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“Those are pretty bad for you, you know.”
It’s an easy in, and out here on the rooftop of the hospital, Samira isn’t always afforded such graces. Sometimes, when she steps through the heavy steel door and listens to the hinges screech behind her, the bite of the wind swallows her words whole before they can reach his waiting ears; other times, it’s dark enough that she can barely see him, and the physical feeling of the space between them is what bites back every sentence that threatens the border of her lips.
This time, Jack unwittingly gives her an in, with the simple shift of his jaw as he lowers the cigarette from his mouth and his neck swivels to look her way, the metal railing still propping up the base of his spine. His ankles are loosely crossed, blending together the uniformly worn-looking cuffs of his scrubs, and despite the candour of his posture, something about his countenance is closed in a manner that has always felt permanent to Samira. Maybe it’s the way he waits a heartbeat or two before every response, as if he’s s checking his own words at the door, or the stretch of the muscles in his arms when he folds them across the broad plane of his chest; maybe, on days like this, with the sun just starting to peer over the horizon, it’s the way that he opts to stare up at the sheet of steel blue in lieu of finding anybody’s face, or the tension in his wrist when he lets it hang by his side, a cigarette still caught so barely between two fingers that it looks like an accident.
“Yeah?” He raises an eyebrow, the movement echoing through the muscles in his face, and it occurs to Samira that it could be those, too; his single-word answers, monosyllabic expressions that he manages to track down in response to every overture that could possibly be thrown at him, frustratingly sufficient in their sentiment.
“Yeah.” She echoes in kind, playing for time while her next move maps itself out on a chessboard in her head. “You should trust me. I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor, huh?” Something like a laugh falls from his lips, that trademark noise of his that seems to be the closest he’ll ever get. “You must know what you’re talking about.”
He shifts his balance for a second, arresting the air in Samira’s lungs, but it’s just to bend his knee, turning the sole of his shoe up into the air so that he can stub out the cigarette on the black rubber. His move, it seems, and now that it’s her turn, she follows her usual path, picking her way over the loose debris on the rooftop and tracing a diagonal line in his direction. Nothing about the short rise and fall of his chest indicates that he senses her drawing closer, but in the months that she’s been working here, Samira has learned a lot about Jack Abbot, including that certain things about him stretch the bounds of a plainly human existence. Aspects of him never really escape her notice; the flagrant disregard he is able to express regarding the bureaucratic efforts of Gloria, who he does not have to deal with anywhere near as often as Robby; the almost-invisible glint of metal that flashes with the bright white-yellow of the fluorescent ceiling lights every now and then, when he runs to respond to an emergency and the hems of his scrubs flutter around his ankles; most particular to this situation, the militant acuity that the soldier in him must never have been quite able to shake, visible in the set of his shoulders whenever she looks at him. She doesn’t need to see any alteration in his stature or respiration, because no world exists where she approaches Jack Abbot and he doesn’t know that she’s coming.
“I do, actually.” A few more steps bring her around the side of the railing, her footsteps more tentative in the small gap between their bodies and the edge of the rooftop than his ever are. “Can’t take all the credit, of course – we have some decent teachers around here.”
This time, his face goes through the quiet motions of a laugh, but no sound accompanies it.
“I’m sure you do.”
“Robby just came in.” She relays the information to him as if it’s news, as if it’s anything more unusual than the next attending arriving for his scheduled shift just before seven. “I caught him up on the kid in south seventeen, and the incident with the baby out in chairs. The family in north three and north four, as well – but Dana already knows to keep them separate.”
His shoulders relax slightly, in the way they always do when he abandons the shroud of despair for a minute and entertains the relief of clinical discussion.
“South seventeen – that’s the boy from the party, in Oakland? Are the police still with him?”
Samira eyes the horizon, scans the skyline full of buildings of various heights and shapes. “No, they left with a warning. Other guy isn’t pressing charges, I think – something to do with dex, or Adderall. Didn’t want to spend any more time down in the station than he had to. I didn’t push.”
