By the end of March, the name has stuck.
This is how it works — he has watched it happen in other cases, the organic process by which language adheres to a phenomenon: the public tries several, the media tries several, and then something lands and stays because it fits the shape of the thing in a way that feels inevitable in retrospect. The Surgeon of Sin lands. He reads it in three separate Inquirer pieces, two television spots, one NPR segment that is surprisingly rigorous. He reads it on a bumper sticker on a car in the hospital parking structure. He sees it on a T-shirt, once, on a man who does not look like someone who wears ironic T-shirts.
The T-shirt reads: THE SURGEON OF SIN — PHILADELPHIA'S DARK HERO.
He stands near the window of the hospital lobby and watches the man in the T-shirt walk through the sliding doors and go to the information desk and ask about visiting hours, and the man is unremarkable in every way — mid-thirties, tired-looking, ordinary — and the T-shirt is unremarkable the way all public text is unremarkable until you read it and feel its weight.
Dark hero.
He considers that phrase for the rest of the morning.
There is a comment section on the Inquirer piece that he reads on a Thursday, which he knows is a mistake before he begins and does it anyway. The comments are, in aggregate, exactly what the reporter in Donahue's press conference was reaching toward: a city that is divided on whether what the Surgeon does is monstrous or necessary, and the specific composition of that division is not what he expected.
He expected outrage. He expected moral clarity — the clear, comfortable public position that a killer is a killer.
He did not expect the number of people who write, in whatever style and grammar they have available, some version of: finally.
He closes the comment section.
He goes to his office. He closes the door. He sits behind his desk and he does a thing he almost never does, which is to allow himself to feel, in full, the weight of public acknowledgment.
He does not feel pride. He has never felt pride. He wants to be clear about that, even inside the privacy of his own office — he is not proud. He is not gratified by the attention, by the name, by the T-shirt.
But something, he admits for exactly one minute, is not nothing.
Then he puts it away.
He picks up the file on his desk. He reads it.
The work is the work. The name is just weather.