We Are All Perfectly Fine

by Dr. Jillian Horton

  “You can sit if you want.”

  He hesitates. I like him because he hesitated. I pat the bench with my hand, closing my notebook. He comes and sits next to me, offers me a gloved hand.

  “I’m Roy.”

  “Jill. Where are you from?”

  “Boston. You?”

  “Canada.”

  “Too nonspecific.”

  This makes me chuckle. “Only a doctor would say that. Once I heard a man checking in at a hotel front desk. The clerk asked him how his drive was. He said, ‘Uneventful.’”

  “Anesthetist.”

  “Right?”

  “Or a surgeon.”

  “But definitely a doctor.”

  “What are you?”

  “Radiologist. You?”

  “Internist.”

  “Condolences.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  Roy rubs his face with the back of his palm. I try to calculate his age. A mallard duck with an emerald green head lands in front of us. It shimmers, even in the dull light.

  “Show-off.” Roy flicks his hand at the duck. It waddles up the bank towards us, quacks at us a couple of times.

  I call out to the duck. “Only doctors here right now, please.”

  “What were you writing?”

  “Just something about a patient.”

  “What patient? You don’t have to answer.”

  “Somebody who blamed me for something that wasn’t my fault.”

  Roy nods. We both sit, contemplating the duck.

  He taps his temple. “I have a file like that up here.”

  “I hear that.”

  “Do you meditate?”

  “Not much. You?”

  “I have been.”

  “Since when?”

  Roy lets the question linger in the air for a while. He pulls a tissue out of his pocket, wipes his nose. “Since my wife left me for somebody else.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I am sorry, because he looks sad, like Mr. Rogers about to cry, and who wants to see that?

  “Why are you here?” Roy looks at me with hound-dog eyes, glasses streaked with something oily.

  “Not sure yet.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Three.”

  “How old?”

  “All under ten.”

  “Guessing you don’t sleep much.”

  “Just between the pages.”

  “That’s very literary.”

  “Well, I’m a failed writer.”

  “Interesting,” he says, and he does sound interested. “Who confirmed you failed?”

  “I got a letter.”

  “Did it bar you from writing again?”

  “Yeah, in a handful of states.”

  “It’s just a very heavy thing to say, ‘I’m a failed’ whatever-it-is. Maybe you’re just a writer who hasn’t published yet?”

  “I guess that might be true.”

  “It’s like a verdict, though, right? The way you said it? It’s harsh. Like you’re writing in a medical record.”

  “I hate the medical record.” I wave my hand emphatically, and my pen falls in the mud.

  Roy leans forward and picks it up, handing it back to me after he wipes it on his pants. Chivalry. I notice his pants are really ugly, some kind of corduroy that looks like mouldy fibreglass. God, this man needs sartorial help.

  “Of course, you hate it as a writer as well as a doctor. Do you identify more as one or the other?”

  I turn towards him a little. It’s a lot of work, meeting all these doctors in the woods. He’s leaning in. I feel him setting down his attention, almost plaintively, like an offering. Something in me softens.

  “I haven’t thought about it like that for a while.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I guess I had to assimilate.”

  “What?”

  “I had to become like everybody else.”

  He rolls his eyes. “I know what it means.”

  I pause because the male mallard is quacking at a female mallard off in the reeds. I call out to the duck: “Some kind of trouble in paradise?”

  Roy persists. “You think you became like everybody else in medicine.”

  “Yes.”

  He’s looking at me skeptically now. Roy, stop looking at me. You’re acting like a big weirdo, and all I have with me to defend myself is a muddy pen, a Moleskine notebook and an expired inhaler I just discovered in my left pocket.

  “Lady,” he says, “this is so dubious.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You have blue hair, and you’re sitting in the woods talking to a duck.” He laughs out loud. “You’re the weirdest person here, and that’s saying something.”

  What exactly is this guy’s problem? He’s an old coot in what looks like an athletic gingerbread-man onesie with fibreglass pants, and he just called me a weirdo?

  He studies me through his smudged glasses. “You know who else is weird?”

  “Um, you’re pretty weird.”

  He flicks his fingers against the side of my knee and makes a tsk sound.

  “Everybody who ever did anything interesting was weird. Name one writer you admire. Or one musician.”

  “Alice Munro.”

  “Who’s that?”

  I gasp. “What do you mean, who’s that?”

  Now Roy is really laughing. He’s doubled over, trying to answer. His face is barnyard red. A perfect slice of the colour wheel.

  “You should have seen your face.”

  “You should see your face. You look like a . . . goji berry or something.”

  “A . . . goji berry!”

  Roy is laughing so hard I might need to give him my inhaler. I don’t find any of this as funny as he does.

  “Tell me your favourite story by Alice,” he says once he manages to stop laughing. “I’ll download it and read it while we’re here.”

  God, that is so annoying. Alice. Hemingway is Hemingway. Ondaatje is Ondaatje. Why is Munro Alice?

  “Please?” he says. His laughter has passed. He’s silent now, sitting on the bench, plaintive-looking. His skin is slack at the neck. He’s back to just looking sad.

  “Read ‘Differently.’”

  He mouths the word to himself so he won’t forget. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about how we’d act if we believed we were going to die.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  I’m disproportionately annoyed with him, can’t keep it from creeping into my voice. “She doesn’t answer it, Roy. She knows you can’t answer it, that’s the point.”

  “Well, I’ll read it.” His voice is eager to please. “And all because a fantastically weird blue-haired woman recommended it to me.”

  The duck has tentatively waddled over to the reeds in the mud a few feet away from us. His head is shaped like a hammer.

  “I like you,” Roy says, sounding almost shy. “It’s much easier to attach to other doctors. Have you noticed?”

  There’s something undeniably poignant about him. I’m picturing him going home to a rented apartment, eating takeout straight out of the fridge. Furniture from IKEA he hasn’t bothered to assemble. No idea how frequently he should change bedsheets. I have a sudden, graphic sense of his loneliness. Sleeping in his underwear, the curtains letting in fillets of moonlight, making it difficult to sleep.

  “Isn’t that why veterans only want to be around other veterans?”

  He nods. “Somebody once told me that residency was like an abusive relationship. They said if you’re lucky, you survive.”

  “Yeah, we’re lucky, all right.

  “We are lucky.” Roy pauses. The duck has wandered over into a triangle of weeds. “We’re totally lucked up.”

  I don’t mind this bat-shaped man, even if he did basically call me crazy. I’m never going to see him again after this week. I can say whatever I want.

  Roy is squinting up at
the tree line. “There’s a falcon up there.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “A symbol of war. You must know that as a writer.”

  “Bad time to be a mouse.”

  “Hunt or be hunted.”

  I turn towards him. “Since you like symbols so much, there’s this ‘game’ called Blue Whale. Have you heard of it?”

  “Like a board game?”

  “It’s supposedly a deranged Internet scheme, though it might just be an urban legend. Where an asshole preys on some vulnerable person and grooms them to commit suicide through a series of desensitizing acts.”

  Roy sits up straight. “Well, that’s fucking evil.”

  “Do you think it’s a metaphor for what happens to us? Like, we hand over our control and it gives people licence to abuse us. And we’re surrounded by suffering and death, and after a certain point we’re willing to keep doing the crazy things they’re telling us to do, and it stops seeming like a huge deal to die.” I pause again, watching his face to see if he thinks I’m crazy. “And maybe it even stops seeming like a big deal to kill yourself.”

  “Medicine as the Blue Whale.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s why so many doctors are killing themselves. Or thinking about it.” He pauses. “But isn’t that because of burnout?”

