7.32 YEARS by A. A. Srinivasan

Dr. Reddy holds the orb between his thumb and index finger, his hand trembling visibly, but only for a moment – for two beats of a pulse – and in that nudge of time, something unsettling creeps from the unexplored crevices in his brain to the forefront of his thoughts, manifesting itself as visibly as the brown-eyed eyeball he holds between his fingers, an organ he is on the verge of dropping on the patient’s cheek, but in the end, does not.
The surgeon regains the steadiness in his hands, and though he has stopped shaking, and his long agile fingers know exactly what to do now, Dr. Reddy, no matter how hard he attempts to access the other, more immediately useful parts of his brain, cannot quite remember ever attending medical school. This, however, does not hinder his recently unsteady digits from now performing to Medical Board standards as he connects this long part to that shorter part, then, with a delicate turn of the wrist slips the brown-eyed eyeball into the green-eyed patient, thus completing Mr. Zelnicek, who has been leading an existence for the last two months as a collective unit of organs minus one.
What Dr. Reddy does not realize is that during each surgery his mind erases itself for one brief moment, a fleeting period of time, encapsulated like a blood cell, floating. This blip immediately precedes a burst of sure-handedness and surgical acumen unmatched by anyone else in his field. Those who work with him in the operating room recognize this crucial moment, but they say nothing – neither during the surgery to alert him, nor afterwards to remind him. They wouldn’t know what to say – to him or to each other. All of them, in fact, are convinced it is their own imagination playing tricks on them.
After this transplant, however, Dr. Reddy’s hands begin to shake again. As he washes them, he recalls for the first time that strange period in the OR: the vague recollection, the concealed unsteadiness. He cannot remember what made his hands twitch uncontrollably then, what triggered it. For twenty minutes he has been scrubbing his hands. Both hands are clean but he continues to wash, splashes his face with water, then thrusts his fingers once again beneath the running faucet. He cannot recollect the last time he saw or spoke to his wife and children. Yesterday? Last month? Five years ago? This uncertainty disturbs Reddy so much that he cuts the consultation with Mr. Zelnicek’s family short: “He should be fine within a few weeks. Good as new. More chic than ever.” The patient’s wife laughs and embraces Dr. Reddy around the chest, wiping a grateful tear away from her blue eyes onto the surgeon’s buttons. She believes she is the one trembling.

“Mel,” Dr. Reddy whispers, leaning over the counter, his eyes darting around furtively. “How much vacation time do I have?” He wants Mel to be a real human resource. Just today.
Mel glances up from his computer and smiles. “Dr. Reddy? How are you? I haven’t seen you in months!”
Dr. Reddy leans over and whispers again, hoping the smile he tries to force onto his lips is friendly and not the painful grimace it feels. Mouth transplants, he thinks.
“Could you tell me,” he says, in a low voice again, “how much vacation I have saved up?”
Mel laughs as his fingers tap the keyboard. “I sure bet it’s a lot, doctor. God, I’ve been here twelve years and I can’t remember your ever taking a vacation!”
Mel’s enthusiasm, his sense of awe, perturbs Dr. Reddy. He is unsettled by the notion that someone could be that excited by his life.
“Wow!” Mel says, whistling. He turns away from his monitor and punches some numbers into a calculator and lets out a deep breath, his eyes wide. “Ummm, well, Dr. Reddy, it seems your vacation hours amount to 7.32 years.”
The doctor leans over the counter, massaging his forehead. “Is that possible?”
“Ummmm,” Mel says, glancing quickly sideways at his computer as if it were an embarrassing relative, “actually, no. It’s not technically possible. Seven years, whoo-hoo, that can’t be right. What a glitch, huh?” Mel laughs and shrugs. “Machines. What can you do?”

