Cutting For Stone Part 42

She wept under me. After a long time, she gently caressed my head, tried to kiss me. She said, "I need to go to the bathroom."

I ignored her. I was aroused again. I began to move inside her once more.

"Please, Marion," she said.

Without removing myself from within her, I rolled onto my back, holding her, flipping her, and setting her on top of me, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hovering over me.

"You need to pee? Go ahead," I said, my breath coming quick. "You've done that before, too."

I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to me hard. I smelled her fever, and the scent of blood and s.e.x and urine. I came again.

Then I let go. I let her slide off.

I WOKE LATE ON SAt.u.r.dAY MORNING to find her back in the crook of my arm, staring at me. I took her again-I couldn't imagine how I had denied myself this pleasure for so long.

When I awoke it was 2:00 p.m. and I could hear her in the kitchen. I went to the bathroom. It was when I returned to the bed that I saw the blood on the sheets. I stripped the bed and took the sheets to the washing machine.

She brought two cups of coffee, a serving of the ca.s.serole and two spoons to me. She was getting feverish again, the dressing gown not warm enough, her teeth chattering, and with spasms of a dry cough. I took the coffee from her. Her dressing gown came apart. She watched me remake the bed.

"Sorry," she said. "I am bleeding because the scars ... I always bleed with ... intercourse. Rosina's gift to me. So that I will always think of her when-"

"Is it painful?"

"At first. And if it's been a long time."

"What about this fever, how long have you been this way? Have you had an X-ray?"

"I'll be fine," she said. "It's a bad cold. Hope I don't give it to you. I took some Advil I found in your cabinet."

"Genet, you should-"

"Really, I'll be fine, Doctor."

"Tell me why you went to prison."

Her smile disappeared. She shook her head. "Please, Marion. Don't."

I knew then it was a story that would do me no good. I knew I had to hear it. Later, when the two of us were seated in my library, I insisted.

HE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL, a firebrand, an Eritrean who like her had left the cause. He shall remain nameless-it's painful enough already. Suffice it to say he won the heart of her baby. (The baby's father had died in the struggle.) And then he won her heart-all this in New York, after her arrival. She felt her life was just beginning. They married. In a year she was pregnant with his child. She began to suspect that he was cheating on her. She found the whereabouts of the woman, the flat where they conducted their tryst. She broke in and hid in the woman's clothes closet and waited there for half a day till the couple arrived in the late afternoon. When her husband and his white lover were on her bed, seeking carnal knowledge of each other in a noisy, effortful way, Genet debated whether to announce her presence.

"Marion," she said, "as I stood in that closet, with this woman's belts in baskets like snakes at my feet, it all came back to me. Everything I had been through from the time of Zemui's death till then.

"I somehow came to America, and what did I do? For the first time in my life, for the one person who deserved it the least, I gave my love completely. I loved him-what is it you said earlier?-more than I loved myself. I gave it all up for this useless man. Standing in the closet, I knew that if I tried to get vengeance, I had to be willing to lose my life. There has only been one man in my life worthy of such a sacrifice, Marion, and it was you. I was too stupid to know that when I was young. I was too stupid.

"He wasn't worth it, but now I couldn't stop myself. You see, in loving him, it had happened again, Marion-I wanted to be great. I thought he was destined for greatness as an academic, as an intellectual, and my greatness would be in being with him.

"For the first time I understood who was the proletariat. The proletariat was me, the proletariat had always been me, and now I needed to act for the proletariat. I had my straight razor in my hand.

"I began to sing in my softest voice. They could not see me though I could see them.

"I opened the door of the closet with one intention for him: to slit his thew, slit it like a stalk of henna. You can only do that when you have loved someone so completely that you have held nothing back and there is nothing left of you-it has all been used. Do you understand?" I understood all too well. "Otherwise, I'd have said to her, Take him and keep him. Good riddance. Instead, I jumped on them.

