That ending could make Fitzgerald seem callous. Fitzgerald lies to her “with the greatest tenderness I have within me.” Later the same day, in the story’s closing scene, Fitzgerald sits with his assistants in a hot tub and plays a parlor game in which they ask one another to choose between various hypotheticals, like “being famous and destitute, or rich and anonymous.”
“We do not say it directly,” Lam writes, “but we talk around the regret of a lost opportunity: the narrow time frame in which an expanding death in the form of a bloody intracranial expansion can perhaps be drained, can sometimes be sucked out like an evil spirit to leave the scintillating brain intact.”Īfter the patient dies on the flight out, his wife asks if the better treatment available at home might have made a difference. In the middle of the night a local doctor tells Fitzgerald that a recent CT scan and a neurosurgeon were unavailable, and the pair discuss the grave outlook. Fitzgerald takes a jet to Guatemala to treat a tourist who’s had a stroke.
In “Night Flight,” one of the best of the linked stories in Vincent Lam’s first book, a Toronto physician named Dr.
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