the emergency room will want to hear all the details of your intake, especially how he was responding before he became aggressive. It will be a good learning experience. Do you think you’re up to it?”
“Yes, I guess so,” she said doubtfully.
“Good. Security should be here shortly. You can accompany them to the emergency room.” I smiled supportively, hoping to be done quickly with this latest clinic drama.
“I’m wondering . . . ,” she faltered, “you know, I’ve never done this before . . . I know you’re terribly busy, but . . . could you possibly come along?” She looked up at me, her eyes huge.
Damn, I thought. Hospitalizations could take hours. But what choice did I have? Hopefully, she’d tell her supervisor how helpful I’d been, and the good word would make its way up the chain to the new boss. The latest marital peace-offering, pressing as it was, would have to wait.
“Yes, of course, I’d be happy to,” I said, nodding. “That’s my job, you know, to support the clinical staff.”
“You’re much nicer than people say.” Her cheeks flushed red as soon as the words were out. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that!”
“No, no, that’s OK.” I gave what I hoped was a light-hearted chuckle. “I know what people say about me. Administrators are often misunderstood. You see? You can’t take things personally.”
The phone rang, the receptionist informing us that Security had arrived. I quickly called home and left Nava a detailed message about why I would be home late—hopefully she’d believe me this time. I joined Dina, the Security officers, and our bedraggled soothsayer into the elevator and down to the emergency room.
As we emerged onto the ground floor of the hospital, we could hear in the distance the shriek of multiple, clashing sirens, the now-familiar soundtrack of a terrorist attack. Loud bells started ringing, alerting the staff to the impending onslaught. The intake clerk brusquely informed us that there had been a suicide bombing on King George Street—we must have been in the elevator at precisely that moment to not have heard the blast—and the ambulances were on their way. The emergency room was mobilizing, with doctors and nurses and technicians rushing to prepare extra beds and supplies. We were shunted into a small room reserved for psychiatric patients just as the first ambulances arrived, obliquely within sight and sound of the moans of the wounded, the covered stretchers, the discarded bloody bandages. The stench of body fluids quickly permeated the air. They ought to have a whole separate wing for psychiatric cases, I thought; the aftermath of such carnage was hardly a soothing sight to people who were already distraught. A muted television on the wall was broadcasting images of the latest bombing site, not far, I noticed, from the jewelry shop on Ben Yehuda. If I had left the office a half hour earlier, would I now be on one of those stretchers? I let my mind spin into an elaborate fantasy of Nava hearing the news, racing to the hospital, frantic with worry, avowing her enduring love, all my frivolous indiscretions swept aside in a cleansing tear-bath of regret and forgiveness.
No one else in the room was paying the television any mind. It was the second attack in the capital that week—perhaps we were all becoming immune. Aside from the three of us, there was a stupefied teenager surrounded by his large, wailing family and a woman who sat alone, holding her head in her hands, whimpering softly. Our relentless prophet preached, in an agitated mumble, into the din. I noticed the edge of a tattoo creeping out from his right shoulder blade and up toward the bottom of his neck. It made me wonder if he was involved with street gangs; these psychiatrically vulnerable kids often were. As I pretended to flip through magazines, allowing the I-almost-died fantasy to play out in its various permutations, Dina leaned in close to decipher the seer’s words, asking him questions and trying to engage him in conversation. Her naiveté was astonishing. Even in my earliest days in the field, I had never been such an innocent.
It took hours for the crisis in the emergency room to subside. By the time our patient was processed and locked away, it was almost 9:00. I was more than ready to get home, but Dina was visibly distraught. I asked her if she needed a drink to help her unwind, and she asked if I might accompany her for a coffee, to help her process the long, emotional day—could we go to Café HaEmek? It was around the corner from her flat. I had intended something a little stronger—only in this hyperactive country would anyone think that coffee could calm the nerves—and ever since the bombing at the Moment Café a few weeks before, I’d been uneasy lingering in coffee shops. But at least Café HaEmek, on the trendy Emek Refaim strip, was convenient, only a few blocks from my home as well.
We walked down the hill in silence, braced against the cool, whistling wind. It was pleasurable, walking by the side of this pretty young woman, though I had a gnawing anxiety that one of Nava’s numerous friends, or even Nava herself, might see us and misunderstand. But what could I do? The girl was overwrought—it was well within my responsibilities to ensure that such a young and inexperienced intern was able to professionally process the events of this long, disturbing evening.
Not surprisingly, the café was almost empty, the mood in the room subdued. Just entering a café felt like an act of defiance, an insistence that no bomb would interfere with our coffee-loving ways. Dina opened her bag for a security check, and we wound our way to a tiny table in the back corner alongside the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the alley. Outside, a few spindly trees were bravely battling the blustery wind. We took off our jackets and ordered two American coffees, though I knew the caffeine would keep me up half the night. Dina was obviously shaken, her hands running repeatedly through her thick hair as she spoke.
“Dr. Benami, you’ve been doing this work such a long time. Do you ever lose your cool? Do you ever let your patients get to you emotionally?”
“Well, no, I don’t. And neither will you, Dina. With time, you’ll develop good professional distance.” A nice way of saying that after a while you just stopped caring.
“But I don’t want to develop ‘professional distance,’” she said, a worried look on her face. “I want the people I work with to know that I see them as real people, not just patients, not just a collection of symptoms. Is that really such a terrible thing?”
I smiled at her indulgently. “It’s never a good idea. You can’t help people if you’re emotionally involved. You’ll have to lose some of your idealism. Tonight was a good example; that fellow couldn’t hear a word you said. You would have been better off watching the television, reading a book, letting him rant on. It might have actually helped him; he would have realized he had no audience and quieted down. More importantly, if you’d done that, you wouldn’t be so wound up now.”
“But he wasn’t completely out of touch,” she insisted. “He knew there had just been a bombing. He thinks the intifada is a punishment for our ‘godless arrogance.’ Maybe he isn’t as crazy as he seems.”
“He was totally irrational. We’re at war over a piece of land. It has nothing to do with arrogance, godless or otherwise.”
She leaned in toward me, and I caught the trace of a delicate perfume. “But so many of the things he was saying were interesting. Even lyrical. And thought-provoking. There was something about him . . .”
Two coffees were unceremoniously plunked down on the table by our surly young waitress. I wondered if it was run-of-the-mill Israeli rudeness or a sign of disdain for people quietly enjoying a coffee mere hours after a bombing. Dina added cream and sugar to her coffee with excessive concentration, struggling to stay calm. She finally took a sip and looked up at me with sad, frightened eyes.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “With time you’ll grow thicker skin, I promise. The first hospitalization is always a little traumatic—I still remember mine from more than fifteen years ago. And to have it happen at the exact same time as a bombing downtown . . .” I shook my head sympathetically. “It’s no wonder you’re as upset as you are.”
“I really liked him,” she said. “Do you think it will help him to be shut up in a hospital ward, where no one will listen to him? I feel like I failed him.”
“Dina,