The website was impressive. There were more than two hundred photos of modern buildings of red brick, concrete, and glass. He was surprised to see as much grass as he did, since he thought of West Texas as being desertlike. He could see the flat terrain surrounding the city and the horizon with a sky that seemed larger than life. He had never been to Texas, and there was nothing about the pictures that beckoned him. He wasn’t much of a traveler. The farthest south he’d ever been was South Carolina, but that was when he was a teenager.
Next Noah looked at the Brazos University Medical Center website. The hospital appeared even more modern than the rest of the university, suggesting that it was a relatively late addition. Within the website, the WestonSim Center had its own section, advertising itself as one of the world’s premier robotic-simulation centers for medical teaching after its opening in 2013. When Noah clicked on it and looked at the exterior photos of the extremely modern glass-sheathed building and read the description of the 30,000-square-foot behemoth, he had to agree. It was a sweet setup, a quantum leap better than what was available at BMH, which had to fight for space in the Wilson Building’s basement. Looking at the many photos of the WestonSim Center interior, Noah was even more impressed by the mock-up sets that looked amazingly realistic, including two fully functioning operating rooms, a delivery room, an intensive-care unit with multiple beds, and three ER trauma spaces. Noah could easily imagine Ava in all of them, taking advantage of their potential for teaching anesthesia technique and how to handle such emergencies as malignant hyperthermia.
Next Noah checked if the hospital and the medical school had all the appropriate certifications from the various accreditation organizations. It did, including the ACGME, or Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. That was the key one, meaning the medical school and the residency training program were entirely qualified.
After several hours of frantic activity since leaving the OR but with nothing but busy work left to keep him occupied, Noah glanced at the time. It was now almost seven-thirty in the evening, and still there had been no additional text from Ava. With painful resignation, Noah began to accept that he wasn’t going to hear any more from her like he had hoped. It seemed that the curt, original text might be all he was going to get until she returned.
Feeling exceptionally weary, depressed, and confused, Noah stood up from his desk. He hadn’t felt this bad since Leslie Brooks had bailed out and left him with a denuded apartment. He struggled with the question of what he should do, whether he should go back to his bleak apartment or stay in the on-call facilities in the hospital. Technically, Noah wasn’t on call, but he knew there was plenty of room if he wanted to stay. Since he was in no condition to make a rational decision, he ended up staying in the hospital by default.
23
SATURDAY, JULY 29, 4:50 P.M.
After spending Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights in the on-call facility in the Stanhope Pavilion, Noah finally felt the need to go back to his apartment Saturday afternoon when he finished everything he could think of doing in the hospital. By then he was entirely caught up in all aspects of his wide-ranging responsibilities as the super chief surgical resident. Even the basic science lecture and the Journal Club agendas for the following two weeks were already done, as was the resident on-call schedule for the months of August and September.
In his whirlwind of work energy, Noah had accomplished more than he thought possible but had run out of things to do, and he began to feel as if people were wondering why he was still hanging around. To make matters worse, on Thursday and Friday nights the on-call chief residents had pointedly asked Noah what he was doing in the hospital on-call room facility, which had a lounge area as well as multiple bedrooms. It was clear both residents were concerned that their competence was being questioned by his presence. In both instances, Noah had reassured them they were doing fine and left it at that, but there was a lingering sense they didn’t believe him.
Unfortunately, for the entire period, he’d not heard a word from Ava. He’d hoped he’d get a text or something, but by Friday he acknowledged it wasn’t going to happen. On several occasions over the last three days he had pointedly argued with himself whether he should text her or even try to call her, but on each occasion his pride had won out. He felt it was her responsibility to get in touch with him, since she was the one who had left. Under the circumstances, his reaching out would undermine the small amount of social self-esteem he was trying vainly to maintain.
But coming back to his sparse apartment did little to buoy his spirits. To him it looked worse than usual in its emptiness, which magnified his loneliness and reminded him how much he missed Ava. At the same time the situation was forcing him to question if his feelings for her were being reciprocated, as he could not imagine leaving her such a curt message if the situation had been reversed. Yet he urged himself to cut her a little slack, remembering that she was a unique, extraordinarily self-motivated individual who came from a background completely different from his, who had suffered a father’s suicide when she was in high school and a failed marriage around age twenty. He knew it was important for him to keep all this in mind because it was how he explained what he termed her “teenagelike” attachment to social media.
Thinking about Ava and her self-centeredness, he wondered if social media was making people narcissistic because of the opportunities for self-promotion or if narcissists were attracted to social media for the same reason. He knew that one of the hallmarks of narcissism was a lack of empathy, which was still how Noah viewed Ava’s terse text and her lack of follow-up communication. If Ava’s love of social media was making her egocentric, he could hold out hope that she had no idea how much emotional distress she was causing him and might very well be sincerely apologetic when told.
With nothing better to do and thinking that it would at least make him feel closer to Ava, he booted up his old laptop and went to Gail Shafter’s homepage. To his chagrin he immediately saw that Gail had posted on Friday, which meant that Ava had enough free time to be on social media yet not enough time or inclination to send him a simple text. The post was about Gail having an “OMG fabulous” opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., complete with a smiling selfie of Ava with a baseball hat covering her blond-streaked hair in front of the Lincoln Memorial and another in front of the new National Museum of African American History. At least he now knew that Ava had indeed gone back to Washington for her lobbying work. After studying the photos, which reminded him of the many in her study, Noah clicked on Gail Shafter’s fan page. He was relieved to see that at least Ava hadn’t found the time to do one of her beauty tips.
Returning to the homepage, Noah reread the post, which talked about what a treat the city was for tourists, how many fun things there were to do and see, and how it was possible to run into famous politicians, with a list of those Gail had managed to see. He then read some of the comments. It was surprising how many people responded in a single day. There were ninety-two likes and almost three dozen comments. Noah read the comments, which were interesting in their banality and how they all seemed paradoxically to exalt simultaneously individualism and tribal group think. There were even replies to the comments and even a few replies to the replies. There was no doubt in Noah’s mind that the dialogue in the virtual space was far different from how it was in the real world.