Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

by Vincent Lam

  Ming received an acceptance letter from Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine in July, and her parents put a down payment on a small condominium north of Bloor Street that backed onto a treed ravine. Her family held a banquet and called her doctor, but Fitzgerald did not attend. In Ming’s home, he had been a faceless voice on the telephone and now was even less present. During summer holidays there was no studying, and therefore no excuse for him to call. Wednesday was their day. The Wednesday after the banquet, as they walked to find a picnic spot, Ming told Fitz that she hadn’t enjoyed it without him.

  He said, “Why do you sound so happy, then?”

  “Don’t you want me to be? My family is happy for me.”

  “You’ve achieved what they wanted. Another family success.”

  A deer crossed the ski run, nervous in the open, sniffing up and down the hill. They stopped walking, and the deer crossed their path and then folded into the woods. Ming said, “We were having a perfectly nice day until now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Fitzgerald. “You deserved a party. You did it.” He reminded himself to be only happy for her, but felt that his exclusion from the celebration entitled him to possessiveness.

  “Getting an acceptance seemed like such a big deal. Now I’m mostly just tired and relieved.”

  One hot, grasshopper-buzzing day at the beginning of August, Ming and Fitzgerald sat at the top of a steep ski slope, swinging in a green metal lift chair. They had once decided to have no romance, and they now referred to that as the “strange phase” of their relationship. A few months later, when they travelled to Toronto for Ming’s medical school interview, they had decided that it was dishonest to deny that they were in love. On that trip, they held each other but slept in separate hotel beds, and agreed that there should be no sex. For Ming, this would be too close to her anger at Karl. Three weeks later, after this prohibition had been put aside upon Ming’s initiative, they conceded that since they had become lovers there was no point in discontinuing a natural enjoyment between two people in love. Now, they sat facing down the hill, without the retaining bar of the ski lift chair. They ate cheese sandwiches and drank iced tea. Ming told Fitzgerald that she could not imagine loving anyone else, now that she had found someone to be honest with.

  He said, “That’s why people get married.”

  “You think so?” she said, drinking from the silver flask. “Aren’t there lots of reasons, both good and bad?”

  “Why don’t we get married?”

  “The circumstances are not ideal,” she said.

  “But are they ever, for anyone?” said Fitzgerald. Ming was moving to a different city in three weeks, and they had come together in halting lunges, preceded by a mutual denial of their deepening attraction. Instead of discouraging Fitzgerald, these events made it seem even more important to make and extract a commitment. “You just said you couldn’t imagine loving anyone else. Let’s hold on to that. We’ll get married.” He took her hand.

  “Fitz, it’s something for later.”

  “Then later. Put it this way: could you think of marrying anyone else?”

  “Right now, no, I can’t,” she said, putting her other hand over his.

  “These connections happen only once. We can’t throw it away because of the problems around us. Later is fine, but let’s commit to our feelings now.”

  “You’ll be a good husband,” she said. Ming took his arm, sat closer, and looked across the landscape of hills cut in a strange way into ski slopes. She had not yet told her parents about him, and said that she needed to wait until she had moved away from home. “It’s stupid, but I wish you were Chinese. They’ll threaten to disown me. That happened to my sister.”

  “But that would just be a pressure tactic, to make you choose between me and them.”

  “They won’t, ultimately. In the end, they can’t lose me. I don’t think so, anyhow.”

  “What happened with your sister?”

  “She broke up with her boyfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  “But that was different. I only met him once. It wasn’t serious, I’m guessing.”

  The five-hour drive from Ottawa would give her the distance she needed in order to tell her parents, said Ming. She spoke with the assumption that Fitzgerald would be admitted to medicine in the following year. This was easier for her to say, and he said “if” while she said “when.” He did speak as if he would move into her condominium. Ming suggested that he might have to live on his own for a little while.

  She said, “My parents did buy it and everything.”

  “You could move out. We could get an apartment, so it would be our own place.”

  “Or something.”

  At the end of August, Ming’s parents moved her to Toronto. They filled her freezer with white plastic containers of ginger beef, sesame chicken, and other favourites of Ming’s. Fitzgerald took the train to Toronto on the same day that Ming’s parents drove back to Ottawa. The night before Ming’s first day of medical school, he said, “Now you’ll tell them?”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “Right now, I need to be on my own, plant my feet.”

  “It should be easier, now that you’re far away.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? That it won’t ever be easy.” She turned away in bed.

  “I just said easier.”

  In September, Fitzgerald returned to Ottawa. At first, he and Ming were both anxious to speak every evening. They fantasized about travelling, about being together, about when Fitzgerald would visit. During the school day, they anticipated these fantasies—which became satisfying in themselves. By October, Ming’s class was dissecting the abdomen, and she suggested that they speak every second night.

  “The volume of information is overwhelming,” she said.

  “But I’ll miss you.”

  “Do you realize I’ve been cutting apart human bodies for the last month?” said Ming. The first rite of medical school was the anatomy lab, the opening of skin into the organs.

  “You mentioned that,” he said.

