by T. Ainsworth
None ever came.
“You motherfucker,” he uttered in a hopeless whisper.
Morgan stared at the paralyzed ceiling fan, his body immersed in the residue of sleepless perspiration and its dried stench. Another night of torment had slowly passed. He smelled her pillow again.
“I’m exhausted. Did we get any sleep?”
“Since when do you need sleep?” she asked back.
They made love again. Afterwards, Caroline’s head lay deep in the pillows with her blues eyes gazing at his. She touched the tip of his nose and gave a tender smile.
“Had enough?” she asked.
Morgan had to move.
He had to get to the hospital.
He walked into his bathroom to piss.
“What the fuck? You fucking asshole!”
His fists tightened as his rage swelled.
“Motherfucking bastard!”
He stumbled to the kitchen. From the soaked newspaper, the smell of Scotch hovered above the depth of the sink. He vomited on it again then groped his way to the sofa and lay down—his consumed body in the fetal position, shaking with each tear.
“Cay…Oh, Cay…I miss you so…”
He was empty. Drained. Ruined. His soul sucked dry. The bitter aftertaste of the unfathomable horror drowned him day and night.
Morgan showered, dressed, and went to work.
His stomach growled. After performing in the OR to everyone’s usual expectations, Morgan threw away his damp surgical cap, buttoned his white coat over his sweaty scrubs, and headed for the hospital cafeteria. Perhaps today he’d be able to eat and keep some food down.
Cautiously balancing his tray, he picked his path through the confusion of the cafeteria, hastening his steps to the table where he and Caroline had shared her lunch. Whenever he could, Morgan tried to eat there, often waiting nearby until it was empty. Sometimes he’d just sit and nibble on a cookie and drink some water. Other times he picked at whatever he had scooped onto his plate, taking in a few bites because he knew he had to. But mostly he stared at the empty chair, remembering the day they shared a simple turkey sandwich and his heart melted like an ice cube into the warm lagoon of her eyes.
A group of surgical residents eating in the next section nodded to him, and Morgan did his best to acknowledge them back. When he looked down at his tray, his appetite vanished immediately. He forced himself to take a bite of an apple. As he chewed, its sourness intensified his exasperation.
Morgan overheard the residents’ conversation.
“You could argue that Christians used force to impose their beliefs during the Crusades…”
The speaker was one of Morgan’s favorite students, an enthusiastic young man from the Middle East who was typically private about his faith. Morgan trained his ears to hear better what the man was saying, but a group of laughing nurses passing between blocked any chance of that until they moved on.
“Islam is a religion of peace—”
Another crowd of people walked between them, talking loudly.
“When the Towers—”
Morgan’s stomach twisted.
“Some people in my country cheered.”
Blood rushed to Morgan’s face. The responsibility of being a senior surgeon could no longer restrain him. Reacting viscerally, he threw his tray toward the resident, jumped across the aisle, and lunged at him, yelling, “You goddamn son of a bitch!”
The surgeon’s fingers squeezed the young man’s neck as the institutional cafeteria chair tipped backward. Both crashed to the floor with Morgan on top. The resident almost lost consciousness on impact.
“How can you talk like that?” Purple in the face, Morgan’s grip around the man’s neck grew tighter. “Fucking Bin Laden—and you bastards—killed Cay!”
Many hands pulled Morgan off and forced him into a chair. Food and broken dishes were strewn everywhere.
“I loved her…” His head bowed into his hands as everyone in the cafeteria stared in shock.
The resident stood up shakily and looked at his soiled white coat. When Morgan struggled to move, the terrified man recoiled and quickly stepped away, never taking his eyes off him.
Ross Merrimac paged Morgan and demanded he appear immediately at his office. Once Morgan arrived, Merrimac shut the door. An administrative assistant stood in a corner, monitoring the conversation.
The chief of surgery suspended his friend from surgery and further barred him from entering the hospital. He had to.
“Morgan, you’ll be lucky if that resident doesn’t file assault charges…and maybe he should.”
