For R.B.

She is thinking about the man who spent a year in Germany studying Hölderlin before giving up literature to attend medical school. One wouldn’t have surmised this from looking at him. He is, she believes, illegible. And it excites her that there is so little to read in the golf-course of Herr Doctor’s appearance.

A few months after they begin sleeping together, he phones her suddenly and requests that she dress nicely. It is the first thing he says. A quiet without solidarity looms on the line, one he removes when adding, quickly, that he is stuck in traffic. He is en route to her apartment. “I would like to show you the hospital where I work, and introduce you to my friends,” he says.

He sounds breathless.

Although she has no desire to meet his friends or be introduced in the context of a developing relationship, she relents. He is, after all, enjoyable. He knows more than her about Hölderlin. He discusses the Jena Circle aptly in bed.

She closes her eyes while braiding her hair, removing the black elastic from her thumb to secure the braid with it—the process is habitual, mechanical, thoughtless. Then she slips her arms through the green silk dress and ties the sash; puts her feet inside the dull leather sandals. A late afternoon sun boinks the yellow velour pillows on a couch in her head. The sun carries its light from other rooms into this. She doesn’t look in the mirror. There is nothing to see. She is distracted by the shoes, the sun, the redolent feel of these sandals-of-many-summers. The ocean returns, as does the scent of the tormented sand. And perhaps there is no transition— the car horn blurs into the wading self she forgets to remove as she walks into the quasi-official date Herr Doctor requested, in accordance with his specifications.

He waves from the front seat of his small, fuel-efficient sedan.

“You look perfect,” he says with hurried earnestness.

She thanks him. His white coat is stiff, the starched crinkliness demands something inarticulable from the patch of green at his side. Already, there is a sort of heroism in his demeanor. He puts it on. He runs his hands through his hair heroically, with a certain exasperation that is more difficult and complicated than the exasperation of, say, the janitor she passed in the stairwell.

They talk briefly about the proletariat. He elucidates his various affiliations and identifications. He barely pauses at stop signs.

The hospital appears on the left like an enormous, concrete bruise. It is famously architectural.

Herr Doctor uses his pass to access the parking deck, and parks on the third floor in a designated space.

“I almost died after reading Elective Affinities,” she says lightly, trying to brighten the atmosphere, and lessen the intense heroism which is torturing him to the point that he rubs his hands back and forth over his pants, pausing momentarily to look at her, before rubbing again.

“You can leave your backpack on the floorboard,” he advises, before pulling himself together abruptly, exiting the vehicle, and walking around to open the door for her.

The two stroll, couple-like, towards the bowels of the building as misfortune echoes in small honks and cries. Cars turn on their blinkers and wait to claim a space. The faces are stoic.

No one is here without longing to be elsewhere, she thinks. Only for love or money would any fool come here.

Herr Doctor places her hand inside his coat pocket. They get all the way up to the electric door. She feels the black rubber mat beneath her sandal and marvels, again, at how pressure prompts the door to open—and it is strange to feel the door opening as he freezes and says “I don’t want to go in . . . I don’t know what I was thinking to bring you here…”

He steps to the left of the door, away from the mat.

Having crossed the threshold, she glances up at the security camera and grins, imagining a man asleep in his chair with a half-eaten bag of Bugles at his elbow. This idea of security inside the hospital seems so tender and childlike, so utterly incomprehensible and irresponsible in context.

“I really don’t know what I was thinking,” Herr Doctor says again, shaking his head and staring at the busy building, the workplace, the industry of human bodies.

His self-mystification verges on the melodramatic.

Although she has never considered bringing a lover or family member to her workplace, she senses that she is missing a central component of his worldview.

“It’s not so strange,” she reassures him, “to bring your lover to your workplace.”

He says it is grotesque “in there” – it is “filled with suffering.” A weary disgust settles on his face.

She has never seen the disgust on the golf course before, but now that she sees it, she cannot unsee it. Like noticing the blue in a Bonnard painting, he has become part of his disgust for the blue which is everywhere, a thread, in his life and words.

“How did I not see this?” he asks rhetorically, after delivering a jovial wave to a sad-looking colleague whom he describes as a surgeon.

