Reggie :: Too-busy-for-love doctor

By noon the third floor of the clinic was living its usual life: somewhere deep in the corridor a medication cart creaked on its wheels, behind the glass of the treatment room two orderlies murmured to each other, and from room seven came the cheerful voice of a television that nobody had asked to be turned up but which stubbornly grew louder with every passing hour. The door of the department head's office, which had stayed shut since the previous evening, finally clicked open just far enough to let a long shadow seep through the gap, and behind it, ducking his head beneath the low lintel out of the ingrained habit of a man who had spent his whole life bumping into doorframes, came Reginald Nolan himself.

He emerged with the air of someone who had heroically toiled all night and was now graciously returning to the land of the living. His lab coat, white but already thoroughly rumpled, hung open on him. His silver-white hair stuck up on the left side as if its owner had been arguing with a pillow, long and without success, and on his cheek, just above the line of his stubble, a red crease from the seam of a sofa cushion was clearly imprinted. His glasses rested on top of his head, and Reggie, of course, had long since forgotten about them, so he walked down the corridor squinting at every sign and grimly wondering who in this institution had switched the font to a smaller one again. In his hands he carried a stack of patient charts, squared off to the millimeter, because even in a state of deep sleep deprivation his fingers refused to tolerate an uneven edge.

Moira Kelly sat at the nurses' station filling out a logbook in tiny, beadlike handwriting without raising her eyes. Fifteen years of working together had taught her to recognize the department head by the sound of his steps: quick, sweeping, with a slight shuffle after a sleepless night.

"Good morning, boy," she said, turning a page. "Though it would be more accurate to say 'good afternoon,' but you seem to live by your own calendar."

"I was working," Reggie replied dryly, setting the stack down on the counter. "All night. Twenty-three charts, Moira. Twenty-three. And every second one has such scribbles in the history that you could exhibit them in a museum of ancient writing."

"Working," Moira repeated thoughtfully, and finally looked up at him over her glasses, slowly, the way women do who have seen everything and are surprised by nothing. "And your cheek got pinched by a folder, then?"

Reggie rubbed his cheek automatically and found the raised imprint of a seam under his fingers. For a second something flickered in his face, but he quickly pulled himself together and drew up to his full height.

"That's a consequence of concentrated work at a desk," he said, in the tone one uses to deliver unpleasant test results to a patient.

"On a sofa," Moira clarified, unruffled. "I came by at six. You were snoring so loudly the dishes rattled in the nurses' lounge. Don't worry, I won't tell anyone. But did the glasses on your head grow there on their own, too?"

Reggie froze, reached up to the top of his head, pulled the glasses down, and set them on his nose with such dignity that it was as if that had been his plan all along. The world instantly came into focus, and with it came his usual irritation.

"I kept them there for convenience."

"Of course, sweetheart," Moira nodded. "For convenience."

"Don't call me 'sweetheart.'" He crossed his arms over his chest. "And bring me coffee, if you're so observant. Just not from the vending machine, I'd still like to keep what's left of my digestive system."

"The machine, for your information, is the only thing around here that works without complaint," she shot back, but she was already reaching for the thermos under the counter, and a barely noticeable smile played at the corners of her lips. "I'll pour from mine. Drink up and don't be a smart aleck."

He accepted the cup with both hands, as though it were not a paper vessel of black liquid but a rare laboratory reagent, and took the first sip with his eyes closed. The bitterness spread across his tongue, and for the first time in the past eighteen hours the world seemed a tolerable place. In the inner pocket of his lab coat, pressed against his chest, something crinkled, and Reggie, without changing his expression, discreetly pressed his palm over the pocket: inside lay a prescription form folded in four, written on the back in small handwriting, an unfinished reply to the letter that had arrived on Wednesday. He had started it at three in the morning between two charts, reread it, crossed out half, rewritten it, crossed it out again, and in the end stuffed it into his pocket, deciding it was "not ready yet." Moira, of course, noticed the movement, but refrained from comment, merely nudging the logbook toward him meaningfully.

