Awayland

by Ramona Ausubel

  “Yes, what?” Kit asks.

  “Dying,” he says. “Every day is a gift.”

  If Summer’s parents, or Kit’s, were still alive, surely they would have insisted that she see another doctor, someone with standard medical training. In a big Atlantic seaboard city where even the jawlines of the residents are authoritative. There are no grown-ups looking in on them. There are no friends. The chamber they are in is a two-person chamber and their voices echo off the sides.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE ALL GOOD REVELATIONS, the idea strikes at night. Summer sits up straight in bed and goes to the window. She slides it open and crawls onto the sloped roof. It must have rained. She draws a line with her finger across her right wrist. “Right there,” she whispers out loud. And she waits a moment, expecting a sign or a signal. Confirmation. The peach trees in the yard reach leaflessly toward her with every one of their knotted fingers. By sunlight, Summer has a good start on her research. They will go someplace else far away. Less regulation, fewer rules. It’s good to live in a country that protects you with laws, until the only way to love your love after you die is to give him one of your hands.

  * * *

  —

  KIT WAKES THE COMPUTER up in the morning. An email is still sending, stuck. Dear Dr. Victamsamphe, it says. I’m dying soon. My beloved and I love each other so much that I can’t possibly put it into words. I want to be with him wherever he is, touch everything he touches, love everything he loves, even after I’m gone. Which is where you come in. Please, it’s the only thing that makes sense. I want you to replace one of his hands with one of mine. If it makes a difference, you could have my love’s unused hand—I won’t need it for long. Maybe there is an orphan or a man who’s been in an accident. At least you could show it to your medical students. Anyway, that’s your choice. We have money. I’m serious. Please write back.

  * * *

  —

  KIT LOOKS AT his hands. He imagines that one of them is his lady-love’s and that she is stumped. Kit feels a kink in his heart. His girl is in the shower, soaping her every inch of skin. He cannot see the maze of tubes and cavities inside her body. He cannot know what is pumping right and what is pumping wrong, how each of those slippery organs is tucked against its neighbor and whether something bad is truly blooming there. Whether, even if her body is perfect, a truck will lose its brakes, tumble off the road where Summer is walking. There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying—everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Summer is not crazy to take notice of this.

  Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrasses.

  Dear Summer,

  You are lucky to love the way you do. A rare beauty. I would like to help you. Thank you for offering your boyfriend’s hand to the orphans, but I’d feel better if I gave it to you.

  * * *

  —

  KIT LOGS OUT of his brand-new account. Does not save settings. He goes into the steam-thick bathroom where his girl is drying off, warm and slow, and he kisses her on the insides of her wrists.

  “You’re perfect,” he says.

  She clucks her tongue. “I’m starving.”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY Summer goes to the lonesome small-town library and reads up. The hand is a near miracle. There are twenty-seven bones: scaphoid, hamate, phalanx. One is called the lunate, which is deeply concave and moonlike. Summer turns her wrists, appreciating for the first time two tiny lunar bodies she has been living with all her life. She learns that this bone has a superior surface and an inferior one, dorsal and palmar surfaces. It articulates laterally with the scaphoid and distally with the capitate.

  Also: muscles. The extrinsic muscles, she reads, are so called because the muscle belly is located on the wrist. The muscle belly? She reads the sentence again. She pets the place on her arm where she imagines this to be. The other muscles are intrinsic, and that seems like a nice thing to be. In the picture, the blood vessels look like tree roots, knotting and thickening their earth.

  Summer begins to get worried. The surgery, she realizes, is unthinkably complicated. Hand replacements can take fifteen hours. Each blood vessel must join another, each strand of muscle must attach. She imagines a room with white floors and very bright lights and a doctor welding together Kit’s wrist and her own hand, two body parts that have touched each other a zillion times, loved each other, met in the dark and in the light, outdoors and in, sweating and freezing cold. And yet they are foreign on the inside. Different bloodstreams, different meat. Rejection is a big complication. Medication is necessary for life.

  But it’s possible. It’s been done. And for reasons less pure, Summer thinks, than love. Summer and Kit get into bed that night and talk about one of his students who got hit in the head with a baseball but seemed to be completely fine until the end of the day when his mother came to get him and he ran from her screaming. Kit says that the mother chased him through the high school maze calling, “I love you, Cody. I love you, I love you,” until her son collapsed in exhaustion by the snack machine and she fell over him like a blanket, holding him under her hot breath until he went soft. Kit called the hospital to check on him.

  “No news except to the family,” the nurse said.

  “I was there,” Kit said. “I saw it. Doesn’t that earn me anything?”

  “The news is medium-good,” the nurse said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  Summer remembers the vascular system, that web. She thinks of the mother and son, blood-bound. Summer tucks her hand beneath her love’s head, catching him in the net of red, red veins.

