“Really. My-my. So, it’s off to Africa you go where, guess what, you won’t speak the language so there’ll be no way in hell you’ll ever get to know anyone…”
“And I sure won’t be part of another volume enterprise, will I?”
“What’s that got to do with medicine? You were treating sick people, right? I mean, isn’t that the point?”
“I don’t know that there is a point anymore.”
“Ah. The heart of the matter. You’ve lost your way.”
He looked away again and sucked in a deep breath, but finally he nodded his head just a little.
“So…you think you’ll find your way back by going to deepest, darkest Africa? Sound about right?”
“I don’t know what I’ll find…”
“Yeah? But isn’t that the point?”
“What?”
“The point, Gene? To find yourself?”
“You make it sound so…trite…?”
“Hey, if the shoe fits…”
“You like kicking people when they’re down, don’t you?”
“Like it? No, not really, but sometimes people listen when they’re face down in the mud. And who knows, if they’re lucky maybe they’ll even listen to themselves.”
His eyes blinked a few times and he nodded. “Anything else, Doc? Any more words of wisdom?”
She hooked up a syringe in his line and shot in something. “Get some sleep, okay? We’ll operate first thing in the morning.”
“What about my things?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
His eyes suddenly felt full and very heavy, and later, sometime in the dark he felt gloved hands running a catheter. More strange voices came and went and at one point someone drew blood, then he was aware of being lifted onto an operating table and then the strangest thing of all; he seemed to be aware of a mask sliding down over his mouth and nose — followed by an all-consuming darkness that was not at all enjoyable…
+++++
“Well, Dr. Frankenstein, it lives,” he heard someone say and he managed to open his eyes.
“McKinnon? That you?”
“Yes, it is, Dr. Harwell. Can you rate your pain for me?”
‘She knows my name,’ the scared little voice inside Gene Harwell’s head screamed. ‘What else does she know?’ He strolled along her razor’s edge, with ambivalence on one side of the blade and utter fear on the other, all while trying to think of how to reply to this simplest question.
“Let’s just say I’m still deep in the land of I don’t give a flying fuck, and let’s leave it at that.”
“Okay, we’ll call it a nice, fat zero. Know where you are, by any chance?”
“In the wonderful land of Oz, and I’m about to pull back the curtain.”
“Memory intact. Sense of humor sucks,” she wrote out loud on her chart. “Know who the president is?”
“Snidely Whiplash, esquire.”
“Good one. I’d never have thought of that. Think you could handle some water?”
“If it comes out of a bottle, maybe.”
“Good situational awareness, too. Okay, five by five, Harwell.”
“You got a path report yet, smart ass?”
“Diffuse seminoma and teratoma in the left testes, no cells in the cord so no radiation needed.”
He felt a roaring surge of relief and then a few tears running down his face, so he cleared his throat before he spoke. “Thanks, McKinnon.”
“No problemo, Gene. Oh, Quintana is okay with things, he says to just lay low here for a while and he’ll be in touch. Martin is bringing your stuff over tomorrow.”
“How long you going to keep me here?”
“You could go home today, but…”
“…but no home to go to. I got that.”
“I’ve got a spare room at my place if you want to bunk out there for a while. There are plenty of places to rent around here, too. Like three, maybe four.”
“Ah. So, any port in a storm, huh?”
“How’s the pain now?”
“I’m feeling it now. Versed is wearing off.”
She picked up a syringe from a bedside tray and hooked it up to his IV and sent a little morphine down his line. “That’ll take the edge off for a while. You have any trouble taking Oxy?”
“Yeah. I don’t take it, period. You got naproxen?”
“Sure.”
“That’ll do.”
“You want me to get my spare bedroom cleaned up?”
He nodded her way, then grinned: “Yeah. That’ll do.”
+++++
He started easy, riding a few miles around local roads, then a few mining trails, but his groin still hurt when he pushed too hard. He worked three weekends at the hospital before he decided he’d had enough domesticity in his life. It wasn’t that McKinnon was hard to take, either; in fact, the opposite was true. She was bright as hell but should have gone into psychiatry, not general medicine, but her constant psychoanalyzing had grown stuffy and was often downright obtuse. Even after a couple of weeks with her she seemed to alternate between voracious horniness and bouts of moodily introspective analysis and he never felt like he belonged.
Probably because he didn’t. And maybe they both knew it.
But he’d liked Batopilas, and something about the place still seemed to pull at him. Maybe it was the steep-walled, tree-lined valley, or how the town was clinging precariously to a ledge just above the edge of the river, or even how the tiny village was defined by narrow cobbled lanes and red-tiled roofs, everything surrounded by overhanging trees and the roar of the rushing water just below. He wondered what it would feel like to stay in a village-like that one and write and to call a place like that home. Maybe he could open up a little clinic there, too…
Yet when he told McKinnon he was leaving she seemed to come undone.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he told her. “I haven’t been here a month…”