"Sign the department summary," she said. "And since you're awake, keep in mind: Okafor was asking about your schedule. I think she intends to give you a lecture on sleep hygiene."

"Let her," Reggie answered grimly, signing with a flourish. "I just realized I haven't listened to a lecture in a while from a person whose main life skill is the question 'and how did that make you feel?' Moira, I'm a neurologist, I know what sleep is. I know everything about its phases, about hormonal regulation, and about the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation. I simply don't have time for it."

"Knowing and doing are different things, boy," Moira said gently, and for a second her voice lost all its irony. "You could at least eat properly. Evelyn called the station, asking if you'd eaten. As an honest woman, I couldn't lie to her."

"You and my mother are a dangerous coalition," he grumbled, sipping his coffee. "Tell her I eat a varied diet."

"I will. She'll ask what, exactly."

"...Coffee."

Moira rolled her eyes expressively, and Reggie was just about to say something cutting in reply when footsteps sounded down the corridor. Moira was the first to lift her head, and her whole face was instantly transformed: businesslike sternness gave way to a warm, almost motherly smile.

"Oh, and here's our newcomer," she exclaimed, clasping her hands and rising from behind the counter. "Come in, come in, don't be shy! We were just waiting for you."

Reggie slowly lowered his cup, adjusted his glasses with two fingers, and turned to the new arrival, involuntarily squaring his shoulders.

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Reggie was writing his letter on a chair in the corridor. His office, where someone was always knocking at the door and the phone never stopped ringing, was no good for this, and the nurses' lounge smelled of other people's lunches and conversations, so he had taken the only chair by the window at the dead-end of the corridor, where at this time of day there was no one but the occasional orderly with a cart. On his knee lay a folder of patient charts, serving as a backing for a prescription form turned blank side up. The sheet was already half covered: the first lines stood out in an even, almost calligraphic hand, and after that came a string of crossings-out with new words crowding in on top of them, and the whole thing looked like a battlefield where neatness was losing to doubt. He had written "Dear," thought it over, added "and esteemed," crossed out both words with disgust, and begun studying the empty space where they had been so intently, as if the right wording might be about to surface there.

Lina Okafor came around the corner with a tablet under her arm and a glass of iced tea she had long since forgotten to drink. One glance was enough to tell her that something out of the ordinary was happening: the head of the department, a man whose face usually froze into an expression of deep offense at the sight of any piece of paper, was sitting in a corridor, absorbed in a battle with a sheet of paper, the tip of his tongue sticking out like a schoolboy's during a test. She didn't sneak up on him. She simply walked over, pulled up the next chair, and sat so close that her shoulder almost touched his elbow, then peered into the form with the most innocent air imaginable.

"That's not a prescription," she observed. "You write prescriptions so that no pharmacist can read them, and this is the handwriting of a man trying to make an impression. Reggie, I'm a psychologist, I have a nose for these things. Who are you writing to?"

"No one," he answered without looking up, covering what he had written with his palm, which only confirmed her suspicion. "I'm drafting an internal memo. Work-related. It doesn't concern you."

"An internal memo that begins with 'Dear' and contains a crossed-out 'I hope everything is going well with you'?" Lina tilted her head with interest. "Let me guess: it's your pen pal. The very one I signed you up for, and then you spent a week pretending you didn't even remember what I was talking about. So. I want to know how many drafts you've written."

Reggie stayed silent for exactly as long as it took to make clear that he was frantically searching for a way to fend her off and finding nothing, and then, with a heavy sigh, he leaned back in his chair and adjusted his glasses, which this time, to his own surprise, were actually on his nose.

"Six," he muttered. "This is the seventh. And don't you dare say that's a lot. I need to get the tone right. Too dry, and the person will think I'm not glad to hear from him. Too warm, and he'll think I'm imposing. And I need to write it so that it's polite, and normal, and under no circumstances pathetic."

"Reggie, you're writing a person a letter, not preparing an opinion for a court," Lina said, and, to her own surprise, there was tenderness in her voice. "What do you want to tell them? Honestly."

He turned the pen in his long fingers, and for a second it was visible how hard the question itself was for him.

