Strange Doctor

She was doing what she could despite the ambient weirdness.

A student approached her and asked, “So, like, Miss Peata? Is it okay if I call you that? I don’t want to seem all, like, passive aggressive or whatever… so like, what if the main character is like, just drunk or whatever? Would that, like, be a good answer on the quiz?”

Ciara searched for a coherent thought to which she might respond.

“Thank you for your question. I admire your interest in the material and your desire to do it some justice when you write about it. We can infer that the protagonist is inebriated—he could very well be in that state, though he doesn’t deem the matter worthy of serious discussion in the text—but he is also confronted by a new way of seeing. Recall our discussion about language. It's inadequate to complete many tasks, but oddly useful when representing that very inadequacy. What do you make of that as a possible theme of ‘Cathedral’?”

Ciara was much less interesting than the student’s phone. She could have responded in Finnish or Portuguese and elicited the same response.

“Okay, so like, I can call you that without offending you?”

Three things were important to her students: giving offense, taking offense, and their grades. The second bore on the third.

“Yes, though that title is a bit outmoded—old fashioned—and you are quite free to call me Ciara. I’m about to defend my dissertation, so then I’ll become safer and happier and insist upon being called Doctor for a while.”

The student looked nauseated or constipated. Their eyes rolled.

“Okay, so like the protagonist isn’t just drunk? Like, I’m wrong, or whatever?”

Most of her other students had packed up as soon as she stopped speaking. She was making notes on the board to direct them to salient passages and remind them of the impending quiz but they had various devices to wrangle. Each had a laptop and a phone and various other items to juggle while groping for some sense of what was next and how awful it would be.

She smiled at the student. Her eyebrows called her smile a fraud.

“Oh, I’m not suggesting that you were wrong, per se. The protagonist may very well be under the influence. Do you think there might be more going on as well? His blind friend has invited him to participate in this strange, charming ritual. That experience changes him, no?”

“Like, I guess. But what’s the point of that?”

“I’m not sure there is only one point. We can talk about that too, if you like. Think about that exercise: trying to draw for and with a blind man. It's uncomfortable and disorienting at first but an epiphany of sorts is the result. The protagonist understands himself and the world differently in the end, doesn't he?”

Dangling from the student’s bag was a copy of the anthology Ciara assigned to the various sections of this course that she taught each term. The title of the book swam before her. It became the title of one of the books she fantasized about publishing once this job was behind her: The Use and Abuse of Relatable: A Love Story. There was a beautiful blurb on the dust jacket by Zizek or Judith Butler. The title was bone white—Book Antiqua?--against an inky field. The volume’s many pages smelled like affluent respect and hope. Then the fantasy dissolved and the bland, familiar title was gaping at her along with the student.

“What I hope you understand is that we can interpret this narrative in various, though by no means infinite, ways. Reading it in the larger context of Carver’s oeuvre, we see ordinary people facing normal, difficult lives. He often allows us to see those lives from a novel perspective by the time his representation of them is complete. When you look at something familiar from a fresh vantage point, what happens to you?”

That had offended the student.

“I’m not comfortable sharing that.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I respect your decision to keep that to yourself.”

The student’s shoulders relaxed. Their breathing slowed, and the urgent flight response enjoyed a break. Ciara exhaled.

“Will that question be, like, on the quiz?”

“Oh no, it won’t. But the answer could be important, in terms of its effect on our conversation about the narrative in question. What you think about this story matters.”

“Oh okay. Thanks, Miss Peata!” Blue light painted the student’s face as their eyes returned home to the screen. They were gone.

Ciara wondered if that exchange would result in an anonymous immolation online or a serrated course evaluation. Reviewing her remarks and the student’s various reactions, she felt pretty safe for the moment.

Collecting her things, she saw a note on a desk in the third row. Notes of any kind, on paper, written in legible cursive, were as rare as raises in her life. She peered at it: “This sucks. Why can’t we just do this online or whatever?”

