doors to slide open, no pre-recorded voice to say you've arrived.
I try to sort out the complications of what I feel, coming back
to this place where everything seems to have shrunk, except
the trees and clouds and graveyards, which have swollen,
and wonder why it doesn't feel like I feel much at all;
watching the autumn gathering of robins hop between
the columns of burial plaques, stopping to tilt their heads,
cupping an ear to the ground as if listening for the
wriggling fingers of the past, but hearing only worms.
Melissa and her cross-country co-pilot counted backwards from their first day of classes to figure out that they had two days to spare on their road trip, which they planned on spending with worthy detours and extra sights. Annette offered once again to check out the town where Melissa was born, where it even sounded like she might have some familyâon her dad's side anyway. But with the mention of her father, Melissa found herself feeling more drawn away from the place than to it and had bent over the map to find something else of interest nearby. (It was amazing to her how even the allusion to the existence of her father could change her mood for the worse, find her clenching her teeth and sighing, shaking her head in silence.) She soon found something of greater interest only an hour away, a provincial park with the attention-grabbing name of Writing-on-Stone, just along the American border.
They turned onto the network of secondary highways and township roads, Melissa fixated on the landscape again. Cows stepping amid their respective bevy of cowbirds (who skittered as attentive as underlings in wait at their beck and call), bovines chewing cud with a boredom that spoke of either pompous royalty or an exhaustive dimwittedness. The Mormon church spires spearing into the sky from every cluster of buildings big enough to name itself on the map, their pinnacles pointing up at the cirrus clouds, prairie plumes trailing a comb of white like ancient eyelashes dragging across a firmament iris, the dome of which was always stretching wider, more awake, attentive, scrutinizing the oil pumps in the abandoned distance below, those oblivious mule heads nodding sleepily at the ground, metronomes keeping time just to forget the hours they were leaving behind.
Hanif Khaled was lost. The hospital he was in, Montreal's Royal Victoria, was modelled after the one in Edinburgh, where the Scots had apparently been captivated with the idea of labyrinthine corridors, with a complex network of wards, wings, and divisions that was entirely mazelike. Hanif, in his third year of medical school at McGill, was doing his clerkship there, and that morning, with a short break between two of his lectures, he'd decided to nip a few floors up and get the results of a test he'd given to one of his patients the day before. He soon found himself in a wing he hadn't even known existed. To get to his second lecture from there, he opted for a clever shortcut, which only turned out to be a wasteful detour. Now he was pushing to be on time, walking fast, holding the strap of his backpack tight over his right shoulder, trying to keep it from bouncing noisily. He turned down a long hallway where two patients in baby-blue gowns were pushing their
IV
poles, shuffling gingerly, an exposed slice of freckled skin running down their backs. He could hear that there was a cluster of elevators farther along the hallway, their bells dinging on arrival, doors sliding open with a clattering grumble, where medical staff and visitors filed out of them, likely dispersing as they always did, with either hesitation or purpose and nothing in-between. He decided he would make his way there, thinking he might fair better on a different floor.
Once at the elevators, Hanif pressed both the up and down buttons, not quite sure which he was going to take. Absorbed in his own predicament, he was startled when a woman, also waiting for the elevator and standing behind him, tapped him on the shoulder. “Pardon me, doctor,” she began, waiting for Hanif to turn around. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”
Hanif was caught off guard. “Uhhh . . .” He glanced at a clock opposite the elevator doorsâthe same as every clock in the hospital, displaying the same time to every one of its hidden corners, plain white circles pinned against the intricate patterns of ornamental stone. This one was relaying to Hanif that he didn't have time to chat. “In fact-uhhh,” he'd said, “I'm hactually not a docter. I'm a mediquel student. So . . .”
There was a disharmonious ding at his back, followed by the elevator doors heaving open. “I am . . . I am very sorrie,” said Hanif, quickly stepping into the elevator, still facing the woman, “but I really avv to . . . I avv a . . .” He pointed to the floor, insinuating that he had urgent business to attend to in a lower ward.
