Brooklyn Zoo (38 page)

I ran into Scott on the sixth floor, and he stopped me. “I have some news I think you’ll like hearing,” he said. “I heard through the grapevine that you’re doing a great job on your family case.” He paused and waited for my appreciation. I’d been refusing to give it to him for so long (so strongly did I resent being asked to pretend that it was there). How much smoother my year might have been had I relented sooner. I smiled.

“Wow, that’s really nice to hear,” I said. It might’ve been, too, had I actually been seeing a family.

“I thought you’d want to know,” he said.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. As I kept smiling, I tried to figure out what might have gone down. Was this my good-humored family supervisor’s winking attempt to help me out with Scott? So separate was he from the G Building in his child and family clinic, would he have even known I needed the boost?

“How’s the paperwork going?” Scott asked. With just weeks to go, whatever outpatient notes we hadn’t been keeping up with during the year had to be attended to. In our free time the interns were now camped out in our office together, mildly nostalgic for each other and this mess of a place, hands cramping as we wrote vague near-paragraphs about sessions long since past.

“Good,” I told Scott. “I’m almost done.” I was.

Alisha would go home soon, or maybe there would be an operation. The former was problematic, as she was having trouble keeping her pain medication down, and without it she was writhing and miserable. As an outpatient, too, it was hard to afford the meds. She’d borrowed from a favorite teacher for them in the past, but they were two hundred dollars a month, and she couldn’t keep asking. Again I felt the heft of reality, this medium I couldn’t alter. Maybe Alisha could use a psychologist, but there was so much else she had to have first. The teacher came to visit and stopped me in the hallway.

“I feel bad for her, of course, but she’s really difficult,” the woman said in a low voice. “She lies. She’s manipulative.”

“Think of everything she needs and can’t get,” I said to her. “Manipulation is adaptive in her case. How else would a girl in her shoes get by?”

The teacher thanked me for the reminder and took a deep breath before entering the room.

The next time I saw Alisha she told me again about her pain and her doctors’ obfuscations, and I was empathetic and reflected how hard her struggle was. She told me she was glad to have me to talk to. Two days later I returned and she was gone. This was how treatments ended at hospitals, without the thoughtful summations and labored in-office good-byes I’d been taught to call termination. In all of these settings that in school had escaped me, there were rarely neat farewells.

Nicholas was leaving, too, before me. He was in physical therapy each day by then, not walking yet but making progress and recovered from his surgery. He would be transferred to a long-term rehab facility in uptown Manhattan, his mother housed in an apartment nearby. They were still talking about moving back west, but my patient had become
ambivalent, for from his hospital bed with his useless legs he’d managed to fall in love. She was a few years older, a friend of a friend. For a girl longing for a drug kingpin with the loyalty of a schoolboy, an outlaw with a newly acquired heart of gold, I guessed Nicholas was a rare find. At least carousing would be hard from an inpatient rehab, for the months he’d likely be there. The girl had asked Nicholas to be exclusive, and he’d eagerly agreed. “I don’t want to talk about anything dark today,” he told me at the start of our last visit. His face was lit with the elation of new love, more potent than the Seroquel. I wished him well.

As on inpatient, there was no evaluation at CL. Psychiatrists did not evaluate psychologists. I’d never been technically their student, not on paper, though like Dr. Begum and Dr. Winkler they’d been nice enough to take me in, like wolves might do for a human baby, bereft of its own species’ elders.

It was the end, and the import of evaluations had fallen away, and also a woman had died while waiting for admission to the psych ER, and everyone in Behavioral Health was wrapped up in it—another in a line of travesties for an already beleaguered staff. The Justice Department had been one thing, and now this was a whole other. The psychiatrist on call in the G Building ER in those early-morning hours had been fired immediately: the security camera had recorded him “kicking” the woman’s still body, though I knew, we all did, that he was only trying to safely rouse her. No matter that she had come in and refused a medical exam (at least I’d overheard that), it looked bad, and nothing was allowed to look bad without people losing their jobs, a cynical and long-standing PR campaign that addressed nothing, until “nothing” was finally all
that ever got addressed. “At least it wasn’t a resident on call,” Dr. Singer said in hushed tones to Dr. Cherkesov from his seat in the CL conference room two buildings away.

It was late June, and we were leaving the hospital in a worse place than even when we got there, and us personally in this better place, so close to being done with all that school.

On my last day at CL, a week before the official final day as an intern at Kings County Hospital, I thanked Dr. Kapoor and Dr. Singer and Dr. Cherkesov for having me, for all that they had helped me to learn. Dr. Cherkesov asked how my time on CL had gone, and I told her it had been a lot to take in, just like the rest of internship. She nodded with her usual solemn face and then spoke in the voice that always matched it: “You will look back on your experience and discover so much more than you are able to grasp now.”

IT WAS THE END, AND EVERYTHING HAD TO BE COUNTED
. How many patients we had seen and how many minutes we had spent with them and in what type of interaction. Psychologists are licensed by the state, and the best way the state could figure out to go about this was to quantify our training experiences, and to the minute. So I returned to CPEP in late June to look over the patient rosters from the month I’d spent there, hoping that I’d recall the names once I saw them so that I could copy them down to prove I’d put my time in. (Of course, we’d been advised at the beginning of the year to record the names and medical record numbers of all our patients, but things moved so quickly on most of the rotations, and none of us had done it. Now it was all over but the scrambling.)