In her peripheral, Jack shifts his weight again, and his jaw ticks slightly as his fingers move at his side. By the next time she sees him, he’ll likely be clean-shaven again, freshly turned out for another shift, but when their twelve-hour days draw to a close, she always notices a shadow beginning to reappear along the sharp lines and angles that surround his mouth. It deepens the contrast in his face, around this time of the morning, when there’s just enough light in the sky to find the high points and throw darkness over the deeper panels of skin around his nose and under his cheekbones. There might be something to be perceived, or made note of, about how intimately familiar she’s become with the shape of his bones under weathered skin; some comment to be made about how she distributes her time in the emergency department between attending to patients and mapping the pattern of his expressions; it’s unlikely, all things considered, to surface through the ocean of scepticism she already receives on a daily basis surrounding how she chooses to distribute her time.
“They’re saying he knocked a girl’s teeth out.” Jack says, not like it’s a question, but somehow still like he expects an answer. True enough, the boy from the party in Oakland is the talk of the town, tonight; such frenzy and chatter doesn’t usually follow around an event like that, a meaningless brawl in a student district, but it’s been a slow night, and there have been more arrivals from that same function than just the two sorry fighters. College kids have been passing through periodically, and each of them have been spouting a different version of events, every tale more sordid and dramatized than the last. It’s doubtless one of those vain, fragile things that drove Jack to this very rooftop, one of the few styles of chatter that brings a visible frustration out of him. Somehow, he never seems to make it through an entire shift without enough of them to send him here, staring absently over the side of the rooftop; Samira used to walk out of the building after a shift with air still left in her lungs, and patience still left in her gut, but recently, she’s been feeling more and more driven to this particular edge herself, and she blames her growing cynicism on him. The thought of it reminds her of what Mel said all of those weeks ago, in the locker room after PittFest, when the building felt more like a morgue than a hospital. She’d appeared haggard, pulling her scrub top and grey shirt over her head and replacing them with a more colourful splash of cotton.
“You know what Dr. Abbot told me, this morning, when I arrived? I said I was excited, and he said, talk to me at the end of the day. Jesus – way to foreshadow, right? I feel like I’m halfway to where he is already.”
Samira had simply nodded her agreement, reeled off some response about not being able to believe that morning had been the same day, but under the delicate skin of their discussion, a tangible feeling sat dormant on the floor between their bloodstained shoes; in just under fifteen hours, a single shift had managed to alter them entirely, uproot the way they thought about their job and impact the rhythm of their breathing. Mel, so impossibly bright and bubbly at the start of her first day, had gained a heaviness in her shoulder by the evening that she still carries around. As for Samira – well, no amount of sunrises spent lingering on a rooftop and hoping for some sort of solace can erase the injury of that day, or quiet the memories of how adrenaline had mercilessly ripped its way through her system and then haemorrhaged out of her like dark crimson blood, spilling all over the sterilised floor.
Given everything, it’s hard to blame Jack for his vices, for his rooftops or his cigarettes, considering how long he’s been working here, and everything else that came before it. The longer she spends working in the emergency department, the more she can’t ignore the stone that sits permanently at the base of her stomach, and the extra limb inside of her that stretches out desperately across the void between the outermost points of their hips, searching for some kind of connection that can help to explain it all.
“Yeah. They sent her to Mercy, so she wouldn’t have to see him.”
“Smart.” Jack squints slightly into the distance. “Makes it a bit harder, in both directions, with kids like that. Can’t just write him off, at that age, but… I don’t know. I really don’t fucking like helping out assholes like that.”
“Well, I’m not one for gossip—” Samira begins, earning her a mocking side-eye from Jack that she has to swallow into her stomach before it shows in the seizure of her spine. “I’m not one for gossip, but I don’t think you have the whole story.”
He rolls his shoulders, and a tiny, satirical smile pulls at his mouth. “Does anybody?”
“I have about four whole stories, if that counts for anything.” Samira informs him, and this time, she’s looking directly at him when his face twists into that silent laugh, and a part of her wonders what she would have to say to achieve volume.
“And?” He eventually pokes, when she falls silent again.
“And, there are very few details that are constant to all of the stories. One of them, not that you heard this from me, is that guy number two is definitely taking dex. Illegally. Another is that guy number two was the instigator. A third – the girl whose teeth he knocked out was his girlfriend. The operative word here being was, because she’s been hooking up with the instigator. I know, it’s all very high school.”
Jack tilts his neck up and grins at the brightening sky. “God, you really are something, Dr. Mohan. You really do get the whole story, don’t you?”
“I’m thorough.” She plays her usual defence. “The whole story can be very important. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Not a chance of that.” He moves his neck side to side, a few joints cracking as he does, and then he’s reducing the angle of his jaw to level his eyes out, and turning to look straight into her eyes, as if it’s fair to up the difficulty level right as she was settling into the flow of the conversation. Ironically, it speaks to them as professionals; her steady, tactical approach, always shattered to pieces by his tendency to come tearing through a room like a hurricane, dismantling everything she thought she knew about pattern and procedure and replacing it with absurd extrapolations of medical theory that she can’t possibly manage to predict. It’s there in the emergency department, every time he backs her into attempting or assisting with some insane stroke of clinical genius that feels like a death sentence for their careers, but always ends up working out; it’s here, as well, whenever she joins him on the rooftop and attempts to cycle through the motions of their typical on-the-clock interactions, until he looks at her like that, says something far more real than the pleasantries they’ve been exchanging, and all of the rules change again. In this moment, the switch moment, he has the same glint in his eye as he does when he has his switch moment in the emergency department, and despite her convictions regarding the reckless spontaneity of it all, months of experience are beginning to force Samira to admit that just maybe, in both environments, he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Do you think he’s a good person, Samira?”
There it is, the only thing left to predict before this exchange derails; there’s the sentence that makes this a conversation she can’t just brush off, can’t just step her way through with standard procedure.
“I don’t know.” The only tactic now is to be brutally truthful, so she is.
“No?” He reflects back at her in that endlessly frustrating way, and if she could collect her thoughts, she might be able to throw together a better answer, but the longer he looks at her, the harder that gets. She’s trying, she really is, but she’s reaching the stage where every time she goes searching in the chamber of her brain for composed thoughts, the only reward her efforts reap is, there’s a ring of brown in the centres of Jack’s eyes, inside the muddle of blue and green, that guards the black voids of his pupils. Medically, it would be noted on a chart as hazel. Given the circumstances, there’s not much to do but wait for a sentence to reach her that she can actually afford to say out loud.
Eventually, a better option floats to the front of her mind.
“I think it’s probably a bit more ambiguous than, is he a good person, honestly.”
Jack raises a curious eyebrow, and a flame shoots through Samira that feels distinctly like winning, so she presses on.
“It would be a lot easier if it was that black and white. Good person, bad person. I just don’t think that exists, I guess? I don’t think there are fully good people, or fully bad people. Everyone’s got a mix of both.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.” Jack nods, his stare still drilling into her. “Where do you put south seventeen?”
“Firstly, his name is Jacob.” Samira can’t help but inject a bit of levity into her tone, half in a desperate attempt to lighten what truthfully is a sobering situation, and half to see how it lands in Jack’s face (quickly, with a slight quirk of the muscle at the corner of his mouth). “Jacob Worthing. He’s studying engineering at Pitt, and he has two little twin sisters. His mother is a schoolteacher.”
“Nice biography.” He swallows the sharper edge of another smile, his eyes narrowing as he looks at her, not gaining in intensity but not mellowing out, either. “Did you get around to his medical history, or is that a job for day shift?”
Distantly as her heart beats in her throat, Samira considers that the words coming from Jack’s mouth could be construed as flirting, but somewhere in the formless gap between her age and his, that kind of thing has a way of getting lost in translation.
“Yes.” She chooses to say with a good-natured roll of her eyes instead of thinking about it too hard. “But it’s not particularly relevant. He has pretty much a clean bill of health, and you’re the one who asked me if I thought he was a good person, by the way. You never asked if he’s had any surgical procedures, or travelled outside of the country in the past six months.”