  * * *

  —

  KIT CHECKS OUT the very same books Summer has just recently returned. Early in the morning, he responds to her emails as her waiting surgeon. He keeps expecting her to write one day and say, Never mind—too big, too dangerous. He tries to gently dissuade her. He tells her the story of an Australian police officer who lost both hands diffusing a bomb and later completed a solo around-the-world motorcycle trip with his transplants. He revved the engine with borrowed hands, braked, came to a stop in a tiny foreign village and found somewhere to sleep, all with borrowed hands. Yet all the time the man could feel that the hands were not his own. They pulled at the ends of his wrists. Their motions were ungentle when the man brushed his hair, smoothed his shirt. He had a wife, and he touched her with his new hands and she took quickening gasps of air and kissed him hard, but in the morning he was mistrustful of her. How could she love someone else’s hands so easily? The man came back to me and demanded that the hands be removed, Kit wrote. Let me go, was what he said.

  Summer writes back: This won’t be a problem for us because we aren’t foreign to one another. I am more familiar to him than he is to himself. Then Kit tries to underscore the likelihood of major complications. But Kit does not like the way it feels, telling his love that her idea is bad. They live on a dark, cold island and their families are dead and the seas are rising and this house, the pair of souls within, miraculously matched, is all that’s safe. Finally, Kit gives in. It’s a story, he figures. All he’s doing is nodding while his darling tells a story.

  The surgeon takes root in Kit’s emails. Kit thinks about him at work and a biography emerges, which he types and sends to Summer. The surgeon did all the necessary preparation when he was very young. Time was generous and elastic. You could wake up at ten and go to class, study, take a break to examine the naked flesh of one of your lovelier classmates, eat something smothered in tomato sauce, read some more and you still had the good night ahead.

  Fo
r ten years, he studied. Always the top of his class. Against the usual course of things, he grew handsomer and handsomer. His hair thickened and winked with highlights. He felt god-blessed, and plus, he was doing important work fixing what was ruined. The little-girl bicyclist and the old-man driver, meeting in an intersection. Her arm didn’t make sense as an arm anymore. His job: give her a life to look forward to.

  A misfired gun meets an old woman’s side. A bear, hungry after the winter; a hiker who walks too close to her cub. A shark, a surfer.

  The surgeon sees the world in terms of dividers. Teeth, claws, chain saws, axes, odd pieces of sharp metal, the spikes on a garden fence, a kitchen knife, a car windshield. He stands as the reuniter. In his hands, repair takes place. Brokenness becomes irrelevant, past tense, superseded.

  Summer writes back about her sweetheart, how he found a baby rabbit and brought it inside and kept it alive under a bare lightbulb, how he gives old men his place in line. He’s good, she’s always known it, but saying it to a stranger makes it feel all the more true. In the surgeon, Summer has found a friend. It’s a good feeling to know that Kit is not the only person on earth who cares about her. Kit reads the letters at night when his girl has gone to sleep and he wishes he could thank her.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE NIGHT of the first freeze, Kit wakes up and finds himself sitting on the kitchen floor with a paring knife in his right hand. He drops it fast and examines himself for incisions. On the back of his left hand, just where it joins the wrist, he finds a tiny scratch, thin as a papercut. He presses it, though it isn’t bleeding. Kit goes outside and feels the cold air hold him. His breath is a gray cloud, disappearing on contact. The invention—the doctor, the surgery—is here with him. It is part of their home now; it is in them.

  * * *

  —

  SUMMER WORKS UP the courage to tell Kit about her plan. Broadly, she tells him, the surgery goes like so: cut, cut, cut, repair, repair, repair. That’s simplified, she explains, but it makes her heart feel easier to think of it that way. So many jobs come down to that—cut, cut, cut, repair, repair, repair. The bones have to be sliced with a small, precise saw. It’s a sound she is glad she won’t be awake to hear. The veins, they are managed with the most delicate pair of scissors. Though of course they are actually stainless steel, medical, Summer imagines her mother’s sewing scissors, shaped like a crane with a beak that opens and closes, wings that separate and fold together. Mother-of-pearl inlay and one bright blue eye.

  Probably, Summer explains, there will need to be two surgeons, working in tandem. Hands off, hands on. They’ll begin early in the morning and finish well after dark. A thousand tiny cuts, a thousand tiny repairs.

  Kit has to act surprised. He says, “I’m not going to forget about you. We don’t have to do this.” Kit knows that he has this one chance to say no. If he doesn’t, he will be doubly complicit, both amputee and surgeon.

  “We don’t have to do anything. This one I’m asking for. I’m thinking January.”

  He looks at her. It’s a story and he does not refuse.