She closed her eyes. The cover of her book appeared in the gloomy theater of her imagination. She counted her breaths: one, two, three. Her N95 was in her bag. She seldom wore it these days, though mixing with crowds made her nervous. She opened her eyes, pulled on the mask and made her way out of the classroom and toward the pedway.

Ciara was especially fond of a study space above the pool. The aroma of chlorine and the chorus of splashes and conversation were familiar. They reminded her of the pool in Bracebridge, Ontario, where she had learned to swim. She had come to Alberta to complete her PhD, at Lougheed University. It was just across the river from her current workplace. She recalled a sandy-haired, sinewy boy named Dwayne (Muskoka was teeming with Dwaynes in the early ‘80s) with dangerous, green eyes who was in one of her swim classes. She had been fourteen or fifteen when their mouth-to-mouth resuscitation drill made it mandatory to put her mouth on his. Orange juice and toothpaste had argued over his breath. It was not a kiss, per se, but she had never forgotten it. The smell of the pool brought back that frisson of confused, naughty excitement.

She found a table and set up her laptop. The first draft of her dissertation was due in seven weeks. Her supervisor was not pleased with her progress. Dr. Chidah was fluent in eight languages—one of which he had invented after losing a bet, if the department secretary was credible. He appeared to have read every work of literature twice and had notoriously illegible handwriting. Rumor had it that he had learned to write in code during a stint with Israeli intelligence and decided to do so for the rest of his life. After reading the initial version of her second chapter, he had scrawled a single comment on it that she eventually deciphered: “This will not do.”

She savored the smell of chlorinated water for a moment. Opening the relevant file, she scanned the last complete line and touched the keyboard. What had Gadamer been on about in Part II, Chapter II of Truth & Method again? One of the dirtiest words in the contemporary lexicon was prejudice. Gadamer had the audacity to argue that prejudices shape understanding.

She realized that she hadn’t had anything resembling a good cup of coffee in several hours. She typed CAFFEINE at the end of her last line and clicked save. There was a Tim Horton’s only a few steps from the study area.

The screen froze. Ciara knew that her laptop was aging. Generally, a few seconds of patience would yield the desired result. A child laughed in the pool below her, seemingly at her expense.

Her inky reflection was staring back at her from the screen. The computer was not paralyzed: it appeared to be dead. Her panicking fingers wrestled the power cord out of her bag. She found an outlet and plugged it in. Shadows moved across the silent screen. Shit.

Her phone was in her hand and her fear had dialed Izzy before she could stop it.

“Hey,” Izzy said. She sounded foggy and distracted.

“I’m having a tech crisis. Do you know how to resurrect a dead laptop?”

“What? No, but Pocán is supposed to be some kind of tech sorcerer. Do you know him?”

Pocán had been a sessional in the English Department for about a century. Ciara and Izzy shared a cramped office only a few doors down the hall from his lair. Ciara had never crossed paths with him and was glad of it—departmental gossip, of which there was a constant flood, had it that he was a creep.

“No. Do you think he can help?”

Izzy was eating something. Ciara’s stomach writhed. She resented her roommate and her computer with furious intensity.

“Sure. He only teaches at night; he should be in his office now. Go!”

Ciara hung up, put her laptop into her bag and ran toward the pedway.

II

His office door was ajar. She swept her fingers through her hair, bit her lip and knocked.

“Dubrule?” he asked from inside—he was expecting some baffled student seeking help with an essay. She gave the door a gentle push and stepped inside.

“Um, no…Dr. Pocán? I’m sorry to bother you—I’m Ciara Peata, from 6-229 D, down the hall. I’m having trouble with my laptop. Would you have a look at it?” She tried to summon her sunniest smile.

His office contained two worlds: the desk next to his looked pristine, uninhabited save for a computer and a phone. Covering Pocán’s desk were what looked like the ruins of a medieval library. Papers and books and the wreckage of his lunch were battling over a tiny grey vacancy behind him.

“What’s the trouble?” he sounded annoyed. He was bald, bearded and paunchy. His shirt and trousers were drab, his boots neglected and forlorn. He peered at her through smudged trifocals and scratched his maniacal beard.

