Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  “Okay, I promise you’ll be glad you waited for this,” he said, clearing his throat theatrically, then reciting in a Monty Pythonesque English accent:

  Leech on my dingus. Leech on my dingus.

  You gave me quite a scare

  This morning before breakfast when I found you there.

  I even wore nylons to keep you away,

  But they ran at the crotch hiking yesterday.

  Leech on my dingus. Leech on my dingus.

  You crawled in through that hole

  And made a beeline, straight for my pole.

  Why is it I who must suffer the hex

  Of an engorged leech feeding at my sex?

  Leech on my dingus. Leech on my dingus.

  I don’t wish to be intimate anymore.

  To me you are nothing but a @#$%-sucking whore.

  And no matter how much you suck my dingus

  I will never reciprocate with leechalingus.

  His climactic line brought scattered applause. I noticed a few strained looks of good cheer on the faces of the female students, and I was glad, for his sake, that he’d resisted the urge to present “Leech on My Dingus” to the entire audience.

  “Well, John,” Tabin said to the dignified Dr. Nkurikiye, who’d listened with an attentive, unreadable expression on his face. “What did you think of my poem?”

  “You know, Geoff,” Nkurikiye replied in his elegant East African English, “I don’t really speak American.”

  Four examination rooms at the Moran’s clinic contained patients, most of them elderly, waiting to see Tabin. Lights flashed from small monitors outside each door, alerting him to their presence. Tabin tapped these lights off each time he entered a room; then he examined the patient’s eyes through a slit lamp and recommended antibiotic eyedrops for infection or, in several cases, corrective surgery.

  For the next two hours, Tabin jogged from room to room, snatching handfuls of lunch from a bowl of M&M’s on the reception desk. Nkurikiye and I hustled to keep pace with him. He punched dim one last flashing light and entered the darkened room where an elderly woman named Betty squinted up at us from a wheelchair.

  Betty shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She had recently begun treatment for breast cancer. Her left foot was in a cast, broken when she’d stumbled on the stairs in her home. Tabin had already operated on her eyes, transplanting corneas from a cadaver, with limited success, and he suspected that underlying damage to her retinal tissue had caused the transplants to fail. He was preparing to try the surgery again.

  Betty looked so frail it was hard to imagine her walking even with a healed foot. “You have to wait until you get so old and everything goes at once,” she said quietly. “The broken leg, the cancer, I can stand. But going blind …” She trailed off. “That’s the worst. Any more you feel dead even though you’re still breathing.”

  Tabin had his hand on her shoulder and was kneading it gently as she spoke. I’d noticed how often he put his hands on all of his patients, as if the healing process started with simple contact.

  “Am I going to be able to see again, Doctor?” Betty asked. “Are you going to make this better?”

  “I hope so,” Tabin said, “but there are no guarantees. The eye is like a camera. The clear front of the eye is like a lens, and the retina at the back of the eye is like film that processes the image. We don’t know if the film at the back of your eye is still capable of making images. But the good news,” he added, now rubbing her knee, “is you don’t have much to lose by trying surgery again. And you may have a lot to gain.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Betty said, pressing her mouth into a thin, resolute line.

  In the Moran’s soaring glass atrium, a tall, strikingly handsome young medical student named Andrew Dorais was waiting for Tabin with a bag of climbing gear slung over his shoulder. Given Tabin’s growing international reputation, there was intense competition among medical students, residents, and fellows to apprentice with him. Already, I’d noticed that a suspicious number of these candidates were fit, young rock climbers.

  Tabin had completed his medical duties for the day, and, displaying the same disarming speed with which he shifted conversational topics, he turned his attention from work to play, chatting enthusiastically with Dorais about a multipitch climb they were planning in the canyons above the University of Utah campus. “The view from the top is just outstanding,” Tabin said. “Ten out of ten. You’re not going to believe what you’ll see!”

  Tabin retrieved his climbing gear from his Ford, crammed it into Dorais’s car, and tossed me the keys. “Why don’t you and John have a cup of coffee—I should be done by five forty-five.” He asked if I’d wait for him in the parking lot of a Phillips 66 gas station a few miles up-canyon, so he wouldn’t have to waste ten minutes driving back down after his climb and we’d have time to shop for the dinner party he had planned.

