autoimmunity * Robert hates the thought of medical school. It is a hate that wants to snap bones and shatter glass windows and toss back shots until he blacks out, it is a childish fury that stamps its feet, wants dramatic fights and apologetic acknowledgment and attention. It is not a logically concluded hate; that would be laid out neatly for all to see, one reason after another, arrayed in grids of self-righteousness and aligned perfectly with rationalization, nailed with facts, spikes through his heart. That would be justified, and this isn't. He'd know how to tell his father no if only he meant it, but he doesn't, so he sits for examinations and writes personal statements that repent of his stint in seminary school. He doesn't mention taking care of his alcoholic mother at the tender age of fifteen, or how it feels to hold someone only to find that she is handfuls of sand falling faster than time through his fingers, or that he will never forget the endless inertia of death under his touch. This sympathy card is far too sharp; when he lets it go his palms will bleed, and it is that much easier to keep the edges sheathed inside himself. Better pain under the skin than blood showing on it, Robert knows. * It disgusts him to the point of nausea when he receives a fat and smug envelope lauding that he is accepted to Monash on a full scholarship. It's a month before the letters are supposed to be sent out, as if the administration is trying to make a point: you're extra fucking special, welcome to the class. "Mr. Chase, we at Monash would like you to know that we expect great things from you." The Dean of Students sounds like he is speaking to a big donor whose name is engraved into bronze, someone so obviously and frighteningly important that Robert has an incredible urge to turn around and see who the dean is really talking to. He resists because he knows he will only find his father standing behind him with crossed arms and averted eyes, casting a shadow like it's a benevolent gift that Robert should be more thankful for having. Robert has the sudden urge to ask how much his dad paid for all this, because Rowan has exactly two ways of dealing with things: either forcing medicine down its throat or throwing money at it. The irony of this has not escaped Robert, who is still stupid enough and so needy that he wonders how he became both problems, and what exactly his father thinks of him. "Dr. Chase wrote a textbook," the dean adds. "Have you read it?" * "Your dad's a really funny guy," Assistant Professor Dundee says with a bright grin, like it's somehow supposed to be a compliment to Robert. He pulls out the newly published textbook, thick and heavy, its cover depicting blue and yellow antibodies swimming in a yellow pus-filled arthritic joint. Medically fascinating and artistically despicable. "I'll pass it on." He uses the same tone he uses on his dad when they've both agreed to be civil, and he's wondering what Dundee hoped to get out of him by that comment. He is swept unawares by a bitter wave of resentment, pulled out to proverbial sea before he realizes his feet aren't on the proverbial ground; he's suddenly trying to breathe and see through a jealousy so stupid and unreasonable that it's childish: Rowan never made his family laugh, how dare he entertain others, what does he do to make them smile? Then the professor laughs jovially as he snaps the book shut; Robert snaps his jaw shut and makes a mental note to recommend on the teaching evaluation form, in vicious language, that Dundee should not be given tenure at the next board meeting. Rowan sends him a copy of the book the next day. At one o'clock of the next morning Robert tries to burn off some frustration by flinging the book through his bedroom window. He goes outside, picks up the glass shards one by one, and he touches the water-green, liquid-swirled edges of the fragments with the same respect he would give a scalpel, but they cut him anyway. When he returns inside he turns on his desk lamp, opens up Gyuton & Hall's Textbook of Medical Physiology and reads furiously, as if it could give him anything besides the smooth bones and embalmed cadavers of answers. At dawn Robert falls into an uneasy sleep knowing that he loves his father: he knows it in the exact same way that he knows every painfully intimate molecular and personal detail of the way that alcohol can ruin a liver, kill a body. But he still drinks himself unconscious every weekend, and doesn't plead cognitive dissonance. * He waits until the second week's fourth party to lose his virginity, not that he remembers what he was saving it for. He wakes up in his own bed, the girl gone. There is a hangover hemorrhaging furiously out of every lobe of his brain, the pain pounding along with his heartbeat and blood-pulse, and it is a rhythm so familiar that it reassures him that everything is all right. A second, sharper pain joins in, higher-pitched, fingernails scraping along his skull. Robert answers the doorbell to find that Rowan is standing with a look of amazement and horror on the doorstep, because it's the first time he's ever seen Robert so very hungover. "What the hell have you been doing?" Rowan demands, takes one step forward then one back like he's seeing a ghost -- the ghost of his wife, Robert thinks in a heady fog of spite and ache. Rowan's eyes are glancing over his neck and collarbones, and Robert can guess the worrisome diagnosis, petichae. "You're bruised all over." "Fuck -- " Robert pulls the top two buttons of his shirt closed, panicking but almost guiltily enjoying watching his father watch him. Rowan shouts, "This isn't why I sent you to medical school!" He could ask, why did Rowan send him to medical school, what did Rowan hope to accomplish? Asking would be the very clever thing to do and it would be the very doctor thing to do because it's like taking a patient history, but Robert has always been incurably, tragically foolish when it comes to his father. "You didn't send me, you made me. I never asked you to --" Rowan looks and sounds righteously outraged, a king spluttering at the insubordination of his subject, "I got you into medical school, you could be more grateful for it --" The words solidify his blood. His heart arrests and crushes back on itself with a pain hard like shards of bone, while the vessels of his body choke on the brittle clots filling them up. Robert knows that he has a chance to say that this hurts, but it would be too much like giving his father a chance, and he thinks that he's given and been rejected enough times to know better. And so his idea of damage control is to slam the door, a movement