  * * *

  —

  KIT CHOOSES THE ISLAND for its remoteness, its fringy palms, the color of the sea. He looks at pictures on the internet from other people’s vacations. They are tan and their towels are covered in sand and they have coconuts with straws. It looks like a good place to be disappointed. Kit knows that land is actual, crossable, and that in a certain number of travel-hours they will arrive on the other side of the Pacific Ocean and no willing hand surgeon will be there to meet them. He knows that the story will end differently than promised, but he does not know what to do other than keep moving forward. Kit has run through a series of possibilities: find a real doctor to do a real surgery; find a fake doctor to do a fake surgery; or, the fantasy that feels most possible, go somewhere far away where Kit’s invented doctor supposedly works, but when they get there it’s just a local clinic where no one speaks English, certainly nowhere for a complicated procedure, and the doctor suddenly stops writing back to Summer, but the island is so beautiful, so warm and the water is thick with brightly colored fish and the beach is long and moon-shaped, and Kit and Summer sleep in the jungle and they eat strange fruits and Summer finds that she is satisfied, better. That death recedes into the far future. And their love is bigger than ever before, and they don’t go home for months because Kit is rich because his parents were rich and this is an inexpensive country and they can live on the water’s edge while the entire winter passes at home, all the storms, all the months of slushy sea, until it thaws there and Kit and Summer return with darkened skin and longer hair and they can open every single window in the house and drag their sarongs out onto the lawn and pretend it’s Asia. Somewhere in there, Summer’s idea, her need, will drift upward and look small, disappear from sight.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE AIRPORT, Kit and Summer sit near a window holding hands and looking out at the geography of grays before them: tarmac, airplane, sky. The orange-vested flight-control man is the single bright spot.

  Summer is not sure Kit believes her plan yet. She suspects that he thinks it is a fantasy. She suspects that his excitement is for a vacation in a nation with spicy foods and good beaches, tremendous golden Buddhas and places where orphaned elephants paint with their trunks. That’s fair. His love is dying any day—certainly a vacation is deserved.

  Kit is inside of the lie now and can’t see out. The invention has its own heartbeat, and it has carried them from their small house on their small island, across to the mainland, to the airport. The actual airport where an actual plane is being loaded with dinner, breakfast, snack, and a stewardess in high heels is arranging tiny Zinfandel bottles in her cart and checking to be sure that there is a safety information card in each seat-back pocket. Kit knows he should have admitted to being part of the world that is not sure what to do with her. But here is the invention carrying them along, here is the gate attendant announcing the first boarding group. Here is the body and here are the wings.

  He notices that Summer is breathing sharply and she can’t keep her hands still. Of course, he realizes: inside her, the wreck of her parents’ plane is a hot cinder. Kit says to her, “This is a big plane. Big planes don’t crash.”

  “If we go down you have to promise that we’ll both die. I can’t be the only survivor again,” she says.

  He gives her his pinkie to swear by.

  * * *

  —

  THERE ARE WIND-BLOWN WHITE CURTAINS in their hut and a squat toilet and the sand is bright gold outside, and the sea is an almost unimaginable shade. It makes Summer’s stomach hurt to look at a blue that blue. Summer and Kit fall into that water, and it catches them, warm. A large gold dog paddles out to them like they need saving and Summer puts her arms out and lets the dog hug her, scratching, trying to keep everyone afloat. “Sweetheart,” Kit says. “Do we need to worry about rabies?”

  Summer, already dying, is free from worry now, she says. The stray dog licks her face and looks proud even though Summer is doing all the swimming. When she comes out, her white legs are striped with scratches.

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS NO WHITE SHINE to the clinic floor, no humming lights, no gurneys or nurses in comfort-clogs. There is no waiting room with magazines and fake plants or real ones. There is not even a door. Kit and Summer walk out of the jungle and up three concrete stairs into a tiled room. A fan stirs the air and a young girl sits at a wooden desk with a stack of paper and pens. She smiles at them and says, “Please, your shoes.” At the doorway, Summer notices a line of sandals.

  “Shoes off?” Kit asks.

  She nods.

  Barefootedness felt good on the beach, exotic in the restaurant, upsetting in a hospital.

  “Is this the right place?” Kit whispers, acting. Summer looks around and cannot te
ll. She takes his hand. They watch a door open and a mother walks out holding a baby. The mother wears a T-shirt that reads “Beautiful Today!” It has a cartoon of a cat with a mouse in its jaw. The baby stretches one tiny arm out and opens her hand like something good is going to fall into it.

  A small man walks out after them and comes to stand before Kit and Summer. He, too, is shoeless. They cannot tell how old he is—a trick of this continent. Skin here does not record time’s passage in the same way. Sun and wind and years slip right over.

  “Hello,” he says, putting his hands together and bowing slightly.

  In the emails, Summer had noted an education, certainly Western. Good grammar. This doctor is foreign. “We’re here for the hand transplant,” Summer says. She draws a line on her left wrist. “It’s so that I can go everywhere with him. Which sounds crazy when you say it, but not crazy when you think it.” Her face is hot and blooded.

  “Yes, yes,” the doctor says.

  “Yes?” Kit asks.

  The doctor takes Summer’s hands and holds them in his own, which are unbearably soft. An American man would be shy to touch anyone with hands that soft. He studies her pinkie, feeling each bone, pressing her nail and watching it whiten. “Very good,” he says.

  Next he takes Kit’s hand, rolls the fingers back and forth, bends the knuckles and straightens them. Kit, too, notes the softness of the man’s skin. He notices a ring on his finger. A woman loves this man, lives in a house with him, trusts her children to him, spends long, dark hours with him beside her.

  “Bones are challenge.”

  “Oh,” says Summer.

  “Oh?” Kit looks at the man and tries to ask him with his eyes what he means. A crossing of wires, he tells himself. No one understands what anyone else is saying.