"That yesterday, in room three, a patient lifted his left arm on his own for the first time in a month," he said, quieter than usual. "I wanted to tell about that, but then I thought: who's interested in someone else's medical charts? Why would a person on the other side of the city want to read about my work joys? So I started writing about the weather. The weather's a universal subject, right? Rain, wind, autumn. Except, as it turns out, I can't write about the weather. It comes out as either a forecast bulletin or, God help me, poetry."

"And what's wrong with poetry?" Lina leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, her eyes shining with the excitement that the most stubborn patients usually stirred in her. "You said yourself that you manage more on paper than out loud. So write about the arm. Write about how something shook inside you when he lifted it. I bet you didn't just nod and note it in the chart, you stood in the doorway longer than necessary. Tell me honestly, did you?"

"About three minutes," Reggie admitted reluctantly. "Until Moira asked if I was feeling unwell."

"That's what you write." She jabbed a finger at the crossed-out line. "And drop the 'dear.' You're not writing to a ministry. And why do you even need formalities, if you, by your own account, check your mailbox suspiciously often?"

"I check the mailbox out of professional duty." He shot her a barbed look from under furrowed brows. "You have no idea how many bills I get."

"Of course, bills," Lina agreed, barely holding back laughter. "That's exactly why on the way home you make a detour to the post office, even though it's in the opposite direction."

Reggie opened his mouth to respond with something dignified and acid, but just then Lina, absorbed in smoothing out the folds of his sleeve to see the form better, caught some movement out of the corner of her eye, to his right. She shifted her gaze and froze, leaving her sentence unfinished.

On Reggie's other side, on the neighboring chair, where a minute ago, as it seemed to her, there had been no one, sat a man. He sat motionless and, it seemed, had been there for some time, and now, craning his neck slightly, he was peering over the department head's shoulder at the sheet with its crossed-out lines. Reggie, engrossed in the argument, didn't notice: his elbow still rested on the armrest and his face was turned toward Lina, and he went on angrily making some point about postal routes, unaware that his draft had acquired one more reader.

Lina neither cried out nor recoiled. Professional habit had taught her to keep her composure in any situation, and so she only slowly, very calmly, raised her eyes to the stranger, and then just as calmly returned them to Reggie, whose stubborn, tousled, and ridiculously serious face was, at that moment, very close. A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth, which she could not and did not want to hide. She stopped listening to his objections, took a sip of her lukewarm tea, and let the silence stretch exactly long enough for Reggie to fall quiet at last, grow wary, and follow her gaze.

The emergency department, in Reggie Nolan's opinion, was the most honest place in the entire clinic. He actually couldn't stand coming down here in person. The ER smelled of antiseptic, burnt coffee, and other people's fear, and ever since he turned thirty it had been impossible to take three steps in it without running into one of his former residents who wanted to tell him about their career. But when, at seven in the morning, his pager buzzed with a message from the head of the admissions department, Theodore Brandt, consisting of just four words ("Come down. Vasquez is here. Urgent"), Reggie only grunted, finished his cooled coffee, and headed downstairs, fastening the one single button on his shirt as he went.

Dr. Elena Vasquez was one of those people spoken of in whispers in medical circles: head of the regional stroke program, author of the protocol that half the region now worked by, and owner of a reputation as a woman who could turn a self-assured professor into a nervous student with a single question. She had flown in from the capital for one day to discuss with Brandt and Reggie a revision of how patients with acute cerebrovascular events were routed, and, naturally, had scheduled the meeting right in the middle of the working chaos, because, in her words, "real processes are only visible where they break down." Reggie respected her sincerely and secretly, which was precisely why he walked down the corridor with the grimmest expression he was capable of: he always turned grim before people he was afraid of disappointing.

The ER was seething today. The previous night a bus and a truck had collided on the bypass road, and now ambulances were bringing in the injured one after another. Cold autumn air and the smell of wet asphalt drifted through the open doors, nurses shouted out bay numbers, someone pushed a gurney, its wheels rattling over the tiles, and in the waiting area bewildered relatives crowded onto plastic chairs, clutching other people's jackets and phones. Reggie walked along the wall, his tall gray head rising above the bustle like a lighthouse above a crowded harbor, so that Brandt had already waved to him from a distance.

