When Hanif was opening the letter from McGill he was inexplicably nervous. But reading that he'd been invited for the interviewing process, he became smug. Whereas his
MCAT
scores might have rightfully bruised his scholastic confidence, he knew that, socially, he was just as self-assured and articulate as he'd been in his early twenties, maybe even more so. On the scheduled day, he walked into the conference room like someone hosting a homey and intimate dinner party. In one interview, the panel, after laughing at an off-the-cuff joke he'd made, asked him what had sparked his interest in going into medical school, now, after having worked as a physiotherapist for ten years. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other, Hanif paused to a single, blinking image of his father, lying in his hospital bed only a few blocks away, his limbs and cheeks emaciating, a novel by Michel Tremblay placed within his reach, as if he might sit up and read from it at any moment. Hanif leaned forward and coughed, excusing himself tactfully, then gave the most winning response he could think of: that it was the natural progression for people in a curative field. He'd spent a decade treating physical injuries, and now it was time to expand beyond the same dislocations and knee operations he was always dealing with, time to learn about the broader scope of health and wellness, to take his already profound dedication to healing and bring it to another level. The chairman picked up a pen and thanked him for his answer, noting something on a sheet of paper. Hanif doubted they'd caught his hesitation.
The family had a meeting in the palliative ward to discuss Fineas's “end-of-life care.” It was agreed that he would be more at ease and, perhaps, less bewildered at home, with nursing aides and physicians visiting regularly, as well as people on-call waiting to assist if need be. Once they'd set him up in his own living room, his condition altered. He slept less, was awake and in an animated state more, though it was anyone's guess how aware he actually was. He'd taken to pushing his head deep into his pillow, his bony spine arched, his eyes darting around in the air above him, never focusing or stalling, never fixing on any one object, a continuous jagged circle. The doctors had given him a month.
When Hanif received the second letter he didn't really know what to do with it, so he brought it over to his parents' place, sitting down in the living room with the envelope between his fingers. He talked with his mother about the slight changes in Fineas's condition from the previous afternoon. When she was finished they looked him over in silence for a while, watching as his eyes moved, Hanif thought, like an animal treading circles in a zoo, tamping a verbatim path of soil around and around its enclosure, never noticing the spectators' elbows hanging over the fence nearby. Hanif finally tapped the envelope and mumbled that he was on the waiting list at the Faculty of Medicine at McGill. Nadia turned to him rigidly, asking to see the letter, as if needing to verify its authenticity before getting excited. But once she'd skimmed it, she couldn't contain herself, and brought the piece of paper over to Fineas, holding it above him. “Hanif,” she called down at him loudly in Arabic, “Hanif is going to be a doctor, Fineas! Isn't that wonderful news?” She held on to his shoulders and moved her head around, chasing his gaze. Finally, she looked back at Hanif, spoke sincerely. “You know. I think he heard. I think he knows.” Fineas continued his manic search of the ceiling.
Then, on a Monday, three weeks later, Fineas appeared to be having an exceptionally good day. Just after lunch, Hanif stepped out, Nadia asking him to get some things at the grocery store, probably thinking of dessert or a refreshing afternoon snack: a cantaloupe, some grapefruit, a few oranges. While he was in the fruit aisle sorting the ripe from the green, and Nadia was wiping down the counters after finishing the lunch dishes, Fineas died. Hanif was the one that found him, placing the bag of groceries on the floor. He didn't call his mother in for a few minutes, wanting a moment alone with him. He sat on the edge of the bed and studied his father's faceâthe soft dents of his temples, the slackened muscles of his brow and cheeksâwithout really knowing why he was doing it. Then, for just a moment, Hanif Khaled let himself entertain a thought, a possibility. It was a fleeting indulgence really, whimsical, hopeful, and so he made a point of never sharing it with anyone, kept it tightly to himself. The following Wednesday, Fineas was buried in the Islamic Cemetery in Saint-Laurent; on his right side, Hanif was intrigued to learn, facing Mecca.
