Читать книгу Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam, Vincent Lam - Страница 10

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MING’S PARENTS THOUGHT THAT SHE VOLUNTEERED at the Ottawa Children’s Hospital on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Both she and Fitzgerald were there on Mondays and Tuesdays, but on Wednesdays neither of them went to the hospital. Instead, they went to the ski hill that was abandoned for the summer, where they would not encounter their classmates or Ming’s cousins, and spread a blanket in the tall grass whose blades glinted in the flat light. The sun pulled sweat out of them, and there was a humid adhesion of skin on skin. When it became too hot, they put on their clothes and walked in the shade of the woods. A ski chalet had burned to the ground during the winter, and when they walked past it Fitzgerald kicked at the charred pieces of wood.

Ming received an acceptance letter from Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine in July, and her parents put a down payment on a small condominium north of Bloor Street that backed onto a treed ravine. Her family held a banquet and called her doctor, but Fitzgerald did not attend. In Ming’s home, he had been a faceless voice on the telephone and now was even less present. During summer holidays there was no studying, and therefore no excuse for him to call. Wednesday was their day. The Wednesday after the banquet, as they walked to find a picnic spot, Ming told Fitz that she hadn’t enjoyed it without him.

He said, “Why do you sound so happy, then?”

“Don’t you want me to be? My family is happy for me.”

“You’ve achieved what they wanted. Another family success.”

A deer crossed the ski run, nervous in the open, sniffing up and down the hill. They stopped walking, and the deer crossed their path and then folded into the woods. Ming said, “We were having a perfectly nice day until now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fitzgerald. “You deserved a party. You did it.” He reminded himself to be only happy for her, but felt that his exclusion from the celebration entitled him to possessiveness.

“Getting an acceptance seemed like such a big deal. Now I’m mostly just tired and relieved.”

One hot, grasshopper-buzzing day at the beginning of August, Ming and Fitzgerald sat at the top of a steep ski slope, swinging in a green metal lift chair. They had once decided to have no romance, and they now referred to that as the “strange phase” of their relationship. A few months later, when they travelled to Toronto for Ming’s medical school interview, they had decided that it was dishonest to deny that they were in love. On that trip, they held each other but slept in separate hotel beds, and agreed that there should be no sex. For Ming, this would be too close to her anger at Karl. Three weeks later, after this prohibition had been put aside upon Ming’s initiative, they conceded that since they had become lovers there was no point in discontinuing a natural enjoyment between two people in love. Now, they sat facing down the hill, without the retaining bar of the ski lift chair. They ate cheese sandwiches and drank iced tea. Ming told Fitzgerald that she could not imagine loving anyone else, now that she had found someone to be honest with.

He said, “That’s why people get married.”

“You think so?” she said, drinking from the silver flask. “Aren’t there lots of reasons, both good and bad?”

“Why don’t we get married?”

“The circumstances are not ideal,” she said.

“But are they ever, for anyone?” said Fitzgerald. Ming was moving to a different city in three weeks, and they had come together in halting lunges, preceded by a mutual denial of their deepening attraction. Instead of discouraging Fitzgerald, these events made it seem even more important to make and extract a commitment. “You just said you couldn’t imagine loving anyone else. Let’s hold on to that. We’ll get married.” He took her hand.

“Fitz, it’s something for later.”

“Then later. Put it this way: could you think of marrying anyone else?”

“Right now, no, I can’t,” she said, putting her other hand over his.

“These connections happen only once. We can’t throw it away because of the problems around us. Later is fine, but let’s commit to our feelings now.”

“You’ll be a good husband,” she said. Ming took his arm, sat closer, and looked across the landscape of hills cut in a strange way into ski slopes. She had not yet told her parents about him, and said that she needed to wait until she had moved away from home. “It’s stupid, but I wish you were Chinese. They’ll threaten to disown me. That happened to my sister.”

“But that would just be a pressure tactic, to make you choose between me and them.”

“They won’t, ultimately. In the end, they can’t lose me. I don’t think so, anyhow.”

“What happened with your sister?”

“She broke up with her boyfriend.”

“Oh.”

“But that was different. I only met him once. It wasn’t serious, I’m guessing.”

