Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  “A bomb blast,” the girl said, choosing her words carefully. “A … comrade of ours … has been injured in the eyes. A commander. If sir is willing, we’d like to bring the commander to hospital.”

  “Sir is willing,” Ruit said. “I’m a doctor, not a politician. An eye is an eye.”

  Ruit imagined that he could see her face flood with relief.

  “How shall we manage it?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow, we see the last patients by two-thirty,” Ruit said. “Bring your commander by after that. I’ll make sure everything is in readiness.”

  He made the first incision gently, widening the wound bit by bit with his blade, as he’d done so many times before, every movement delicate but brisk. Once he’d captured it with a cannula, the slightly opaque cataract slid easily out through the tunnel of tissue he’d constructed. After all of the challenging cataract operations he’d performed, this case was simple and stress-free.

  Tabin inserted the intraocular lens smoothly and centered it in his patient’s eye. He snuck a glance at his new supervisor, an ophthalmologist whose wavy, flame-colored hair escaped her surgical cap, wisp by wisp. Tabin pushed his stool away from the operating table, and his supervisor leaned in to look through the microscope’s eyepiece, inspecting his work. “Lens is lined up well,” she said. “The eye is clear and clean. I’d say it looks perfect, Dr. Tabin.”

  “Geoff,” he said.

  “Jean didn’t remember me at first, but we’d met years before,” Tabin says. “It was at a conference of the New England Ophthalmological Society in Boston, when I was a senior resident at Brown. I saw this hot redhead sitting alone during a lecture and introduced myself. As I recall, her first words to me weren’t really that romantic. I think she said, ‘Stop bothering me.’ ”

  Tabin hadn’t known it at the time, but her husband, Eugenio DeMarchis, an Italian anesthesiologist, had been killed a few years earlier, when the car he was driving home after he’d been called in for emergency, middle-of-the-night surgery at St. Vincent’s Hospital on Staten Island, swerved into oncoming traffic and hit a truck head-on. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt and survived the blunt impact of the steering wheel on his chest only long enough for an ambulance to rush him to the hospital before he died.

  Widowed, with three daughters aged two, five, and seven, and a growing fear that she wasn’t strong enough to raise them alone, Dr. Jean DeMarchis was in no mood to be romanced the day Tabin flirted with her at the conference. “I was trying to pay attention to the lecture and was having a hard enough time keeping my mind on my work when this guy started hitting on me,” Jean says. “He looked young enough to be a medical student. You know how Geoff kind of hops when he gets excited? He was doing that, and I just wanted this hyper, hopping guy to leave me alone.”

  In Burlington, Dr. DeMarchis had been assigned to proctor her department’s newest employee, which meant she was required to observe Tabin performing surgery. “When I saw Geoff’s climber’s hands, I thought, ‘No way is this guy going to be any good.’ But he was a terrific surgeon. His hands were a lot more delicate than they looked.”

  One evening soon after Tabin was hired, the chairman of the ophthalmology department held a party in Tabin’s honor, at his home on the shore of Lake Champlain, formally welcoming Geoff to the University of Vermont. Tabin sought out his redheaded supervisor. He took a draw from his beer and studied her. By the dusky lake, with lanterns lighting her wavy red hair, she looked, he thought, lovely. She didn’t seem to remember their encounter in Boston. He considered reminding her, but he’d bought a small house only a block away from hers in Burlington, and he didn’t want to give Jean the impression that he was stalking her.

  “I thought he was exciting,” Jean says. “He was telling stories about climbing and Nepal. You could definitely say he made an impression on me.”

  They often saw each other socially after that, and Jean got to know and like Tabin’s Australian girlfriend, Samantha, who lived with him for much of his first year in Vermont. Jean was in a relationship herself, but she felt it might not have a future. “The man I was dating told me he wanted to wait to get serious until the kids were older,” Jean says. “He said that would be healthier for them. I took that to mean he didn’t want to commit, and eventually we split up.”

  In the spring of 1996, Jean attended an ophthalmology conference in Boston, where she found herself seated next to Dr. Mike Wiedman, Tabin’s mentor at Harvard who had encouraged him to climb Everest. “Observing that I was from Burlington, he mentioned that I must know Geoff Tabin and that I should get to know him better, as he was such an amazing man,” Jean says. “His stories about Geoff fascinated me.”

