Mayo’s glance shifted back to the attendant.
“What did you do to your hand? Is that a burn?”
“Hot stove.”
“Stove shmove! Understand something, Wilson: you can’t build a fire for a marshmallow roast by pouring kerosene on matzohs and then striking a match. Matzohs treated in this way will invariably attack. And stop biting your fingernails for heaven’s sakes. What are you doing prowling around at this hour? Who are you reading to, Wilson? Bats?”
“Oh, well, the Burn Ward. Sometimes they can’t sleep.”
Mayo lowered his eyes and nodded.
“Yes, I know,” he murmured glumly.
“I’m going down to the lab. Did you need something?”
“No. No, not a thing, Wilson. Thank you for asking.”
Mayo’s mood had again turned somber, his bright shield of humor now too heavy to lift into place. Wilson stood studying him intently for a moment, and then mutely turned around and left. Mayo lifted his head and stared after him. Once a month Mayo would drive to Ramallah, volunteering his help at a leprosarium run by an order of Austrian nuns. Once or twice he’d found Wilson there, reading books or bits of news to those lepers who were either illiterate or blind. It reminded the neurologist of yet another “miracle,” this one concerning one of the lepers, an older and heavyset peasant woman who, little by little, had lost her sight. Sitting silent and alone in her darkened cell, she would wince and give a low sharp cry of pain if ever suddenly exposed to bright light. Two months ago her sight had returned. The leprosy was still with her but much of her loneliness was not.
“I need a nose job!”
Samia had exploded into the room, her arms swinging and brushing against her sides making starched cotton swishing sounds. She plopped down into a torn green Naugahyde chair. “There, you see?” She had turned her head to the side, pushing up on the end of her nose with a fingertip. “I need somebody good, really good.” Mayo stared in quiet disbelief as the nurse slumped all the way down into the chair with her legs a few inches above the floor and her size ten shoes thrust out in front of her. “I’ve got Americans coming for dinner next week,” she said. “What do I do? What kind of food do I serve them? Give them Jewish food? Arabic? What?” Hands rapidly gesticulating while her large and dark moody eyes flashed, she then launched into a rapid-fire, breathless soliloquy that bounded from subject to random subject: from the upcoming dinner, to the Golan Heights, to the right amount of lemon juice to use when making hummus, until finally, her box of non sequiturs emptied, she leaped up out of her chair to browse and scrutinize the photos and sayings on the walls.
“I see there’s lots of new stuff here,” she observed.
“Why not?”
“Was that Wilson I saw coming out of here?”
“Yes.”
“It’s always so peaceful around him. Ever notice that, Moses?”
“No.”
“You’re a stone. He’s a little bit slow. But, oh, that smile! It’s a killer! But why he doesn’t shave off that beard I haven’t a clue. You know, he lives across the street from me. I see him all the time.”
“Geographically desirable, Samia.”
“Yeah, I know. And he’s cute. But too young for me, Moses.”
Mayo looked puzzled.
“Too young?” he said. “He’s older than you.”
“No way. Plus he hangs out with lowlifes at the Club 2000.”
“And so how would you know that? Are you stalking him, Samia?”
“Don’t be smart. You know, sometimes when I’d look across the street I could see there’s this guy there in Wilson’s apartment. He’s got the curtains pinched aside and looking down out a window at a fruit peddler clanging his bell. And I see that this guy’s in pajamas. You think Wilson light could be light in the loafers?”
“I doubt it.”
“Wouldn’t hurt if he’d shave off that beard. It covers too much of his face. Oh, what’s this? Does this mean something? What? Is it a line from the movie?” She was pointing to a caption in bold block letters that Mayo had inscribed beneath the Casablanca photo:
I NEVER MAKE PLANS THAT FAR AHEAD
“Yes, it means something.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“You are such a curmudgeon. And what about this?” the nurse asked. “This one here next to Meral when he made that big arrest.” She had moved from a newspaper photo of a uniformed sergeant of police to another of two smiling teenaged boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders. She pointed. “This is you here, right? On the left?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“And who’s the other one?”
