Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

Of course, she had very little time to socialize or date or to pursue any interests outside work — she’d loved cycling during college and she’d taken several long bicycle trips, including one around the coast of Ireland; she’d played the piano well enough that she’d considered going to a conservatory to study composition and performance; she liked to garden and to cook; but all those things went by the wayside now. She had expected this. She had no time for anything that first year except work and it was thrilling and exhausting. Sometimes she envied the interns who were going into general practice and would be done in a year or two, but other times she pitied them: how could you ever want to leave the intensity of the hospital, a place where you knew the things you did and the decisions you made were of the greatest importance, where you were changing and saving lives every day?

But the body has its own cravings quite apart from the intellect, and sometimes she would feel the absence of a lover in her life as clearly as a hunger pang and then she would wonder if she’d made the right decision. It was not the same for women, she understood; even now, the expectations for a wife were different from those for a husband, and although of course many individual men and women did not conform to traditional roles and found a way to love each other anyway, still when a man she was on a date with learned she was going to be a surgeon or when after a few meetings he found he had to see her only when her work allowed, which was not often, she felt him detach, retrench, withdraw. Sometimes she could tell the exact moment when this happened. Something in the man’s posture or in his facial expression changed. The duration of time in which he’d look at her would shorten until at last he didn’t look at her at all and then she would get the call or, worse, the email or once even, to her horror, a text message, telling her that he didn’t think it was working out between them and he liked her but was sorry, etc.

All the other interns in her track were men and she tried dating a couple of them but they were too much like her: ambitious, focused and competitive.

Then her elderly parents split up, to Cynthia and her siblings’ great surprise, at the end of her first year of residency. She had thought that they were happy together or, if not happy, at least content, at least comfortable with each other. Their separation really shook her up; what other model of relationship did she have? Her brother Harry was on his second divorce. Her sister Karen occupied a marriage that seemed great at the beginning but then lost all the air inside it; Karen and her husband David seemed more like ghosts haunting each other than like spouses. Was that the point of all this effort, to end up trapped with someone in a set of small rooms, unable to either leave or truly inhabit your own life?

So Cynthia stopped trying. She focused on her work and when she was working she was happy. There was so much to learn, so much to take in; sometimes she thought she could feel the new pathways of understanding being driven through her brain like roads. She was coming to see the body in ways that she could not have imagined before, to understand how well it could recover from damage and disruption, how adroitly it could compensate when it encountered some unexpected obstacle to the fulfillment of its functions and desires. It seemed to her that this capacity to adapt was its particular gift, its magic. Sometimes she thought she could see through the people around her, through their seemingly inert flesh and into the fizzing, busy miracle of blood and bones and cells remaking and renewing themselves.

She finished her shifts exhausted and most nights or mornings she would come home and crawl into bed and drop into sleep like a stone into a pool of water. But sometimes she was still full of the feverish energy, the adrenaline that had sustained her through the many hours on her feet and then she could not sleep.

On these insomniac nights she poured herself a drink and sat down at her computer and clicked through pages of brightly colored ephemera: news stories about the latest film star to be stopped for reckless driving and ordered into rehab, pictures of children in faraway countries rescued after floods and earthquakes, quizzes that told her which Beatle she would be if she ever had been or ever could be a Beatle. And sometimes she chatted with people whom she’d never met and never thought she would.

In the different chat rooms she would visit, she introduced herself to whoever was already there and described herself a little. She told who she was and what she did, though never exactly where she lived. She talked for a while with the mostly male interlocutors who came her way, and they were variously dull or interesting, intelligent or stupid, charming or crass; she liked each of these qualities or not depending on her mood. Some evenings she was pleased to find herself communicating with someone erudite and cultured about the works of art they both loved and the books they’d read. Other times she was glad when the person typed some blunt obscenity about her breasts or cunt. She replied in kind or closed the window on her screen immediately depending on whether the explicitness turned her on or bored her. Eventually, she started to get sleepy and could go to bed and rest.

This was how she first encountered Kris. The name came up in a chat room for classical music enthusiasts that Cynthia had been to on previous occasions, but she had never seen this user before. Hello , she typed. After a moment, the mild reply came: Hello.

Who are you? she typed.

My name is Kris, said the screen after a pause. I live in Norway in a little town north of the capital. Who are you?

I’m Cynthia. I’m training to be a doctor. I grew up in Chicago.

There was another delay and then: Chicago? I have been to Chicago several times to perform. I used to play the violin in the symphony in Oslo and we went on a number of tours in the United States.

What do you do now? Cynthia asked.

A few years ago, I left musical performance so that I could develop and run an organic farm. I thought: how hard can that be after learning to play Shostakovich? Serves me right! Farming is so much harder than I could ever have imagined when I started out. It took all my time! Finally, though, it is beginning to turn a profit and I have hired a manager to help me run it so that I can go back to the city almost every weekend. Which is good because I can see my kids more often.

You have children?

Two. A boy and a girl. They live with my ex.

That must be difficult.

Well, we are relatively lucky. She’s a wonderful parent and we get on well as friends, we just weren’t so good at living together in the end. We were too different. Perhaps you know how that can be. There was a blank on the screen, the cursor pulsing as it waited. Then Kris typed: But I’m sorry, I’ve talked a lot about myself. Please, tell me about you and your work. Being a doctor must be fascinating.

They continued chatting and when Cynthia finally glanced at the clock she had to excuse herself and go to bed because several hours had passed in what felt like much less time. She had been enjoying their conversation so much that she had not noticed. This pleasure was not only because they had so many interests in common, although that seemed to her remarkable enough: Cynthia felt like she was talking to someone who had taken up all the discarded threads of her own life — music, gardening, Kris even liked cycling — and made another life out of them. But there was also an ease between them, a shared sense of humor. When Kris made jokes, which were mostly gently self-mocking, she found herself laughing in spite of her exhaustion. She liked the slight formality of the way Kris wrote, the sign of someone who had learned English as a second language and knew its grammar too well to be a native speaker. Kris seemed to like her too, and before they signed off at last asked if they could meet again the following evening. Cynthia checked her schedule and agreed and they set a time and said goodnight.