by Sydney Gan
The body of man has in itself, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; these make up the nature of his body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health. Now he enjoys the most perfect health when these elements are duly proportioned to one another in respect of compounding power and bulk, and when they are perfectly mingled. Pain if felt when one of these elements is in defect or excess, or is isolated in the body without being compounded in the body with all the others.
– Hippocrates, The Nature of Man, trans. W.H.S.Jones, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1931, v.IV. pp. 11-13.
The sinking day leans heavy on me, its slumber pressed against my palms and the hard set of my shoulders. My eyesight is failing me as the sun outside plummets. All I can register is residual coffee at the back of my throat.
Illuminated by naked bulbs, the common room feels on its last hushed breath before it too, as the evening, dissolves into gentle rest. Across the window ledge I lounge on, tome in lap, Odessa Dearon furiously scribbles annotations in the margins on a velvet sofa.
Odessa likes to peruse her books, flick her worn Oxfords and chew on her pencil where everyone can perceive her. She obsesses over the prestige of her medical degree, something no one can scarcely fault her for doing.
Academia, in some part, is an elaborate performance—she is simply relishing it.
Next to her, the perfect outline of Rahul Ansari slides languidly.
Even from where I am seated, I smell him, ink and money. No one grins quite like Rahul, smiling like he’s captured the sun. The graying busts of the Greek pantheon around the room would be a better fit to emulate his likeness instead. His hand discreetly pins the corner of Odessa’s skirts; they both say nothing.
Distantly, the knoll of church bells reverberates. The solemn sound sends a scatter of black birds across the bronzing expanse of the sky, and the air of the room smarts. With a thump, Odessa’s book slaps shut.
As for me, I have been scanning the same paragraph for the last hour. My thumbnail is caught between my teeth, and my back hurts from the awkward crook of my neck. For common folk, there is nothing quite like the darkening of the day to extinguish any hope of productivity for the rest of the night, but scholars are an entirely different breed.
Darkness is normally meant for sleeping. For academics, candles are to be lit and literature continues to be deciphered.
“I’m ravenous,” Rahul says without looking to survey our responses. He never has to concern himself with escaping the attention of others. “I don’t suppose any of you want to get another coffee?”
“You’re going to kill yourself if you don’t put actual food in you,” Odessa says pointedly. She inclines her head towards me and my gnawing mouth. “Caleb, tell him.”
“Yes, tell me, Caleb,” Rahul bares his teeth, laughing. “Educate me as to the workings of the human body, o’mighty freshman.” It amuses him some more when I opt for an eye-roll as my response. He thinks my taciturnity enjoyable.
Odessa ribs Rahul and he does it back. I watch his woolen sweater-clad elbow dig into her sides and she laughs. Their pinkies touch when she swats his hand away.
I drop my attention back to my text, chewing my cheek.
Diagrams of vertebrae radiographs swim across my vision, the body stripped down. I glide the tip of my pen across the page, trying to imagine a solid spine before me, attached to an unmoving person. I force the hands of my imagination to feel the ridges of the back, to apply the abundance of theory that has plagued my waking hours.
My insides curdle, sour and sigh. Apathy weighs down any effort to care.
Academia, as far as it is performance art, requires excellent actors. I do not think I am one. I fail to emulate the vigor my peers exude, seem never to be able to find the urge to put myself in the throes of education. I look at my readings and feel a blanket of dread. I cannot see myself dedicating myself to the study of the human body, yet I stare at cold, dissected cadavers every week.
When I think too much about it, it steals my breath.
I have never been the kind of person who doesn’t care. In fact, I’ve largely constructed my sense of self around giving a shit. I believed I was nothing if not driven by passion, and before I continued with my studies, I’d promised myself that I would do what I loved. There I went, conjuring up splendid ideas of my future, never having to second guess any of it. I was perfect before the age of eighteen, after all – all I had to do was what I was told. When a choice presented itself, I lunged at it with closed eyes and an open heart.
I hate to be jaded, I want to be enamored with my future. I’m afraid I’ve become the former.
