Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“Oh.”

“I don’t buy mine from the bird store. Just go to the elevator. Get millet, sunflower, whatever you want, at ag prices.”

“You say my colleagues at the clinic supported this?”

“Let me put it this way: they were unwilling to go up against the board. And they said you didn’t support them when they had the slowdown. They’re not too happy with you. Except that Dr. Mayhall, but I understand she’s a loose cannon.”

“That hurts.”

“Sure it does. No matter what you may have done, you’re still a human being. You have your hopes and dreams no matter what.”

“Todd, do stop.”

“You need a lawyer.”

“I have a lawyer. Niles Throckmorton.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Good luck.”

Todd’s expression changed and he seemed cold as charity. It was really then that I began to take this whole thing seriously. “It’s almost eight. You want to grab something to eat? I started the day drawing up charges for the owner of the Trails End Hotel. Had a window give way and this salesman fell seven stories to the sidewalk. I don’t know why it’s supposed to be on my desk. The only applicable statute was the law of gravity, which is no respecter of persons.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Nothing tempting? A nice chop?”

“No.”

“So, then, guess I dine alone. I have only myself to blame, bringing this news. See you in court.”

And, of course, back to work! I got very odd looks from my colleagues, however, and my remark, “No one to murder, I shall turn to healing,” produced hardly a smile. I’m accustomed to making people smile and have a complacent faith in my wit; therefore, this failure to gain a response produced a shift in my mood.

The news had yet to spread, and things were altogether normal until early afternoon. I did a couple of physicals, ordered X-rays for an ankle injury that turned out to be a sprain. The young electrician was very disappointed it wasn’t broken, and I tried to console him. I should never have told him he could go back to work immediately, as it caused him to leave in a somber mood without a word to me. I was for a moment reasonably happy, handing out SSRIs and birth control pills with abandon. I ate lunch from the coin machines in the lobby while reading Field & Stream . Things started going downhill in the middle of the afternoon with unannounced cancellations, all my appointments, really. I sat alone in my office and watched clouds in my window. As the day heated up, the clouds moved a little faster, but that was about it for celestial change — i.e., no revelations except that I began to wonder whether I was actually guilty in some way and if, after a very long time rising from my unpromising origins, I was finally ruined.

I was, of course, guilty of the crime, but the victim wasn’t Tessa. Was this a technicality? Would honesty compel me to plead no contest? I had ethical standards to guide me from time to time, but they tended to flit in and out on the winds of that day’s mood. The great difficulty lay in my feeling no guilt for what I was being accused of. The actual source of my discomfort eventually came to me. We are most of us romantic enough to imagine that the perfect partner exists for us somewhere in the world. We know this is not true, the idea that only one other human being could suffice. But it doesn’t bother us that it is untrue, and that’s the essence of romance: indifference to truth. I felt that only one person could have been my life companion and that I had failed to recognize her through obstinate want of self-knowledge. It was Tessa. Who cared if she was an utter fright? She alone had understood me, and I had failed her. But did that constitute murder? Of course, she would have driven me completely crazy and that would have seemed sufficient motivation. When I thought of a lifetime with Tessa, a crime of passion seemed not out of the question.

I believed my colleague Gary Haack was someone who might have something heartening to tell me. He was a reasonable man, a secular man, free of all social juju, levelheaded in practice and in staff meetings, a man who made few bones about the fact that work was no more than a means to an end, no matter what kind of work it was. He once told me that if he spent a decade ministering to the victims of the atomic bomb, it still would be a means to more skiing and hot-air ballooning. I don’t know why we believed this thoughtlessness gave Dr. Haack some kind of authenticity, but I expect that the Hallmark card view of medicine had come to seem cloying: the kindly old shit in pince-nez and dangling stethoscope bending over the rosy-cheeked tomboy, a worried spaniel occupying a nearby rag rug. I also thought that the fact that Haack had never particularly liked me increased the chance of his being objective. I didn’t like him either, the asshole.

He was faced away from me, toward the window and its view of restricted parking. I announced myself, and he straightened slightly at the sound of my voice. He said, “Do please leave me out of this.”

I was taken aback. Walking the corridors, I found not a single face turned in my direction — plenty of backs, though. After the first moments of paralysis and dismay, I sank into unexpected and unfamiliar rage. It came as a spiraling, helpless anguish and an abstract revulsion at my plight. But what was my plight? I was new to this pariah status and could have more readily accepted it if only a few of my patients had shown up. It also seemed to me now that self-pity was fuel for this fire and a powerful fuel it was. I don’t know if you can beat the anger and self-pity cocktail for real mayhem potential.

When I was in school I worked part-time as a telemarketer. It was surprising how many people, on hearing my message, told me to eat shit and die. Telemarketing was a distressing glimpse of human nature which I ought to have forgotten but hadn’t. It’s no damn use finding deficiencies in human nature, because sooner or later you spot them in yourself. My job was to sell candles over the phone: car candles, soy candles, church candles, scented candles, pillar candles, colored river rocks to go with your floating candles, votive candles, wedding and anniversary candles, citronella candles to keep bugs away, birthday candles. Always the same result—“Fuck you. Eat shit. Et cetera.” I’d tell them, “I know where you live, I’m gonna get you.” Then when I was an intern, I heard about people shoving candles up their rectums. I’ve had a lot of trouble with candles and they’ve given me a lot of trouble. You won’t find them in my house. I don’t know who thought them up in the first place. Poor light source anyway, and a fire hazard.

For several days, the nicest thing I heard about myself was that I was not a flight risk. On reflection, I found this offensive. After a rocky beginning, this town had tidied me up. No flight risk. No flight, period. I certainly didn’t want to go to prison.

The very thought slowly turned a leaf of dread inside. I have watched patients stare into the parking lot knowing that they were not to leave for the time being or, in other cases, ever. I found that more dreadful than violence. I’ve seen the anguish in a patient’s face when someone they were watching got in a car below their window and drove away.

You can’t leave .

I avoided my office for nearly a week. Our receptionist had organized a small pile of message slips under an old souvenir letter opener from Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, where I had gone with a girl I thought I’d marry — two girls I thought I’d marry. There were several notes trying to explain cancellations “in view of the circumstances,” several solicitations, and one very short note. Some had left in the most extraordinary circumlocutionary style messages plump with exit strategies, in case I was acquitted. But back to the shortest of them all.