Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Vincent Lam
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,