by Vincent Lam
The humming noise of the bus whirring away.
Round red lights receding.
The heat of blood on his face, and the cold ground that had ripped through his pants to open his knees raw.
Cars honked. Move on.
The bike was unrideable. The wheels had pancaked into the frame when it was run over by the bus. Fitzgerald was alive through the luck of being thrown far enough forward. He chained the bike to a street sign, called the transit commission from a pay phone, told them what had happened, and they gave him a file number. He called the police, and they gave him a file number. He asked what he should do, and the constable asked if he was injured. Cuts and bruises, he said. Keep the file number, she said, and hung up. He took a bus home, glaring at the driver. After picking the gravel out of his face and knees with a shaving brush, Fitzgerald lay down.
The house was quiet. He thought vaguely of his father, who had said he was going to Luxembourg this week on business, or Lausanne? Some European place that began with L. He didn’t pay attention anymore, and so the two of them were quiet bachelors living in the same house. Fitzgerald remembered his mother, and his tears stung in the scrapes from the bicycle crash.
Only then, lying on his own bed with his face oozing, did he think of Ming. In a distant way, it occurred to him to call her, to tell her about the moment when he was airborne in the intersection of Sussex and Rideau and believed that he would die. He didn’t have her telephone number. A letter. He would send a letter, and she would feel sorry, would wish that she had been there to comfort him, and would feel guilty at her neglect. But why send a letter when he was going to Toronto tomorrow? Then he realized that he had felt cleaner and lighter in the four hours since the accident, that he hadn’t thought about Ming or about medical school (was it really the first four hours in months?).
He fell asleep.
Fitzgerald slept until the next morning, and barely woke in time to catch the train, still tired. Lake Ontario’s surface was a rippled grey as the train hummed toward Union Station, and Fitzgerald felt a blank surprise that the world continued—that the bus had rushed away into a winter afternoon, that today he would still have to explain himself at his interview. If the bus had found its mark, he decided, the world would have been much unchanged. Someone else would have become a doctor, perhaps a better one than himself. Fitzgerald reminded himself that he only had an interview, not an admission, and so he still might not become a doctor. Today, this did not seem to be as disastrous a possibility as he had previously believed. He tried to summon his conviction that all of this was crucial, but felt only vaguely amazed at having spent so many hours listening to static-hiss recordings of lectures, straining to write minute facts in his cramped notes.
Dr. McCarthy was the dermatologist who, in her private office on Edward Street, welcomed Fitzgerald on behalf of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. There was also a young Asian man in black jeans and a green scrub top who wore a crisp white lab coat and whose stethoscope was slightly askew on his neck. An impressively battered aluminum clipboard was propped between his hand and hip.
Dr. McCarthy said, “We always involve a trainee in these little sessions. This is Karl.”
“I’m a surgical resident,” said Karl, as if it should be evident that this exercise was entirely too banal for his important schedule.
“What did you do to your face?” asked McCarthy.
“Karl, take a look.”
Karl grasped the edge of the bandage and said, “The best way is fast—to rip it right off.” He yanked the plaster, and with a pain more vivid than the original injury, Fitzgerald felt the fragile scab rip cleanly away with the bandage.
“Hmm,” said McCarthy. She frowned slightly at Karl.
Fitzgerald explained about the bicycle and the bus, telling the story as if his only concern at the time of the accident had been his medical school application.
Dabbing at Fitzgerald’s raw chin with a plastic-bristled surgical scrub brush, McCarthy said, “Although I’m a dermatologist, you didn’t have to rip off half your face to come see me. We had already invited you for the interview.” She seemed very pleased with this remark. The scrubbing burned, and Fitzgerald winced at the pain. She made him take off his pants so they could examine his knees. She had Karl scrub the knees, and he was rough—perhaps because he had expected to interview a candidate rather than change dressings.
“What did you like about Ottawa U?” asked McCarthy.
“I had a chance to develop my study techniques.”