“Meral.”
“I never would have guessed it.”
“Why?”
“He’s smiling.”
Mayo stared at the photo with a distant sadness in his eyes as he remembered how three months after it was taken the last of Meral’s family, his mother, had died, and the twelve-year-old Meral had to make all the necessary funeral arrangements.
“What a quiet man,” remarked the nurse. “Is he seeing anybody?”
“What do you mean? A psychiatrist?”
“A woman.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Too bad,” said the nurse.
Then she wheeled around to Mayo with shining eyes.
“Oh, but wasn’t he great with that maniac in Psycho!”
Nesting in solitude on Floor 7, the hospital’s Psychiatric Ward had once harbored two docile schizophrenic inmates, each of whom believed he was Jesus Christ. Six weeks ago one of them had murdered the other. The killer, a captured seventeen-year-old Syrian soldier who had lost his genitalia in combat, had unexpectedly, blithely and without provocation slit his victim’s throat with a twelve-inch kitchen knife, which he afterward held against his own throat while threatening suicide at the approach of hospital security. Locked in this impasse, someone had thought to call Meral, waking the policeman in the dead of night. At the sight of him entering the ward, the young black-bearded killer, at that moment in the midst of a raving preachment he was offering as proof of his divine identity, fell instantly silent, and when Meral walked up to him with his hands held out, palms upward, and in Arabic softly uttered, “Ibni—my son,” the knife slipped from the soldier’s grasp to the floor and, bursting into wrenching, wracking sobs, he fell forward into Meral’s arms, reaching around him and gripping him tightly while Meral placed both his hands on the young soldier’s head and said over and over again in Arabic, “Yes, my poor son. I know. I know.”
“He was only amazing,” Samia rattled on as she turned to the wall again. “I mean, there’s something about him that gets you. I don’t know what it is, but you trust him. Okay? You just trust him. So what’s this?”
She was pointing to a plaque reading “Cuba Si, Masada No!”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What’s—”
The neurologist cut her off brusquely.
“Alright, stop it, Samia! Just stop it! Come on, sit down here and tell me the whole thing again!”
The nurse turned to him with a look of incomprehension.
“Tell? Tell you what?”
“You know very well what.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That whole thing about the clown.”
“Oh, that.” With a limp, dismissive flip of her hand the nurse turned to examine the photos again. “You know I’m really not too sure I can—”
“Stop it, I said! I surrender! All quiet on the paranoid front! Look, I’ve thought it all over, and I want to hear the whole thing again, every detail, every scrap you can recall. This time I’ll listen, Samia. I swear it!”
The nurse’s mask of indifference fell away, and looking touched and grateful, she moved quickly to the Naugahyde chair and sat, this time not slumping down but instead leaning forward with a breathless eagerness to recite once again her story of how on her break at 3 A.M. two days before, M
onday, March the 11th, she had sauntered into the Children’s Ward for a visit with Tzipi Tam, a good friend and the charge nurse on duty at the time, and on the way momentarily paused in wonder on observing that behind the glass partition of the ward a clown in full circus costume and makeup was adroitly juggling three orange-colored vinyl balls for an audience of the only two children in the ward who were awake: a rosy-cheeked two-year-old girl and the rabdomial cancer “miracle” child. Her recitation ended, the nurse leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. Mayo asked if she was sure of the date this had happened. She was.
It was the day that the cancer and dysautonomia had vanished.
“Could you tell who it was?” Mayo asked.
The nurse shrugged.
“You couldn’t?”
“All that makeup and stuff. The red wig. Long and bushy and frizzy,” she said. “Frizzy curls.”
“Surely had to be staff,” Mayo mulled.
“I don’t know.”
“Or someone hired by a parent?”
The nurse’s eyebrows knitted inward.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, did any of those children have a birthday?”
“When?”
