The Deaf people had a right, they said, to know what was being said, and to know what was being sung, and it said so in the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and so on and so forth. So the promoters picked up the telephone and called the State Commission for the Deaf, and the State Commission for the Deaf confirmed that the Deaf people had a right, and the Allman Brothers a responsibility.

Enter stage left, fresh out of interpreter training school, armed with my code of ethics and lexicon of a thousand signs, the hired hand—for three hundred and fifty dollars plus mileage and tolls. My first big gig.

The sweet familiar reek of cannabis met me at the gate where Security raised an eyebrow, then knitted it to the other eyebrow, when I flashed my official INTERPRETER FOR THE DEAF ID and sashayed through the turnstile, flexing my sign language muscle and cracking my knuckles.

There were two Deaf couples sitting up front at the foot of the mountain of speakers. I spotted their flitting hands in a jiffy with my trained eye, introduced myself in the Deaf way, enumerating my Deaf connections, my Deaf teachers, my Deaf resume. Then out came Gregg Allman and some gray ponytails and the crowd went wild and I went to work.

They opened with “One Way Out,” then eased into “Ramblin’ Man,” “Midnight Rider,” “Southbound” and “Melissa.” I juggled, fingerspelled, finagled the lyrics for close to an hour, and then, thankfully, they played “Jessica,” an instrumental, so I sat down to take a break.

But not two beats into it, someone was tapping my shoulder. It was one of the Deaf guys. “Hey,” he said, “why did you stop?” I told him, “It’s an instrumental—there are no words to interpret.” He looked disappointedly toward the stage for a long wordless moment. “In that case,” he said, “interpret the instruments. We want to know which instruments—we have a right to know!”

I made a face that said, “Are you kidding me?” And he made a face that said, “I am totally serious, get your ass back up there on that stage.” Which I did, with a little resentment and more than a little attitude, and I gave him my best air guitar, air bass, air dobro, air drums—boom ba boom ba-dum ching—snare drum, bass drum, toms, cymbals, hi-hat, all the while shaking my booty as best I knew how, something they never taught us in sign language class. In fact, I surprised myself with the boogie and groove that came out of me, if I do say so myself.

I got home at 2:00 in the morning. I lay in bed wide awake, my ears still buzzing from the assault of the music. And I found myself, in spite of myself, smiling to myself as my resentment began to lift: That Deaf guy’s insistence that I show him the music—without the words—was a perfectly reasonable request. After all, we all have the music in us. Even Deaf people have the music in them. He was only asking me to help him see it. Which, after all, I was getting paid to do. Bottom line, it helped me see that I have the music in me, too.

Accompaniment: “Jessica” — The Allman Brothers Band

“There is something too permanent about ‘I,’ something shrunken and stifling.” Annie Ernaux, The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer

D dropped out of Rogers Park’s Sullivan High School before his senior year, the 1969-70 term. As a freshman, sophomore and junior, D was eccentric, studious and unfashionable, a persona that was socially isolating and unsustainable. During the long hot summer of 1969, his sensibilities radically shifted. He tore away the ‘uncool’ sartorial remnants that had been foisted upon him by his Eastern European immigrant parents, as if pulling a deep scab. Newly costumed in the fashion of the day, in bell-bottoms, flowing shirts with wide lapels, double-breasted jackets, wire-rimmed glasses and long sideburns, he drew double takes from Chicago’s Morse Beach to Rush Street: “Man, are you Ray Manzarek, from The Doors?” Or, even more thrilling were the times they exclaimed: “You could be John Lennon’s double!” These spontaneous affirmations allowed an escape. When he first sported those wire-rimmed glasses, popularized by Lennon, his stepfather violently condemned them as “n**r glasses.” His mother tag teamed with an unrelenting, sixteen hour campaign of nagging. He did not budge. After all, for them he was the bajkeverő, “the bastard,” “the troublemaker,” and suddenly, under their roof, the feared image of the counterculture.

By mid-August, Sullivan was a stage he was compelled to exit. Students, teachers, and administrators had three years to observe and interact with what he had been. It was better to move on. Just sixteen years old, he enrolled as a freshman at Roosevelt University’s South Loop campus, for the Fall 1969 term.

The Fall of 1969: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Roosevelt occupies Louis Sullivan’s 1889 Auditorium Building on South Michigan Avenue. Back then, its revolving door opened onto a mosaic tile entrance, and from there an imposing staircase climbed to a second floor that functioned like a train station between classes. The police riots of the 1968 Democratic National Convention were still in the air, like the smell of smoke months after a California wildfire. That Fall brought the murder of Fred Hampton while the Vietnam War kept on. As befitted the times, he was not the sole desperate and hastily reinvented soul on campus. The cafeteria was where D’s improbable circle gathered: an Italian hipster, an ex-nun, an English lit teacher who began every class with meditation and the chanting of AUM. The second floor was where he met Aaron Mendelson.

Mendelson spoke volubly with a faux British accent, his broad face framed by thick black hair and equally thick eyebrows. Intense deep brown eyes burned behind black horn-rimmed acetate eyeglasses. He wore three-piece suits around the South Michigan Avenue campus, which accentuated his thick hands and legs, a pronounced waddle on flat feet, while sporting an ebony cane with a white onyx tip.