The five-hour drive from Ottawa would give her the distance she needed in order to tell her parents, said Ming. She spoke with the assumption that Fitzgerald would be admitted to medicine in the following year. This was easier for her to say, and he said “if” while she said “when.” He did speak as if he would move into her condominium. Ming suggested that he might have to live on his own for a little while.

She said, “My parents did buy it and everything.”

“You could move out. We could get an apartment, so it would be our own place.”

“Or something.”

At the end of August, Ming’s parents moved her to Toronto. They filled her freezer with white plastic containers of ginger beef, sesame chicken, and other favourites of Ming’s. Fitzgerald took the train to Toronto on the same day that Ming’s parents drove back to Ottawa. The night before Ming’s first day of medical school, he said, “Now you’ll tell them?”

“I’m tired,” she said. “Right now, I need to be on my own, plant my feet.”

“It should be easier, now that you’re far away.”

“You don’t get it, do you? That it won’t ever be easy.” She turned away in bed.

“I just said easier.”

—

In September, Fitzgerald returned to Ottawa. At first, he and Ming were both anxious to speak every evening. They fantasized about travelling, about being together, about when Fitzgerald would visit. During the school day, they anticipated these fantasies—which became satisfying in themselves. By October, Ming’s class was dissecting the abdomen, and she suggested that they speak every second night.

“The volume of information is overwhelming,” she said.

“But I’ll miss you.”

“Do you realize I’ve been cutting apart human bodies for the last month?” said Ming. The first rite of medical school was the anatomy lab, the opening of skin into the organs.

“You mentioned that,” he said.

She described the dissections on a daily basis. She complained that one of her dissection partners, Sri, was a sentimental wreck who couldn’t even cut open an arm, who did nothing but slow her down. Chen, her other partner, was tolerable. Every minute was important, she said, and she had realized that she was spending too much time on the telephone. “I didn’t learn the thorax well enough, because you need me too much. How much do we have to talk? Human anatomy is important—it’s for real now.” Whenever Fitzgerald mentioned her classmates she corrected him, because they were “colleagues.”

“Right.” Fitzgerald wondered whether his biology and biochemistry lectures were no longer real—perhaps they were only the means to an end. He had previously enjoyed the ideas and concepts but now, even as he became more obsessive about the details and patterns of facts, he hated knowing that his marks were soaring as a result of Karl’s study methods. He tape-recorded lectures, applied a meditative attention to details and trivial facts. His weekly time sheet was crammed with reading, eating, listening to tapes, memorizing, and working on medical school application packages. He worked with a desperate and fastidious zeal, imagining that each A+ brought him a step closer to Ming. One night, Fitzgerald told her that he wished they could stop studying, and instead could lie in the grass at the ski hill. Ming reminded him that achieving the last twenty marks required twice as much effort as getting the first eighty.

Fitzgerald said, “Another saying from Karl.” Ming’s cousin Karl’s systematically mind-numbing method of achieving near-perfect scores was Ming’s lesson for Fitzgerald.

Ming was silent.

It was the first time Fitzgerald had mentioned Karl. Until now, only Ming had ever brought Karl into their conversations. Fitzgerald had often thought of Karl while being coached in study techniques by Ming, and he knew that Ming had to push Karl out of her mind when they were in bed. He did the same, but had not told Ming of this. He said, “Sorry, that just came out. I’ve been studying too much.”

“I’m showing you how to get into medical school. Isn’t that enough? Is it my fault that Karl taught me how to do it?”

Fitzgerald felt his heart beating. He said, “It’s as if his shadow is on me when I’m studying.”

“Well, you’ve never met him so you can dismiss your excess of imagination. I’ve got his shadow on me, and one of us is enough.”

“I guess learning is learning. Sorry.”

After his midterms in October, Fitzgerald asked Ming when he should visit.

She said, “There’s no good time. Only less bad times.”

“When will you tell your parents?”

“Now that I miss them, it’s hard to hurt them.”

“Then you’re glad to be away from me.”

“No. But it is a relief to be further from our secret.”

“And easier to study your anatomy and your dissection than to face our relationship, our problem.”

“You have this amazing belief that things have something to do with you,” she said. “Don’t you see? I have to be as committed to renal anatomy as I am to us.”

