He had no girlfriend at present. He never had a girlfriend for long. But there were some women who saw in his numbed silence, his reluctance to meet the eye, something to work with. They hoped to rescue him. Rescuing the rescuer, ha! A doomed enterprise.
“He’s married to his specialty,” somebody once said to somebody.
“Oh, no,” said the other somebody. “He’s engaged to his cart.”
Zeph had heard this joke and was not offended. Who wouldn’t feel an abiding affection for that cart of scrupulously ordered drawers with a disposal container attached to one side. Needles, syringes, label tapes, and IV catheters in the top drawer. More needles and ampoules in the second. Continuous-nerve-block sets in the third. Emergency stuff in the fourth, along with drugs whose names scanned like poetry, according to a would-be girlfriend who had memorized them as an aid to seduction. “Lidocaine, ephedrine, phenylephrine, epinephrine,” she began, and then got stuck on atropine, poor puppet.
When he left the party he walked home along half of the perimeter of the hospital grounds, looking up at the edifice every so often. A huge parking lot floated from the rear. Some old-timers—that is, docs who had been young in World War II—remembered the year-by-year expansion of the lot.
But long before that brutal felling of trees, neighborhoods were forming just beyond the fringe. At the beginning of the last century a subway station had been constructed near the Castle and the three-deckers were built. They became—they were expected to become—dwelling places for the poor. Birthed together like litters, block after block, the houses were clapboard, and each floor had a porch. There was a plot of land in the back of each to be shared by all three tenant families; Irish then, now folks from more faraway places: there were the Filipino blocks, the Venezuelan area, Little Brazil…Many adults worked in the Castle; others took the subway to jobs in town. Each neighborhood had a few restaurants, a bar, a grocery, a couple of day-care centers.
The area had one unexpected feature, discovered when the three-deckers were erected. This was a stream, mostly underground, but running for a while through a little wood. The earth was more swamp than soil; strange bushes and spindly, widely spaced trees thrived in it; nothing could be built on its softness, you couldn’t even hide there. The city, acknowledging the piece of land unprofitable, might have embellished it a bit, put up markers to identify the vegetation, made a sanctuary of it for people and birds. But the city left it alone. The two public schools among the neighborhoods of the Castle each had a playground and a basketball court, and one had a baseball field. And so kids ignored the little forest. The only people to visit it during the day were peculiar children, perhaps shunned by their boisterous fellows, perhaps preferring isolation. Zeph went there occasionally to smoke and very occasionally to snort.
This summer the woods were being explored by two sixth-graders from the Filipino community, Joe and Acelle, Joe because he liked plants and insects, Acelle because she liked Joe. Every afternoon Joe tolerated Acelle’s almost wordless presence. Her chief occupation when school was out was helping her only sister—their mother was dead. When not busy with that task she followed Joe, obeyed him, adopted his ideas. Sometimes, though, she just lay down and listened to the birds.
“My house is too quiet,” she explained.
“Mine isn’t.”
Acelle’s flat held three people at its most crowded; Joe’s was occupied always by a festival of relatives. Even the basement had been taken over. The only real silence was in the doc’s place on the third floor. Joe could go there anytime, even when it was empty; and when Zeph was there it was as good as empty.
For a few hours each day these children waded, climbed trees, chased rabbits, dissected worms, and built a kind of teepee, which they called Castle 2.
There were three entrances to Castle 1. The wide one, designed for horse-drawn wagons, was now used by ambulances. Another served the parking lot, and had become willy-nilly the main entrance. The former main entrance, with its five arches—four windows and a door—welcomed people who came on foot or by bus, who walked up the numerous stairs to the door or were wheeled up a winding ramp by a feeble relative or, if their arrivals coincided with his, by Zeph.