  Nkurikiye and I drank coffee at a café on the Moran’s top floor. He frowned at his white foam cup. “You must visit Rwanda,” he said. “Our coffee …” He paused, tactfully, to edit his criticism. “Our coffee compares rather favorably with this.”

  Nkurikiye was Rwandan, but like so many of his fellow citizens, he had been forced into exile by the periodic waves of violence that had washed over his country for much of the twentieth century. He’d been educated in Burundi and South Africa and, after becoming a doctor, had volunteered as a medical officer in the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel army that had watched the gathering genocidal storm brewing from its camps in Uganda, on Rwanda’s northern border. In 1994, when word of mass executions by machete had reached his encampment, he’d joined a group of soldiers, led by future president Paul Kagame, who’d fought their way to the capital, Kigali, and tried to put an end to the killing. Nkurikiye told his story in the barest possible outline, only hinting at his personal trauma and loss, politely redirecting the conversation to the puzzling blandness of much of the American food he’d sampled so far.

  On one subject he was extremely talkative: the bounty of American material life. He considered Salt Lake supermarkets overwhelming, because they contained more choices—from entire aisles of cereal or potato chips—than anyone could reasonably expect. But he found them enchanting, too. “Anything you can dream of is there,” he said, “if you know where to look.”

  Nkurikiye felt that America’s abundance threaded through every aspect of our national life, including his encounters with patients. “In Rwanda,” he said, “you would never hear patients speaking to doctors the way they do here. Dr. Tabin is a renowned surgeon. Yet his patients question everything, second-guess much of the medical advice he gives them. In my country there are so few doctors, patients are simply grateful to see you. Here, they can always wheel their cart to another aisle of medical experts if they don’t like what you have to say.”

  I asked him if he found that frustrating. “It is an adjustment,” he said. “The threshold here for problems is very low. But I’m not complaining. Perfection is not bad, if it’s possible. In fact, it’s wonderful, if you can afford it. As a doctor, nothing would make me happier than to have these choices, these resources, for Rwanda’s people.”

  We hit a lull in the conversation, and both of us looked out through the café’s floor-to-ceiling windows, over Salt Lake City’s eastern suburbs, to the lines of jumbo-sized SUVs idling at lights, to the curving rows of five-thousand-square-foot homes terraced into neatly landscaped hillsides, watered lawns sparkling gem green among the baked brown hills.

  “If you had these resources, what would you do in Rwanda?” I asked.

  “We’re a small country, a country just beginning to recover from catastrophe,” he said. “We’ll never be anything like this. But Nepal is a good model for us. I’d like, one day, to become something like the Ruit of Rwanda. My dream is to build an eye hospital on the Tilganga model, not run by a bureaucratic government—private, but not for profit. I’d like to create a training center that can change eye care
, that can reverse blindness across East Africa. With Dr. Geoff and Dr. Ruit’s help, I think we could make that happen.”

  Nkurikiye left with a medical student who’d offered to drive him home to the spartan rental house that the Moran had provided for him. I stood in the parking lot, jingling Tabin’s overloaded key chain, and looked up at the concave glass façade of the Moran, curved like the functional retina of an enormous eye, reflecting the light of the lowering sun. Betty might not have her sight returned to her here, but thousands of other patients certainly would. And from this building containing the latest medical technology, where the ceaseless energy of Dr. Tabin combined with the boundless optimism of international visitors like Dr. Nkurikiye, who came to glimpse the possibility of perfection, what other visions might be achieved?

  At the Phillips 66 station, I slumped in the driver’s seat of Tabin’s Ford. There was no sign of him at 5:45, or 6:00, or 6:15. Finally, just before 6:30, Dorais’s car arrived and Tabin slung his gear in the back and switched places with me, taking the wheel. “That was fun, fun, fun,” he said, easing into traffic. “Andrew’s not quite world-class, but he’s a darn good climber.” Tabin’s nose was sunburned and one elbow bloodied, bits of gravel clinging to a fresh abrasion. He seemed as oblivious to the wound as he was to his late arrival.