In his own glass-walled office, Reddy locks the door and calculates in his head. That’s more than 15,000 working hours. He wonders if this computer glitch will ever be fixed, and if so, how many hours will be left to him.
“DING!” Reddy glances at his computer. One more email. He has 4,532 messages in his inbox, five of them unread. The systems administrator who, instead of informing Dr. Reddy in person that his inbox will be cleaned in three weeks, two weeks, one week, tomorrow, has sent him a final warning in a message that Reddy will never read.
By the time Reddy walks out of his building for the day, early, leaving his five emails unread, replying to no one, and has reached his 1972 Jaguar E‑Type, everything has come back to him. Nothing to fret about. Here he is, he thinks, a divorced surgeon, who resides at 5418 Glencrest Drive, his wife – ex-wife, that is – lives across the county at St. Mark’s Place. His kids, both grown now, have just moved into new apartments and he has yet to see their neighborhoods. With the amount of vacation the computer has compiled for him, he could visit more. Reddy smiles, wonders what all that strange inner commotion was about back there in the operating room. Everything, everything is just fine. This is what Reddy thinks as he whizzes up the road in his classic car with a vanity plate that reads “SURGIN,” which, to Reddy’s dismay, causes strangers to believe he’s an electrician. He leans on the gas pedal, heads straight up into the mountains for some fresh air, though he misses the sign that says ROAD CLOSED, not solely because he is preoccupied, but also because vandals have punched the sign to a pulp and moved it so far off the roadway that it’s indiscernible to most motorists, especially ones who forgot why they wound up on the mountain at all, let alone with 7.32 years of vacation. These dilemmas are precisely what Dr. Reddy is attempting to sort out when his car swerves off the road and hits the face of an inconveniently placed cliff. He had forgotten to fasten his seat belt when he walked out of the hospital and into his car, which now leaves opportunity for his body to escape the confines of his automobile in a manner even jaded circus performers would find impressive if not downright breathtaking.
Dr. Reddy’s body is propelled in an arc. He flies over the ravine on the opposite side of the road, down, down, down, down – but before his body can be broken into a thousand bits and pieces that cannot be reconstructed with the help of all the surgeons in the world, his sturdy belt catches on a robust branch that sways and bounces for a moment before coming to rest. And so Dr. Reddy, a man who has touched the brain stems of one foreign president and two prime ministers, is left dangling from an Oregon pine by his pants, unconscious, three hundred and twenty-four feet above solid ground.
There are many opportunities for Reddy’s body to plummet into the canyon, never to come out whole again, but every time he wakes, he faints, shifting his weight every so slightly, so that slowly he slips from branch to branch, down, down, down, gently like a single sheet of paper on a warm breeze. Aside from a fat lip, a broken toe and a number of superficial abrasions caused by a tree that grew fond of him, the unconscious Dr. Reddy is in one piece when he reaches the bottom.
When Reddy fails to show up for work the following morning, his colleagues are the first to raise the alarm. Late in the evening of the second day’s search, the emergency teams inform his family that they have found the wallet belonging to the owner of the wrecked vehicle. It washes up on the riverbank, along a wide strong river that has been known to take many lives unapologetically in the past. The wallet is found far from the site of the accident, and unknown to them, far from Dr. Reddy and his tree. All three of these points are at quite a significant distance from each other: the location of the car, Dr. Reddy, and the ominous wallet by the river, but they form an almost perfect equilateral triangle. On the third day, the Search and Rescue teams give up hope of finding and saving the owner of the smashed Jag and declare him dead. His colleagues, certain of his return, are visibly shaken when told they have no legal rights regarding the ultimate decision. “But he’s due in surgery in less than an hour.” By the fourth morning, squirrels are storing acorns in Dr. Reddy’s finely tailored pockets.

So, it is a surprise to both Dr. Reddy and his colleagues when the hospital’s Chief of Neurological Surgery wakes up, alive, on a gurney, two floors beneath his own office. A hiker, who had also failed to see the posted quarantine signs, found Reddy’s body slumped against a tree at the bottom of the ravine, then proceeded to poke cautiously at him with his walking stick, first frightened by the sight of the lifeless lump, then even more startled to find that the lump was alive.
Dr. Reddy, in his supine position, stares at his colleagues and medical staff hovering above him, who are presently blocking out the light and a bland patch of ceiling and says, “I thought some of you worked for a living.”
This comment is less to impose his authority than to remove eyes gazing on the incongruity of his new position in the scheme of things. He also can’t remember how he got here and would very much like to mentally reconstruct the missing events, simply to prove that he can.
His nursing staff is there too, and they smile awkwardly, glancing sideways at each other, then depart after offering sympathetic pats on their boss’s shoulder, which don’t quite touch him because no one is brave enough to make that much contact with someone whose hands are the most costly item on his insurance policy. Only the Deputy Chief of Neurosurgery and two other colleagues remain in the room, all individuals whom he could almost call friends because they’re bound by shared histories of astounding feats on the operating table and an affinity for ex‑spouse jokes.
Reddy slowly brings his arm up to his face, scratches the stubble on his chin. He has never grown facial hair, which is just as well because he has flawless skin despite his fifty-six years on a planet filled with free radicals. Women are jealous and can only explain away his eerie smoothness with a rumor that Reddy shaves with a scalpel.
“Hi there, Reddy.”
“Hi, Tina.”
Tina, his deputy, is the only person in the room who has ever seen him in bed, but never quite this helpless despite her disarming physical charms. And that was a long time ago. Before she can say anything else, Ken leans over and says, “Well, Reddy!” He reaches out to give his friend and colleague a manly slap on the back until he realizes the predicament this would create, leaving his hand to flutter aimlessly in mid-air.
Jerry laughs, a little too boisterously, and says, “Your funeral was fit for a king.”
Tina smiles and takes Reddy’s wrist, checking his pulse.
“Am I okay?” This is all he can manage to say. He can’t bring himself to ask if anything is irreparable. Inoperable.
Ken booms, “You’re fine, mister!” He’s struck again with the sudden urge to pat Reddy on the back, but instead launches into an explanation, edited to such an extent that it makes no sense to Reddy’s ears, or his brain, like a patient with an invisible spinal cord. “You’re fine,” he reiterates. “Just some scrapes, a banged‑up toe that’s going to hurt for a while, and a small bout of the Black Death.”

