It was an early March day in Ottawa. Fitzgerald rode his bicycle under a noon sun that chewed gleaming wet facets into snowbank peaks as streaks of black sediment crumbled toward the curb. Fitzgerald had just checked the midterm exam results, and was near the top of each of his classes. Tomorrow he would go to Toronto for his interview. The invitation had come from the Faculty of Medicine in a stunningly ordinary white envelope.
Fitzgerald pedalled away from campus along the canal, through lakes of slush toward the red light at the intersection of Sussex and Rideau. He chewed upon the imperative of acceptance into medical school, and scripted the shining, clear conversation with Ming that would set aside all the misunderstandings that had separated them. For months now, Fitzgerald’s mind had alternated between studying and allowing his speculations to spin like wheels stuck in a rutted path of Ming and medicine, digging the tracks deeper and deeper. Everything would fall into place once he was accepted to the University of Toronto. That was it, the end point after which career, perfect words, heroic acts, and true love would come naturally as a matter of course.
She might call tonight to arrange to see him in Toronto tomorrow. He prepared himself for the things she might say, thought about what response would show tenderness, strength, and more maturity than when they last spoke five months ago. Fitzgerald pedalled slowly, timing the lights. Spinning his legs backwards, he judged the crosswalk with its orange hand flashing, then the traffic signal that turned yellow as he came closer, then red. Now his light was green, and he stood up out of the saddle in order to sprint through the intersection. As his rear wheel gripped the asphalt and he surged forward toward the green light, Fitzgerald saw the bus running the red, and now he was in the intersection with the bus, gigantic and fast, rushing at him. He grabbed the brakes with a spasm of his hands, and the bus swerved, its rear wheels locking, sliding sideways and throwing a fan of slush. He flew over the handlebars of the bike into the air with a sense of vast calm—an empty mind in the sudden knowledge that he was very near his death.
The humming noise of the bus whirring away.
Round red lights receding.
The heat of blood on his face, and the cold ground that had ripped through his pants to open his knees raw.
Cars honked. Move on.
The bike was unrideable. The wheels had pancaked into the frame when it was run over by the bus. Fitzgerald was alive through the luck of being thrown far enough forward. He chained the bike to a street sign, called the transit commission from a pay phone, told them what had happened, and they gave him a file number. He called the police, and they gave him a file number. He asked what he should do, and the constable asked if he was injured. Cuts and bruises, he said. Keep the file number, she said, and hung up. He took a bus home, glaring at the driver. After picking the gravel out of his face and knees with a shaving brush, Fitzgerald lay down.
The house was quiet. He thought vaguely of his father, who had said he was going to Luxembourg this week on business, or Lausanne? Some European place that began with L. He didn’t pay attention anymore, and so the two of them were quiet bachelors living in the same house. Fitzgerald remembered his mother, and his tears stung in the scrapes from the bicycle crash.
Only then, lying on his own bed with his face oozing, did he think of Ming. In a distant way, it occurred to him to call her, to tell her about the moment when he was airborne in the intersection of Sussex and Rideau and believed that he would die. He didn’t have her telephone number. A letter. He would send a letter, and she would feel sorry, would wish that she had been there to comfort him, and would feel guilty at her neglect. But why send a letter when he was going to Toronto tomorrow? Then he realized that he had felt cleaner and lighter in the four hours since the accident, that he hadn’t thought about Ming or about medical school (was it really the first four hours in months?).
He fell asleep.
Fitzgerald slept until the next morning, and barely woke in time to catch the train, still tired. Lake Ontario’s surface was a rippled grey as the train hummed toward Union Station, and Fitzgerald felt a blank surprise that the world continued—that the bus had rushed away into a winter afternoon, that today he would still have to explain himself at his interview. If the bus had found its mark, he decided, the world would have been much unchanged. Someone else would have become a doctor, perhaps a better one than himself. Fitzgerald reminded himself that he only had an interview, not an admission, and so he still might not become a doctor. Today, this did not seem to be as disastrous a possibility as he had previously believed. He tried to summon his conviction that all of this was crucial, but felt only vaguely amazed at having spent so many hours listening to static-hiss recordings of lectures, straining to write minute facts in his cramped notes.
Dr. McCarthy was the dermatologist who, in her private office on Edward Street, welcomed Fitzgerald on behalf of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. There was also a young Asian man in black jeans and a green scrub top who wore a crisp white lab coat and whose stethoscope was slightly askew on his neck. An impressively battered aluminum clipboard was propped between his hand and hip.
Dr. McCarthy said, “We always involve a trainee in these little sessions. This is Karl.”
“I’m a surgical resident,” said Karl, as if it should be evident that this exercise was entirely too banal for his important schedule.
“What did you do to your face?” asked McCarthy. “Karl, take a look.”
Karl grasped the edge of the bandage and said, “The best way is fast—to rip it right off.” He yanked the plaster, and with a pain more vivid than the original injury, Fitzgerald felt the fragile scab rip cleanly away with the bandage.
“Hmm,” said McCarthy. She frowned slightly at Karl.
—
Fitzgerald explained about the bicycle and the bus, telling the story as if his only concern at the time of the accident had been his medical school application.
Dabbing at Fitzgerald’s raw chin with a plastic-bristled surgical scrub brush, McCarthy said, “Although I’m a dermatologist, you didn’t have to rip off half your face to come see me. We had already invited you for the interview.” She seemed very pleased with this remark. The scrubbing burned, and Fitzgerald winced at the pain. She made him take off his pants so they could examine his knees. She had Karl scrub the knees, and he was rough—perhaps because he had expected to interview a candidate rather than change dressings.
“What did you like about Ottawa U?” asked McCarthy.
“I had a chance to develop my study techniques.”
“And what did you learn about studying?”
“That knowledge acquisition is all about discipline,” said Fitzgerald. He said to Karl, “You’re from Ottawa?”
“So it seems,” said Karl.
Fitzgerald said, “I’m a friend of Ming’s.”
“Oh, what a small world,” said McCarthy. “You have mutual friends. But you have not met, correct? We can’t have the interview be biased, of course.”
Both Karl and Fitzgerald smiled blandly at McCarthy, which she took as confirmation that they were strangers.
As Karl hunched over, scrubbing hard at Fitzgerald’s knees, hurting him, Fitzgerald imagined jerking his knee up into Karl’s jaw, Karl’s head snapping back. Could he make it look like an accident,