Merrimac didn’t offer him a chair.
“He deserved it,” Morgan seethed through his teeth. Pumping his fists, Morgan had no intention of backing down.
“No he didn’t!” Merrimac answered in an unusually loud voice. “The other residents said he was condemning the terrorists. But that makes no difference, Dr. Morgan.” He was getting testier and it showed. “You almost strangled that kid.”
Merrimac glared. “You’re a damn doctor!” His forehead blood vessels bulged.
“They killed Cay…”
“I know how much you loved Cay, but that house officer didn’t kill her! You know that! Attacking an innocent man is your approach to anger management? Are you crazy?” Merrimac’s hands moved in underscored synchrony with his words.
“Why did I believe you?” Merrimac said, finally catching his breath. “Should have gone with my gut, insisted you get help weeks ago. But oh no! Damn surgeons and their egos! They can control everything!”
He continued through clenched teeth. “God almighty! Do you have any idea how bad this is? We’ve invested a fortune in you and this transplant program! I frigging know the chairman of the board is going to call me and ask why we have a bigoted lunatic on staff! How will this affect the hospital? Worse yet, the program we’re trying to build!”
Merrimac’s hands shot in the air. “What about our patients? Christ almighty!” With a final sway of his arm, Ross Merrimac motioned him toward the door. “Unlike the way you treated that kid, you get a fair hearing! We’ll notify you about the date. Now…get the hell out of my face!”
To sever contact, he grabbed a surgery journal, opened it to a dog-eared page and started reading.
Escorted to his office by hospital security guards, Morgan collected whatever he could, packed it in his briefcase, surrendered his identification badge, and changed into street clothes. They flanked him to his BMW.
During the two weeks before his hearing, Morgan became a vagrant entombed in his own home. Eating little, sleeping less, and infrequently shaving, he moved aimlessly from room to room, snatching restless catnaps and doing little else. Cocooned in his misery, there was no escape.
“You were stupid for jumping that kid…” he said. Flushing the toilet, he’d argued the point with himself for days. “Nah…fuckin’ prick deserved it.”
His words suddenly softened. “Cay…You would’ve scolded me, I know.” He thought the worst. “Been ashamed…I’m sorry.”
Childlike, he started crying into the carpet where he lay haunted without pity.
Their jog through Grant Park had taken them a mile out in the lake at the end of Navy Pier. A leisurely stroll back gave them time to let their conversation drift.
“Why ‘Cay’?” he asked. Morgan had been curious many times.
“Daddy called me that since I was little.” She laughed, her face glowing even without makeup. “Who knows why fathers do what they do?” A shrug suggested acceptance. “It just stuck.”
“You said not everyone’s allowed to use it.”
A sudden breeze swayed her ponytail. “My nickname’s very personal to me,” she replied, begging the next question.
“So when you called me from the airport, and I called you Cay…you didn’t correct me. Why?”
Caroline stopped and smiled at him, then said the words that would stay in his heart forever. “I only let people I love call me that.”<
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Morgan couldn’t believe it. She had loved him from the beginning.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s go get cleaned up. Saturday’s a-wasting.”
With shampooed hair tucked under a towel and her bathrobe open in the immodest style he loved, she gathered their running clothes and headed for the washing machine. He went toward her.
“Cay…” he stammered, “Caroline…I love you. Will you marry me?”
An overt sigh followed.
“You’re going to need to work on your timing, Dr. Morgan.” Nonplussed, Caroline loaded the clothes in the washer. “Every girl dreams about this moment…and you realize, of course…” She measured the soap and softener in exact detail and started the cycle. “You’ve just asked me to marry you while I’m doing your laundry? Regardless…” Her eyes twinkled above a smile and she threw her arms around him. “My answer is…yes!”
“Then we need to go shopping,” he said.
The Michigan Avenue jewelry stores consumed them that afternoon. When the salesperson handed Caroline a loupe and a large diamond, she became restrained and asked for a minute alone with Morgan.
