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The air in New York City did not smell like Lagos. It didn't have the scent of woodsmoke or the salt of the Atlantic. It smelled of exhaust, old steam, and a biting, metallic cold that seemed to seep directly into Rotimi’s bones.
It was 1990-something, and the "Greatest Doctor" was currently a man with twenty dollars in his pocket and a coat that was entirely too thin for a Brooklyn winter.
Rotimi stood outside a dilapidated apartment building in Flatbush, his suitcase leaning against his shins. He looked up at the grey sky. In Nigeria, he was a star, the top science student, the pride of OAU. Here, he was just another immigrant with an accent and a degree that the American medical boards viewed with deep suspicion.
"Hey! Move it, pal!" a delivery man barked, shoving past him.
Rotimi stepped aside, his jaw tightening. He remembered his father’s voice: Strive for perfection.
The first few months were a lesson in humility that felt like a slow-motion car crash. To eat, he had to work. To work, he had to drive. He found a job driving a taxi, a battered yellow Crown Victoria that smelled of stale cigarettes and desperation.
He worked the night shift, twelve hours of navigating the labyrinth of New York’s five boroughs. While other drivers listened to the radio or chatted with dispatch, Rotimi had a different companion. Propped up on the passenger seat, illuminated by the flickering yellow light of the cab’s interior lamp, was a Kaplan USMLE review book.
At red lights, he studied the glomerular filtration rate. While waiting for fares at LaGuardia Airport, he memorized the branches of the left coronary artery.
"Where to, Mac?" he would ask a passenger, his mind still hovering over a diagram of the Loop of Henle.
"Penn Station. And step on it," the passenger would grunt.
"Certainly," Rotimi would say, his voice calm and melodic. "We shall arrive shortly."
He was a ghost in the city, a man living between two worlds. He lived on a diet of ninety-nine-cent pizza and "day-old" bread from the local bakery. There were nights when the hunger was so sharp it felt like a physical weight in his stomach, but he refused to spend his meager savings on anything but exam fees. Each dollar saved was a brick in the bridge he was building back to medicine.
One evening, a particularly belligerent passenger noticed the medical textbook on the seat. "What’s a cabbie doing with a book like that? You trying to learn how to sue your doctor?"
Rotimi glanced at the man in the rearview mirror. "No, sir. I am learning how to save your life, should we ever meet in a different room."
The passenger went silent for the rest of the trip
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