The Doctor’s Plan

My plan worked. A liquid injected into the veins of children—yes, children, unwilling, screaming, crying children—to prevent them from contracting communicable diseases. Hate me if you want to. I never asked for your forgiveness. When I was just a boy, I watched my parents die before my eyes. Polio. I vowed to get my revenge. And I didn’t care who I helped or how many lives I saved along the way.

This surgical mask is my disguise and my means of shielding myself from covid spittle. I don’t need to show my face. I have no face to show. I am no longer a man. I have become what you call me, a give-no-shits Doctor, out here running cold water on the world’s burns.

Where is my conscience, you ask? Never had one. I’ve been too busy dressing wounds. Conscience is for cape-wearing amateurs who haven’t yet recognized that they are, at their core, just like me. Broken. Weary. Numb. Band-Aid toting. Come and get me, so-called heroes. Because I’m about to strap you to a gurney and apply an ice pack to your throbbing head. And the whole time I’m going to laugh while asking what your kid has been up to.

Don’t call it a costume. Call it scrubs. I wear them because of bloodstains. Yeah, Mr. Secretary, the blood from your nose when you forget to turn on the humidifier at night. Dry heat from a radiator will do that to you. Take a lollipop from my assistant. It’s poison-apple-shaped, and I’m not sorry.

I’m about to point this gun at your forehead and take your temperature. Ninety-eight point six. Just as I predicted. I document it. I document everything—yes, everything. I got files on you going back years. Even you, Mr. Secretary. The time you broke your ankle in ninth grade? I was there, fitting you into a moon boot and estimating your insurance company’s allowable fee.

I know why I’m here today, Mr. Secretary. An inquiry? Yeah, right. It’s a setup, but what you suits don’t realize is that I got this place surrounded with nurses, and every last one knows how to apply a tongue depressor. You bureaucrats have decided that I’m the problem. Seen me for what I am—an eccentric with a taste for rare sharks and the Journal of the American Medical Association. But you don’t scare me. I’ve got a crash cart and a drawer full of gauze pads and an inexplicable British accent. Let’s go, federal government.

You say that I will save millions of lives this year. Next year. Each year in perpetuity, until I am stopped, once and for all. “Really, that many lives?” I ask, coyly. After you’ve saved one, let me tell you, the rest get a lot easier. And now? I sleep like a baby. I didn’t have regrets when I was just a resident, giving stitches to children who fell off jungle gyms. Now that I’ve developed an mRNA vaccine? I don’t block anything out—no, I remember. I remember every mother’s scream, every photo of a newborn baby, every balloon, all while I stroke a white-haired cat. An evil cat.

What do I want? Nothing less than world domination. The eradication of the H.I.V., Ebola, and tuberculosis pathogens. Yeah, I said it. Do I shock your delicate constitutions? Deal with it. I want fewer preterm-birth complications. Clean drinking water. My smiling face on every poster for sleep-apnea studies. And my own fleet of special-capability vehicles with sirens and lights and the word “AMBULANCE” written backward, so that other drivers can read it in their rearview mirrors.

You want to fire me, Mr. Secretary? Go ahead and fire me. You hide behind your institutions and believe in social order. But I am the institution. No one in this whole public-hearing room can find a vein like I can. And when I do find it? I stick a needle right in there, and I draw enough blood to determine whether you need to take an iron supplement. And then I lean back and admire the human bones that I’ve collected as part of my anatomy model.

Take me to court. Imprison me. But you can’t imprison an idea. You can’t imprison the idea of me administering my fellow-inmate’s insulin. I will shoot him in the arm multiple times a day, and, trust me, Mr. Secretary—in the darkest moment of the night? He will thank me.

You ask if I will go quietly. Have you not been listening? Of course I will go quietly.

After I fill this entire chamber with laughing gas. Regretting turning down that KN95 now, aren’t you? I’ve got a helicopter waiting on the roof to take me back to my lair, the Cleveland Clinic. And don’t even think about getting to me there, unless you’re willing to set up an appointment with our office a month to six weeks in advance. And don’t think that you won’t be getting a text reminder. Because you will.

What you don’t realize is that you need me. You need me for balance. For annual checkups. For dinosaur stickers.

And believe me, fools, I’ve got plenty. ♦