In the first week of November, Ming told Fitzgerald that she and Chen had gone out for dinner in October. He lived in the same building. Occasionally, she said, they grabbed a quick bite after class.

“We’re nothing more than colleagues, but I wanted to mention it. I wasn’t going to tell you, because it’s nothing. Chen and I hung out once, maybe twice. Then I thought to tell you, because otherwise if you found out you might misunderstand and think that it was something.”

“He’s Chinese?” said Fitzgerald.

“Who cares,” she said.

“You kissed him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “This is why I wasn’t going to mention it.”

A week later, Ming said that perhaps she and Fitzgerald should “slow down.” Also, there was something that she regretted, she said. A tiny misunderstanding, which she and Chen had already clarified. Chen hadn’t exactly known about her commitment to Fitzgerald, and so there had been a kiss, although entirely one-sided, and she had stopped him as soon as it started, so it wasn’t really that she had kissed him at all.

Fitzgerald called three times a night. He called at random times and asked Ming where she had been when she hadn’t picked up the phone. He fell behind in listening to lecture tapes, until she reminded him that he had to study if he wanted to get into medical school and come to Toronto. We should cool down, she said, see what happens in the next year.

“Slow down, cool down, it’s all you say now.”

“I’m going to answer the phone once every two days. I got call display.”

A week later, Ming said that Chen had tried to kiss her again, and she hadn’t stopped him. Did Fitzgerald want to break up because of her lack of faithfulness, she asked. She would understand. She explained all of this in one very long expectant breath, with no pause. Fitzgerald said that he wanted to come see her.

“Our first plan was the right one, to just be study friends. I wish we hadn’t got so off track,” said Ming.

“I need to see you. You owe it to me.” He felt an urgent need to bed her harshly and memorably if it should be the last time.

“If you’re going to be angry, it’s better for us to make a break.”

Fitzgerald said that he needed her to get through everything—the exams, the interviews. Ming warned him not to twist things into being her responsibility.

“Don’t make me into your mother,” said Ming. A long, mutual silence. Then, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m not sure why I said that.”

“Is that what you think this is about?” asked Fitzgerald. He had once told Ming that the loneliness he felt after his mother died was like living in a house frame that would never be clad with walls or a roof.

“Look, that was wrong of me. Pretend I never said it.”

“That hurts, you know? And then it hurts more that you want to pretend you never said it.”

“You’re not going to lay a guilt trip on me,” said Ming, suddenly hard again. “I don’t do guilt.”

“No, you don’t, do you?”

“Let’s stop.”

“We’re not done talking,” said Fitzgerald.

“We are done. What else do you have to say?”

“Lots.”

“Do you have anything good, anything positive to say, or are we just going to hate each other more? I’m sorry I mentioned your mother, which was wrong. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. That’s all I can say on that subject.”

“Well, you meant more, but now you won’t own up to it.”

“Let’s stop, let’s not hate each other.”

“Hate? I thought we loved each other. I don’t know why you’re bringing hate into it. As for my mother—”

“Good night.”

“No, don’t you, Ming—”

“Good night, Fitzgerald.”

When he called back, the phone rang until it went to her answering machine. Five minutes later, he dialed and the phone rang until her machine picked up. An hour later, her machine answered still.

Ming answered his calls every second night. She told Fitzgerald that she still thought he was a beautiful person, as if this was a dreary but proven scientific principle and therefore she could not deny it despite its uncomfortable implications. She maintained that he was the only person she could trust telling “everything” to, which meant the intimate aspects of her tutoring by Karl. Fitzgerald wanted to ask whether he, too, would become an uncomfortable secret, but feared that the asking would make it come true. At the end of each call one of them would be crying, and the other angry. In December, Ming said that although it was a “fact” that she loved Fitzgerald “as a person,” they should no longer speak.

“You need me more than I can deal with, and more than you can handle, frankly.”

“But if you weren’t trying to run away, I wouldn’t need you so bad.”

“It’s not my fault. I won’t allow that.”

“What about next year, when I come to Toronto?”

“If you come to Toronto, next year is next year. I suppose anything is possible.”