Jack still looks like he’s hovering on the precipice of breaking into a real smile, but Samira knows him well enough by now not to expect it to ever actually happen.
“Fair.” He concedes, ducking his head slightly. “Continue.”
“He was born and raised right here in Pittsburgh, so most of his friends are people he’s known since kindergarten. In particular, his girlfriend’s name is Amy, and they’ve been together since eighth grade. And he’s had the same best friend since before he can remember. Aaron Riley.”
Samira has always loved being able to relay her tales with this kind of narrative. It affords her the rare chance to watch a masterful piece of machinery at work in real time, watch the realisation dawn on his face before she even reaches the end of the sentence as it all clicks into place.
“Aaron Riley.” He finishes the sentence with her, their voices blending together for just a second in glorious harmony. “Central nine. Multiple broken ribs, contusions, possible concussion. Tested positive for dextroamphetamines.”
“Bingo.” Samira can’t suppress the grin that attaches itself to her face when he hits the nail on the head, and for a second, it’s delightfully indulgent to entertain the possibility that she isn’t imagining his sharp intake of breath. “I talked to both of them, you know.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“Jacob – south seventeen – he told me he walked in on them, together. In the throes. He walked away, actually, but then they both came running after him, trying to explain it all. Aaron grabs his arm, you know where the story goes from there. Amy – the girlfriend – she tried to break them up. That’s how she got caught in the crossfire. The way Jacob describes it, when he didn’t take the news well, things got a bit ugly – Aaron started going on the offensive, saying a lot of pretty cruel things. Etcetera.”
Jack nods slowly, and Samira watches his throat move as he swallows, watches the skin tighten and release. “And Aaron?”
“Commerce student, no siblings, single mom. Got a full ride to Pitt – academic scholarship. Work’s getting harder – that’s why he started taking Dexedrine. To catch up. He said that since he started taking it, he’s noticed that he gets kind of erratic when he’s drinking. Not himself. He admitted to saying those things, but he said Jacob started saying them first.”
“You believe him?”
“Yeah.” Samira nods, and Jack mirrors her in a way that makes her feel as if he has entire faith in her judgement. “I do.”
“What about the girlfriend?”
“They’d been heading in this direction for a long time, according to Aaron. Jacob and Amy were growing apart, she didn’t know how to tell him, all the stuff you’d expect. Aaron didn’t mean to develop feelings – neither of them did – but you know the deal. Feelings can’t be chosen, or controlled. Even if there’s a reason it shouldn’t, this stuff just happens.”
“Yeah.” Jack echoes again, still nodding slowly, still staring at her with his fingers fidgeting at his sides. “This stuff just happens.”
“So, they were heading this way for a while.” Samira draws in a deep, steadying breath, and tries to focus on the finer details of the story at hand instead of the shape of the knuckles on Jack’s hand, the angles of the bones in his fingers. “They didn’t start sleeping together until a month ago, maybe two. They were trying to find the right time to tell him.”
Jack clicks his tongue. “Never a right time. Have they watched a movie?”
“I know. Either way, it’s all out in the open now. I think it probably went a lot more violently than everybody intended.”
“And now that you know the whole story, as they tell it?” Jack tilts his head, staring at her quizzically. “Where does Jacob land, on your scale?”
Samira allows herself a single, heavy sigh. “I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he was drunk, and he’d just found out his girlfriend of almost six years is sleeping with his best friend of about two decades. That’s a lot to swallow sober.”
Jack nods passively the entire time she’s speaking, his eyes a deadly still that belies the constant movement of his hands.
“That’s not to say I think he’s a good person, either. Even with alcohol in play, I find it hard to give a lot of credit to a guy who’s capable of breaking a bunch of his best friend’s ribs, and knocking out his girlfriend’s teeth. I talked to him for a while – I think he was hurting, for a long time now. He could tell something was wrong between him and Amy, but he couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I think he’s not honest – not as honest as Aaron, anyway. He talks about himself very sympathetically, in all the stories.”
