possibly mentally ill, contemptible. Maybe you’re not built for the profession. And how can you say it’s them, not you, who are the problem, anyway? It is unseemly for a resident to be piqued by a patient or vitiated by feedback. You’re either OK or you’re not. And if you’re not, then maybe someone somewhere down the line made a mistake. Do you belong here? Are you fit to work, Karina? Stow this happening with the others, somewhere in the hinterland of awareness, always just out of view. Put the hurt in a titanium box, something soundproof, store it with any lingering righteous indignation and despair. You have patients to see. If you’re worthy, you’ll prove it anew.
I return to the chart room dazed. Jenica hovers over her monitor bent at the waist. A thin pleather purse strap dangles from her wrist. Her stethoscope is looped around her collar like a stiff necktie.
“Need anything?” I ask dully.
She clicks once on her screen and turns to face me with a shit-eating grin. “Oh, hi, Karina,” she says brightly. “No, I don’t think so.” She scans my face with practiced vigilance. “Are you OK?”
I stare at her through what I imagine are hooded lids and nod. “Tired,” I say. “But I’ll be fine.”
The morning passes in vivid, scintillating flashes of appalling clarity. A young mother hints to me that she is not safe at home, and somehow, even in my fog, I have the wherewithal to secure an urgent appointment with the social worker down the hall. A forty-something man with multiple sclerosis needs a note proving he is wheelchair-bound to give to his insurance provider. A homeless man with a putrid, deep-tissue infection on his great toe and a high fever has to be transported downstairs to urgent care.
I watch my corporeal body minister to these ailing people from some remove, as though floating breezily along the ceiling tiles. It is only at lunch that my carcass is ensouled once again, allowing me just enough time to shovel heaps of “cheezy” baked pasta into my mouth.
This momentary merger of body and spirit brings with it a paroxysm of intense despair, which nearly crumples me in my seat. Miraculously, the lunchroom is almost empty. A few scattered nurses stare at their phones while desultorily picking at their food, and no one even glances at me. I whisk down the hall to take shelter in an empty stall in the staff washroom, where I sob silently into a wad of toilet paper.
A steady stream of women make their midday circuit, blowing their noses, urinating loudly, and trumpeting farts long held in. On a whim, I text Ben.
Karina [12:21:34]: Not a great day. Wondering if you would be free tonight. I know it’s short notice. It’s OK to say no. Sorry and thanks.
I wipe my eyes with my shirt and rip my soul from my physical body once again. Then I return to clinic for a mercifully prosaic afternoon. No one seems to notice my puffy eyelids or red, runny eyes. A full two hours before the end of clinic, Dr. Fossal excuses herself to attend an exercise class.
“My husband signed me up for it and I don’t want him to lose the deposit,” she explains. “If either of you have questions, Dr. Stilton has agreed to serve as my supervisor proxy.”
Jenica and I see the last few patients together, a young man with erectile dysfunction and a woman with recurrent bacterial vaginosis, and perfunctorily report to the simpering Dr. Stilton, who approves of our management plans with effusive encouragement.
It is still light on my walk home, so I make my way through the small urban park midway between my apartment and the clinic. Lumpy sleeping bags span the scattered benches, and from the distance of the walkway, it is impossible to determine which of them conceal unfortunates. There is even a bedraggled older man lying prone on the ramp to the curly-cue slide, sleeping with a denim coat thrown over his face, leaving only a clump of matted silver hair visible to passersby.
Barry calls me on my walk to inform me that there is some interest in my parents’ house. The realtor will host a showing this weekend, and Barry will keep me apprised.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he tells me sedately. “We’ll just let this thing play out.”
I notice as I hang up that I have a new QuidNunc message from Ben.
Ben T [16:29:36]: Yeah of course. I’m home tonight. Come on over. We’ll have frozen pizza or something. Apt 4H 622 Whitehead St. I’ll be back from school at 530 pm. When will you arrive?
Rather than head home first to shower before heading to Ben’s, I stop at a tea shop down the street from the clinic and nurse a camomile blend, still benumbed and cadaverous. Little curls of thought, half-formed and wispy, float through my awareness like pipe smoke only to be dispelled by Dr. Fossal’s acrid voice piped into my awareness: What happened to this girl?
