The Surgeon
Page 4
I felt an intense confusion. I could not understand how a man who in my memory I had said goodbye to just a few years before could now be dead. It took awhile to understand I had been at sea for three decades. That somewhere in the back of my mind I had assumed my parents would live forever. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t even cry. Six months later, slowly making my way back to my mother, another letter, this time from a friend of the family. My mother had died and been laid next to my father in the basement of the Preservation Guild. It felt as if the second trauma had made me fully experience the first. All I could think of was my father. And then the two of them working together in their bungalow. I remember I stood on the end of a rickety quay in a backwater port reading the letter. Behind me the dismal wooden shanty town and above explosions of green-and-blue parrots. The sun was huge and red on the horizon, as if we were close to the edge of the world. Her hand discarded the letter and reached over to caress my hand. I wept silently. ***
Five years later, I tired of life at sea–it was no place for the aging–and I returned home. The city was bigger and more crowded. The medical school carried on as it had for centuries. The mages’ college had disappeared, the site razed and replaced with modern, classroom-filled buildings. I stored my many trunks of possessions–full of rare tinctures and substances and oddities–at a room in a cheap inn and walked down to my parents’ bungalow. It had been abandoned and boarded-up. After two days, I found the current owner. He turned out to be a man who resembled the Stinker of my youth in the fatuousness of his smile, the foulness of his breath. This new Stinker didn’t want to sell, but in the end I took the brass key, spotted with green age, from him and the bungalow was mine. Inside, beneath the dust and storm damage, I found the echoes of my parents’ preservations–familiar fond splotches across the kitchen tiles–and read their recipes in the residue.
From these remnants, what they taught me of their craft, and the knowledge I brought back from my
travels, I now make my modest living. These are not quite the preservations of my youth, for there is even less magic in the world now. No, I must use science and magic in equal quantities in my tinctures and potions, and each comes with a short tale or saying. I conjure these up from my own experience or things my parents told me. With them, I try to conjure up what is so easily lost: the innocence and passion of first love, the energy and optimism of the young, the strange sense of mystery that fills midnight walks along the beach. But I preserve more prosaic things as well–like the value of hard work done well, or the warmth of good friends. The memories that sustain these concoctions spring out of me and through my words and mixtures into my clients. I find this winnowing, this release, a curse at times, but mostly it takes away what I do not want or can no longer use. Mine is a clandestine business, spread by word-of-mouth. It depends as much on my clients’ belief in me as my craft. Bankers and politicians, merchants and landlords hear tales of this strange man living by himself in a preservationists’ bungalow, and how he can bring them surcease from loneliness or despair or the injustice of the world.
Sometimes I wonder if one day Lucius will become one of my clients and we will talk about what happened. He still lives in this city, as a member of the city council, having dropped out of medical school, I’m told, not long after he performed the surgery on me. I’ve even seen him speak, although I could never bring myself to walk up to him. It would be too much like talking to a ghost. Still, necessity might drive me to him as it did in the past. I have to fill in with other work to survive. I dispense medical advice to the fisherfolk, many driven out of work by the big ships, or to the ragged urchins begging by the dock. I do not charge, but sometimes they will leave a loaf of bread or fish or eggs on my doorstep, or just stop to talk. My life is simple now. Over time, I think I have forgiven myself. My thoughts just as often turn to the future as the past. I ask myself questions like When I die, what will she do? Will the arm detach itself, worrying at the scar line with sharpened fingernails, leaving only the memory of my flesh as the fingers pull it like an awkward crab away from my death bed? Is there an emerald core that will be revealed by that severance, a glow that leaves her in the world long after my passing? Will this be loss or completion? For her arm has never aged. It is as perfect and smooth and strong as when it came to me. It could still perform surgery if the rest of me had not betrayed it and become so old and weak. Sometimes I want to ask my mirror, the other old man, what lies beyond, and if it is so very bad to be dead. Would I finally know her then? Is it too much of a sentimental, half-senile fantasy, to think that I might see her, talk to her? And: have I done enough since that ecstatic, drunken night, running with my best friend up to the cadaver room, to have deserved that mercy? One thing I have learned in my travels, one thing I know is true. The world is a mysterious place and no one knows the full truth of it even if they spend their whole life searching. For example, I am writing this account in the sand, each day’s work washed away in time for the next, lost unless my counterpart has been reading it.
I am using my beloved’s hand, her arm as attached to me as if we were one being. I know every freckle. I know how the bone aches in the cold and damp. I can feel the muscles tensing when I clench the purple stick and see the veins bunched at the wrist like a blue delta. A pale red birthmark on the heel of her palm looks like the perfect snail crossing the tide pool at my feet. We never really knew each other, not even each other’s names, but sometimes that is unimportant.