Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (7 page)

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.