I gather my backpack and paper cup and make my way toward Upper Quayside, where Ben lives. I wander along the backstreets, where there are still relics of the city that has now all but moulted away, with scrubby little bungalows flanking hip plant nurseries and kombucha bars. Ben lives in the old Quayside elementary school building, which was converted into industrial loft-style apartments some years back.
I follow a woman about my age into the red brick building. She smiles at me while holding open the door, and I scurry behind her up the stairs. It is quite a schlep to the fourth floor, and my breathing is ragged and almost wheezy when I arrive at 4H. Ben seems surprised to see me on his doorstep, panting just a little more laboredly than a dog who has just caught a tennis ball. He is wearing a cardigan and cords, and his dark hair is unusually wild.
“Karina,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d be here at—” He peers behind him. “Uhh, five thirty-five.” He swings the door open and waves me in. “But that’s OK. Shoes off, please.”
I doff my shoes on a section of scruffy blue carpet on which several pairs of askew shoes are arranged.
“Didn’t you say you’d be home at five-thirty?” I ask.
His lips twist into an inscrutable expression. “Well, you never texted back,” he says and strides out of the narrow entryway to allow me to make my way into the living room.
It is spare and tidy, with a few oppressed bookcases bowing under their freight and a small, blanket-draped futon tucked into a corner. In the centre is a square, glass-topped dining table with two plates stacked on its surface.
“Oh, wow. That’s tacky of me,” I say. “Sorry, Ben. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“It’s not much,” he says from an arched fenestra in the small galley kitchen, whose entirety I can see behind him. “The apartment, I mean.”
“Sorry,” I repeat. “It’s rude to show up unannounced.”
“Oh, no worries,” he says and looks down to start chopping on an unseen board. “But now you’re going to have to wait for some food. I’ll throw a salad together.”
I meander into the entrance to the kitchen, which is so narrow that I would have to spread my arms akimbo to join him. “I could help,” I say.
He shakes his head. “No, no. This is going to be quick. A little spinach salad with our frozen pizzas,” he says with a little grin. “We’re sophisticates.”
I linger there in the doorless entryway, cross-footed. He raises his eyebrows at me. “So?” he says. “What’s going on?”
“You go first,” I say. “What’s new with you?”
He shrugs and tosses a handful of spinach into a colander, which he shakes under the faucet. “Normal,” he says over the patter of water. “Just teaching and admin shit. I taught an intro class on historiography. It’s a kind of survey on historical method. Then I co-led back-to-back social history seminars with an old PhD colleague of mine, Olivia.” He squeezes the spinach to drain the excess water and then balances the colander on the sink ledge. “I also had office hours, which were uneventful.”
He turns a creaking black knob on the old white oven’s front-facing console and turns to me with a blithe smile. “It’s a nice surprise to see you, even though I’ve gathered it’s not in the happiest of circumstances.”
I uncross my feet and lean on the casing in the empty doorframe. Ben gestures somewhere behind me. “Grab a chair,” he says. “No need to just stand there being uncomfortable.”
I drag one of the light wooden chairs to the doorway and sit. “I feel bad sitting while someone’s standing,” I say.
He flaps his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.” He slides his rear onto the window sill and cocks his head. “What happened, Karina?”
I feel as though I am talking from behind thick glass. “I walked into an ambush,” I say. “You remember pop quizzes in junior high? Well, my supervisor gave me a pop eval. It did not go well.”
“Hard feedback,” he offers. “No sugar-coating.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t really feedback,” I say. “Not the way you’re thinking about it. She—.” My voice falters. “It’s hard to explain.”
He sits silently there on the window-ledge, waiting for me to continue, and the policeman inside my head waves her billy club, warning me to keep my suffering to myself. “Last week, I had a deranged patient,” I say quietly. “She’s quite unwell, and I feel bad for her. Just a terrible life full of every kind of trauma you can imagine. Some people are cowed by their misfortune, but not this woman. She screamed at me at the top of her lungs. She called me a bitch.” I wring my hands above the chair. “There are patients who don’t want you to help them.”
Ben frowns incredulously. “Wait, she called you a bitch?”
“It happens,” I say. “Some people can’t control themselves.”
“And then you give them the boot.”
