Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

“Pay close attention,” Kauters said, beaming.

Rabiewski’s body shuddered, his hands burrowing in the netting like unconscious animals. Then violent convulsions began. The cage screeched, its iron legs banging against the floor. The bed almost tipped over, and both doctors had to press it hard against the wall. The attack subsided as quickly as it had come. The body hung in the net like a board. Feverish shudders ran through an arm or a leg. Then this, too, ceased.

“Do you know what this is?” the surgeon asked Stefan, as if he were giving an examination.

“Irritation of the motor region caused by pressure from the tumor?”

Kauters shook his head. “No, my friend. The cortex has entered necrosis. An ‘acortical man’ is emerging. Freed from the cortex’s inhibiting influence, the older, earlier evolved parts of the brain, still unaffected, are speaking up. That attack was Bewegungssturm, the motor storm, which occurs in all animals from infusorians to the birds. The animal is trying to escape, in the face of a threat to its life. The subsequent torpidity is the second stage of the same reactive apparatus. The so-called Totstellreflex, playing dead. Dung beetles do the same thing. See what it looks like? Now it’s receding beautifully!” he cried, excited. The engineer, racked by cramps, was now arching his back, pressing against the nets.

“Yes… that comes from the quad protuberance. A classic case! The mechanism that served the amphibians millions of years ago now emerges in Homo sapiens when the more recently evolved parts of the brain drop away.”

“Should I make the preparations for an operation?” Stefan asked, unable to look either at the convulsing body or at the surgeon’s joy,

“What? No, no. I’ll let you know.”

After his rounds, Stefan looked in on Sekułowski. Their relations had developed from their earlier unsettled state into a clearly established order: the master and the pupil who had to put up with his abuse. As a rule Stefan did not discuss patients with him, but Rabiewski was an exception: Stefan was desperate and needed advice. He dared not act on his own, and he was not sure what he could do anyway. Go to Pajączkowski? But that would mean lodging a complaint against Kauters, who was his superior and an experienced physician. So he settled on describing the engineer’s condition to the poet, even if that might cause an outburst of passion and indignation. But Sekułowski himself had not been feeling well of late, and he was eager to hear the tale of someone worse off than he.

Plumping up the pillow behind his back, Sekułowski delivered a long exposition: “Once—maybe it was in ‘The Tower of Babel,’ I said that man presents a particular image to me. It is as if someone had labored for centuries to make the most beautiful golden sculpture, adorning every centimeter of its surface with varied forms: hushed melodies, miniature frescos, all the beauty of the world captured in a single totality obeying a thousand magical laws. And this sublime sculpture is mounted in the depths of a huge roiling dung heap. That, more or less, is man’s position in the world. What genius, what precise craftsmanship! The beauty of the organs! The stubborn mind that harnesses the impassioned atoms, electron clouds, and wild elements, imprisons them in the body, and compels them to deeds alien to their nature. The infinite patience of designing the joints, the complex architecture of the bones, the labyrinth of circulating blood, the miraculous optical system, the finery of the fabric of nerves, thousands upon thousands of mutually restraining mechanisms, rising above anything we can think of. And all of it completely unnecessary!”

Stefan, shocked, was unable to reply. The poet smacked his hand against a large open book that had been covered by sheets of paper now strewn across the bedding: it was an anatomical atlas Stefan had lent him.

“What a disparity of means and ends. Your engineer vegetated, oblivious to what was fettered inside him, until suddenly the cells slipped their chains and their powers—until then directed inward, doing the bidding of kidneys and intestines—were suddenly liberated! The explosion of a thousand pent-up potentials. The spirit bursts through its chrysalis and appears in sudden enlargement: a watch with its works in revolt.”

“Are you thinking of the malignancy?”

“That’s what you call it. But what a name for it! You see, doctor, your ideas are pickled in formalin. For God’s sake, show a little imagination! Cancer? That is simply the side door, the Seitensprung, of the organism. My Blind Powers, securing the living tissue against accidents of a hundred thousand kinds, seem to have left one vent ajar. Everything was working perfectly, and suddenly—out of control! Have you ever seen a child playing with a watch, the way the child pulls off the hour hand, which makes the second hand spin and buzz like a horsefly? Instead of measuring the hours, the hands gobble up fictitious time! A tumor is a little sprout that grows from one mutinous cell. Slowly, you understand? Slowly it develops in the brain, draws nourishment from the blood, invades, eats through, and destroys those well-tended flower gardens planted in the human fodder…”

“You may be right,” said Stefan, “but why doesn’t Kauters operate?”

The poet, writing so feverishly that his pen point kept making holes in the paper, did not reply. There was a long silence. Outside the window, a bronze ray broke through the clouds and lit the treetops. The room drank in the light, which abruptly vanished. Stefan’s heart was pounding. Suddenly he asked, entirely out of context; “Excuse me. Why did you write Reflections on Statebuilding ?”

Sekułowski, who had been lying on his side, turned and looked Stefan in the eye. Stefan could see the blood rising in the poet’s face, but he still was glad that he had asked the question.

“What do you care?” Sekułowski retorted in a deep voice that Stefan had not heard before. “Please stop boring me! I have to write!”

And he turned his back on Stefan.

Stefan decided to see Staszek. Perhaps he could help.

Staszek tied a ribbon around the thesis he was working on and put it away in a drawer. He complained to Stefan. The hospital did not keep him busy, he was bored with the patients. It was an enormous effort to put in his hours. He could not walk, sit, or lie down; Nosilewska’s image stayed with him constantly.

“You’ve got to make up your mind,” Stefan said, overcome by sudden compassion. “If you want, I’ll invite her to my room tonight, you come along, and then I’ll say I have to get things ready for an operation and I’ll leave you alone with her.”

But Nosilewska declined the invitation. She was busy copying out data from a large German anatomy textbook. The green ink staining her fingertips made her look girlish. She said she had to go see Rygier right away. Rygier had once taught anatomy in medical school, and he could help her with some of this pathology material.

Staszek, who had been waiting in Stefan’s room for the results of the expedition, now found new reasons to suffer. He was convinced that Rygier had invited Nosilewska for extra-scientific purposes.

“Well, maybe,” Stefan thought. “Do you love her?”

Staszek shrugged. He was sitting sideways in the chair, his legs hanging over the arm, kicking nervously.

“I won’t answer stupid questions. I can’t work or read, I can’t sleep, I’ve lost control of my thoughts, I’m going to hell in a handbasket, and that’s it.

Stefan nodded. “It could be love. Let me ask you a couple of crucial questions. First, would you use her toothbrush?”

“Come on!”

“Yes or no.”

Staszek hesitated. “Well, maybe yes.”