Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Life in the Balkans
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 06.22.2009
Alone with the nurses, Mr. Zimberg tells Jackie it's not happening. No more cardio consults, no more angio, no more bypasses, no more bupkas. He apologizes for his irritation, but alludes to a saying his friend used to hand him: "Well, that's life in the Balkans." He didn't know what he was talking about, this friend, until lately.
(Zimberg's played by Eli Wallach, who quotes this phrase more than once in his own autobiography, attributing it to his first stage agent, and presumably brought it to this episode.) But in this context, what Zimberg now understands is what his friend meant: life is still life until it's not life anymore; that we take what we take, and give what we can, and in the end we're all handed the same amount of life, just in different shapes. The usual dreary existentialism that keeps people alive in brutal climes and amid unjust, unearned punishments. But what the old know and the young fear learning is that the scathing sharpness of this dreary existential humor is really just the price: the thing you're buying is another minute of life, and the right to fill it up with love. C'est la guerre. You have to laugh, because if you don't, you lose the war. In the Balkans, everything is in short supply.
Zimberg doesn't want his wife to lose "one minute of sleep" over this, his new dying. He honestly thinks she doesn't know. He can feel her: "Here she comes! My childhood sweetheart." Mrs. Zimberg runs to the bed, smiling deeply. "I looked and looked!" she shouts joyfully, and he grins. "And now you found."
Jackie introduces herself, and Zimberg explains to his wife how he was just saying, no more doctors and no more medicine. His wife completes his sentences; she knows he's ready too. They are entering the Balkans, over rocks and barren fields, after decades, with his hand in hers. "All he needs is in this bag," she says, and he nods; Jackie's eyes go humorously wide: "Must be some bag!" They laugh. It is. She leaves them to each other, bouncing for a second to talk to Eddie.
"You rang?" Eddie says, revved up and ready; she tells him her back is killing her and he promises to take care of it -- they'll meet in twenty minutes; he grins wolfishly and leaves. Then it's later, and a young lady is coming in on a gurney, cold and sweating, no fever yet. Her cute, bedimpled husband is sick with worry. He doesn't know what her allergies are, yet. They're too young to know those things; they're too happy to know how to hold hands like that yet. "Penicillin," she gasps out, in pain, and they transfer her to the bed. Allergic to penicillin.
The young wife wasn't feeling great last night, but started cramping up this morning. Jackie can tell they're Midwestern, not native New Yorkers, because "You're in pain and you're apologizing." They apologize; it is their anniversary. Her vitals are okay, Jackie wants to do a pregnancy test, they are overjoyed. She leaves them beaming.
Then it's later, and Zoey's dancing weirdly toward Jackie, calling out, "Hi!" Jackie tells her to stop saying hi, that once a week is plenty, that five days consecutively will earn her a Metro card. Zoey reports on her doings and Jackie notices her stethoscope is gone; Zoey tries to explain that Eleanor took it but Jackie doesn't care. The excuses are for the outside world, she's trying to teach her every day: you don't apologize for mistakes, you just stop making them. And then you laugh, because that's life in the Balkans; because if you don't stay on your toes and remember to breathe, if you don't do both of those, all the time, people die.
"Dr. O'Hara is..." Zoey shivers, wondering for the word, the precise chilly, intimidating, scary, word. "A doctor." Jackie nods. "Okay, here's a tip. Doctors take shit. Sandwiches, stethoscopes. Credit. They can't help themselves. Figure it out, Zoey."
Then it's later, and Eddie's closing the Harmacy shades while she grimaces at him in pain, trying to smile. She gazes lovingly at the rows of bottles and jars of pills, and he starts doing some kind of fucking massage on her. She's pained by it, but also charmed. "Yep," she finally says, "That's it. Right there, you got it." He's so proud, she's not interested. He keeps going. There's something else:
"Eddie? Your hands feel sad." He grins; "You're killing me," he says. She asks again why his hands feel sad: they're replacing him, perhaps, probably, with a Pyxis machine. She jumps up, horrified. "Over my dead body!" She asks, desperately, if it means he'll be transferred to another floor, and he shakes his head. The whole point is getting rid of him altogether with the "bullshit pill machine," but she shouldn't worry about him, he can just go work at CVS or whatever. Not really the point. She calls it a robot and he corrects her and then realizes that technically it is a robot. Still not the point:
"I don't fucking believe this. We're gonna need ID numbers now so they can keep track of every fucking aspirin we take out? Like we need more oversight! Why don't ya staple a fucking camera to my forehead? It's gonna take us like twenty minutes to punch a number into a keyboard to get a fucking Motrin. I swear to God I could puke." What she means is: where will her drugs come from now? "Yeah, I'm gonna miss you too," Eddie says, none too happy with the sudden transparency of their arrangement right now. She looks at him and sighs because what, this is serious: