by Liam Durcan
He thought it was impossible that Celia wouldn’t see the change in him too, and perhaps it was that sense of confidence that gave him the courage to speak to her. They talked about music or movies or the start of school–she was starting at the same school as Patrick that fall. It was meaningless talk, talk as a way of not saying anything. These conversations–conducted in the purest dialect of adolescence: halting, punctuated with his grunts of feigned indifference–were about nothing, and yet he would go home and replay the transcript of all that was said, cringe at every idiot phrase, relish every joke that made her laugh. But that night, after Roberto’s mutiny, she was in no mood to talk. She stood behind the cash–where he detected a new Celia vibe, one of delicious glowering–and refused to even acknowledge the boy with the mop in front of her. They had closed up the store and were standing on the sidewalk outside Le Dépanneur Mondial when she spoke to him, seemingly for the first time since Roberto left.
“Walk me home?”
He tried not to nod too avidly, hoping a show of concern for her safety getting home would mask any sign of euphoria. Very likely, it was a beautiful night, moonlight sifting through the canopy of trees, but Patrick was blind as he walked beside her, forcing himself to relax but feeling as nonchalant as a one-man band. At her front door, her only words were “Wait here.”
She disappeared into her house and left him there. Wait for what? A tip? A sign from God?
After a short lifetime of fuming and confusion, Patrick saw Mrs. Robitaille come to the door. She waved to Celia and picked her way carefully down the front stairs. Reflexively, Patrick stepped behind a tree until Mrs. Robitaille was past.
Another lifetime, longer, before Celia appeared at the doorway, waving him in.
He smelled sex. He was doused and set on fire by the very act of her waving. She could have waved him over a cliff and he would have zombie-walked into thin air. Marshalling all his restraint so as not to bound up the front stairs of Celia García’s house, he followed. Inside, the duplex was quiet, lights lowered, empty except for the two of them and Nina who slept in a back bedroom. Celia held her finger to her mouth, as though he needed a reminder. Down a darkened hallway, he heard the whoosh and thud of a clothes washer filling.
They walked through the kitchen, past the table where they sat two weeks before and she had smiled at him. I’ll be quiet, he promised, I’ll be very quiet. His brief restaurant career finally came to good use and he was instantly aware of how much time they had until her parents returned, able to calculate with NASA-like precision the minute-by-minute timeline of an average couple in their forties out to dinner. Seating, menus, and ordering: twelve to fifteen minutes. Appetizers: fifteen to twenty minutes. Main course: forty-five to sixty minutes. Dessert and coffee: twenty to thirty minutes. Final bill: fifteen minutes. French restaurant: add one half hour. Anniversary: tack on another thirty minutes. They should already be home by now, but if they made arrangements for a sitter maybe they would stay out a bit later.
He was a small-scale seismic event of adrenalin and testosterone. If she had known, she would have run and locked the door behind her, but she kept walking, now past the kitchen and down the other hallway that led to the back of the house. She was in front of him. Total Celia immersion. He saw and smelled her, heard her footsteps. He imagined her bra and panties, the inventory of first sightings. They’d have to be quiet. They reached the end of the back hallway and the door that he assumed led to her bedroom. He wanted touch. He wanted taste. But she opened the door to the back balcony, turned on the outside light, and stepped outside. He couldn’t wait. He reached out, touching her shoulder. She turned.
“Yes?” she said, looking at Patrick as though he’d just tapped her on the shoulder to return a glove she had unknowingly dropped. He didn’t understand. It was stark disappointment, like someone had turned on the lights to reveal a cinderblock room. She smiled and tilted her head toward something sitting in the corner of the balcony.
“I have to paint out here. Nina has asthma,” she said, and lifted a canvas up, surveying it before turning it around for him.
Patrick was speechless, presented with the canvas and the utter obliviousness of its artist. His first impulse was to pitch the canvas into the leafy darkness below the Garcías’ back balcony and walk out the door. But he didn’t. He held the picture in his hands and tried to keep from shaking. To defuse his anger at the injustice of the moment, he reminded himself how a little sensitivity and self-control demonstrated now could reap rewards in the future. This didn’t work–he still felt like a car in a skid–and so he imagined Hernan and Marta arriving and the competent beating from Roberto that he had probably avoided, and these thoughts helped him regain his composure.
Above, shadflies were engaged in mad, barrelling flight around the balcony’s light bulb. Yellow light fell like sprinkler mist. It was hard to appreciate the colours of the painting. The first details he made out were the vertical lines and a figure among them. The figure’s hands were lifted to chest level, separating and pushing away stalks of corn. The figure was him.
“Can I take this inside?” he asked.
He heard the clack of the frame as she put the picture flat on the kitchen table and switched on the overhead light. The canvas came alive with colour. It was beautiful. The densely green fields, the detail of his hands. But what he examined most closely was how she had painted his face. There, before him, emerging from the cornstalks, wearing his clothes and inhabiting his body, was a face that he didn’t want to recognize. He scanned the other details but returned to his face, finding again that it showed a person he didn’t want to be. It portrayed him as a child. An expression of petulance. That was how she saw him. He was a child to her, a cranky boy in a field. Redemption came in the thought that he was not this boy she could capture so easily. This was before, he told himself, painted before he’d witnessed the man in the dormitory. Now everything was different.
