The Other Path

Here’s a moment from what I imagined my life would be like: I’m at a cocktail party in a Manhattan penthouse. A tuxedoed gentleman is playing Cole Porter on the baby grand; guests in Dior and Versace are chattering in groups, toasting each other with champagne flutes, admiring the penthouse owner’s recently acquired Picasso. I swan across the room in, oh, I don’t know, vintage Halston, something black and slinky, the sort of thing Liza might have worn to Studio 54 back in the day.

“And what do you do, darling?” asks a silver-bouffanted woman of a certain age. (They all call each other darling here. My fantasy apparently takes place in a mid-1930s romcom, or whatever they called romcoms back in the 1930s, so what I’m doing in a vintage ’70s Halston outfit, I cannot tell you.)

“Me? Oh, I’m a physician,” I say casually.

The guests all stop talking and turn to me, awe and admiration on their faces. “Are you really?” says the silver-bouffanted woman. “Why, you must be brilliant as well as stunningly beautiful.”

Here’s a moment from my actual life: I’m in a large, overcrowded room in a courthouse. A bored college-age kid with a pair of drumsticks is tapping out a rhythm on the radiator. The people who are trying to get comfortable in uncomfortable folding metal chairs are reading newspapers or sending the kid dirty looks. One fifty-ish woman with frizzy gray hair that clearly hasn’t seen the inside of a beauty salon in, well, ever is lying flat on her back on the floor looking up at the ceiling as if it’s got a replica of the Sistine Chapel fresco on it (it does not). I trudge across the room wearing the only clean jeans I could find (clean because I never wear them, and I never wear them because the material is some satanic mix of canvas and sandpaper) and a white T-shirt that’s very comfortable and flattering if you don’t mind everyone taller than you getting a clear look at your boobs. And everyone is taller than me. (I’m four foot nine and three-quarters, which makes me a legal midget in the state of New York. When I told an acquaintance of mine who works on Wall Street about that, she said, “Huh. Can you, like, get something for that? A tax write-off or something?” Short answer—pardon the pun—is no.)

The bespectacled thirty-year-old court clerk who is obviously reevaluating his career choices looks up at me and says, “Yeah?”

“I think, I mean, I don’t think—I don’t think I should be on a jury. I don’t think I should be here.”

 “Uh-huh. And why is that?”

“Well, I, um, I’m a physician.”

He looks at me and does not say, And?

“So, I, uh … I mean, it’s flu season. People are sick. I could be helping them. And, let’s be honest, what lawyer wants a physician on a jury? No lawyer. So I’d just be here wasting everyone’s time. Plus, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid.”

The clerk shakes his head. “Sorry, ma’am, that’s not a legitimate reason to be excused from jury duty.”

The drumming college kid sidles over to me. “Hey, are you really a doctor?” he asks.

“Yes.” I smile modestly.

He undoes the top button of his jeans. “Could you just look at this rash for me? WebMD said it could be cancer but I think it’s just an ingrown hair.”

“I—that’s not really appropriate …”

He shrugs and goes back to his drumming.

I flop down on a metal folding chair and consider my options. I wouldn’t actually mind jury duty, honestly. A few days off from the constant COVID, COVID, flu, drug seeker, COVID, flu, STD check, STD check, flu, COVID … “And are you vaccinated?” I ask my miserable COVID-positive patients and my equally miserable flu-positive patients. “Do you practice safe sex?” I ask my STD-check patients. “Are you actually kidding me with this bullshit that you’re allergic to all NSAIDs and the only thing that works for you is Percocet?” I refrain from asking my drug-seeking patients. Now, some of them are vaccinated and some of them do practice safe sex and some of them (maybe) are allergic to all NSAIDs, but even a single “No, I ain’t getting vaccinated, I’m not letting the government put microchips in my body!” coming from an overweight white male who’s struggling to breathe because he doesn’t believe any of that nonsense about cigarettes or Chinese diseases is pretty disheartening. All of it is pretty disheartening.

Here’s the thing, though: Once you’re about halfway down this path to doctor-hood, somewhere around the end of the second year of medical school, you can’t turn back, you can’t say, Oh, hey, you know what? Funny thing, but it turns out this isn’t really for me because you’ll never be able to pay off your medical-school loans doing anything else. Well, robbing banks, maybe.

I put my face in my hands.

“Hey. You. Doc.”

There’s a voice coming from by my feet. Ah, the frizzy-haired lady. “I’m sorry, did I step on you?”

“Nah, you’re good.” She sits up, stands (with some theatrical groaning), sits down in the folding chair next to me.  “I’m Irene. Hey, you know what your problem is?”

Yes. I took the wrong path about fifteen years ago, and now I’m stuck traveling down this road forever. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. Thank you.” I don’t know why I’m thanking her.