Hanif was offered a placement, and, wavering until the last day he could decide, he finally accepted it. He took a leave from work and was plunged, almost instantly, into a surge of dense information that was steeped in opinions and politics. He struggled to keep on top of it and strained to ignore the contradictions that swirled in the undercurrents. The buzz-phrase of the day was “evidence-based medicine,” where everything was either verifiable and could be plotted into an existing paradigm or discounted. Which, Hanif thought, was fair enough, until the next class would roll around and he would learn, for example, how clubbed fingers were a potential indicator of lung cancer. No, the professor would confess, there is no understandable connection between the disease and the symptom. But it had been seen enough, and was now accepted. The students duly noted it down. In the following class, the body would again be evinced as an apparatus that had been comprehensively mapped out, studied, and digitized. A human being was composed and comprised of a chemical soup that, as such, had restrictions, conventions, and rules that it must abide by. Therefore, one could ascertain what might be added or taken away to achieve the most advantageous effects. Mysteries, if there were any, were only a factor of time. They would be solved. And more likely sooner than later. At the end of these lectures, the students would stand as if for an ovation, shoving books into the hungry mouths of their backpacks, and file out the door to the next class.
He studied before bed, usually dozing off at his desk, head easing onto his arm “for just a second,” sinking into a sleeve that smelled of the formaldehyde from his gross anatomy labs, the green-glass warmth of his lamp melting into his ear.
Meanwhile the first anniversary of Fineas's death loomed on the calendar, and only became more daunting the closer it crept, easing forward with its kindling of apprehensions and presentiments. When it finally arrived, it floated through the rooms where Nadia and Hanif were bracing for it, only to pass them by, dissipating into a completely normal day. It was an occurrence that would repeat itself, more or less, every year.
Hanif's second year of medical school was just as overwhelming as the previous. He had his first contact with patients, in a course where general practitioners were assigned groups of students to show around their clinics, where they were allowed to interview patients and perform some of the physical examinations.
When going into his third year, he'd had a physician tell him that working in hospitals was really just a nonstop game of catch-up, where all you were shooting for was to tie up the loose ends that had become frayed by the end of your shift, as to not leave anything unruly for the people behind you. When Hanif began his clerkship at the Royal Victoria Hospital, he was sure that that wouldn't be the case, as he would only be in charge of two or three patients on any given day. But even that proved to be thorny. He was always fighting the sensation that he didn't exactly know what he was supposed to be doing, straining to see the symptoms and diagrams that he'd memorized, the picture-perfect examples and case studies that had blistered from his textbooks. But he had no idea how these symptoms manifested themselves as permutations of other things and so could never be exactly sure what it was or what his next move should be. He took a cautious approach, ran tests that most would deem redundant, and took every opportunity he could to listen in on conversations between other physicians.
When his shifts were through, he was allowed to finish up his paperwork in some doctor's office that wasn't being used. He would slouch in its leather chair and stare dazed out into the hallway, where a series of plaques adorned the walls, commemorative inscriptions to chairmen, benefactors, and governors that bore seldom-used words such as “bestowal,” “endowment,” “bequest.” His head would often ease forward, lower, until it was resting on the desktop, which is how he would stay until a nurse walked by and poked her head into the room, asking if he was all right.
“Sorrie,” he would say, rubbing his eyes, straightening his papers.
And now he was lost, and about to be late for his second lecture of the day, wandering around the labyrinth in the upper floors of the Royal Victoria Hospital without being able to find a substantial clue as to where he was. In the humming elevator, he was thinking of the woman who'd just wanted to ask him a question, thinking of the way he'd left her and how likely it was that he wouldn't have been able to give her an answer anyway. In fact, it struck Hanif that, lately, he wasn't really sure of anything. Not medical facts, not his studies, not the decisions in his life, not even why he was making them. It felt like his entire existence had become a losing game of catch-up.
