Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  “Hundreds upon hundreds of deaths,” he mutters. “Thousands of successes. Years of my life spent under their earth. Which counts for nothing, it seems—”

  “If you made a mistake,” his wife tells him softly, “that only means that you are fully human.”

  She touches the top of his cheekbone, as if feeling for the lever of a secret door.

  “Only admit it to them, so we might begin to make amends—”

  The doctor is speechless. He hears her accusation. Incredibly, he also hears that she has already forgiven him.

  In an act of spontaneous combustion, his wife burns up her image of him as a perfect man, resurrects him, and embraces him.

  But that’s not me! That’s an impostor, flawed, ugly, clumsy, deluded…

  The doctor recoils from her forgiveness, disgusted. Her eyes pool with love, and it seems to him there is something animal or alien about her ability to forgive him for this thing he has not done. Almost instantly, this occurs. The way a lake recovers its composure after a hailstorm. Blue to the bottom again, even the stitches dissolved. You are a better surgeon than I am, he thinks, horrified. It is a ghastly thing to behold. My death.

  There is suddenly, he feels, no one left to defend—that man has been swallowed up into this forgiveness.

  “No. No. I did nothing to deserve this, this—”

  This love badly frightens him. He does not want it. If she could believe that he’d failed his patient, and lied to everyone about it—

  He watches his hands shoving her away.

  “If only you believe me, in all the world, I will live,” he promises her.

  His wife looks up at him with injured, animal surprise; he has never touched her roughly.

  “I myself have made a thousand errors—”

  “But if you do not believe me,” he says. “If you have become…like them…”

  Her small mouth drops open as she reaches for him. She has the face of someone at the top of a fall, her arms wheeling in space. She grabs for his shoulders, sobbing; the sound seems to come from somewhere else. Her small hands paste themselves to his chest. He thinks of the purple stars embroidered on his ceremonial robe. And when her hands at last fall to her sides, he sees stars plummeting from the night sky.

  “They are going to strip me of everything now,” he tells her. “They will not stop at my reputation. I’ll soon be rotting in the garrison—”

  Shadows dart down the hall. Stricken, the doctor lurches after his children.

  “The surgery was a success, and no woman wanders the woods. If you cannot believe me,” he shouts, “then you are not my family.”

  Several hours later, he dresses and leaves for the caves, although of course no patients await him; he has been suspended from performing surgeries pending the counts’ investigation and decision. To reach these caves requires a briary hour-long climb, where to this day the dark forests of Black Corfu loom in fathomless contrast to the turquoise Adriatic.

  At the cave mouth, the doctor pauses. It occurs to him that they might be waiting for him deep below. An ambush. The hunters moving onto new quarry in the morning light.

  * * *

  Two nights pass. The doctor is unjailed. His wife and daughters do not leave the house. No hunter has captured or even glimpsed the vukodlak; at the same time, her presence on the island is ubiquitous. The wailing women in the harbor chapel see nothing else, kneeling in the candlelight with seamed eyelids like seals.

  Another doctor is now caroming around Korčula Town: leering and fiendish and floppy-handed. Apocalyptically incompetent. The doctor’s twin, ruining his good name. Open your eyes. Give me a chance to fight him, the Other Man. The usurper who has replaced me in your memory.

  Those few who do meet the doctor’s gaze still fail to see him. Eyes trawl over his skin, and a monster springs into their nets. His voice shakes, and they presume his guilt.

  How can I go on living here, unseen…?

  Could a rumor so neatly erase every prior memory of him?

  Moving behind the market stalls, the doctor eavesdrops on his own death. Everyone is talking about his mistake. In some variants of the rumor, his crime. He hears his former self writhing and dying on the floors of their minds. Once-familiar voices are corrupted, rusty with fear:

  “…because she was interfered with—”

  “…the soil disrupted…”

  “…and blood in her mouth!”

