Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Afterwards, as he stood with the X-ray pictures and the letter for the prison doctor in his hand, he was suddenly filled with curiosity. Ungovernable curiosity. The officers who had brought him here seemed to be in no hurry. One of them was reading a newspaper. The other, who was standing by the door, shot Jonas an inquiring glance. Jonas motioned to them to wait a moment. He hefted the large, brown envelope in his hands, as if he thought the weight of it could tell him something about his future. He took out one of the pictures and held it up to the light, remembering Olav Knutzen, remembering the Red Room, that basement in Grorud. He was staring at his own lungs, a dark and yet transparent image. Did this photograph merit an OK stamp? His ribs looked like a sort of cage. It was almost as if prison life had forged bars inside him too. He recognised all he saw. Apart from one thing — something in his lungs, inside the cage, a very small, pale patch, shaped rather like a butterfly. He felt a chill in the pit of his stomach, soon his whole body was caught in an icy grip.

He was in prison, convicted of murder. One little misdemeanour couldn’t hurt. He tore open the letter to the doctor and read the radiologist’s notes. The conclusion was given at the bottom in block letters: HILUM-MILD FULLNESS. FURTHER EVALUATION RECOMMENDED.

He went back to the woman behind the glass in reception, said he wished to speak to whoever had written the note about his X-ray. ‘I have to talk to him,’ Jonas said. ‘Right away.’ The lady at the window was not at all sure. It was against all the rules, Jonas knew. Don’t you realise who I am, he almost shouted at her, but bit it back. She would have taken this as a reference, not to his erstwhile television celebrity, but to his notoriety as a murderer. Somewhat startled, she picked up the phone, asked him to take a seat, wait.

The doctor came out. The radiologist. It was a woman. She said it was okay, she could make an exception. She did not say why. She took him into the viewing room. The prison officers waited outside. The walls were lined with light-boxes. On one hung some X-rays. There was a Dictaphone on the table. Jonas caught the scent of a discreet, distinctive, but good perfume. He had the feeling that he could trust, could talk to, a doctor who wore such a perfume. The badge on her coat said that her name was Dr Higgs. Her blonde hair was nonchalantly pinned up. When she hung his X-rays on a light-box he noticed her bracelet, an unusual, broad band of gold, decorated with hieroglyphics of some sort. ‘I have to be honest,’ she said, looking at a picture of his chest viewed from the front, at the vague suggestion of a shadow with a scalloped outline that reminded Jonas of a butterfly. ‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Don’t doctors always know what things are?’ he asked.

He could not understand why she suddenly glanced at him in surprise, while at the same time permitting herself a little smile. Was she thinking of his television programmes or — he had to turn this over in his mind a couple of times before daring to pursue it all the way to its conclusion — was she thinking of Margrete, of the fact that he had been married to a doctor? Had she known Margrete?

‘Don’t tell me you believe that,’ she said. And yet, when she raised her hand and pointed to the paler patch in his lung, the sight of that broad bracelet decorated with obscure symbols made him feel that she must possess a rare brand of knowledge, the wisdom of another civilisation.

Interpreting an X-ray was not always easy, she went on. No matter how experienced you were, sometimes you were faced with something you could not explain. Jonas could not help thinking of the College of Architecture entrance exam, the box with the gauze panels, the little, imaginary building barely discernible at the very back. She had never seen anything like it, she said. With her nail she traced an outline in his lungs. It could be a cyst, a tumour, or something to do with the lymph nodes. She didn’t think so, though. To Jonas her bracelet, the gold, seemed to hover in thin air. Whatever the case, it was impossible for her to say right here and now whether it was normal or abnormal.

The room seemed supernaturally white due to all the light-boxes. Jonas studied the photographs of his own chest cavity. There was something about the exquisite, almost topographical, structure of the lung tissue that put him in mind of a map. Of an unknown continent. Maybe it was still possible to discover new countries. Inside oneself. He peered intently at the light-box, at these images which, though flat, had a depth to them. A warm, tremulous thrill ran through him. Chill dread was replaced by impatient suspense. Was there any chance of examining it more closely right away? Dr Higgs said yes, that was possible. Jonas liked her even more for that. She’s just as curious as I am, he thought.

He went through the same procedure as before, the only difference being that this time the X-rays were taken in the CT lab, after they had injected a contrast dye into his arm. He had a strong impression of being in the hands of Fate as the CT bed was slowly passed through the hole in the gantry and he positively felt the rays slicing through him. Or no: he was a galaxy. Someone was looking at him through a telescope, searching for an unknown planet.

Dr Higgs took him back to the viewing room. In the light-box, next to the first pictures, there now hung forty different sections of his lungs. It was odd to stand there in those bright surroundings and see his innards exposed in this way, spread out like a transparent fresco on the walls. He knew you would have to be very well-versed in anatomy, in the architecture of the human body, to know what you were looking at. The only thing he could make out in each slice was his spine. He could not help thinking of cuts of meat. It’s like seeing yourself carved up, he thought.

He looked back at the first X-rays. Again his eye was drawn to the white, butterfly-shaped patch, just above the heart. Now, though, the sight of those wings or whatever they were, seemed to reassure him. He realised that the tightness in his chest could just as easily be a sign of something good — a feeling of well-being so unfamiliar and so confusing that it had actually caused a panic in his breast.

‘I had thought it might be sarcoidosis ,’ Dr Higgs said, her gold bracelet flashing across the pictures as she explained what they showed, something about lymph nodes, something about connective tissue. ‘But not according to the CT pictures.’ She showed him the same section of the lungs in a number of the CT pictures. In these the patch was darker, but still transparent. ‘It almost looks like a little cavity within the cavity of the lung,’ she said.

He considered this thought: a chamber within a chamber. A tiny lung inside his lung. He relaxed even more. Maybe, he thought excitedly, the body also had a guarde-roba , like the ones in the Renaissance palaces that Aunt Laura had told him about: a secret room full of mysterious objects. Dr Higgs was right: there were many things which medical science had not yet discovered — like the gland that caused your head to reel when your girlfriend came walking towards you. Descartes might well have been on the right track when he located the interaction between body and soul, the source of the spark which rendered man more than a machine, in the so-called pineal gland.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Dr Higgs said again. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It might not be anything serious. No two lungs are exactly alike.’ She handed him an envelope. ‘Give this report to your doctor. It’s up to you to decide, in consultation with him, whether you want to have more tests done.’

Jonas thanked her. Thanked her most sincerely. Even shook her hand. Again his eye was caught by her bracelet. He was about to ask about it, but she beat him to it. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she said. ‘I bought it from your aunt. The finest goldsmith in the country.’