Work Text:
‘This will improve our understanding of adiposity and sarcopenia in this population, help identify thresholds predictive of metabolic risk, and ultimately prevent or ameliorate… ’
Better prevent than ameliorate.
‘...ameliorate the long-term impacts on health and…’
Twenty five years should be long enough.
Hers is a singsong voice, the warm, trilling kind. Mellow sun dances on the frills of her dress. The yellow one.
The man at her side twirls her on the empty curb. Dips and kisses her. Her laughter is all that is pure and golden.
A child follows them. Embarrassed. She bends down to kiss him, and he is furious.
The scene shifts.
The child is on the front porch, eyes set somewhere beyond the wild bergamot bushes.
Tear tracks on pink cheeks mingle and dry with dust from his afternoon’s exploits. Something like a steely resolve troops in his eyes.
Ethan Ramsey has been staring at the same sentence for fifteen minutes now.
Whoever coined the term ‘nostalgia’ from the Homeric nostos and algos was speaking of anguish caused by an inability to return. But they failed to discern the inevitable tethering of reminiscence with habituality.
That is more or less the case with him. Louise Ramsey walked out on her husband, and eleven year old son some twenty five years ago right before his birthday. For a very long time now, home is not about apple crisps or kitchen gardens.
About this time every year, a crevice in his mind he likes to call the amygdala dwells on the same days.
Almost as a ritual.
He is a scientist. A rationalist. And like every year, he reminds himself there is work to do.
Unless there’s a knock at the most unpleasant hour.
He never returns to the article. Never manages a come in. The distraction walks in, messy hair knotted with a pencil. Probably because she has lost another hair tie.
He mustn’t be that aware. She talks too much.
‘Dr. Mukherjee.’ He sounds gruff. They’re supposed to be redrawing their boundaries, even if he is the only one making an effort. ‘I thought your shift ended-’
‘Two hours ago.’ Rigours of a sixteen hour shift mark her visage. Her smile is a little too conniving for his comfort. ‘I had work afterwards.’
She starts shuffling papers on his desk, permission be damned. He pinches the bridge of his nose, and manages an exasperated sigh. Since when have interns started walking into his office with… birthday cakes?
‘What do you think you’re- It’s not my-’
‘I heard rumours that Dr. Ramsey had to cancel a date.’ She sounds amused. He does not miss the split second glance she shoots his way before continuing. ‘On his birthday, too. Such a shame.’
He scoffs.
‘No one knows it’s my birthday.’
‘Oh, they do. They’re just too afraid to… ah, invoke the wrath of Dr. Ramsey.’
Of course, she is not one of them. She has absolutely no regard for the immutable drill he has observed for nearly four decades. And why must she, when her sole intent is to swivel the rusty axis of his life.
Ethan has never known the first shower of an Indian monsoon. It is sudden and torrential, just as it is feared and revered. It smells like summer, and mango blossoms.
Ethan has never known one until this year.
‘I’m thirty seven, Rookie,’ He manages weakly.
‘And I would’ve bought the candles accordingly if I knew that.’
The tealights she arranges look so much better, he thinks. The cake is a simple blue and white affair. Not the ones that have more icing than cake, he notes. Not the ones he disapproves of.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Terminator
‘I could’ve whipped something up without sugar,’ She rambles, suddenly starting to blush. ‘Or ordered one. But I only just came to know it’s your birthday. And there wasn’t a lot of-
‘Thank you, Apu.’ Tresses of warmth curl about his chest and the gravel of his voice.
Ethan has avoided birthday cakes for a decade now. Unless it’s Naveen’s birthday, he thinks with a pang.
In his time with Harper or his brief involvements in med-school, no one has ever convinced him to do birthdays. He checks himself. This is just an intern being kind.
But interns aren't kind to Dr. Ramsey, are they.
She assures him the photos are not for social media. They settle on the couch, it’s his first birthday cake in over a decade.
He is glad for an innocuous reason to look at her, laugh at jokes that in any other company would draw his scorn. She is oddly comforting. Unlike most interns who avoid his office at all costs, she moves about it as if she was meant to be here all along.
He must have stalled birthdays worth twenty years only to spend it on a couch with her.
The plates are disposable. It is nothing like the restaurants that come with his status, for there is an endearing simplicity about it.
It almost feels like… home.
He steals occasional glances at her. It has been four agonisingly long days after their return from Miami. And for all his attempts to redraw their boundaries, it has been a non-return of sorts.
Aparna drives him to distraction, flouts each and every one of his rules. Seeks him out in supply closets and muddled dreams. And every time he breaks her heart a little more, he finds himself floundering in his own squalor.
The German counterpart to the English ‘nostalgia’ is ‘sehnsucht’. Like ‘nostalgia’, it has the charm of what has been. But unlike it, it also has the enigma of what has never been. Miami will remain the swansong to an ideal that slipped through Ethan’s fingers.
A surge of anguish ripples through him as he realises all of this is his for the asking, and he will have none of it.
‘It wasn’t a date,’ He blurts out.
He wouldn’t tell her that if he wants her to move on. Not truly.