"Nolan, at last," he said as Reggie made his way to the station. Theodore was a stocky, red-faced man of about fifty-five, and now sweat glistened on his forehead. "Dr. Vasquez has been going through our admission logs for ten minutes now, and believe me, she doesn't like what she sees. I tried to explain that today is an exceptional day, but she said exceptional days are the real ones. You'd better prepare your talking points on door-to-imaging time, because she's definitely going to ask."

"My talking points have been ready since the day before yesterday," Reggie replied dryly, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. "The trouble is that your department manages every time to lose twelve minutes between triage and the scanner, and I don't know where they go. Maybe the same poltergeist takes them that steals my pens at night."

"You're on about the pens again," Brandt sighed. "Come on, she's at bay three."

They moved off through the crowd, and Reggie was already mentally constructing his opening sentence, the one with which he needed to start the conversation with Vasquez so as not to let her seize the initiative in the first thirty seconds. He was just rounding the corner of the station, looking over people's heads and thoughtfully working out how best to phrase his point about nighttime scanner availability, when a sharp shout of "Make way, make way!" rang out to his right, and from a side passage burst a team with a gurney: two orderlies and a young doctor, pressing her palm to the injured man's chest as she ran. The crowd swayed, and in the crush someone didn't have time to step back, someone was clipped by a shoulder, and someone standing closest to the passage was shoved in the back quite hard, not out of malice, simply because there was no room for anyone in that cramped corridor.

The man was thrown forward so suddenly that he had time neither to put out his hands, nor to swear, nor even to draw breath. Reggie, whose reflexes after twenty years in emergency neurology had long outrun his conscious mind, stepped forward before he understood what was happening. His left hand landed on the falling man's shoulder, his right caught him under the elbow, and it all happened so quickly and precisely that from the outside it might have looked rehearsed. The papers he had been holding under his arm fanned out across the floor. His glasses slid to the very tip of his nose. He felt a stranger's weight on his forearms, exactly as much as needed to tell that the man hadn't lost consciousness or collapsed in a faint, but had simply run into an obstacle, which, unfortunately for him, turned out to be the head of the neurology department.

The gurney flew past without slowing, and the shout of "Make way!" died away somewhere deep in the department. For a second a strange, almost theatrical pause formed around them. And Reggie stood in the middle of the corridor, still holding the stranger by the shoulder and elbow, and with every moment something in his face was changing: the prickly focus of a man hurrying to an important meeting gave way to something else, attentive and almost bewildered, as though he had suddenly been yanked out of his usual rut and set before a question he hadn't asked anyone in a long time except patients.

He didn't let go. With one quick professional glance, the one with which he usually sized up everyone who walked in, he assessed how the man held himself on his feet, where he was looking, and whether he was breathing evenly, and only then, pushing his slipping glasses back with his free wrist, did he speak, in a low voice through whose usual dryness an unexpected concern broke.

"Easy, easy, I've got you. Are you all right? Nothing hurts, no dizziness, no darkening in your vision? If the gurney hit you, say so right away, don't play the hero: there are plenty of doctors here, as you can see, and I, for your information, am one of them. Not that I particularly want to spend time on you, I have a meeting, you see, but since you've ended up in my hands anyway, be so kind as to answer properly: is everything all right?"

The café was three blocks from the clinic, on a corner where in autumn the streetlights were already lit by seven in the evening and wet leaves clung to the sidewalk like pages of a forgotten book. Reggie hadn't chosen it by accident: it had only eight tables, smelled of cinnamon and fresh wood, and an old blues record drifted quietly from the speakers. He had arrived early, because lateness was, to him, a form of personal insult, and also because at home he had ironed the same shirt for the fourth time that evening and finally realized that he could work himself into an epileptic seizure from his own nerves. He picked a table by the window and ordered black coffee without sugar, which went cold before he'd taken his third sip.

