Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam Page A

later.”
    â€œThen later. Put it this way: could you think of marrying anyone else?”
    â€œRight now, no, I can’t,” she said, putting her other hand over his.
    â€œThese connections happen only once. We can’t throw it away because of the problems around us. Later is fine, but let’s commit to our feelings now.”
    â€œYou’ll be a good husband,” she said. Ming took his arm, sat closer, and looked across the landscape of hills cut in a strange way into ski slopes. She had not yet told her parents about him, and said that she needed to wait until she had moved away from home. “It’s stupid, but I wish you were Chinese. They’ll threaten to disown me. That happened to my sister.”
    â€œBut that would just be a pressure tactic, to make you choose between me and them.”
    â€œThey won’t, ultimately. In the end, they can’t lose me. I don’t think so, anyhow.”
    â€œWhat happened with your sister?”
    â€œShe broke up with her boyfriend.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œBut that was different. I only met him once. It wasn’t serious, I’m guessing.”
    The five-hour drive from Ottawa would give her the distance she needed in order to tell her parents, said Ming. She spoke with the assumption that Fitzgerald would be admitted to medicine in the following year. This was easier for her to say, and he said “if” while she said “when.” He did speak as if he would move into her condominium. Ming suggested that he might have to live on his own for a little while.
    She said, “My parents did buy it and everything.”
    â€œYou could move out. We could get an apartment, so it would be our own place.”
    â€œOr something.”
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    At the end of August, Ming’s parents moved her to Toronto. They filled her freezer with white plastic containers of ginger beef, sesame chicken, and other favourites of Ming’s. Fitzgerald took the train to Toronto on the same day that Ming’s parents drove back to Ottawa. The night before Ming’s first day of medical school, he said, “Now you’ll tell them?”
    â€œI’m tired,” she said. “Right now, I need to be on my own, plant my feet.”
    â€œIt should be easier, now that you’re far away.”
    â€œYou don’t get it, do you? That it won’t ever be easy.” She turned away in bed.
    â€œI just said easier.”

    In September, Fitzgerald returned to Ottawa. At first, he and Ming were both anxious to speak every evening. They fantasized about travelling, about being together, about when Fitzgerald would visit. During the school day, they anticipated these fantasies—which became satisfying in themselves. By October, Ming’s class was dissecting the abdomen, and she suggested that they speak every second night.
    â€œThe volume of information is overwhelming,” she said.
    â€œBut I’ll miss you.”
    â€œDo you realize I’ve been cutting apart human bodies for the last month?” said Ming. The first rite of medical school was the anatomy lab, the opening of skin into the organs.
    â€œYou mentioned that,” he said.
    She described the dissections on a daily basis. She complained that one of her dissection partners, Sri, was a sentimental wreck who couldn’t even cut open an arm, who did nothing but slow her down. Chen, her other partner, was tolerable. Every minute was important, she said, and she had realized that she was spending too much time on the telephone. “I didn’t learn the thorax well enough, because you need me too much. How much do we have to talk? Human anatomy is important—it’s for real now.” Whenever Fitzgerald mentioned her classmates she corrected him, because they were “colleagues.”
    â€œRight.” Fitzgerald wondered whether his biology and biochemistry lectures were no longer real—perhaps they were only the