The Surgeon’s Tale by Jeff VanderMeer Cat Rambo
Part I
Down by the docks, you can smell the tide going out—surging from rotted fish, filth, and the briny sargassum that turns the pilings a mixture of purple and green. I don’t mind the smell; it reminds me of my youth. From the bungalow on the bay’s edge, I emerge most days to go beach-combing in the sands beneath the rotted piers. Soft crab skeletons and ghostly sausage wrappers mostly, but a coin or two as well.
Sometimes I see an old man when I’m hunting, a gangly fellow whose clothes hang loose. As though his limbs were sticks of chalk, wired together with ulnar ligaments of seaweed, pillowing bursae formed from the sacs of decaying anemones that clutter on the underside of the pier’s planking. I worry that the sticks will snap if he steps too far too fast, and he will become past repair, past preservation, right in front of me. I draw diagrams in the sand flats to show him how he can safeguard himself with casings over his fragile limbs, the glyphs he should draw on his cuffs to strengthen his wrists. A thousand things I’ve learned here and at sea. But I don’t talk to him—he will have to figure it out from my scrawls when he comes upon them. If the sea doesn’t touch them first. He seems haunted, like a mirror or a window that shows some landscape it’s never known. I’m as old as he is. I wonder if I look like him. If he too has trouble sleeping at night. And why he chose this patch of sand to pace and wander.
I will not talk to him. That would be like talking to myself: the surest path to madness. ***
I grew up right here, in my parents’ cottage near the sea. Back then, only a few big ships docked at the piers and everything was quieter, less intense. My parents were Preservationists, and salt brine the key to their art. It was even how they met, they liked to tell people. They had entered the same competition—to keep a pig preserved for as long as possible using only essences from the sea and a single spice. “It was in the combinations,” my dad would say. “It was in knowing that the sea is not the same place here, here, or here.”
My mother and father preserved their pigs the longest, and after a tie was declared, they began to see and learn from each other. They married and had me, and we lived together in the cottage by the sea, preserving things for people.
I remember that when I went away to medical school, the only thing I missed was the smell of home. In the student quarters we breathed in drugs and sweat and sometimes piss. The operating theaters, the halls, the cadaver rooms, all smelled of bitter chemicals. Babies in bottles. Dolphin fetuses. All had the milky-white look of the exsanguinated — not dreaming or asleep but truly dead. At home, the smells were different. My father went out daily in the little boat his father had given him as a young man and brought back a hundred wonderful smells. I remember the sargassum the most, thick and green and almost smothering, from which dozens of substances could be extracted to aid in preservations. Then, of course, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, tiny crabs and shrimp, but mostly different types of water. I don’t know how he did it—or how my mother distilled the essence—but the buckets he brought back did have different textures and scents. The deep water from out in the bay was somehow smoother and its smell was solid and strong, like the rind of some exotic fruit. Areas near the shore had different pedigrees. The sea grasses lent the water there, under the salt, the faint scent of glossy limes.
Near the wrecks of iron-bound ships from bygone eras, where the octopi made their lairs, the water
tasted of weak red wine.
“Taste this,” my mother would say, standing in the kitchen in one of my father’s shirts over rolled up pants and suspenders. Acid blotches spotted her hands. I could never tell if there was mischief in her eye or just delight. Because some of it, even after I became used to the salt, tasted horrible.
I would grimace and my father would laugh and say, “Sourpuss! Learn to take the bitter with the sweet.” My parents sold the essence of what the sea gave them: powders and granules and mixtures of spices. In the front room, display cases stood filled with little pewter bowls glittering in so many colors that at times the walls seemed to glow with the residue of some mad sunrise. This was the craft of magic in our age: pinches and flakes. Magic had given way to Science because Science was more reliable, but you could still find Magic in nooks and crannies, hidden away. For what my parents did, I realized later, could not have derived from the natural world alone. People came from everywhere to buy these preservations. Some you rubbed on your skin for health. Some preserved fruit, others meat. And sometimes, yes, the medical school sent a person to our cottage, usually when they needed something special that their own ghastly concoctions could not preserve or illuminate.
My dad called the man they sent “Stinker” behind his back. His hands were stained brown from handling chemicals and the reek of formaldehyde was even in his breath. My mother hated him. I suppose that is one reason I went to medical school—because my parents did not like Stinker. Does youth need a better excuse?
As a teenager, I became contemptuous of the kind, decent folk who had raised me. I contracted a kind of headstrong cabin fever, too, for we were on the outskirts of the city. I hated the enclosing walls of the cottage. I hated my father’s boat. I even hated their happiness with each other, for it seemed designed to keep me out. When I came back from my studies at the tiny school created for the children of fishermen and sailors, the smell of preservatives became the smell of something small and unambitious. Even though poor, the parents of my schoolmates often went on long journeys into the world, had adventures beyond my ken. A few even worked for the old men who ran the medical school and the faltering mages’ college. I found that their stories made me more and more restless. When the time came, I applied to the medical school. They accepted me, much to the delight of my parents, who still did not understand my motivation. I would have to work for my tuition, my books, but that seemed a small price.
I remember a sense of relief at having escaped a trap. It is a feeling I do not understand now, as if my younger self and my adult selves were two entirely different people. But back then I could think only of the fact that I would be in the city’s center, in the center of civilization. I would matter to more than just some farmers, cooks, fisherfolk, and the like. I would be saving lives from death, not just preserving dead things from decay.