“I don’t know—I was typing along and it died. My dissertation could be gone for good and that would mean I am too.” She grimaced, pulling out the laptop and handing it to him.

He flipped the laptop and placed it on his neighbor’s arid desk. His broad, hairy left hand trembled. He smelled like cigarettes and despair. A flake of dandruff drifted onto his shoulder.

“Leave it with me; what’s your file called?”

“goldenball3—I’m writing about Yeats via Gadamer and Dilthey.”

He grunted with what might have been approval. “Are you one of Chidah’s disciples? He’ll make you feel illiterate, most of the time.”

She laughed. “That’s right! Is there anything I can do to repay you? If you can rescue my work I’ll sing and dance, or do some grading, or…” She was not interested in spending more time with this odd creature but she needed that file. Now.

He looked intently at a point about a foot from her left shoulder. She wondered if this was a technique designed to rebuff charges that he stared at students. She waited, leaning against the door.

“I have an idea that will strike you as strange.” He swiveled his chair and began burrowing into the chaos on his desk. He extracted a phone and jabbed the screen to life, then scrolled his way to something that made him wince.

“Look at this.” He handed her the phone. She examined the screen:

MOTHER: IAN, I HAVE COME TO A DECISION. I THINK YOU ARE THE SORT OF PERSON ONLY I CAN LOVE.

Ciara gasped. She felt submerged, cold. What mother would write such things? Even if she was right, should she have spelled it out—for her son?

“She sent me that at the height of the third COVID wave. I was teaching 5, 46 student sections online. Galleries of Zoom ghosts mocked or ignored me all day. I was giving serious thought to snuffing this brief, fat candle altogether. That message almost nudged me over the brink, save for one thing: I’d like to prove her wrong.” He smiled through the tangled beard. She wished he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry.” She actually was. “Are you Irish?”

“Aren’t we?” His query sounded like an accusation and was too quick for her liking.

“Uh, yes, I suppose.”

“Do you know what Dr. Chidah says about the Irish?”

She shook her head. She was sure there was something moving in the rubble on his desk.

“’The Irish are equal parts cruelty and sentimentality!’ We were reading Dubliners; ‘The Boarding House,’ I believe. He was on to something, as that warm maternal intervention confirms.”

Ciara thought of her grandmother, Mary. Whenever she and Mary met, the first words out of the mean old matriarch’s mouth were always the same: “Your outfit needs ironing.” She nodded at Pocán.

“How can you prove her wrong?” she asked.

“She never stops complaining about my aversion to being photographed. Mine’s a face for radio and I know it. What I have in mind is a triptych of images: three photographs that will persuade her that I am seeing someone in a serious way. It would be a complete hoax, of course.” He took off his glasses, pulled out the tail of his shirt and began to scrub the lenses with it. His hand trembled again.

Nausea slithered through Ciara at the thought of even pretending to be interested in this poor toad. What sort of pretentious twit uses the word “triptych” in ordinary conversation? She had to have that bloody file right away, though. It was merely a weird trick, played on someone who did seem nasty.

“Look, nothing at all would come of this—I mean, I can’t remember the last time I even thought about anything other than teaching and writing.”

He laughed. “Of course! Between the plague and the internet, ours is a golden age of lonely onanism. Anyway, it would be three snaps—a dinner or two and the illusion of romance and you’ll be safe as houses. I can sort this thing out!” he pointed at her laptop.

Exhausted, she wanted to get away from whatever was lurking under the mess on his desk. “Fair enough,” she said. She tapped her number into his phone and handed it back to him. “Please let me know the moment you’ve got it sorted and we’ll work something out. Thank you, Dr. Pocán…I’m sorry we met this way but I appreciate your help.” She inched toward the door. A janitor was mopping the floor outside, mumbling to himself in what could have been Farsi. She hoped he was casting a broad spell of protection.

“No trouble, Ciara. I’ll let you know when I’m through.” He winked in a way that made her regret this arrangement and swiveled back toward the bookish bedlam. She slipped into the corridor and ran for Izzy.

III

“He’s eight kinds of weird!”