“And what did you learn about studying?”
“That knowledge acquisition is all about discipline,” said Fitzgerald. He said to Karl, “You’re from Ottawa?”
“So it seems,” said Karl.
Fitzgerald said, “I’m a friend of Ming’s.”
“Oh, what a small world,” said McCarthy. “You have mutual friends. But you have not met, correct? We can’t have the interview be biased, of course.”
Both Karl and Fitzgerald smiled blandly at McCarthy, which she took as confirmation that they were strangers.
As Karl hunched over, scrubbing hard at Fitzgerald’s knees, hurting him, Fitzgerald imagined jerking his knee up into Karl’s jaw, Karl’s head snapping back. Could he make it look like an accident, like a sudden reflex of pain? It would be for Ming, he told himself. But they would know. They were doctors, therefore all-seeing, and they would recognize whether a knee-jerk was reflex or assault. And why should he do this for Ming, when this impulsive act might keep him from success, and she had drifted so far from him that she had changed her phone number? His knees had gone from scabbed and scruffy to raw and oozing with bloody fringes.
Karl said, “One thing you learn in medicine is that wounds heal. Almost all bleeding stops with pressure.” He scrubbed hard, and Fitzgerald tensed his thigh. “Also, there’s some pain.”
He should drive his leg upward. It was Karl’s fault that Ming had learned to exclude, to be hard. Of course, it was Karl’s study system that had brought Ming to medical school and himself to this interview. But the method was irrelevant. To study was to work. To work was to make it one’s own. As he neared the decision to do it—to knee Karl in the jaw—Karl finished wrapping his knees in gauze with a rough flourish. Karl stood and the opportunity for violence was gone. Fitzgerald looked at Karl and said, “Ming taught me that the first eighty marks are easy to get, but you lose it on the last twenty, so you live your life for the last twenty. Bleeding must be the same. The few cases that don’t stop are the tough part, right?”
McCarthy said, “Before we discuss the management of hemorrhage, tell me about ‘knowledge acquisition.’ Is that what they call academics now? Like buying a house, or a hostile corporate takeover. How is it, Fitzgerald, that you ‘acquire’ knowledge?”
Fitzgerald told himself to turn away, to look away from Karl’s gaze. “Maybe ‘acquisition’ is not right, since that implies taking it away from someone else. I guess when you know something well enough that you can use it from the gut, and it affects the way you think, then it’s an idea that you own. ‘Ownership’ might be a better way to think of it.”
“Owning ideas is all about discipline?” asked Karl.
“Why don’t you get dressed,” said McCarthy. Fitzgerald was standing in his boxer shorts and dress shirt, his face and knees freshly wrapped in gauze. After Fitzgerald had dressed, McCarthy asked him what quality he felt was most important in a physician. Trust is most crucial, said Fitzgerald.
“In that case, what should I ask you in this interview, if I wanted to know whether I could trust you?” said McCarthy with a tight grin.
“Ask me anything, and I could make up something that would sound good,” said Fitzgerald. The interview continued for another half-hour. McCarthy bantered and Karl read questions from his sheet, sullen and cautious. At the end of the session McCarthy gave Fitzgerald sample tubes of cream for his abrasions and said, “I still don’t know if we can trust you.”
“The only way to find out is to let me in and see what happens.” He said it plainly, somewhat tired.
After the interview, Fitzgerald went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, ran his fingers through his hair. He got in the elevator and Karl caught the closing door, stepped in with him.
“We haven’t met,” said Karl. “I’m sure of it, so don’t tell me we have.”
“But I know you. Ming and I are close friends.”
“You want to know how you scored today, close friend?”
“No,” said Fitzgerald.
“I wouldn’t count on Toronto.” Karl stood directly in front of Fitzgerald, and behind him the elevator buttons flickered in sequence as they descended to the ground floor. “See, all it takes is one bad score—an exam, an essay, an interview—and you’re out. Bye-bye. McCarthy liked you, but I think you’ve got the wrong attitude. Besides, whatever you think you know about me, you don’t.”