Tina makes a note in his chart and touches his hand gently before leaving the room, not totally unlike a friend, but perhaps more like a physician with just the right kind of bedside manner.
As it turns out, Reddy sat at the bottom of that forest for five days, unconscious of everything pulsating around his head: the shrillness of the birds, the short thunderstorm, the buzzing rescue teams looking for someone to rescue, the rodents ridden with fleas infected with Yersinia pestis. The day he wakes up in the hospital is the same day of his funeral, a memorial service without a body, a casket, an urn, just a photo leaning against an artist’s easel near the lectern, a picture of the smiling Dr. Reddy on a beach somewhere. His colleagues received quite a shock when they returned to work that very afternoon to find the deceased in Ward B on a saline drip.
“We just got back an hour ago,” Jerry says. “Beautiful. Really touching. I even donated money to the cause that your daughter chose. A crapload. You should be flattered. Do you think I could ask for some of it back? No, that would be bad. But do you think I could?”
Reddy is bewildered. Truly, utterly. He is genuinely curious what charity his daughter chose in his name but is more intrigued by how he wound up dead.
Ken snorts and rolls his eyes, says, “You were initially taken to – get this – to Sacred Heart East. Until they were able to identify you. If that accident didn’t kill you, I’m surprised Heart East didn’t finish you off.” Everyone laughs but Reddy. “You’ll need to stay for a few more days, but at least you’re where you belong now. You’ll make a terrifying patient.”
“Does my family know I’m alive?”
Ken and Jerry laugh, as if what Reddy has just said is terribly funny. That’s what the three of them do when they’re together: laugh a great deal, keep rigorously fit, and spend an inordinate amount of time in the company of unconscious people.

When Dr. Reddy returns home a week later, car-less and limping, he asks his daughter to stop at the mailbox before heading up the long driveway. As he picks up the stack of mail, he waves at his neighbor across the street, Mr. Hughes, a World War II veteran, who survived the war only to collapse in front of Dr. Reddy’s eyes this morning. Mr. Hughes has witnessed many men die in his lifetime but never has he seen one come back to life. Reddy stands silently from a distance, wonders whether he should resuscitate the man or head inside and sift through two weeks of mail while indulging in a full glass of Chianti.
It is his daughter, however, who darts from the car and checks the man’s vital signs. Mr. Hughes wakes immediately, shaking his head, mumbling and jabbing a rather menacing finger in the air in the direction of Reddy, who still stands motionless, across the street, staring not at his hyperventilating neighbor, but at the mound of flowers and candles and cards and more flowers piled high around the entrance gate to his property. Some people also left stuffed animals: teddy bears, a unicorn.
Mr. Hughes trembles and yells, “You’re dead!”
This is an accusation that Reddy must often deny in both the near and far-reaching future. And today too. The burden of proof, after all, is now on him.
By the time Mr. Hughes lands in the safe hands of the paramedics, Dr. Reddy has already entered his house and sat down, and is now polishing off his third glass of wine. Usually he drinks no more than two glasses of alcohol in a week, but today. . . today the rules are different.
“You’re the only person I trust with my heart,” says Dr. Reddy when his daughter walks in, rolling her eyes. She thrusts her hip to one side, elbow jutting out like an angry teenager, which she was, long ago.
“What was that all about?” the youngest Dr. Reddy says. A first-year cardiology resident, she has learned that her father’s attempt at flattery is one she will hear every day for the rest of her practicing career, always from men. “You’re a doctor for heaven’s sake. You can’t just stand there.” She walks toward him but doesn’t sit down. She brushes crumbs from his dining table and holds the tiniest remnants of a toasted breakfast he ate two weeks ago in the cup of her hand.
“I specialize in transplants. He didn’t look like he needed anything replaced.” She is right of course. He has to agree with her. But he doesn’t need to do it out loud.
She walks to the kitchen sink and dumps the crumbs down the drain. “You need some time off. Please tell me you’re not going back to work for a long time. A really long time.”
Reddy hadn’t thought about it yet, but he believes it would be a good idea to seriously consider his daughter’s suggestion.
He brings the wine glass to his lips but his daughter walks in again, promptly snatching it away. She stomps into the kitchen and he can hear her pouring both the contents of the glass and the bottle down the drain.
When she returns, he asks, “Where is Nikhil?”
Now he’s got her rolling her eyes again.
As it turns out, his son, also Dr. Reddy, a third-year pathology resident, has gone abroad, off to somewhere really cold, somewhere with three syllables, the specifics escape her now, a decision he made after he’d heard his father had died. Whether the catalyst was the painful loss of his dad or the sudden awareness of his own mortality, no one knows. All they know is that his son still thinks his father has been swiped off the planet.
“And no one has heard from him since?”
“Nope.”
His daughter finally sits down next to him and unwinds a cord on the dining table, then removes her laptop from its sleeve. “Mom wants to talk to you.”
“When is she coming?” Reddy’s heart felt suddenly a little tighter, as if it just punched itself.
“She’s not. She’s at work. She wants to video conference with you.”
His wife – ex-wife – also Dr. Reddy, an anesthesiologist at a facility beyond the farthest edge of the county, did not visit him in the hospital. He has a difficult enough time conversing with his wife on the telephone and an even harder time in person, but people seem to think up all sorts of new technology where people who want to avoid each other can’t.
“Actually, she did visit,” his daughter says. “You were asleep.”
“How convenient.”
“Stop. It’s a really long drive for her.”
“It’s a long trip to the next life. We won’t mention round trip.”
She looks up at him, glaring.
“Why are you so angry?” he says. “Some sympathy for the dead?”
“Enough!” She’s shaking as she types in her password, and now he understands.
He places his hand over hers on the keyboard and she starts to cry. “Chitra,” he says. “Chitra.”