violent like murder, and he can feel his muscles crumbling like red clay, disintegrating from the inside out. * The textbook inoculates a slew of snide smirks and raised eyebrows from fellow students flipping through the second edition, chasing him after afternoon lecture, prodding him with pencils during study sessions. "Rob! Is your dad really Rheumatology Rowan?" "Is that why --" "Is that how --" Robert is a tangle of latent repressed teenage rebellion, and the distribution of his maturity is horribly skewed. There remains a sharp-edged, juvenile shard of him that presses painfully against the prematurely old parts all around it. It's that piece of Robert wanting to make it painful in actions that speak louder than words, the same way that Rowan taught him. And he longs to hurt back, with a desperation in his muscles that makes his bones ache and crack under the strain. He opens his mouth, and all that comes out is a strangled "-- Yeah." There is no need to dissect the response into three pieces: his father has always been the reason, the answer, the excuse, the cause and the fault and the blame. Sometimes he even thinks that this is convenient; more often, he knows and regrets how pathetic it is on his part. So he turns around, chest aching, fingernails digging into his skin, tongue glued into place, fingertips still gripping onto the pain that he had meant to inflict, the hateful words he had meant to say. He calls up Rowan that night, and spends ten minutes listening to enthusiastic and hopeful congratulations on his excellent marks. What comes next is completely unexpected, a dark gaping hole on an X-ray, a flare on an MRI: "Do you like medicine, Robert?" It's the first time the question has been asked, and he wonders if Rowan realizes that one should never ask questions whose answers one does not know. It leads to undesirable responses. "Yes," he lies anyway, and explains to Rowan that when he injects antibiotics into an IV drip he feels like he is useful; when worried eyes swivel and fixate on his mouth he knows that someone is listening. Rowan expresses approval, and Robert realizes that his father knew the answer all along. Robert thinks about reading on the course and manifestation of diseases. When they spring from textbook pages into the clinic and onto radiology film and writhe upon beds, then all the weight of medicine and his hate of it turn inward together, press into him like a blade, and he knows that he is under his own knife. It is pain traced along the spiderweb of nerves in and under his skin, leaving no scars for anyone to see. * Robert Chase is very, very good. He has a magic touch with needle and scalpel, an instinctive way he understands the body's workings, an inexplicable ability to memorize facts, read over tests, then return the information in a gestalt way, giving back more than he received. He has the ability to run his fingers along the lightbox, reading and translating the shadowy films on the wall and prophecy what will come. By the time that Rowan finds out about his plans for a prestigious residency in the States, Robert is selling the flat and living amongst half-filled suitcases. Later he will remember that when the first telephone call in a year and the last in forever comes, he is folding a blue linen shirt, laying the sleeves flat and crossed across the front. Rowan opens with, "Why did you choose intensive care?" Robert says truthfully, even though it has always been just as easy for him to lie, "It interested me the most." He likes how the sharp lights soften the angles of the fluorescent-green-on-black monitors. He likes how the wheezy respirators smother the sound of unconscious patients, like a fluffy pillow pressed over lips. He likes how the chill he inhales slows his heart when he paces through the hallways. He likes the careful peace, pale and cold and heavy as time, like an old, worn shroud hung on the ceiling and draped over the walls by white hands. When Rowan speaks, it's the plunger of a syringe pressing down, poison shooting into veins, pain radiating. "Did you ever look at my book?" Not read, but only look. Robert now knows that Rowan, too, has learned. Robert closes his eyes and remembers broken windows, a torn hardcover, his hands lacerated by glass that he didn't want to let go of. "Is this about your ego?" "That's not what I mean," Rowan says, "Doctor Chase --" and it's an acknowledgment, an apology, clumsy like a botched surgery, everything wrong. "I don't care --" about you, he finally tells Rowan, wondering that he was able to wait this long to tell the truth. Truth always is their last resort, the richest parting gift there is -- like death -- all bitter and no sweet. It is how they have always dealt in truth, one hurt in exchange for another: Rowan left for good the day his wife died, and Robert knows that he is returning the favor. "I always knew that," Rowan admits, like the patient who blinks at predictions of death and promises of painlessness in his passing, "I was just hoping." Teenagers all develop allergies against parents; that's when they are for certain no longer the same flesh. Robert simply takes it to the illogical next level. He hangs up the phone, thinking that Rowan should understand perfectly, or at least better than anyone else -- he studies the immune system gone insane, the body turning on itself. This is flesh turning toxic, hate like senseless antibodies clumping wildly all over his blood, smoldering like a systemic inflammation that cannot be cured, only managed. This is self-destruction on the molecular scale. * It's six years and a funeral later that Robert unwraps the very last edition of Rheumatology, by Rowan Chase. They've called him Chase for a while now, and there's no ambiguity. It's the first time that he opens the book, and the inside cover is printed with a dedication that reads: to my son, Robert. When Chase dreams that night it makes all the sense in the world to say that he's sorry and his father says I'm sorry too. In his dream pain is simply an equivalent trade and there is no need to lay up piles of hurt; in his dreams medicine is not a knife held to his own skin. In a dream -- curled inside his fists and tucked under his eyelids and fused between his vertebrae -- he has always known these things. When Chase awakens the next morning he tries to close his eyes around the dream, but there is not enough substance to hold onto, too much to grasp, and as the tingle all over his skin fades he wonders, not for the first time, if medicine is only a way of punishing himself. Perhaps it never was what he wanted, but it really is exactly what he deserves. * - end