Of the surgeon, Herr Doctor adds: “I feel sorry for him, you know, he’s trapped here all weekend for the duration of the unending trauma…”

Idiotically, she assumes that Herr Doctor’s colleague is ill, is entering the hospital for a procedure or treatment, and will find himself trapped in a room as a patient, forced to rely on the goodwill of humans who would rather be elsewhere but are paid, instead, to administer ruined bodies.

Herr Doctor laughs when she asks what disease brings the surgeon to this harrowing point. He laughs and pulls her hand from his pocket with a measured glee. He lifts her hand to his lips and kisses the inside of her palm. It is heroic.

She experiences the kiss as flashes of contact and emptiness, softness around the edges, nothing in the middle where the kiss lands on the white scythe-shaped scar in the center of her palm, the hole which once carried countless fragments of glass.

“I meant the exhaustion of being forced to be around all the suffering, and all these dramatic people who come to the ER for no good reason, just to burn resources because they have some tiny cut, and the trauma of that, for us,” Herr Doctor whispers furtively.

But how we see things determines what we are looking to see, her father had told her the year before, as they stood on a similar threshold, and she recalls their conversation now, as she stands with one sandal on the black rubber mat and another on the smooth asphalt with Herr Doctor kissing her hand and whispering, she recalls her father saying Albert Einstein said one could determine if a car was going at the speed of light by turning on its headlights, a discovery which had come to Einstein as a teenager, when staring at trains and wondering: if I were riding on a train at the speed of light, would I be able to see my reflection the mirror well enough to shave? At the speed of light, you would see exactly what you see if you were standing still, her father had assured her. The speed of light is a constant—what is different is the place from which you begin. Time slows down as you speed up, so you, my dear, will lose less time, or experience less time passing, than those waiting for you at the place you left. This is the queerness of special relativity.

There is the sand—

“You really have no idea how much trauma we experience,” Herr Doctor continues, “the first time we lose a patient.”

She nods. Herr is right. She has no idea. It is true that she barely remembers those weeks in the ICU, the purr of oxygen divided by the drone of angles, the bleached shapings of sound and light on the edge of death. Due to unspeakable events, the idea she doesn’t have assumes a motionless someone lying between the metal bars of the bed, surrounded by beeping machines who are the final constant between the mutating faces of strangers. There is the sheer jaggedness. Someone taking their last breath. Someone billing the insurance. Someone running into the room, wailing, “Billy, Billy, did I miss him? Is he here?” Everything continues relentlessly, efficiently, orbiting this body on the bed. This Billy whose name had been exhaled like staccato popcorn during sex. This Billy whom some fool likely loved before hating.

The parking deck is a massive metallic structure responding to stress. Across the street, the buildings pass sunset from window to window like a baseball. There are so many ways of being solid, she thinks as Herr Doctor pats his pockets for car keys.

She thinks she told him—once—that she had survived the car crash by accident. The crash was an accident, as was her survival, she thinks she said. No one could predict the future. Not even her father, the famed internist, dared to predict. There is so much courage in the hands which reach out without needing to secure their own heroism. She can’t remember if she ever said this to him. Or what had developed.

“You have a tendency to form keloids,” Herr Doctor observes as she leans against his car door, amid the din of the bustling garage. He is the first who tells her that.

Later, she will look back and wonder if she should have paid him for the privilege of his observation. At what line is intimacy transactional? What do we owe each other for advice, for kindness, for mentioning the books we have read?

“Maybe the decision not to go into the hospital is special for us,” she says to him. She flirts on the cusp of flirtation. “Maybe–” she lifts her braid and rubs it across his cheek, “today is our version of Beethoven’s Opus 101, the piece which marks a fundamental change in our sonatas.”

He laughs. “Yes,” he says. This is precisely what he wants from her. It is the sort of frippery he expects.

The two hustle into Herr’s car, closing the doors simultaneously. Two booms—they let themselves cackle. They permit themselves to look directly at one another.

He puts the keys in the ignition as she straddles the driver’s seat, as she straddles him, aiming to tweak the bass away from self-pity.

“(And yet: what if knowledge itself were delicious?)” Roland Barthes wonders in The Pleasure of the Text.