Ciara had ridden the LRT home--a macabre adventure since the pandemic had erupted. Grizzly stabbings, thefts and wanton drug use had become routine. She had no recourse: she had never driven due to her poor vision, and taxis and ubers were beyond her modest means. Tenured faculty could afford such luxuries. She and Izzy scrambled to muster rent and groceries, especially given stratospheric inflation. Arriving home to discover Izzy devouring Chinese takeout, she had reconsidered her atheism.

“He tore it up across the river when he was in grad school,” Izzy managed to get the observation through a large mouthful of eggroll. “From what I’ve heard, he had some kind of affair with a tenured colleague for which the local puritans never forgave him. They’re not supposed to get involved with peasants like us. He asks students direct questions in class, too! The Ratemyprofessor hate is real.” She laughed, but it was clear that she did so with a modicum of sympathy for the poor fellow.

“Can he find my file?” Ciara anointed her eggroll with plum sauce.

“Absolutely!” Izzy sprawled on the futon that served as both her bed and their couch. “The question is: do you want to go through with this creepy game of his?” Her tone was playful but Ciara could see real concern in her dark eyes.

“I don’t know… his mother does sound harsh, and I know what that’s like. The idea of messing with her head is appealing, but if he gets the wrong idea, I’ll pepper spray his dandruff covered ass. Have you seen his desk?!?”

Izzy smirked. “There’s a desk under there?! My supervisor is the same way. She argues that an empty desk reflects an empty mind. He must be some sort of genius, or a complete nut.”

Ciara’s phone began to sing. She glanced at the screen:

IAN: OLD NERD TO THE RESCUE! I REHABILITATED YOUR LAPTOP AND FOUND YOUR FILE!

ARE YOU TERRIBLY BUSY AT THE MOMENT?

She turned the phone toward Izzy, her face decorated with incredulous shock.

“Text him back!” Izzy was galvanized. “I’m here. You can get your computer and the diss back, and if he misbehaves, I’ll lift his scrotum up over his head!” She leapt up on the futon and flexed formidably.

CIARA: OMG! HOW DID YOU GET THE FUCKER WORKING AGAIN? THANK YOU SO MUCH! IZZY AND I ARE HAVING CHINESE. WE’RE AT GARNEAU TOWERS, APARTMENT 1104.

IAN: GARNEAU TOWERS! I HAVE TERRIBLE MEMORIES OF THAT PLACE. ARE YOU ENJOYING THE ANTIQUE PLUMBING AND THE BEDBUGS?

CIARA: LOL. IT’S CHEAP AND CLOSE TO CAMPUS AND THE LRT. OURS IS NOT TO WONDER WHY, OURS IS BUT TO STUDY, TEACH AND DIE.

IAN: BLEAK TRUTHS. BE THERE SOON.

“He’s on his way. I wonder who did the dance without pants with him?!? I can’t imagine getting that close. He smells like the charred remains of a dive bar.”

Izzy cackled. “I don’t know; he had hair then, I guess, and they say he was wicked clever in class. How did he seem in his office? Did it get awkward?”

“Not really, but he’s odd. He’s a washed-up, middle-aged man who dislikes his mother.”

Izzy sighed. “Could he be sad because he’s a stale trope with a pulse?” Izzy winked at her and started sorting the remainder of their feast in anticipation of a third party. She was a stickler for style, working on a dissertation about the work of the recently departed Martin Amis.

Ciara looked out at the blinking geometry of the drowsy city. She felt secure with Izzy, and it was astonishing that Pocán had rescued her work. This could actually be fun, as long as it remained a prank. Of course, there would be gossip, rumor, speculation…

The buzzer made them both freeze. “Listen Izzy, is this a terrible idea? I don’t want to abet a creep, and if he thinks I owe him anything but gratitude, I’ll report him to anyone who will listen!”

Izzy gripped Ciara’s shoulders. “I am not going to take any shit and neither will you. He did you a solid and Chidah will fit you for cement galoshes and throw you in the river if you don’t have a draft ready soon. Don’t freak out. It’s fine. We’re furies!” She bared her teeth menacingly and Ciara giggled. Izzy had made her feel rich in the midst of want for years.