“You know I’m serious, Rahul.” Odessa’s lilting voice rises above the crackling air. The fireplace crunches on its dry logs, spitting embers and ash. “What’s the point of learning all of this when you don’t even intend to take care of yourself? It’s ironic, is what it is.”
Rahul tosses his head. “I’m going to work myself to the bone when I’m in my residency anyways, this is sort of like practice.”
My temple presses against the palladian windowpane misted over with condensation. I know I cannot even pretend to embody the pride in Rahul’s voice when he articulates his future. He speaks as if he looks forward to it. I wonder what that must feel like.
Disillusionment is the word I would use, but it brings to question the very audacity of my moaning. That is the term they use on soldiers who return from their great wars and come to learn that patriotism is a sham. I am a nineteen-year-old who wields his pen like a knife and drags his feet when he walks.
Enclosed by weathered pages, musty leather and ancient ink, I often feel as if someone has thrusted me into a tomb. The ceiling seems to sink when I think these thoughts, and the arsenic-green baroque wallpaper feels dizzying to look at.
Unexpectedly, Rahul looks at me. “What do you think, Caleb? Must I starve myself to be a good doctor?”
I flounder. “I-I don’t know if I’m suited to answer that.”
“Don’t act like an idiot,” Odessa chides Rahul, but she cannot help but giggle at my perplexion. She extends comfort, half-heartedly, “You shouldn’t sell yourself short, Caleb, you are wonderfully smart.”
I nod stiffly.
Across from me, Rahul’s mouth twists downward. Setting his elbows against his knees, he leans towards me. His brows are drawn, his black gaze pinpricked with green-eyed savagery.
“You won’t care to even try and answer?” he demands.
I know he doesn’t really care if I answer. But I do anyway.
“Smarts are probably insufficient. I suppose a good practitioner also needs passion, dedication.” I chew my tongue for a beat. “Obsession.”
The corner of Rahul’s lip ticks upwards. Almost crouched over me, he appears more tiger than man. I can see the intimate dip of his clavicle peeking from under his round collar. When he pushes up against his leg, his sleeve pushed above his forearms shifts. It exposes a thin tattoo of Latin: Sedit qui timuit ne non succederet.
He who feared he would not succeed sat still.
“Passion. Obsession,” Rahul mirrors. “How terribly romantic.”
His spine straightens as he unravels from his intimidation stance. Odessa shakes her head as if in reprimand, but the gentle press of her mouth makes her seem pleased about something. Her foot nudges Rahul’s calf.
“Why do you say it like that?” I find myself saying. Rahul, high on his belittlement, starts.
The knot in my chest pulls, like the tug of tension before release. Rahul’s derision awakens a wanting within me: a desire to pick his brain, palm his gray matter and stain the crescent of my fingernails with his blood. Maybe, just maybe, he also tastes the heavy dullness of academia, and longs for something else—something more compelling instead.
I suddenly feel ravenous, looking at him.
“Come on, Caleb,” Rahul says slowly. “Do you really think you’ll always love poring over articles and cutting open bodies for the next five years?”
“That’s really cynical, Rahul,” Odessa informs him.
Rahul harrumphs. “The freshman was being delusional.”
I ignore Odessa’s addition. “You don’t like any of this?” I ask, perhaps too excitedly. “The readings and bodies and what not?”
Do you lack the little fire under your skin as well as I do? Do you feel increasingly entombed?
“Fuck no.” Rahul peers at me, half-hanging off the window nook, hair falling into my desperate eyes. “Do you?”
Suddenly a little bashful, I shake my head. Rahul shrugs, point proven. It should have felt like he had extended a hand for me to grasp, a point of solidarity for something that was bothering me. And yet, I still feel uneasy, peculiar.
“Then why do you persist?”
Rahul begins to look irritated. “Deferred gratification. What else? I won’t be thinking about all this when I’m employed for the rest of my life.”
Odessa hiccups a little sound of amusement. “That’s passion in its own right—the obsession with becoming absolutely filthy with wealth.”
