Joan Is Okay(33)

* * *



—

ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, at around 3:00 p.m., the time our office seemed to have the most visitors, a woman I’d never met came in and asked if she could have a few moments of my time. Another attending was here, but she was on the other side of the room, wearing large, noise-canceling headphones that looked like earmuffs and plowing through her emails at a hundred words a minute.

Where should I sit? the woman asked, and I gestured to Reese’s empty chair. Reese had a messy desk that I tried not to look at. Pens were scattered everywhere and papers fanned out, brown rings where coffee mugs used to be. Some of his shelving had collapsed yesterday, over his desk and keyboard. Against my advice, he had stuck them to the wall with Command strips instead of real screws.

The woman took notice and said the desk was in violation of several health codes, hinging on unsafe.

My co-worker is not well, I said.

Who? She asked and after I told her, she wrote a note to herself, on a small spiral notebook, that she had in her black blazer pocket.

I asked if she was a detective. Had Reese perished on vacation and an ongoing investigation been started?

She said no, not a detective, and that my office mate who, in the workplace, should be more correctly referred to as Dr. Mayhew, was doing better. Like all of us with respect to wellness, he was taking it one day at a time.

But I’m not here to discuss Dr. Mayhew, she continued, and produced from her black tote a manila folder that had my full name, first and last, handwritten on the tab. I’d watched enough television now to know. Appearance of a mysterious blazered woman was never good, compounded with your name on a tab was worse. But I was taken aback that employee records were still being kept manually, that this folder, my folder, had been filled in and written on, then put into a physical cabinet to be plucked out for today, and that there were still cabinets around and not supercooled rooms with banks of supercooled processors.

I asked the woman about all this.

We’re HR, she said, not Mission Impossible.

I laughed, because this time I got the reference. I’d seen one of those movies, I said. Disavowed. Crazy stunts. Boom, bam, pow.

She smiled at me, but it was an uncomfortable smile, like she knew something I didn’t and wasn’t looking forward to what was ahead. Then she opened my file and started to read from it. It was my CV and certifications, a short paragraph of biographical information.

You have a brother in Greenwich, parents in Shanghai, though your father recently passed, our most sincere condolences.

I tilted my head and asked how she’d heard about that.

About what?

My father.

It’s stated here in your file.

But how did it get in my file? I hadn’t told HR in any official capacity; I hadn’t updated any biographical information since I was hired.

She straightened the papers in my file. Now the four sheets of paper were perfectly stacked.

Is this information incorrect? she asked.

I said no.

Then she didn’t see the issue. The woman’s eyes were uneven, in that one sat slightly higher than the other. Her cheeks had a layer of fine peach fuzz.

Recently we processed your raise, she said. Thank you for your hard work and dedication to our hospital. Your director deeply respects and advocates for you. He has identified you as a must-keep personnel, so we will do our best.

But, the woman continued, when we processed your raise, we did notice some inconsistencies. For instance, we noticed that after visiting China for two days last September, you resumed work that immediate Monday.

The director’s paranoia became my own, and my mind jumped to whether this woman was here to punish me for having taken an unsanctioned trip to a foreign land. I’d learned about the McCarthy era in school and how ever since the words communism and red have become synonymous with China and its people. Some patients liked to know if I was born here, if English was my first language, and I worried that this woman was here to ask the third follow-up question that those patients never thought of but an unsolicited mailing from a random Asian cultural center had: Still, despite being born here and fluent, were you ever part of the CCP, and if so, do you plan to quit?

Visiting China is now okay, I stated, stiffening my back and imagining myself, as the doorman had taught me, in the center of an elevator going up. Borders are open and international relations, at least superficially, are not awful. But had I forgotten to submit a travel form to them or to the internal board of review?

She said it wasn’t that, and I could visit China as much as I liked. Neither HR nor the IRB was the TSA.

A toss-up, who had more power in this hospital, HR or the IRB or accounts payable, though each group would probably name itself. Had I ever met an IRB or an accounts payable employee? No. And this was the closest I’d ever been to any HR personnel.

I asked if her coming today had anything to do with Wuhan.

Wuhan?

I stayed in Shanghai and nowhere else, I said. I explained that the two cities are far apart and as different as Omaha and Manhattan. Wuhan being Omaha, an inland city filled with nice midwestern people who took on industry jobs and believed in a hard day’s work. It isn’t their fault, I said abruptly, about the situation now developing there.

She raised her eyebrows and asked which situation was I referring to?

The fish market, the bats.

She repeated the word bats, then looked down at my folder. There’s nothing here about bats, she said. Or fish markets. She closed the folder and looked back at me with a new kindness. Our main concerns for you are less global, should we say, and more focused. Our concerns are twofold and with that she held up two fingers like the peace sign or like V for victory. The first, that from mid-October to now, a period of almost twelve weeks, I’d taken no full weeks off. Attendings must take off-service weeks, or else the workflow in the community becomes imbalanced. The second, that I had resumed work right after my China trip, a personal trip of great importance, a pilgrimage effectively to bid goodbye to my father, and had not taken the recommended one month leave of bereavement.