Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle. A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.
    “I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”
    Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.
    “I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”
    “It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”
    “That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”
    “Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.
    “Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”
    He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.
    “So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    “Ten?”
    “I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s already in the damn hospital . Where she ought to be.”
    Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.
    “You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”
    “Who would ever want to have a baby here ?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.
    “It’s a birth ,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”
    Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went Awwwwww shit .
    “You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist—”
    “Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”
    Lazar turned his back on her and went into