Her leg is beginning to go numb so she adjusts her position slightly, and the cold metal of the railing behind her slides against her back for a second, bringing a shiver to the surface of her skin that doesn’t escape the watchful gaze next to her. “It’s all just a bit greyer than everyone thinks, you know? It’s – you know when you do the psychology lecture, in college? I kept up with psychology for a while, after. Considered going into psych, but I’m glad I didn’t. Anyway – it’s a big thing that they talk about, these days. Deconstruction. Learning not to perceive everything in binary states, black and white, good and bad. Not assuming that the truth you know will always stay true. It comes from a philosophical theory, about the relationship between text and meaning. The context we give to words. I don’t know – it all gets a bit meaningless, if you get too philosophical about it. Literally.”
The sun is making itself known now, brightening the sky overhead, and a quick glance at her phone tells her that it’s almost quarter past, and they won’t get away with standing out here for much longer, drinking in the dawn.
“I think it makes more sense if you apply it.” She meanders. “Context matters, with human beings. There’s no perfect human, and no evil human. Good people can have bad morals. Bad people can have good morals.” She spares him another quick glance. “People can change.”
This time, he just nods once, short and tight and not entirely convincing.
“If you reduce everything to a binary state, you never learn to understand the nuance. You get stuck with these permanent thoughts – permanent ideas – and there’s no flexibility. And that’s how you reach the good-bad state – by assuming that it already exists. You tell people there’s only two boxes, they’re going to have to fit themselves in one of them. And if the only options are 100% good, and 100% bad? One of those things is a lot easier than the other.”
Jack breathes in slowly through his nose. “What about the other two?”
“I think they’re also young, and they don’t know everything yet. Aaron comes from a situation that probably both Jacob and Amy don’t understand, and he’s under a hell of a lot of pressure. That doesn’t mean I support illicit stimulant use, or somebody saying the kinds of things he said. It certainly doesn’t mean I agree with how they handled it – they both betrayed him, in a really deep way, and it’ll probably affect him for a long time. And it sounds like Amy was pulling away from him, not offering him any kind of an explanation – again, not an excuse to knock her teeth out, but that part wasn’t as intentional as the other stuff. Plus, I haven’t talked to her, so I can’t really pass a final Amy judgement. But Aaron – he’s made a lot of shitty decisions, but he knows it, you know? He recognises what he’s done wrong, and I think that can be half the battle, a lot of the time.”
Jack hums softly. “Do you think that makes somebody a better person, on your scale? If two people commit equally bad acts, and only one of them admits and acknowledges the extent and nature of the wrongdoing – does that make him better, just because he admits it?”
There he is again, the hurricane, just when Samira thought that she sounded clever, thought she knew what she was talking about. The question rings in the air for a long time, and eventually, all she can do is purse her lips and stare back out at the horizon.
“I don’t know.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then she makes the fatal mistake of looking back at him, because he winks, fast and brutal, and in a fraction of a second it single-handedly reshapes her perception of the world, reduces her thoughts back to the ring of brown in the hazel mixture of his eyes.
“There’s the catch.” He says. “People make things binary so that they can pretend they know the answer to everything. The moment you accept that it’s bigger than that is the moment you admit that there’s a lot out there that you just don’t have the answer to.”
The extra limb inside of her is straining to grab onto this moment, hold onto the tenuous string of connection in the way that Jack seems to understand exactly what she’s saying.
“Deconstruction.” She says again, watching as he looks away from her and squints back out at the skyline. “Forgetting everything you thought you knew, so that you can keep learning. Not getting stuck under the weight of everything you think you already know.”
“Sounds like none of us know anything, the way you’re talking about it.” Jack points out, and there’s a challenge in his words that it’s only in Samira’s nature to rise to.