This was the access that Zeph preferred. At dawn the morning after the party, he climbed the stairs, carrying a knobby walking stick, his legacy—his only legacy—from his father. He went through the big doorway into the old beamed hall and then into an old-fashioned elevator like a cage, and then down to the surgical suites, thoroughly up-to-date. He began the ritual of changing his clothes and scrubbing up. Zeph had a limited wardrobe—he was still paying off college and medical-school debts, would be doing so for years—but he always wore a jacket and tie to work. You would expect these garments to smarten him up. In fact they made him seem more shambling and unaware: a tall loose-limbed guy carrying a stick for no apparent purpose.
“Your stick—maybe there’s a sword hidden inside,” a resident had suggested.
“I’ve never looked,” he fibbed.
As for his head: he had brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other. “Make contact,” his preceptors had urged. “Look at me,” pleaded women of all types. Contact? Look? Not in his repertoire. He had been self-sufficient all his life. He’d gotten through medical school by virtue of a good memory and deft fingers. And despite that continuing interest in the sides of patients’ necks, he didn’t flunk bedside manner; the soft voice and the thoughtful answers to their questions told patients he was in their corner even if he didn’t meet their eyes. Some patients may have even preferred the averted glance.
Zeph’s eyes, if you did get a glimpse of them, were dark blue. When he was giving general anesthesia—he occasionally got nonregional assignments—he leaned over the patient and asked him to count backward from ten and there was a kind of cobalt flash just before seven. But mostly Zeph’s job was regional, continually administering exactly the right amount of blocking drugs to exactly the right nerves, and delivering a little sedation too. The less stuff given, the better, but there must be enough of it to keep pain at a safe distance. Zeph considered all pain his mortal enemy, all patients of either gender his suffering mother, all surgeons dragons indifferent to the cruelties they were practicing. The patients’ conversation during this partially sedated state included long sleepy pauses between phrases and sometimes between words, but the talk only occasionally turned into jabberwocky. The dialogue began in a confidential mode and soon acquired a tone of intimacy, though the topics were unromantic. Bird-watching. Jazz. Immigrants, too goddamn many. Zeph’s responses were invitations to say more, continuing the palaver while his hands and eyes kept busy. What color is the bobolink? You prefer Bird to Coltrane? Yes, many people here were born elsewhere; have you traveled yourself?—a reply intended to blur insult if anyone had heard it; often the entire surgical team was made up of fellows from the Asian rim or the subcontinent, though the surgeon in charge was usually Yankee. Or Jewish. Sometimes Irish. Zeph was Irish on both sides, though his father had not been a surgeon, not any kind of doctor, just a feckless hippie who named his one child Zephyr and willed him a walking stick and did talk jabberwocky.
When Zeph paid his postoperative visits a few hours after the surgery, the patients did not seem to remember these conversations, and sometimes they did not even remember the man now standing beside their bed with his eyes on their neck. Being forgotten didn’t trouble him. He’d learned also to tolerate the next string of visits to the next day’s batch of surgical patients, though he always entered the room as if he were metal and had neglected to oil himself. He swiveled his eyes until they briefly met the eyes of the person in the bed. He said his silly name. He shook hands if the patient seemed so inclined. He was here to answer questions no matter how trivial they seemed. He sat down, preferably on a chair, on a stool if necessary, indicating that he was in no hurry. He answered the queries a
nd he wrote a note or two on his clipboard, and when the questions were done (though some were repeated and repeated) he took over the conversation, explaining in the simplest lay terms possible the nature of the dope, its duration, its possible side effects, the probability of nasal intubation, and the unavoidable necessity of tethering the patient’s wrists to the side rails. “I’ll be taking care of you,” he said. And then, with a little less effort than earlier, he met the patient’s eyes again. And shook hands, maybe, and said good-bye.
Now, at 6:30 in the morning, he walked in his paper slippers to the OR anteroom, where he was the first doctor to arrive but the second member of the team there; the scrub nurse was always waiting. She helped him into his mask and gloves and he entered the pearl and silver sanctuary. He checked the treasures in his beloved cart. The other docs padded in. Then the first patient, supine on wheels. Things began.
