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“When Teddy’s sworn in as president, will we have to get there early to stake out our seats or do you think he’ll save them for us?” Kenya shook her head. “Saving seats isn’t very presidential.”

“I don’t want to be president,” Teddy said.

“You don’t know what you want yet,” his father said.

“That’s true. I don’t know what I want. I only know what I don’t want.” Teddy was working as an advocate for the homeless in Al-bany now, and while he had come to accept the fact that he needed the law degree, he was starting to think that political life was not necessarily a matter of elected offi ce.

“I can see it now,” Sullivan said. “Teddy will be the president, Tip will be the surgeon general, and Kenya will sweep the Olympics.”

Doyle was reading the program. He did not look up. “Something like that.”

Teddy and Kenya both turned to look at Sullivan, but Sullivan only dropped his eyes and became interested in the program himself .

The addition of Kenya to the family had had the unexpected effect of giving Teddy much more sympathy for Sullivan than he had ever had before. He saw now how easily Doyle’s attention had turned away from Tip and himself as it settled on her, just as it had turned away from Sullivan twenty-five years before. The difference was that Kenya was magically exempt from everything the boys had had to endure. She didn’t have to go to Kerry’s fund-raising breakfasts. She was never once sent into the cold to hand out leafl ets or canvass door to door. Politics, just at the moment that Teddy had finally picked it up, had ceased to be his father’s driving interest.

He had Kenya’s spring meets now, her fall meets, her state champi-onships, Junior Olympics, trophy halls. There was a never-ending stream of races for Doyle to follow now, and while they might not a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 284

be for congressional seats, it could nearly be counted on that the gazelle of Union Park was going to win.

Not that it mattered. Teddy was as proud of Kenya as Doyle was, and despite what anyone might say when he wasn’t in the room, he hadn’t turned to politics to please his father. He had turned to politics in hopes of pleasing God. It was the pledge he had made in the hours before his mother’s death, his second mother, or his first one, depending on how you counted them. While they waited for the outcome of her second surgery of the day, Teddy went into the stairwell of the hospital alone and swore to take on the heaviest mantle he could imagine. His hope was that God might forgive him, that God might even choose to spare the people Teddy loved. Teddy was responsible for what had happened, and his responsibility lay in the fact that he hadn’t listened to anyone. The chance to do the right thing, say the right thing, spring into considerate action had presented itself again and again, and from the moment the car came bearing down on Tip in the snow Teddy had not moved fast enough.

He did not think of reneging on his promise later that evening when Tennessee Moser died, nor did he think of giving it up the following summer when he lost his uncle. While Teddy had hoped for God’s favor, it was not the contingency of the deal. His decision was his penance, in the same way medical school had been Tip’s penance, though neither brother spoke of it as such. But both of them could see there would have been a benefit to being more like Sullivan, who had dealt with the mistakes of his life by setting himself adrift. Teddy and Tip had chosen the opposite course instead. Their punishment was to nail themselves down.

The lights in the symphony hall lowered and Sullivan whispered to Kenya, “Here we go.” One by one the various deans and professors approached the podium and scattered their perfunctory pearls of wisdom over the graduates’ heads. When they were fi nished the r u n

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convocation speaker took the stage, a tiny Indian girl who had to bend the microphone as far down as she could in order to make herself heard.

“For four years we have worked alongside each other,” she began. “And tonight we share a common dream.” Tip, who sat in the first row of graduates by virtue of his placement in the alphabet, was fairly certain they did not, unless all of his classmates had in fact been privately dreaming of fishes. That was not to say they were all thinking noble thoughts of medical science.

Most of them, he knew them well enough to say, were probably thinking of dinner about now, about cleaning out their apartments and getting the hell out of Baltimore. But Tip alone was seeing the members of the faculty on the stage decked out in their doctoral hoods and bright academic finery as a pulsing reef of stoplight par-rotfish, scrawled fi lefish, bright blueheads, and yellowhead wrasse.