“Isn’t that what everyone’s working towards, anyway?” Rahul grabs his papers. They scrunch in his fists. “You’re terribly inquisitive today, freshman. What have you done and got yourself possessed with?”
I do not answer, nursing the sinking feeling in my chest. As Odessa and Rahul work to pack up their study materials from the low oak tables, I begin to contemplate that perhaps I may be alone in my passionate dispassion.
I don’t think Rahul cares about his line of study. He simply reshapes himself to the mold of an exemplary student and reaps his satisfaction from success. He doesn’t mind that he doesn’t care about what he is doing right now, so long as it contributes to his affluence.
I am unlike him. I’ve always been the impatient kind; the eat-the-marshmallow kind. Nothing feels worth writhing through these gray, gray days, where hours muddle and stretch miserably. As I slog through these formative years of my life, I would be working towards nothing I love and, therefore, nothing at all.
“Are you coming?” Odessa peeks her head into my line of sight. I blink, eyes aching, mouth dry. She helps me collect my belongings and slings my messenger bag across my chest. I comply, speechless.
Our trio fractures at the white stone steps of the library. Rahul exchanges low whispers with Odessa, prompting a grin and a side hug. Odessa Dearon waves at me before she heads home. I cannot find the spirit to return the simple gesture.
And so, I am left alone with Rahul Ansari. He gives me an apprehensive once over and starts towards his campus residence. Listless, I follow him.
“Why did you ask all those questions back there? Be honest,” Rahul says as we walk along the thin canal, avoiding the jutting roots of the leafless trees that protrude from the pavement. Water sluices against the bobbing boats tied to the harbor, the motion making me a little dizzy.
“I don’t know,” I say, dishonest. I hold onto my unreasonable sense of betrayal from his earlier divulgence like a token with a sharp edge, digging into my palm. It makes me angry to feel alone. I cannot help the resentment.
“Someone’s lost their passion in the study of medicine, haven’t they?’ Rahul nudges further. I do not think he even cares; he just wants something to talk about that would amuse him. I stay silent. “Oh, come on, freshman, out with it. What, have you gotten sick of the endless technical terminology, or the laborious hours in the lab? What about the constant one uppance of your snobby-as-hell classmates? The crushing workload?”
“I don’t know,” I echo, partially true this time. He is right about everything, and yet there is something else—the niggling voice that tells me that maybe I never had a passion for losing in the first place.
Rahul laughs cruelly now. It delights him that I am uncomfortable. “Or is it the cadavers?” he waves a taunting finger over my nose. “Are you too scared to do your practicals at night?”
“Stop it,” I snap. Rahul’s grin repeats itself tenfold in my head, like pinging echoes. “Shut up.”
A wild, ecstatic shock crosses his expression. Rahul’s teeth are pearly under the moonlight. “Make me, freshman.”
I don’t think he believes I am capable of rage. I’ve been subdued for so long, after all. And yet, when the tightness in my chest snaps and the two ends of the tension lash against my ribcage, my fingers close around the pen in my pocket.
I stab upwards.
There is a soft spot, between the jaw and the neck, where the weapon finds purchase. Rahul’s grin slips. There is so much blood, warm and wet. This is something I am unfamiliar with in my routine dissections in the lab.
Cadavers don’t bleed. A human boy does.
A wretched gurgling punctures the air. Only I am left to hear it, sinking to my knees as blood bubbles from Rahul’s lips. He chokes, his chest seizes, and before I can even think about what to say, there is only stillness in the night.
My heart races in my chest as I stare at the body before me. A perverse slice of moonbeam illuminates one of Rahul’s blood-filled eyes. His fingers, splayed, dip into the canal. The pen is still in his neck, his blood still rapidly draining.
Tentatively, I reach out. When nothing happens, I touch his collarbone, still warm against my cold touch. I trace a Y down his sternum. I imagine the edges of my palm as the slick slice of a scalpel.
I don’t think I can leave Rahul here, but I think I must. I have to wrestle the urge to collect him in my arms, to leave an imprint of a kiss—any memento for the day of my awakening.
Stained, dirtied, and sinful, I believe I have found something else to care about.