"I cut them, but not as badly as I had in mind. They escaped. I waited for the police. I felt as if I had taken off handcuffs that had been on my wrists the whole time. I had been looking for greatness, and I found it then. I was free at the very moment when my freedom would end."

She saw my expression as I followed the story, and she smiled.

"Genet died in prison, Marion. Genet is no more. When they take your living child away, you die, and the child growing inside you dies, too. All the things that matter are gone, and so I am dead."

There was a tiny part of me that wanted to say, You have me, Genet. But for once, I stopped to consider myself, to save myself I felt compa.s.sion for her of a sort that I hadn't felt before: it was a feeling better than love, because it released me, it set me free of her. Marion, I said to myself, she found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?

CHAPTER 51.

The Devil's Choice

IN RETROSPECT, my illness began that Sunday morning in the crystalline moment of waking to a silent house in which I knew I was alone and she was gone. Forty-three days later, the first shudder of nausea arrived, an ocean surge as if a distant Vesuvius had collapsed into the sea. Next an ancient fog, an Entoto mist full of shifting shapes and animal sounds descended on me, and by the forty-ninth day I had lost consciousness.

How remarkable that a life should turn on such a small thing as a decision to open a door or not. I ushered Genet in on a Friday. She let herself out two days later without a good-bye, and nothing would be the same again. She placed a pinwheel cross at the center of the dining table, a gift for me, I presumed. That St. Bridget's medallion she wore on a necklace had been her father's, and it had belonged to a Canadian soldier named Darwin before that.

The tale of her ex-husband lingered like a nasty flu. I'd insisted on hearing the story. I discovered that Genet was capable of selfless love- just not with me. Still, in my home I'd found a momentary equilibrium with her, or the illusion of it, as if we were again like children playing house, playing doctor.

I HURRIED HOME each night after work, hoping to find her waiting on my stoop. My heart would sink when I glimpsed the yellow sticky I had left for her inside the screen door, telling her the key was with my good neighbor, Holmes, and to feel at home. Once inside, I felt compelled to retrieve my note, checking to be sure I had, in fact, written on it. I confess, I even left a stub of a pencil by the door in case she felt inclined to compose a reply.

By Friday, a week after I first dragged her into my home, the sight of that yellow square of paper screamed, FOOL! The stubby pencil said, FOOL OF THE HIGHEST ORDER. I tore up the paper and flung the pencil stub into the street.

I wasn't angry with Genet. She was consistent, if nothing else. I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.

Sitting in my library that night, having done more damage to a bottle of Pinch in four hours than I had in the year since I bought it, I replayed our last exchange. She'd been curled up in the chair I now sat in, wearing my dressing gown, the gown that I now wore. I came to her with tea- that signature move of fools, one of the stigmata by which you shall know us.

"Marion," she said, for she had been gazing at my library, my eclectic little collection. "Your father's apartment in Boston, the way you described it ... it sounds so much like this."

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "I built these bookcases myself. Half the books here have nothing to do with surgery. Surgery isn't my life."

She didn't argue. We sat quietly. At one point I saw her gaze flit to the rug on the floor between us-there was an intruder sitting naked on those synthetic fibers, a dark silent man with razor cuts to his body. His presence put a damper on our conversation.

When I announced I was going to go to bed, she said she'd be right along. She smiled. I didn't believe her. I thought I'd never see her again. But I was wrong. She joined me under the covers. We made love. It was tender and slow. It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.

TWO WEEKS AFTER SHE LEFT, I felt at odds with my house. I found my library oppressive. In the kitchen, I took out my dinner, which was a foil packet labeled FRIDAY in my handwriting; it was the last of what I had cooked, frozen, and packed in aliquots many weekends ago. Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos inside my head.

Thank G.o.d for my good neighbor, Sonny Holmes. He heard me raging, he heard me bang my head against the fridge. Sonny Holmes had an inherent curiosity an honest, all-American nosiness that came with crossing one's seventieth year and that did not try to conceal itself. Hed been aware of the coming of my guest-such a rare event-and he'd heard the headboard music and then the long silence.

