A DIGRESSION ON THE EDUCATION AND FORGING OF ONE ELIAS RIGG
Being a Recollection of How One Becomes Entrusted with Latex Gloves, Thermometers, and the Hourly Intimacy of Strangers
These are the serialized accounts for the novella, Working Terms. All tasks are mandatory. All emotions are optional. Welcome to your role in the system.
FROM THE LAST → Elias Rigg, a provisional nurse technician with more instinct than training, accidentally charts a dead man as stable, then quietly deletes the evidence. No one notices. But something in him shifts—he keeps faking it, only now with the haunted devotion of someone who’s begun to mistake performance for belief.
It is a little-known truth (and even less often spoken aloud in professional settings where peanut butter and lawsuits are served in equal measure) that many who enter the so-called Healing Professions arrive not by design but by default—shuffled there by errant clicks, expired FAFSA forms, or the soft paternal advice that they are “good with people.” Such was the case with Elias P. Rigg.
Descended from no one of consequence (save a distant uncle who once sold refurbished defibrillators to the city coroner), Elias emerged into adulthood possessed of three qualities prized in neither church nor commerce: a gift for imitation, a tolerance for suffering, and a face that suggested accountability without ever having practiced it.
He began, as many medical functionaries do, as a Student of Elsewhere. That is, not a nurse, not a doctor, but a promising idiot; a designation unofficial yet frequently bestowed upon those whose CVs shine with half-finished ambitions and whose primary skill lies in nodding precisely one second after everyone else.
By divine accident or clerical oversight, Elias was accepted into the Pathway to Care™ Certified Clinical Technician Apprenticeship, a four-week program offered in the basement of a regional mall next to a shuttered Payless ShoeSource. The course was taught by a woman named Jeannette, who instructed her charges in such sacred arts as “look busy when surveyed,” “chart what looks correct,” and “never touch the red button.”
The final exam consisted of correctly identifying a blood pressure cuff, refraining from laughter during a mandatory CPR video, and completing the sentence: “If a patient is unconscious, I will ______.” Elias wrote “try not to make it worse,” which Jeannette called “concerningly honest,” then passed him with distinction.
Thus armed, Elias emerged into clinical life as a wholly unseasoned yet certified provider of vitals—a term here meaning “numbers that are both numerical and vaguely reassuring.”
It must be understood that Elias did not intend harm. He was, in fact, deeply afraid of it. He believed hospitals were sites of curious rituals—not one of being hostile, exactly, but certainly theatrical. Somewhere between an opera and air traffic control. His job, as he understood it, was to walk quickly, wear gloves with dignity, and above all else: not interfere.
His first rotation was at Markwell Community Medical Pavilion, a name designed to suggest grandeur, though it consisted chiefly of two intersecting hallways, a coffee machine that hissed, and the soft screech of chairs no one had oiled since the second Bush administration.
He was given a badge, a cart, and a clipboard that still bore the markings of previous chartings, the ink of others more confident, more reckless. He was told to begin. And so he did.
Poorly. But with flair.
Interlude: On the Subject of Faking It
Being a Survival Disguised as Competence
Elias’s philosophy of labor could be summarized as follows:
If it is in a chart, let it be true.
If unsure, copy thy neighbor.
If caught, be contrite—but only to the degree that implies future usefulness.
Smile, but not too well. Suspicion clings to the cheerful.
To his credit, Elias never falsified out of malice. Only necessity. The way one might learn the lines of a foreign prayer spoken at a table where one is a guest but not kin. He memorized the shape of procedures, not their purpose; the tone of concern, not its content.
To many, this would suggest moral failings. But the world of healthcare, particularly at its underfunded, overclocked, weekend-staffed periphery, is one in which performance often outruns principle.
UP NEXT → THE MAZE AND THE GHOSTS: Being an Orientation Manual for the Unoriented Idiot, in Which Elias Learns the Hospital Was Never Meant to Be Escaped
I’m keeping this free because that feels right. If you want to support it anyway, out of some quiet belief in people making things, there’s a button for that. There are no special perks, just the work and a thank you.