I HAD LOST the three loves of my life: my son, my wife, and my job. I could never bring back my son. The Sarah who I knew was gone forever. Then there was my work in the ER. The one time I needed to lose myself in work and sublimate my pain, my work became my pain. I couldn’t go immediately back into St. Vincent’s. Not come within blocks. Some of the nurses and staffers cleared out the office for me. I never opened the boxes. I could not look at the pictures of Castor, and of Sarah and me. We stored the boxes in the apartment.
We had very little turnover in my ER among the nurses, the orderlies, the volunteers, and the security guards. It was a second home to many of us, where we laughed at the absurdities of life, shot the breeze about sports and movies and politics and family weirdness. Where trust was a necessity with illness and fear surrounding us. Trust enabled the entire staff to work with grace and calm during the immediacy of the ordeal and its aftermath, though a spare few spoke to the tabloids. Some, too haunted by the enormity of blood and death, moved to other hospitals or private practices, or left medicine altogether.
It was more than Hippocratic devotion, but for years I thrived on meeting thousands of people who passed through the ER, and unlike the TV hype, most did not have serious life-threatening illnesses. We acted with a cool determination and not with sweaty, soap operatics. The patients all had stories, faces, and languages, and they would fade in and out of the hospital. I would often feel a tinge of regret that I would not forge bonds with my patients. I reassured myself that most of my doctor friends in private practice had mostly superficial, one-time-a-year, let-me-review-your-chart relationships with their patients. Some patients I’m sure I would’ve loved talking to at length. Others would’ve been forgotten the second they left my office. I owned no burning desire to specialize in oncological evaluations, gastrointestinal investigations, or ventricle incisions. Instead, I got off on the immediate gratitude of the patients I helped.
After Castor’s murder, I didn’t want to hear their stories. Or for them to hear mine. I didn’t want to help anyone with tales of my sorrow while I felt so bathed in bitterness.
I had lost all faith in myself as a doctor. So had others.
Two days after the shivah, the Jewish period of mourning that we observed for three days, instead of the official seven, at Matt’s house, Ray Esperenza called. He’d never expected that his job would include managing a crisis this severe. He told me that the hospital was hiring a professional firm, which was fine with him. I thought this call was one of friendship.
“Neil, when are you … are you moving back to Chelsea?” Ray was a pretty effusive guy, and that is why he was so good at his job managing hospital egos, but his voice sounded detached.
“Don’t know, Ray, it’s too soon.” I wasn’t sure where we, or more precisely I, would be staying. Sarah’s and my impending separation was none of anyone’s business.
“OK, then, I’ll come up there.” Apparently, whatever he had to tell me couldn’t wait. I thought the hospital brass wanted to offer special gratitude for my work.
Ray arrived the next day with flowers in hand for Sarah. I took them into the kitchen and brought him a can of Coke. He looked ghastly; his shirt stained with sweat and it wasn’t that hot. He got straight to the point of his visit. “We all know what you did was valorous, damn heroic. But,” he sipped the Coke, “and I don’t agree, Neil,” he began to have trouble breathing, and he began crushing the still half-full can, “the board of directors thinks it’s in your best interest to take some time off. They mean a long time off.”
“They’re firing me?” If I hadn’t still been in shock, this would have sent me there.
“Not exactly, but yeah, dammit, they prefer that you don’t come back.”
“But I have a contr—” I didn’t finish my sentence. Ray, unable to look me in the eye, cupped his hands on his sagging jowls and told me any discussion was futile. I didn’t bother to ask why. I couldn’t take any more devastation.
They made an offer to pay the remaining three years of my salary if I agreed not to show up. Ever. I didn’t agree or disagree.
Matt and a lawyer friend of his stepped in to negotiate for me. They demanded that five years of salary be paid in full up front, and that I would be allowed to take another job. They also secured recommendations and a letter saying that to protect my reputation, it was my choice to move on. The hospital agreed to four years of salary. Matt and the hospital board and their lawyers saw potential lawsuits coming. Matt understood they would need me on their side. Even after Ray’s visit, I still naively thought the hospital settled because it was the right thing to do. Matt didn’t disabuse me of my notions until Skirpan’s family officially filed their suit. That payoff is why I didn’t “need” a job.
For the wrong reasons, Charlie had been right. I needed the embassy job when I first arrived in New Delhi. It served as a buffer between the world outside of me, and stopped me from languishing in the free fall of despair. After helping the Indian woman in the street, for the first time since before …, I felt worthwhile. The terrified grimaces of the couple and then their glints of hope broke the frieze of faces in the lost faith of my living death.
Perhaps, if Holika and I had not been together, I would’ve helped the woman and then let it pass by as another day in the formless, shapeless time that had become my life. During the night as Holika and I merged as one, filling the deep emptiness of longing within ourselves, the shield over an even darker and more protected wound deep inside me began to crack. No matter that she did not intend to make life, I felt life in me. And as we made love, slow and dreamy, her small, strong hands gripped my back pressing for my expanding cock, her praising voice, a luxurious whisper borne on the ancient breaths of the Kama Sutra, urged in the syncopation of breath and words, “Please touch me beyond my body,” and the images of Castor and Sarah, who I felt, saw—even waiting for the taste of Sarah when Holika and I first kissed—Sarah’s image inside my head as we began, faded and I inhaled and saw only Holika, and when my sperm exploded inside her as she came. The bad air flowed out of me as if I’d been holding my breath for six months. The immense release of the weight of my pain went from falling in on me to falling out, and although this floating above soiled memories didn’t last, couldn’t last yet, I felt the first lightness of a breath free from despair.
In those moments of lightness, I felt almost like the Neil Downs that I was the moment before I got The Call. It was time to make changes in my everyday Indian life. That meant—as much as trusting my emotions with Holika, for I was clueless where we were heading, if anywhere—finding more work.
All India Institute of Medical Services is the most famous hospital in Delhi. New Delhi Public Hospital is for the downtrodden with conditions ranging from atrocious to OK, where you are sent to die and have a damn good chance of doing so, even if you shouldn’t. Dr. Dillip Patel, who I’d never met although he’d worked at Long Island Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn for years before returning to India, was the medical superintendent of NDP, as everyone in Delhi commonly calls it. After more than a few phone calls, I got in touch with him.
He spoke with the abrupt irony of a long-term New Yorker, but also the cadences of a native-born Indian.
“Neil Downs? I know that name …”
Uh-oh.
“You used to work at St. Vincent’s? I am good friends with Casey Freed. I worked under her when I first came to America.”
“Really? Casey is a terrific surgeon.”
“Yes. Now what can I do for you. Is this about your pleasure or my business?”
I told him what I was thinking.
“Is a week from Wednesday at 7 o’clock a problem?”
“Not at all.” I’d hoped to go sooner, but couldn’t object.
“Get here early, take some time and look around first, and then,” I thought I heard him suppressing a laugh, “then we will talk.”