  She described the dissections on a daily basis. She complained that one of her dissection partners, Sri, was a sentimental wreck who couldn’t even cut open an arm, who did nothing but slow her down. Chen, her other partner, was tolerable. Every minute was important, she said, and she had realized that she was spending too much time on the telephone. “I didn’t learn the thorax well enough, because you need me too much. How much do we have to talk? Human anatomy is important—it’s for real now.” Whenever Fitzgerald mentioned her classmates she corrected him, because they were “colleagues.”

  “Right.” Fitzgerald wondered whether his biology and biochemistry lectures were no longer real—perhaps they were only the means to an end. He had previously enjoyed the ideas and concepts but now, even as he became more obsessive about the details and patterns of facts, he hated knowing that his marks were soaring as a result of Karl’s study methods. He tape-recorded lectures, applied a meditative attention to details and trivial facts. His weekly time sheet was crammed with reading, eating, listening to tapes, memorizing, and working on medical school application packages. He worked with a desperate and fastidious zeal, imagining that each A+ brought him a step closer to Ming. One night, Fitzgerald told her that he wished they could stop studying, and instead could lie in the grass at the ski hill. Ming reminded him that achieving the last twenty marks required twice as much effort as getting the first eighty.

  Fitzgerald said, “Another saying from Karl.” Ming’s cousin Karl’s systematically mind-numbing method of achieving near-perfect scores was Ming’s lesson for Fitzgerald.

  Ming was silent.

  It was the first time Fitzgerald had mentioned Karl. Until now, only Ming had ever brought Karl into their conversations. Fitzgerald had often thought of Karl while being coached in study techniques by Ming, and he knew that Ming had to push Karl out of her mind when they were in bed. He did the same, but had not told Ming of this. He said, “Sorry, that
just came out. I’ve been studying too much.”

  “I’m showing you how to get into medical school. Isn’t that enough? Is it my fault that Karl taught me how to do it?”

  Fitzgerald felt his heart beating. He said, “It’s as if his shadow is on me when I’m studying.”

  “Well, you’ve never met him so you can dismiss your excess of imagination. I’ve got his shadow on me, and one of us is enough.”

  “I guess learning is learning. Sorry.”

  After his midterms in October, Fitzgerald asked Ming when he should visit.

  She said, “There’s no good time. Only less bad times.”

  “When will you tell your parents?”

  “Now that I miss them, it’s hard to hurt them.”

  “Then you’re glad to be away from me.”

  “No. But it is a relief to be further from our secret.”

  “And easier to study your anatomy and your dissection than to face our relationship, our problem.”

  “You have this amazing belief that things have something to do with you,” she said. “Don’t you see? I have to be as committed to renal anatomy as I am to us.”

  In the first week of November, Ming told Fitzgerald that she and Chen had gone out for dinner in October. He lived in the same building. Occasionally, she said, they grabbed a quick bite after class.

  “We’re nothing more than colleagues, but I wanted to mention it. I wasn’t going to tell you, because it’s nothing. Chen and I hung out once, maybe twice. Then I thought to tell you, because otherwise if you found out you might misunderstand and think that it was something.”

  “He’s Chinese?” said Fitzgerald.

  “Who cares,” she said.

  “You kissed him.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “This is why I wasn’t going to mention it.”

  A week later, Ming said that perhaps she and Fitzgerald should “slow down.” Also, there was something that she regretted, she said. A tiny misunderstanding, which she and Chen had already clarified. Chen hadn’t exactly known about her commitment to Fitzgerald, and so there had been a kiss, although entirely one-sided, and she had stopped him as soon as it started, so it wasn’t really that she had kissed him at all.

  Fitzgerald called three times a night. He called at random times and asked Ming where she had been when she hadn’t picked up the phone. He fell behind in listening to lecture tapes, until she reminded him that he had to study if he wanted to get into medical school and come to Toronto. We should cool down, she said, see what happens in the next year.

  “Slow down, cool down, it’s all you say now.”

  “I’m going to answer the phone once every two days. I got call display.”

  A week later, Ming said that Chen had tried to kiss her again, and she hadn’t stopped him. Did Fitzgerald want to break up because of her lack of faithfulness, she asked. She would understand. She explained all of this in one very long expectant breath, with no pause. Fitzgerald said that he wanted to come see her.

  “Our first plan was the right one, to just be study friends. I wish we hadn’t got so off track,” said Ming.

  “I need to see you. You owe it to me.” He felt an urgent need to bed her harshly and memorably if it should be the last time.

  “If you’re going to be angry, it’s better for us to make a break.”

  Fitzgerald said that he needed her to get through everything—the exams, the interviews. Ming warned him not to twist things into being her responsibility.

  “Don’t make me into your mother,” said Ming. A long, mutual silence. Then, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m not sure why I said that.”

  “Is that what you think this is about?” asked Fitzgerald. He had once told Ming that the loneliness he felt after his mother died was like living in a house frame that would never be clad with walls or a roof.

  “Look, that was wrong of me. Pretend I never said it.”

  “That hurts, you know? And then it hurts more that you want to pretend you never said it.”

