Chapter 2
Paulie squirmed in his chair as soon as the door swung open and the doctor walked in. He wasn't holding a clipboard. "Good afternoon, Paul," the doctor said, "Mister and Missus Key-es-love-ski." He bowed his head and sat down in a hideously vermilion leather chair tucked behind a metal desk.
Paulie's mum hadn't taken her arm from around Paulie's shoulder since they sat down. His dad was more hands off, but even he couldn't stop looking at Paulie and smiling, saying, "I love you," and every once in a while reaching over to ruffle his son's hair.
"Good afternoon, doctor," Paulie's mum said. "How bad is the news?"
The doctor stopped ogling her breasts, wiped his lips and made a salesman's face. "Everything is perfectly fine, Missus K. Do you mind if I call you folks Mister and Missus K? My Russian pronunciation isn't what you might call 'the best'."
"Polish," Paulie's dad said.
"We don't mind, doctor," Paulie's mum said. She wiggled her chest to straighten her back and the doctor ogled her again. "You were saying, doctor..."
"Yes, I was. I was saying that after having conducted the proper testing, whose details I won't bore you folks with, it appears that your son"—He addressed the patient.—"It seems that you, Paul, are a lucky and hardy young man."
"There's no brain damage?" Paulie's dad asked.
"None. There's nothing worrying," the doctor said, "other than the boy being an apparent fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs. However, I am told this is a pre-existing condition."
The humour was lost on the pair of worried parents. Paulie just thought it wasn't funny. "You see, I grew up in Detroit," the doctor tried to explain.
When there was still no reaction, he tried to salvage the joke by saying in a hushed insider's voice to Paulie, "This was ages ago, back in the Cup days, when the likes of Steve Yzerman and Serguy Fodorov laced them up in the Joe Louis. Nicholas Lidstrom and Scottie Bowman. All before your time, I'm afraid. Google it some time."
Paulie estimated the doctor's age at no more than forty. He estimated the doctor's personality as jackass. Nonetheless, the jackass was right. Paulie didn't feel like there was anything strictly wrong with him. He didn't feel brain damaged. Unless that was one of the effects of brain damage, though that sounded too much like a paradox. Paulie did feel different, but not in a way he could properly explain, and different without being worse. The only part of his body that actually hurt was his tooth, the one behind his left upper fang, but he chalked that up to George's errant stick.
"Are you telling us that a person can spend—"
"No, Mister K," the doctor said, "I am certainly not saying that. Obviously, your son—Paul, you did not spend nine minutes underwater. That would be impossible."
"But Pinder turned on his stopwatch and measured," Paulie said. He had seen the watch himself, and Pinder had purposefully not reset the timer because it did show nine minutes. His own perceptions Paulie would have doubted, but how could a watch be wrong?
The doctor leaned back in his chair. The leather crackled. Paulie shuddered at the sound. "Obviously, a boy's perception is affected by many factors, not least of which is his excitement and a natural inclination to 'fudge' the truth when it comes to adventures and episodes, and while I don't discount that the boy may have subjectively believed the time elapsed was nine minutes, the objective fact of the matter is that that is impossible. If the time had been nine minutes, we'd be a person less in this room right now."
Paulie didn't follow the logic.
His dad put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. "Tell me, doctor," he said, "have you read The Hobbit?"
"Honey..."
The doctor raised an eyebrow. "The children's book?"
Paulie's dad opened his mouth to say something serious but Paulie said instead, "My tooth still hurts."
The doctor cleared his throat and spread his arms theatrically. "I'm a miracle worker, not a dentist." Then he made several consecutive "Boo yeah!" When the faces around him failed to be any less blank, he said, "Al Pacino? Scent of the Woman?"