“That day.” Mayo was remembering his time in California and how parents on a child’s birthday would sometimes send greetings to the place of celebration by way of a clown on roller skates.
But in the middle of the night? he immediately questioned himself.
“I don’t know, Mayo. Why?”
“Never mind. And how tall was this person?”
“Pretty tall, I think. Big. A big person.”
“Strongly built you mean? Husky?”
“Yeah, both.”
“So then you’re sure it was a man.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I can’t be sure is all I’m saying.”
“But you think so.”
“Have you ever seen a female clown?”
“I’ve dated them, Samia. Did you talk to him?”
“No. I was only passing by.”
“Did he see you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“He kept juggling, though?”
“Yes. He kept juggling.”
“Did the children seem bothered by this?”
“They seemed happy. The little girl put her hands out in front of her and clapped them together and giggled.”
Mayo stared at the nurse without expression. Then he lowered his gaze to his desktop and nodded. “Yes,” he said, staring abstractedly. “I believe you. It’s all as you’ve said.”
Mayo glanced back up.
“You called Security, Samia?”
“No. I thought maybe it was authorized and I’d ask her first, ask Tzipi. When I got to her station, though, she wasn’t there. So I walked back to find out what was going on but when I looked into the ward again he was gone.”
“You mean the clown?”
“Yeah, the clown.”
“The two children. Still awake?”
“Just the boy.”
“Did he seem somehow different to you?”
“Different? Like what?”
“Well, like healthier, perhaps.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know.”
“More alert?”
“I wouldn’t know. Not my ward.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I was reading: there’s this drug now in Europe, a hypnotic, men are slipping it to women and then raping them, Mayo.”
Mayo nodded. “Yes. Rohypnol.”
“Does it actually work?”
“Why, Samia? Want to slip it to yourself?”
The nurse emitted a chuckling snort and then stared at the neurologist fondly. “You’re so funny,” she said.
Mayo lowered his gaze.
“Yes, funny is forever,” he uttered distantly.
“You want to hear about Lakhme again?”
Mayo looked up with a frozen expression, then leaned forward, shuffling papers around on his desk.
“No, not now, Samia. Thanks. I’ve got a lecture to prepare.”
“Oh, well, I’ve got to get going myself.”
Samia stood up.
“Let me know if you’ve got some more questions.”
“I will.”
“Thank you, Moses.”
“For what?”
“Oh, you know.”
The nurse turned and walked out of the office, and even after she had vanished from his sight, Mayo’s gaze remained fixed on the empty hall until the squishing of her footsteps faded away. He remembered reading in a medical journal that in London there was once a Sleep Disorder Clinic located directly across the street from “Big Ben.” After that, Mayo thought, could there be any tale mad enough to doubt? An elevator door sighed open somewhere, waited, and then slowly and quietly closed. Maurice making his getaway, Mayo reflected, before the “Crazy God Police” come to pick him up. Can we ever have a rational, dependable universe with this kind of crazy hocus-pocus going on?
“Never mind,” he then murmured: “Just so long as the magic is white.”
A faraway melancholy painted Mayo’s eyes as for a moment he stared at the Casablanca photo, and from there he turned his gaze to the Europa cigarette butts bent and mounded in an ashtray on his desk, and from there to the blackness outside his window, wishing it were dawn when the U.N. Headquarters building could be seen high on a hilltop to the east in Ein Kerem where John the Baptist had been born, thus permitting the neurologist his customary smile upon reflecting that the rise on which the building now stood was the biblical Hill of Evil Counsel. Then he quietly lowered his head to his work, desultorily studying the paper on pain and scribbling notes on a blue-lined yellow pad. Twenty minutes later he tossed down his pen. Racing thoughts. The foreboding. The dream. Restless, he got up and left his office to wander, prowling the quiet pre-dawn halls with their regularly posted SPEAK SOFTLY signs.
