Pagers.
Spring 2003.
(Probably a work in progress.)

I used to live with a woman I loved, and once in a while, she carried a pager. If it went off beside us while we slept, she got out of our warm bed and dressed in the dark, gathered up a bag of things, went out the door quietly. Falling back to sleep, I would roll over and curl up in her warm place in the bed, imagining her driving through empty city streets, through intersections with blinking yellow streetlights. And then I imagined her at her destination, the emergency department of a local hospital, where she helped rape survivors through long nights of medical care, forensic exams and police questioning.

Later she would wake me again a little, slipping back in the bed, her body chilly from the outside night, nudging me back over to my side, curling back into sleep together and the quiet of our apartment.

I loved her for other reasons, but I loved her for her pager too. Back then, she was preparing to be a psychologist while I prepared for medical school, and I imagined our future lives as people who cared for patients, each in our own way. I imagined our pagers on nightstands, late night calls about people in trouble waking one of us one night, the other another night.

It may sound like a strange romance, the idea of these intrusions; but that vision of the pager by the bed was my white dress and wedding cake, my will-you-love-me-when-I'm-64, my silver anniversary in waiting. I wanted a love that spilled over beyond the two of us. A love that looked back with open eyes at the suffering of the world and did not turn away.

In the end, she left me. While listing her grievances, she told me that the idea of the pagers pressured and scared her; she stopped knowing that she wanted to care for patients, stopped knowing if she wanted this driven life we shared, and thought I might not love her if she did something else. I disagreed, but it didn't matter; she also left for other reasons, with or without the pagers.

Now I live alone, or sort of, with the things I didn't give away crowded into a small room in a medical school dormitory. Gone is the warmth of the apartment we shared, or even of the one I lived in alone when she left; I sleep in a narrow bed, keep my food in a cabinet with a lock and key, shower in a shared bathroom down the hall. The dormitory is surrounded by large buildings full of research labs; by four major hospitals; by streets full of ambulances, cars with worried parents bringing sick children, people with their hair out from chemo and masks on their faces.

I never liked the smallness of my dorm room, or the bland sterility of the hallway outside, but I did like the helicopters and the ambulances, and for a while, I liked being here. I liked the obsessive monastic quality of it. I used to half-joke that going to medical school was like joining the French Foreign Legion; if so, then the sounds of emergency vehicles make this my natural base camp.

As the year has gone on, though, I've become more and more restless about the dorm, and now I'm looking for a new place to live. I got obsessed with the Coldplay song where the singer repeats the line, "Home, home: where I wanted to go" and sang that lyric again and again, only slowly realizing what it meant to me. At a friend's house, sitting around the kitchen table drinking red wine and eating good home-cooked food, alternately gossiping and praising the Stevie Wonder songs playing in the living room stereo, I thought, oh, yeah, right. This is the other part of life.

The dorm's scarcities remind me of the limits of pagers. For the pager fantasy to work, my beloved and I must share the bed we leave in the night; we have to share a life and a home together. Which means the pager can't go off too often. It can't take home away.

That's why, in the real world, a lot of people are attracted to doctors but might not want to marry one; the person who answers the page is brave and beautiful as she or he goes off into the night to help a suffering person, but only to a point. The pager can inspire, but it can also be a thief; a thing that demands instead of asking, it can brutalize its owner more than it dignifies her.

As I find myself drawn to women with that quality--women who will answer pagers--and as I nourish that quality in myself, I also ask myself how my partners and I will survive our own impulses to carry pagers, to answer calls. When I talk to my fellow medical students, we often worry together about the demands of our profession and what they will mean to our future families, our children. We worry about how we will remain decent people who are part of our loved one's lives. We want pagers, but only now and then.

 

 

copyright 2003 joe wright