One night I sat on a bench overlooking Morningside Park, taking sips of tequila from a flask with a friend who was also a writer in the master’s program. She too felt uneasy in New York.
“I think about dropping out of the program all the time,” I said.
“So do I,” she said. “But I don’t know what else I’d do. I’ve always been a writer.”
“Sure,” I said.
From the bench, we could see down over the tops of the trees in the park, and the lights of Harlem stretching away on the other side.
“What would you do?” she asked.
“I’d go to medical school,” I said without hesitating. As I spoke, the plan began to take shape. I wanted to be back in the clinic, back in that storytelling space—but more than that, I wanted my life to feel solid again. I wanted to work all day, and see what I had done at the end of the day. I wanted to be useful.
“Well,” my friend said. “That makes sense.”
CHAPTER 3
I LEFT THE WRITING PROGRAM IN DECEMBER OF 2006, and the next step on my path toward medical school took me to Portland, Oregon, for a “postbac,” a postbaccalaureate premedical program. These programs are designed for the truly masochistic student who wishes to complete all of her premed classes—general chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, calculus, and biology—in a single year. I found a room on Craigslist in early June, and my parents drove me across the country to drop me off.
Portland is the kind of liberal town where a lesbian friend of mine could decide to recycle the double-ended dildo that she and her partner were bored with, and the city workers would haul it away without comment. There were dead volcanoes within the city limits, and so many waterfalls nearby that I felt a bit oppressed. (“Texas has a subtle beauty,” I said once, dismissing a sixty-foot waterfall with a wave of my hand. “It’s not all flashy and in-your-face.”) I got a red bicycle, named it “Squeaky,” and memorized the periodic table. Flowers bloomed all summer: poppies in the neighbors’ yard, passionflowers climbing up the fences I passed on my way to the library.
My house was a little safe haven on the southeast side, full of young people who had just moved to Portland. There was Corey, the landlord, a photographer who also worked on a commercial crab boat. There was Sara, the beautiful Australian (favorite animal: wombat), and Heather, a really decent human being who counseled college students. Heather had a genetically deficient white cat named Brian, who liked to defecate on white things (carpet, comforters, paper). Once, Brian got stuck in a tree just four feet off the ground, and we all gathered in the yard to mock him.
I felt happy at home, but I was lonely at school. It was my own fault: I had convinced myself that I was a “writer”—a very different sort of creature from the average premed student. These other premeds were squares who seemed to wear only rain gear. The vaunted fashion and coolness of Portland was not on display in the General Chemistry course at Portland State.
To be honest, my sense of superiority came from fear. I feared that all these other people, these squares, were right for medicine, whereas I myself could never be a good doctor—not with my liberal arts degree, my wandering mind, and my dark sense of humor. I’m too cool for this, I told myself, when really I was afraid I wasn’t good enough. So I sat by myself in class and stewed over the elements, until the day I sat down next to Frank.
I was late to class, holding a cup of coffee and sloughing rain off the sides of my gigantic brown jacket. Hoping to go unnoticed by our chemistry professor, I snuck in a side door. But all the rows were filled. I clumped and dripped up the stairs, feeling increasingly exposed, until someone hissed, “Here. You can sit down here.”
That someone was a thin young man with curly blond hair and a huge smile. “Thank god,” I whispered to him. “I’m terrified of all these people.”
“Me too!” he whispered, and patted my arm.
Frank and I recognized each other instantly. We were both in a sort of hiding, assuming that our true selves could never get into medical school. He—for the first time since junior high—was trying to hide the fact that he was gay. Our ideas about doctors were mostly unfounded, because neither of us had had regular medical care growing up, but we took doctors seriously. Doctors, we figured, were straight white men. They were rational creatures, content to spend a thousand sunny afternoons in the laboratory macerating rat lungs to extract a protein. They were calm, and a bit humorless.
Frank and I were not like that. We laughed our way through general chemistry, which—to our mutual shock—we aced. “We understand science!” we squealed when we got our grades.
We also laughed about our families. I showed him a picture of myself with my crooked teeth in the trailer park days, and told him the story of the time my cousin divorced her husband without telling him about it. (“That’s so trashy!” he whispered with delight. “Exactly!” I said.) At the end of the summer, Frank went on a weekend trip to the lake with his family, which he chronicled for me in hilarious detail: with his latest stepfather, his mother, and a set of cousins, he had stayed in a cabin on the lake. His grandmother Ma, who was the most stable and loving person in Frank’s life, had not attended. One day the family went tubing, pulling ski tubes behind a boat. The trip had taken a year to save up for, but Frank’s mom was pretty stressed the whole time. At one point she fell off the dock. He said I was the only person who could laugh so hard with him at something that was actually so sad.
As summer cooled into fall, Frank and I became lab partners in every class and study buddies every night. Frank knitted quietly beside me through three lectures about the reptile kidney; I wrote a poem for Rattus norvegicus and marveled at the perceptive powers of the pit viper. (Those pits on their skulls sense infrared radiation from the warm bodies of mice, but neuroscience has shown that the viper experiences the heat as an image—like what we would see with our eyes!) In lab, we explored the electrical properties of the zebrafish, used simple machines, and transformed acids into salts. “Voilà!” Frank would say, waving his hand over a beaker. “Science!”
It never stopped feeling like a miracle that Frank and I could do well in science classes. Yet we did, and mostly because we studied fanatically, together. As I became closer with Frank, I began to drop the idea that I was too cool to be a regular premed. Our giant textbooks became a badge of honor, which we would proudly lug from place to place. We were a comfort to each other: If Frank could make it in medicine, so could I. If medicine could be a place where we would meet the true friends of our hearts, then maybe we both were going to be okay.
Between problem sets, we would analyze each other’s relationships with men. Frank desperately wanted to be in love, whereas I had an abundance of love but no real sense of direction with relationships.
“Why would you kiss him?” he squealed when I told him I had kissed a random guy whom I didn’t think was very smart.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said, and he looked at me with wonder. From Frank’s perspective, a straight woman who had an easy chance to find real love, but seemed instead to wander through meaningless encounters, was wasting the chance he desperately wanted for himself. Sometimes he would do the math: If 10 percent of people were gay and half of those were men, and 20 percent of those were in his age range, then he could potentially find love with one in every one hundred people. That meant 1 percent of the Portland population, or, as he would put it brightly, “Nearly six thousand potential boyfriends right here in the City of Roses!”
But in our premed classes—the community where we spent most of our waking time—the chances felt slimmer. The anxiety of applying to medical school, and trying to conform to some notion of the archetypal good doctor, worked its way into Frank. Although nobody in our community was mean to Frank, and nobody told him that a gay man can’t be a doctor, Frank had gotten a subtle message—just as I had—that a doctor is a certain kind of person. “I worry about it,” he told me. “How will I hide it in interviews?”
“Do
you have to hide it?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. And I figured he knew more about the subject than I did. Frank didn’t come out to most people in class; he didn’t brighten up and laugh hysterically at my dumb jokes until we were well away from campus.
Nor did the gay community, which Frank had been a vibrant part of during his college days in Eugene, feel like a safe haven to him. “Sometimes I think the gay community here is pathological,” he said with sadness. “We all just got so messed up in high school. We were really taught to hate ourselves. And then you’re supposed to just be able to open up and love someone who symbolizes everything you hate about yourself.”
As the rainy fall progressed to the dark and rainy winter, Frank and I moved from being study friends to being real friends. There was a stand of bright yellow trees in a park downtown that he loved; they kept their color until November. After class we’d walk arm in arm under those yellow trees to Powell’s Books, where I started reading poetry and Frank taught me what brioche was. On Sundays, he would come over for dinner. He was having a hard time eating that winter, but he loved the fish tacos I made from halibut that my brother sent from Alaska. I would send Frank home with a Tupperware container full of fish.
But by January, the rain was getting me down. The rain, the darkness, and studying for the MCAT. Why does anybody ever leave the great state of Texas, where winters are sunny?
“Rain makes the flowers grow!” Frank said. So I nicknamed him “Cloudforest.”
“Cloudforest,” I would say, “we understand physics.”
One Thursday afternoon, Frank and I sat on a couch at our usual coffee shop to do organic chemistry homework. I was complaining about a new housemate—Ron, who washed his whole body twice a day with antibacterial soap and had screamed at me twice for touching his dishes. Frank suggested that we use science to “take him out,” and we giggled over the idea, then got very nerdy. We were in the middle of a three-day experiment in organic chemistry lab, distilling caffeine from tea. “Could you use caffeine?” Frank asked.
We figured that you could. We figured caffeine could kill a pesky roommate, and probably by arrhythmia. Then we talked about other things. Frank was worried about passing the MCAT. My grandmother had paid for me to take an MCAT prep course, but Frank had no such help. He told me that he was down, really down. He was doing all the right things to try and feel better—exercise, knitting, seeing his counselor. He’d gone on an antidepressant. But nothing was helping. We talked a while, just so close on that couch that our forearms were brushing, then walked down to the bookstore. I met another friend there, and Frank and I said good-bye. He was never very much for mixing friend groups, having long cultivated a habit of keeping parts of his own life secret.
That Sunday night, I didn’t call Frank and he did not call me. It was the first time in months we hadn’t had Sunday dinner.
FRANK WAS MISSING ON MONDAY. In eight a.m. biology he missed a quiz, which was totally unlike him. I called, and left a message. Cloudforest, this is Rachel. You missed a quiz! I’m worried about you; call me back.
I was worried enough that our friend Amy drove me over to Frank’s house to look for him between classes. The door was locked. There was a pecan tree in the yard, and I threw fallen pecans at his window. It was February, and they were soft with rot. The pecans tapped against Frank’s window, but he did not respond.