  “You’re not going to lay a guilt trip on me,” said Ming, suddenly hard again. “I don’t do guilt.”

  “No, you don’t, do you?”

  “Let’s stop.”

  “We’re not done talking,” said Fitzgerald.

  “We are done. What else do you have to say?”

  “Lots.”

  “Do you have anything good, anything positive to say, or are we just going to hate each other more? I’m sorry I mentioned your mother, which was wrong. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. That’s all I can say on that subject.”

  “Well, you meant more, but now you won’t own up to it.”

  “Let’s stop, let’s not hate each other.”

  “Hate? I thought we loved each other. I don’t know why you’re bringing hate into it. As for my mother—”

  “Good night.”

  “No, don’t you, Ming—”

  “Good night, Fitzgerald.”

  When he called back, the phone rang until it went to her answering machine. Five minutes later, he dialed and the phone rang until her machine picked up. An hour later, her machine answered still.

  Ming answered his calls every second night. She told Fitzgerald that she still thought he was a beautiful person, as if this was a dreary but proven scientific principle and therefore she could not deny it despite its uncomfortable implications. She maintained that he was the only person she could trust telling “everything” to, which meant the intimate aspects of her tutoring by Karl. Fitzgerald wanted to ask whether he, too, would become an uncomfortable secret, but feared that the asking would make it come true. At the end of each call one of them would be crying, and the other angry. In December, Ming said that although it was a “fact” that she loved Fitzgerald “as a person,” they should no longer speak.

  “You need me more than I can deal with, and more than you can handle, frankly.”

  “But if you weren’t trying to run away, I wouldn’t need you so bad.”

  “It’s not my fault. I won’t allow that.”

  “What about next year, when I come to Toronto?”

  “If you come to Toronto, next year is next year. I suppose anything is possible.”

  In the following weeks, Fitzgerald left monologues on Ming’s answering machine, emotional diatribes examining their relationship’s dynamics. He left messages saying he wanted to discuss medical school application issues with her, and when she didn’t call back he left further messages in which he discussed his thoughts about her possible responses to his issues. Sometimes he described his day’s study progress, subject by subject. Fitzgerald pleaded with Ming to call him. He addressed the reasons he imagined she might have for not calling him, and promised that if she called, he would be calm and neither of them would cry. He would be silent for a few days, and then call to leave a message saying that he was finally getting beyond their relationship, that it was wonderful that things had cooled down a bit to give them both space, so it would be great if she would call and they could talk like good old friends. Like colleagues, he said.

  Fitzgerald began calling to hear her voice on the machine. In the middle of the day, when he felt lonely, he would call just to hear the recording.

  Hi. You’ve reached Ming, but I’m not here. Leave a message.

  One day, at two in the afternoon, she picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi.”

  Her voice was sticky. “I was napping. I just grabbed the phone. Why are you calling in the afternoon?”

  “I’m addicted to the idea of you.”

  “Oh, I didn’t check my call display,” she said with a mix of annoyance and apology, as if to explain why they were actually talking.

  “We’re meant for each other. We decided.”

  She said nothing, and then came the dial tone.

  The next day, Ming’s number was out of service. The new one was unlisted.

  It was an early March d
ay in Ottawa. Fitzgerald rode his bicycle under a noon sun that chewed gleaming wet facets into snowbank peaks as streaks of black sediment crumbled toward the curb. Fitzgerald had just checked the midterm exam results, and was near the top of each of his classes. Tomorrow he would go to Toronto for his interview. The invitation had come from the Faculty of Medicine in a stunningly ordinary white envelope.

  Fitzgerald pedalled away from campus along the canal, through lakes of slush toward the red light at the intersection of Sussex and Rideau. He chewed upon the imperative of acceptance into medical school, and scripted the shining, clear conversation with Ming that would set aside all the misunderstandings that had separated them. For months now, Fitzgerald’s mind had alternated between studying and allowing his speculations to spin like wheels stuck in a rutted path of Ming and medicine, digging the tracks deeper and deeper. Everything would fall into place once he was accepted to the University of Toronto. That was it, the end point after which career, perfect words, heroic acts, and true love would come naturally as a matter of course.

  She might call tonight to arrange to see him in Toronto tomorrow. He prepared himself for the things she might say, thought about what response would show tenderness, strength, and more maturity than when they last spoke five months ago. Fitzgerald pedalled slowly, timing the lights. Spinning his legs backwards, he judged the crosswalk with its orange hand flashing, then the traffic signal that turned yellow as he came closer, then red. Now his light was green, and he stood up out of the saddle in order to sprint through the intersection. As his rear wheel gripped the asphalt and he surged forward toward the green light, Fitzgerald saw the bus running the red, and now he was in the intersection with the bus, gigantic and fast, rushing at him. He grabbed the brakes with a spasm of his hands, and the bus swerved, its rear wheels locking, sliding sideways and throwing a fan of slush. He flew over the handlebars of the bike into the air with a sense of vast calm—an empty mind in the sudden knowledge that he was very near his death.