I had been seeing Doctor A for five years by that point. One day I had come in for my usual appointment to find him sitting on the reclining chair as if he had always been there. Nobody could tell me what had happened to my previous doctor. But Doctor A was my third one, and my favourite, if truth be told.
A doctor is a sort of mother, Doctor A told me during our first session, and I laughed because it was both absurd and true. That’s the kind of patient I’m going to be, just so you know, I told him.
Doctor A listened well, but was not afraid to speak. Sometimes I wished he were more afraid to speak. It’s good for you, he said. It’s good for you to hear the things you don’t want to hear. He filled vials with my blood for mysterious purposes and observed the fluctuations of my weight and blood pressure. He nodded and gave me prescriptions written on yellow paper that I sometimes filled and sometimes crumpled into a ball and pressed down in the bins of the clinic bathroom, underneath used tissues, depending on how I was feeling that day. Occasionally I asked for specific pills but he always refused and said, Nice try! If you wanted something you had to go the circuitous route. Inventing symptoms, trying to trick him.
Oh, you want the green ones, he would say, tapping his pen on his notepad in a way that transfixed me. He had very beautiful hands, though I tried not to notice how beautiful they were. I didn’t like to examine those kinds of feelings too much, but I was reminded when he came close to me or when he looked good that some women had sex with their doctors in order to obtain a positive report, or just because the transference was no longer resistible. Transference was seductive, I had to admit, though I had never slept with my doctor, and was proud of it.
Mostly, though, I did not think much about Doctor A. He was just part of my routine, like morning laps around the green in the centre of our houses, neatly cutting up the slower runners. The other women and I wore similar nylon shorts, our lockets hitting exactly where our ribs shielded our hearts. Hello, we said sometimes, but more often we were silent. We lived outside the heart of the city, bounded by looped roads. It had been hard to sleep because of the traffic when I first moved, but now I needed the sound of it, the windows open wide to the white noise.
Following each run I made the longish walk to the laboratory where I worked, my lab coat in a nylon rucksack. There was a comfort in knowing I was moving towards a place of total predictability. As I walked I smoked exactly two cigarettes and drank coffee from a white ceramic flask. My nails were bitten to the quick and I could not wear nail varnish due to my work. The further I got into the city the more people joined me, men and women walking ahead or behind, smoking their own cigarettes and drinking from their own flasks. I stopped outside the lab to stub the second cigarette out on to a stone wall and tie my hair back. Looped elastic once, twice. You don’t have to go in, I started saying to myself, kindly, but of course I always went in.