Everything which happens as she straddles him is a sort of sexual aside, a parenthetical, an effort to distract the man from the world by positing sexual possibility. (She puts the tip of her tongue against his earlobe, tastes salt, soap, sadness. He shudders. His erection hardens like dried desert mud beneath her right knee. “You are so flexible,” he says, shaking, like a 4 puppet without joints or bones…” “I could break you in half,” he adds. “But I could also fix you. I would fix you.”)

*

The next morning, alone in her apartment, she brews coffee on the stove and turns to her imaginary cat. “Is it still heroic if you’re raking in an elite salary for it?” she asks.

The cat she imagines doesn’t meow or yowl—it hasn’t even acquired a definite color pattern yet. It is ill-equipped for questions. But it is the cat every woman must have in order to be taken seriously. The cat protects her from being accused of soliloquy or monologuing aloud to herself.

As she mulls this notion of seriousness, of being taken that way—quite seriously— Herr Doctor lights up her phone with a stream of texts. The frantic pacing of the messages, the somersaulting of one on top of the other, creates a sense of urgency. She resents his expectation that she be on-call, that she reply immediately.

For a week, she avoids his increasingly outraged (and outrageous) texts.

She imagines her phone is dead until one day, he texts, “Tomorrow is my birthday. Can I take you to dinner?”

Nothing in her wants to say yes.

“Please?”

The cat slithers between her calves like a silvery feather boa.

“Okay,” she texts back.

“Damn you,” she whispers to the cat she imagines.

And so, on the following day, they go to a splendid restaurant and sit at a private table in a small room where a dimmed Ligeti crawls from the ceiling-mounted speakers. Herr puts his hand on her knee and asks what she has been doing.

“Writing, teaching, the usual.” She smiles carefully, tonguing a loose filling.

His heroic energy ricochets from the gilded-lily-patterned wallpaper. “Tell me something real!” he says. “Tell me something that will make me feel alive. You’re good at that.”

She folds the napkin into a cube and says: “How we see things determines what we are looking to see.”

Herr smiles agreeably. Says “exactly.”

And so, she begins telling him about yesterday, specifically, about the beauty of her three-hour drive with Valerie, the elder neighbor whose medical insurance had rejected the local clinic treating her for stage-4 melanoma. Since Valerie’s cancer spread to her brain, she was no longer allowed to drive. Valerie joked often and laughed like a defiant horse. Valerie thanked her for chauffeuring away from death. As she unrolls details from their drive to Mississippi, where the insurance-approved treatment center exists, she pauses to describe the hue of the sun when she and Valerie stopped at a lake named after a ghost story. She can’t remember the name of the lake or the ghost, only the light on their hands as she and Valerie skipped stones over the water, sharing a canned beer and a large bag of salt-and-vinegar chips.

Herr Doctor’s face whitens. “I don’t want to talk about friends with cancer or the elderly. It is too negative,” he whispers loudly.

His hand loosens, lifts, hovering briefly above her knee like a mosquito.

A blush inches around the small patch of skin near his eyebrows. More than anything, she wants to touch that spot—to wind him down, to mute him for a minute. But she does not.

And Herr continues speaking. “You talk about these negative things as if they’re normal,” he says. “Look, I deal with that shit all day. Can we have a nice dinner at this expensive restaurant without you triggering my work-related trauma? Those people aren’t even real— they’re drains on life. They’re going to die. I don’t want to think about them here.”

Valerie’s giggle bounces like a red ball through her head. Is there a train in this? Is there a genius, a mirror, a hospital, a father?

She excuses herself and goes to the restroom. The tiled wall is cool—she leans her back against it to absorb the coolness. She looks down and snaps a photo of her shoes, then texts it to Valerie. They are Valerie’s shoes, on loan for the evening. They are not her familiar sandals, not shoes she could wade in. But she feels herself alive inside them anyway.

It is the last time she and Herr eat together. It is his birthday. He is heroic. She has a tendency to deform things like sex, sandals, scars, mercy, relativity.

---

Alina Ştefănescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her poetry collection, DOR, won the 2020 Wandering Aengus Book Prize. Twitter: @aliner