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of the bus whirring away.
    Round red lights receding.
    The heat of blood on his face, and the cold ground that had ripped through his pants to open his knees raw.
    Cars honked. Move on.
    The bike was unrideable. The wheels had pancaked into the frame when it was run over by the bus. Fitzgerald was alive through the luck of being thrown far enough forward. He chained the bike to a street sign, called the transit commission from a pay phone, told them what had happened, and they gave him a file number. He called the police, and they gave him a file number. He asked what he should do, and the constable asked if he was injured. Cuts and bruises, he said. Keep the file number, she said, and hung up. He took a bus home, glaring at the driver. After picking the gravel out of his face and knees with a shaving brush, Fitzgerald lay down.
    The house was quiet. He thought vaguely of his father, who had said he was going to Luxembourg this week on business, or Lausanne? Some European place that began with L. He didn’t pay attention anymore,and so the two of them were quiet bachelors living in the same house. Fitzgerald remembered his mother, and his tears stung in the scrapes from the bicycle crash.
    Only then, lying on his own bed with his face oozing, did he think of Ming. In a distant way, it occurred to him to call her, to tell her about the moment when he was airborne in the intersection of Sussex and Rideau and believed that he would die. He didn’t have her telephone number. A letter. He would send a letter, and she would feel sorry, would wish that she had been there to comfort him, and would feel guilty at her neglect. But why send a letter when he was going to Toronto tomorrow? Then he realized that he had felt cleaner and lighter in the four hours since the accident, that he hadn’t thought about Ming or about medical school (was it really the first four hours in months?).
    He fell asleep.
    Â 
    Fitzgerald slept until the next morning, and barely woke in time to catch the train, still tired. Lake Ontario’s surface was a rippled grey as the train hummed toward Union Station, and Fitzgerald felt a blank surprise that the world continued—that the bus had rushed away into a winter afternoon, that today he would still have to explain himself at his interview. If the bus had found its mark, he decided, the world would have been much unchanged. Someone else would have become a doctor, perhaps a better one than himself. Fitzgerald reminded himself that he only had an interview, not an admission,and so he still might not become a doctor. Today, this did not seem to be as disastrous a possibility as he had previously believed. He tried to summon his conviction that all of this was crucial, but felt only vaguely amazed at having spent so many hours listening to static-hiss recordings of lectures, straining to write minute facts in his cramped notes.
    Dr. McCarthy was the dermatologist who, in her private office on Edward Street, welcomed Fitzgerald on behalf of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. There was also a young Asian man in black jeans and a green scrub top who wore a crisp white lab coat and whose stethoscope was slightly askew on his neck. An impressively battered aluminum clipboard was propped between his hand and hip.
    Dr. McCarthy said, “We always involve a trainee in these little sessions. This is Karl.”
    â€œI’m a surgical resident,” said Karl, as if it should be evident that this exercise was entirely too banal for his important schedule.
    â€œWhat did you do to your face?” asked McCarthy.
    â€œKarl, take a look.”
    Karl grasped the edge of the bandage and said, “The best way is fast—to rip it right off.” He yanked the plaster, and with a pain more vivid than the original injury, Fitzgerald felt the fragile scab rip cleanly away with the bandage.
    â€œHmm,” said McCarthy. She frowned slightly at Karl.

    Fitzgerald explained