‘You don’t have to-’
‘She is Declan’s associate in Panacea. She suggested signing the contract with the Diagnostics Team over dinner tonight. So… just business.’
Claudette Wilson is the most promising young face of Panacea, and Ethan needed less than a minute to know why.
Sleek, dark hair styled at her nape played up her high cheekbones. The ruby of her pliant lips, almost risque for a meeting such as this, always lingered a little longer on the rim of her coffee mug. Even the measured spoons of her laughter came with an all too enticing lilt.
Ethan has met the other type. Vacuous and synthetic. But the steely glint in her eyes came with a weighty intelligence. An unfaltering wit. And when a perfectly manicured hand brushed the contours of his cuff, he knew it was never meant to be just business.
She was irresistible. And so was he.
That afternoon, the bitterness in his mouth had nothing to do with coffee. He learnt he would refuse Claudette even if her paychecks did not come from Panacea.
Aparna falls silent, almost as if discerning in his words everything he left unsaid.
They have run out of jokes and topics for a harmless chat. He is getting terribly comfortable with her again, he realises alarmed. And she is fidgeting with the ring on her finger.
She’s nervous too. He knows. He could define every twitch and turn of those fingers.
Somewhere in their conversation they have edged so close that her knee juts into his thigh. The couch is surprisingly small for two people. Minutes pass, and despite himself, he does not want her to leave.
His fingers rest on her flustered hands, it’s a deep-rooted reflex. Looking down, she weaves his hand in both of her own. Even as the adrenaline surging in his blood incites him to flee, the delirious part of him emerges stronger and more naive.
He thinks she is leaning in. Soaking up the mayhem in his eyes. The slight movement causes wisps of errant hair to slip from the messy bun. There’s new growth around her brows, a faded scar on her forehead. But it’s her eyes that still hold sway over him.
They stroked him with a strange, silent awe on a balcony on the shores of the Atlantic.
She is nothing like interns that hover around him year after year. Sucking up for recommendations, sometimes more. She can devour him, and just as easily cast him aside without batting an eye.
And yet she is here. Snuggled in his office while her friends call it a night with cheap beer and rowdy escapades.
But she is different tonight. The quiver in her eyes tentative, even wary.
His hand rises of its own accord, tucking strands of hair behind her ear. Inadvertently, it brushes her face, lingers a little longer against her cheek.
She caressed his face as the ocean crashed around his being. It was like falling from the top of a precipice. Tumbling into the amorphous, a terrifying weightlessness. He waited.
‘It’s getting late.’
She smells like the hospital, muted shades of honeysuckle, and like herself.
The cool breeze hummed a steady rhyme against the tumble of her midnight blue dress. Bits of the moon bounced off the dark curtain of her hair, plunging into her eyes. Ethan had never seen such fathomless eyes.
‘I should go.’ She leans into his palm, eyes fluttering close.
‘You should.’
And then she caught him. It was the hollow of her neck. It was soft. Like the rest of her.
Neither of them move today, silently imploring the other to charge. Or retreat. The battle drum in his chest is a dull ache. Throbbing and unconsolable.
The ridges of her collarbone bore traces of his ruin. Traces she covered every morning and stripped every night, like the rites of a godless liturgy.
His free hand is still laced in hers, the other drawing her face nearer.
Her lips are inches from his own as he draws a languid finger across them. Her warm breath spills on his lips, warring and mingling with his own ragged ones.
Her mouth was stained with wine. Numbing and inciting. He was battered, and bruised. Marooned at her side. And she was warm. So warm.
His hand traced the pummeling of her heart, kneading the softness of her chest. Her tongue jousted with his own as the ocean lapped at its shore. Tireless and persevering.
She was wild. Like her Gangetic nor’westers on a sultry afternoon. He was bewitched. She was doing something good to him.
Suddenly the air around them is ripped by the sound of his phone.
It’s his father.
The two of them recoil to their own spaces, Ethan horrified that he let himself stray so far yet again. Silencing the still erring device, he faces Aparna bracing for another apology.
‘I know.’ She looks back with a placid smile, all traces of vulnerability gone. He is vaguely aware of the gentle pressure on the hand still clasped in her own.
‘Happy Birthday, Ethan. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She is gone before he can marshal his thoughts.
Ethan flops back into the couch, shivering and alone. The incandescent glow from the solitary lamp drenches the office in a soft, ethereal haze. She might not have been here at all but for the little things she scatters around him every time she forays into his life.
Today she leaves with him a caesura . It thwarts the cadence of a life he has been putting together since Miami.
After a minute, or perhaps a staggering nightmare, when he rises to pack the rest of the cake, he sees it.
She must have forgotten her hair tie was in her pocket after all.
It stares up at him from the floor, the silken, mute witness of his transgression. He gingerly picks it up, and turns it in his hand as though it houses some ancient sorcery.
Laying it on his desk, he considers texting her. But scarcely does he scroll down to her name when he stops himself. And pockets it.
Somewhere in the Atlantic, waves still crash upon the rocks, moistening, but never quite lingering.
The waves are relentless. Some day, the rocks crumble into fine sand.