  The doctor goes to the homes of his friends: Nicolas Grbin, Matthias Grbin, John and Jerome Radovanović. Look at me, he begs them. Could I do these things? Out of love, they overcome their horror. Unshade their eyes to meet the red eyes of the doctor. The terrible transparency of the eyes of his friends reveals this: Nobody, not even those who still love me, believes me.

  * * *

  Three nights without fresh news. The hunters chase a red-tailed squirrel, but have yet to sight a vukodlak. Many reputations are now at stake. Hunters grumble that perhaps the boy misled them, while the chirurgo defends the investigation to the Council of Ten. Many people, in the end, have a motivation to help a corpse to move again.

  So when the doctor learns that the searchers have dug up the grave of Nediljka Nikoničić, over the family’s protestations, and discovered an empty coffin, he cannot even be certain that it is Jure da Mosto who has framed him.

  “Her body is missing,” he tells his wife.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Incredibly, she takes his hand.

  * * *

  On the night before his deposition is to be taken, the doctor himself comes down with a case of the rumor. The false memory feasts on his doubts. Parasitically, it grows stronger, brighter, more vehemently alive. How to combat it?

  He feasts on me like a worm in mutton. To kill him, I must simply stop imagining him—

  “My hand did not slip,” he practices in the mirror. “Never once, in a thousand surgeries, has my hand slipped.”

  The doctor tries to conjure his wife’s face, and the faces of his daughters. He needs a shield composed of those faces who still love him. Instead, he sees his patient walking between the pines, her red hair brighter than the moon. She is moving downhill, toward Korčula Town. Try as he might to chop down these woods and blank his mind, he continues to watch her hissing descent. This, he knows, signals the beginning of the end. How can he convince anyone that he has a steady hand, when he cannot control even his own fantasizing, the tremors of his imagination?

  “Why do you credit this boy’s account?” he shouts at the mirror. “A visitor who arrived mere days ago? It is clear that this vukodlak is nothing but a figment of the boy’s disturbed mind—”

  But it’s too late. The vukodlak’s face has lodged inside him, pillary white. In his mind’s eye he watches himself lurching over the operating table, a character in their tale. Oh, Lord, help me, I have been infected—

  Stunned, the poor doctor begins to believe their story.

  * * *

  Now it is not his patient with her flaming hair who haunts him, her bare feet taking crunching steps over the pine cones. It is the Other Man.

  For the Other Man is everywhere. Leaping from mind to mind, eclipsing him like the false red lid drawn over the true moon…How can I kill the Other Man?

  Who stole my name and my dignity, who stole the trust of my patients from me…

  Who strolls from mind to mind, knocking on doors and evicting me…

  The Other Man.

  The monster-twin.

  It is impossible to forgive his wife for forgiving him. If she is capable of loving such a creature, what can he ever have meant to her? He cannot face the terrible love pouring his way. It will erase him entirely.

  “If you could love that—”

  In his mind’s eye, he sees his hand rising and striking her. He watches her neck s
napped back. He funnels these visions through the minds of his friends, imagining them imagining him. That he does none of these things does not, in the end, matter. The doctor thinks: I am their monster.

  * * *

  “I can be trusted with any patient.”

  The tribunal has been assembled since dawn. When the bell comes again, tolling ten times, he stares from face to face to face for the eternity of that deafening gonging. All these men are well known to him. He has operated on many of their grandmothers, mothers, great-uncles, fathers. His voice is hoarse but controlled: “As evidence, I remind the court that I have performed this operation on several of my own children.”