Amy drove me back to campus for organic chemistry class, where Frank missed a test. Impossible. He was ranked third in our class in organic chemistry, and proud of it. He didn’t miss tests. After the test, I bicycled home. I looked up Frank’s housemate Dean on the Internet, and called him at work asking him to go home and check on Frank. He agreed. He would go straight home.
Then time began to move very slowly.
I sat in the window seat of my bedroom, watching the wind trouble some leaves on the asphalt far below. I don’t know how long I sat there, but finally I realized that Dean had not called back.
WHEN I ARRIVED at Frank’s house, the medical examiner’s truck was parked outside. The front door was open, and I walked in to find Dean and a man in police uniform and a woman in a dress standing silently in the foyer.
“No,” I said.
“Rachel,” Dean said. I had never met him before.
“Frank?” I asked.
“I’m so sorry,” Dean said, and he stepped toward me and hugged me hard for a long time. So without anybody saying it, I knew that Frank was dead.
“When you called,” Dean said, “I didn’t expect. I didn’t know that he would be there in his room.” So Dean had been asleep in the next room while Frank quietly killed himself, and then came home to find his housemate dead in his bed.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I didn’t know,” he repeated.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Do you want . . . do you want to sit?” he said. So I sat down on the couch next to the strange woman, who introduced herself as a social worker, and the three of us waited while the medical examiner went upstairs and came back again.
“There’s a note,” he said when he returned. “Do you want to read it?”
Dean said no, he didn’t think he could handle it right then, but I said yes.
In the note, Frank described how he killed himself with caffeine. He had gone out in the style of a good science student: well researched, precise, effective, using a simple method we had studied in organic chemistry lab. He even described researching the lethal dose.
Frank wrote that he had thought about suicide for a long time. He used to think about throwing himself off of one of Portland’s bridges, but he didn’t want his body to be all waterlogged. (I remembered saying good-bye to him on a bridge one night, how he waved hugely and bounced away toward home with his book bag. He did not seem preoccupied with the water, then.)
Frank signed the note, “I love you, Mom and Ma.” His mother and his grandmother, who did not yet know that he was dead. Would police be headed toward their home right now?
My name and phone number, along with those of two other friends, were written on the bottom of the note. Frank, so conscientious, knew we would inform anybody who needed to know.
I didn’t go to look at his body, but the medical examiner told me about the room. There were NoDoz scattered on the carpet, and the Wikipedia page for caffeine was open on his computer. A Tupperware container of fish that I’d cooked—maybe his dinner, or maybe meant for lunch the next day?—was on his bedside table.
FOR A FEW days, I was dysfunctional with grief. Some people brought food, and eventually I ate. So many people called with condolences that, in a moment of exhaustion, I dropped my ringing telephone into a glass of water beside my bed. It was a relief.
My new housemate John Johnson drove me from place to place, held me while I wept, and stayed up nights playing board games or watching Saturday Night Live reruns with me—anything to turn my mind from the loss. When I slept, I dreamed that I was hanging out with Frank. In the dream I said, “I’m so relieved! I thought that you were dead!” and Frank laughed and shook his head no. Then I woke up and began sobbing when I remembered what had happened.
I had a few rambling telephone conversations with Frank’s mother, who called to thank me for being Frank’s friend after finding my number on the suicide note. She asked me to bring Frank’s favorite sweater home for him to be cremated in, and John was ready to drive me across the state until she called again and changed her mind. People moved around me gently, saying that I should take all the time I needed. If I needed to drop some classes, or leave school for a while, I should. “Medical school’s not going anywhere,” they said.
And so, for a few days, I stayed home. Who would I sit next to in class? I wondered. Who would be my lab partner?
Then, later that week, my father called.
“I’m so sorry, kiddo,” he began. We talked for a while, and then I told him that I was thinking of taking a break from school
.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. And then he went on. “This is an awful thing. And it’s the first time this has happened to you, sweetie. But you know what? It’s not going to be the last.”
I was silent. There was a firmness in his voice that I had not heard from anyone else that week.
“You know I dropped out of college,” he said. “Well, I had started taking classes up there in Arkansas, and one day I got home and found that my friend had blown his brains out with a shotgun. And I left. I left, and I never made it back. And that wasn’t the last time I lost someone like that. But you know what? You’re not going to leave.”
“Dad—” I began.
“No, listen to me now. I love you. And I know you. I probably know you better than anybody else knows you, because you’re so much like me. I know who you come from. Your grandfather was a Marine. He fought on the Pacific front in World War II, and only 20 percent of his battalion survived. He saw all his friends get shot. Over and over. One of his best friends was shot in the face right next to him. And you know what, Rachel?”
“What?”
“Your granddad came home alive, and he was a happy guy. Listen, Rachel. He was a happy guy.”
“Dad—”
No Apparent Distress Page 3