She couldn’t sleep. Through the windows she watched them cut up the tree. They loaded the pieces into a truck and hauled them away. She paced. She looked in on Radar. She washed and rewashed her hands. At some point, she fetched Dr. Fitzgerald’s handwritten letter from the manila folder. When the sun finally rose, she picked up the telephone and dialed the number beneath the letterhead. It was much too early to call, she knew, and no one would answer, but it comforted her to hear the ringing on the other end. It meant there was an other end. The line rang and rang. The rings began to bleed together.
And then: “Hello?”
It was a man’s voice. She was caught completely off guard.
“Hello?” the voice said again. She could tell he was getting ready to hang up.
“Yes.” She came to life. “I’d. . I’d like to speak to Dr. Fitzgerald, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Oh!” she said. It was him. She had not expected it to be him. A secretary, perhaps, but not him.
“Oh,” she said again. “I’m sorry to call you so early.”
A silence on the other end.
“I’m. . I’m Charlene Radmanovic. You wrote us a letter.”
“Ah.” The voice shifted. She could hear the squeak of a chair in the background. “Mrs. Radmanovic. I’m so glad you called.”
“Please,” she said after a moment.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“In regards to what?”
“My son.”
“Your son?”
“I need to know what happened.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
“I need to know what I did to him.”
There was a pause. “Why don’t you come up here and see me? We can discuss everything.”
Gratefully, she fell into the plush confines of his expertise. Twice a month, Charlene and Radar would ride the train up to Boston, all expenses paid, and visit the doctor’s laboratory, inside the twisting hospital complex next to the old city jail. From the moment she sat down in his office, she realized that he was the doctor she had always imagined before all of those useless specialists had unraveled her faith in the medical profession. He maintained a distinct air of calm that was neither contrived nor austere. Though he was already well into his sixties, he seemed both younger and older than this — perhaps it was the way in which he quoted Japanese proverbs with ease while sipping on a can of Tab soda. If he had not been a doctor, she could have seen him as a soft-spoken Sedona guru pursued by legions of followers.
Her many late nights reading textbooks and obscure dermatological articles had turned her into a bit of an expert in the field, and she had already familiarized herself with Dr. Fitzgerald’s many impressive achievements. After two years in the Army, a fellowship at Oxford, and a series of high-profile research projects on melanoma tumor growth at the Mayo Clinic, he had become, at age thirty-nine, Harvard Medical School’s youngest chaired professor. Now, twenty years later, he had just released a revolutionary schema to classify the color of skin. Designed primarily for dermatologists to diagnose skin types, Fitzgerald’s classification system was an attempt to update the largely problematic Von Luschan chromatic scale from 1897, which separated all human skin tone into thirty-six tiers. In the first half of the twentieth century, “respected” anthropometrists like George Vacher de Lapouge and Carleton S. Coon had drawn upon Von Luschan’s scale in order to categorize and sublimate racial populations within the extremely dubious discipline of “race science.” Following the Holocaust and the events of World War II, Von Luschan’s scale had largely been abandoned by the scientific community.
Fitzgerald’s system, by contrast, jettisoned such nuanced and largely subjective differentiation for a much more generalized six-point scale, focusing not on racial categorization but rather on the skin’s responsiveness to UV light, ranging from Type I (scores 0–6), “pale white; always burns, never tans,” to Type VI (scores 35+), “deeply pigmented dark brown to black; never burns, tans easily.” To his credit, Dr. Fitzgerald appeared well aware of the great potential for misuse of his schema. In a 1976 Archives of Dermatology editorial, in which he elucidated his motivation for creating such a scale, Dr. Fitzgerald also issued a warning, which Charlene had underlined in red pen: “Given the destructive history of trying to classify a person’s race based upon various phenotypical attributes, under no circumstances should the Fitzgerald scale be mistaken for any kind of comprehensive racial classification. . [Appearance] alone does not dictate an individual’s reaction to ultraviolet radiation nor his or her membership in any racial grouping. . [The] clues to our composition, more often than not, lie beneath the surface” (Fitzgerald 1976, 142).
“You,” the doctor said to Radar on their first visit to Boston as Radar sat in his lap, wondering at the pad of the doctor’s stethoscope. “You are the most special person I’ve ever met.” He twirled his hands in the air: one finger became two, and then two became one. A simple metamorphosis that made Radar giggle in amazement.
Radar was comfortable with Dr. Fitzgerald from the start, but then he was comfortable around most. Though he was only two and a half, his short life had been one of constant medical inspection, and Radar had become pliable in a doctor’s hands. He had come to expect these intrusions into his person, for he had known no other existence than that of the examined. Perhaps because of this, he remained a silent child. Even his cries were fleeting, muted affairs, as if he was reluctant to disrupt the world around him.
“This is fine,” said Dr. Fitzgerald. “Many children take a while to find their voice. My mother always told me that I didn’t speak until I was three. And you know what? Those were the happiest days of my life. What’s the rush to join the chorus? Most of the time, we say nothing of consequence.”
During their second visit, after a day of testing basic reflexes, blood work, and UV tests, Radar fell asleep on the doctor’s examination table. He appeared at peace, forgiving of all trespasses, and as they admired him, the doctor spoke lovingly: “‘Oh, the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh, the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!’”
Charlene stared. A button depressed.
“Dickens?” she ventured.
He nodded. “The Chimes. He’s a well I return to often.”
This led to a surprisingly impassioned back-and-forth on which was his best work (he: Bleak House; she: Great Expectations) and whether or not the serialized novel could ever be revived. It was a literary cauldron she had not stirred in years. The talk of books quickened her pulse and dampened the divot just above her lip.
She sat back, marveling.
“What is it?” said the doctor.
“I just hadn’t expected this. . It’s not usual that you talk about these things with a doctor,” she said. “And I’ve met quite a few lately. I thought you were all. .”
“What?”
“Boring?” she ventured.
He laughed. “Most of us are, I’m afraid. You know, it’s funny, but I find that books are essential to my profession. I’m a better surgeon if a story has its claws in me. All I need is a little dose of Melville or Dickens and his dirty alleyways, and my scalpel grows steady.”
She had a vision of him lounging in his surgeon’s gown between surgeries, his feet thrown up on the operating table as he savored the last few pages of Bleak House.
“I know I shouldn’t admit it,” she said, “but a part of me always struggled with Dickens. Sometimes it feels like he’s just trying so damn hard. His characters aren’t real, you know what I mean? They’re like these little parts of a machine. Like that man who just spontaneously combusted in the middle of the book—”