Topic: Day One, Part One

Ali al Amat

Date: 2009-01-20 00:14 EST
This was Ali's first day.

Here he was at ground zero, standing beside his Victory motorcycle, parked in his parking spot. It was astonishingly close to the front entrance of the Riverview Clinic. There was the small neat sign: "No. 5 - Director", with "A. al-Amat" printed below. The January wind sighing over the curve of his helmet was bitterly cold.

There was the hospital's brick-and-mortar facade, peaceful at this hour. The building had to be a hundred years old at the very least. The seven am sunlight struggled through the chill and lowering clouds down to earth; when it reached the long narrow windows it seemed hardly to have the strength to reflect there, and it puddled listlessly on the sidewalk. There were only small signs of life: two nurses in white walking to the front entrance, their faces burned vividly pink by the cold air. One cut her eyes at him, whispered behind her hand at the other. The breeze carried their giggling from fifty feet away.

The Chief is going to have my head by the end of the day, he thought in resignation. Doctor Kieran Dorst, the chief resident, had already threatened him once for agitating her flock of nurses.

He was stalling, he knew it. But he'd meant to be here precisely at eight o'clock, he really had; only he'd found himself at five-thirty with the sheets in a tangle, staring at the ceiling, arms folded behind his head, brain clicking away at a furious rate. Making plans. Turning over ideas. There was no sleep left in him. And so here he was standing out in the parking lot, an hour early.

Well, this is the moment of truth...please, Bast, let there be coffee, he thought. Then he took a deep breath and walked into the building.

—-

"Mr. al-Amat!"

The receptionist waved him over as soon as he pulled his helmet off inside the lobby's blessed warmth. "Doctor Valkonan said you'd be in. Here, these are for you. Also this, and Mr. Milken—he's our accountant—he wants to meet with you today. He'll talk to you about the requisitions. And this is for you, too, and these are for your health insurance, you'll want to look those over. This is a map, just in case you need help finding your way around the first few days. Doctor Dorst left you a reminder that you promised her lunch. Doctor Valkonan said she'd like to check in with you this afternoon. Also, I would just like to point out that you need an assistant, because there is no way I'm doing this for you every day."

Her grin was surprisingly cheeky after the rapid-fire delivery, and she seemed utterly immune to his good looks. With the helmet and the load of paperwork and forms and notes and brochures she'd given him, his arms were entirely full. He very, very briefly considered giving it back to her, turning around, and walking back out again. He'd never been responsible for more than a hundred people at a time in his entire life, barring the Killarney evacuation. How was he going to do this"

Then the five-thirty excitement, the awareness of possibility, rose up in him once more. He took another deep breath and returned her smile. "Thank you. Where is my office, please?"

She pointed. "Administration is down that hall, you'll see the doors. You're third door on the right. Doctor Star is in today, so if you see a dolphin floating around, don't freak out or anything, okay?"

Ali thanked her again, noting the nametag—Lorelei Ashcroft—and her appearance—slight build, blonde braids, impressively pointed ears—hefted the small mountain of paperwork, and limped off down the directed hallway. Behind him there was a sudden bout of giggling as more nurses walked in.

—-

There was coffee.

On a set of cabinets built into one wall was the coffee maker—already loaded and filled with water; he pressed the button and it gurgled happily at him—and a spider plant he resolved to name "Droopy."

His desk was a giant slab of cherrywood, polished to a satiny semi-gloss finish, with about a thousand drawers and shelves and cubbyholes tucked in underneath. To his delight, it was big enough that he could stretch out his legs without feeling the least bit cramped. It fit him so well that it smacked of pre-planning—he found himself wondering whether it had always been in this office, or whether it had been ordered the day he was first being considered as a candidate. He sat in his chair (buttery-soft brown leather, exceedingly ergonomic, also a perfect fit) and wondered whether he should even ask about it. The offer of L'Esprit de Courvoisier from Maranya's boyfriend Antonio still had him stunned.

Upon the desk was a telephone with too many buttons, and a computer: small, sleek, asleep save for a small green replica of the hospital's logo in one corner of the screen. When he tapped a key to wake it, fifteen notes pasted to the virtual work surface sprang to life. The topmost was a reminder that he needed to key the computer to his voice; the second was a message that he needed to meet with the head of the hospital's information technology department; and so on, each one flashing an urgent, seizure-inducing orange at him.