  We roared up the sweeping curves of I-80 toward Park City while Tabin fiddled with his phone, scanning emails and text messages. “Shit!” he said. “Shit! I forgot I’ve got a tennis match.” He asked if I could drop him at the Park City Racquet Club and shop for dinner while he played. He peeled off his sweat-stained climbing clothes in the club parking lot. Standing in his boxer shorts among the rows of Swedish and German cars, he fished around for a tennis outfit, pulling on a reeking pair of gray gym shorts and a wrinkled, once-white T-shirt advertising antibiotic eyedrops.

  “There should be ten of us, maybe twelve,” he said after directing me to his grocer of choice. “So why don’t you get twelve great steaks—whatever looks best, maybe rib eye. Also some salad stuff, some veggies for the grill, some wine, actually lots of wine with this group. We’ll stop by my house for martini fixings on the way.” He didn’t mention money. I agreed to pick him up an hour later.

  I stashed the groceries among the sports gear in Tabin’s truck and watched the end of his match through the long glass window of the racquet club’s waiting room. He was playing doubles, and the other three men on his court wore clean, color-coordinated outfits. One of his opponents had recently played on the pro tour. Tabin’s partner had once been an All-American at Arizona State. But despite his wrinkled gray clothes, the doctor held his own, hitting crisp baseline drives to the far corners of the court, chasing down drop shots with the same tenacity with which he pursued all the other passions of his life.

  Three decades earlier, Tabin had been captain of the Yale tennis team. The summer before he began studying at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, he’d played in several professional European tournaments, leaving the world of pro tennis only after calculating that his odds of success in it were slight. Still: medicine, mountaineering, tennis. It seemed unfair for a person to excel in so many fields, to have the ability and energy to jam so much bristling life into every hour of the day. But I wondered, as Tabin dove for and missed a hard, angled passing shot, if the doctor’s life might not involve some form of sacrifice, at the very least for the members of his family who hoped to share meaningful amounts of his time.

  Tabin jogged into his chaotic house, past a pack of barking rescue dogs—dogs his wife, Jean, had taken in during his last trip—to fetch supplies. Without showering, he changed into long pants and a bright orange bicycle jersey. He threw vodka, vermouth, olives, oil, vinegar, and half a head of lettuce into a cardboard box, leaned over his daughter Sara, eleven, and son, Daniel, nine, at the kitchen table to give a cursory glance at their homework, and kissed his wife on his way out. “You sure you don’t want to come?” he asked.

  “You misbehave with your climbing buddies,” Jean said, sticking out her knee while closing the door to prevent the dogs from escaping.

  As Tabin drove, I could see the lifts of the Canyons ski area, stilled by summer, and, beyond them, the towers of Olympic ski jumps, silhouetted against a darkening sky. Fifteen minutes later, we approached the modern glass-and-timber house belonging to Tabin’s friend Bill Crouse. With our arms full of meat and liquor, we squeezed through the front hall, threading our way past a fleet of mountain bikes, road bikes, and racks of climbing gear.

  The party had started without us, and half a dozen open wine bottles stood on the kitchen counter. Tabin greeted everyone, from his closest friends to casual acquaintances, with precisely the same short, sharp yelp of pleasure. He commandeered the stereo, turned up the electric blues he’d selected, and mixed a giant batch of dirty martinis.

  I thought I’d seen Tabin in his element that morning, leaning forward on his Surgistool, surrounded by a team of technicians. But this was clearly his element, too. I stood awkwardly, holding both the glass of red wine someone had passed me and the martini Tabin had jammed into my other hand, meeting people with nods rather than handshakes. Everyone seemed to be a skier, cyclist, or climber. Crouse was a former mountain guide who had summited Everest six times. The conversation revolved not around regular work but first ascents of obscure peaks, the condition of single-track trails near Park City, and planned trips to ski or climb new routes in Greenland and Antarctica.

