Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

At first I spent my evenings in the bars, drowning my sorrows and listening to benga music and soukous. The jazzy Congolese and Brazilian rhythms were uplifting, full of optimism, but when I retired to my room, afloat in beer, my melancholia was always worse. Other than the music, Kenyan culture made no impact on me. The fault was mine. I resisted the place. Thomas Stone had come to Nairobi when he fled Ethiopia with his demons chasing him. It was another reason I was disinclined to stay.

I called Hema on a schedule, dialing different friends’ houses every Tuesday night. Things were no better, she said. Were I to come back, I'd still be in danger.

So I stayed in my room and studied every waking minute. I passed the American medical equivalency exams two months later, and immediately presented myself to the American Embassy for my visa. Again, Harris had eased my way.

I was righteous: if my country was willing to torture me on suspicion, if it didn't want my services as a physician, then I disowned my country. But the truth is that by this time I knew that I wouldn't return to Ethiopia, even if things were suddenly rosy again.

I wanted out of Africa.

I began to think that Genet had done me a favor after all.

CAPTAIN GETACHEW SELASSIE—no relation to the Emperor— piloted the East African Airways 707 that flew me out of Nairobi. I heard his calm voice twice during the abbreviated night. I had a new respect for his line of work, which brought him closer to God than any cleric. He was the first of three pilots who carried me through nine time zones.

Rome.

London.

New York.

THE RITUAL OF IMMIGRATION and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining? I passed into marbled hallways, up and then down escalators and into a cavernous receiving area which, even with two planes disgorging passengers, looked half empty. There was no one to herd us from one spot to the next.

Before I knew it, I was out of the sterile, hushed incubator of Customs. The automatic doors swished shut behind me as if to seal out the contamination of the cacophonous crowd outside, held back by a metal barrier.

A Ghanaian woman, whose flowered gown and headcloth had made her look so regal when she boarded in Nairobi, walked out from Customs beside me. We were both exhausted, dazed, unprepared for the sea of faces scrutinizing us. We stood there, manila X-ray folders (a requirement for immigration which no one checked) clutched awkwardly, baggage straps crisscrossing our chests, wide-eyed like animals coming off the Ark.

What struck me first was that the locals were of all colors and shapes, not the sea of white faces I had expected. Their lewd, inquisitive gazes traveled over us. In the cross fire of bewildering new scents, I picked up the Ghanaian woman's fear. She pressed close to me. Men in black suits held up signs on which they had printed names. Their gazes were flat, like overseers taking the measure of the Ghanaian woman's pelvis, noting the gap between her first and second toe which everyone knows is the only reliable gauge of fecundity. I had a vision of the Middle Passage, of blacks shuffling down the gangplank, shackles clinking while a hundred pairs of eyes probed their flanks, their biceps, and studied the exposed flesh for yaws, which was the Old World syphilis. As for me, I was nobody, her eunuch. She dropped her bag, she was so rattled.

It was while bending down to help her that I saw the sign in the hand of a swarthy brown-eyed man. He held it at waist level, as if he didn't want to be identified with the liveried sign holders. His bush shirt hung out over baggy white pajama pants. Brown sandals on sockless feet completed his outfit. The letters on his sign could have spelled MARVIN or MARMEN or MARTIN. The second word was STONE.

“Is that supposed to say ‘Marion’?” I asked.

He surveyed me from top to bottom, and then he looked away as if I weren't worth a reply. The Ghanaian woman gave a cry of recognition and rushed away to family.

“Excuse me,” I said, stepping into the man's line of sight. “I'm Marion Stone. For Our Lady of Perpetual Succour?”

“Marion is girl!” he said, his accent guttural and raw.

“Not this one,” I said. “I'm named after Marion Sims, famous gynecologist?”

There was (according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) a statue of Marion Sims in Central Park, at 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue. For all I knew, it was a landmark for taxis. Though Sims started off in Alabama, his success with fistula surgery brought him to New York City, where he opened the Woman's Hospital and then a cancer hospital, which later was named Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

“Gynecology should be woman!” he rasped, as if I'd broken a fundamental rule.

“Well, Sims wasn't and neither am I.”

“You are not gynecologist?”

“No, I meant I'm not a woman. And yes, I'm not a gynecologist.”

He was confused. “Kis oomak,” he said, at last. I knew enough Arabic to understand that he'd just invoked a gynecological term that made reference to my mother.

THE BLACK-SUITED DRIVERS led their passengers to sleek black cars, but my man led me to a big yellow taxi. In no time we were driving out of Kennedy Airport, heading to the Bronx. We merged at what I thought was dangerous speed onto a freeway and into the slipstream of racing vehicles. “Marion, jet travel has damaged your eardrums,” I said to myself, because the silence was unreal. In Africa, cars ran not on petrol but on the squawk and blare of their horns. Not so here: the cars were near silent, like a school of fish. All I heard was the whish of rubber on concrete or asphalt.

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our giant African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration, of the superorganism. It's a sound I believe that only the new immigrant hears, but not for long. By the time I learned to say “Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce,” the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism.

The silhouette of this most famous city—the twin exclamation marks at one end, King Kong's climbing toy in the middle—was familiar. Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, the Empire Theater, and Cinema Adowa had seen to that. My hubris was to think I understood America from such movies. But the real hubris I could see now was America's and it was hubris of scale. I saw it in the steel bridges stretching out over water; I saw it in the freeways looping over one another like tangled tapeworms. Hubris was my taxi's speedometer, wider than the steering wheel, as if Dali had grabbed the round gauge and pulled its ears. Hubris was the needle now showing seventy miles per hour, or well over one hundred and ten kilometers per hour, a speed unimaginable in our faithful Volkswagen—even if we'd found a suitable road.

What human language captures the dislocation, the acute insufficiency of being in the presence of the superorganism, the sinking, shrinking feeling at this display of industrial steel and light and might? It was as if nothing Id ever done in my life prior to this counted. As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow.