McInerney, Jay. "Con Doctor".

Summary & Analysis

The protagonist of the story is the forty-year-old Doctor Kevin McClarty. He grew up in Evanston, Illinois, son of a nurse and an anonymous doctor. He graduated from the University of Chicago as the second best in his class. Presently he lives in a community called Live Oakes Manor, a neat suburban area with its own private facilities protected by a brick wall with an uniformed guard at the gate. He moved there less than a year ago after he left a rehab centre in Atlanta, Georgia. He was treated for drug addiction. He was married for ten years. Now he lives with the attractive and provocative Terri, a recovering alcoholic. She owns a clothing store. McClarty admires her independence, self-assurance, and ruthless efficiency.

McClarty is haunted by nightmares. He either has pharmaceutical fantasies or he dreams about the prison where he works as a con doctor, the Midstate Correction Facility for high-security criminals. He did not have any dreams ‘back in the days of pills and needles’. He often experiences the lock’n’sock in his nightmares, which is beating received by a prisoner from fellow prisoners coming to his cell in the night. He always felt ‘alien and isolated’, ‘removed from the general populace’, and ‘[d]espite all the years of medical school and all the sleepless hours of his internship, he never really believed he was a doctor; he felt like a pretender’. He took drugs in an attempt to become a ‘part of the stream, an unconscious member of the larger community’.

McClarty was not charged with any crime but he feels himself a criminal. Nobody knows that it was him who gave nurse Marcia DeVane the drug she wanted an hour before she drove her car into the abutment of a bridge. The prison inmates whom he treats consider themselves an innocent victims who do not really belong to the prison, but McClarty feels that he does belong there. It is as if he were expiating his error by doing the dangerous and disrespected work of a con doctor. He suffers by a sense of estrangement; his present ordinary and upright existence seems to him less real than the nightmarish circumstances under which he was living as a drug addict.

McClarty was never attacked in the prison, though he was recently threatened by the inmate called Lesko whom he cut down his Valium. He goes through his usual duties. He treats a prisoner who received the lock’n’sock but who also received his satisfaction when one of the attackers bit him––he has AIDS. Another prisoner is treated for diabetes; he complained of the prison food, but biscuits and candies were discovered in his cell. McClarty loves to think of his healing faculties as godlike, though he realizes that he is in fact powerless. Once he relaxes in his caution when he is alone with guard Santiago and some fifteen prisoners. Lesko approaches him and stabs him with a knife. When he is collapsing in Lesko’s arms, McClarty ‘realizes with a sense of recognition bordering on relief, that he is back in the dream’. Santiago never ceased to wonder about the smile on the face of the dying doctor.