Believing Cedric

by Mark Lavorato

  Hanif’s feet stayed very still on the tiled floor. “Mother,” he said in Arabic, encouraged by the compliment, “I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe. I’m not a believer. What I believe, in fact, is that it won’t do anything, for anyone.”

  “Hanif,” she said, also in Arabic, the first time she’d ever addressed him in it. “I’m not asking you to believe. I’m asking you to pray. And it’ll do something for me.”

  He looked out the window, ran a hand through his hair, then kicked off his shoes and stood beside her. She was right about his pronunciation, and in only minutes he’d learned the verses and positions. He’d always been such a clever boy.

  That winter, Hanif, while certainly not feeling very clever—researching what might be going on in his father’s skull, reading periodicals and journals, coyly looking for the laymen’s abridgement—decided that studying for something medical would give him some welcome and needed stimulation. He prepared for his MCAT, curious to see what kind of marks he could get, wondering if he still had it in him. The score he received, however, wasn’t much to write home about; much like his GPA, which he’d let slip near the end of his party-filled physiotherapy studies. Both numbers hovered just around the minimum requirements to be accepted into the Faculty of Medicine at McGill, the benchmark he was using to gauge his success. So, still unsure of whether he’d proven anything to himself, and with a little curiosity, and a little more abandon, he submitted an application, mentioning it to no one.

  Fineas was moved into a palliative care ward. He was no longer speaking but would respond to both Arabic and French with a nod or shake of his head. Questions had to be brief and simplistic; he was easily confused. Are you tired? Are you uncomfortable? Are you in pain? He gave drunken nods to them all. On good days, he was still able to amble around a bit, but after he’d had several accidents when in the washroom alone they had him wearing incontinence pads and a catheter. He would sleep for days at a time, waking with a grogginess that no sunlight or fresh air ever managed to clear.

  When Hanif was opening the letter from McGill he was inexplicably nervous. But reading that he’d been invited for the interviewing process, he became smug. Whereas his MCAT scores might have rightfully bruised his scholastic confidence, he knew that, socially, he was just as self-assured and articulate as he’d been in his early twenties, maybe even more so. On the scheduled day, he walked into the conference room like someone hosting a homey and intimate dinner party. In one interview, the panel, after laughing at an off-the-cuff joke he’d made, asked him what had sparked his interest in going into medical school, now, after having worked as a physiotherapist for ten years. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other, Hanif paused to a single, blinking image of his father, lying in his hospital bed only a few blocks away, his limbs and cheeks emaciating, a novel by Michel Tremblay placed within his reach, as if he might sit up and read from it at any moment. Hanif leaned forward and coughed, excusing himself tactfully, then gave the most winning response he could think of: that it was the natural progression for people in a curative field. He’d spent a decade treating physical injuries, and now it was time to expand beyond the same dislocations and knee operations he was always dealing with, time to learn about the broader scope of health and wellness, to take his already profound dedication to healing and bring it to another level. The chairman picked up a pen and thanked him for his answer, noting something on a sheet of paper. Hanif doubted they’d caught his hesitation.

  The family had a meeting in the palliative ward to discuss Fineas’s “end-of-life care.” It was agreed that he would be more at ease and, perhaps, less bewildered at home, with nursing aides and physicians visiting regularly, as well as people on-call waiting to assist if need be. Once they’d set him up in his own living room, his condition altered. He slept less, was awake and in an animated state more, though it was anyone’s guess how aware he actually was. He’d taken to pushing his head deep into his pillow, his bony spine arched, his eyes darting around in the air above him, never focusing or stalling, never fixing on any one object, a continuous jagged circle. The doctors had given him a month.

  When Hanif received the second letter he didn’t really know what to do with it, so he brought it over to his parents’ place, sitting down in the living room with the envelope between his fingers. He talked with his mother about the slight changes in Fineas’s condition from the previous afternoon. When she was finished they looked him over in silence for a while, watching as his eyes moved, Hanif thought, like an animal treading circles in a zoo, tamping a verbatim path of soil around and around its enclosure, never noticing the spectators’ elbows hanging over the fence nearby. Hanif finally tapped the envelope and mumbled that he was on the waiting list at the Faculty of Medicine at McGill. Nadia turned to him rigidly, asking to see the letter, as if needing to verify its authenticity before getting excited. But once she’d skimmed it, she couldn’t contain herself, and brought the piece of paper over to Fineas, holding it above him. “Hanif,” she called down at him loudly in Arabic, “Hanif is going to be a doctor, Fineas! Isn’t that wonderful news?” She held on to his shoulders and moved her head around, chasing his gaze. Finally, she looked back at Hanif, spoke sincerely. “You know. I think he heard. I think he knows.” Fineas continued his manic search of the ceiling.