Ciara touched the button to let him in. He knocked a few minutes later.

When she opened the door the scent of melancholy and tobacco made her step back from the entrance. He looked a bit green in the stern fluorescent light of the hallway. He held out her laptop.

“Thank you, Ian!” Ciara gestured for him to enter and Izzy approached, extending her hand.

“Izzy?” He shook her hand, though Ciara noticed that his hand trembled as he did so.

Izzy was not timid. “I’m glad you were there to help Ciara. Are you alright?”

He deflated, lowering his gaze. “MS” he said with rancor, as though uttering a curse. “I was diagnosed during the pandemic. I asked the neurologist if prolonged exposure to abject stupidity could be the cause. He told me that if that were so, every doctor in Alberta would have MS.”

Izzy laughed but gave Ciara a worried look. Ciara put her laptop in her bedroom and invited Ian to sit down. She put a plate in front of him and spooned some beef with broccoli and an eggroll onto it. Izzy poured water for the three of them. “How did you get her computer working?”

Ian took a bite of his eggroll and brushed crumbs from his beard. “It wasn’t hard. I took some computer science as an undergrad and worked for IT in the spring and summer for a couple of years. We forget that human beings write the code and solder the circuit boards. They’re just tools.”

Izzy drank deeply. “Tools that are busy generating terrible prose. How many of the papers you read this semester were written by ChatGPT?”

Ian sighed. “Too many. All of that Elon Musk, singularity nonsense aside, ChatGPT is an abominable, automated plagiarist. COVID pulverized PSE. They pretend to read and let robots write their papers, and we swim oceans of nonsense for peanuts.” He selected a plump floret of broccoli and chewed, scanning their small apartment and the view of the metropolitan night.

“Why am I panicking about my dissertation, then?” Ciara rubbed her temples and frowned. “If it’s all a charade and tenured jobs are as rare as MENSA members at a rodeo, why bother?”

“Charades!” Izzy’s eyes brimmed with mischief. “Ciara told me about your mother’s message. I’m pissed off for you. Do you want me to take a photo of you two?” She stood and extended her hand toward Ian; he surrendered his phone.

“I’m glad Ciara told you. I know it sounds silly, but I've survived the plague and MS and all sorts of nonsense at the U. I'm worthy of more kinds of love than the merely maternal, for pity's sake.”

Ciara sat next to Ian and picked up the last eggroll. “It’s a stupid cliché, but what if we Lady & The Tramp this sucker? Do you think that will intrigue her?”

Ian beamed. “Are you serious? I mean, the last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable. Something more polite would be fine if you like.” Ciara turned to study Izzy’s reaction. Izzy’s gaze found her friend’s right away.

Ian chuckled, “You two have lived together for quite a while, eh? That was a classic spousal swivel if I’ve ever seen one.” He sipped water from a jittery glass.

“The fuck’s a ‘spousal swivel’?!” Indignation flickered in Izzy’s eyes. She squared her shoulders and seemed ready to punch their twitchy guest in the neck.

“I’m sorry,” said Ian, uttering the holiest phrase in the Canadian liturgy. “Watch the other humans who spend significant time together. Say something provocative and you’ll see: they search for each other’s eyes to assess what’s been said. Their reactions mold each other. It’s sort of lovely.”

Ciara was surprised to sense something thawing inside her when he made that remark. Izzy relaxed.

“That settles it. Fraud time!” She laughed and put one end of the eggroll in her mouth. Izzy considered them through the phone.

Ian turned to her. That amphibious sheen had faded in the softer light of their flat. He took the other end of the eggroll between his teeth, holding his beard away from his mouth with an unsteady hand. Izzy took their picture.

“It’s silly, but I appreciate it.” He began to clean his glasses as he had in his office. Ciara dropped the eggroll on her plate and wiped her mouth. “It’s nothing, and you saved my ass. Do you think two more will do it?”