This patient was an overweight man of fifty-seven with diabetes and a raging need for a knee replacement.
“I’m going to insert the needle now, just as I explained,” Zeph said, and even as he spoke, the needle was reaching the necessary nerve. Zeph lowered his head toward the patient’s head so they could speak and Zeph could meanwhile watch the monitors and not get in the way of the surgeons, already clustered at the knee like jackals. “Are you feeling anything in your left foot?” Zeph said, and a nurse scratched its sole. “No,” the man replied. The nurse pinched his thigh. “Do you feel anything in your left thigh?” Zeph said. Another “No.” Zeph announced, “Ready,” in a firm voice never yet heard outside of the operating room.
The patient told Zeph about sailing: “Nothing like it, you are master, you are jubilant, you yourself are the…are the…”
“Wind?” Zeph suggested.
“Out of body…out of mind…you are made of air and sky.”
“Water?”
“Marshmallow…peanut butter.”
Zeph reduced the Versed.
“Come out with me sometime, Doc.”
“Love to.”
The next patient was so talkative that Zeph added diazepam to her IV, then joined in her complaints about children and grandchildren; you would think, if you heard his responses, that dealing with recalcitrant offspring was his life’s interest. The third, a boy with a supposedly operable tumor in his abdomen, was a general. Zeph, unable to communicate with this child sunk in artificial sleep, noted that the tumor was extensive and not completely excisable. The final surgery was a lumpectomy, nice and clean. The woman on the table flirted with him and he flirted right back, kept her as close to full awareness as possible. “Have you ever been in love, Blue Eyes?” she giggled.
Afterward, a mute shower, his second of the day, while the chatter that had clung to him drained into the hospital’s sewer.
One day, shortly after a rain, something unfortunate happened. While sliding on her backside down the bank toward the stream, Acelle was stabbed by what felt like a dagger. It was in fact only a bit of narrow branch. It would have done little damage had she been wearing jeans, but today she’d worn last year’s party dress. Below the striped mini her legs were bare and her upper thigh and even part of her buttock were vulnerable to the miniature weapon; worse yet, the thing had its own pointed twiglet, which had entered the flesh easily enough but, Joe saw, would be a bitch to dislodge.
“It’s like a fishhook, pointing backward,” Joe explained to Acelle. “They make fishhooks that way on purpose…so they can’t be pulled out the way they came in, and the fish can’t get loose.”
She was lying on her stomach. “Pull it out anyway.”
He bent and looked closely at the little bit of tree that seemed to be feeding on her tenderness. “No, the fishhook will rip you. It went in slanted, like a splinter. It’s very near the…skin, the surface. Maybe I could cut your skin and lift it out.”
“Maybe you could stop talking and do it.”
He took out his imitation Swiss Army knife. The two of them had been enjoying it all summer. It was his birthday present. Even this knockoff was so expensive that all his relatives had to chip in. “I should sterilize the blade.”
“Spit on it.”
Instead he turned around and urinated on it and on his hands. Then he gave her his wadded-up and filthy handkerchief to hold between her teeth. He stretched the affected area between his forefinger and middle finger, and made a swift cut with the point of the blade, just deep and long enough to flip the twig out with the flat of the blade. The nasty twiglet came out too. The thing lay on her thigh; he brushed it off. The bleeding narrowed to a trickle.
“It hurts a lot but not as much as before,” Acelle said. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
Near the main entrance—the de facto main entrance, not the original one that Zeph entered every day with his stick under his arm—was the gift shop that had recently become Victoria Tarnapol’s to manage. Victoria had been born in the Castle but had rarely been back since that uncomplicated event nearly six decades earlier. Returning now, even to run the silly gift shop, seemed momentous.
