by WD Clarke
Dr. Ed smiled that sad smile, the one that meant ‘I’m sorry, but our time is up for this week’, and, as this last patient quitted his chambers, he allowed himself a little sigh. He was not big on sighs, as a rule, and did not enjoy placing himself in too-close proximity to those who were. Sighing connoted, amongst other things, inertia, and Dr. Ed was not big on inertia. Now, there were a number of things that Dr. Ed was not big on, and one day around Xmas two years ago, after an unpleasant row concerning his wife’s enthusiasm for Daytime Drama, his wife made up a list of these dislikes, and wrote them, without title or heading, upon the dry-erase grocery list board in the kitchen, with a blue permanent marker:
CATS MUSHROOMS PHYSICAL DISABILITY
SMALL TOWNS LOUD MUSIC TEARS (ESP. HERS)
DANDELIONS AGGRESSIVE FEMALES
CHRYSLER CARS UNIONS SPORTS
CONTROVERSY, ARGUMENT, 'EMOTIONAL' DISPLAYS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER
IMITATION LEATHER GERMAN OPERA EVANGELICAL MINISTERS
ANYTHING SHE WATCHES ON TV
TELEMARKETERS POLITICIANS CIVIL SERVANTS
SPIRITUAL PEOPLE, STREET PEOPLE, FAT PEOPLE, LOUD PEOPLE, BALD PEOPLE, MESSY PEOPLE, IMMIGRANT PEOPLE, FOREIGN PEOPLE, OLD PEOPLE, YOUNG PEOPLE, LITTLE PEOPLE, SICK PEOPLE, WEAK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE
PEOPLE!!
HIM
HER
THEM
US
THIS
Dr. Ed was not too keen on that, either, but said nothing to his wife (or to anyone else) about it. It was probably the Seven Year Itch, if one could believe in such a thing. Whatever it was, he knew that it, too, like so much else in life, would pass.
He was right, of course (he always was). It did.
3
Dispassionate
Now, Dr. Ed Was Not a particularly bigoted man. And he did have his sensitive side. He would never confess to it openly, but that list of his wife’s did in fact hurt him, and deeply—but, of course, only briefly. He was not the type to carry grudges long, and he would never, ever have done, or do, anything like that, to her. It was both bitter and vindictive, what she did, and it bore the tell-tale mark of Schadenfreude—a word he liked the sound of, denoting a ‘feeling’ he never, ever allowed himself to feel. However, knowing Dr. Ed and his legendarily even temper, his wife’s mendacious little act could not have given her very much pleasure at all. Perhaps, he considered, it was all a result of those new diet pills….
But no, Dr. Ed was not a particularly bigoted man. And as for that list of hers: as a chronicle of dislikes, it was more or less accurate, give or take a few items, and leaving out the maudlin attempt at character assassination at the end. But dislike is a broad kind of word, capable of embracing a good many gradations and levels, and if Dr. Ed disliked anything, it was the sloppy kind of ‘thinking’ that his wife had employed when she grouped all of those things together like that, as if they were all equal, as if they all had the same valence.
Take street people. Just as there are a great many kinds of people who live on the street, all with their own reasons for living there, so too would one have a great variety of reactions to them, if one had taken the opportunity to acquaint oneself with, say, John-by-the-liquor-store, or Joe-outside-the-bank, or Jane-with-dog-and-kid.
Now, one might happen to get to know, and to like or to dislike, any or all or none of them qua individuals. But in the abstract, as part of the seething mass of humanity, one would be obliged—one is obliged—to enter into an entirely different kind of relationship. It would be exceedingly difficult for anyone to ‘like’ street people, in this sense. One would either dislike them, generally (for their shiftlessness, for getting in one’s way, for not pulling themselves up by bootstraps both personal and various, etc., etc.), or one would dislike the abstract situation (bad luck, personal crises, the free-market political economy, blahblahblah….) that brought them to their … station … in life. One might even be inclined toward compassion, but suffer from an initial sense of aversion which is—Dr. Ed would of course refrain from using the term ‘instinctual’, but he would readily admit that one’s character is complex, and not always identical with what one would like to ‘think’ of oneself. And then there is biology to contend with—ahh, biology! And so the truth, Dr. Ed would maintain, is always a little darker, always a few shades more opaque, than one would prefer to admit….