When his wife’s face pops up on the screen, his daughter heads to her bedroom to take a nap. Reddy doesn’t know if she’s really tired, or trying to be polite, or taking cover.
“Reddy,” his wife says.
“Lakshmi,” says Reddy.
That is how their conversations start. At some point during their marriage, she stopped calling him by his first name. He can’t remember why. A sexual joke between them?
“You’re looking better than the last time I saw you, less dead certainly.”
“I’d like to say the same about you.” He didn’t know why he always came out caustic, but something about her half-eaten sandwich and the dainty little carton of soy milk next to her elbow irritated him.
“I see modern medicine cured you of the plague,” she says. “Too bad it can’t clear up some of your other, more serious, afflictions.”
“It can, but fortunately for you, it’s illegal.” Then he tries to hang up on her, but his daughter’s computer is unfamiliar to him, so he can’t figure out how, exactly, to terminate the connection, so they are stuck there, together, each staring out their own separate windows, she, with a view of the patients’ parking lot, he, staring at an old leaning oak tree, threatening to bring down part of the roof.
He can hear her slurping her stupid milk though a straw. Sometimes he wishes she would behave more like his daughter – or his son for that matter – who could be angry or openly disconsolate. He wishes she could be the sort to, when tragedy strikes, find herself drawn to some place inhospitably cold with three syllables.
Out of the corner of his eye, he examines her perpetually untidy office, a space that always looks as if it has been struck by a gale, except he doesn’t think nature can be that chaotic. Now his house, unlike the one he shared with her for nearly three decades, is immaculate. The way he likes it.
She is the first to turn toward the webcam and speak: “If it makes you feel better, you raised over eight thousand dollars for the Head Trauma Foundation. You’re saving lives when you’re alive and when you’re dead.”
He can’t tell if there’s sarcasm in her voice. Still, after all these years, he can’t tell.
“Did you attend my funeral?” he says. He doesn’t want to sound defensive, or offensive, because he truly wants an answer.
“I’m the one who planned your funeral.”
“Before or after I died?”
“Both.” She takes another sip of her milk.
He laughs despite himself. And she smiles.
She wags a finger at him, shaking her head. “You forgot to change your will, by the way.”
He didn’t forget – or he told himself to forget each time he talked to his attorney. He left her as main beneficiary. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been busy. Really caught up in things. I guess I should get around to it now – that is, if I can have my money back.”
“I don’t know what I would do with it.” And she means it, too. She never cared much for money, for things, and Reddy knows this but takes it as an affront anyway, as if his money, his home, aren’t good enough for her. He sits back silently, sulking.
“Don’t you want to hear about your funeral?”
“Not really.” Though, in fact, he does. Were there a lot of people? Were there too few? Had his son departed for parts unknown before or after? Did anyone cry? Did his wife?
His phone rings, his land line. It says, “Queen” on the display. This is the fifth time she has called since he left the hospital. Many high profile individuals have been laid out on his operating table over the years: film stars, athletes, models, cabinet ministers, senators, heads of state, royalty, race car drivers. Several of these people attended his funeral, but none of them visited him in the hospital.
His wife asks: “Don’t you want to answer that?”
He rubs his eyes, says he’s tired. The ringing stops and he can hear his daughter’s soft voice upstairs talking to the caller.
He can see the corner of his wife’s L-shaped desk where there once rested a photograph of the two of them in front of their first house, the older of their two children sitting on his lap, a picture that has now been replaced with a 365 Days of Kittens calendar. It’s still on February 2nd though it’s July.
“Where is our son?” he says.
She puts down her milk and pushes it to the side. He doesn’t know why she’s sitting so far away from the screen. “He performed your funeral rites, you know. That wasn’t easy for him. The whole ordeal sent him packing to . . . . He was mumbling when he left.”
“Shouldn’t we try to find him?”
“He was always such a sensitive child. But he’ll be fine.” She adds, “Just very sensitive.”
“Are you accusing me of something?”
“No,” she says, leaning into the screen a little. He feels her come closer, and he pushes his chair back.
“I didn’t make him go into medicine,” says Reddy.
“I never said you did.”
“Maybe it was you.”
“I’m hanging up now,” she says. “Get some rest.” Then she says something that he doesn’t understand, something mumbled but clearly foreign to him. They have always had to converse in English mostly, as she speaks – or rather, once spoke – Tamil and he, Telugu. But there are times, every now and again, where the two languages almost agree. This instance wasn’t one of them.

