V.

by Thomas Pynchon

  It was expected this would calm her down, but barbituric acid derivatives affect individuals differently. Perhaps her initial sexual arousal contributed; but by the time Esther was taken to the operating room she was near delirium. “Should have used Hyoscin,” Trench said. “It gives them amnesia, man.”

  “Quiet, schlep,” said the doctor, scrubbing. Irving set about arranging his armamentarium, while Trench strapped Esther to the operating table. Esther’s eyes were wild; she sobbed quietly, obviously beginning to get second thoughts. “Too late now,” Trench consoled her, grinning. “Lay quiet, hey.”

  All three wore surgical masks. The eyes looked suddenly malevolent to Esther. She tossed her head. “Trench, hold her head,” came Schoenmaker’s muffled voice, “and Irving can be the anesthetist. You need practice, babe. Go get the Novocain bottle.”

  Sterile towels were placed under Esther’s head and a drop of castor oil in each eye. Her face was again swabbed, this time with Metaphen and alcohol. Gauze packing was then jammed far up her nostrils to keep antiseptics and blood from flowing down her pharynx and throat.

  Irving returned with the Novocain, a syringe, and a needle. First she put the anesthetic into the tip of Esther’s nose, one injection on each side. Next she made a number of injections radially around each nostril, to deaden the wings, or alae, her thumb going down on the plunger each time as the needle withdrew. “Switch to the big one,” Schoenmaker said quietly. Irving fished a two-inch needle out of the autoclave. This time the needle was pushed, just under the skin, all the way up each side of the nose, from the nostril to where the nose joined forehead.

  No one had told Esther that anything about the operation would hurt. But these injections hurt: nothing before in her experience had ever hurt quite so much. All she had free to move for the pain were her hips. Trench held her head and leered appreciatively as she squirmed, constrained, on the table.

  Inside the nose again with another burden of anesthetic, Irving’s hypodermic was inserted between the upper and lower cartilage and pushed all the way up to the glabella—the bump between the eyebrows.

  A series of internal injections to the septum—the wall of bone and cartilage which separates the two halves of the nose—and anesthesia was complete. The sexual metaphor in all this wasn’t lost on Trench, who kept chanting, “Stick it in . . . pull it out . . . stick it in . . . ooh that was good . . . pull it out . . .” and tittering softly above Esther’s eyes. Irving would sigh each time, exasperated. “That boy,” you expected her to say.

  After a while Schoenmaker started pinching and twisting Esther’s nose. “How does it feel? Hurt?” A whispered no: Schoenmaker twisted harder: “Hurt?” No. “Okay. Cover her eyes.”

  “Maybe she wants to look,” Trench said.

  “You want to look, Esther? See what we’re going to do to you?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was weak, teetering between here and hysteria.

  “Watch, then,” said Schoenmaker. “Get an education. First we’ll cut out the hump. Let’s see a scalpel.”

  It was a routine operation; Schoenmaker worked quickly, neither he nor his nurse wasting any motion. Caressing sponge-strokes made it nearly bloodless. Occasionally a trickle would elude him and get halfway to the towels before he caught it.

  Schoenmaker first made two incisions, one on either side through the internal lining of the nose, near the septum at the lower border of the side cartilage. He then pushed a pair of long-handled, curved and pointed scissors through the nostril, up past the cartilage to the nasal bone. The scissors had been designed to cut both on opening and closing. Quickly, like a barber finishing up a high-tipping head, he separated the bone from the membrane and skin over it. “Undermining, we call this,” he explained. He repeated the scissors work through the other nostril. “You see you have two nasal bones, they’re separated by your septum. At the bottom they’re each attached to a piece of lateral cartilage. I’m undermining you all the way from this attachment to where the nasal bones join the forehead.”

  Irving passed him a chisel-like instrument. “MacKenty’s elevator, this is.” With the elevator he probed around, completing the undermining.

  “Now,” gently, like a lover, “I’m going to saw off your hump.” Esther watched his eyes as best she could, looking for something human there. Never had she felt so helpless. Later she would say, “It was almost a mystic experience. What religion is it—one of the Eastern ones—where the highest condition we can attain is that of an object—a rock. It was like that; I felt myself drifting down, this delicious loss of Estherhood, becoming more and more a blob, with no worries, traumas, nothing: only Being . . .”