The woman was staring at him pleadingly, clearly distressed. She had apparently had a very serious question to ask him. The doors slid closed between them. Instead of descending, the elevator began to climb.
Hanif sighed. He'd been given looks like this before, looks that, for him, managed to highlight the complications of how and why he'd chosen to study medicine in the first place. Looks that brought him back to an argument he'd had with his father, on the day he'd graduated from
CEGEP
at the top of the dean's list. Though Hanif had appreciated his father's confidence in him, he insisted he just didn't have what it took to be a doctor: detesting even the smallest levels of stress, functioning horribly in the mornings, and loving his easy schedule, a daily planner with enough empty slots to cram his demanding social life around. Nor, he'd added, did he have the drive, interest, or discipline to pursue it. Sorry, Yaba.
Hanif's father, Fineas, had disagreed. But he'd promised he would respect his son's decision, that he would support him in whatever he chose as an occupation, even if it happened to be the wrong one. Fineas himself was a doctor, and he and his wife, Nadia, had immigrated from Egypt, fled what had become a police state, just for the welfare and future prospects of their only son. But Fineas was also a man of his word, and through the years he never once said to Hanif that he'd settled to be less than what he had the potential to become. Though he believed that that was exactly what his son had done, and sat in the background, quietly, thinking itâwatching Hanif's graduation as a physiotherapist three years later, watching his amateur downhill ski races throughout university, the slideshows of his California road trips, the unravelling of his car, toilet-papered again by his prankster friendsâthinking it.
Hanif had coasted through a carefree decade as a physiotherapist, working at a chic sports-injury clinic in downtown Montreal. But nearing the end of that decade, he became aware of a nameless cerebral appetite. It was the kind of thing that felt like it had been quietly building for years and would no longer be sated by just another good book or weekend road trip. He was missing something, a challenge or test to pit himself against. Not knowing what else to do with it, he picked up a program for continuing education at McGill and browsed the course titles for night classes. Why not, he thought to himself, choosing the very first thing that stuck out for him, an introduction to Arabic: elementary reading, writing, and speaking. On the first evening there, he was asked the inevitable question, the teacher simply wanting to know why everyone had decided to take her course. The responses went around the room in a semicircle, creeping through the desk arrangement, and every answer to Hanif sounded more impressive than the next, the bar being raised incrementally until it was at the redhead boy beside him, who looked to be about twenty. “I just feel,” the near-teenager said, “that, as of late, the Arabic world has become the scapegoat of choice in Western society, and I guess I'd just like to understand their culture a bit more, to maybe help curb that, uhm, tendency.” The room nodded in thoughtful accord before shifting to Hanif, who looked to be more of an Arab than anyone in the room.
“And how about you?” asked the teacher, though ostensibly already knowing the answerâlike others that were staring at him with discerning looks.
Hanif adjusted his sitting position, readjusted it. “I-ehh . . . don't know. Was just . . . interested.”
In the fall of 2000, Hanif got a phone call from his mother, asking if he wouldn't mind coming along while Fineas had some tests done. She was afraid of the specialist jargon and terminology they would use while speaking to a fellow physician, and she hoped Hanif would be able to translate what was being said into palatable French. When Hanif asked what kind of specialist they were going to see, she said she imagined it had something to do with optometry. Fineas had been seeing double for a week now. Though he'd been complaining about peculiar smells around the house as well, like heated rubber tires in the kitchen. Hanif noted the dates, hung up the phone, and felt the blood drain from his face.