“Well, no,” I say. “You can’t just boot them out. You could give them a warning or, if they’re repeat offenders—and I mean really incorrigible—you could dismiss them from your practice. That’s what should happen, at least. But my supervisor, Dr. Fossal, thought I should have been able to salvage this particular appointment.”
Ben’s face is a parody of righteous indignation. “I can’t see how.” He opens the oven door and slides two frozen pizza discs onto the rack. “I forgot to ask if you’re a strict vegan.”
“No, I’ll eat pizza every now and then,” I say. “You know, it’s a weird thing, Ben, the culture of medicine. I don’t really know how to explain it to someone outside the guild, so to speak.” I chuckle humourlessly. “The guild.”
“Graduate school was pretty brutal,” he offers. “Seven years of working for pennies and ingratiating myself. The whole experience had a battle royale flavour in its way.”
“It’s like the system can’t help but eat its young,” I say. “When I was in medical school, the program assigned each of us a faculty mentor. They weren’t evaluators or anything. I guess they were more like guidance counsellors tasked with orienting doe-eyed medical students to the reality of clinical life. Ludmilla and I met just a few times a year at a coffee shop on campus. She used to buy me coffee and a muffin. When I started my clinical rotations, I confided in her that one of the surgeons I was working with on my general surgery rotation screamed at me—I mean, really screamed—for getting in his light. Ludmilla told me medicine attracts the best and worst people. And she was right. All those horror stories are true, Ben. The one-hundred-hour weeks. The petty tyrants in white coats. The cutthroat mentality among trainees. It’s all true.”
I look past him and almost shudder under a wave of deep, embodied shame. Even now, away from the shadow of the towering medical edifice, the grievances singe my tongue like hot coals.
“I’m not really sure how to describe to you what happened today,” I say. “Fossal brought me into her little office for an ‘evaluation’ and then she—well, she said the kinds of things people don’t typically say to each other.”
Ben is frowning, but he says nothing. So I continue, droning on in my hollow voice. “I handled the patient well. I didn’t react.” I pause. “Well, I booked her follow-up on a day I wasn’t in clinic.”
He nods. “Of course. Why would you see her again?”
“Well, that’s just it,” I say. “It was a clinical sin to protect myself from this woman’s abuse. It’s considered ‘avoidant,’ which is code for weak and incompetent.”
He hops off the window sill to flick on the oven light. “I mean, that’s crazy,” he says, peering at the pizzas through the semi-opaque window. “I can’t see how a doctor and patient can have any sort of relationship without mutual respect. It seems kind of self-evident, right?”
“You’d think so,” I reply. “It’s perverse. And—" My voice falters under an upsurge of desperate sadness. “I hate it.” This last statement is exhaled in a susurrus breeze, barely audible. And then I begin to weep, pooled in the chair, my head bobbing with great, expulsive heaves. I hear Ben’s padded footsteps as he approaches and lays a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“The worst people I’ve ever met are in medicine,” I sob quietly. “Fossal brought me into her office and she said things to me that people don’t say.” I affect a crude impersonation of her abrasive, poison-dipped contempt, muddled some through the tears that drip into my mouth. “Maybe you’re not cut out for this job. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with you. Is this grieving or something? I keep wondering, what happened to this girl?”
Ben squeezes my shoulder. “Imagine,” he says softly. “Asking someone who just lost her father something like that.”
“That’s just her. And what is it, an endurance test? A gauntlet? To prove I belong, that I’m worthy and good enough? Or is she just a sadist? I don’t know what to think.”
“She’s probably an unhappy person,” Ben says. “Or a cruel one.”
“I’m supposed to believe, in spite of everything, that it’s all worth it. My undying love of medicine is supposed to carry me through. Trust the process, they used to tell us when I was in medical school. But beware the hidden curriculum.”
“Meaning what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say sourly. “Something like, you’re going to be a doctor, but you’ll suffer for the privilege. The road is long and hard, but it will lead to light. But who cares?”
“You don’t love it?” Ben asks. “I mean, medicine?”
“Of course not,” I spit. “Even that question, that’s medicine’s culture. It’s seeped into the rest of the world. It’s this, this—" I search for the word. “It’s a martyr complex. I’m supposed to carve myself up for the profession, for patients, for the love of the fucking job.”