In the Burn Ward he chatted with a sleepless young soldier who had carried his own severed arm from the battlefield of October’s Yom Kippur War in the hope that surgeons could reattach it: “That’s what I remember, that I took my arm by the hand.” Then Mayo drifted up to the fourth floor Neurology Ward where, on stepping out of the elevator, he saw Father Mooney approaching. Seeing Mayo, the fortyish and handsome Franciscan paused in his stride for a moment, looking hesitant and somehow blocked; and then, smiling broadly, he resumed his approach with his hand outstretched to shake Mayo’s. The neurologist inwardly grimaced: a relentlessly hearty raconteur, the Franciscan would batter any cornered listener with tiresome and seemingly endless recitals meant to illustrate his daringly mad sense of humor, such as posing as a pregnant nun in a wheelchair when meeting a fellow priest at an airport and loudly and joyously exclaiming with his arms thrust out to the mortified arrival, “Oh, Jim! I’m so glad it was you!”
“Hey, Mayo! Good to see you!” Mooney exclaimed.
Mayo put an index finger to his lips.
“Oh, yes, sorry,” said Mooney in a lowered tone. “Forgot the time.” As the elevator door began to close, Mooney’s hand stabbed out to hold it back. “How’ve you been, Mayo?”
“Still on this side of the grass. Saw you passing by earlier.”
“Yes, I know. Couldn’t stop. I was taking communion to someone. Emergency. One of those things.” Mooney raised an arm for a glance at his watch. It was a chunky gold Rolex. “Oh, well, got to get back,” he sighed. “Lots of tourists due early at the chapel today.” The rounded walls of the priest’s little church were filled with mosaics of heralding angels chorusing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” and no matter the season, December or July, tourists gathered underneath its glass-domed nave to sing Christmas carols, often with an unexpected stirring in their hearts. As Mooney stepped into the elevator, Mayo glimpsed a scar at the base of his neck. The priest turned, pressed the ground floor button, and then lifted his
hand in farewell so that Mayo saw the wide white Band-Aid that was wrapped around the top of a middle finger.
“Got some new stories for you, Mayo. Come and see us.”
“Yes, I will,” Mayo murmured absently.
“Oh, well, good! Make it soon, then! Okay? Make it soon!”
The elevator door whined shut.
Hands tucked into the pockets of his medical jacket, the neurologist lowered his head in thought, and as he listened to the elevator’s lurch at the start of its descent, he tried to fathom why an icy tingling in his bloodstream was raising up hairs on the back of his neck.
A thump of the elevator stopping below.
Mayo looked up and stared abstractedly down a long hall and its rows of numbered patient rooms. What was wrong with him? he wondered. Which among the colorful and crowded palette of bizarre disorders of the mind had left the ghost of a brushstroke on his brain? A flash of white as a nurse appeared abruptly, emerging from an intersecting hall in the distance, and then an attendant, possibly Wilson, Mayo guessed. He waited until they had walked out of view, and then again began shuffling down the hall until he arrived at Room 406, where he stopped and stared sadly through the door’s observation port into darkness and a night light’s feeble glow. The room’s last occupant was a man named Ricardo Rey. He’d been Mayo’s patient. The one who had died. With a soul of patient kindness and the face of a white-haired elderly cherub, Rey was an official of the Spanish consulate who had come under Mayo’s care after suffering a devastating stroke. As the nurturing weeks of convalescence slipped by, Mayo’s outlook had grown cautiously optimistic, this in spite of a problem with the patient’s eyesight: he could not see anything beyond two feet. Then the matter turned somehow vaguely sinister, as Rey began reporting seeing people in his room who weren’t there. This included an incident in which the Spaniard, while sitting up in bed conversing with Mayo, interrupted himself in mid-sentence to turn and look up and a little to his left to inquire with aplomb and exquisite courtliness, even in the face of an apparition, “I’m so terribly sorry. Do I know you?” Mayo had at first not been overly concerned, attributing the visions to probable damage to the ocular portions of Rey’s brain, but things changed when Mayo asked what the apparitions said to him.
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