GIVE ME SOMETHING SO I STOP SHRIEKING

She dreamed of doctors. Square jawed, blue-eyed doctors. And with big hands- yes, big, but also dexterous and nimble. She dreamed of doctors who quickly gave her lists, with action-plans, with prescription medication, with recommendations and connections and American alma maters. Someone kind of like Patrick Dempsey on Grey’s Anatomy- someone who could rush through a teal coloured hospital hallway with a white coat that flapped in the air when he ran, clipboard pinched under his arm. With a half-sorry, half-valorous facial expression, he’d burst through her door and take to her needs. In waking life, Wilhelmina settled for ugly, thick-armed Dr. Abelman— but nevertheless, when he replied to a voicemail inquiry of hers, or sent her an email with bloodwork results, pangs of love and affection shot through her, and all she could think about was her poor old father and his rosy cheeks after drinking țuică.

Wilhelmina’s parents (Mr. And Mrs. Popescu) owned a grocery store in Bucharest, a stone building with wooden doors the colour of wine licorice, and windows always zested by floral bouquets of peonies and daisies and tulips at the ready to beckon a customer. Mr. Popescu, a lifelong business-minder, had diligently passed the years by working his way to the spot of nepotistic inheritor. He became the proprietor of the store in 1936 when his second-uncle Raz retired for a life of quiet aesthetic cultivation in Brașov, and before the year’s end, Popescu married his fiancé Emma. With the flush of a prosperous life, his belly grew and his cheeks reddened and his neckties got longer and his ankles got sorer. In 1937, he had another floor added to the shop- a patisserie section staffed by 3 new employees who feigned a Parisian flare. In 1938, Emma gave birth to twin daughters— Anka (copperish and strong) and Wilhelmina (silvery and shy). On April 4, 1944, with a new patio deck well under construction for the shop, the twins turned six and lost their jolly buxom father to an American bomb that hit the sidewalk outside a church a few blocks north of the grocery. It was one of the first bombs dropped on Bucharest the night of the Allied raid, and it incinerated him (along with their dog, Carol, and a mailman on his bicycle).

When Wilhelmina heard the news of her father’s death, she was playing on a wooden rocking horse in her family’s garden. Her real memories start here: with the hanging ivy that blew in the spring wind, with the overripe plum smell that wrinkled her nose, and the creaking sounds of her horse; the pale- faced maid Sanda, voice fluttering and neck perspiring, told her the news. Cruel Sanda. She whose hands touched every inch of their quiet home, and breached its holes with a duster. She had outlived her rosy father. At the violation of his death, shy Wilhelmina squealed and shrieked and kicked, shattering her toys and ripping at her hair. Hours later, the doctor was over, flicking a needle-tip that squirted valium, supplying a generous dose to young shrieking Wilhelmina’s arm— her huge, pulsing eyes got smaller and smaller, and the image of the doctor got bigger and bigger as he and Sanda held her back. Seconds later, her world was a milky heaviness. Her animal screams withered up and dried into a little heave, and then she curled up into a dreamless sleep.

Instantly thrust into a cold new reality, the violence of the moment did something irreversible to her inner machinery, as if loosening a valve that had been stuck all her life and uncorking the high- pressure steam of maturation that can never be reversed. Maturation- that awakening to the inevitable end- a fine, studied cultivation of a fear of dying. God seemed less and less paltry to her the more she aged, and doctors seemed more and more essential.

They sent for Anka at once, but the news would take months to reach her (she was off on a mountain trip in Transylvania with her favourite uncle). Instead, Wilhelmina stayed bedridden for two weeks, clutched in the unbreaking grasp of her mother like a pearl inside a tight clam, and drugged drowsy everyday by the young handsome doctor.

When something on the level of your father being obliterated by a bomb happens to you when you’re old enough to explicitly understand, time starts to speed up earlier than when it usually does. For me, the speed-up only happened when I got depressed in high school, but I bet my grandmother started the old skip-through-life during her 2-week valium bender at age 6. All the attention she seeks from doctors these days might as well be for the same purpose. Give me something so I stop shrieking.

Yes, she dreamed of doctors from that day on— gentle ones with gentle lips and doe eyes to listen to her unraveling worries, but also strong and firm ones with catty reflexes— and her December 11th weekend’s heart problems must have been a small miracle because afterwards, her life more and more resembled her dreams. Wheeled into the ER by a calculating team of ponytails and buzzcuts, Wilhelmina was immediately dazzled by their youthful vigour. Yes, the way that boy doctor gripped the metal rail of the ambulance as he hauled me in through the back, his face a serious smear, and drenched in the dark blues of a winter midnight... with front line boys waving the Rod of Asclepius so diligently, maybe Canada would have a fighting chance in a third worldwide scrap: those are trench-digger arms.

When I call her, Wilhelmina picks up the phone quickly, and she sounds happy. She’s resting in an emergency room at St Michael’s, and her heart rate has gone down a lot after a day of care. By the sound of her daisy-white voice and trailing vowel noises, she hasn’t slept a wink, preferring instead to savour whatever drugs they’ve given her. In the meantime, my grandfather Nicolae makes obsessive circles around the hospital in his car, listening to the radio and sometimes stopping to call his daughter, and then call his daughter, and then call his daughter. For a few minutes on the phone, I am sweetie and boo-boo and ingerasul meu, and I realize that my calling her has acted as a perfect kind of nightcap for the drug cocktail binge she’s indulged in; a fine-aged blend of near-death emergency, handsome doctors and robust painkillers and opioids— she’s in a kind of heaven tonight.

And when we end the call, my secret reality crashes back down on me and I remember Verlaine and how he walked his shoe grease into her apartment, and how he pointed at the smudgy sky. He’s a useful weakling, but still a weakling, and it’s fitting that his name sounds so much like the pretentious Verdurin, but a pity that it evokes Verdun, that stalwart sight of something hard-fought, and something very French. There are still snowbanks on the ground, but by the time I get home, the frigidity is fading into a kind of bland near-warmth that I find more palatable than the interior sweatiness of my parents’ home. No one is awake in this house except for me. I feel crummy. When I feel crummy, I stand at a crossroad and make a decision that’s halfway to Camus’ “suicide vs coffee”, wherein I pick between going on a run and smoking a cigarette— the key difference being the difficulty of killing oneself and having a coffee at the same time, and the relative ease of smoking a dart and then going on a jog. So I do just that: first a smoke in the alleyway behind our house, and then a long and hard run with no music and no onlookers in the pitch black night. While I run along, I can’t help but think of little Wilhelmina’s sleepy weeks in the cradle of her mother’s arms, and I fleetingly consider trying valium.