The floor numbers progressed downward.
“Feeling pretty guilty, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but don’t count on Toronto.” Karl turned away from Fitzgerald and gazed at the elevator door, leaning back on the railing.
Fitzgerald stepped in front of Karl, faced him. “Does the surgery program director know about your teaching experience, about how you got your start in tutoring?” They were at the fourth, then the third floor. “Imagine the embarrassment if there was some reason you couldn’t be left alone with kids, perhaps needed special supervision during your pediatric surgery rotation. It’s terrible how people talk.”
Second floor, then ground level. The door rumbled open slowly, an old elevator.
“How’d I do?” said Fitzgerald, putting his arm across the elevator door. “That interview score. How’d I perform?”
Karl raised the aluminum clipboard as if about to hit Fitzgerald with it, but instead pointed its corner between Fitzgerald’s eyes and said, “If you end up in Toronto, just remember that someone will see your mistakes.”
Fitzgerald moved his arm, allowed Karl to pass, and watched him disappear around the corner.
An hour later, standing on the Dundas subway platform, Fitzgerald removed his tie. His sports jacket was constrictive and lumpy under his winter coat. He rolled the tie carefully and pushed it into an outside pocket of his coat. He rode the subway to Summerhill station, stepped off the train, and stood on the platform as people walked past him. He sat on a plastic bench that looked like a square mushroom, pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets, and watched two more trains arrive and depart. The three tones of the bell sang out before the doors whooshed shut and the second train hurtled away with a rising clatter. Fitzgerald climbed the tiled stairs to the exit and clanked through the turnstile. Outside, the cold air felt like morning water. He was afraid. His breath steamed around him as he walked.
First, he buzzed.
He tried Ming’s apartment twice.
The screen said No Answer. It was four-thirty-five in the afternoon. He rang again, punched the numbers on the keypad with a determination he hoped would make her appear. The transmitted electronic bleeping continued until the screen flashed No Answer again.
From his inner jacket pocket, Fitzgerald removed the keys. He opened the front door, went up the elevator, and his feet were light and fast as he walked down the hallway to Ming’s door.
He knocked using his fingers, making a short little rhythm.
Silence.
He knocked again, rapped with his knuckles.
Still quiet.
The tip of the key trembled as he tried to bring it to the lock, and then with two hands he steadied and pushed the toothed key into its slot. It went in easily, without jamming or catching. He turned it. It turned smoothly, a soft click. She had not changed the lock.
He opened the door and called out, “Hello?”
No one.
Again, “Ming? It’s me.”
Quiet.
When he had last seen the apartment, it had been almost bare—furnished by her parents with one station-wagon load of prefabricated Swedish furniture and three brush-painted scrolls. Now, Ming had settled in. There were sandals and a single black pump in the hallway. In the kitchen, oven mitts that were supposed to look like slices of watermelon hung from a drawer knob. Medical pathology books and dissection notes covered the surface of the coffee table. Fitzgerald removed his shoes and winter coat, put them in the closet, and sat in the armchair that faced the couch.
On top of the study notes was a half-finished cup of tea, its inner surface ringed with brown circles. The apartment smelled of ginger and garlic. A large print of Van Gogh’s Starlight over the Rhone hung above the couch, and Fitzgerald stared at it for a long time. He examined the rippled lines of the light reflected in the water, and the hunched stance of the man and woman. Why were they looking at the artist, and not at the deep cobalt water shot through with the light of reflected stars? They faced away from the riverbank, away from the dark liquid at the heart of the scene. They stared out at the viewer, who could be none other than an eye looking down from the black night.
She shouldn’t be surprised, he thought.
He had written, he told himself, sitting there in his socks.
