Imran grasped the metal doorknob and sighed disconsolately against the heavy wood frame. He paused in order to steady his nerves (the kid had really shaken him; though he thought he had acted professionally enough when the kid had called him a fucker and a son of a bitch—terms of endearment, he was sure) and to brace for the blitzkrieg assault that may, or may not, be awaiting him courtesy of the fat bastard lurking inside.
Shots had a way of doing that to a patient, making him jumpy and panicky when all it was was a quick pinprick of pain. But in his seventeen years of practicing medicine, he had witnessed many older, if not wiser, patients hyperventilate and vomit upon sight of the needle. He tried to refrain from holding these nervous souls in contempt, because he truly wanted to sympathize and be compassionate to their fears. But these days…
Well, these days have been very trying for the Good Doctor. And it wasn’t just the sudden onslaught of canine illness that precipitated this feeling in Imran. In a twisted way, he had actually enjoyed staying up with Pepper, watching him yak and shit out a brown, smelly storm. As disgusting as that had been, it had also been entertaining. Different. No, what was drawing on his reservoirs of patience and goodwill of late was the prevailing sense of repetitiveness and drudgery that permeated every movement he made. It felt like vertigo, as if the earth was flat and someone, perhaps a deity of great importance and size, was tilting it, and every object, person, animal, and building was sliding along at the same creeping pace toward a deep, inescapable chasm. And he was the only person noticing it! When he’d finally summoned the courage to express this (fantasy?) theory to his wife, Nari had blamed it on the Dog Days and the heat (which was surely part of it). But all Farouk Imran knew for certain was that everything, from brushing his teeth at 7:10 in the morning to brushing them again, like clockwork, at 8:45 at night, and all the events that occurred in between, felt both dreadful and futile. Wife, kids, work, friends, neighbors, acquaintances: nothing ever changed. Laura was always dopey and forgetful when he greeted her in the morning and stayed that way all day. Walking into the clinic one morning about a week ago—now this is just crazy—he had held the image in his mind of Laura sitting at her desk, per usual, but instead of pigging out on a Danish or sipping coffee, she was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle—just humming away and licking the tip of her pencil as the solutions popped into her head. That was when Imran realized he was close to losing his grip on the whole being a doctor thing, because…you just had to know Laura Walker. And still the vertigo persisted. At first, he had tried ignoring it; then he had tried dismissing it; then he had tried fighting it, until, finally, he had just given up and accepted it. But once he embraced the idea, he owned it. Then again, in his heart of hearts, he had always wanted to believe that the world was slanted and all of existence was sliding toward some dark abyss beyond the knife edge horizon of land and starry sky. Sometimes Farouk would fast-forward his fantasy and ponder the scenarios after earth took its final plunge. Death? He didn’t think so. Change, for sure—more than likely the bad kind. Because he also thought that it might be a great, big conveyer belt on which humanity stood, lived, breathed, and died, and we’d all stick to that belt as it rolled over the horizon. And that was the truly scary part. Because as hard as he tried, Farouk couldn’t fathom what the underside of the earth looked like. His imagination wouldn’t take him that far.