But that list of his wife’s was a cruel, low blow, wasn’t it? If his wife ‘felt’ all warm and fuzzy about the homeless, well, that was just swell—& super, terrific, well done. But a more honest person would admit that one didn’t always feel that way. Or take ‘aggressive females’, which was also on the list: that was supposed to signify that Dr. Ed was a misogynist, but nothing could be further from the truth. For truth is borne out by behaviour, not by inclination, and Dr. Ed had always behaved most professionally towards any female, aggressive or not, and had treated with dignity and respect all of his patients and colleagues, be they male or female (and, for that matter, Chinese or Hindoo). No, Dr. Ed’s behaviour was impeccably gender- (as well as race-) ‘blind’.
The truth is that a great many people in this dark, unreasonable world behave unreasonably, and Dr. Ed knew that it was his job to act, rather, as a beacon of light. One must tolerate people, give them the space to perform their irrational antics, allow them their moments of perverse insistence on this/that/the other, and, so long as no harm is done and such demands do not prove to conflict with one’s own rationally considered priorities, one should allow such people to get their way, and to let them see what good it does them. For nothing is to be gained from forcing a showdown over an issue in which one does not really have a … personal stake.
Dr. Ed was proud of the fact that he had, at the hospital at least, a reputation of dispassionate fair-mindedness. Once, when the female residents had exerted a not-insignificant amount of pressure upon him, with the aim of the establishment of a quota system for gender equity as regards the department’s hiring practices, he gently reminded them that professional expertise would be the sole criterion employed by the search committee, of which he was chairman. The complainants were, of course, quite angry with this, but when it turned out that the next two vacancies were filled with extremely capable females, their resentment was replaced with a renewed and deepened respect for their department head. Everyone thus grew to understand that Dr. Ed was the kind of man who listened, who assessed each situation based upon what he considered to be its merits, and who acted accordingly. No politicking, no favouritism, no guff.
And the department had been rolling smoothly along ever since.
Take this more recent example: just the other day, a longstanding patient, a particularly shrill woman whom Nurse Sloggett had named ‘The Emu’, had walked right through Reception and into his office—without an appointment, of course. She’d slammed the door on her way in, and it was most fortunate that Dr. Ed was in-between patients at the time, for he had a number of quite withdrawn and disturbed individuals on his card that particular morning, all of whom he had just started treating with an experimental new drug Alba (which targets the brain receptors for ‘feelings’ of overwhelming guilt, burden or loss) as part of a Phase Ib clinical trial for the pharmaceutical giant Eumeta PLC. Anyhow, the Emu was herself evidently deep into a manic phase, and she shouted that she had stopped taking her lithium because it had made her gain weight. Unfazed by her melodramatic entrance, Dr. Ed calmly explained to her that while it was possible that lithium was the culprit, it was more likely the Imipramine. She listened, he elucidated, she nodded, he proposed, she agreed, he explained, soothed, reassured. It was all over in less than 5 minutes, and when he genially sent her on her way, she thanked him, and held in her hand a Eumeta exercise and diet plan, as well as prescriptions for Alba and lithium, both of which she would get, as a newly-minted participant in the clinical trial, free of charge.
4
Santa Claustrophobia
Dr. Ed’s Sigh was a relatively shallow one
, shallow at both ends of the respiratory cycle. It just barely agitated the ‘egg’ in Dr. Ed’s chest, and would most likely have gone unnoticed by anyone else in the room, if anyone else had been in the room. But Dr. Ed was alone. It was quite nearly noon.
Dr. Ed made a quick call home to see if his wife had yet hoisted herself towards the vertical. Getting no answer, he left no message on the answering machine, hung up the phone, swivelled his chair 90 degrees to face his computer, and logged on to University Hospiatal’s Unix server.
username: [email protected]
password: pavlov
His e-mail in-box was full of quotidian effluvia: hospital safety bulletins, university staff postings, calls for papers, drug company propaganda. He typed ctrl-s for ‘select all’, and was about to type ctrl-d when he spotted a sender who was not one of the usual suspects: [email protected]. Hôtel Dieu was the Catholic hospital on the other side of town, and Dr. Ed didn’t know anyone named Fraser personally, there or anywhere else. He knew of a Fraser Keith, a local oncologist, and of course there was Fraser Arnott, who headed up ob/gyn at his own hospital, but neither of them could want to speak to him for any imaginable reason. Who could it be?
He opened up the file, whose Subject line contained only:
re:
The message read:
see you at the holistic expo?
Holistic bolistic, Dr. Ed ‘thought’, and then wrote an equally terse reply:
do i know you?
And sent the message on its way. Wasting no more time on the lamentable contraption, Dr. Ed logged off, shut the computer down, pushed the palms of his hands into his thighs, levered himself upright, removed his white smock, hung it upon the coat tree by the door, retrieved his waist-length Barbour oil-cloth coat and his tweed hat, put on his galoshes, and stuck his head through the door that led to the nurse’s station.
—Back at 13:00, he needlessly reminded Nurse Sloggett, who was a particularly aggressive female in her mid-forties, and who had proven herself to be as admirably intractable as a Tiger Tank in her capacity of Gatekeeper for the 9 years that Dr. Ed had been Senior Consultant here, something which he had commemorated without fail every birthday (May 12) and Xmas, with suitably expensive tokens of his professional esteem. He even kept a list in his filing cabinet of these presents, to make sure that he did not erroneously repeat himself, as used to be his wont, for Dr. Ed knew that he was not a man of too very much spontaneity, and would likely commit just such a faux pas again if he did not organize himself into behaving otherwise.
The list was at that very moment languishing at the bottom of Dr. Ed’s teakwood ‘To-Do Box’ (itself a gift of an Xmas Past—ca. 1991—from his wife), and this was because we were now into the second week of Advent, and Dr. Ed’s P.I.M. or Personal Information Manager program, Orgtastic!! (which was—perversely, given what Dr. Ed ‘thought’ of the Church—still, out of habit, programmed to display the feasts of the Roman Catholic liturgical year) had reminded him of this fact. And Dr. Ed needed reminding, for he had made it a practice—ca. 1967—of limiting his ‘thinking’ about his lack of church-going to twice-yearly, at Xmas and Easter, and limiting his actual attendance to precisely never. His wife’s own attendance at her Pentecostal Fellowship Centre was sporadic, but, all-in-all, less virtual.
Dr. Ed’s master list read:
It was ca. 1991, when he was particularly busy—finishing a PhD in Behavioural Psychology (to beef up the federal research grant potential of his MD (FRSC) in Psychiatry), establishing his corporate Operations Research consultancy firm, Synomics, as well as negotiating with the hospital for sufficient office space to facilitate the integration of his research, his private practice and the training of his numerous residents & post-doc fellows, all of whom also required more-than-merely-adequate research facilities—that Dr. Ed had first had the brainwave of conserving his gift-hunting ideas and energies by giving his wife and nurse identical presents. At the time it had just made sense; he knew that he and his wife were stuck in some kind of mysterious rut, and needed out of it—somehow, anyhow. A little voice in Dr. Ed’s head told him it was necessary to send her the message that she was important in his life, regardless of what had apparently transpired between them, whatever it was. That little voice told him to move past recrimination, toward reconciliation; the question was, though, the obvious one: how?
Whenever he ‘thought’ of his wife, he ‘thought’ only of their apparently many, unfathomable problems, not of any solution to them. His marriage was a vast splotchy blackness, both a stultifyingly opaque Rorschach test and a regrettable (yet perhaps inevitable) stain on the otherwise impeccable white linen suit that was his professional life—that is, his life.
This was when Dr. Ed had his brainwave. It was so simple, he wondered why he hadn’t ‘thought’ of it before: whenever he wanted to ‘think’ of his wife, he would ‘think’ of Nurse Sloggett instead. He would then transfer any warm, thankful, unconfused (yet Platonic) ‘feelings’ that he had for Nurse Sloggett onto his wife, and thus succeed in behaving at home the way he behaved at work: that is, calmly, rationally—and fairly. The plan was simple, and brilliantly conceived. And, whenever so deployed, thus far, it had worked.
Dr. Ed paused in his doorway for a moment to consider Nurse Sloggett. Unlike his wife, she was a bit homely, neither beautiful nor ugly. Unlike his wife, she was stout, solid, neither fat nor thin, and that ravager, time, had taken very little away from her looks, such as they were. And, again, unlike his wife, she was an efficient bundle of energy, a real facilitator, someone who ironed out the wrinkles in that impeccable white linen suit of his. Dr. Ed was thankful for Nurse Sloggett. What would he ever do without her?
5
Whose Disembodied Head
Nurse Slogget Nodded a wordless of course/goodbye at Dr. Ed, whose disembodied head then retreated as suddenly through the door’s narrow opening as it had arrived. Dr. Ed then left his office the back way, towards the service elevator.
The physical plant of University Hospital was, for a Canadian institution of this sort, a relatively handsome one—from the outside. It had been completed in the late 1960s, when the infrastructural enthusiasm of the post-war boom (having collided with the twin evils of increasingly bear-minded markets and parsimonious—and usurious—central banks everywhere) was just beginning to draw to a close. The dour limestone of the original building, a building that could be numbered among the country’s oldest, was at that time dwarfed by (rather than supplemented with) a new addition, which was conceived by the very same architects who were charged with updating the central post office. Its confident, modernist façade was a collage of granite, aluminum and glass that emphasised rather than diminished its essential boxiness, with prominent rectangular panels and bold vertical lines.
The hospital addition had not aged too well, however. To be honest, even when new it had suited the conceptual aspirations of its architect somewhat more fully than the workaday needs of its subsequent inhabitants; but now, in 1993, it was just plain old. You would not know it if you were somehow spirited directly into Dr. Ed’s dominion (‘Old Building’, 4th floor, F-wing, avoiding the crumbling plaster in E-wing, climbing past outmoded Radiology and dank (with ‘non-functional’ air-conditioning) Geriatrics on level 2, circumspectly skirting the horror that was nominally the Cafeteria on level 3—whose state of repair was so very much ‘temporarily inoperative’ (its steam generating plant was now essentially shot, and the kitchen! Well, all meals were trucked in from the City, over 150 km away, weren’t they?)) that, had you taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up surrounded by a bank of microwaves that filled three walls in a U-shaped alcove, all of which were re-reheating melamine bowlfuls of re-reconstituted dehydrated mashed potato flakes, well, let’s just say that you would have been glad you were, like the lucky game-piece landing on the first corner of the Monopoly board, ‘just visiting’.
But if you somehow bypassed all of that and found yourself, again, somehow, inside Dr.
Ed’s private fiefdom, you would see something altogether different. The sallow tiling of the past had been replaced with a pleasing, padded blue carpet throughout. Painted-shut windows had given way to tinted Argon-filled double-glazing. Back-breaking wooden chairs from 1945 had been sold off to the local school board, and staff and clients alike now perched contentedly atop lumbar, thorax and cervical spine-sparing ergonomic wonders. Green X-ray death machine CRT terminals had finally met their maker, and no-glare, low-EMF monitors now stood in their stead, switching themselves on and off and notifying maintenance as needed, as did THE HEPA-quality air filtering/conditioning system and the full-spectrum overhead lighting. The entire floor had been treated to a retrofitting with fibre-optic cable, and every computer was linked to the university’s Unix-based network. Dr. Ed’s department was a hospital within a hospital, the wealth and refinement of civilised Rome at the centre of an increasingly neglected and therefore chaotic Empire.