(A work-in-progress. Sci-fi, and maybe romance)

I don’t go out any longer. It’s been a while, now. I won’t say I don’t miss it, but what’s to be done? When I had moved to a lonely mountaintop in Oregon, it wasn’t long before they encroached on me, so I moved to a more desolate area of Montana and got lost in the vastness. But that was a fruitless venture for escape, for again, they came, and again, I picked up and moved, this time to upper Saskatchewan. But, you know, time has a funny way of collapsing upon itself, where a minute or a month or a year becomes just so many blinks of the eye. So even here, they eventually came, as I knew they would, building their dwellings alongside and atop one another, ever smaller spaces, ever taller. So I don’t go out. It’s totally my choice because they don’t know who I am, though I’m quite sure many an accusing finger would love to point my way. But that’s just how people are. If people could magically transfer blame away from themselves somehow, relieve and absolve all self-guilt, sleep soundly again, at least for a little while, who wouldn’t do that?

Before, way before, when I lived in New York City, I loved to go out, be around and amidst the masses, whether my peers or total strangers. Yes, I loved the exotic smells wafting from ethnic bakeries and coffee shops as I sauntered by with no particular place to go. I salivated at the multi-national bevy of food choices, and luxuriated in the sights and sounds of hustle bustle, but it was the variety of humanity that brushed up against me at every turn that invigorated, nurtured, and encouraged me through simple osmosis of the spirit. That vital energy, the warmth I always felt being around other people and the empathy for whatever trials and tribulations they might be going through was probably what led me into medicine in the first place.

I didn’t intend to go into research, that sort of found me much later on. That’s more or less a solitary occupation, much like writing, which I do now because that’s all that’s left to me. Of course all by choice, but still.

My passage starting through medical school was not unlike thousands before and after me. It was going to be difficult because I had to have two part-time jobs to make ends meet even though I had a scholarship. I received that scholarship because certain things came to me without much difficulty and I had an excellent memory. It was my memory and my uncanny collating skills that led me from being the GP I had intended on becoming, into full-time research.

Well, that’s not entirely true, because if it wasn’t for Susan, I might never have discovered my singular ability. I’m not really blaming her, you know, for she was just one of life’s circumstances, like we all have, that put me in the right place at the right time, as it were.

We met in anatomy lab the first day. I was drawn to her immediately, not only because of her personal appeal to my eye, because that wasn’t even what made me notice her in the first place. There were twelve of us in the lab and she was on the other side of the room. We were paired two students to one cadaver, and it seemed credible enough that for people to overcome their initial nervousness—or in some cases, sheer horror—of seeing and actually having to touch and dissect a once living human being, that they resorted to profane and downright nasty remarks concerning their particular specimen.

Susan’s voice, trebly in reprimand, said what I thought, but would never have been able to articulate, not because of loss of words, but because I was a chicken shit. She didn’t sugarcoat, she didn’t mince words. Susan met force with force.

“Show some respect, assholes.”

Maybe it was because she looked like she could have knocked any of the frat boys out with one punch that deterred them from spontaneous insult, but I think it was the steely glint in her cold gray eyes that shriveled their balls. Susan wasn’t a big girl by any means, but she was fit, robust, and firm. During summer break, she led hiking expeditions into the wilds of Colorado. A tomboy that exuded womanliness, Susan wasn’t cute, but was richly beautiful in a natural healthy-looking way where her unique glamour was only evident upon close examination. You had to spend some time looking, appreciating the construct of a face that was odd enough to draw you in and occupy your dreams once it did. But no one really had that opportunity, for her eyes could rake you like a ninja’s throwing dart, forcing you to glance away. But she never threw those darts at me.

I guess it’s hard to imagine a romantic moment when the gaze of two young people come together and share some unspoken truth across the eviscerated chest cavities of two bloodless, formaldehyde-smelling, fat-smeared corpses. But there you have it; that was our moment. She didn’t smile at me. I’m fairly certain my expression was pretty close to that of my cadaver. I can’t say we stared at each other, for it was more like being hardwired into her through her eyes. Only when someone passed between us did this mutual connection snap. My eyes drifted into the open abdomen coming to rest on the reverse side of the exposed spinal column.

I didn’t look up because I wanted to stay within the fantasy I imagined I had passed through. And when by necessity I had to participate in the class and bring my eyes out of the inner mortal remains flayed before me, I avoided any ocular rotation that would bring my eyes to her section of the room. However, my lingering adolescent aversion toward conscious contact with a desirous female was short-lived because upon exiting the lab, she stepped in front of me, forcing a staggering halt.

“Buy me lunch,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

It was at this lunch in the crowded cafeteria where medical jargon wafted on the air saturated with medicinal odors commingling with steam-heated food, that I realized something about myself, when by all respects, I should have been learning about her. But you see, that was what made Susan so special: you could find yourself through her. All my life I had enjoyed being around other people. I moved through them like a little happy tugboat, allowing their lives to touch on mine, to hear their stories, to feel their pain, manipulating them to receive my help, but the fact was, I didn’t mingle, they didn’t hear my stories or feel my pain. Not because they didn’t want to, it was just that I was comfortable when the tide flowed in my direction, bringing the world to me, but the moment it flowed away, when who I was would be revealed, beached in the light of day, my tugboat sailed. Susan understood those ebbs and flows, but she wasn’t a savior or an enabler. She was a pragmatist.

“Together, we can take this school in three years,” she stated.

“I work. It’s not possible.”

“You’ll move in with me, you won’t have to work. What we save on two years of schooling far outweighs any enumeration you could earn.”

I responded in the most pragmatic way I could think of. “Where do I sleep?”