He was at work when his mother died. As always, he was sleep-deprived, and the lukewarm latte he’d chugged on his way down the hall didn’t seem to be having much effect. If the sun was shining, which it was, he barely noticed. The walls were in place, the ceiling squared-off overhead, the floor firm beneath his feet. There were the customary smells and sounds, somebody screaming somewhere, a burst of voices, a door swinging shut sans human agency. It was a Monday—or maybe a Tuesday. Not that it mattered. He might have been hungry—or maybe not. His shoes were too tight. He’d forgotten to brush his teeth.
His cell started buzzing as he was making the rounds, looking in on a patient who’d hit a telephone pole while driving under the influence and wound up with a fractured collarbone, a grade-three concussion, and half her scalp peeled back through the intervention of the rearview mirror. The patient, a white female, twenty-eight years of age, had just asked him if she was going to lose her hair, and he did his best to reassure her—whoever stitched her up had done a creditable job and depending on how she styled her hair when it grew back in, the scar would be all but unnoticeable. She’d been admitted the night before and no one was all that concerned—She was young. Clear-eyed. Stable. There was no past medical history.
“No, no, no, you’re going to be fine,” he said, and the two interns with him nodded in agreement, no complications here, everything routine—boring, even—but his phone, which had gone quiet in the interval, began buzzing again.
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