The Misanthrope
Copyright© 2025 by Drabbles
Chapter 1: The Calcification of Dr. Henry Gordon
Dr. Henry Gordon had perfected the art of living without living. It was a skill he’d honed over five years with the dedication he’d once applied to his medical training—methodically, relentlessly, until the performance became indistinguishable from reality.
His apartment reflected this achievement. The one-bedroom unit on the fourteenth floor of a building in Lincoln Park was not so much decorated as it was arranged. Everything occupied its designated space with the precision of surgical instruments on a tray. Books lined the shelves alphabetically by author, their spines creating a gradient from dark to light that he found soothing in a way he couldn’t articulate and didn’t try to. The kitchen contained exactly seven days’ worth of identical meals in glass containers, prepared every Sunday evening while listening to podcasts about medical malpractice law. The bedroom held a bed, a nightstand, and a lamp. That was all. He’d removed the dresser two years ago after realizing the open closet system was more efficient.
There were no photographs.
This was deliberate. Henry had spent the first year after Claire’s death surrounded by photographs, drowning in them, until one day he’d realized they weren’t preserving her memory—they were pickaxing away at whatever remained of his ability to function. So he’d boxed them up, stored them in a climate-controlled unit across town, and discovered that grief, when properly contained, could be managed like any other chronic condition. You didn’t cure it. You just reduced its impact on daily operations.
At forty-two, Henry had become a man of routines so rigid they bordered on ritual. He woke at 5:47 AM without an alarm—his body had learned—and spent exactly twelve minutes in the shower, alternating between hot and cold water in a pattern that jolted him into full consciousness. Coffee was measured to the gram. Breakfast was overnight oats with precisely 30 grams of blueberries and 15 grams of almonds. He was out the door by 6:35, arriving at Kellerman & Associates by 7:15, a full hour before anyone else.
This was when he did his best work.
As a medical advisor for one of Chicago’s most aggressive personal injury firms, Henry’s job was to translate human suffering into billable arguments. He reviewed medical records, deposition transcripts, expert witness reports—all the documentary evidence of bodies failing, being failed, breaking down under the weight of negligence or misfortune or simple bad luck. He was exceptional at it. His reports were masterpieces of clinical precision, stripping away the emotional noise to expose the pure mechanical facts of injury and causation.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. He’d spent fifteen years as an emergency room physician, fighting to save lives with his hands, and now he spent his days determining their monetary value with his mind. But the transition had been necessary. After Claire died—after he’d stood there in his own ER, watching his colleagues work on his wife with the same desperate efficiency he’d applied to countless strangers, knowing even as they worked that the internal injuries from the crash were too severe, too many, too much—he’d discovered he could no longer touch patients without his hands shaking.
So he’d retreated into advisory work, where the patients were already treated, already healed or not healed, already reduced to paper. It suited him. The dead couldn’t disappoint you, and the injured on paper couldn’t bleed.
His colleagues at Kellerman & Associates treated him with a mixture of respect and unease. He was brilliant, they all agreed. His medical analyses had won them millions. But he was also strange—too tall, too thin, too quiet, moving through the office like a ghost in an expensive suit. He attended meetings when required, spoke only when necessary, and never, ever joined them for drinks after work. He didn’t do lunch. He didn’t do coffee. He didn’t do small talk by the water cooler or birthday celebrations in the conference room.
“Dr. Gordon is very focused,” the senior partners would say, which was a polite way of saying he’d amputated his personality and cauterized the wound.
Henry preferred it this way. Efficiency was its own reward. He’d calculated once that the average American spent approximately 40 hours per year on workplace socializing. He’d reclaimed those hours, redirected them toward productivity. His case reviews were legendary for their thoroughness. He billed more hours than seemed humanly possible because he’d eliminated the human parts that consumed time—friendship, romance, leisure, joy.
It was a life of perfect isolation, and he’d convinced himself it was exactly what he wanted.
The morning everything changed began like every other morning. Henry woke at 5:47, showered for twelve minutes, consumed his measured breakfast, and left his apartment at 6:35. The October air was sharp, promising winter, and he walked to his car—a sensible gray Volvo that he’d chosen for its safety ratings—with his leather messenger bag tucked under one arm.
The drive to the office took twenty-three minutes at this hour, following Lake Shore Drive south before cutting west into the Loop. Henry had the route optimized, knew every light pattern, every lane that moved fastest. He listened to nothing. The silence in the car was complete, broken only by the hum of the engine and the occasional sigh of the brakes.
He was seventeen minutes into his commute when he saw the car.
It was impossible to miss—a ancient Honda Civic the color of faded teal, listing on the shoulder of the road with its hood propped open like a mouth frozen mid-scream. Hazard lights blinked weakly in the gray morning light. And standing beside it, staring at the engine with the bewildered expression of someone confronting an alien artifact, was a young woman in a bright yellow coat.
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