Now entangled in hours, days, weeks of bureaucracy that afflicts the living, Reddy considers killing himself. His family had cancelled his credit cards and when Reddy applies for new ones he’s repeatedly told that the bearer of that Social Security number is deceased. When he attempts to withdraw cash, he is told the name of the person on those bank accounts is dead. He longs to return to work in search of purpose and distraction but, despite his eagerness, this proves impossible. He cannot write prescriptions or renew his narcotics license, as the DEA says, “This particular ‘N. Reddy M. D.’ is no longer alive.” One day, the FBI Fraud Division shows up on Reddy’s doorstep eager to investigate this guy attempting to assume a dead man’s identity. The two special agents are disappointed by the end of their conversation with him. They consider arresting Reddy anyway, for something, but then they would have to explain to their boss and to the courts and maybe even the president why they arrested a dead man, and prosecution could get sticky.
When Reddy braves the Social Security office, he is handed a sheet of paper with an office number in another building, on another street, ten miles further away from the twenty miles he has already traveled from his house. After shuffling some papers around and failing to make eye contact, the woman at the next location tells him to head down the hall to another department, where he is then informed he should return to the original building where he began today’s odyssey, but this time to a different room on a different floor.
He doesn’t know what department he has landed in now. But it seems the right place because no one orders him to some other destination, and the receptionist tells him to take a seat, where he waits an hour and twenty minutes before his name is called.
“Well, Mr. Reddy,” the young blonde woman says as she glances over the form he filled out in the waiting room. She is seated behind an enormous transparent glass desk. He likes tidy desks, but not this one because it doesn’t look as if any work is performed on it, and if you did work on it, you’d be staring directly into the trash bin.
The woman looks up and smiles one of those tight smiles and says, “Your situation is unusual, Mr. Reddy – ”
“Yes,” he says, shifting his eyes away from the garbage can.
“But your predicament is more common than you’d think.”
Reddy is about to shift in his chair but he stops and blinks at her. His phone vibrates. The name that pops up on the screen is again “Queen.” He ignores it the way he ignored it seven times earlier today and eight times the previous day and countless times the last few weeks.
“Yes, yes. At least four to five people in this city alone are declared dead each year, who in fact are still breathing and walking and wondering where they left their keys. At least twenty to thirty people in the county and hundreds across the state, not to mention the entire nation.”
Reddy’s muscles loosen a little, his shoulders settle a little lower on his body. Her words, entirely unexpected, comfort him.
“Yes, there are hundreds, thousands of you roaming the streets every day.”
“Well, that’s good,” he says. “Not good, but . . . I mean, at least you have a procedure to handle these situations. I thought I was the only one.” Normally he likes being the only one.
“Oh, no no no no. Not by faaar.” She sings away his worries. “I’m going to send you home with this packet of paperwork and here’s a brochure for the self-help group.”
He takes the stack of documents from her and the glossy brochure on top that says, “The Society for the Living Declared Dead.” They even have a logo: LDD. The L is steely gray and the first D is a pale yellow and the last D, depicted in a stylized font, a fiery fuchsia. He almost laughs before he hands it back to her. “I won’t be needing this, but thank you.”
She pushes it back toward him and there it hovers, half on and half off her silly glass table. “You’ll find that it might help you.
“Help me with what?”
“Cope.”
“Cope with what?”
She tilts her head to the side and for the first time she looks softer, kinder. He knows now what it feels like to sit on the unsheltered side of a really big desk. “Mr. Reddy, when one is declared dead, well, that’s a lot to deal with in everyday life.”
“Well, I won’t need to deal with it every day as soon as you declare me alive again.”
Silence.
More silence.
He is familiar with this quiet because as a physician and a divorcee he hears it often. Sometimes he is the one emitting it.
“You do realize,” she says, “that there’s an average of three years you have to wait.”
Nothing.
“To be alive,” she adds. “Again.”
More nothing, not even breathing.
“And . . .” she says, humming to herself as she glances over his form, a tune he vaguely recognizes, but then she brings her song to an abrupt close before it’s over, “wait, I see here you were a naturalized citizen.”
He doesn’t like how she has begun to refer to him in the past tense.
“Yes,” he says, “I am.”
“Mmmm,” she says, a bad sound.
“I’ve lived here for over thirty years. I’ve been a citizen for more than twenty-five. I died here.”
“Yes, well, unfortunately, there’s a problem. You need to be declared alive in your country of origin first,” she says, “then, of course, you can try to immigrate here again.” She clears her throat once, then twice, that’s twice too many. Her voice climbs slightly higher. “Hopefully you can obtain a green card, and, well, after that, you can become a citizen!” She glances up but is afraid to look him in the eyes. Her tight smile is back. “At minimum, it would take you at least seven years. On the other hand it could take much longer, but well, we won’t think about that. But it looks like you’re fairly skilled, so that’s a plus!” She’s practically shouting now because even she knows this appointment in her busy schedule isn’t going well. “Would you like some water?” She stands up and leaves the room without asking for an answer. When she returns, she sits down in the chair next to him and places a hand on his arm. He slowly takes the water from her but doesn’t drink.
She pulls the brochure from the precipice of the table and tucks it into his pocket the way the ground squirrels had once deposited their seeds and fleas. “We can’t deport you,” she says. Her voice has resumed its calm, deeper tones. “Deportation is reserved for the living. You can stay if you want. It’s just that you won’t be, really, alive.”

For once, Reddy wishes one of his kids had become a lawyer. What medicine can’t solve, perhaps an immigration attorney can. He would like to plunge into that mysterious white landscape his son has found, but that kind of despondency requires a passport.
When Reddy returns home after having been told that the prognosis for death is more death, he throws away the brochure and sits down on his sofa. His daughter promises to do something, anything, she just doesn’t know what yet. “We’ll get it sorted,” she says. “I’ll tell Mom. She’ll know what to do.”