Standing and straightening his coat, Ian nodded. “You must think I’m nuts, but yes. Let me get you both some sushi tomorrow night at Mikado before I teach, and we can polish off act two.” He turned to leave.

“Let us know what she says!” Izzy’s enthusiasm washed any weirdness out of the moment.

“Will do, once I have three to send her. I want to make a good case.” Ciara thanked him again and he left.

The three of them met for sushi the following evening. They staged another amorous tableau, sharing food and gazing into one another’s eyes through the miso steam. Their acclaim for Izzy's skill as a photographer made her voluble. “It’s strange walking around Edmonton without a mask after three years. I’d forgotten how awful parts of this city smell!”

“It’s not so bad,” Ciara was scrolling through Ian’s phone to choose the best image. “The espresso machine at The Dean’s Beans in Building Five smells like tenure. I mark at the closest table and bask.”

Ian grinned. “I read some of your dissertation on the bus. How wedded to Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach are you?” A bit of rice was surfing through his beard as he spoke. Ciara felt disgust soften into fondness as it bobbed.

“He’s right about the relationship between the work and the reader. Texts aren’t complete until the work of interpretation begins. Art wants us to finish it.” She snared the last morsel of sushi from the plate and gobbled it up to punctuate her thought.

“See? Your dissertation won’t be complete until Chidah pans it!” Izzy squeezed Ciara’s arm. “By the way, I’ve got that talk tomorrow night, so you two are on your own for act three.”

Ciara clenched. She looked at Ian. His beard still contained passengers and his hand curled in his lap like a dead salmon. She wasn’t sure she could do this alone.

“I could bring some pizza to your place. We’ll make quick work of it, don’t worry. Then I’ll see what Mother makes of our ruse!” His grin was feral, anticipating dessert. Ciara shuddered.

“I have a swarm of papers to grade,” she did not need to feign revulsion. “Text me tomorrow and I’ll let you know how it’s going.” They walked back to campus together. Ciara monitored Ian’s slight limp with alarm.

IAN: HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT STUDENTS ROUTINELY PREFACE REMARKS WITH, ‘TO BE HONEST,’ OR "I CAN’T LIE"? DOESN’T THAT IMPLY THAT THE DEFAULT SETTING IS LYING OR BULLSHITTING?

CIARA: I’M ALMOST THROUGH WITH THESE PAPERS. WHY WOULD ANYONE WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING THEY HAVEN’T READ?

IAN: I ONCE ASKED A COLLEAGUE IF HE HAD READ BECKETT’S “WAITING FOR GODOT.” “READ IT?’ HE REPLIED, “I’VE ONLY TAUGHT IT TWICE.” FRAUD IS EVERYWHERE.

CIARA: HELP. BRING FOOD.

IAN: DONE. 7?

CIARA: YES PLEASE.

Something about that exchange dissolved her doubts. When he turned up, his beard was immaculate. He was redolent of sandalwood instead of sorrow and nicotine. His shirt was blue silk and his trousers pressed. He had pizza and a bottle of wine. It was like seeing Trump win a spelling bee. He waved to the Uber as it drove away.

“I splurged. That’s Henry,” he said. “I taught him four or five years ago across the river. He recognized me as soon as I clambered into the car."

“It was quite a conversation: ‘To be honest—they shared a spousal swivel when he uttered that phrase--Dr. Pocán, I hated your class. I was reading Don Quixote again, though, and it started to make some sense. It's better to imagine another, better world instead of accepting this one. Even if this one takes you out in the end.’ He might have been shining me on, but I have hope.”

“I can’t lie. You look smart.” she said.

The pizza and the wine worked their wonders. They sluiced away some of the pain of thinking through writing to which no thought had been given. His hand was steady as he poured her another glass. He followed her appraising gaze. “The meds are finally taking effect,” he said with a smile.

“Act III,” she whispered it into her glass and pointed to her room. “Let’s pretend to be in bed together. That’ll blow her skirt up!” They climbed into her bed together. She pulled the duvet up to their necks and they grinned into his phone. “Let’s stop pretending,” she said. And they did.