In January 1970, D invited Mendelson to an evening party at an Uptown apartment, hosted by D and two roommates. While the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour played in the expansive 1920s living room suffused with incense, Mendelson wandered to the enclosed back porch and covertly appropriated cans of black, pink, red and white paint. He smuggled these into his former cohort’s bedroom and painted a mural on one wall: The wall adjacent to his host’s bed was painted black. In the center was a white outline of a grave, with some Latin phrase. There was a white skeleton on the wall and a cross, over a grave, with a ghost-like figure hovering above, suggestive of The Devil. When Mendelson finished his hastily composed masterpiece, he casually walked out of the room, telling no one. When D brought an “older” nineteen-year-old woman into his room for perfunctory sex, it was only then that Mendelson’s grisly “gift” was discovered.

He saw Mendelson one last time, a month later. When he visited Mendelson’s 1950s basement apartment in West Ridge, their conversation had just begun when Mendelson dropped to the floor, writhing; an epileptic fit. The drooling, the uncontrolled agitation, the flapping tongue, the manic eye rolls, and Mendelson’s sheer helplessness. It was over in a few minutes. Then slowly, carefully, D crouched down to where Mendelson lay sprawled and gently helped him up. Unmasked, the English affectation was gone, along with all other pretense. Weeping, he confessed that he was not born and raised “across the pond.” He was from Oklahoma City.

D stayed with Mendelson for a half an hour, offering what reassurance he could, obliquely sensing a future unmasking of his own. Then he left. They never saw or heard from each other again.

Accompaniment: “Pale Blue Eyes” — Velvet Underground

This is one version of what we’re looking for, submitted by an editor. Yours will bring something we can’t anticipate and do it better.

In The Pitt, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, an attending physician, pauses mid-sentence. It looks like thinking, which is why it isn’t questioned. But as an attending, her role carries final responsibility. The decisions settle with her; the room moves with her timing. I noticed it before I knew what it was, and by episode seven, when she talks to her neurologist over the phone, it becomes something that had already been happening.

Over time, the pause changes. The timing shifts just enough to register differently. The rhythm slips, and it begins to feel like something is happening, even without a name for it.

Later, it’s named. Seizures. The quiet kind. She has lived with them for decades. Built a career with them. Learned how to move through her work while carrying something that could interrupt her at any moment.

There’s a scene where she shows her chart. She does it carefully, as if controlling how it’s presented might control what it means. It feels like she is trying to remain the doctor in the room while something else is being introduced.

Once it’s spoken out loud, everything around her changes. The pauses begin to carry consequence.

I worked as a surgical technologist, and the job depends on a rhythm that isn’t written down. You learn it through repetition, through proximity, through the way a surgeon reaches for something before asking for it. You learn how to move without breaking the flow.

I remember holding a retractor for so long my hand went numb, but I didn’t move it. I remember thinking that if I shifted even slightly, something would open that wasn’t supposed to. There was an imprint in my palm that stayed for the rest of the day, like I had been gripping something that wasn’t entirely there.

I fainted during a case. I was the second assist to the surgeon. It had already been hours. We were searching for lymph nodes in the axillary space; slow and careful. I had locked my knees without realizing it. I hadn’t been drinking water. The room stayed focused while I slipped out of it.

When I came back, I was laying on the ground. Someone made fun of the socks I was wearing. I laughed at the joke. They carted me off in a wheelchair, which made it more dramatic than it needed to be.

There was a case where I was asked to get a 15mm sagittal blade for the third metacarpal. The surgeon specified the SM-3103. I opened the instrument case. Inside were only retractors, forceps, clamps, scalpels. No blade. I knew what it looked like. I had seen it before. I looked again, slower, moving things aside, as if it might be underneath something else, or arranged differently this time. For a moment, it felt like it should be there, like I had just missed it in a way that could be corrected if I kept looking carefully enough.

It became a moment that would be recounted.

There was another time, during a cholecystectomy, I didn’t move the scope the way I should have. Not dramatically wrong, just enough that it interrupted what someone else needed. It passed quickly in the room and in the way I was understood afterward.

These were small things that felt like moments inside a much larger body of work. And they began to collect.

It didn’t happen all at once. It showed up in smaller adjustments. The kinds of cases I was placed in. The tone of conversations that stayed neutral on the surface. A sense that I was being considered differently, though nothing explicit had been said.

Near the end, I was assigned to a room that never filled. I stood there in full setup, everything opened, everything ready, and nothing happened. People passed by, looked in, kept walking. At some point, someone came in and asked if I had been told already.

I said, no.

They said something like, “Oh,” and left again.

I stayed for a while longer. It felt like leaving would confirm something I hadn’t agreed to.

Eventually I broke down the table. Everything went back into itself. It all fit the way it was supposed to, as if it had never been used.

Watching Dr. Al-Hashimi move through the ER after her condition is known, I realized how quickly a person can change categories inside a system like that. She is still the same doctor. Still trained, still capable. But the meaning of her presence has shifted.

Hospitals are built around controlling variables. Even when things are chaotic, the goal is to bring that chaos back into something predictable. There isn’t much room for something that can’t be timed or anticipated.

I didn’t lose the ability to do the work. What changed was how my presence was understood within it. I became harder to place. And once that shift happens, it doesn’t really reverse.

The system that treats patients who live with uncertainty doesn’t easily make space for that same uncertainty in the people who work inside it. That difference is easy to overlook until you find yourself on the wrong side of it. Once you are, it becomes very clear how narrow that space really was all along and how easily a few moments can be carried forward, held in place, and used to explain everything that comes after.