  Tabin introduced me to Andrew McLean, who had pioneered a form of backcountry skiing so technical he’d had to invent the tools to make many of his first descents practical. As a product designer at the outdoor company Black Diamond, he’d dreamed up and manufactured the Whippet, a ski pole with an ice ax built into the grip for “fall and you die” terrain, slopes so steep you could perish unless you had a sharp tool at hand to arrest your slide. McLean, like Tabin, appeared physically unimpressive at first glance. He was skinny and wore unflattering glasses over a toothy grin too large to fit his narrow face. Then I noticed the prominent veins in his limbs, so corded and twined that it seemed he was capable of pumping twice the volume of blood that ordinary humans could circulate. “Geoff makes a fantastic martini, but as a skier, he’s just passable,” McLean said, sipping his drink. “I’ll admit he’s got a good motor, though. Maybe that’s what got him up all those mountains.”

  “Can you keep up with Andrew?” I asked Tabin.

  “No one can keep up with Andrew,” Tabin said, his chin once again nodding emphatically after he’d finished speaking, as he often did when hammering home a fact he considered indisputable. “Hey, is the grill ready?” he shouted to someone over his shoulder. “I’m starving!” I spoke with McLean awhile longer, as Tabin ran onto the deck and threw a dozen rib eyes over the coals, sending up flames that lit his beaming face the same fiery shade as his shirt. McLean seemed to know Tabin as a mountaineer first and a doctor only distantly second. Nearly everyone I spoke to at the party seemed to view Tabin primarily as the fourth person to climb the Seven Summits. Of his higher goals in medicine, they had only the haziest perspective.

  Someone turned the music up even louder, and Muddy Waters’s throaty baritone made the windows rattle like a second set of drums. I felt, at that moment, very far from the quiet evening on the roof of the makeshift hospital in Rasuwa with Ruit. How had these two fundamentally different men managed to work as partners for more than a decade? How could someone as calm, deliberate, and disciplined as Ruit possibly mesh with an impulsive extrovert like Tabin, who burned every waking hour of his days?

  Tabin had run back inside, leaving the grill unattended, and was telling a lengthy, uninterruptible joke from the supply he always had on tap, shouting over the music, the needle of his fun-o-meter surging into the red. Could the secret of Ruit and Tabin’s success be found in the way their personalities, and their radically different upbringings, complemented each other? I suspected so, but I realized I needed to stop simply grazing the present
and start excavating. I sipped from my left hand, then my right. Like Ruit and Tabin, the combination was odd but effective. I was definitely becoming drunk.

  Was the doctors’ shared vision really a force capable of curing much of the preventable blindness on earth? I stood unsteadily, listening to Tabin labor up a long ridge toward his punch line, and watching the fire I could clearly see flaring up over his shoulder turn several hundred dollars of prime, aged steak into cinders.

  Down from the Moon

  This country is said to present a very elevated, rugged tract of lofty mountains, sparingly snowed, uninhabitable by man or domestic animals.

  —Notation written across a blank spot on an 1858 British colonial map of northeastern Nepal, the region where Sanduk Ruit was born

  Cold. The kind of cold you can’t escape. That is Sanduk Ruit’s first memory. Not the faces of his five brothers and sisters. Not the silver bird-shaped buckle that fastened the striped pangi his mother wore around her waist, or his father’s ruddy complexion, perpetually windburned from his days on the trail to Tibet. Those memories come later. But the cold, so relentless you could almost see waterfalls of ice-blue air crashing down canyon walls from the snow peaks, pooling in the shadowed Tamor River gorge, and steeping his village in glacial chill.

  Perhaps that’s why the pot of boiling water proved so irresistible. In Ruit’s small wood-plank house, as in similar homes across the eastern Himalaya, where humans lived at the limit of what altitude allows, a fire was always burning, hot water always at hand to cook tsampa, boil a potato, or brew tea. Sanduk Ruit, aged four, climbed up on a bundle of split cooking wood and stared down into the steam. The warmth was delicious, and he wanted more of it. Pushing up the sleeve of his homespun sweater of heavy brown yak hair, he lowered his left arm, up to his elbow, into the fire-blackened pot.