  Samantha moved back to Australia to continue her studies, and Jean found her thoughts turning, increasingly, to Tabin. She was training to run the Boston Marathon, and each time she ran by his house, she was tempted to stop. One evening she saw him standing in his kitchen window and knocked on Tabin’s door. She left with an invitation to run with him. After one of their runs he invited her over for dinner.

  During the meal, Tabin told carefully selected stories about climbing and his work with Ruit in remote Himalayan villages. “I remember at some point Geoff placed a statue of a fertility goddess he’d picked up during his travels on the table as we talked. I found him fascinating and brilliant and goofy and adorable,” Jean says. “I’d never met anyone like him.” That night, after she’d walked home, Jean tossed in bed, replaying highlights from their conversation. “I woke up at three A.M.,” she says, “and I thought, ‘This guy is the most incredible person I’ve ever met.’ He was like a combination of Albert Einstein and Mr. Magoo.”

  “From the moment we started dating, I was crazy about Jean,” Tabin says. “We had so much fun. And as I got to know her girls, I fell for them, too.” Ali, Jean’s crimson-haired, freckle-faced youngest, shared Tabin’s sense of humor. She was eight, and she’d walk around Burlington with Tabin while he did errands. He’d pretend to be Himalayan and speak Nepali-sounding gobbledygook to the clerks at the supermarket or the ice cream shop, and Ali would translate his nonsense into plausible English. “She was really good at it,” Tabin says, “and was able to keep a straight face until we walked back out into the street, where we’d both lose it.”

  But Tabin felt conflicted. He’d bought a two-bedroom house a few blocks from the campus that suited his bachelor’s life perfectly. He’d installed a hot tub in one of the bedrooms and converted the attic into a climbing gym, which became a party center and focal point for Burlington’s mountaineers. “Jean’s place was hyperfemale and not my style at all,” he says. “It was frilly and full of antiques and lace curtains. And I really loved my little house and the lifestyle I had there.”

  Still, Tabin adored Jean’s daughters, so much that he found himself daydreaming about what it would be like to form a large family and add children of their own to the mix. They used birth control but joked about the “puppy” they might have if the potency Julius Tabin had passed on to his son found a way past the imperfect barriers they put in place. “That would be great,” Tabin told Jean. “I’ve always wanted a puppy.”

  In October 1996, while Tabin was packing for his next trip to Kathmandu, his mother, a shrewd assessor of current events, phoned to ask whether it was safe for him to work in Nepal. He told her not to worry, but, in truth, he wasn’t sure; he wondered how the Maoists’ declaration of war would affect the HCP. The glimpse he got of the city, on the short ride from the airport to Tilganga, revealed little out of the ordinary. There were no crowds of rebel protesters, no unusually heavy military presence in the streets.

  The next day, sitting together in Hilda’s backseat, Ruit and Tabin inched out of town, beginning the long drive to an eye camp Nabin had organized in the Maoist-dominated district of Dhading. Nabin had gone ahead with Tilganga’s advance team to convert a rural clinic into an operating theater capable of meeting Ruit’s standards. “Without any complications,” Ruit sa
id, “we should catch Nabin by midafternoon and begin operating tomorrow morning.”

  “Complications,” Tabin said, “meaning Maoists?”

  As the traffic thinned out at the city’s western edge and they sped toward the hills, Ruit briefed Tabin on what he thought the insurgency would mean for the HCP. He explained that the Maoists were extremely active in the countryside, where they had wide support among the rural people, but rarely made their presence felt in the capital. He told Tabin about the Maoist commander whose shrapnel-scarred eyes he’d repaired after hours at Tilganga. Since then, Ruit said, several high-level Maoists had come to him clandestinely for treatment, most often for ordinary complaints like cataracts or glaucoma, and less frequently for injuries inflicted by weapons. “From what I’ve seen, they’re a fairly sensible lot,” Ruit said. “If we run into trouble in rural areas, I think they’ll look kindly on our work, once we tell them clearly who we are.”