He was always seeing people as fish. He saw his patients as mack-erel, as bass, that was how he remembered them. It was the device he used to endure their suffering and steel his interest in their complaints. And as he listened to little Soma Choudery, who had been his cadaver partner in pathology, and who but for that fact he might have dated, drone on about the nobility of their chosen profession, he realized medicine was not the profession he cared to choose at all. It was not helpful, normal, or beneficial to anyone for him to continue on with this particular mistake, no matter how far down the road he had taken it. It was at that moment, somewhere between Soma’s charge that they never cease to learn from what their patients had to teach them and her hope that they would someday move towards a single-payer system, that Tip decided to return to ichthyology. He had always gotten his best thinking done during speeches.

It came to him clearly and for the first time that he did not have to go through a residency and internship. He did not have to practice a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 286

medicine in order to prove any more completely how sorry he was.

At the end of the day what his father had always suspected about him was true: he did not find human beings as interesting as fi shes.

Their bodies lack the grace, the fluidity of motion. There were no new species of human to discover, and if there were Tip hoped that they would be left alone.

Not that he could completely regret what he had done. If medical school had not cured him of his grief, it had at least tempered it. His decision to shoulder this cross in the first place had come to him as quickly and certainly as his decision to lay it down: four and a half years ago in the waiting room of Mount Auburn Hospital when a nervous young girl in a lab coat that said “Dr. Spruce” on the pocket explained that, unbeknown to anyone, there had been a slight laceration to the spleen at the time of the accident. Tennessee Moser, on her second brief appearance in Tip’s life, was then rushed back into surgery and it was there that she died. She left behind a coat, a purse, a dark green hat, two yet-again-motherless sons, and one freshly minted motherless daughter. He could still see Kenya when she first came to live with them. For months she would only sit on the very edges of the furniture, looking like a girl who meant to leap up from the house on Union Park and run as fast as she could for home the minute they turned their backs.

After Soma had wrapped it all together on some pithy note about the implicit dignity of human life, the dean of the medical school began reading through the names of the class. When Thomas O’Neill Doyle was called, Tip crossed the stage and heard a small, unrestrained cheer go up from the middle of the hall. Tip’s anat-omy professor would be pleased to know that at that moment Tip was thinking about the spleen. That was specifically the thing that had driven Tip to medical school, an organ that ranked only slightly above the appendix in its unnecessary relationship to the human r u n

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body. “The spleen,” he had screamed at Dr. Spruce, because even as an ichthyologist he had taken human physiology his sophomore year. He gave himself four and a half years to wonder how any competent doctor could fail to inquire as to the state of the internal organs of a woman who had been hit by a Chevy Tahoe in a snowstorm, four and a half years to wonder if they would have failed had she not been black and uninsured. It wasn’t until his third year during a surgical rotation that he understood that the laceration would have bled into the abdomen all night, the slowest drip a body would allow, and that they then gave her post-surgical blood thinners to prevent the possibility of blood clots to her lungs after her hip replacement, and that was the thing that opened up the flow so that by the time she was awake enough to grab at her own round, hard stomach and cry, she was already as good as dead.

Tip’s penance was neither as cruel nor as abstract as his brother’s.

All he had to do was save someone else, if not someone stepping out in front of a car then at least that same person brought into an emergency room after the fact. He had thought the world was in need of a few decent doctors, ones who could see past the bones, and after his years at Johns Hopkins he was greatly assured that the world would have them. All the students he met were intelligent, many were com-passionate, a few, like Tip himself, were true scientists. He did not regret the time he had spent there. The knowledge he gained could only improve him. After he got a doctorate in evolutionary biology he would be perhaps the first medical doctor of fi shes.