Celia was watching him, waiting for the first words of praise, he thought. Patrick knew he could have reacted in many ways. Years later, he felt ashamed for not being more magnanimous and telling her he was honoured to hold a thing of such beauty, that he was without words, impressed at her skill and creativity. It was true, after all. But he could not say these things. She thought he was a child, she had shown him that, and what followed seemed natural, inevitable. He had shrugged and handed the painting back to her.
“I have to go,” he said, and he left.
Patrick followed Celia into the public gallery of the courtroom where they parted, mumbling like a couple of teenagers about him sitting over here and her sitting toward the front with Roberto. The tribunal reconvening, Patrick was now able to recognize the players. Lindbergh and McKenzie sat across from Marcello and Ing Song Park, the only lawyer of the group he hadn’t met (so far, but the day was still young). A court official entered and Hernan followed, in steps easy enough to convince Patrick that Hernan’s legs were not shackled. He’d somehow expected this, as though the tribunal would be less than credible without leg irons. Hernan wore his plain blue shirt, and Patrick wondered whether that was tribunal issue as well or just a habit of the accused. Hernan stepped into the small glass cage and settled himself in the chair, briefly glancing down, appearing to be thinking or praying, and then dispelling any doubts by lifting the fiddly little earpiece and plugging it into the side of his head. Why did he need to listen, or even be here, if he wasn’t going to speak in his own defence? Why did he need translation at all? Patrick supposed Hernan was like anyone, occupying himself. Trying to get through days that presented him with a schedule divided between boredom and vilification.
A man in his forties took the stand, stated his name, and the questioning began. He was a professor at UC Davis. He had been a student at the National Autonomous University when he was arrested two decades before. It was explained to him after the arrest that they were looking for his cousin, who was suspected of being a Communist. When he told the two officers
he didn’t know where his cousin was or anything he was involved with, one of the officers hit him in the face with enough force to knock him over. He described his vision being blurred, the stinging pain and then the metallic taste in his mouth. The witness remembered pursing his lips to breathe out and seeing a red mist. With his hands secured behind his back, he could not staunch the flow of blood from his broken nose. The front of his shirt turned red.
McKenzie asked him if he’d been alone when he’d been arrested and he said yes. But during his days at Lepaterique, he’d seen glimpses of others as he was moved from one interrogation room to another. McKenzie asked him the names of those he’d recognized but the witness said he couldn’t recall. During his confinement he’d seen many faces, but wasn’t sure whose were hallucinations.
The witness then reported how the interrogation intensified. New people appeared in the room. He was blindfolded but could hear smatterings of English being spoken. The university professor told the court that the beatings were made worse by the regime used between interrogations. Prisoners were kept awake for days on end, or forced to stand for hours with the rubber mask, the capucha, on their heads and made to endure near-asphyxiation. Not sleeping was the worst, the university professor said plainly, as though he were describing a food he once used to dislike.
When he could not give his captors any useful information, they moved on to other means involving a different team. He remembered only the electrodes being placed and, at first, the mildest of the shocks. The rest was pain and fear and movement of people around him. McKenzie asked if this was where the university professor first encountered the doctor, and the university professor said yes. Is this man in the room with us now? McKenzie asked. Yes, he is, the man responded. Indicate for the court. The university professor raised his hand, as if indicating directions to a fellow traveller who had become lost, and said, “Hernan García de la Cruz.” He pointed directly at Hernan in the glass dock. It made Patrick want to cry. Pointing was a vector, a directional force, a hurricane heading ashore or a hawk bearing down on its prey. Words, even accusatory ones, were scalar. Words floated in the air. The pointing was unnecessary, but there is an undeniable hunger for it, an act that accomplished what all those words fell short of. The university professor lowered his hand, away from Hernan. After this pistol shot, Patrick imagined a spider-web fracture pattern in the fronting glass panel of Hernan’s cage. But it remained smooth, the bottom of a well from which Hernan stared, unflinching.
Instead it was Celia who responded. Throughout all of this, Patrick’s attention had been split between Celia and Hernan. Hernan was a sphinx behind the glass; Celia, a repertoire of gestures as coping mechanisms: a hand brought to the brow was denial; intent scribbling as sublimation; a rare despairing glance in Patrick’s direction (another vector, emotive force to be determined). She put her elbows on her knees and held her head in her hands.
McKenzie asked the witness how he knew that the accused was a physician, and the university professor replied that Hernan had tended to him. When asked to elaborate, the university professor said that when he awoke it was Hernan over him, involved in some hurried activity that he presumed to be medically related. Once, he awoke with an intravenous line in his arm and the accused was tending to that. The witness reported that initially he thought Hernan was helping him. But each awakening became a resurfacing into pain, and after a day of torture, after repeatedly awakening from unconsciousness to find Hernan hovering above him, the doctor became inseparable from the pain. He remembered asking Hernan to stop hurting him. He remembered getting no response.