"You need to hire a security firm," he said, coming to a quick diagnosis before I had even finished my story. Sonny believed in the ennea-gram, that Jesuit-invented cla.s.sification of people into personality types. He was a One, willful and confident and certain. He had me pegged as a Three or a Four, or was it a Two? Whatever it was, it was a number that did not argue with Ones.

"I need a what?" I said.

"A private detective."

"Sonny, for what? I don't want to see her again."

"Perhaps so. But you need closure. What if she's in jail or in a hospital? What if she's trying desperately to get back to you, but can't?"

A n.o.ble motive, that was all a Two needed to continue an obsession. I latched on to that.

East Coast Investigations of Flushing turned out to be an earnest, blond youth by the name of Appleby, son of Holmes's late sister-in-law. Appleby quickly established that Genet had not returned to her halfway house. She hadn't gone to Nathan's restaurant, where she washed dishes. She had not checked in with her probation officer and she had not called Tsige. He learned these facts in no time. He even knew that Genet had been diagnosed with tuberculosis while in prison. She began medications, but then failed to report for her DOT-Directly Observed Therapy-after she was released. The cough, the fever, in all likelihood were her tuberculosis coming back. The disconcerting news was that if she ever materialized, I'd be third in line after the state health department and her probation officer. She would be headed back to jail. Apple by s source in jail could get his hand on her complete medical records if we wished, and Appleby said he'd taken the liberty of telling the man to proceed. I was concerned about violating her confidentiality. "Knowledge is power in these kinds of situations," Appleby added, and with that he won me over; any man who would use a quote that Ghosh loved was a man to trust. "You are paying to know," he added, "and I think we're obliged to know more."

"So what now?" I asked Appleby. I wasn't asking him about exposure to tuberculosis. I could handle that.

Appleby avoided my eyes. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were covered with twitchy blood vessels, ready to flush at the least provocation. His condition was acne rosacea, not to be confused with the pedestrian acne vulgaris, the bane of many teenagers. Appleby's nose would one day be burgundy and bulbous, the cheeks a meaty red. Already shy, his problems would get worse because strangers would a.s.sume incorrectly that his appearance was a result of drink. Here I knew about his future while paying him to tell me mine.

"Well, Dr. Stone," Appleby said, clearing his throat, his nose starting to redden, a sure indication that I would not like what he had to say, "Respectfully, I would say to check your silverware. Inventory your belongings. Make sure nothing is missing."

I looked at him for a long while. "But, Mr. Appleby, the only thing that matters to me is precisely the one thing that is missing."

"Yes, of course," he said.

The compa.s.sion in his voice told me he had known my kind of pain. There are legions of us.

AS FAR AS THE EVENTS of the next few weeks, I recall one night waking to the shrill ring of the telephone. Receiver in hand, I was lost, uncertain whether I was at Our Lady or back at Missing. I was the backup trauma consultant. But I couldn't decipher what the resident at the other end wanted. This isn't uncommon for the first ten seconds of a middle-of-the-night conversation. The caller understands. But, as we kept talking, the fog in my brain refused to lift. I hung up. I pulled the phone from its moorings. The next morning, my mind felt clear, but my body wouldn't rise off the bed. I was weak. The thought of food turned my stomach. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Perhaps that same day, perhaps a few days later, a man was on the edge of my bed. He took my pulse, called my name. It was my former Chief Resident and now my colleague at Our Lady, Deepak Jesuda.s.s. I desperately held his hand and asked him not to leave-I must have recognized the danger of my situation.

"I'm not leaving," he said. "Just pulling back the curtain." My memory is that I told him everything that had transpired. He examined me as I spoke. He pulled down my eyelids, interrupting me only to ask that I look down at my feet, or say "Ah!" At one point he inquired if I had a stethoscope in the house. I said, "Are you kidding? I'm a surgeon," and we laughed together, a strange sound that had been missing from my home. I said "Ouch" when he probed just under my ribs on the right. I found this funny. I heard him murmuring on the telephone. All the while, I did not let go of his hand.

Three men whose faces I knew arrived with a stretcher. They wrapped me in a flannel coc.o.o.n, carried me out to the curb, and lifted me up into their ambulance. I remember wanting to say something about the beauty of their motion, the inherent grace, and how incredible it was, this baby-kangaroo-in-pouch feeling. I apologized for not having appreciated their skill all these years.

Deepak rode with me. At Our Lady, he walked alongside my gurney past the shocked faces of the staff we encountered in the halls and elevator. He wheeled me into the Intensive Care Unit of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. My eyes glowed yellow under the harsh fluorescent lights, but I didn't know it. My skin, too. I bled wildly from every needle stick. Too late, the nurses tried to hide the ominous tea-colored urine in my catheter bag from me, but I saw. For the first time, I was very, very scared.

The increasing swelling in my brain made me desperately sleepy. I held on to consciousness long enough to ask Deepak to come near. "Whatever happens," I whispered, "don't take me from Our Lady. If I must die and can't die at Missing, I want to die here."

At some point I was aware that Thomas Stone came to my bedside and was studying me, but not with the concern of a clinician. It was the petrified look I knew so well, the look of a parent whose child had suffered some misfortune. It was at about this time that I lost consciousness.

AS I LEARNED LATER, the cable to Hema read: COME AT ONCE STOP MARION CRITICALLY ILL STOP THOMAS STONE STOP P.S. DO NOT DELAY STOP-and she did not. Hema called in her favor with the Comrade President-for-Life's wife, who understood all too well Hema's need to be at her son's sickbed. The American Emba.s.sy readily provided visas, and by day's end, Hema and Shiva were on their way to Frankfurt via Cairo. Then, still on Lufthansa, they crossed the Atlantic. Hema pulled out the telegram more than once, studying the letters, looking for a hopeful anagram. Over Greenland, she said to Shiva, "Perhaps this means Thomas Stone is near death, not Marion."

Shiva said with absolute certainty, "No, Ma. It's Marion. I can feel it."

At ten in the night New York time, they floated into the Intensive Care Unit, a graying woman in a maroon sari, the face striking despite the racc.o.o.n rings around her eyes. With her was a tall youthful man who was so obviously her son and my identical twin.

They slowed outside my gla.s.s cubicle, weary Old World travelers peering into the glow of a New World hospital room. There I was, the son who went to the States for higher studies, who became a pract.i.tioner of the artful, lavish, disposable-everything, lucrative, and incredibly effective American brand of medicine, with no prices on the menu, so different in style and substance from what they did at Missing; only now it must have appeared to them as if the American medicine had turned on me, like the tiger turning on its trainer, so that I lay moored to a blue-gray ventilator, chained to moni tors on the consoles behind my bed, comatose and invaded by plastic tubing, by catheters and wires. There was even a stiff wire like a nail poking up from my skull.

They saw Thomas Stone seated on the side of my room closest to the window, his head resting awkwardly against the bed's safety rail, his eyes closed as if in sleep. In the seventy-two hours since he sent the telegram, my condition had worsened. Thomas Stone opened his eyes, suddenly aware of them. He stood up, bedraggled, stiff, and somewhat shrunken in his borrowed scrubs, relieved but apprehensive. Worry lines ran into his eyes, and his face was drawn and pale under his shock of white hair.

The two old colleagues and combatants had last seen each other in a delivery room, moments after my birth and our mother's death. That was also when Stone had last seen Shiva: in Operating Theater 3, held tight in Hema's arms.

The bedside table and the ventilator blocked Hema's approach to the near side of the bed. She circled to where Stone stood, her eyes on me.

