Dr. Michael Robinavitch

Robby's always loved live music. He prefers clubs and festivals to stadiums or arenas. In this bigger venues, you're too far away, and you didn't get the benefit of being there. In a club or a festival crowd there's the smell of alcohol and sweat, the press of bodies, and this collective thrum that went through every body there. They're communal experiences. At their best, they're spiritual. He's not got high hopes for this band in particular, but there's guitars and drums and decent cheap beer, and he's managed to talk Jack into coming, so it could definitely be worse.

He comes back to the corner that he'd parked Jack in with two bottles of beer in hand.

"How're you holding up?" He asks, offering one.

He doesn't really notice it, at first -- sure, he feels more level than he has on a long time, and he's sleeping better, but he doesn't really interrogate it. Maybe Darrow suits him? Maybe, for the first time in a long time, he's just happy. Yeah, a few of the joints on his right hand have frozen, but he did break them years ago, coming off a skateboard, so maybe it's that. He's also done something to his back that seems to really be affecting his mobility, but he's got a couple of days in a row off, so he can rest. And it just doesn't feel important, anyway. Everything will be okay.

On the evening before his first day off, he sprawls on the couch to read but it isn't long before he drifts away, into content nothingness, sleeping like a stone.

It's a tough learning curve. He's a brand new resident at a tough hospital in a city that, sometimes, feels like it could swallow him whole. He misses the sea, misses being able to go home and get his Baba's cooking when it suits him. There's so many tourists. There's so much noise.

For the last few months, its felt like New Orleans could close over his head.

Still, it's not all bad. He's got a little apartment on the top floor of a building on the edge of the French Quarter, and the food's good -- better than good -- and, eventually, he thinks he's going to be the kind of doctor that he desperately wants to be. And then there's the music and the liquor, and all of the reasons why the place is thronged on a Friday night. After his shift, Robby goes home to shower and change, and then he heads out, to a little bar that he likes that has live jazz and a decent kitchen. He'll hang out for a few hours, get dinner, listen to some music and, with any luck, he'll run into a handful of people he knows and find someone to go home with.

And it's hours later, and his belly's full, and he's slightly drunk when he sees a familar sillhouette at the end of the bar. He stares, for a moment, to make sure he hasn't got it wrong, but he'd know that profile anywhere. He's spent years thinking about it, how than man had looked when he leaned in to kiss him. How he'd wished for more.

"Holy shit," he says, walking up behind the guy's stool. "Jack Abbot. In the flesh."