Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

By Friday, a week after I first dragged her into my home, the sight of that yellow square of paper screamed, FOOL! The stubby pencil said, FOOL OF THE HIGHEST ORDER. I tore up the paper and flung the pencil stub into the street.

I wasn't angry with Genet. She was consistent, if nothing else. I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.

Sitting in my library that night, having done more damage to a bottle of Pinch in four hours than I had in the year since I bought it, I replayed our last exchange. She'd been curled up in the chair I now sat in, wearing my dressing gown, the gown that I now wore. I came to her with tea— that signature move of fools, one of the stigmata by which you shall know us.

“Marion,” she said, for she had been gazing at my library, my eclectic little collection. “Your father's apartment in Boston, the way you described it … it sounds so much like this.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “I built these bookcases myself. Half the books here have nothing to do with surgery. Surgery isn't my life.”

She didn't argue. We sat quietly. At one point I saw her gaze flit to the rug on the floor between us—there was an intruder sitting naked on those synthetic fibers, a dark silent man with razor cuts to his body. His presence put a damper on our conversation.

When I announced I was going to go to bed, she said she'd be right along. She smiled. I didn't believe her. I thought I'd never see her again. But I was wrong. She joined me under the covers. We made love. It was tender and slow. It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.

TWO WEEKS AFTER SHE LEFT, I felt at odds with my house. I found my library oppressive. In the kitchen, I took out my dinner, which was a foil packet labeled FRIDAY in my handwriting; it was the last of what I had cooked, frozen, and packed in aliquots many weekends ago. Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos inside my head.

Thank God for my good neighbor, Sonny Holmes. He heard me raging, he heard me bang my head against the fridge. Sonny Holmes had an inherent curiosity an honest, all-American nosiness that came with crossing one's seventieth year and that did not try to conceal itself. Hed been aware of the coming of my guest—such a rare event—and he'd heard the headboard music and then the long silence.

“You need to hire a security firm,” he said, coming to a quick diagnosis before I had even finished my story. Sonny believed in the ennea-gram, that Jesuit-invented classification of people into personality types. He was a One, willful and confident and certain. He had me pegged as a Three or a Four, or was it a Two? Whatever it was, it was a number that did not argue with Ones.

“I need a what?” I said.

“A private detective.”

“Sonny, for what? I don't want to see her again.”

“Perhaps so. But you need closure. What if she's in jail or in a hospital? What if she's trying desperately to get back to you, but can't?”

A noble motive, that was all a Two needed to continue an obsession. I latched on to that.

East Coast Investigations of Flushing turned out to be an earnest, blond youth by the name of Appleby, son of Holmes's late sister-in-law. Appleby quickly established that Genet had not returned to her halfway house. She hadn't gone to Nathan's restaurant, where she washed dishes. She had not checked in with her probation officer and she had not called Tsige. He learned these facts in no time. He even knew that Genet had been diagnosed with tuberculosis while in prison. She began medications, but then failed to report for her DOT—Directly Observed Therapy—after she was released. The cough, the fever, in all likelihood were her tuberculosis coming back. The disconcerting news was that if she ever materialized, I'd be third in line after the state health department and her probation officer. She would be headed back to jail. Apple by s source in jail could get his hand on her complete medical records if we wished, and Appleby said he'd taken the liberty of telling the man to proceed. I was concerned about violating her confidentiality. “Knowledge is power in these kinds of situations,” Appleby added, and with that he won me over; any man who would use a quote that Ghosh loved was a man to trust. “You are paying to know,” he added, “and I think we're obliged to know more.”

“So what now?” I asked Appleby. I wasn't asking him about exposure to tuberculosis. I could handle that.

Appleby avoided my eyes. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were covered with twitchy blood vessels, ready to flush at the least provocation. His condition was acne rosacea, not to be confused with the pedestrian acne vulgaris, the bane of many teenagers. Appleby's nose would one day be burgundy and bulbous, the cheeks a meaty red. Already shy, his problems would get worse because strangers would assume incorrectly that his appearance was a result of drink. Here I knew about his future while paying him to tell me mine.

“Well, Dr. Stone,” Appleby said, clearing his throat, his nose starting to redden, a sure indication that I would not like what he had to say, “Respectfully, I would say to check your silverware. Inventory your belongings. Make sure nothing is missing.”

I looked at him for a long while. “But, Mr. Appleby, the only thing that matters to me is precisely the one thing that is missing.”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

The compassion in his voice told me he had known my kind of pain. There are legions of us.

AS FAR AS THE EVENTS of the next few weeks, I recall one night waking to the shrill ring of the telephone. Receiver in hand, I was lost, uncertain whether I was at Our Lady or back at Missing. I was the backup trauma consultant. But I couldn't decipher what the resident at the other end wanted. This isn't uncommon for the first ten seconds of a middle-of-the-night conversation. The caller understands. But, as we kept talking, the fog in my brain refused to lift. I hung up. I pulled the phone from its moorings. The next morning, my mind felt clear, but my body wouldn't rise off the bed. I was weak. The thought of food turned my stomach. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Perhaps that same day, perhaps a few days later, a man was on the edge of my bed. He took my pulse, called my name. It was my former Chief Resident and now my colleague at Our Lady, Deepak Jesudass. I desperately held his hand and asked him not to leave—I must have recognized the danger of my situation.

“I'm not leaving,” he said. “Just pulling back the curtain.” My memory is that I told him everything that had transpired. He examined me as I spoke. He pulled down my eyelids, interrupting me only to ask that I look down at my feet, or say “Ah!” At one point he inquired if I had a stethoscope in the house. I said, “Are you kidding? I'm a surgeon,” and we laughed together, a strange sound that had been missing from my home. I said “Ouch” when he probed just under my ribs on the right. I found this funny. I heard him murmuring on the telephone. All the while, I did not let go of his hand.

Three men whose faces I knew arrived with a stretcher. They wrapped me in a flannel cocoon, carried me out to the curb, and lifted me up into their ambulance. I remember wanting to say something about the beauty of their motion, the inherent grace, and how incredible it was, this baby-kangaroo-in-pouch feeling. I apologized for not having appreciated their skill all these years.

Deepak rode with me. At Our Lady, he walked alongside my gurney past the shocked faces of the staff we encountered in the halls and elevator. He wheeled me into the Intensive Care Unit of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. My eyes glowed yellow under the harsh fluorescent lights, but I didn't know it. My skin, too. I bled wildly from every needle stick. Too late, the nurses tried to hide the ominous tea-colored urine in my catheter bag from me, but I saw. For the first time, I was very, very scared.