I’d once heard an EMT liken being in an ambulance to being in a show. The lights, the sounds, and, if you do your job right, the glory.
On the brochure’s front flap was the familiar picture of Reese that I had seen around the hospital, on side tables, chairs, stuffed into an acrylic holder mounted to the walls of reception rooms. Distinguished, experienced-looking, but not fatigued, with his white coat and polished stethoscope, posing with the stacks of machines beside a pristine, empty bed.
* * *
—
IT WASN’T GLORY THAT had drawn me to health care work but the chance to feel pure and complete drudgery in my pursuit of use. I had to feel totally spent after work, else I wouldn’t have felt like I worked. So being in the trenches was a delight but it also meant that the sky was as pitch-black when I entered the hospital as when I left. Then in passing the grand cathedral, the facade of which was lit up by artificial lights, I would realize that I hadn’t seen the sun. The sun had risen and set that day, and supposedly all the days of this week, but I hadn’t thought about it once.
As the director had put it when he hired me, I was a gunner and a new breed of doctor, brilliant and potent, but with no interests outside work and sleep. I’d asked if he was trying to compliment me or insult. Compliment, he’d said. Because being a gunner was good. Disease is war, and in war, gunners operate the artillery.
For whatever reason, the director still liked to compliment me. The remarks would come on spontaneously, without warning, and the overall situation left me feeling worse, like he thought I needed the praise or else I would keel over. But did I say thank you during or you’re welcome after? Did I say nothing at all and just let him carry on?
On my first Friday back on service, around 3:00 p.m., the director paid the shared office a visit when no attendings were around except me. Per protocol, attendings were summoned to see him. A director’s office was much nicer, and our director in particular loathed in-between-meeting gaps.
I asked if I was in some kind of trouble.
Not trouble at all, he said, and sat perched at the edge of my desk like a professionally dressed five-six, 149-pound bird. He went on to say that my work this year had been more than satisfactory, that as with last year, I had gone above and beyond, etc.
I listened. I smiled. I felt my teeth get cold from not being able to recede back into my mouth.
When the compliments were done, he said he wanted to check in and make sure that I was okay to work and didn’t need more time off.
I said I’d just finished two weeks of doing nothing.
But do you need more time?
My director had never asked me that before, so I asked if this had something to do with my father.
He had heard about my father, yes, but this had nothing, or at least very little, to do with him. If I needed more time to process, it was a complete nonissue. He could just make Doctor Baby-Blue Eyes work extra.
Doctor Baby-Blue Eyes was Reese, but we couldn’t call him that in public anymore since HR had informed everyone in a training that there would be no more derogatory nicknames or ragging on other colleagues or on specialties. No more “dermatology is on dermaholiday” or “orthopedics is run by boneheads.” Though the main issue I had with Reese’s nickname was that he had green eyes, not blue. I reminded the director of that detail, and he joked that I was getting soft.
Not soft, I said. Accurate.
We laughed.
So, we’re good? he asked.
I said indeed. At this point, I thought the director would leave, but he remained perched on my desk with a far-off look.
I followed his gaze to an empty corner of the room. I worried he was having a seizure or seeing a ghost.
Sir?
Incredible to him that I had gone to China for a weekend. There and back, in only forty-eight hours. Extraordinary, he said. But what was even harder for him to believe, and he didn’t mean to offend, only to be transparent, was that though he knew me to be ethnically Chinese, he hadn’t expected me to still have relatives back there, let alone a father. Further, it wasn’t the sudden death that had struck him, but the thought of my having a father at all. Maybe he’d never imagined me in relation to a father, even though I obviously had one—everyone had a father, even a child with two mothers; it made perfect biological sense.
I looked back at that corner again, which was still empty, but now I worried he had seen my father’s ghost and I had missed it.
This is coming out wrong, the director continued, waving a hand across his face as if to erase it.
The motion reminded me of an Etch A Sketch and how in clearing the screen you had to violently shake the apparatus of aluminum powder.
To comfort him, I said that I had the same thought all week about the sun. I had forgotten about it all week, though the world would perish without one.
Right, but fathers are quite different from suns, aren’t they? Suns. Sons. Icarus should’ve listened to his father and not flown so close.
I didn’t quite catch my director’s drift and asked if he was trying to be clever. He cleared his face again and said he was just trying, unsuccessfully, to lighten the mood.
So, what was he like? Your dad.
Normal guy, I said. Nothing out of the ordinary.
My director said he’d had a look at my file.
Oh yeah?
I know your mom is still in China, but you have a brother here in the States, in Greenwich. That’s not too far.
Not at all.
The two of you get along?
Very much so. I love my brother. We met in Wichita.
Met? You mean where you were born.
No, I was born in Oakland.
And him?
He would probably say Connecticut.
What’s he like?
My brother? Just another average Joe.
* * *
—
THE AVERAGE JOE IN America is expected to move 11.4 times in his life. Who knows about the average Jane. From Wichita, we moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. From Scranton to Bay City, Michigan. More town than city, Bay City was the last place we would live together as a family, and for only two years. Then counting my moves within Massachusetts, from dorm to dorm and later to New York for work, I was right under the average at eleven.
During my childhood and adolescence, we moved because of my father. His dream enterprise was in construction, like an enterprise that sold tarps, specifically the waterproof tarps used to cover unfinished sites. But wherever he tried to start this business, no bank would lend him money for it and the enterprise would fail. He could look suspicious: gaunt cheeks; extra-small, inset eyes; a few very long whiskers that sprouted out around his mouth. Whenever the business failed, he would wash his hands of the state. Time to start anew, he would say, time to break new ground.
My father was an optimist. For the number three, he would touch his index finger to his thumb, the same hand gesture as for the A-OK.
The only business routes available to him were to open a Chinese restaurant or convenience store, and neither he was interested in. There wasn’t enough time (or money) to go back to school for an MBA, which was where he thought the real problem lay, not in his appearance but the lack of American degrees. He took on odd jobs, washing dishes at restaurants, delivering newspapers, landscaping, stocking store shelves, while my mother cleaned houses. Average people, my parents. Who raised two average kids.
But as average parents, they still differed in small ways. I could have told Reese this memory of my father, but he wouldn’t have understood.