I know my face is twisting as I speak, like my mother’s, ferocious and wide-eyed. “It’s a job,” I repeat. “But you’re supposed to pretend you never hang up your stethoscope. Whatever happens to you, it’s supposed to fill you with joy and purpose and—and aren’t you grateful for the opportunity to serve? Huh? Don’t you know how privileged you are to be here? Even with the endless hazing. This ludicrous, endless nightmare of oneupmanship and suffering that they call training. And you know? I used to love it, medicine. At least I thought I did. I wanted to be a doctor so badly, and I climbed that goddamned hill to get here. I spent my weekends in libraries. I killed myself to prepare my application package. I applied over and over and over again, Ben. That’s why I’m finishing in my thirties, not my late twenties. Maybe there was a part of me whose motives were purely self-serving, but I did have this dream of doing good, of helping people, you know, making something of myself. And I thought it would be collaborative.”
I laugh with anguished fury, splashing my outstretched hands with tears. “Isn’t that stupid? I thought I would be surrounded by kind, compassionate, I don’t know, wonderful people working together to heal others. And the truth is, nobody gives a fuck about you. Patients, colleagues, supervisors. It’s a thankless, gruelling existence. They take from you even when you’ve got nothing more to give.”
The oven timer dings, and Ben pushes himself off his knees and gingerly slides the pizzas onto a wooden cutting board one by one. “Sorry, I’m listening,” he says.
“I probably sound unhinged,” I say sheepishly, wiping my eyes. “Ranting like a maniac. And it almost feels obscene to say these things. Blasphemy against the medicine gods.”
Ben leans onto a dull knife and slices the pizzas into eights. “They beat that into you, Karina. That’s all part of the indoctrination. In grad school, it’s a variation on the same theme. You’re lucky to be there. You should be grateful to the society you live in that you can pursue any kind of scholarship at all. That’s why it’s taken us so long to mobilize and demand better wages.”
“Long live the meritocracy,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Know your place.”
“Well, that’s another topic altogether. But I’m sorry about what happened to you,” he says. “It’s hard to wrap your mind around. I mean, what you’re describing is appalling. All I can figure is that something happens to these people when they run the gauntlet.” He gestures toward the dining table with a wag of his chin. “Here, let’s eat,” he says.
I scoot my chair out of the way so he can deposit both pizza plates on the table. I grab the wooden salad bowl and follow suit. Then I drag my chair back to the table.
“I feel bad for dumping on you,” I say. “It’s a bit early on for me to show up unannounced and start crying. This must all seem pretty maudlin.”
He serves himself a slice of mushroom pizza and shakes his head. “You’re a human being,” he says. “Look, if we’re going to get to know each other better, at some point we’ll have to be here. I mean, this is your life.”
I serve myself a slice of both pies. “I guess I wonder why anyone would want to share it,” I say.
He hesitates, one hand hovering above the furled crust of the spinach pizza. “Well, we all suffer, Karina.”
“What if I’ve become one of them?” I say. “I would never know. It would seem normal.”
“This is them, you know,” Ben says. “You don’t have to own their cruelty.”
“That’s what everybody says. But it’s not true. Dignity is something other people give you. The last six years have done something to me. They’ve changed me. And you know what? I don’t even know why I’m doing it anymore. Too far in to quit, I suppose. I’m, what, two-hundred-thousand dollars in debt. It’s a done deal.”
“You must be good with patients,” he offers. “And I’d bet most of them see what an unusual person you are.”
I swat away this platitude with a wagging finger. “That’s cold comfort when you’re getting kicked around and worked like a dog,” I say.
“Look, fair enough,” he says. “It’s a bit of a behind-the-curtains moment, actually. I kind of thought your life was like that TV show ICU. You know, you work in a big fancy hospital with beautiful people. Everyone collaborates to save lives. You all grab a beer after your shifts end and follow an intricately laid out plan for who’s going to sleep with whom that night.”
“What it feels like,” I say. “Is all my time is running out, lost to the gaslight.”
He holds a cupped hand up to his mouth to shield its contents. “Well, maybe it will all be worth it in the end. In spite of everything.”
“You mean the money.”
