The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw Page A

good work had little to do with optimism. For Simon, it was as though rubbing against a surface as rough as his own had scraped away a layer of dead psychic skin, and he felt, briefly, in more direct contact with the world and with himself than he had since Amelia died.
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    T HE night before he officially withdrew from medical school, he met Katherine at a bar near her apartment in Murray Hill. He drank too much that night, a sloppy cascade of whiskey and beers and more whiskey. He talked about how much he missed Amelia. He talked about his father, how he would never be able to tell him he’d left school, how he was too ashamed to ask him for help with his loans. He was aware, even through the enabling scrim of alcohol and self-pity, that his performance was bathetic, ridiculous, and that Katherine’s response—to take him back to her apartment so he could drink himself the rest of the way into oblivion in private—was the correct one.
    And so suddenly there they were, in her clothes-choked studio on East Twenty-Ninth Street, two glasses of terrible Spanish red wine and a pile of red capsules on the coffee table in front of them, Katherine explaining that the drug was the current hotshot painkiller in clinical trials, and she couldn’t tell him how she’d gotten her hands on it, and it wasn’t like the dirty opioids, and the word was that if you snort it, you’re treated to the most delicious pharmaceutical high this side of morphine, and did he want to try it?
    Yes. Yes, he did.
    Katherine leaned over the table and cracked open two of the capsules and prepared the lines, her hair, dyed to the bluish-black shine of crow feathers, falling across her face. The contents of the capsules resembled dried clay, and the sinus burn was incredible. Nothing happened for a moment, and then a warmth blossomed at the back of his skull and slipped down his neck, spreading outward through his blood with the slowness and sweetness of maple syrup dripped onto his tongue.
    He leaned back in his chair and blinked at Katherine.
    She gave him a dopey half smile: “I think we have a winner.”
    He nodded, lit a cigarette. He drifted away for a moment, closing his eyes and following the thin trail of heat down into his lungs.
    He’d been called in front of the med school’s disciplinary board that afternoon. He’d arrived expecting to be excoriated and then expelled; instead, they offered him a one-semester suspension and a psychiatrist. They wanted to talk about his feelings. He sat in his chair at the end of a long, polished conference table and blinked at the cluster of gray heads at the opposite end. A woman with hair the color and texture of steel wool sat at the head of the table, chairing the committee. In a kind voice, she asked whether he considered the school’s opportunities for psychological outreach and support to be sufficient or, perhaps, too limited, either by time constraints or, possibly, by the medical culture itself. He said he wasn’t sure. He asked them why they thought he might benefit from psychological outreach. There was silence from the far end of the table; then one of the doctors said that if Simon wanted to offer an explanation for his actions in the anatomy lab, they’d be happy to hear it. The woman at the head of the table shot the speaker a warning look. “We don’t expect our students to be machines,” she said. “We understand that the stresses of our program can manifest themselves in a variety of ways.” She told Simon that the school would be able to roll over his spring semester loans to the following fall on the condition that he enter into their psychological counseling program. He understood that an answer was expected of him. He already knew he wasn’t coming back, but he said he’d think about it. The committee members shifted in their seats as though a foul smell had wafted through