  But midway through his testimony, his composure breaks; at the worst possible moment, he loses control of his voice. His memory betrays him, sucking him into the past. He sees himself walking through the pinewoods of Žrnovo with the littlest of his children in his arms—the stillborn son who never breathed, who would not take a single step. What risk could such a body run of walking the woods? his wife had asked. “Leave him be, my love. He never crawled. He is in heaven now.” But the doctor had insisted on taking the precaution. The infant’s face was the doctor’s face, a tiny amber cameo. He recognized a larval form of his own lips. The bud of his nose, itself a cartilaginous copy of the nose of his grandfather. In the freezing theater, the doctor bent to kiss the lips of his son. A part of the doctor lives in permanent exile on the white calcite ceiling of the cave. He floats over his son, in the blank air above his gloved hands. He sees that this detachment is necessary, and he hates the necessity. That operation cost him more than he can admit to anyone, and he shrinks away from the memory.

  “I can be trusted—” He winces to hear the high pitch of his voice, imploring them to trust him. He has already lost, then. Tears undam themselves and flow freely down the doctor’s cheeks. With his next breath, he manages to steady his voice:

  “My record is perfect and I can be trusted with any patient.”

  But look at what has happened to their faces!

  * * *

  “On January 3, the hand of our posthumous surgeon slipped while he performed his paralyzing surgery. It is possible that this slip was, in fact, deliberate—”

  After they read out the accusations leveled against him, he is returned to his home. No vukodlak has yet been discovered in the woods; nevertheless, the case will be sent on to the Council of Ten that evening. Even now, the ship containing the investigator’s files is leaving the harbor. Months will pass before a verdict reaches him. Yet there are many impatient Korčulans who are certain of his guilt. Others, consumed by fear, conflate the end of their nightmares with the end of his life. Writing in his log, the doctor wonders: What has happened to the elderly surgeon on Lastovo? Has he been strung up in the pines?

  His hand begins to tremble, knocking the oil lamp from the table. The doctor looks down at it in horror. His fingers are moving independently of him, pinching at the wick. It is possible that they have never been under his control.

  I was a good doctor, and now I am not. It is the rumor that is turning him into a monster; he had not been one before, had he? But even that certainty is dissolving.

  In later centuries, new etiologies for diseases like the Black Death will evolve. Germ theory replaces miasmatic superstition. Alexander Fleming fights microorganisms with penicillin. But Fleming does not predict how quickly disease-causing bacteria can mutate. Attempts at treatment breed a genetic resilience into the disease. Only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it.

  The rumor continues to mutate. One strain has it that the Nikoničić countess had been pregnant with the doctor’s child at the time of her death. One strain has it that dozens of his patients are circumambulating the woods. Including a naked infant on all fours. One strain has it that his wife is a vukodlak, which he keeps boarded up in his house. With each passing minute, it seems, the rumor grows resistant to the truth. The evening after his trial, the investigator dismounts to share its latest evolution with the doctor.

  “The boy remembers more and more of the story.”

  “Does he?”

  “Something else came back to him.”

  Seagulls scream above the harbor. All over the island, in the minds of his neighbors, the red-haired vukodlak is just waking up.

  “Tell me, what has returned to young Jure now? What imaginary memory?”

  As it turns out, the doctor has badly underestimated Jure da Mosto. The boy has a creative gift that belies the poverty of imagination suggested by his bland seed-hull face. The doctor, after being introduced to another nightmare version of himself, walks stiff-legged to the docks and empties the contents of his stomach into the bay. Tiny red fish rise to nibble at his vomit, and the doctor feels consoled by this alone: the voracious appetite of nature and its yawning indifference to his reflection floating on the water.

  That evening, the doctor discovers that his quarantine has failed. He finds his wife seated by the window, watching a pale-green sliver of sea. Despite having followed his orders to barricade herself inside the house, his wife has somehow caught wind of the rumor’s darkest variant.

  She speaks with a calm that shakes him.

  “They say you were in love with her.”

  “No. That is neither possible nor true.”

  “They say you did something…to her body. And kept it here to do more—”

  “Oh, my love.”

  Because she has already watched him doing these hideous things, hasn’t she? She has been entertaining him, the Other Man, all afternoon. He cannot prevent her from seeing whatever the rumor commands her to imagine.

