Tess Gerritsen: The Surgeon

I reach under the mattress and take out the scrap which I have torn from today’s cast-off newspaper, which the guard so kindly slipped me for a price.

It is a wedding announcement. At 3:00 P.M. on February 15, Dr. Catherine Cordell was married to Thomas Moore.

The bride was given away by her father, Col. Robert Cordell. She wore an ivory beaded gown with an Empire waist. The groom wore black.

A reception followed at the Copley Plaza Hotel in the Back Bay. After a lengthy honeymoon in the Caribbean, the couple will reside in Boston.

I fold up the scrap of newspaper and slip it under my mattress, where it will be safe.

A lengthy honeymoon in the Caribbean.

She is there now.

I see her, lying with eyes closed on the beach, bits of sand sparkling on her skin. Her hair is like red silk splayed across the towel. She drowses in the heat, her arms boneless and relaxed.

And then, in the next instant, she jerks awake. Her eyes snap wide open, and her heart is pounding. Fear bathes her in cold sweat.

She is thinking of me. Just as I am thinking of her.

We are forever linked, as intimately as two lovers. She feels the tendrils of my fantasies, winding around her. She can never break the bindings.

In my cell, the lights go out; the long night begins, with its echoes of men asleep in cages. Their snores and coughs and breathing. Their mumblings as they dream. But as the night falls quiet, it is not Catherine Cordell I think of, but you. You, who are the source of my deepest pain.

For this, I would drink deeply from the spring of Lethe, the spring of forgetfulness, just to wipe clean the memory of our last night in Savannah. The last night I saw you alive.

The images float before me now, forcing themselves before my retinas, as I stare into the darkness of my cell.

I am looking down at your shoulders, and admiring how your skin gleams so much darker against hers, how the muscles of your back contract as you thrust into her again and again. I watch you take her that night, the way you took the others before her. And when you are done, and have spilled your seed inside her, you look at me and smile.

And you say: “There, now. She’s ready for you.”

But the drug has not yet worn off, and when I press the blade to her belly, she barely flinches.

No pain, no pleasure.

“We have all night,” you say. “Just wait.”

My throat is dry, so we go into the kitchen, where I fill a glass of water. The night has just begun, and my hands shake with excitement. The thought of what comes next has engorged me, and as I sip the water, I remind myself to prolong the pleasure. We have all night, and we want to make it last.

See one, do one, teach one, you tell me. Tonight, you’ve promised, the scalpel is mine.

But I am thirsty, and so I lag behind in the kitchen, while you return to see if she is awake yet. I am still standing by the sink when the gun goes off.

Here time freezes. I remember the silence that followed. The ticking of the kitchen clock. The sound of my own heart pounding in my ears. I am listening, straining to hear your footsteps. To hear you tell me it is time to leave, and quickly. I am afraid to move.

At last I force myself to walk down the hall, into her bedroom. I stop in the doorway.

It takes a moment for me to comprehend the horror.

She lies with her body draped over the side of the bed, struggling to pull herself back onto the mattress. A gun has fallen from her hand. I cross to the bed, grasp a surgical retractor from the nightstand, and slam it against her temple. She falls still.

I turn and focus on you.

Your eyes are open, and you lie on your back, staring up at me. A pool of blood spreads around you. Your lips move, but I can’t hear any words. You do not move your legs, and I realize the bullet has damaged your spinal cord. Again you try to speak, and this time I understand what you are telling me:

Do it. Finish it.

You are not talking about her, but about yourself.

I shake my head, appalled by what you ask me to do. I cannot. Please don’t expect me to do this! I stand trapped between your desperate request and my panic to flee.

Do it now, your eyes plead with me. Before they come.

I look at your legs, splayed out and useless. I consider the horrors that lie ahead for you, should you live. I could spare you all of this.

Please.

I look at the woman. She doesn’t move, doesn’t register my presence. I would like to wrench her hair back, to bare her neck and sink the blade deep in her throat, for what she has done to you. But they must find her alive. Only if she is alive will I be able to walk away, unpursued.

My hands are sweating inside the latex gloves, and when I pick up the gun it feels clumsy, foreign in my grasp.

I stand at the edge of the pool of blood, looking down at you. I think of that magical evening, when we wandered the Temple of Artemis. It was misty, and in the gathering dusk I caught fleeting glimpses of you, walking among the trees. Suddenly you stopped, and smiled at me through the twilight. And our gazes seemed to meet across the great divide that stretches between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

I am looking across that divide now, and I feel your gaze on mine.

This is all for you, Andrew, I think. I do this for you.

I see gratitude in your eyes. It is there even as I raise the gun in my shaking hands. Even as I pull the trigger.

Your blood flicks against my face, warm as tears.

I turn to the woman who still sprawls senseless over the side of the bed. I place the gun by her hand. I grasp her hair, and with the scalpel, I slice off a lock near the nape of her neck, where its absence will not be noticed. With this lock, I will remember her. By its scent will I remember her fear, as heady as the smell of blood. It will tide me over until I meet her again.

I walk out the back door, into the night.

I no longer possess that precious lock of hair. But I do not need it now, because I know her scent as well as I know my own. I know the taste of her blood. I know the silken glaze of sweat on her skin. All this do I carry in my dreams, where pleasure shrieks like a woman and walks with bloody footprints. Not all souvenirs can be held in one’s hand, or fondled with a touch. Some we can only store in that deepest part of our brains, our reptilian core, from which we have all sprung.

That part inside us all which so many of us would deny.

I have never denied it. I acknowledge my essential nature; I embrace it. I am as God created me, as God created us all.

As the lamb is blessed, so is the lion.

So is the hunter.