For weeks, he had sent letters reminding her of his interview date, asking if they could meet. She didn’t write back. He wrote notes in which he addressed possible objections she might have to seeing him. Was she afraid of hurting him? If so, he wanted nothing more than to see her. Perhaps she felt that because their relationship was over, they shouldn’t see each other? If this was her concern, he wrote, she should feel completely comfortable because he had accepted that the relationship was done, that their romance was finished, but it hurt him to not be able to see his closest friend. Maybe she was too busy? They would meet quickly, eat a meal like old friends—didn’t she have to eat? Did she feel that everything between them was in the past? He wrote that although the past was gone, he didn’t discount the future. Since he would be in Toronto for his interview and neither of them was deliberately travelling to see the other, this would be a perfectly neutral meeting—not evoking the past but also not requiring a future. Did she hope they would simply forget each other? Impossible.
He had written these things to her, but no reply had come. She should not be surprised to see him. He had tried to express the important but casual and enjoyable nature of a meeting. He didn’t write that he would simply come to her apartment, enter, remove his shoes, and wait. Why not? Perhaps he didn’t really think he would do it. The idea had run in his mind like a movie: she would be surprised at first, but then seeing him in her home would allow all of the old feelings to come back to her. She would hold him, she would thank him for seeking her out, she would swear to never turn away from him again.
Maybe he didn’t think any of this could be real. It was unreasonable to break into her apartment, and so perhaps he never really thought he would be sitting here like this, flipping through her pathology notes, smelling her kitchen, patting the bandages on his face to see whether they had soaked through. That’s what it was, he reminded himself, breaking and entering. Was that why he had not written about this possibility? Perhaps he had suspected that she had forgotten about his set of keys. Perhaps he had thought that had he mentioned anything about coming over on his own, she would change the locks. He hadn’t written that he would be sitting here on her couch, that he would pick up her half-finished tea, go to the microwave, heat it up, sip it—that he would wish to feel like a soothed child because she had also sipped from this cup but would find that it was just stale, microwaved jasmine tea gone bitter with the leaves steeped too long in cold water.
Five-ten.
He wondered about the one black pump on the floor. Where was its partner? He looked for it in the hallway closet, pushed through her sheaf of clothing, smelled the jackets, the sweaters—her smell had changed. Less pungent, maybe from less home cooking? Or did he remember it d
ifferently? Had she been in such a rush to get the shoe off? He looked into the bedroom briefly, the sight of the bed painful, but thankfully there was no trail of footwear leading to the mattress. He closed the bedroom door, heart pounding, still holding the tea. In September, after her parents had left, they had a perfect week, a week of playing house. It was before her classes started, and they made love on their first night in the apartment, having assembled only the bed—the rest of the furniture still in its unopened flat-packed boxes. They filled her kitchen from the stalls in Kensington Market, and went to Centre Island twice to watch children playing. Ming had been the one who would point to kids, especially mixed-race children, and say that their kids might turn out like that.
Five-twenty.
He finished the tea anyhow, hopeful. It had a quality like warm, wet dishwater.
Five-twenty-five.
Fitzgerald gathered up some of the heart dissection notes from the coffee table. They were very instructional, like diagrams that show how to assemble model airplanes, except in reverse. They indicated where to cut, where to separate the muscle, how to open the heart in order to best observe its valves. He saw that Ming had added to the notes, that she had coloured each of the coronary vessels with a different marker. She had written words next to an asterisk. This was to remind herself to look something up.
* Mitral Regurgitation.
* Collateral Circulation.
Then, he noticed a smiley face in the bottom right corner of a diagram of the Purkinje system. A smiley face? Ming did not draw smiley faces. She was serious, focused. Who had done this? Fitzgerald flipped the pages. On another sheet, an unfamiliar hand had written Dinner at Italia—six-thirty? There was a little bulbous-drawn heart. Was this the individual known as Chen—Chen the kisser, Chen the interloper? Fitzgerald felt betrayed that Ming had never mentioned little cartoon smiley faces and hearts. This was wrong, that he would have been replaced by someone who doodled on anatomy notes. He continued to leaf through the papers.