"He is 'critically ill' from what, Thomas?" Hema said, referring to the two words in the telegram that had most frustrated her. Her tone was professional, as if she were asking a colleague about a patient; it allowed her the pretense of being calm when inside she was quaking.

"It's hepatic coma," Thomas said, responding in the same manner, grateful that she'd elected to converse in the language of disease, a fallback which allowed even their son to be reduced to a diagnosis. "He has a fulminant hepat.i.tis. The ammonia level is very high and the liver hardly functioning."

"What from?"

"Viral hepat.i.tis. Hepat.i.tis B."

Stone let down the bed rail and the two of them stood over me. Hema's hand reached behind her for the tail end of her sari, the part that went over her shoulder. She brought it to her mouth.

"He looks anemic, not just icteric," she managed to say at last, clinging to the idiom of medicine to describe my pallor and jaundice. "What's his hemoglobin?"

"Nine, after four units of blood. He's bleeding from his gut. His platelets are down and he isn't making clotting factors. The biliru-bin is twelve, and his creatinine just today is four, rising from three yesterday ..."

"What's this, please?" Shiva said, pointing at my skull. He stood across from Thomas Stone, the bed between them.

"An intracranial pressure monitor. Goes into the ventricle. He has cerebral edema. They're giving him mannitol and adjusting the ventilator settings to keep the pressure down."

Shiva looked skeptical. "It goes through his skull, through brain into the ventricle just to measure? It does not treat?"

Thomas Stone nodded.

"How did this begin?" Hema asked.

As Thomas Stone recounted the sequence of events, Shiva freed the bedside table and found slack between the bed and ventilator. He let down the bed rail on his side. Moving with the slow efficiency of a contortionist, he slid under the tubes and wires. Deepak entered in time to see Shiva lying on his side next to me, his head touching mine. His being there looked both precarious and entirely natural. All Deepak could do was stare, noting, however, that my intracranial pressure tracing, which had done nothing but go up for three days, went down.

No sooner had Deepak introduced himself than Vinu Mehta, the gastroenterologist, filled the doorway, panting from taking the stairs. Vinu had been an internal medicine resident at Our Lady when I was a surgery resident. After specializing in gastroenterology he'd joined a lucrative practice in Westchester but wasn't happy and had returned to the salaried staff of Our Lady.

"Vinu Mehta, Dr. Madam," he said, putting his palms together in a amaste before grasping Hema's hand with both of his. "And this must be Shiva," he said, unfazed at seeing Shiva in my bed. "I know this only because I am certain the other gentleman is Marion." He turned back to Hema. "What a shock this must be, madam. For everyone here, too. Our whole world is upside down! Marion is one of us." This sudden switch to the vernacular of feelings made Hema's lips tremble.

One look at Vinu and you knew the stories about him buying groceries for patients he discharged were probably true. Id seen him extend a patient's stay to insulate her from some madness at home. He was the best friend to everyone on the staff and regularly baked cakes and cookies for me. I always sent him a card on Mother's Day, which pleased him no end.

"I was called the minute that Marion was brought here, Dr. Madam," Vinu went on. "Hepatology, the liver, that is my field. Hepat.i.tis B swims around here. Lots of carriers, intravenous drug addicts and people who acquire it from their mothers at birth-very common in immigrants from the Far East. Madam, we see no end of silent cirrhosis and even liver cancer from this virus. But acute fulminant hepat.i.tis B? In my career I have seen only two other patients quite this severe."

"Vinu, tell me the truth," Hema said, taking on a no-nonsense, Mother India tone with this young doctor who was all too ready to play the role of nephew. "Is my son a drinker?"

I suppose it was a fair question. I hadn't seen her in more than seven years. She knew it was in my genes. What did she really know of who or what I had become?

"Madam, categorically no!" Vinu responded. "No, no. A gem of a son you have."

Hema's stern expression softened.