  The mask with the clay nose lay on a small table nearby. Referring to it with quick side-glances, Schoenmaker inserted the saw blade through one of the incisions he’d made, and pushed it up to the bony part. Then lined it up with the line of the new noseroof and carefully began to saw through the nasal bone on that side. “Bone saws easily,” he remarked to Esther. “We’re all really quite frail.” The blade reached soft septum; Schoenmaker withdrew the blade. “Now comes the tricky part. I got to saw off the other side exactly the same. Otherwise your nose will be lopsided.” He inserted the saw in the same way on the other side, studied the mask for what seemed to Esther a quarter of an hour; made several minute adjustments. Then finally sawed off the bone there in a straight line.

  “Your hump is now two loose pieces of bone, attached only to the septum. We have to cut that through, flush with the other two cuts.” This he did with an angle-bladed pull-knife, cutting down swiftly, completing the phase with some graceful sponge-flourishing.

  “And now the hump floats inside the nose.” He pulled back one nostril with a retractor, inserted a pair of forceps and fished around for the hump. “Take that back,” he smiled. “It doesn’t want to come just yet.” With scissors he snipped the hump loose from the lateral cartilage which had been holding it; then, with the bone-forceps, removed a dark-colored lump of gristle, which he waved triumphantly before Esther. “Twenty-two years of social unhappiness, nicht wahr? End of act one. We’ll put it in formaldehyde, you can keep it for a souvenir if you wish.” As he talked he smoothed the edges of the cuts with a small rasp file.

  So much for the hump. But where the hump had been was now a flat area. The bridge of the nose had been too wide to begin with, and now had to be narrowed.

  Again he undermined the nasal bones, this time around to where they met the cheekbones, and beyond. As he removed the scissors he inserted a right-angled saw in its place. “Your nasal bones are anchored firmly, you see; at the side to the cheekbone, at the top to the forehead. We must fracture them, so we can move your nose around. Just like that lump of clay.”

  He sawed through the nasal bones on each side, separating them from the cheekbones. He then took a chisel and inserted it through one nostril, pushing it as high as he could, until it touched bone.

  “Let me know if you feel anything.” He gave the chisel a few light taps with a mallet; stopped, puzzled, and then began to hammer harder. “It’s a rough mother,” he said, dropping his jocular tone. Tap, tap, tap. “Come on, you bastard.” The chisel point edged its way, millimeter by millimeter, between Esther’s eyebrows. “Scheisse!” With a loud snap, her nose was broken free of the forehead. By pushing in from either side with his thumbs, Schoenmaker completed the fracture.

  “See? It’s all wobbly now. That’s act two. Now ve shorten das septum, ja.”

  With a scalpel he made an incision around the septum, between it and its two adjoining lateral cartilages. He then cut down around the front of the septum to the “spine,” located just inside the nostrils at the back.

  “Which should give you a free-floating septum. We use scissors to finish the job.” With dissecting scissors he undermined the septum along its sides and up over the bones as far as the glabella, at the t
op of the nose.

  He passed a scalpel next into one of the incisions just inside the nostril and out the other, and worked the cutting edge around until the septum was separated at the bottom. Then elevated one nostril with a retractor, reached in with Allis clamps and pulled out part of the loose septum. A quick transfer of calipers from mask to exposed septum; then with a pair of straight scissors Schoenmaker snipped off a triangular wedge of septum. “Now to put everything in place.”

  Keeping one eye on the mask, he brought together the nasal bones. This narrowed the bridge and eliminated the flat part where the hump had been cut off. He took some time making sure the two halves were lined up dead-center. The bones made a curious crackling sound as he moved them. “For your turned-up nose, we make two sutures.”

  The “seam” was between the recently-cut edge of the septum and the columella. With needle and needle-holder, two silk stitches were taken obliquely, through the entire widths of columella and septum.

  The operation had taken, in all, less than an hour. They cleaned Esther up, removed the plain gauze packing and replaced it with sulfa ointment and more gauze. A strip of adhesive tape went on over her nostrils, another over the bridge of the new nose. On top of this went a Stent mold, a tin guard, and more adhesive plaster. Rubber tubes were put in each nostril so she could breathe.