In the following weeks, Fitzgerald left monologues on Ming’s answering machine, emotional diatribes examining their relationship’s dynamics. He left messages saying he wanted to discuss medical school application issues with her, and when she didn’t call back he left further messages in which he discussed his thoughts about her possible responses to his issues. Sometimes he described his day’s study progress, subject by subject. Fitzgerald pleaded with Ming to call him. He addressed the reasons he imagined she might have for not calling him, and promised that if she called, he would be calm and neither of them would cry. He would be silent for a few days, and then call to leave a message saying that he was finally getting beyond their relationship, that it was wonderful that things had cooled down a bit to give them both space, so it would be great if she would call and they could talk like good old friends. Like colleagues, he said.

Fitzgerald began calling to hear her voice on the machine. In the middle of the day, when he felt lonely, he would call just to hear the recording.

Hi. You’ve reached Ming, but I’m not here. Leave a message.

One day, at two in the afternoon, she picked up the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi.”

Her voice was sticky. “I was napping. I just grabbed the phone. Why are you calling in the afternoon?”

“I’m addicted to the idea of you.”

“Oh, I didn’t check my call display,” she said with a mix of annoyance and apology, as if to explain why they were actually talking.

“We’re meant for each other. We decided.”

She said nothing, and then came the dial tone.

The next day, Ming’s number was out of service. The new one was unlisted.

It was an early March day in Ottawa. Fitzgerald rode his bicycle under a noon sun that chewed gleaming wet facets into snowbank peaks as streaks of black sediment crumbled toward the curb. Fitzgerald had just checked the midterm exam results, and was near the top of each of his classes. Tomorrow he would go to Toronto for his interview. The invitation had come from the Faculty of Medicine in a stunningly ordinary white envelope.

Fitzgerald pedalled away from campus along the canal, through lakes of slush toward the red light at the intersection of Sussex and Rideau. He chewed upon the imperative of acceptance into medical school, and scripted the shining, clear conversation with Ming that would set aside all the misunderstandings that had separated them. For months now, Fitzgerald’s mind had alternated between studying and allowing his speculations to spin like wheels stuck in a rutted path of Ming and medicine, digging the tracks deeper and deeper. Everything would fall into place once he was accepted to the University of Toronto. That was it, the end point after which career, perfect words, heroic acts, and true love would come naturally as a matter of course.

She might call tonight to arrange to see him in Toronto tomorrow. He prepared himself for the things she might say, thought about what response would show tenderness, strength, and more maturity than when they last spoke five months ago. Fitzgerald pedalled slowly, timing the lights. Spinning his legs backwards, he judged the crosswalk with its orange hand flashing, then the traffic signal that turned yellow as he came closer, then red. Now his light was green, and he stood up out of the saddle in order to sprint through the intersection. As his rear wheel gripped the asphalt and he surged forward toward the green light, Fitzgerald saw the bus running the red, and now he was in the intersection with the bus, gigantic and fast, rushing at him. He grabbed the brakes with a spasm of his hands, and the bus swerved, its rear wheels locking, sliding sideways and throwing a fan of slush. He flew over the handlebars of the bike into the air with a sense of vast calm—an empty mind in the sudden knowledge that he was very near his death.

The humming noise of the bus whirring away.

Round red lights receding.

The heat of blood on his face, and the cold ground that had ripped through his pants to open his knees raw.

Cars honked. Move on.

The bike was unrideable. The wheels had pancaked into the frame when it was run over by the bus. Fitzgerald was alive through the luck of being thrown far enough forward. He chained the bike to a street sign, called the transit commission from a pay phone, told them what had happened, and they gave him a file number. He called the police, and they gave him a file number. He asked what he should do, and the constable asked if he was injured. Cuts and bruises, he said. Keep the file number, she said, and hung up. He took a bus home, glaring at the driver. After picking the gravel out of his face and knees with a shaving brush, Fitzgerald lay down.

The house was quiet. He thought vaguely of his father, who had said he was going to Luxembourg this week on business, or Lausanne? Some European place that began with L. He didn’t pay attention anymore, and so the two of them were quiet bachelors living in the same house. Fitzgerald remembered his mother, and his tears stung in the scrapes from the bicycle crash.

