The Redactor, Chapter 11

It is physically impossible to make yourself not be nervous. To be aware you are nervous causes nerves.

  This realization came to me as I was striding toward the metal detector standing between me and my departure lounge at the airport. I could feel sweat springing out on my forehead, and tickling me behind the ears.

  What if the police had circulated my photo? What if the passport alterations were obvious? I had no way to tell they weren’t. What if my face tugged three ways when I tried to lie to immigration?

  By chance I caught my own reflection in a mirror before I joined the end of a line waiting to pass through a metal detector. My scalp was freshly shorn, my face grizzly, my clothes down-played, but hanging at the end of my arm was something that jarred with everything else: my briefcase.

  Without breaking stride I veered into a restroom as if that had been my intent all along.

  I placed my briefcase on a bench, snapped its catches back, and opened it. Its contents were a mess of the paraphernalia of a professional academic. I retrieved the remaining papers from Hiero’s dossier, folded them, and stowed them in a jeans pocket. Then I pawed through the papers piled in the briefcase’s base—a couple of bad essays I hadn’t returned to their authors because I’d written expletives in their margins, a journal paper on yet another interpretation of Beowulf, a form letter from the university extoling its new workload management system, and a parking ticket I’d fought hard to have waived. I dug through the litter and back through time until I reached the base of the briefcase and saw the stain left by a banana that had once, long again, lain there forgotten for weeks.

  Why did I never clean this crap out?

  I gathered it up and dumped it into a bin.

  Tucked into pouches and pockets on the inside of the briefcase lid were smaller items—pens, a thumbdrive, a photo of Jean and Tracey, conference name badges, and a tangle of lackey bands that were beginning to crack with age. I took the thumbdrive, photo, and the Schaeffer pen engraved with my name, a gift from the university for fifteen years of mind-strain. The rest I tossed into the bin.

  The inside of the briefcase was almost bare now, but for the lint collected in its corners and creases, and a pack of business cards held together by a bull-clip. I picked up the cards and squeezed the clip’s jaws open.

  I flipped through the cards, reading each one after the other. I had mementos from GPs, Physicians, Cardiologists, Immunologists, Endocrinologists, Neurologists, Dieticians and Naturopaths. I even had a card for a friendly Psychiatrist, who tried to convince me I was thinking my heart into a terminal velocity. I had a more productive conversation with the acupuncturist. He at least recognized I was the nail that had been hit with a variety of hammers, and made me a cup of tea.

  If the paper in the base of the briefcase was the sedimentary record of my working life, this pack of cards was the same for my dance with the medical fraternity.

  I had swung down the line from one partner to the next, and finally fallen off the procession with this diagnosis:  idiopathic orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

  Idiopathic from the Greek, idios, meaning “one’s own” and pathos, meaning “suffering”. I.e., your own unique brand of pain.

  Sorry, Mr Griffin, but we don’t know why your heart stops beating when it stays too long above 160 beats per minute. Best to live calm, eh?

  To my mind, that idiopathic resembles idiot is no accident.

  Idiopathic attached to any diagnosis is its doom. It means the sample space for your disease is one. You’re it. And medical science doesn’t do ones. Clinical studies, and the drug companies that pay for them most definitely, don’t do ones—unless the one is followed by the word ‘billion.’

  So the diagnosis is your polite instruction to leave the party. No more dancing for you. Something in your biology, or psychology, or pathology, or some other -ology, is irreparably, mystifyingly, screwed. Get over it, and get on with whatever life it leaves you. And be aware that unpaid bills will be handed over to our debt collection agency. Have a nice day.

  I never sunk so low as to get an aura-photo, but what’s the bet even that would have come back green with purple polka dots?

  I pressed the cards together, re-clipped them, held them over the bin, and hesitated.

  That pack of cards had become part of me. Every one a joker. I knew it was a sick kind of nostalgia to hold on to them.

  But I put the pack in my pocket.

  With a final look at my empty and forlorn briefcase, I exited the restroom.

  Striding again toward the metal detector I felt naked.

  When I stepped beneath the detector it shrieked at me. I ignored the attendant’s instruction to try again, and instead walked over to her pointing at where I imagined the implant next to my heart was, the one that communicated my heart rate to the Medline watch travelling through the X-ray machine.

  Knowing I was going to fail every metal detection test was actually kind of soothing. There was no tension that came of waiting to see if it would go off. It always did.

  She called over a male officer, who frisked me, and gave me the okay.

  At immigration, I lied like a pro, and the officer stamped my passport with a smile and told me to have a nice flight.

  As I joined the flow of travellers heading for the flight gates, it occurred to me why it had been so easy: barring the odds and ends in my pockets, and the chunk of silicon near my heart, almost nothing remained of Jack Griffin. I had even left my name behind.