Three Light-Years: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

comical; in the ER, anything could happen. There was a lot of boredom, a lot of drug addicts and drunks; but also, on the one hand, the inexhaustible list of howlers and absurdities made up by patients and their families, and on the other, the act of challenging death, that, too, never-ending. My father asked questions; he liked to hear her laugh and talk, not just because of the passion apparent in her stories, but because they showed her competence. Each time, he was amazed by the accuracy of her diagnoses, and by how sound and sensible her treatments were. He thought that sooner or later, at least once in a lifetime, a doctor like him (diligent, caring, mediocre) was bound to meet a true natural talent. There was no envy, it was pure admiration. Maybe he was deluding himself about his role in Cecilia’s bravura, deluding himself about being the first to discover it. The only resource he could claim, experience, could be measured by age; it was less mysterious than talent, but more bitter, because to a great extent you earned it by making mistakes.
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    One day Cecilia arrived at the café and said she wasn’t hungry; she needed to talk and felt like walking, did my father want to keep her company? They went out and he asked her what had happened, because it was clear that something had happened, something had upset her. Cecilia said she had just laid out a patient. “I laid him out” meant “he died in my hands,” a common expression among doctors, though a bit brutal, and one which perhaps implied an admission of guilt, even if no one was to blame. Coming from someone else, my father wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but “I laid him out” sounded strange and moving coming from her. Not that he didn’t lay out patients, frequently, constantly, one after another: it seemed to be his specialty.
    A suspected recidivous ulcer had arrived in the emergency room. But the patient had intense chest pain, was pale and sweaty, and had a reading of 180 in one arm and 80 in the other. So Cecilia had sent him to have a CT scan, because she was thinking about the aorta. The man, a very tall, thin, elderly fellow with a bewildered look, was left lying on the stretcher until they came to take him. They had exchanged a few words. He was in pain and he was thirsty. “I’m dying of thirst” he kept saying. He remembered a fountain where he used to go to get water as a child, in the countryside, and he remembered the water was so cold that when he filled the bottle the glass fogged up. Ten minutes later they called her from Radiology: he had died while they were scanning him. “But I just sent him to you,” she told the radiologist. She didn’t think he would go so fast.
    She was afraid she’d never forget that image, his final memory, the bottle fogged up by the icy water. My father listened in silence. He was ashamed of having once told her that he couldn’t stand his patients’ relatives, that until people got sick they didn’t learn anything from life. He’d said his department was full of unstable or inattentive relatives who expected the doctors to work miracles or perform some kind of undetectable euthanasia before the holidays. He told her that the living didn’t want to see dead bodies anymore, that rather than cure people, hospitals served to cover up death. He was ashamed of having told her that the old people in his care were treated like broken appliances. He was ashamed to have spoken only about the most grotesque side of his work, as if the rest didn’t exist. He’d left out all that was noble, left out himself as a doctor; by leaving himself out of the picture, except as a victim of the relatives’ stupidity, he’d meant to leave out illness and death. Was this, too, something he’d done out of reserve? He sensed that with her he would learn to be less reserved.
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    One evening in early May my father came out of the locker room on the ground floor. In the