  “God, no. Burnout isn’t a clinical diagnosis, right? It’s a phenomenon. But you take a bunch of people who are altruists and perfectionists and have the same baseline predisposition to mental illness as the rest of the population. And then you put them in ‘jail’ for five years, and you script everything they do, right? You limit their sleep, you limit their food intake, you cut them off from their loved ones; they kill a few people by accident and you tell them everything is their fault, but if they keep their mouths shut maybe nobody has to know what they did. But in return, they have to take over running the prison. Do it to the next generation.”

  “Well, this is a little dystopian.” Roy takes off his glasses, then puts them back on again, like he can’t make up his mind whether he actually needs them. He gestures towards the main building, points in the general direction of the Zendo. “It does beg the question, why are we here? So many of us?”

  “Did you expect medicine to feel like a life sentence?” I kick a patch of grass with my toe, lifting it off the earth. “Aren’t you sick of living the way we’ve been living, Roy? Wouldn’t you like things to change?”

  “What’s your life in a sentence? Sum it up.”

  “That’s gimmicky.”

  “Shouldn’t it be easy for you to come up with one if you’re a writer?”

  “I told you I’m a failed writer.”

  “Bad sentence. Plus I already told you, you’re not a failed writer.”

  “That wasn’t my sentence. Just please stop calling me a writer. I have to publish something real first. Otherwise I sound like an even bigger joke.”

  He touches my wrist. It’s a surprisingly intimate gesture for a man I’ve just met. His fingers are weightless on my skin.

  “You’re not a joke,” he says quietly.

  I don’t answer him.

  “What’s going on there?” Roy points at the grass I’ve excavated with my foot. “Looks like a biopsy.”

  “It’s dirt, all right.”

  He bites his lower lip. Usually only women do that. This endears him to me. I feel his willingness to be vulnerable, the fresh bruise on his heart.

  “Blue-haired internist,” he says somberly, “I’d like to talk to you again.”

  “All right, man with fibreglass pants, let’s meet tomorrow.”

  “I’ll find you,” he says. “In the rain, in the forest, I’ll find you.”

  “Give me my regards.”

  Roy smiles at me, a puzzled smile, the smile of someone who knows a secret you know too, before either of you has figured out what it is.

  * * *

  SUPPER IS ALREADY going on when we get back to the main hall. I’m tired and cold. I eat mindlessly by myself in a corner, not really tasting the food. I go back to my room. My clothes are damp. Dampness has infiltrated everything. I decide to get ready for bed.

  The shower room is as impersonal as the bathrooms. There are no recognizable patterns on anything: no florals, no deer on the hand towels. A small white lump of soap, featureless, like the statue by the pond. Even the shower door is a milky plastic. Nothing reflects light.

  I hang my things over the towel bar, undress, turn on the water. Steam fills the room. The air is thick and soothing. The soap smells like eucalyptus. I shampoo my hair, watching a thin stream of blue run down my body and into the drain.

  It’s funny, but I notice how dense the air is, notice as I stand under the hot water how happy my body is to receive it, notice what it feels like when I breathe in that warm air. Summer days at the lake and heat rising off the water like the back of a great animal. My children, playing in the sand. Building pointless labyrinths of castles. Starting again from scratch every afternoon.

  I can rebuild.

  I can’t rebuild.

  I turn the water off, pat myself dry with the towel, wrap it around my hair. I melt a little coconut oil into my face, brush my teeth, decide to go to bed early, because I’m tired from all this sitting and thinking and talking.

  It was a surprise to find myself writing about Mr. Ripple, but I guess I knew he was in there somewhere. Just one more bad thing that happened. One more story I’m carrying, one more rock in a bag of rocks.

  “What if this is all our practice?” Ron said earlier. It hovered in the room, a radical idea.

  There was a long, electric pause.

  “Our clinical practice?” someone asked hesitantly.

  “Our true practice.”