Reddy spends his days staring at the blank television screen. He loses his appetite, forgets his exercise regimen, pours whisky into his coffee. At night, he wanders the halls of his ten-thousand-square-foot home, walks down the stairs, only to walk up them again. He searches out his son’s room, his daughter’s room, but realizes now that they never lived here, not in this house. The room designated for his daughter is tidy, sparse, nothing but bottles of travel-sized shampoo and conditioner on the dresser, a green toothbrush, a comb, a bottle of pain reliever. His son’s room has no shampoo, no toothbrush, just a mottled blue and yellow bedspread atop a queen bed, a contusion that takes up most of the space.
Reddy can no longer sleep in his own bed. He tries sleeping on the sofa, then on the living room floor, then in his bathtub, which reminds him of a coffin, so he settles himself back on the sofa.
One day, he wakes up on the couch, stares at his reflection in the face of the blank television for a long time, then picks up the phone. For the first time in weeks, he has something new to share.
“I’ve grown a beard,” he tells his wife.
“Congratulations,” she says.
“Want to have lunch tomorrow? See my new beard?”
“I’m in surgery all day.”
He calls his daughter, says, “I’ve grown a beard.”
“Don’t grow a beard,” she says.
“Want to have dinner tomorrow?”
“I’ll be in surgery the entire day.” He is too familiar with what that implies, the exhaustion, too drained for company.
Reddy putters around his yard in his bathrobe. He takes up gardening, a less strenuous way of tending to the living; he can almost enjoy this nurturing, a hose in one hand, a glass of single malt in the other. He spends hours on the internet, learns the names of all the plants and flowers in his garden: Carolina cherry laurel, lily of the Nile, Brunfelsia pauciflora, which first blooms bright purple, then fades to lavender, then transforms to a stark white before falling from the stems. They are sweetly scented, like jasmine, but then Reddy thinks everything smells like those fragrant white garlands his wife wore in her hair long ago. His daughter once brought a small bouquet of roses for his office and when he leaned over to sniff them, what he smelled was jasmine.
Inside, he begins to gather the flowers spread all through the house, the flowers that were left near his front gate when the neighbors had first heard of his demise, the flowers left over from his funeral, from his hospital stay, the flowers that are now dead and brittle, more delicate than when they were alive. He gathers them up so he can throw them away, but as he steps out the door, a small unicorn, the size of his palm, falls from the mass of dusty petals and cellophane. He lays the bouquets on his front doorstep and picks up the soft toy. In the distance he can hear the faint drone of a leaf blower as he lowers himself onto the welcome mat, clasps the creature between his two highly trained hands, and begins to weep.

One evening, when he absently picks up the telephone, he thinks it is his wife calling, but instead he hears the Queen’s voice on the other end of the line.
This particular queen is the queen of some little country up where the elk outnumber the people and everyone carries a gun, even the children, for unexpected run-ins with bears and anything less ferocious that they haven’t already blown to extinction. If he lived there, he’d probably start annihilating things too, for fun. He knows she has been calling since the day he returned home from the hospital and now he wonders if it is because his son has found his gloomy paradise there.
“Reddy!” she says. “You’re alive, heavens.”
He doesn’t quite know how to respond to this, so he simply dispels her initial impression. “No, I’m not.”
He actually wants to get off the phone should his wife attempt to call. He says this isn’t a good time but the Queen, whom he simply calls “Queen,” says she has an important matter to discuss with him. “My cousin has been in an accident.”
Reddy, quite frankly, doesn’t care.
He explains his predicament, drawing out his words a little because he is slightly drunk, but she won’t be deterred. She can provide a hospital, staff, equipment, everything, she tells him. “You can do it here.”
His body has fallen so out of shape he’s convinced that, even if he wanted to help her, which he doesn’t, he’d become dizzy and weak after a mere twenty minutes over an anesthetized patient.
“You must come,” she says. “You must agree.”
Reddy will not agree. He is quite merciless about his disagreeability. He falls asleep, cradling the phone to his ear, the monarch lulling him with her softly beseeching tones.

As the weeks pass, his son phones his mother occasionally, sporadically, leaving cryptic signs of life on her office voicemail in the middle of the night when he knows she will not be there, and cannot therefore coax him back home. Reddy is relieved to hear the news, but one can only assume, then, that his son still believes his father dead.
And as the weeks pass, Reddy expands two inches around his waist, grows his fingernails long, ignores the calls from the Queen, a desperate voice, pleading with him. The Queen has taken to calling him at all hours of the night, which Reddy cannot bear because the medications that his ex‑wife prescribes are the only way he can fall asleep. He also has no health care coverage.
“Do you know how much these pills cost?” is what the Queen hears when she calls him at four a.m.
His wife visits more often now. In the evenings, when she drops off the prescriptions, they stand there, Dr. Reddy and Dr. Reddy, leaning against the counter under the kitchen lights, in awe of the three-digit numbers next to the dollar sign on the pharmacy receipt, two people who haven’t paid for their own medication in decades. And either the pharmacist has no record that this patient is dead or she sees no real harm in dispensing medications to people who can’t, theoretically, suffer any adverse side effects.
His wife and daughter, during their visits, continue to dig the LDD self-help brochure from the trash and place it in conspicuous areas of his house: near the coffee machine, in the bathroom, under his pillow. It always winds up in the trash again. One day, he simply rips it up. But after one of his daughter’s longer visits, he finds photocopies of the brochure taped all over his house, including the refrigerator, including the ceiling above the bed he rarely uses. It is his ex‑wife who entices him out to dinner but then dumps him at a school four towns over, where she yells, “Room 207B!” through the window right before she zooms away.