They found the tumours quickly enough but couldn't do much about them. They were small, and they were many. Hanif asked the different oncologists pointed questions, and hearing the ring of some kind of clinical training they would give him in-depth descriptions, justifications, and methodological reasons why it was impossible to operate, and that they would just have to see how he responded to chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and perhaps radiosurgery. In addition they would have to keep a close eye on the building pressure in his skull and be ready to take measures to curtail the effects, which were only sure to get worse. Whenever Fineas was informed of a change in his prognosis, he would let out a measured sigh. Nadia would ask him if he was all right. At which he would smile, say nothing.
The burgeoning cancer changed him in unexpected ways. He soon lost the patience he was known for, became easily annoyed, even spiteful, said things that a father never should. Like the evening he pulled Hanif closer and murmured into his face that Hanif, who'd been gifted enough to become a surgeon, was wasting his life massaging shoulders. Hanif pulled himself away, flung his father's hand off him, and called him a petty old man. They were words he didn't regret.
Five months later, Fineas was only speaking in Arabic. No one knew if this was a choice or a necessity, in the way that nobody knew how his experience of the world was changing as his neurons crammed ever tighter. Hanif understood enough of what was being said, either due to the course he'd taken or having picked some of the language up passively, overhearing his parents' arguments and endearments while living under their roof for twenty-three years. It was a foreign tongue that he had been around all his life; he was just never spoken to in Arabic, his parents probably imagining that he would integrate into Canadian society more easily that way, be better off
not
knowing it, richer.
As Fineas deteriorated, he was shifted around to different floors in different hospitals, corresponding to the complications that arose in his condition. After one of his moves, Nadia went home to get a few more of his things, personal effects that she brought into his room, set along the windowsills and bedside tables, things he never noticed were there. Hanif went to pick up his mother, arriving earlier than he'd said he would, only to find her with her forehead to the floor, standing up with the mechanicalness of ritual.
“Beh, que-ce que tu fais là ?” He asked her what she was doing accusingly, because he knew.
She was unembarrassed. She not only admitted that she was praying but motioned for him to come and stand beside her, gesturing that he should join in. She could teach him, she'd offered, if he wanted, and added that his pronunciation in Arabic (at least in the few words she'd heard him say) was excellent. He would sound just like the calming Imams in the mosques of her youth. Come on, she encouraged, there was no reason to be ashamed.
Hanif's feet stayed very still on the tiled floor. “Mother,” he said in Arabic, encouraged by the compliment, “I don't think you understand. I don't believe. I'm not a believer. What I believe, in fact, is that it won't do anything, for anyone.”
“Hanif,” she said, also in Arabic, the first time she'd ever addressed him in it. “I'm not asking you to believe. I'm asking you to pray. And it'll do something for me.”
He looked out the window, ran a hand through his hair, then kicked off his shoes and stood beside her. She was right about his pronunciation, and in only minutes he'd learned the verses and positions. He'd always been such a clever boy.
That winter, Hanif, while certainly not feeling very cleverâresearching what might be going on in his father's skull, reading periodicals and journals, coyly looking for the laymen's abridgementâdecided that studying for something medical would give him some welcome and needed stimulation. He prepared for his
MCAT
, curious to see what kind of marks he could get, wondering if he still had it in him. The score he received, however, wasn't much to write home about; much like his
GPA
, which he'd let slip near the end of his party-filled physiotherapy studies. Both numbers hovered just around the minimum requirements to be accepted into the Faculty of Medicine at McGill, the benchmark he was using to gauge his success. So, still unsure of whether he'd proven anything to himself, and with a little curiosity, and a little more abandon, he submitted an application, mentioning it to no one.
Fineas was moved into a palliative care ward. He was no longer speaking but would respond to both Arabic and French with a nod or shake of his head. Questions had to be brief and simplistic; he was easily confused. Are you tired? Are you uncomfortable? Are you in pain? He gave drunken nods to them all. On good days, he was still able to amble around a bit, but after he'd had several accidents when in the washroom alone they had him wearing incontinence pads and a catheter. He would sleep for days at a time, waking with a grogginess that no sunlight or fresh air ever managed to clear.