  For someone who’d come to Kathmandu as an outsider, Tabin admired how thoroughly Ruit had been able to establish relationships with people of influence at every level of Nepalese society. “Basically,” Tabin says, “he seemed to have the whole country wired; he had lines of communication open to everyone who mattered, and I felt like as long as I was under his wing, there was really nothing to worry about.”

  Two hours from Kathmandu, at a checkpost constructed of felled trees, Ruit and Tabin were stopped by teenage Maoist soldiers waving antique British rifles that looked too rusty to fire. They inspected Ruit and Tabin’s papers, then demanded that the doctors make a donation to the Maoist cause before they’d be allowed to pass. Ruit stepped out of Hilda, inflated his chest, and brought his large, square head right up to the face of the boy who appeared to be in charge. “Listen clearly, bhai,” he said, calling the anxious camouflage-clad teenager “younger brother” to emphasize his own standing. “My contribution to the Maoist cause is that I have stitched back together the eyes of your commanders when the bombs they were building exploded too soon. That, bhai, is the only contribution I’m willing to make. You won’t rob a single rupee from me. We’re here to help the poor, the people you say you’re fighting for. Can you say the same?”

  “Sorry, Doctor dai,” the boy said, leaning his gun against a tree trunk like he was embarrassed by it. “You and the foreigner are free to pass.”

  Not every encounter was settled so easily. At other checkpoints, deeper into Maoist territory, they were often detained until a senior officer could be contacted to grant them the right to pass. During one of these mandated rest stops at a rebel checkpoint, they left Hilda idling by the roadblock and strolled for a few hundred yards back the way they’d come, passing Maoist symbols—raised red fists, hands breaking the chains that bound them—spray-painted on boulders. As they walked along the line of stilled vehicles waiting for permission to proceed, Tabin finally told Ruit about Jean: about her career, and her children, and both the doubts and enthusiasm she sparked in him.

  “An ophthalmologist, isn’t it?” Ruit said, his eyebrows raised in approval. “But three children by another fellow. That is rather a lot to take on, I agree. Still, you’re not getting any younger. And she sounds like a woman of character. I’d advise you to proceed.”

  During other enforced delays, Ruit lectured on one of his favorite subjects: whether Maoists could really be trusted to combat rural poverty as aggressively as they were battling the country’s elite institutions, and if they could provide the decent, democratic governance he felt his people so urgently deserved.

  “The countryside is really burning, eh, Geoff?” Ruit said while they were waiting for permission to pass still another checkpoint, the barrels of the young and inexperienced soldiers’ guns waving uncomfortably close; they were near Dhading, the heart of rebel country. “One of their commanders told me the Maoists already control eighty percent of the country. Everything but the cities. Our work here,” Ruit said cheerfully, as if he almost relished the challenge, “is becoming a bit more complex, isn’t it?”

  Once they’d reached Dhading and settled into the all-consuming routine of surgery, their medical team operated as flawlessly as they always had before the Maoist revolt. But traveling less than a hundred miles to treat rural patients had proved far more difficult than Tabin had expected. How could the HCP reverse the tide of blindness across Nepal, not to mention the entire Himalaya, if they couldn’t drive ten minutes without finding themselves at the mercy of teenage rebels?

  When Tabin returned to comparatively uncomplicated Kathmandu in early November, he found a fax from Jean waiting for him at Tilganga. “Remember that puppy you wanted?” it read in her sloppy doctor’s scrawl. “We’re getting one.”

  On the succession of long flights home, Tabin felt a potent cocktail of confusion and exhilaration swirling inside him. Jean’s fax made the obstacles the HCP faced seem either simpler or much more difficult, depending on the shifting currents of his emotions. During his flight to London, it seemed that having Jean by his side might make the insanely difficult task he’d set for himself easier. But hours later, on his last leg across the Atlantic, he stared at the endless, comfortless expanse of ocean and wondered whether being tethered to a family might make him question the risks working with Ruit required.

  “I’d thought about a future with Jean and the girls, and it appealed to part of me immensely,” Tabin says. “But when you’re a bachelor for forty years, and you’re used to your freedom, you don’t necessarily picture a widow with three children as your romantic ideal. I had doubts about whether I was ready to take on all that responsibility.”

  Those doubts were obvious to Jean when Tabin returned. The man she’d fallen for, the risk-taking traveler, ready to dive into the unknown, was nowhere to be found. “I don’t want to put pressure on you,” she told him. “I’m going to have the baby. You can be a part of it if you want.”