The gift shop was a place where an empty-handed visitor could pick up a box of scented soaps or an embroidered handkerchief or a glass candy dish to delight a moribund patient. A rotating rack of paperbacks was useful, as were the games and puzzles for children. And since Victoria’s ascendancy, two round café tables and little chairs had appeared, and she served coffee and tea and slices of the pastry she baked at home early in the morning. Her mini-café became popular—many visitors did not like the hospital cafeteria, where you could overhear conversations between doctors about conditions you’d prefer not to know existed.
Mr. Bahande, a security officer, was posted near the glass-walled gift shop. In those first days he merely nodded to the new manager. But one morning he had to skip breakfast because his older daughter—she had a face like a goddess, she had a spinal deformity—had trouble settling herself at her workbench, and the younger one, who usually helped out, was late for school, and so he had to make all three bologna sandwiches: his, Camilla’s, Acelle’s. On his midmorning break, when he would normally be walking in the hospital garden, he headed hungrily for the cafeteria instead. But he stopped to look at a ship in a bottle in the gift-shop window—he’d like to try making one of those things—and then, looking up, looking farther in, he saw the café tables, one of them occupied by a man slumped with worry, and behind him, in a little recess, the manager. Her gray hair was cut close to her narrow head. The slide of her nose was interrupted by a bump, adding beauty to a face which was already distinguished. She was slicing something and the sight of that something pulled him right in. It was linzer torte. It turned out to taste better even than Marie’s, God rest her soul.
Thereafter he came in every morning at 10:15. He ate various breads, various coffee cakes, various pies; also citron gâteau and baklava and a puff inside which seemed to float not chocolate but its divine essence. He liked them all but he preferred the less sweet pastries. She began to make more of those, fewer of the sugary ones.
Since the gift shop was rarely busy before eleven, they were able lightly to pass the time of day. One morning—the treat was gingerbread with pieces of ginger in it—he asked her to join him at his table. After a moment of confusion, during which her palms reached for her sculpted hair, she washed her hands again and cut a slice for herself and sat down opposite him.
Without discussion Joe and Acelle went to the Castle, using the old entrance, the one Zeph favored. In the emergency room Acelle gave her name and the family’s insurance number. She knew it by heart because of her sister’s frequent visits. The doctor thought Joe was Acelle’s brother and allowed him to remain in the cubicle, but when he examined Acelle he pulled the curtain.
“I’m going to give you a shot of Novocain and then wash this out for you. Have your mother change the dressing every day and put on this ointment, and don’t take a bath tonight. I’ll give you a tetanus shot for good measure.” After doing exactly what he sai
d he’d do, he rolled her onto her back and lifted her easily—she was a small girl—and stood her up. “Dizzy?” he asked. His hand on her shoulder steadied her for a couple of necessary minutes. “Sitting will be painful for a few days.” He flicked open the curtain to reveal Joe, waiting on a stool, and on his lap a plastic bag holding Acelle’s bloody underpants. “Did you make that incision, dude?”
“Yes,” Joe said.
“Good job.”
“Good job,” Acelle echoed as they left, and she attempted to take his hand, and after a few moments he allowed it to be taken.
And now Zeph prepared to visit patients scheduled for surgery tomorrow. He put on fresh scrubs because people like to see their doctors in costume.
The first was an old childless widow with cancer of the tongue. It was advanced—she had ignored it, had skipped appointments with dentist and doctor, had worn a kerchief whatever the weather, had invented excuses not to visit her few friends still living, all incapacitated anyway. But yesterday, fate in the form of a fissure in the sidewalk had tripped her. The ambulance attendants, placing her swelling hand on her thigh, gently removed the telltale babushka. The lesion bulged like an apricot. The emergency-room doc splinted her broken fingers and she was whisked to Head and Neck, and examined, and talked to, and scheduled for surgery.
Of course the mutilated tongue slurred her speech. But Zeph understood it all, giving her the occasional gift of a direct gaze.
“I taut…go way,” she fabricated.
He knew she had not thought it would go away; she had thought instead that discovery would mean instant yanking out of the organ and death shortly afterward, whereas secrecy would mean prolonged if solitary life.
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