“Maybe we don’t.” She bites on her lower lip while he’s not looking, takes the opportunity to examine the side of his face and pretend to believe that he can’t see her staring at him, can’t sense her. “I think that’s the key to this whole thing. Treating every case like we don’t know shit. And I know I go slow, but that’s why. I’m trying not to assume anything. And you do it, too, when you come up with these new ways of doing things, instead of just staying glued to procedure.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jack offers her something that seems to be the closest he’ll ever get to a full smile, and it feels like the biggest win she’s managed all shift. “You mean like when you drilled into somebody’s head with an EZ-IO?”
“Oh, whatever.” Samira tries desperately to breath through the flush that graces her cheeks, but she can feel it heating her skin, and he can clearly see it, if the way he’s looking at her with a slight tease in his eyes is any indication. “You could do with just taking a compliment yourself, every once in a while.”
“Ah,” Jack shakes his head slightly, “but then what kind of a teacher would I be? You know, somebody told me recently that they’ve got decent teachers around here. I can’t be the one to lower your standards. I’m just bolstering.”
He's just fluffing, is what he’s doing, just wasting time, but Samira doesn’t call him out on it because she prides herself on never engaging in hypocrisy.
“I’m sure.” She echoes his words from earlier. “Seriously, though – I think it’s important when you do a job like this. Assumptions are dangerous. Nothing is black and white. Plus, I think it can help with perspective, too. We all get a bit existential, sometimes.”
Once again, Jack nods his agreement. “Maybe that’s what we need to do, then. Deconstruct. Reshape our perception of the whole job. Change the way we do things.”
She shrugs, tries to make it look as casual as possible. “Maybe I’ll speed up, a little.”
“Yeah.” He expels a short, humorous breath. “And maybe I’ll stop smoking.”
With a short sigh, he pushes up from the railing and twists his heels to face away from the horizon. The sun catches the tiny copper wire-coils of his hair, catches an angle of metal at his ankle for just a second, and then he’s moving towards the door.
“We’d better get out of here, before Robby recruits us to stick around for another twelve hours.” He looks back at her when he reaches the door, his fingers pausing on the handle. “You coming?”
Still dazed from the whiplash of the change in direction, she follows quickly in his footsteps as he hauls the door open and jogs down the tall staircase. His stride is just slightly longer than hers, just slightly quicker, and she has to push her pace to keep up with him as they travel through hallways and door frames, back into the locker room to grab various bags and coats.
“Jesus.” She mutters half to herself as the dust settles and the suspended reality of the rooftop recedes. “What am I on about, anyway?” They pass south seventeen on their way out, and she glances back at the curtain for just a second, but Jack keeps walking, so she resolves to make the better decision and leave it behind, closing his lead again as they weave through the car park.
As usual, despite the vast size of the lot and her relative inattention on the approach to work, Samira has managed to land curiously close to Jack’s truck. When he stops, opening the driver’s side door, there’s a moment of hesitation in the air that rarely happens outside of the rooftop; whether it’s a good idea or not, Samira feels an absurd need to hold onto it for a second.
“Why did you let me go on like that? You barely got a word in.”
He grins ruefully, directs it down to the ground. “I’m just doing you a favour, Dr. Mohan. I know how much you love to talk.”
“Ha. Funny.” She says, deadpan, but her fingers tremble slightly around the metal of her keys in her back pocket. “You should have stopped me.”
“It was interesting.” Jack responds, his words rooftop-honest, and it’s slightly terrifying in the parking lot, way down on solid ground. “Your theory. I think you were dead on, about losing the binary thinking. Maybe not so much about reshaping our entire perspective – a lot of old people here. We’re not so good at that. This hospital might be too old, to be honest.”
She gives the statement a second to hang in the air as she retreats toward her own car, for fear that if she doesn’t, they might break an unspoken rule about rooftops that they can’t afford to lose sight of. By the time she’s standing in front of her own bumper, it’s easier to breathe out, easier to turn around and glance back at him one more time, still watching her walk away.
“You never know.” She ventures, her voice strange in the cold, quiet air. “There’s a long time out there, still waiting to happen. Everything could change.”
“Yeah.” He digs his hands into his pockets, leans so far into the black door of the truck that he almost disappears from view, and it feels like a strategic retreat.
“Or everything could stay the same.”