“You ain’t fine. You hate your life and you got no way to get out of it, am I right?”

“I don’t—”

“Oh, cut the crap, I’m psychic.”

Fabulous. The icing on the cupcake of my day: trapped in the jury waiting room with a crazy lady. I start to say the usual things one says in this situation—How delightful, you must have such an interesting life, I’m going to go to the ladies’ room now—but before I can get out a word, I meet her eyes. She looks back at me with a steady gray-eyed gaze—Athena, the gray-eyed goddess, I think randomly—and part of me says, Wait.

“Lillian,” she says. Which is my name.

“Yes,” I breathe.

“I’m gonna tell you something. You ready? Okay, good. Here it is: This courthouse is about to blow up.”

“What? What do you—how do you know?”

Irene shakes her head. “Did I not just say? I’m psychic. What, I’ve gotta give you all my bona fides before you consent to believe me? Why is it that the crazy orange man who was running the country not all that long ago can announce, ‘The election was rigged,’ and half the country is like, ‘Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense, I’ll buy that,’ but when I, a certified psychic,  casually mention that one building is about to go up in smoke, I gotta quote everyone chapter and verse how I know?”

I have no answer to this. And psychics can be certified?

“Fine,” Irene huffs, crossing her arms. She looks at me, stares at me, and I feel like there’s a tractor beam between her eyes and mine. “Fine,” she says again, softly. “Lillian Sarah Barden. Capricorn. Your father was some sort of prepper type; you and a couple of other families lived off the grid in the mountains for years. Both parents are dead now. Siblings—one. No.” She closes her eyes, opens them again. “None. The little boy died at the age of three, poor thing. Aneurysm. You’re a physician because—what, you thought you could save kids from that? Please. If the boy had collapsed into the arms of a pediatric neurosurgeon who immediately wheeled him into the OR, he still woulda died. We clear? Okay. You had an affair with your biology professor, and it turned out he was married, and—oh, this is good—you cheated on your MCATs. Just a few answers, but you wonder if it made a difference. You have an almost full bottle of …” She squinted. “Di-aze-pam? What’s that? Oh, Valium. You have an almost full bottle of Valium at home and you’re contemplating self-harm. You believe I’m psychic now?”

I nod. I do.

“Good. We’re all on the same page. Now, I don’t claim to know all the technical details here, but there’s a furnace thing downstairs, and it hasn’t been cleaned right in about forty years, and something is stuck somewhere, and so something very unfortunate is about to happen.”

“You should tell people! We should tell someone that…” I trail off and she watches me follow that thought to its logical conclusion.

“Yeah, we simply must run and tell people that they all have to leave the premises immediately because the crazy psychic lady says the place is gonna blow up. What could go wrong with that plan?” She rolls her eyes. “Here’s where I’m trying to help you out. Now, you just walk out that fire exit there—the fire alarm isn’t working, none of them are, which is part of the problem—and you hustle yourself down the street as fast as your tiny little size five feet can carry you, and after about, oh”—she consults some internal clock—“four minutes, the place will blow, blam!” She nods. “Yup, nothing left but a crater. They won’t be able to find most of the bodies from this building. Everyone who was in here will be presumed dead. And you, my little friend, will be home free, as they say. No more student loans to pay back, being as you’re dead. No more slogging through a life you can’t bear. Move to Fiji! Move to France! There are ways to get around a lack of paperwork.”

The clerk up front is calling out various names. I hear mine.

“Tell him you gotta go to the ladies’,” says Irene.

“I’m…I just have to go to the ladies’ room, sir!” I call. I can see the clerk’s eye-roll from here.

“All right, whatever, make it fast.” He looks at his list again. “Caleb Greene?”

“Go on, now,” says Irene. “Go.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going out the other door, don’t worry about me. You go. Choose the right path this time, huh?” She winks.

I turn to look at the fire door, and when I turn back, she’s gone.

I grab my things and go, walking briskly at first, and then, when I’m through the door, running. I didn’t look at the time when I left, but it’s probably about three and a half minutes later that an explosion rocks the ground for five city blocks around me.

I turn around and see the flames, watch the pieces of debris (and, presumably, body parts) rain down. Sirens start to wail. People are running toward me; I see a mother pull her toddler close and cover him with her body. Someone yells something about terrorists.

I could very easily run away with the others. I know how to live off the grid; I could go back to the mountains for a while, decide what to do next.

Or—and here’s the thing—I could run back to what used to be the courthouse and try to save at least some of the injured. Apply pressure to a wound, do CPR, help the paramedics triage. Of course, that’d be the end of my escape plans. Someone remembers seeing me alive and well—and I know a lot of the paramedics around here—I’m not going to be able to pull off my “Dead people don’t have to pay back their student loans” plan.

Huh. Which path to take this time?