The elevator doors slid open and he stepped out, looking up and down a new, unfamiliar corridor. A male nurse rounded a corner to his right, and Hanif, giving the man a quick glance, suddenly froze. It was striking how much this man resembled a younger version of his father. Hanif felt like he couldn't breathe. Cold seeped down the length of his vertebrae. The olive-skinned man, not knowing what to do with the loaded stare, addressed Hanif in passing. “Salaam,” he said before disappearing around another corner. Hanif, watching the place where the man had left his sight, realized that he had said nothing in return.
He began breathing again, blinking hard. He shook his head and took in his surroundings as if for the first time. There were a few doors with uninspired Christmas decorations taped to their frames, which led to other places, other corridors. The floor below his feet was gleaming with polish, in contrast to the floorboards that had been nicked, scuffed, and marked by the polishing machine. The hallway was empty.
And Hanif Khaled was still lost.
Getting older
is convincing me that
a person's life is weighed out
by its shortcomings, its defeats
embarrassments
The things that made us
wince and cringe and cower
but somehow not shrivel
We kept on, less proud of course
less righteous, less right
but still plodding
walking the precarious cycle
from bendable bones to brittle ones
from fragile to frail
Meanwhile our ambitions and measures
compress with our spines
thin out with our scalps
Accomplishments scaling themselves down
to the size we always were
True, I've got a lovely daughter of twenty-eight
somewhere
but I've also drunk espresso with the pigeons
under the colonnades of Piazza San Marco
and stood to listen to an entire
song at Queen and Dundas
by a busking violinist with his
case hinged open
Which I threw a toonie into
before moving on
like I'd done with pennies as a kid
into bloated wishing wells
Bruno was curled up on the chesterfield beside her, the tip of his tail drooping over his nose. It was a deep sleep, his tabby eyes sealed tight, his purring having stopped long ago, even if Melissa's hand was still on his back. Melissa Johnson was focused on the book in her other hand, her thumb pressed into its crease, prying it open. When she'd finished the page she was reading, she grinned, removed her hand from the cat, and dog-eared the page's corner. Despite this movement, Bruno slept on. And would have continued to had Melissa not glanced into her empty teacup and calculated that there was enough time for another before work. Unfortunately for Bruno, the sofa was the antithesis of firm, the weakened springs creaking and sponging low when weighted, as well as springing widely back as she stood up, jostling him. The cat woke to give her a narrow-eyed glare as she disappeared into the kitchen, then tucked his face under his paw and let out a world-weary sigh. Outside in the boreal distance, a chainsaw puttered out. A crow complained in the quiet that was left behind. In the bay window in front of the sofa, a myriad of individual cloudsâthe kind that are only seen in autumn, small and shaped like blotchy snails with grey-bottomed bodies and white-furrowed shellsâglided through the sky, all of them moving in the same direction, from one nameless place, to another.
After the kettle whistle rose to a squeal in the other room, deflating with the sound of its being taken off the burner, Melissa returned with a steaming mug, the tag of a teabag flapping lightly from its rim. She picked up her book again and sunk into the couch, where Bruno, deeply annoyed by yet another bounce of the cushions, stood to leave, though faltered with a stretch and a yawn, a trembling high-arched back, watching her settle in as if to judge how long she would be staying, his face a sleepy scowl. Gradually, if reluctantly, he moved a little farther away and curled up again.
Just then, far below the clouds in the bay window, a sleek car drove into view and turned with certainty into her driveway. She looked up from her book, sure that this car, which she'd never seen before, would reverse out and drive away in the opposite direction, something that happened quite often on the road where she lived, an almost dead-end lane in the small town of Haliburton, Ontario. But whoever it was had turned off his car and was getting out, though with much less conviction than he'd had while pulling in. It was her father, Cedric, now slouching in her driveway, slamming the door while squinting through the front window, a hand held over his brow to function as a visor.