Marcello’s questions centred on acts. It was not a crime against humanity to make sure that someone was well-hydrated, he argued. The witness described duress and lapses of consciousness, was this an adequate state of mind to facilitate recall of remote events? How could anyone know what Hernan did to this man except for others in the room at that time? Can we trust those accused torturers, men trained and committed to acts of violence? Hernan was there, true. Presence alone did not necessarily make a doctor into a torturer.
More than most, Patrick was aware that people in his profession had been known to do some very bad things. But then again, if a group had an ethical code dating back twenty-five centuries, it probably meant that it had been necessary for at least that long. In these past seven years, he had become a student of those moments when doctors transgressed in the most abhorrent ways. He tried to keep this interest to himself, sparing his acquaintances, who he doubted, even with their worldliness and anthropological detachment from evil, could have stomached the material. But Heather had discovered the books eventually. Having her find the books stowed away in a cabinet had been the worst possible outcome, making the cache all the more illicit in her mind and multiplying her disgust. She told him what she thought of the books and let him infer her revised opinion of him.
The history of doctors and torture was voluminous and detailed and he had read it all cloaked in twin moods of horror and fascination. Of all the seismic events in the moral imagination, Auschwitz still made the ground shake most profoundly. And there, as at other times, he found it was the doctors who epitomized the descent; the most highly educated and respected group of a technologically advanced, previously civilized society effectively renouncing its oath and devouring itself. It was the doctors who were the experimenters and selectors at the camps, who performed their tasks under the mantles of science and healing. And among the more easily understood monsters described in the death camps, Patrick had been kept awake nights pondering the disturbing story of Ernst B., an Auschwitz physician commended by prisoners for his kindness and humanity in the camps, while at the same time being fully committed to the ideology that led to their creation. Ernst B. had been a gentleman, a man capable of committing heinous acts and inspiring warm sentiment from his victims, fully able to live two lives, of proving to Patrick that something like this could be done, had been done.
And while Auschwitz was the standard for his profession’s depravity, it was not the sole appearance. The doctors were there, on hand for Japanese atrocities in China. They were there in Cambodia, sweating like masons behind a wall of stacked skulls. They were there in the Soviet Union, establishing their own little gulag of a psychiatric system, because any difference became more explicable, more acceptable, as a pathology. (Ironically, Marcello wanted him to do something similar for Hernan, except that the diagnosis would come with an extended day pass.) And with each instance, the commonalities became clear: physicians caught up in the swell of a larger impulse, a mass movement or sentiment or state of emergency that made all the old rules seem obsolete. Expertise was divorced from morality, honing itself in predictable, terrible ways. Even more predictable were the ways in which perpetrators dealt with the accusations when they were called to account for their crimes years later; they would explain themselves in one of three ways: they were simply acting on orders, implying that war or civil emergency suspended their ethical responsibilities; others spoke of their experience as though it had been a dream, one they could not yet comprehend. The last group killed themselves. Whether they had come to a fuller understanding was debatable.
It would be reassuring to think of these horrific moments as nothing more than past chapters in the history of medicine, like surgery before anaesthesia or antisepsis. But they became persistent, dogged reminders, footnotes appending themselves and forcing Patrick to look down at the smaller print.
The first pictures Patrick saw of the broadcast of a captured Saddam Hussein–the surprised, tousled look of a bus terminal indigent–were not of him simply sitting there; they were of his medical exam. The tyrant opened his mouth, and instead of defiance streaming out, a tongue depressor poked in. Say ahh, Satan. Of course it was more than a medical exam; the edge of the tongue depressor scraped the inside of the mouth, capturing a fine layer of the monster for a definitive identification.
It was startling because it was familiar. It was a quaint a
ct of submission, captured on tape and disseminated worldwide. No one Patrick knew had any response to this exhibition other than glee that the monster had been caught, and while Patrick would deny a finer moral sensitivity (if a tongue depressor shoved into his gob was as bad as Hussein got, he’d be infinitely better off than the luckiest of his victims), he couldn’t keep his eyes off the doctor performing the exam. Performing the exam, that was the word. Who was this guy with the tongue depressor? Patrick knew that if he tried to talk to his more liberal acquaintances about this being an abuse of power, that the broadcast of a simple medical exam was a gross breach of ethics, they would smile at him indulgently and think that he should get a life. And it wasn’t that far a drive in a pickup truck to find others who would return such talk with a look of wordless revulsion reserved for a blood enemy. No, Patrick kept quiet. He didn’t need to be called naive or sanctimonious or just dismissed as an ACLU headcase who should care more about the troops in harm’s way than about some clapped-out despot getting a free army physical. But the broadcast of Hussein being examined bothered him because either no one was thinking about it or somebody was thinking about it, very hard, and allowed the exam to be broadcast anyway.