Only then, lying on his own bed with his face oozing, did he think of Ming. In a distant way, it occurred to him to call her, to tell her about the moment when he was airborne in the intersection of Sussex and Rideau and believed that he would die. He didn’t have her telephone number. A letter. He would send a letter, and she would feel sorry, would wish that she had been there to comfort him, and would feel guilty at her neglect. But why send a letter when he was going to Toronto tomorrow? Then he realized that he had felt cleaner and lighter in the four hours since the accident, that he hadn’t thought about Ming or about medical school (was it really the first four hours in months?).

He fell asleep.

Fitzgerald slept until the next morning, and barely woke in time to catch the train, still tired. Lake Ontario’s surface was a rippled grey as the train hummed toward Union Station, and Fitzgerald felt a blank surprise that the world continued—that the bus had rushed away into a winter afternoon, that today he would still have to explain himself at his interview. If the bus had found its mark, he decided, the world would have been much unchanged. Someone else would have become a doctor, perhaps a better one than himself. Fitzgerald reminded himself that he only had an interview, not an admission, and so he still might not become a doctor. Today, this did not seem to be as disastrous a possibility as he had previously believed. He tried to summon his conviction that all of this was crucial, but felt only vaguely amazed at having spent so many hours listening to static-hiss recordings of lectures, straining to write minute facts in his cramped notes.

Dr. McCarthy was the dermatologist who, in her private office on Edward Street, welcomed Fitzgerald on behalf of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. There was also a young Asian man in black jeans and a green scrub top who wore a crisp white lab coat and whose stethoscope was slightly askew on his neck. An impressively battered aluminum clipboard was propped between his hand and hip.

Dr. McCarthy said, “We always involve a trainee in these little sessions. This is Karl.”

“I’m a surgical resident,” said Karl, as if it should be evident that this exercise was entirely too banal for his important schedule.

“What did you do to your face?” asked McCarthy. “Karl, take a look.”

Karl grasped the edge of the bandage and said, “The best way is fast—to rip it right off.” He yanked the plaster, and with a pain more vivid than the original injury, Fitzgerald felt the fragile scab rip cleanly away with the bandage.

“Hmm,” said McCarthy. She frowned slightly at Karl.

—

Fitzgerald explained about the bicycle and the bus, telling the story as if his only concern at the time of the accident had been his medical school application.

Dabbing at Fitzgerald’s raw chin with a plastic-bristled surgical scrub brush, McCarthy said, “Although I’m a dermatologist, you didn’t have to rip off half your face to come see me. We had already invited you for the interview.” She seemed very pleased with this remark. The scrubbing burned, and Fitzgerald winced at the pain. She made him take off his pants so they could examine his knees. She had Karl scrub the knees, and he was rough—perhaps because he had expected to interview a candidate rather than change dressings.

“What did you like about Ottawa U?” asked McCarthy.

“I had a chance to develop my study techniques.”

“And what did you learn about studying?”

“That knowledge acquisition is all about discipline,” said Fitzgerald. He said to Karl, “You’re from Ottawa?”

“So it seems,” said Karl.

Fitzgerald said, “I’m a friend of Ming’s.”

“Oh, what a small world,” said McCarthy. “You have mutual friends. But you have not met, correct? We can’t have the interview be biased, of course.”

Both Karl and Fitzgerald smiled blandly at McCarthy, which she took as confirmation that they were strangers.

As Karl hunched over, scrubbing hard at Fitzgerald’s knees, hurting him, Fitzgerald imagined jerking his knee up into Karl’s jaw, Karl’s head snapping back. Could he make it look like an accident, like a sudden reflex of pain? It would be for Ming, he told himself. But they would know. They were doctors, therefore all-seeing, and they would recognize whether a knee-jerk was reflex or assault. And why should he do this for Ming, when this impulsive act might keep him from success, and she had drifted so far from him that she had changed her phone number? His knees had gone from scabbed and scruffy to raw and oozing with bloody fringes.

Karl said, “One thing you learn in medicine is that wounds heal. Almost all bleeding stops with pressure.” He scrubbed hard, and Fitzgerald tensed his thigh. “Also, there’s some pain.”