  Tabin alternated between soaking in his hot tub and climbing in his attic, brooding about the choice he had to make. Whether he was in the water or hanging from holds, he knew that his decision would alter the way he assessed himself. Stepping off the railing of the Royal Gorge Bridge, tethered to survival by an elastic rope that hung nearly a thousand feet above the Arkansas River, hadn’t felt half as frightening as the leap he was considering.

  “It felt like my life had spiraled away from the possibility of having a family of my own,” Tabin says. “So, on the one hand, I was thrilled about the idea of our child growing inside Jean, about seizing the chance I thought had passed me by. But there was also big-time fear; I was terrified about jumping from bachelorhood to the Brady Bunch overnight.”

  A few weeks after he’d arrived in Burlington, Tabin woke early, groggy from a night of fitful sleep, and phoned his parents. It was even earlier in Chicago. But he imagined, after all the years of waiting and hinting, that they wouldn’t mind. “Do you still have Grandma Sara’s diamond ring?” Tabin asked when he heard his mother’s voice.

  The shriek of delight from the central time zone stirred Tabin fully awake.

  They held the wedding two months later, on January 4, 1997, so that Jean wouldn’t be showing too obviously, and booked the posh Top-notch Resort at the Stowe ski area for the affair. Most of Tabin’s tennis teammates from Yale attended the ceremony, along with his classmates from Harvard and Oxford and Brown, and his expedition mates from Everest’s Kangshung Face. They had plenty of material to work with for their toasts, and they dredged up embarrassing anecdotes about Tabin’s unharnessed days, trying to top one another at a roast they held for him the evening before the wedding, in a dive bar they’d rented for the night called, appropriately enough, the Matterhorn.

  Paul Burke, Tabin’s roommate at Yale, recounted an incident from their freshman year when his alumni father had taken the teenagers to Mory’s Temple Bar, one of Yale’s exclusive private clubs, and poured punch bowls of various liquors into the inexperienced drinkers. Burke had the crowd howling in appreciation as he related how Ta
bin, staggering around their dorm room and judging the distance to the bathroom too daunting, had opened their window and urinated from the second story of Wright Hall at precisely the moment Burke’s formally dressed father, on the way to his car, was passing below.

  But it was one last adventure as a bachelor that Tabin concocted just hours before the ceremony that nearly caused him to be late for his own wedding. Tabin could almost hear Ruit’s disembodied words—“Remember, Geoff, you can’t do everything at once”—as he drove away from the resort where the guests were gathering, into the Green Mountains. Along with two friends, the Alaskan climbing guide Carl Tobin and the Colorado-based mountaineer Neal Beidleman, Tabin attempted a first ascent of one of the toughest ice climbs in Vermont. “The frozen waterfall was a freestanding pillar the width of a tree trunk. If you hit it too hard, the whole thing could collapse and kill you,” Tabin says. “But we took our time and worked our way up it, using our ice tools as delicately as kitten’s claws.” At the top, the three embraced and gave Tabin the honor of naming the demanding first ascent. He chose “Prenuptial Agreement.”

  Tabin made it back moments before the six o’clock ceremony was scheduled to begin, showered quickly, threw on his suit (a tasteful black, far from the mothballed, Oxford-era white tuxedo with the wide lapels), and arrived at the altar just as the string quartet started playing.

  “I was still learning about the way Geoff worked,” Jean says. “Thank God I didn’t know he was out climbing just before the ceremony or I would have been a wreck.”

  Tabin had hired his favorite local musician, Big Joe Burrell, and his band played the electric Chicago-style blues Tabin considers the bedrock cultural contribution of his hometown. He and Jean were carried on swaying chairs by their guests, in the Jewish tradition, as Big Joe fought his way through “Hava Nagila.” Then the newlyweds descended to the dance floor, where they were surrounded by a hundred friends, relatives, climbers, and coworkers, shaking their hips to the Chicago groove. Livia, Emilia, and Ali, Jean’s—and now Geoff’s—three daughters, joined their parents on the dance floor, along with another addition to the family, riding along to the rhythm beneath Jean’s cream-colored wedding dress.