This is how it works: He’s still got brown at the temples, it’s the opposite of the gray everywhere else that can be called, with vicious consolation, “distinguished.” It hints at a still-present ember, that he can still weave his hands around a woman’s waist, maybe around her waist even. It’s been ten years, but maybe. He can surely drive his hands to drive that truck up to the foothills one more time, wash down McDonald’s with a beer and a smoke. Lay him back to maybe own the sky for a second. Away from beds and tubes and drips. Above him now, though, is just the operating table light, too cold for its brightness.
This is how it works: She shrugs off her lab coat, slips on a sweatshirt, sits down at the desk in the cramped office. Everything is as it always is, controlled and randomized and accompanied by a mug of coffee. An e-mail from an ex, sending her an article about a newsman who died of cardiac arrest. It made me think of you, he writes, since you hate newsmen so much. Frowning, she replies with just a colon-parenthesis smiley face. She clicks to crack open the spreadsheet, starts tallying. Forty-two minutes later, she tallies marks in the columns for “male,” “55-60,” “smoker,” “unstable angina.”
This is how it works: Someone makes a mistake, apologizes to God. Who forgives off-handedly, being generally busy.
This is how it works: His daughter comes by, his son doesn’t. She stands at the foot of his bed, narrow-eyed, shaking her head sternly. Worry squeezes out as anger; he always ascribed those quick transformations to her mother. But now, in the recovery room, he thinks of a night he threw an ashtray at a phone that wouldn’t ring. It was the kind of thing he did, once. His daughter is there because she does that, now; his son is not there because he never did that. And he is there because of many things he did, maybe everything. It’s a process that flows like fluid through pipes. There’s that pain near his heart, steady now, and he’s moved to move. To tell his daughter what he’s figured out.
This is how it works: Coat back on, she ducks out of the cath lab where she’s been observing. One of the other fellows comes out, says something about how that guy flushed maybe mayo or something down his plumbing. Winks at her. He’s got a nice nose, but she’s tired and she nods and walks away. She weaves towards an exit, wondering now where she put her mug down, missing it inordinately. An alarm goes somewhere behind her, someone’s crashing. But she’s outside, wondering if she’s run away from something, forgiving herself by thinking about the data. Thinking about P values. Thinking about the likelihood that things aren’t governed by chance, or that they are, and how you can tell.
C.A.B. Fredericks is Online Editor for Slice magazine and a medical blogger for The Faster Times. He takes infuriatingly long showers.