“Wes,” she told him, “no big diamonds.”
“I can afford them,” he replied.
“No,” she said firmly. “I’m not your second wife…”
“Oh, Cay,” Morgan wept into the carpet. “You never knew I bought the ring! You never knew I was coming to surprise you...”
How he loved the secret planning! Even though they had spent the entire weekend making love at his townhouse, Caroline never had an inkling what he was up to.
His phone rang. He listened through the answering machine.
“Dr. Morgan,” the unemotional woman said, “this is a reminder that your disciplinary hearing is at one p.m. this afternoon. Please be prompt. Thank you. Goodbye.”
She hung up.
“I have nothing left,” came his exhausted whisper after the click. Finally fulfilled by Caroline’s presence in his life, his world had become perfect—until it was destroyed.
“Nothing…”
He was on his knees.
“Oh, Cay…”
The anger had beaten him. Exhausted, his mind, body, and soul were ruined.
“I can’t do anything...”
He fell to the floor, weeping into his forearm.
“Oh god, Morgan…you’re so fucking weak!”
The tears soaked his skin.
“A spineless jellyfish!”
He rolled onto his back, sucking mucus from his nose to the back of his throat.
“Fuck,” he uttered, trying to swallow the tenacious slime. “Fuck…”
He started coughing. Propping up his head and neck against the side of the sofa, his vision wandered tiredly around the room.
On the shelf beside the fireplace were his surgical textbooks. Every chapter covered a problem in the human body and the ways to operate on it—an instruction manual without wasted words.
“Split the muscle in the direction of...”
“Insert the trocar through....”
“Close the wound by…”
In time a surgeon would learn every page. Someday the instructions would flow to the hands and fingers unmarred by hesitancy or self-doubt.
“Get up!”
His inner voice began speaking, commanding him to reality. Physicians heard this voice throughout their careers. Whether lying in bed, driving, working—anywhere—it would surface without warning and persist without mercy, besieging its owner until it forced atonement for a mistake or oversight.
“Get the fuck up!”
Morgan heard the silent command intensify, overwhelming him with the same severity as it had when one of his babies died.
He cleared the back of his throat and swallowed the glob.
Morgan walked to look out the back window. The building’s garage light pried open the gloom, revealing calm pools of rainwater, the thermometer barely above freezing.
“I’m going running,” he said.
Unused for months, he put on his track suit and shoes. The pants were so large he had to tighten the waistband. The jacket’s sleeves slid beyond his wrists. He stepped outside and pulled the door shut. Lumbering several hundred years toward the lakefront path, his muscles ached from the sudden jolt of exercise—a cruel reminder of his months of idleness. He halted at a stone and masonry ledge in the park where molasses-thick muck oozed through the cracks. As the damp mist invaded his bones, Morgan stared beyond the mud to the brown grass where the winter before Caroline had laid down in the soft snow and flapped her arms and legs to make angels. At her urging and without protest, he had joined her to do the same.
He could still hear her laughing.
Morgan continued south, his moist breaths dissipating the quicker he ran. He didn’t realize he had been sprinting until he looked up and saw the closed drapes of Cay’s vacant condominium. He slowed, coming as close to the building as he could. Craning his neck he saw the checkerboard of windows climb to the sky until they converged at a vanishing point, then he looked toward the lake.
His soggy track suit provided no shield from the winter morning, but he wasn’t cold. His muscles ached, but he didn’t feel them. The anger and pain were gone. There was only clarity.
“You fucking bastard,” he said coolly. “Time to fix this. You’re history.”
The stone faces around the giant ellipsoid table offered epitaphs to the absurdity of the hearing. They thought they knew the outcome, but Morgan had already reached the verdict.
With unctuous authority, each of them in sequence described, discussed, and commented while also watching for the adulating nods of their peers. Occasionally they would look at Morgan’s fixed gaze, his motionless hands and fingers entwined.