I let myself into the psych ER with my skeleton key, and like moths to a flame my eyes rose to the familiar sign above its door: “If you don’t have a key, you DON’T belong here.” In
October, despite my key, I’d felt a certain kind of not belonging, one buttressed by my presumed shortcomings. Now I grasped the not belonging had origins also less particular to me, rooted in an institutional and ontological confusion and indifference. Both energized and worn down by this place that declared psychic problems medical ones and then sent me to go about some half-derided and under-supervised handling of them, I wouldn’t hesitate to turn in the key, the last vestige of my official business there. But I would do it with a true ambivalence.

It was early, before 10:00, and the ER was quiet and bruised after the scrutiny it had come under following the death there. Post–Justice Department, the physical space looked altered, too. Doors were clearly marked: “Pediatric Suite,” “Soiled Linens.” It appeared cleaner and better lit, and there were fewer patients aimlessly milling about, though maybe June was just a quieter month. The place felt different now, and I felt different in it. The dread that had gathered in my stomach each time I’d arrived to spend my day inside back in the fall—so strongly I’d tried to overlook it—was gone now. I’d grown more comfortable behind locked doors, only now so close to when I would be rid of them. I went to the nursing station, where a closed-circuit television system had been installed and miniature TV screens let viewers see the goings-on of each remote corner of the place. I looked out from behind the thick glass and saw Mr. Rumbert, whom I’d first met in the psych ER and then followed to G-51. The immaculate pajamas I’d last seen him in on the unit had been replaced by plain jeans and a dark T-shirt. He looked upset, pacing and muttering and holding his arms tightly to his sides. At least he wasn’t selectively mute. I walked out to greet him.
“Mr. Rumbert!” It was nice to see him but sad, too, as his very presence there could only mean things were not going well for him. He held still and looked at me.

“You ignored me before,” he said. He sounded hurt. I hadn’t seen him until just then, and I told him so. I tried to help calm him down, but after our initial greeting he just went back to his agitated pacing. The nurses on duty discussed giving him a sedative, less violent but slower acting than a shot. I hated to leave him like that, but I didn’t work in the psych ER anymore, and anyway wasn’t that always how it went?

I returned to my business. In a room in the back I’d rarely ventured into, I found a computer where old patient lists were saved as spreadsheets. I opened the documents dated each day I’d been there and scanned them. I’d been worried I wouldn’t remember, but then I did and vividly, not only the names of the people I’d known eight months earlier and sometimes for just a day or two, but also even their stories. Angel Kingston, right, whose hallucinations started after a beating she got picking her kid up from school. Cyrus Varner, so sure that his neighbors were spies, with him their weaselly target. They’d impressed themselves upon me, these people, like footsteps on a beach. Time would eventually wash the particulars away, but it would have to be more than had already passed.

Time blurred other experiences more quickly, but maybe, too, that was willful on my part, like barely noticing the bodily dread engendered by the locked wards. When Scott conducted my end-of-year review, he emphasized how much better I’d gotten in the time since our last talk. I’d stopped railing against the scant attention paid to my training, and I’d been making an accompanying effort to look more cheerful besides (the latter with some resentment that this was what it took to be deemed a tolerable trainee). When I told the other
interns about our meeting, they smiled and teased that finally I was reaping the rewards as opposed to the punishments of working under a boss with narcissistic tendencies: I was Scott’s student, so after spending the year with him, I could only now be markedly improved. I laughed, too, but also felt kinder toward him than that. I imagined his words were his way of apologizing for whatever role he’d played in my difficulties there and of letting me know that he forgave my transgressions, too. In the end we were just two people growing uneasily into our roles.

That last morning there was a graduation party on the sixth floor, and all the psychologists came. Dr. Wolfe and Dr. Pine. Dr. T. and Dr. Levine. Dr. Winkler and Dr. Singer even dropped by, but not Dr. Begum, who had finally given up on getting G-51 into shape and fled to a child unit in J. The doctors talked to us like colleagues, I thought, though only Tamar would actually become that. She’d gotten the forensics job, the one I hadn’t been interviewed for despite Dr. Wolfe’s efforts (“What went on over there?” he’d asked me a month or so back, nodding his chin in the direction of Scott’s office as I only shook my head). Scott and Dr. Reemer made speeches and gave us certificates of completion. Everyone applauded. The room had been decorated for the occasion, the streamers dangling from ceiling tiles only throwing into gross relief how unsuited for festivity the hard, rusted space actually was. I thought of the incoming intern class, who’d arrive to the streamers on Monday, full of envy for those of us who’d come—no, gone—before.

The interns would meet in Manhattan for celebratory drinks that night, but there was our individual business to be taken care of, and as always we went about that on our own. I finished late afternoon and knocked on Scott’s door. I handed
him my ID and my key, and we hugged because the moment required it, the embrace as necessary bookend. Caitlin came by and stood in the doorjamb, offering her own pale arms for a lukewarm pat. “Let us know what you’re up to,” she said as I moved down the hall.