He flipped through the messages to kill the painful flashing, then poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it while looking out his very own tall, narrow window onto the grounds. They were manicured and quite dead; the skeletons of trees bridged the gap between the lightening sky and buff-colored slopes of grass. In the distance a profusion of bare branches announced the presence of the river for which the clinic was named, but he could see no hint of the water itself. No one dared the cold to walk along the paths. He didn't blame them.

His watch beeped eight o'clock. At that precise moment his phone began to ring, and a fresh cascade of messages poured onto his computer screen. Ali sucked in another deep breath and began his day.

Ali al Amat

Date: 2009-01-20 00:31 EST
It was a blur.

He rolled up his sleeves and dove in. He read through all the notes and memos and folders. He filled out forms and took careful notes of his own. Someone delivered a copy of the hospital's charter, granted by the municipal government; he read through that, carefully pacing himself on the coffee. He put in a request for ethics statements, codes of conduct, employee handbooks and the like, and trawled through those once he received them.

He spoke with the hospital's accountant, Robert Milken, for an hour. Milken was a dapper older gentleman with a red bowtie, bright blue eyes, and a crooked grin; Ali found himself liking the man on sight. They settled on a schedule for regular meetings. Shortly after Milken's departure, a box full of financial statements arrived. He buried himself in those until he ran out of coffee. It was getting harder to find empty space on his gigantic desk; his virtual workspace was beginning to look like a house of cards with the layers upon layers of notes stacked on it.

His watch told him it was lunch. He followed the map to the cafeteria, where Doctor Dorst was lying in wait for him. She pounced, scolded him roundly for stirring up her nurses, and dragged him off to meet two other doctors. They traded friendly barbs; he asked a thousand questions, watched the interrelationships, took mental notes. At the end of it he decided that he liked them, too. He thought about asking Kieran out. He decided to wait.

The IT director showed up after lunch, and led him through a few functions of the computer that he hadn't already discovered. They discussed the hospital's intranet and data archive systems. Then the man launched into a passionate speech that gradually evolved into a plea for Ali's approval for more money for a newer network. Ali deflected him, more or less gracefully, and chivvied him out.

Not long after that, Doctor Maranya Valkonan herself showed up. Here in her element, the contrast in the face she turned to the public and the person she was when at work became obvious and startling. She seemed pared down to her essential self: precise, focused, her gaze incisive, her questions succinct. She quizzed him briefly on his needs and experiences, assured him that he needed only to put in the request to human resources to have an assistant allocated. She promised him more of Antontio's fabulous coffee. Then she swept out, labcoat flying, and the financial statements were suddenly less interesting.

Still, the first year's accounting occupied him through the remainder of the afternoon. As the weak sunlight finally failed, he reached a stopping point and switched over to an examination of the marketing materials. The computer helpfully switched the room lighting to the indoor evening lamp, wrapping him up in a blanket of warm yellow light. He read on.

—-

The baby smiled.

Ali tapped the glass separating him from the nursery with a long finger and smiled back. He thought he remembered hearing somewhere that babies weren't able to smile until they were at least six months old, but this one seemed to be smiling with a vengeance. There were five other babies in the rows of cribs, but this one was closest. The baby—a boy, he surmised, from the color of its shirt—flailed its fat little fists ineffectually at the air.

He had no idea what time it was; he was almost afraid to check the clocks he passed, and he kept his arms firmly folded, his watch hidden. The Admin wing had gone quiet hours before. The hospital itself settled into the night—voices were quieter, eyes were a little redder. His own were burning by the time he'd given up reading, and his ghost reflected in the glass seemed to glare at him.

He had given no thought to children, since his divorce. Babies had hardly entered his mind. His walkabout through the halls to this place was a forcible reminder of the reason this hospital existed: to provide healthcare to the community, with a special focus on pediatric care. Babies were important. Babies mattered. This was the right decision. This was absolutely the right thing to do, taking this job, being right here, right now. He wiggled his fingers at the newborn, and felt something very like joy.

Beside him an older couple was talking to one another about another baby asleep in her crib. The man had his arm around the woman. The woman was sniffling, overcome with a joy of her own. Ali turned to them.

"My apologies, I could not help overhearing—your first grandchild, you said? Congratulations! I am Ali al-Amat, the Director of Administration here at the hospital." He offered his hand.

His watch beeped ten o'clock.