  I sit on my single bed in the dim light of the table lamp, putting away my toothbrush, taking my nightgown out of the drawer, where it’s folded like a uniform. Ron, are you seriously trying to suggest all the crap things that have happened in my life are my practice? The people I feel like I’ve killed are my practice? How are they supposed to feel about this? And what if I go through all this practice just to find I can’t handle medicine anymore? That I’m too old? Too tired? Maybe even irrevocably broken in a way I don’t even know how to articulate?

  What would the point of all of it have been, if I quit now . . . to be a failed or an unpublished writer, or whatever Roy said I should start calling myself?

  * * *

  SOMETIMES PEOPLE ASK why so many doctors are writers. But maybe the question really should be, why do so many writers put themselves through the unmistakable hell of becoming doctors?

  I started writing again after my second son was born. I’d been seriously ill when I was pregnant with him. I was admitted to the hospital where I worked, under my husband’s last name so the students and residents wouldn’t notice it was me in an isolation room, my white blood count so mysteriously low that I couldn’t be with other patients on a general medical ward. As I packed my suitcase that morning, unsure whether I was going for a day, or a month, or what would happen next, I looked at the sleeping form of my first little boy, not even two, his cotton pyjamas stamped with blue cars, the gentle rise and fall of his chest. I sat back down on the bed, tears leaking from my eyes, and watched him breathing as if I’d never noticed the miracle of that pattern before, repeating, repeating, a loop, no beginning or end.

  I checked into the hospital. People I worked with came to consult on me, sitting across from my hospital bed with worried looks. Listening to their words, hearing but not hearing. Numbers circling in my head. The white count. The platelets. The liver enzymes. The beta-HCG. Blue cars on white pyjamas. I couldn’t sleep that night, in my room high above the inner city. The matrix of houses. Chain-link fences. Crumbling turrets. Open windows, even in the dead of winter. Smoke rising from a cigarette. A woman and a man and a snarling dog. Trying to make sense of it all. Seeing if I could find a single thread of narrative to link what was happening
outside the window and what was going on here, inside, with my life. Promising the universe if things got better, if everything could just turn out all right, there was something I’d do differently, even though I wasn’t sure what it was. Holding on to the words of one of the nurses who had come to give me fluids and draw more bloodwork, a kind, motherly Caribbean woman who murmured she was sure I was going to be fine as she slipped the needle into my vein.

  The next day, my counts had risen. The worst was over. It was just a virus, temporarily stunning my bone marrow, now receding without fanfare. Unlike every other person on that cancer ward, I got to go home intact. Even if I lost the baby, a baby who wasn’t even a baby at this point, who was just the idea of a baby, really, a macadamia nut in my womb—even if I did, I was still the luckiest woman of them all. Leaving, walking out, going back to my one very real little boy who barely knew I’d been gone. Like reading a letter with horrible news, only to look more closely and discover it was actually intended for somebody else.

  But I didn’t lose the macadamia nut. He grew and grew, and soon he had a heartbeat. Then he had a face, and arms, and legs. Then he had everything else, and after that, he had a name: Adam, God’s first man.

  That morning in the hospital, I had made a deal and meant to keep it. I wouldn’t forget how I had been lifted up by the random benevolence of the universe. One beautiful child. No cancer. A husband I loved. A home by the edge of a park, a lawn that blurred into an acre of trees, where birds nested in the shrub outside my window, hatching their babies while I nursed mine, their calls eventually mingling with the little macadamia nut’s soft, piercing cry. This time I’d notice it all. I’d be grateful. I’d write.

  And yet. In the months that followed, I’d nurse the macadamia nut to sleep and sit staring into his perfect face and weep. I wept because I knew that no matter how tightly I held him, in less than a year we’d have to say the first of an endless string of goodbyes, and medicine would come back for me like a reaper, the way it showed up when I went back to work after my first son was born, taking me away from him physically but also psychologically, separating us like a barbed-wire fence. I cried because I loved him and didn’t want yet another baby to have to come second. And I dreaded all the other imminent separations. Nursery school and preschool and other women comforting my children while the hospital took over every aspect of my life.