  Then, on a Monday, three weeks later, Fineas appeared to be having an exceptionally good day. Just after lunch, Hanif stepped out, Nadia asking him to get some things at the grocery store, probably thinking of dessert or a refreshing afternoon snack: a cantaloupe, some grapefruit, a few oranges. While he was in the fruit aisle sorting the ripe from the green, and Nadia was wiping down the counters after finishing the lunch dishes, Fineas died. Hanif was the one that found him, placing the bag of groceries on the floor. He didn’t call his mother in for a few minutes, wanting a moment alone with him. He sat on the edge of the bed and studied his father’s face—the soft dents of his temples, the slackened muscles of his brow and cheeks—without really knowing why he was doing it. Then, for just a moment, Hanif Khaled let himself entertain a thought, a possibility. It was a fleeting indulgence really, whimsical, hopeful, and so he made a point of never sharing it with anyone, kept it tightly to himself. The following Wednesday, Fineas was buried in the Islamic Cemetery in Saint-Laurent; on his right side, Hanif was intrigued to learn, facing Mecca.

  Hanif was offered a placement, and, wavering until the last day he could decide, he finally accepted it. He took a leave from work and was plunged, almost instantly, into a surge of dense information that was steeped in opinions and politics. He struggled to keep on top of it and strained to ignore the contradictions that swirled in the undercurrents. The buzz-phrase of the day was “evidence-based medicine,” where everything was either verifiable and could be plotted into an existing paradigm or discounted. Which, Hanif thought, was fair enough, until the next class would roll around and he would learn, for example, how clubbed fingers were a potential indicator of lung cancer. No, the professor would confess, there is no understandable connection between the disease and the symptom. But it had been seen enough, and was now accepted. The students duly noted it down. In the following class, the body would again be evinced as an apparatus that had been comprehensively mapped out, studied, and digitized. A human being was composed and comprised of a chemical soup that, as such, had restrictions, conventions, and rules that it must abide by. Therefore, one could ascertain what might be added or taken away to achieve the most advantageous effects. Mysteries, if there were any, were only a factor of time. They would be solved. And more likely sooner than later. At the end of these lectures, the students would stand as if for an ovation, shoving books into the hungry mouths of their backpacks, and file out the door to the next class.

  He studied before bed, usually dozing off at his desk, head easing onto his arm “for just a second,” sinking into a sleeve that smelled of the formaldehyde from his gross anatomy labs, the green-glass warmth of his lamp mel
ting into his ear.

  Meanwhile the first anniversary of Fineas’s death loomed on the calendar, and only became more daunting the closer it crept, easing forward with its kindling of apprehensions and presentiments. When it finally arrived, it floated through the rooms where Nadia and Hanif were bracing for it, only to pass them by, dissipating into a completely normal day. It was an occurrence that would repeat itself, more or less, every year.

  Hanif’s second year of medical school was just as overwhelming as the previous. He had his first contact with patients, in a course where general practitioners were assigned groups of students to show around their clinics, where they were allowed to interview patients and perform some of the physical examinations.

  When going into his third year, he’d had a physician tell him that working in hospitals was really just a nonstop game of catch-up, where all you were shooting for was to tie up the loose ends that had become frayed by the end of your shift, as to not leave anything unruly for the people behind you. When Hanif began his clerkship at the Royal Victoria Hospital, he was sure that that wouldn’t be the case, as he would only be in charge of two or three patients on any given day. But even that proved to be thorny. He was always fighting the sensation that he didn’t exactly know what he was supposed to be doing, straining to see the symptoms and diagrams that he’d memorized, the picture-perfect examples and case studies that had blistered from his textbooks. But he had no idea how these symptoms manifested themselves as permutations of other things and so could never be exactly sure what it was or what his next move should be. He took a cautious approach, ran tests that most would deem redundant, and took every opportunity he could to listen in on conversations between other physicians.

  When his shifts were through, he was allowed to finish up his paperwork in some doctor’s office that wasn’t being used. He would slouch in its leather chair and stare dazed out into the hallway, where a series of plaques adorned the walls, commemorative inscriptions to chairmen, benefactors, and governors that bore seldom-used words such as “bestowal,” “endowment,” “bequest.” His head would often ease forward, lower, until it was resting on the desktop, which is how he would stay until a nurse walked by and poked her head into the room, asking if he was all right.

  “Sorrie,” he would say, rubbing his eyes, straightening his papers.

  And now he was lost, and about to be late for his second lecture of the day, wandering around the labyrinth in the upper floors of the Royal Victoria Hospital without being able to find a substantial clue as to where he was. In the humming elevator, he was thinking of the woman who’d just wanted to ask him a question, thinking of the way he’d left her and how likely it was that he wouldn’t have been able to give her an answer anyway. In fact, it struck Hanif that, lately, he wasn’t really sure of anything. Not medical facts, not his studies, not the decisions in his life, not even why he was making them. It felt like his entire existence had become a losing game of catch-up.

  The elevator doors slid open and he stepped out, looking up and down a new, unfamiliar corridor. A male nurse rounded a corner to his right, and Hanif, giving the man a quick glance, suddenly froze. It was striking how much this man resembled a younger version of his father. Hanif felt like he couldn’t breathe. Cold seeped down the length of his vertebrae. The olive-skinned man, not knowing what to do with the loaded stare, addressed Hanif in passing. “Salaam,” he said before disappearing around another corner. Hanif, watching the place where the man had left his sight, realized that he had said nothing in return.

  He began breathing again, blinking hard. He shook his head and took in his surroundings as if for the first time. There were a few doors with uninspired Christmas decorations taped to their frames, which led to other places, other corridors. The floor below his feet was gleaming with polish, in contrast to the floorboards that had been nicked, scuffed, and marked by the polishing machine. The hallway was empty.

  And Hanif Khaled was still lost.

  ( xi )

  Getting older

  is convincing me that

  a person’s life is weighed out

  by its shortcomings, its defeats

  embarrassments

  The things that made us

  wince and cringe and cower

  but somehow not shrivel

  We kept on, less proud of course

  less righteous, less right

  but still plodding

  walking the precarious cycle

  from bendable bones to brittle ones

  from fragile to frail

  Meanwhile our ambitions and measures

  compress with our spines

  thin out with our scalps

  Accomplishments scaling themselves down

  to the size we always were

  True, I’ve got a lovely daughter of twenty-eight

  somewhere

  but I’ve also drunk espresso with the pigeons

  under the colonnades of Piazza San Marco

  and stood to listen to an entire

  song at Queen and Dundas

  by a busking violinist with his

  case hinged open

  Which I threw a toonie into

  before moving on

  like I’d done with pennies as a kid

  into bloated wishing wells

  October 21, 2007, 4:16 PM

  Bruno was curled up on the chesterfield beside her, the tip of his tail drooping over his nose. It was a deep sleep, his tabby eyes sealed tight, his purring having stopped long ago, even if Melissa’s hand was still on his back. Melissa Johnson was focused on the book in her other hand, her thumb pressed into its crease, prying it open. When she’d finished the page she was reading, she grinned, removed her hand from the cat, and dog-eared the page’s corner. Despite this movement, Bruno slept on. And would have continued to had Melissa not glanced into her empty teacup and calculated that there was enough time for another before work. Unfortunately for Bruno, the sofa was the antithesis of firm, the weakened springs creaking and sponging low when weighted, as well as springing widely back as she stood up, jostling him. The cat woke to give her a narrow-eyed glare as she disappeared into the kitchen, then tucked his face under his paw and let out a world-weary sigh. Outside in the boreal distance, a chainsaw puttered out. A crow complained in the quiet that was left behind. In the bay window in front of the sofa, a myriad of individual clouds—the kind that are only seen in autumn, small and shaped like blotchy snails with grey-bottomed bodies and white-furrowed shells—glided through the sky, all of them moving in the same direction, from one nameless place, to another.

  After the kettle whistle rose to a squeal in the other room, deflating with the sound of its being taken off the burner, Melissa returned with a steaming mug, the tag of a teabag flapping lightly from its rim. She picked up her book again and sunk into the couch, where Bruno, deeply annoyed by yet another bounce of the cushions, stood to leave, though faltered with a stretch and a yawn, a trembling high-arched back, watching her settle in as if to judge how long she would be staying, his face a sleepy scowl. Gradually, if reluctantly, he moved a little farther away and curled up again.

  Just then, far below the clouds in the bay window, a sleek car drove into view and turned with certainty into her driveway. She looked up from her book, sure that this car, which she’d never seen before, would reverse out and drive away in the opposite direction, something that happened quite often on the road where she lived, an almost dead-end lane in the small town of Haliburton, Ontario. But whoever it was had turned off his car and was getting out, though with much less conviction than he’d had while pulling in. It was her father, Cedric, now slouching in her driveway, slamming the door while squinting through the front window, a hand held over his brow to function as a visor.

  Melissa’s lips hinged open.

  The last time she’d seen him was four years ago. Which isn’t to say that their communication had been severed by a dramatic episode, it was just that, as the years went by,
there were fewer reasons to stay in touch. He did call her every year on her birthday, sounding pressed for time as usual, as if he were making the call between appointments, or snapping his fingers at a waiter to get the bill, maybe in traffic and changing lanes on his way to the golf course. Melissa ended these annual conversations with the feeling that he was just as happy as she was to hang up, each of them rolling their eyes as they pressed the red button on their respective receivers. Her last two birthdays he’d only gotten around to leaving a message on her answering machine, which suited her fine. She sure didn’t call him for his birthdays. And he sure didn’t call for Christmas, when Melissa and Julie were alone in the house together, the unilateral team of his opponents, as he likely saw them.

  It was true that Melissa and her mother had become faithful allies leading up to the divorce. In fact, it was Melissa who’d instigated it. Cedric had always been far from the limelight of her grade-school plays and soccer matches, coming in late only to stand in the dim at the back with his standard set of excuses, which seemed to wear thin and weaken at the speed of Melissa’s maturity. Until she was sixteen and her disappointment had turned into offhand acerbic remarks. Once, while Cedric was admonishing her about her physics grades, she’d asked him flat out, as if questioning the marks he’d had back in his own high-school English, what he thought the word “neglectful” meant. It snubbed him into a silence, encouraged her antagonism. Though it was a challenge she aimed at her mother instead of Cedric, pressing her with irksome questions when he wasn’t around, gradually nudging her out into the wide agoraphobic open. Questions like: Are you happy in your marriage? How does it nurture you? Would you hope for me to find one just like it? Really? Why not?