He should drive his leg upward. It was Karl’s fault that Ming had learned to exclude, to be hard. Of course, it was Karl’s study system that had brought Ming to medical school and himself to this interview. But the method was irrelevant. To study was to work. To work was to make it one’s own. As he neared the decision to do it—to knee Karl in the jaw—Karl finished wrapping his knees in gauze with a rough flourish. Karl stood and the opportunity for violence was gone. Fitzgerald looked at Karl and said, “Ming taught me that the first eighty marks are easy to get, but you lose it on the last twenty, so you live your life for the last twenty. Bleeding must be the same. The few cases that don’t stop are the tough part, right?”

McCarthy said, “Before we discuss the management of hemorrhage, tell me about ‘knowledge acquisition.’ Is that what they call academics now? Like buying a house, or a hostile corporate takeover. How is it, Fitzgerald, that you ‘acquire’ knowledge?”

Fitzgerald told himself to turn away, to look away from Karl’s gaze. “Maybe ‘acquisition’ is not right, since that implies taking it away from someone else. I guess when you know something well enough that you can use it from the gut, and it affects the way you think, then it’s an idea that you own. ‘Ownership’ might be a better way to think of it.”

“Owning ideas is all about discipline?” asked Karl.

“Why don’t you get dressed,” said McCarthy. Fitzgerald was standing in his boxer shorts and dress shirt, his face and knees freshly wrapped in gauze. After Fitzgerald had dressed, McCarthy asked him what quality he felt was most important in a physician. Trust is most crucial, said Fitzgerald.

“In that case, what should I ask you in this interview, if I wanted to know whether I could trust you?” said McCarthy with a tight grin.

“Ask me anything, and I could make up something that would sound good,” said Fitzgerald. The interview continued for another half-hour. McCarthy bantered and Karl read questions from his sheet, sullen and cautious. At the end of the session McCarthy gave Fitzgerald sample tubes of cream for his abrasions and said, “I still don’t know if we can trust you.”

“The only way to find out is to let me in and see what happens.” He said it plainly, somewhat tired.

After the interview, Fitzgerald went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, ran his fingers through his hair. He got in the elevator and Karl caught the closing door, stepped in with him.

“We haven’t met,” said Karl. “I’m sure of it, so don’t tell me we have.”

“But I know you. Ming and I are close friends.”

“You want to know how you scored today, close friend?”

“No,” said Fitzgerald.

“I wouldn’t count on Toronto.” Karl stood directly in front of Fitzgerald, and behind him the elevator buttons flickered in sequence as they descended to the ground floor. “See, all it takes is one bad score—an exam, an essay, an interview—and you’re out. Bye-bye. McCarthy liked you, but I think you’ve got the wrong attitude. Besides, whatever you think you know about me, you don’t.”

The floor numbers progressed downward.

“Feeling pretty guilty, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but don’t count on Toronto.” Karl turned away from Fitzgerald and gazed at the elevator door, leaning back on the railing.

Fitzgerald stepped in front of Karl, faced him. “Does the surgery program director know about your teaching experience, about how you got your start in tutoring?” They were at the fourth, then the third floor. “Imagine the embarrassment if there was some reason you couldn’t be left alone with kids, perhaps needed special supervision during your pediatric surgery rotation. It’s terrible how people talk.”

Second floor, then ground level. The door rumbled open slowly, an old elevator.

“How’d I do?” said Fitzgerald, putting his arm across the elevator door. “That interview score. How’d I perform?”

Karl raised the aluminum clipboard as if about to hit Fitzgerald with it, but instead pointed its corner between Fitzgerald’s eyes and said, “If you end up in Toronto, just remember that someone will see your mistakes.”

Fitzgerald moved his arm, allowed Karl to pass, and watched him disappear around the corner.

An hour later, standing on the Dundas subway platform, Fitzgerald removed his tie. His sports jacket was constrictive and lumpy under his winter coat. He rolled the tie carefully and pushed it into an outside pocket of his coat. He rode the subway to Summerhill station, stepped off the train, and stood on the platform as people walked past him. He sat on a plastic bench that looked like a square mushroom, pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets, and watched two more trains arrive and depart. The three tones of the bell sang out before the doors whooshed shut and the second train hurtled away with a rising clatter. Fitzgerald climbed the tiled stairs to the exit and clanked through the turnstile. Outside, the cold air felt like morning water. He was afraid. His breath steamed around him as he walked.