Tip pulled up his mortarboard on the left side and discreetly scratched the scar over his ear which had never stopped itching. The ankle and the shoulder had turned out fine. He went running on the weekends and never gave it a thought, unless he ran with Kenya. He told her the ankle was the reason he couldn’t keep up with the pace she set. It was Kenya who was always pressing him back towards the a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 288

fishes, whose unwavering call he had on this night finally agreed to answer.
You are insane!
she e-mailed him day after day.
I am going
to the Amazon without you.
Everyone knew that Tip had gone to medical school because he felt responsible for their mother’s death, because he saw himself as too self-involved to even lift up his head and look through the snow for the lights of a car, and too scientifi -

cally limited to realize a leaking spleen when it presented itself. Only Kenya thought that this wasn’t reason enough to give up the science he loved.

At the end of the program the graduates stood and repeated the Hippocratic Oath, the updated version that did not make the doctor forswear sexual relations with the male and female slaves in the patient’s home, then there was a hearty round of applause, an orderly procession, and it was done. Tip turned his back on it all and set out to fi nd his family. As he swam into the crowd, he was struck by the way everything looked different now. His heart was nearly bursting from the joy he had chosen to allow himself. There were no tonsils in front of him, no earaches, irritable bowels, cancer, cracked femurs. There was only an endless ocean of schooling fish, the quick and shimmering dart of life that he belonged to. He walked past all those happy parents snapping pictures of the young physicians they had produced, all those young physicians nervously thinking ahead to their residencies. It was not the day to break the news to Doyle, even if Tip believed the decision would not affect him as it would have in what they referred to as the pre-Kenya days. He milled through the people spreading out across the lobby and he saw them as anchovies, smelts, and grunions flashing silvery in the light. Ten feet away he saw Teddy wave his long arm above his head and Tip went to him gratefully.

“Dr. Doyle,” his brother said and kissed him unabashedly on the lips. “I am so proud of you.”

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“I can’t believe you left the poor,” Tip said and put his arm around his brother’s shoulder.

“The poor can soldier through for a weekend without me.” Then the crowd shifted imperceptibly and opened up a narrow path for Doyle and Sullivan and Kenya to meet them. They were all together, each one singing Tip’s praises, giving their congratulations.

“Every family needs a doctor,” Sullivan said as Doyle arranged his children for a photograph.

Kenya, now impossibly tall and wearing a lemon yellow sun-dress, looped her lanky arms around Tip’s neck and for a moment allowed herself to hang there. “What a waste of a mind,” she said.

Doyle shook his hand and then clapped him hard on the shoulder. “We have reservations,” he said. “The Brass Elephant.” He looked at his watch. “We don’t want to lose them.” Sullivan looked out over the milling crowd. “Think of all those poor fools with no reservations.”

Together they trudged through the miserable neighborhoods of downtown Baltimore in the dark, feeling the car might as well have been parked in West Virginia. Tip, as the graduate, got the front seat, and Sullivan drove. Doyle and Teddy and Kenya crowded in the back.

“Well,” Doyle said and shook his head. “It’s a remarkable thing.”

“Not so remarkable. Didn’t you see all those people graduating ?”

“We saw the two people who graduated ahead of you,” Teddy said. “We didn’t care about the rest of them.”

“You only notice the ones who beat you in the race,” Kenya said.

Sullivan looked in his rearview mirror. “Which would mean what, exactly? That you’ve never noticed anyone?” a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 290

Kenya leaned forward and slapped the back of Sullivan’s head while Doyle slid a trim white box between the seats and tapped it against Tip’s arm. “This is from us,” he said.

The sight of the box made Tip strangely anxious. It was like getting a wedding present on the day of a broken engagement. “You shouldn’t have gotten me a gift,” he said. He meant it.

“A little something. Open it up. Kenya did the bow.”

“I’m a genius,” Kenya said.

Tip slid the ribbon over the top so as not to disturb his sister’s work and rustled through the tissue paper. It was a stethoscope, a Littmann. He held the cool metal in his hands and wondered how many of his classmates were unwrapping their own Littmanns at this exact moment. “It’s lovely.”

“I know you have one,” Doyle said.

“This is much nicer.”