  “A woman like that,” he explodes, “would never touch me in life! Not even in church! She would not touch you, she would not touch our daughters—”

  “They say,” says his wife, “that you touched her.”

  She sleeps on the outer edge of their bed, like a caterpillar clinging to its leaf. Her back is to the doctor. And yet her palm is flung onto the bed behind her, for him to take if he so desires. Her arm bent backward. He stares at it with horror. She is still reaching for him. How could you possibly, possibly…, he wonders, afraid even to finish the thought.

  * * *

  The doctor spends the next three days knocking on doors, an uninvited guest. He pleads his case to whoever answers. He cannot rest until his reputation is restored. He begins in the poorest quarter of the walled city, crabbing his way up the sea-slick docks. One night soon, he will reach the counts.

  “You are behaving like a guilty man,” his wife admonishes. “You are making their case for them. You can’t see that?”

  He looks at his wife blearily. It does not occur to him that he has become a species of vukodlak himself, driven to circle the island streets.

  “The rumor has polluted every mind on the island. If I cannot defeat it, I see no possibility of a new beginning for us. I would have to change our names, burn off my skin…”

  His daughters adopt their mother’s pitch, blocking the door frame of the apartment with their tiny bodies: “Stay home with us, Papa!”

  The doctor blinks at the four of them as if surprised to find intruders in his home. His thumb covers his lower lip, forming a little crucifix; he is afraid that he might cry, or scream.

  “Don’t you recognize us? We are your family.”

  That night, his wife approaches him with a new plan: they will flee the island.

  “We can leave.”

  “Oh? Where can we go?” He is smiling broadly now, as if this were the latest uproarious turn in a long joke. At last, he can whisper the punch line to her:

  “I have one skill. And now that is in dispute.”

  He turns his bony hand in front of her face in the light.

  “Nobody believes in me anymore.”

  “We believe
you. We are the ones who believe in you.”

  The doctor laughs until his eyes water. The Other Man is looking out at him.

  “Please. Find a ship.”

  “You all believe I did it.”

  * * *

  “I can be trusted with any patient,” he says aloud to the watchful rabbit. Her pink nostrils inflate and fall, and he feels a rush of love for her; animals, of course, are immune to the rumor. He enters the cave to prepare the theater for a new patient. For a long time the rabbit sits on the rusty-orange log, peering down the throat of the cave to where the shadows jump.

  * * *

  The windows of their fortressed houses leave these rich men surprisingly vulnerable, thinks the doctor.

  He is genuflecting in a light dusting of snow, midway up the staircase cut into the limestone cliffside which spirals up to the ivory veranda of Peter Nikoničić. Leagues below him, the dark sea rolls into the coastline, gonging soundlessly on and on. Here is one dilemma which the counts of Korčula share with the barnacle people: to admit the rich light of the moon into one’s home, one must also expose one’s family to the stares of outsiders. Any pair of eyes can follow the moonbeams into one’s private rooms. The doctor feels he is exploiting a privilege of the already dead. If nobody believes that he exists any longer, the good doctor, why shouldn’t his ghost take a long look into the amber dining hall of the Nikoničić family? The doctor has never before climbed to this elevation; he grows dizzy staring out at the tall waves crashing down the length of the island. The main house with its colonnades and every outlying building are made of white stone quarried from Vrnik. He admires the unity of the house, the luminous domed roof, like a moon exhumed from under the earth. Edging closer, the doctor peers into the interior world of his accusers. A dozen plates are set on a long black table, with bouquets of nettles. The table itself is an elegant ungulate, an Italianate species of furniture, with legs that end in oak hooves. Perhaps it, too, has been hobbled so that it cannot gallop off with the silver, the golden decanter. The Other Man, the doctor guesses, has already dined here. Peter Nikoničić no doubt invited the Other Man into his thoughts a hundred times a day, to reenact the bungled surgery.