Nine people attend the meeting though the classroom can fit approximately thirty people. Reddy counts the chairs. The small shelves, short enough for children to reach, are filled with books, stuffed animals, crayon boxes, craft supplies; on the bright yellow walls hang colorful construction paper artwork, educational maps, and several portraits of past presidents who are, to his knowledge, dead. Over there in the corner, inside a wire cage, a guinea pig named Charlotte points her quivering snout directly at the gathered group. He remembers how he and his wife once reduced their son to tears when Nikhil brought home the class bunny. Dr. Reddy and Dr. Reddy peered over the enclosure, started to laugh, and recounted to the eight-year-old boy, how during their residencies they had once found a dead rabbit on the side of the road and decided to perform a dissection on their kitchen table. The boy returned the rabbit to the teacher the following morning, four days before it was due back.
The memory generates a slight aqueous blur emanating from the lacrimal glands near each of Reddy’s eyes. He takes a deep breath and blinks several times when he hears people moving furniture around him. Nine chairs and desks now form a circle in the middle of the classroom.
Someone sitting near the teacher’s desk clears his throat and begins to speak. “We are the opposite of Alcoholics Anonymous here because,” Reddy is told, “we feel names are important. We must use our names to help facilitate our recovery and negotiate the world.”
Reddy, the last to lower himself into one of the chairs, knows now that if he punches the counselor in the face, he cannot be prosecuted. He nibbles on the dry cookie one of the members handed out before the meeting and wonders what would happen if he robbed a liquor store, or performed surgery without a license, or kidnapped the class pet.
“Let’s allow the new member to introduce himself, shall we?”
It takes a moment for Reddy to realize the counselor is talking to him because he is concentrating on the green chalkboard that hadn’t been erased properly by the teacher. He can discern the words “dog” and “run.”
All eyes are trained in his direction, everyone nodding encouraging smiles at him with a disconcerting empathy. “My name is Dave,” says Reddy, which it isn’t. He wants his lie to be monosyllabic. During the break, people call him Bill, Mark, Sam, Todd.
The other members are interested in what he once did for a living, to which he also answers with a lie and tells them he was a pathologist, and then they are no longer interested.
During the second meeting, they’re asked to simulate their own deaths. “It’s like returning to the womb, but the opposite. Fast forwarding, so to speak. But this time,” the counselor says, “this time someone will be present to stop the madness.” They all glance nervously, cautiously at Reddy because it was a pathologist responsible for starting their madness to begin with, for declaring the fates, with a simple signature, of at least four people in that very room. With the others, it was merely a computer glitch that erased them from the planet, so it’s unclear how they intend to reenact such an ending. It seems rather anticlimactic, the delete button. But Dr. Reddy/Dave decides during this second meeting that he is not at all in the mood to recreate a car accident, a catapult from a car, nor his unconscious interlude with pestilent fauna, and he knows that he will never wish to re-live such an event, so he walks away during the break just as his phone rings for the fifth time this evening.
“Citizenship,” the voice says.
“What?”
“Citizenship. I will give you citizenship. Here. In my country.”
“Queen, no offense, but your country sucks.” He had learned that word from his kids and asked them not use it. “What on earth would I do there?
“Same thing you do over there. Of course you’d have to grow accustomed to our climate.”
“I don’t think I could.” Reddy is heading toward the parking lot where he has just remembered he hasn’t parked a car. He keeps walking, squinting into the distance.
“We could get married.”
“No, we couldn’t.”
“But don’t you think it would be fun to be king?”
Reddy considers this for a moment. He’s heard many unusual suggestions these past months, but this is the first worth listening to. “No.”
“Eventually your money will run out.”
“I have a family caring for my interests.”
“You’ll never practice medicine again.”
Reddy stops walking.
“As I see it,” she continues, “you could go back to your birth country, start life rolling again, but how? You are stateless. No one will let you beyond the ticketing counter, let alone passport control.”
“Queen . . . .” he says. And she waits for more but there isn’t anything else. Leaning against the shelter of the bus stop, finally, he says “It’s getting dark here. I’m going home.”

The next day, at 10:07 a.m., when Reddy is still fast asleep on the family room sofa, his doorbell rings with some urgency. He looks at his watch and notes that, in his past life, he would have already been awake for five hours by now, would have jogged six miles, showered, eaten breakfast, arrived at work. That’s what he recounts every day when he wakes up, what he would have done.
A courier stands on his doorstep and says, “Dr. N. Reddy? Package.”
In return for his messy physician’s scrawl, a signature that is no longer valid on any official document, Reddy is handed a padded yellow envelope with no return address, no stamps.
The passport is the color of blood, embossed with a coat of arms in intricate veins of gold. She had pulled the photo from the hospital internet site. Somehow she is sure he will say yes. Mentally he takes stock of his wardrobe and knows that everything inside is inadequate. He was born at low latitude, lived the second half of his life at mid-latitude and is now plagued by thoughts of where he might end his days. He doesn’t know if he can commit to a map like that.
But then, how can he not?