He shrugs. “Well, we can’t ignore the elephant, Karina,” he says. “Not to commodify your suffering or anything, but there will be gold at the end of the rainbow. That is something, isn’t it?”
I fidget in my seat. “That’s a bit crass, don’t you think, Ben?”
“That didn’t come out the right way,” he says quickly. “What I meant is that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, although the tunnel itself seems to be lined with spikes.”
“Six months in front of me and six years behind me.”
“It’s like a PhD,” he says.
“The best years of our lives gobbled up.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe this is the perfect moment for training, the, what is the Greek word, kairos? Not the right calendar time, but the right time.”
“God, you sound like my dad,” I say. “Not the right calendar time, but the right time. He wrote this thing. It’s, I don’t know, a kind of treatise, a last bit of counsel to pass along to his only child. I found it when I was cleaning up the house after the funeral. He had dementia, so God knows how long it was sitting there collecting dust. But he thought that time is everything. Literally everything.”
I look up from my plate to see if Ben is still listening. He nods at me to continue. “There is nothing more valuable than time. We only have so much to spend, and then, poof, it’s gone. Others can take it from us. We can blow it in a million different ways. But we are only free if we can decide what to do with our time. That’s what he wrote. And if my dad is right, Ben, then I have decided to spend my best years in abject misery. I have given my time to the gobblers. And for what? For the promise of stability or prepackaged identity or—” I tap my finger on the table. “Time is everything, he wrote, because it’s the substrate of memory. And you know what, I don’t want these memories and the person they’ve made.”
We sit silently at the table for what seems like minutes. When he speaks, his voice is quiet and clear. “If only we could choose our memories,” he says.
“Or get our time back.”
“You’d need a machine for that,” he replies. “Or access to a wormhole.”
“At this point, I’d settle for better memories,” I say wistfully. “Or a return to the old, good ones frozen in amber. The ones where everybody’s still here and the future seems hopeful.”
“It sounds like you need a memory palace,” Ben says.
My eyebrows rise in genuine surprise. “You know about the method of loci?”
“Of course,” he says. “Some ancient thinker, I don’t remember who, called it inner writing. Make your memories into a structure you can inhabit. If you do it right, it’s indelible, permanent.”
A small confession escapes from my lips. “My father made one,” I say coyly. “That was in his letter, too. He left instructions.”
Ben balls up his napkin and drops it onto his crumby plate. “Then maybe you should make one, too,” he says. “Put your memories, good and bad, somewhere else, in your head but out. You know what I mean?”
I stare down at my own plate, on which two stiffening, lukewarm pieces of pizza are glistening under the grease of the once-melted cheese. “That’s a lot of work,” I say.
“Maybe it would be like a kind of meditation.” He pauses. “Or a benediction.”
I finish my waxy, soggy pizza, and he quietly gathers up my plate and silverware and stacks them in his shallow sink. “You know,” he says tentatively. “I hate to boot you out, but tomorrow, I agreed to do a seven a.m. study session with my methods students.” His face scrunches with regret. “But we can get together soon, right? Maybe Friday?”
“Oh, I should go,” I say, rising a bit more quickly than I intend. My knee knocks against the underside of the table, and I suppress a groan. “Thanks for letting me come over and ruin your night.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m glad you thought of me first.”
We walk to the door together and I gather my backpack and slip on my shoes. I crane my neck to kiss him on his prickly cheek.
He smiles. “Should I walk you to the bus stop?”
I allow him to accompany me the one block to the empty bench at the end of a narrow residential side street. My eyes are swollen from the tears and tissue wiping, but my mind is uncannily quiescent, as though its busy agora of handwaving negotiation has been vacated for cleaning.
When the bus arrives, I hug him once more and plod to the rear seats, which are vacant at this time of evening, far past rush hour, but too early for revellers. I glance at my phone screen to check the clock, and there is a single QuidNunc message splashed across the screen. I tug at the message’s edges to glimpse the message without opening it and cannot help but gasp.
751-587-8942 [19:27:59]: Jeez I’m so sorry Karina. This is really embarrassing but I think I had you confused with someone else. Silly memory, Now I know why you were so confused at the restaurant hee hee! God bless anyway and hope you have a nice night
*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology
