The Anatomy of Perception

by AJ Rose

  “I know, okay? Just sit back down and let’s talk about this. I can help you figure this out.” I was thinking about the hospital’s pro bono budget, that if anyone qualified for a handout, it was this kid, but I didn’t know how I was going to get that one by the chief without him insisting on calling social services for these brothers. I had gotten lucky with my situation—

  I should beat your faggot face in so you don’t look so much like her, Daney-boy. Quit crying. Six is old enough to toughen your shit up.

  —in that I’d had somewhere to go, thanks to Holly’s parents, who were understanding and filled in the gaps for Dylan and me until Dylan began filling those gaps himself. Dylan also kept us from cropping up on the state’s radar every time there were bruises to hide, calling me in sick to school sometimes, or skipping himself. Thankfully, it wasn’t so often we became truancy problems.

  So I understood where George was coming from with the fear and the desperation. But he didn’t let me explain what I was thinking, and he didn’t listen and sit back down so I could tell him maybe he wouldn’t have to pay. He turned and ran from the waiting room, his feet that were too big for his body slap, slap, slapping down the tile corridor in search of an exit.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, a hint of surprise in my tone. Thankfully, no one heard. Well, regardless, I had some finagling to do on Johnny’s behalf, and there was no way George wouldn’t be back to check on the kid. Maybe when he returned, I’d have good news to tell him. I stood and realized for the first time I still had the paper apron on, with a smear of Johnny’s blood across my torso. Not good outside the ER. I yanked it off and tossed it in a trashcan as I went in search of the chief.

  “Can you believe that kid, holding it together like that in the ER while his brother was bleeding out on the table in front of him? Tough little bastard,” Sabrina observed as she decompressed in our usual post-surgery vending-machine-alcove shrink session. Not every case required talking it out, but both of us had learned in our second year that sometimes we had to rehash in order to remain human. A lot of people didn’t understand how Sabrina could function as such a robot, but I did. It was because in these moments, in this space where we’d made our first ever confessions, we were safe to fall apart. This vending machine’s proximity to the cafeteria pretty much guaranteed it was rarely interrupted, though we did have to keep our voices down because of the lab window just down the hall.

  “Reminded me of me and my brother as a kid,” I said. “Tough, can conquer the world as long as they’re together,” I hurried on before she could ask if gunshot wounds were the norm for us growing up. She blew out a breath, too self-absorbed with the surgery to catch my almost faux pas.

  “There’s no reason a child like that should be on the wrong end of a bullet. Did you get the story out of the brother? I couldn’t find him when we got Johnny into recovery.”

  I shook my head. “He panicked. Took off. I’m sure he’ll come back, and when he does, I get to tell him his brother’s surgery is free of charge, on the condition he just talk to a social worker. I know they’ll try to railroad them back into the foster care system, but I have social services’ word they won’t split them up. Best I could do.” Restless, I dug in my pocket and got up to buy a Snickers.

  “Well, that’s something. Kid can have a future if his brother will just let him. Thankfully, when we got him on the table I didn’t see any gang tattoos or anything. Maybe it’s not too late for them.”

  “I hope not,” I said, biting into my candy bar.

  “Speaking of abandonment, why didn’t you go out for drinks with us the other night? I know you needed a little relaxing. That cancer kid dying was tough on all of us.”

  The patient to whom she referred was a ten-year-old boy named Timmy, who’d battled non-Hodgkin lymphoma for most of his childhood, and had been the cheeriest sick kid I’d ever seen. Unfortunately, he’d succumbed, and his loss was acutely felt among the pediatric staff and those of us who’d rotated through peds in the last year. Timmy had been in and out often enough that most of the residents had met him at one time or another.

  “I needed to get home,” I said vaguely.

  “You mean you needed to prove to Craig you’re not friends with me anymore,” she retorted, and though her glare had a playful edge to it, I knew she was not happy with the situation.

  “That’s home. This is work. No reason for the two to overlap.”

  “Well, at least his mom got better, right? So he’s not here wandering the halls to catch you talking to me. Honestly, Silver, that fucking sucked. You’re just lucky I’m understanding and didn’t ditch you first.”

  “I didn’t ditch you!” I protested, tossing my candy wrapper at her. She batted it down.

  “Whatever. You missed a good time.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I grinned wickedly.

  “Oh, so you’re in a warm spell at the moment? I swear your relationship is one of the moodiest things I’ve ever seen. You’re worse than girls.”

  I waved her off. “We’ve got our issues like any couple. But we love each other, so shut up.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. “I still don’t know why you can’t love each other where I can watch.”

  “After three years of knowing me, you should get it by now that I don’t like to share, Sabrina. You’re not getting anywhere near our bedroom.”

  “Dammit,” she pouted. “How about your shower or your living room floor?”

  I winked, knowing the flirting was helping her forget about fourteen-year-olds with bullets in their guts. But the truth was, I lied on both sides of the coin. I told Sabrina things between Craig and me were fine when they were anything but, and I told Craig I was no longer friends with Sabrina. She’d saved my ass on the Crohn’s patient. There was no way I could have turned my back on her friendship after that, but there was also no way I could tell Craig why and make him understand. I couldn’t tell anyone.

  All the things I held back from him were beginning to pile up, like wind-driven snow banks. Craig was standing in the midst of my growing mound of snowflake lies, the one-at-a-times that were beginning to build on each other, and he was feeling the cold with no idea why. His accusations of me growing distant and unavailable had become more and more frequent. He’d told me the duration of his mother’s sickness was the most emotionally available I’d ever been for him, and his anger that it took brain tumors and stage 3 cancer of a family member to get me there was justified.

  I just couldn’t tell him why.

  So we coasted, me hoping when I walked in the door from work, I’d be greeted by the happy artist who’d captured my heart, not the reticent angry roommate who was slowly assuming my boyfriend’s identity. We touched each other with less heat and frequency, and I didn’t know how to get back to that easy camaraderie we’d shared when I was in med school, where we both had the world at our feet and hearts in our eyes. Corny, I knew, but I missed him. I missed the other half of my soul.

  I checked my watch. Almost 8:00 p.m. I was four hours past my shift end, but I’d wanted to see how Johnny’s surgery went. Still, I had to be nearing my eighty-hour max for the week, so I stood and stretched, turning away when I noticed Sabrina eyeing my torso as my scrub shirt pulled up to reveal my happy trail. Yeah, she still perved, and yeah, I still felt nothing beyond vanity when she did it.

  “I’d better get, or I won’t have enough hours left to check in later and try to catch Johnny’s brother. Text me if he comes back and see if you can hold him until I get here.”

  She nodded and stretched as well, shoving her chest at me, not that I was moved by her breasts. “Will do. I’m going to shower so I won’t kill the patients with my stench alone for the rest of my shift. What is it about surgery that leaves such a stank? Don’t answer that.” She followed me to the residents’ locker room. “Go home. Have monkey sex with your boyfriend and take pictures so I can see.”

  “God, there’s a thing? Called porn? You can go there to get your j
ollies.”

  “Porn is so impersonal,” she whined, yanking her ponytail free. “I want reality.”

  “Don’t we all,” Dr. Getty muttered as he passed us on his way out to start his shift. Getty, the fourth resident on Kingsley’s team, who’d started intern year with us, had a crush on Sabrina, and it was painfully obvious to all of us. It was a recent development, though, and I was waiting for him to nut up and tell her. When he was gone, I pointed in his wake.

  “When are you going to put that poor guy out of his misery and climb him?”

  “You’re just trying to distract me.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Nope,” she said, whipping off her scrub shirt and smirking when I turned away from her to get my street clothes and take them into a cubby to change in private. There was a line, and I’d very clearly drawn it after that first argument with Craig about her, but that didn’t stop her from toeing her ass right up to the line, sneakers nearly touching, and daring me to do something about it.

  The thing was, her interest made me feel good. Yeah, she objectified me, but for a little while, why shouldn’t I enjoy that, if I knew what it was from the start? What was the harm when it would never come to anything? It’s not like she wasn’t also my friend. But that was just it: Craig would never listen long enough to understand, even if I could tell him the entire truth about her.

  The evening air was beginning to chill with sundown, and I shoved my hands in my hoodie pocket to keep them warm for the two-block trek to the subway platform, a walk I’d made so many times I could do it in my sleep. People bustled in and around the cluster of hospitals that made up this section of Manhattan, and farther away, people were immersed in their nightly dinner or clubbing plans. I wondered at their lives, thought about Johnny and where he’d have been on a cooling fall Friday night. Would he have been panhandling? Did he have a talent like Craig did, where he could put out a battered case of some kind and earn some honest money wowing the rarely impressed people of New York City? I imagined a decent singing voice on him, something that he could have honed in the last couple years once puberty hit and his voice dropped. Maybe his brother hustled the crowd into parting with their money for this kid who could croon like no other.

  Was there a girl out there waiting for him to serenade her?

  A guy, even?

  I hoped whatever his future, it included love. Maybe a decent apartment, a couple of—

  A hand grabbed my sweatshirt front and yanked me into an alleyway, catching me by surprise. The momentum spun me in a circle and I was slammed against a brick wall face first, my chin meeting the masonry with such force my teeth clacked together and made a loud bang in my head. There’s a reason the chin is one of the spots boxers go to for a knockout punch, and it really rattled my cage. I blinked, trying to stay focused enough to understand what was happening.

  The hand at the back of my jeans sent a frisson of ice bolting down my spine, the cold serving to help me shake off the disorientation from the slam into brick.

  “Keep still and nothing real bad happens to you, got it?” a deliberately husked voice said in my ear.

  “Nuuuu,” I answered intelligently, still seeing stars. When the hand patting my ass relieved me of my wallet, immense relief knocked all my pressure points from head to toe. Robbery was so much different than rape.

  “This all you got, asshole?” my assailant demanded, this time letting in a little more of his voice with the disappointment that I only had about sixty bucks. That was when I felt it, the cold push of something round at the base of my skull. I froze, pictures from my life flashing in rapid succession before my eyes: My mother’s smile. The first time my dad backhanded me for reminding him of her. Cleaning up vomit that trailed from his open, unconscious mouth down the side of the couch to pool on the hardwood floor before it could make the house stink. Hiding at Holly’s, and sneaking over on holidays so I’d have something to hold on to after Dylan ran away. Holly in high school. College and baseball. Med school. My face chalked on the sidewalk.

  Craig. I didn’t want to leave Craig like this. Especially not with the bitter words we seemed to speak to each other more often lately. Suddenly, feeling his arms around me one more time was imperative, even if it meant I had to say goodbye. One more time. One more chance. I’ll do anything.

  “Please,” I whimpered.

  “Shut the fuck up, dick,” the mugger snarled even as familiarity pricked my addled brain. Something fresh, recent.

  “George?” I asked, my hands shaking against the wall but not moving to turn me so I could prove my theory of the guy’s identity. I probably should have kept my fucking mouth shut.

  “Shut up!” he roared. He leaned on me from shoulders to knees, and I was surprised to discover he was about my height, just over six feet. He’d seemed so diminished in the ER, worried about his brother. “No fuckin’ George here, asshole. And they don’t believe fuckers with head injuries neither.”

  “Huh?” Who has a head injury?

  The cold muzzle left my scalp, followed by a blinding flash of pain on the back of my head, and the stars I’d been fighting in my vision swirled like hundreds of snowflakes, amassing to bury me. I crumpled as they overtook my field of vision and everything went blank.

  “You asshole,” Craig snarled, standing in the door of my patient room and leveling me with a glare I didn’t have the wherewithal to be hurt by. “Who the fuck said you’re allowed to get robbed and pistol-whipped? You don’t get to scare me like this.”

  The police officer who’d gotten my statement (four times to check for consistency) snapped his notebook closed. “I think we have everything we need, but someone will call you tomorrow to check on you. If you have anything new, please use this number.” He held up a business card and pointed to the number for general inquiries. “Your report will be made available in the next forty-eight hours, once we get it in our system. If we have any breakthroughs or make any arrests, we’ll let you know.” I hadn’t been much help. Other than vague impressions of memories, the mugging itself was fuzzy. I had a feeling of utter desperation to see Craig again, and the niggle there was something important I had totally spaced.

  Craig scurried to my side, his face now etched with worry, and picked up my hand, bringing my knuckles to his mouth, the stubble of his chin scratching my fingers as he kissed my skin. The officer retreated, leaving me alone with the only person in the whole world I wanted to see. I wished he’d climb into the bed and put his arms around me, but that old fear that someone would see kept me from voicing it, even though holding back was stupid, since the whole hospital had seen me support Craig when his mom was being treated for cancer. Still, I couldn’t say it.

  “It’s okay, Craig,” I rasped instead, eyelids at half-mast. “They’ve run all their tests and poked all their needles. I have a mild concussion and a missing wallet.”

  “Fuck,” he swore, his lips thinning as his chin trembled and he blinked rapidly. He distracted himself by brushing my hair back from my forehead. There’d been no need to bandage me up, since I had a giant knot but no laceration. I’d been lucky, and we both knew it.

  “I’m okay, just have a vicious headache—until the drugs kick in, which should be any minute. They’re getting me discharged now.” I brought my other hand over to cover his, stroking his skin. I was so grateful to be able to touch him again that I almost started crying, too.

  He looked around. “But you’re in a patient room.”

  “VIP treatment,” I mumbled, closing my eyes. “ER was loud, and Dr. Kingsley had mercy on me by admitting me for the duration of my tests. I talked her out of overnight observation.”

  “Hey,” Sabrina said, striding into the room purposefully with a sheaf of papers. Craig bristled, but she didn’t give him a chance to protest. “So I have your discharge orders and instructions,” she continued, all business. Thank god. I was not in the mood to referee the two of them. But surely she wouldn’t push my buttons after a concussion, ri
ght? I squeezed his hand to make sure he wasn’t going to pick a fight with her. “Are you going to be looking after him the next couple days?” To her credit, there was not an ounce of unprofessional interest, lechery, or judgment in her tone. She was perfectly doctorly. Weird.

  “Yeah,” Craig answered, cringing as though he were waiting for the lewd joke to follow.

  She made no such joke. “Okay, these are the signs you need to look for should his head injury get serious.” Passing over a piece of paper, she pointed with her pen. “If any of these or a combination of them should happen, get him back here. If these in particular happen, call for an ambulance.” She passed over another page. “This is a list of acceptable medications he can take for the pain if he doesn’t want the drug Dr. Kingsley prescribed. It’s a narcotic and can cause impairment, which Dane said he’d rather not play with, except the first dose to kill the worst of the pain. No aspirin, because if there’s a hematoma forming or any kind of possible bleed, that will make it worse. Any questions?”

  Yeah, who are you and what have you done with the girl who holds her leverage over my head and threatens sexual demands all the time?

  “Um,” Craig said, hurriedly scanning the sheets. “What about food? Can he eat whatever?”

  “Yeah, no dietary restrictions, but he’ll probably be nauseated for several more hours. I’d suggest mild, bland foods until he feels he can tolerate his normal diet, but that’s just because no one wants to vomit something spicy.” She made a face at herself, and her guard slipped back in place. I chuckled uncertainly and Craig looked between us to see if there was some inside joke he was missing or a sign we were still friends. She gave him nothing.

  “How long?” I asked. I should have known, but I’d had my brains scrambled, so I was pretty sure I got a pass for not quite remembering Dr. Kingsley’s hurried diagnosis once her concern over a brain injury faded.