First, he buzzed.

He tried Ming’s apartment twice.

The screen said No Answer. It was four-thirty-five in the afternoon. He rang again, punched the numbers on the keypad with a determination he hoped would make her appear. The transmitted electronic bleeping continued until the screen flashed No Answer again.

From his inner jacket pocket, Fitzgerald removed the keys. He opened the front door, went up the elevator, and his feet were light and fast as he walked down the hallway to Ming’s door.

He knocked using his fingers, making a short little rhythm.

Silence.

He knocked again, rapped with his knuckles.

Still quiet.

The tip of the key trembled as he tried to bring it to the lock, and then with two hands he steadied and pushed the toothed key into its slot. It went in easily, without jamming or catching. He turned it. It turned smoothly, a soft click. She had not changed the lock.

He opened the door and called out, “Hello?”

No one.

Again, “Ming? It’s me.”

Quiet.

When he had last seen the apartment, it had been almost bare—furnished by her parents with one station-wagon load of prefabricated Swedish furniture and three brush-painted scrolls. Now, Ming had settled in. There were sandals and a single black pump in the hallway. In the kitchen, oven mitts that were supposed to look like slices of watermelon hung from a drawer knob. Medical pathology books and dissection notes covered the surface of the coffee table. Fitzgerald removed his shoes and winter coat, put them in the closet, and sat in the armchair that faced the couch.

On top of the study notes was a half-finished cup of tea, its inner surface ringed with brown circles. The apartment smelled of ginger and garlic. A large print of Van Gogh’s Starlight over the Rhone hung above the couch, and Fitzgerald stared at it for a long time. He examined the rippled lines of the light reflected in the water, and the hunched stance of the man and woman. Why were they looking at the artist, and not at the deep cobalt water shot through with the light of reflected stars? They faced away from the riverbank, away from the dark liquid at the heart of the scene. They stared out at the viewer, who could be none other than an eye looking down from the black night.

She shouldn’t be surprised, he thought.

He had written, he told himself, sitting there in his socks.

For weeks, he had sent letters reminding her of his interview date, asking if they could meet. She didn’t write back. He wrote notes in which he addressed possible objections she might have to seeing him. Was she afraid of hurting him? If so, he wanted nothing more than to see her. Perhaps she felt that because their relationship was over, they shouldn’t see each other? If this was her concern, he wrote, she should feel completely comfortable because he had accepted that the relationship was done, that their romance was finished, but it hurt him to not be able to see his closest friend. Maybe she was too busy? They would meet quickly, eat a meal like old friends—didn’t she have to eat? Did she feel that everything between them was in the past? He wrote that although the past was gone, he didn’t discount the future. Since he would be in Toronto for his interview and neither of them was deliberately travelling to see the other, this would be a perfectly neutral meeting—not evoking the past but also not requiring a future. Did she hope they would simply forget each other? Impossible.

He had written these things to her, but no reply had come. She should not be surprised to see him. He had tried to express the important but casual and enjoyable nature of a meeting. He didn’t write that he would simply come to her apartment, enter, remove his shoes, and wait. Why not? Perhaps he didn’t really think he would do it. The idea had run in his mind like a movie: she would be surprised at first, but then seeing him in her home would allow all of the old feelings to come back to her. She would hold him, she would thank him for seeking her out, she would swear to never turn away from him again.

Maybe he didn’t think any of this could be real. It was unreasonable to break into her apartment, and so perhaps he never really thought he would be sitting here like this, flipping through her pathology notes, smelling her kitchen, patting the bandages on his face to see whether they had soaked through. That’s what it was, he reminded himself, breaking and entering. Was that why he had not written about this possibility? Perhaps he had suspected that she had forgotten about his set of keys. Perhaps he had thought that had he mentioned anything about coming over on his own, she would change the locks. He hadn’t written that he would be sitting here on her couch, that he would pick up her half-finished tea, go to the microwave, heat it up, sip it—that he would wish to feel like a soothed child because she had also sipped from this cup but would find that it was just stale, microwaved jasmine tea gone bitter with the leaves steeped too long in cold water.