  Two days later the packing was removed. The adhesive plaster came off after five days. The sutures came out after seven. The uptilted end product looked ridiculous but Schoenmaker assured her it would come down a little after a few months. It did.

  III

  That would have been all: except for Esther. Possibly her old humpnosed habits had continued on by virtue of momentum. But never before had she been so passive with any male. Passivity having only one meaning for her, she left the hospital Schoenmaker had sent her to after a day and a night, and roamed the East Side in fugue, scaring people with her white beak and a certain shock about the eyes. She was sexually turned on, was all: as if Schoenmaker had located and flipped a secret switch or clitoris somewhere inside her nasal cavity. A cavity is a cavity, after all: Trench’s gift for metaphor might have been contagious.

  Returning the following week to have the stitches removed, she crossed and uncrossed her legs, batted eyelashes, talked soft: everything crude she knew. Schoenmaker had spotted her at the outset as an easy make.

  “Come back tomorrow,” he told her. Irving was off. Esther arrived the next day garbed underneath as lacily and with as many fetishes as she could afford. There might even have been a dab of Shalimar on the gauze in the center of her face.

  In the back room: “How do you feel.”

  She laughed, too loud. “It hurts. But.”

  “Yes, but. There are ways to forget the pain.”

  She seemed unable to get rid of a silly, half-apologetic smile. It stretched her face, adding to the pain in her nose.

  “Do you know what we’re going to do? No, what I am going to do to you? Of course.”

  She let him undress her. He commented only on a black garter belt.

  “Oh. Oh God.” An attack of conscience: Slab had given it to her. With love, presumably.

  “Stop. Stop the peep-show routine. You’re not a virgin.”

  Another self-deprecating laugh. “That’s just it. Another boy. Gave it to me. Boy that I loved.”

  She’s in shock, he thought, vaguely surprised.

  “Come. We’ll make believe it’s your operation. You enjoyed your operation, didn’t you.”

  Through a crack in the curtains opposite Trench looked on.

  “Lie on the bed. That will be our operating table. You are to get an intermuscular injection.”

  “No,” she cried.

  “You have worked on many ways of saying no. No meaning yes. That no I don’t like. Say it differently.”

  “No,” with a little moan.

  “Different. Again.”

  “No,” this time a smile, eyelids at half-mast.

  “Again.”

  “No.”

  “You’re getting better.” Unknotting his tie, trousers in a puddle about his feet, Schoenmaker serenaded her.

  Have I told you, fella

  She’s got the sweetest columella

  And a septum that’s swept ’em all on their ass;

  Each casual chondrectomy

  Meant only a big fat check to me

  Till I sawed this osteoclastible lass:

  [Refrain]:

  Till you’ve cut into Esther

  You’ve cut nothing at all;

  She’s one of the best, Thir,

  To her nose I’m in thrall.

  She never acts nasty

  But lies still as a rock;

  She loves my rhinoplasty

  But the others are schlock.

  Esther is passive,

  Her aplomb is massive,

  How could any poor ass’ve

  Ever passed her by?

  And let me to you say

  She puts Ireland to shame;

  For her nose is retroussé

  And Esther’s her name. . . .

  For the last eight bars she chanted “No” on one and three.

  Such was the (as it were) Jacobean etiology of Esther’s eventual trip to Cuba; which see.

  chapter five

  In which Stencil nearly

  goes West with

  an alliga-

  tor

  V

  I

  This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black. It moved fast but clumsy. It could have been lazy, or old or stupid. Profane thought maybe it was tired of living.

  The chase had been going on since nightfall. They were in a section of 48-inch pipe, his back was killing him. Profane hoped the alligator would not turn off into something smaller, somewhere he couldn’t follow. Because then he would have to kneel in the sludge, aim half-blind and fire, all quickly, before the cocodrilo got out of range. Angel held the flashlight, but he had been drinking wine, and would crawl along behind Profane absentmindedly, letting the beam waver all over the pipe. Profane could only see the coco in occasional flashes.