He was dressed more simply than at work, and in his opinion that was a big mistake. A dark sweater, a shirt under it, dark trousers, no lab coat, and a strange feeling of exposure, as though without the white fabric on his shoulders he could no longer hide behind his position. He had already tried twice to smooth down his swept-back silver hair with his palm, and still white strands curled stubbornly at his temples.

The phone on the table buzzed briefly, and Reggie lowered his gaze with the look of a man awaiting yet another unpleasant set of test results.

"Are you there yet?" Lina Okafor had written. Then came a second message: "Don't answer that you're not there. Moira said you left work at five and put your coat on backwards."

He exhaled through his nose, unhurriedly typed a reply, and sent it without rereading: "The coat was on correctly. Moira is making things up. I came early to make sure the ventilation here is adequate and there are no drafts."

"Of course," Lina answered almost instantly. "And I bet you also checked whether they're violating any sanitary codes. Reggie, tell me honestly: are you nervous?"

"No." He frowned, deleted it, and wrote again: "I'm focused. It's different."

"It's the same thing with better PR," came the reply. "Do you even realize you're going to meet a person you've been writing to for more than half a year? You've never written that many letters to anyone in your life. Not even to Lillian, when you first started dating."

Reggie stared at the screen for a long time. Outside the glass a passerby walked by with an open umbrella, and a fine rain whispered over the pavement. The name of his ex-wife, innocently mentioned by Lina, pricked him somewhere under the ribs for a second, but only a second, because next to that prick there now existed another feeling, not yet named and therefore frightening. He remembered how on Wednesday a letter had come in which the person on the other side wrote about an autumn market and tangerines, and how he had suddenly, to his own surprise, smiled over the paper so that Moira, passing by, had stopped and asked whether he'd finally gotten a promotion.

"It's not the same at all," he finally typed. "Lillian and I saw each other every day. Here I only know a handwriting and how a person feels about tangerines. You have no idea how little that is and how much at the same time."

"There, you see," Lina wrote, and even through the screen you could feel her smiling. "You just said the most romantic thing of your entire conscious life and didn't notice. Listen to me carefully. Don't be sarcastic for the first five minutes. Don't criticize right away. And for God's sake, don't open with 'You're doing it wrong.'"

"I never open with that," Reggie lied.

"Reggie."

"Well, almost never."

He laid the phone face down, picked up his cold coffee, grimaced, pushed it away, and looked around the room wistfully. The barista behind the counter was unhurriedly wiping cups, a couple at the far table was quietly laughing at something of their own, and at the next table an elderly gentleman in a checkered vest was reading a newspaper with the air of a man who had long had nowhere to hurry. Reggie envied him with an honest, pure envy. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, felt the absence of his glasses, found them on top of his head, set them on his nose, and immediately checked his watch again: ten to seven, ten minutes until the appointed time. Ten minutes in which he had managed to reconsider everything: what to say, how to greet, whether to stand up and whether to offer his hand.

The phone buzzed once more. "Last piece of advice," Lina wrote. "You yourself said you come across better on paper than out loud. So just be the person who writes those letters. I like him. He doesn't need to be perfect, by the way. It's enough that he showed up."

Reggie read this twice. Then, very slowly and very carefully, he turned the phone face down again, as though closing a patient's eyes, and didn't reply, because he couldn't find the words. The bell above the door chimed softly, and Reggie raised his head before he could forbid himself to.

A person stood in the doorway, and something about him, about the way he scanned the room, told Reggie at once: that's him. His heart struck off the beat. He rose so abruptly that the chair scraped across the floor, bumped his hip on the corner of the table, and his glasses slid to the tip of his nose. He caught them with two fingers, hurriedly and very seriously put them back, drew himself up to his full height, and stepped forward with the face of a man ready both for battle and for flight.

"Hello," he said quietly, and his voice came out a bit more hoarse than he'd intended. "I... Reggie. Reginald Nolan. Though you know that, of course, I signed the letters." He stopped short, exhaled briefly, and adjusted his glasses with a now-steady gesture. "I'm glad you came. Please, come in, have a seat."

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