Tolkienesque

Excerpt from Tolkienesque:

1. The Invitation

In a basement apartment in Mineola there lived two doctors.

Well, that’s how the fairytale version of this story would begin. But this is not a bedtime story or a children’s book. This is an account of how, in our own time, evil attempted to rise and overwhelm the delicate fabric of our society. Darkness has a way, however, of bringing out the light. At least that’s what my friend Gee once told me. He once said, “For goodness to prevail, nothing more is needed than for ordinary people, going about their quiet lives, to seek out their own small happiness while living with reason and decency.”

The true beginning of this story is shrouded in the past. It began in the days before the American Revolution when Ferdinand Emeritus, already a very wealthy man, claimed his estate on the western shore of the Hudson River Valley of what would eventually become New York State. Like most Americans, I had no idea who Ferdinand Emeritus was. If I ever had heard the name, it just blended seamlessly into the secondary tier of Founding Fathers. He seemed merely another indistinct patriot whose face adorned no currency, who was never the subject of a Broadway musical, and without so much as a beer named after him.

I, myself, did not come into this tale until much later—236 years later, to be precise, when an invitation from my uncle William “Billy” Beauregard Bakken arrived at the aforementioned basement apartment. Perhaps I should clarify that the “two doctors” in question were myself (a psychologist) and my new wife (an internal medicine physician). We were not from Long Island originally but had been assigned to live there by an internship placement algorithm known as “The Match.” Long Island, however, was similar enough to our New York City (Staten Island) roots that it wasn’t much of an adjustment.

We were not overfond of our basement apartment. Although we are both of below average height (and the top shelves of the kitchen cabinets remain perpetually out of reach), the low ceilings still left us feeling like some kind of mythical rabbit creatures living in a subterranean burrow. I disliked the coldness of the floor that made slippers a must (I much preferred to go barefoot when possible). Worst of all were the ceiling-height half windows that only let sunlight in a few hours a day. Even the succulent plants on our windowsills languished in a state of half life. The darkness, however, was at times convenient.

Michele, my wife, was in her second year out of medical school. She worked for Guardian Health. If you are from the Northeast of the United States, there is a very good chance that you have received care from this enormous health conglomerate. You would almost certainly recognize their symbol—a white tree on a blue shield. Guardian has a reputation for excellence, but that reputation is built largely on the backs of perpetually sleep-deprived indentured servants known as “medical residents.”

Michele’s schedule flip-flopped from day to night so often that the conventions of time had little meaning for her. In the twilight of the sunless basement apartment, the calendar was reduced to a countdown of arbitrary collections of minutes and hours until her next shift. Our bedroom, which we referred to as “The Cavern,” was perpetually dark enough for a sudden fit of blindness to have gone unnoticed. I had blocked out even the trickle of sunlight we might have had by taping up black garbage bags so that Michele could sleep in whatever corner of the day her taskmasters permitted her. Once the door was closed, the only clues as to when it was daylight were the lawn mowers and leaf blowers that screamed over our heads three days a week (Long Islanders have a serious addiction to landscaping).

When Michele was home, she often ambled around in a state of semiconsciousness, like one who is sleepwalking through a nightmare. I kept telling her that she was past the hardest part, that she was no longer an intern, and that it was going to get better any day now. These were all lies. The truth was that young doctors are human sacrifices to the dark gods of corporate greed, unable to eat, sleep, or pee with any predictability for days on end until they are mere shells of humanity who can reliably execute spinal taps and run codes with unconscious efficiency.

My life was a pleasure cruise by comparison. I was afforded luxuries such as being able to eat breakfast in the morning and sleep at night. I could go out for pizza or burritos at lunch. My days were spent in comfortably furnished offices talking to interesting clients who, for the most part, were far better adjusted than all the people I knew personally (you know, the ones who would never go to therapy).

Into this calamitous arrangement came my uncle Billy’s invitation. A groan escaped me when I saw his pristine calligraphy addressed to “The Doctors Crespo.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, and it certainly wasn’t that I didn’t want to see my uncle. He was my favorite relative. My wife’s schedule, however, made attending social gatherings nearly impossible. As a medical resident, she could only take off by duping another sleep-deprived resident into covering one of her seventy-two-hour shifts. She could, of course, call out sick, but then all of her patients would probably die, and her residency sentence would be extended by a week.

“It's okay,” I said after I brought up the party, “I can go without you.”

“But I’m going to be off for six hours that day.”

“Why don’t you just use that time to rest?”

“Maybe I can move something around,” she said while pouring herself a bowl of Wheaties. “I want to go. You always talk about your uncle and that little town. . . . What's it called?”

“Harmony-on-Hudson.”

Michele was right. As a child, I had been very fond of spending time with my uncle in his large house in the Hudson Valley. My family typically visited twice a year, at Thanksgiving and perhaps for a long weekend in the summer. I loved the storybook feel to the little village, taking walks by the river, and running around my uncle’s whimsically sculpted backyard. But as my nuclear family burgeoned into new layers of extended family, gatherings with my aunts and uncles became increasingly rare. And now that I had a whole other family of in-laws to visit on the holidays, chances to see my uncle were few and far between. His retirement party seemed a last opportunity to visit him and to show my wife an important part of my past.

“Honey, if you do take off, you shouldn’t waste so much time in the car. It’s at least a three-hour round trip from here. You should rest.” But she was already asleep, sitting at the table, a Wheaties flake stuck to her lip. I sighed and stared at the Wheaties box where the uber-handsome tennis player Leo “The Laser” Gronblad was exuberantly smacking a ball. Michele had made no secret about his being her celebrity crush.

“I bet women don’t fall asleep while talking to you, do they, Leo?”

When I gently touched her on the arm to wake her, she yelled “Code Blue” and jumped out of her seat before realizing where she was.

After cleaning up the spilled cereal, I helped her into the bed and closed the door. We had this same conversation a few more times, but each time she was more and more insistent that she would be able to attend the party. My protests gave way, and two weeks later I left a message on my uncle’s answering machine.

“Hi, Uncle Billy! It’s your favorite nephew, Ralphie. Thanks for inviting us! We will definitely be there!” I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just changed the course of my life.

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