Tonight, Reddy picks up his phone and dials.
“I’m coming,” he says. “I will be there.”
There’s a soft, deep sound on the other end, a resuming of breath.
“But I don’t want to be King,” he adds.
“Good. I don’t think anyone else wants you to be King either,” she says. It’s the most unconvincing lie she has ever told but the only field of detection Reddy has ever been skilled at is diagnosis.
“I’ll be there next week.”
“We’ll send someone for you,” says the voice on the other end. And there’s silence for a long time before they both put down the phone.

Reddy, a man whose hands have not performed a surgical procedure in what seems an eternity, tests the agility of his fingers with a scalpel at last. He looks closely in the mirror, at his unblinking reflection, raises a steady right hand in the air, and begins to shave.

As Reddy waits for the airport limousine, a familiar car arrives in his driveway. He watches from the window as she steps out of her vehicle and approaches the door. He opens it before she reaches the steps.
“Leaving without saying goodbye?” says his ex‑wife.
“I thought we said goodbye on the phone last night.”
“No we didn’t.”
He doesn’t know if he should be offended by this, by her telling him he’s wrong again. With a diplomacy that impresses them both, he says, “Now that I have a passport, I can always travel. Come back.”
“You would return to say goodbye?”
He invites her in and closes the door. There are no signs of moving boxes, no bunched up newspapers from wrapping valuables; the house and all its belongings look as they did when she last visited. Only two small suitcases near the door betray a departure.
She smiles and reaches out to him. Even if he finds her words heavy with ambiguity, somehow he knows these little gestures. This doesn’t mean she wants him to take her hand – if she wanted him to do that, her hand would have been tilted more upwards, fingers together. This time, her fingers are slightly splayed, palm not quite facing the sky, a supplication.
He hands her the passport that she has been so curious to see. She walks into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of water and leans against the counter. She turns the passport round and round examining each page, each intricate detail. She rubs her fingers across the luxurious cover, the embossed gold stamp, petting it before opening it again.
“That was always a good photo of you.”
“I thought so.”
“A little too stiff, but still nice.”
He stands next to her, propping himself against the counter as well, places his arms across her shoulders as they inspect it closer, their necks bent together over the document, clean pages, no stamps. The room is silent, except for a distant helicopter flying overhead in the vicinity.
She places the passport back in his hands. They stand there for a moment, staring at the small round kitchen table, not unlike the one on which they had once dissected a jackrabbit together.
“I’m going to find our son,” he says, “now that I have this.” He grips the passport a little harder and draws her close. They stand quietly in an embrace, losing track of the time, his cheek resting gently against her hair until the noise of the helicopter grows louder, rising slowly to a shaking rumble, impossible to ignore.
“Maybe they’re searching for someone,” she says, pulling away. Reddy’s neighborhood borders the mountains. Sometimes inexperienced hikers lose themselves in the hills, but when his wife moves closer to the back door to have a look, eyes trained up into the afternoon blue sky, she says, “I think your ride is here.”

Had Reddy known his yard was big enough for a helicopter landing, he would have thrown more parties.
Together they walk outside, through the sliding glass doors, carrying what little luggage Reddy packed. The pilot waves to them. Reddy knows the only real footprint he has, at this very moment, is a carbon one. He longs to change this, looks forward to it at last.
As he slowly approaches the aircraft, he realizes his wife is no longer beside him. He can see her at the edge of the enormous lawn, at the border of the patio, her long hair coming loose from her hair band, flying up and up, writhing, swirling around, as if summoned by the helicopter blades. Reddy remembers one evening, long ago, when the kids were young, and they all watched a TV movie together. The character of the Medusa went slinking around walls and pillars, waiting to pounce, the children sitting on the floor, entranced, gripped by the growing dramatic tension, while Dr. Reddy and Dr. Reddy lay on the sofa behind them, sipping sweet tea, discussing how all those snakes could possibly get enough blood from that woman’s head into their circulatory systems to stay alive. How did that work? “Stop it!” the kids pleaded, “you’re ruining it!”
Reddy and his wife attempt to bid farewell but they can’t hear each other above the deafening noise of the helicopter. Screaming at each other comes quite naturally to them, but still, they’re forced to move closer. He beckons her with a subtle movement of his wrist, a gesture she still can read. She smiles and shakes her head, the newly trellised backdrop of white blossoms behind her. He thinks it’s the beating of the blades above them that wafts the scent of jasmine everywhere.
“That passport has your name on it,” she says. “They need only one Reddy. Go!”
Reddy looks back at the pilot and holds up his hand, requesting one more moment. He turns to face his ex‑wife, and prepares to say this as loud as he can so she will hear him. He will utter this only once, one last chance at a life sutured. “We could get married!”
She tilts her head, her mouth forming the shape of incomprehension, an airy and barely audible, what?
“Don’t worry,” he replies. “It would just be a green card marriage!”
She smiles again and tries to tame her coils, but it’s no use, so she releases them.
“Narendra,” she says, shaking her head, and this time, when she opens her mouth, he can almost hear his name.

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A. A. Srinivasan’s stories and translations have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Chicago Review, Connu, Grist: The Journal for Writers and The Pushcart Prize anthology.