Over his bifocals the senior medical officer said, “Dr. Morgan, what happened was inexcusable, even considering your personal circumstances. Your behavior has generated legal problems for the hospital.” He glared, waiting for an apology. Bristling when none came, his eyes rolled, “Dr. Morgan, are you listening?”
“Yes.”
He wasn’t.
“Dr. Merrimac”—the officer motioned to him—“any comments to Dr. Morgan?”
Ross Merrimac looked at his friend and studied the ill-fitting sport coat and the shirt collar that had grown too loose. The haphazardly knotted necktie displayed an out-of-character inattention to detail.
“Wes…I know you hurt,” he said. “Life is full of tragedy. Look at what you do for a living. We all feel for you.”
Merrimac tried to connect through the unspoken yet understood emotions of their world, but for Morgan his voice was just an irritation.
“You know your temper’s very short, and that makes you unsafe. We’re in a high-risk profession. We cannot have physicians who don’t control their actions.”
Morgan nodded but was oblivious to the words. He was problem solving—a habit ingrained over the years. As he considered the first elements of the new task ahead, those surrounding him at the table could only appreciate vacuity in the surgeon.
The senior officer asked, “Dr. Morgan, do you have any response to Dr. Merrimac, or any of us, for that matter?”
“No.”
Merrimac shook his head in disbelief. What had he missed? A man could be hurt, but a surgeon rarely cracked like this. Death happened, and life went on. He was watching his friend’s entire career fall apart. During the forty-five-minute meeting, Morgan had spoken only a few words and none in his defense.
“Dr. Morgan, please step outside,” the officer said. “We’ll call you back when we’re ready.”
Standing impatiently by a window, looking at the hospital Caroline had built, Morgan continued planning. In time he was again seated, staring in the same indistinct manner as before.
“Dr. Morgan,” said the senior operating officer, “this committee has discussed the circumstances of your actions and considered your tragedy.” His voice had become an annoying
distraction. “You will receive a six-month suspension from all clinical activities. During this time you’re prohibited from entering this hospital for any reason. In June this committee will meet to consider your reinstatement. If for any reason you do not comply, your hospital privileges will be terminated.”
“Fine.” Morgan’s head never moved.
Several pieces of paper slid toward him. “Please sign these. One acknowledges the terms of your suspension; the other speaks to a required psychiatric evaluation and whatever treatment necessary. Take the copies with you.”
“Fine.”
He was on his feet and opening the door, only turning to acknowledge Merrimac’s voice.
“Wes, you take care. You can call me day or night.”
Morgan nodded once.
Outside the building he ground the papers in his fist, tossing the crumbled wad in the first trash container he saw. The surgeon had no interest in a couch, pills, or shock treatments.
Deaf to a speeding ambulance, he entered the university library and saw several coeds laughing quietly at a table near the entrance.
“Do any of you have a pen and paper I could buy?” Morgan asked them.
“I’ve got this,” one of the women giggled, holding up a pink legal pad and pen topped with a feather.
“That’ll be just fine,” said Morgan, giving her twenty dollars.
She looked surprised. “Anything else you’d like?” She smiled.
“No,” said Morgan, not playing to her suggestion. “This is all I need. Thanks.”
He walked to the stairwell, climbed several flights, and found a cubicle where he wouldn’t be noticed. He hung his raincoat on a nearby chair, tugged loose his necktie, and sat down. Occasionally he used a computer terminal or went to another floor to retrieve information, but mostly he sat and wrote, organizing his thoughts until closing time.
SEVEN
January 2002
Ross Merrimac didn’t know what to think. Morgan had to be upset after the hearing, but needed to understand Merrimac was only doing his job. Morgan wasn’t one to hold a grudge—he just wasn’t that way. When the messages on Morgan’s phone went unanswered, Merrimac hoped his friend was simply taking a long vacation someplace like the Bahamas, lost in both the liquor and sunshine. Still, he worried about his star surgeon, so he left the hospital one wintry afternoon and drove to Morgan’s home. If there were no answer, Merrimac would tape prewritten notes to his front and back doors.