  From time to time his quarry would half-turn, coy, enticing. A little sad. Up above it must have been raining. A continual thin drool sounded behind them at the last sewer opening. Ahead was darkness. The sewer tunnel here was tortuous, and built decades ago. Profane was hoping for a straightaway. He could make an easy kill there. If he fired anywhere in this stretch of short, crazy angles there’d be danger from ricochets.

  It wouldn’t be his first kill. He’d been on the job two weeks now and bagged four alligators and one rat. Every morning and evening for each shift there was a shapeup in front of a candy store on Columbus Avenue. Zeitsuss the boss secretly wanted to be a union organizer. He wore sharkskin suits and horn rims. Normally, there weren’t enough volunteers to cover even this Puerto Rican neighborhood, let alone the city of New York. Still Zeitsuss paced before them mornings at six, stubborn in his dream. His job was civil service but someday he would be Walter Reuther.

  “Okay, there, Rodriguez, yeah. I guess we can take you.” And here was the Department without enough volunteers to go round. Still, a few came, straggling and reluctant and not at all constant: most quit after the first day. A weird collection it was: bums . . . mostly bums. Up from the winter sunlight of Union Square and a few gibbering pigeons for loneliness; up from the Chelsea district and down from the hills of Harlem or a little sea-level warmth sneaking glances from behind the concrete pillar of an overpass at the rusty Hudson and its tugs and stonebarges (what in this city pass, perhaps, for dryads: watch for them the next winter day you happen to be overpassed, gently growing out of the concrete, trying to be part of it or at least safe from the wind and the ugl
y feeling they—we?—have about where it is that persistent river is really flowing); bums from across both rivers (or just in from the Midwest, humped, cursed at, coupled and recoupled beyond all remembrance to the slow easy boys they used to be or the poor corpses they would make someday); one beggar—or the only one who talked about it—who owned a closetful of Hickey-Freeman and like-priced suits, who drove after working hours a shiny white Lincoln, who had three or four wives staggered back along the private Route 40 of his progress east; Mississippi, who came from Kielce in Poland and whose name nobody could pronounce, who had had a woman taken at the Oswiecim extermination camp, an eye taken by the bitter end of a hoist cable on the freighter Mikolaj Rej, and fingerprints taken by the San Diego cops when he tried to jump ship in ’49; nomads from the end of a bean-picking season somewhere exotic, so exotic it might really have been last summer and east of Babylon, Long Island, but they with only the season to remember had to have it just ended, only just fading; wanderers uptown from the classic bums’ keep of them all—the Bowery, lower Third Avenue, used shirt bins, barber schools, a curious loss of time.

  They worked in teams of two. One held the flashlight, the other carried a 12-gauge repeating shotgun. Zeitsuss was aware that most hunters regard use of this weapon like anglers feel about dynamiting fish; but he was not looking for write-ups in Field and Stream. Repeaters were quick and sure. The Department had developed a passion for honesty following the Great Sewer Scandal of 1955. They wanted dead alligators: rats, too, if any happened to get caught in the blast.

  Each hunter got an armband—a Zeitsuss idea. ALLIGATOR PATROL, it said, in green lettering. At the beginning of the program, Zeitsuss had moved a big Plexiglas plotting board, engraved with a map of the city and overlaid with a grid coordinate sheet, into his office. Zeitsuss would sit in front of this board, while a plotter—one V. A. (“Brushhook”) Spugo, who claimed to be eighty-five and also to have slain forty-seven rats with a brushhook under the summer streets of Brownsville on 13 August 1922—would mark up with yellow grease pencil sightings, probables, hunts in progress, kills. All reports came back from roving anchor men, who would walk around a route of certain manholes and yell down and ask how it was going. Each anchor man had a walkie-talkie, tied in on a common network to Zeitsuss’s office and a low-fidelity 15-inch speaker mounted on the ceiling. At the beginning it was pretty exciting business. Zeitsuss kept all the lights out except for those on the plotting board and a reading light over his desk. The place looked like a kind of combat center, and anybody walking in would immediately sense this tenseness, purpose, feeling of a great net spreading out all the way to the boondocks of the city, with this room its brains, its focus. That is, until they heard what was coming in over the radios.