The day I left, my father took me aside and said, “Don’t become something separate from the work you do.” The advice irritated me. It made no sense. But the truth is I didn’t know what he meant at the time. His parting hug, her kiss, though, were what sustained me during my first year of medical school, even if I
would never have admitted it at the time.
***
The brittle-boned old man stands at the water’s edge and stares out to sea. I wonder what he’s looking at, so distant. The sargassum’s right in front of him, just yards from the shore. That’s where I stare, where I search.
***
As a medical student, I lost myself in the work and its culture, which mainly meant sitting in the taverns boasting. I had picked up not just a roommate but a friend in Lucius, the son of a wealthy city official. We roamed the taverns for booze and women, accompanied by his friends. I didn’t have much money, but I had a quick tongue and was good at cards. Many long nights those first two years we spent pontificating over the cures we would find, the diseases we would bring to ground and eradicate, the herbs and mixes that would restore vitality or potency. We would speak knowingly about matters of demonic anatomy and supposed resurrection, even though as far as anyone knew, none of it was true. Anymore. Lucius: They had golems in the old days, didn’t they? Surgeons must have made them. Sorcerers
wouldn’t know a gall bladder from a spoiled wineskin.
&n
bsp; Me: Progress has been made. It should be possible to make a person from some twine, an apple, a
bottle of wine, and some cat gut.
Peter (Lucius’ friend): A drunk person, maybe.
Lucius: You are a drunk person. Are you a golem?
Me: He’s no golem. He’s just resurrected. Do you remember when he began showing up? Right
after we left the cadaver room.
Lucius: Why, I think you’re right. Peter, are you a dead man?
Peter: Not to my knowledge. Unless you expect me to pay for all this.
Lucius: Why can’t you be a resurrected woman? I have enough dead male friends.
During the days—oh marvel of youth!—we conquered our hangovers with supernatural ease and spent equal time in the cadaver room cutting up corpses and in classes learning about anatomy and the perilous weakness of the human body. Our myriad and ancient and invariably male instructors pontificated and sputtered and pointed their fingers and sometimes even donned the garb and grabbed the knife, but nothing impressed as much as naked flesh unfolding to show its contents. And then there was the library. The medical school had been built around the library, which had been there for almost a thousand years before the school, originally as part of the mages’ college. It was common knowledge, which is to say unsubstantiated rumor, that when the library had been built thaumaturgy had been more than just little pulses and glimpses of the fabric underlying the world. There had been true magic, wielded by a chosen few, and no one had need of a surgeon. But none of us really knew. Civilization had collapsed and rebuilt itself thrice in that span. All we had were scraps of history and old leather-bound books housed in cold, nearly airless rooms to guide us.
Lucius: If we were real surgeons, we could resurrect someone. With just a little bit of magic.
Medical know-how. Magic. Magic fingers.
Me: And preservations.
Richard (another of Lucius’ friends): Preservations?
Lucius: He comes from a little cottage on the—
Me: It’s nothing. A joke. A thing to keep fetuses from spoiling until we’ve had a look at them.
Peter: What would we do with a resurrected person?
Lucius: Why, we’d put him up for the city council. A dead person ought to have more wisdom than
a living one.
Me: We could maybe skip a year or two of school if we brought a dead person back.
Richard: Do you think they’d like it? Being alive again?
Lucius: They wouldn’t really have a choice, would they?
Do you know what arrogance is? Arrogance is thinking you can improve on a thousand years of history. Arrogance is trying to do it to get the best of the parents who always loved you. Me: There’re books in the library, you know.
Lucius: Quick! Give the man another drink. He’s fading. Books in a library. Never heard of such a
thing.
Me: No, I mean—
Lucius: Next you’ll be telling us there are corpses in the cadaver room and—
Richard: Let him speak, Lucius. He looks serious.
Me: I mean books on resurrection.
Lucius: Do tell…
For a project on prolonged exposure to quicksilver and aether, I had been allowed access to the oldest parts of the library—places where you did not know whether the footprints shown in the dust by the light of your shaking lantern were a year or five hundred years old. Here, knowledge hid in the dark, and you were lucky to find a little bit of it. I was breathing air breathed hundreds, possibly thousands, of years before by people much wiser than me.
In a grimy alcove half-choked with dust-filled spider webs, I found books on the ultimate in preservation: reanimation of dead matter. Arcane signs and symbols, hastily written down in my notebook. No one had been to this alcove for centuries, but they had been there. As I found my halting way out, I noticed the faint outline of boot prints beneath the dust layers. Someone had paced before that shelf, deliberating, and I would never know their name or what they were doing there, or why they stayed so long.
Lucius: You don’t have the balls.
Me: The balls? I can steal the balls from the cadaver room.
Richard: He can have as many balls as he wants!
Peter: We all can!
Lucius: Quietly, quietly, gents. This is serious business. We’re planning on a grandiose level. We’re
asking to be placed on the pedestal with the greats.
Me: It’s not that glorious. It’s been done before, according to the book.
Lucius: Yes, but not for hundreds of years.
Peter: Seriously, you wonder why not.
Richard: I wonder why my beer mug’s empty.
Peter: Barbarian.
Richard: Cretin.
Me: It seems easy enough. It seems as if it is possible.
One night, Lucius and I so very very drunk, trying too hard to impress, I boasted that with my secret knowledge of reanimation, my Preservationist background, and my two years of medical school, I could resurrect the dead, create a golem from flesh and blood. Human, with a human being’s natural life span. “And I will assist him,” Lucius announced, finger pointed at the ceiling. “Onward!” We stumbled out of the tavern’s soft light, accompanied by the applause of friends who no doubt thought I was taking a piss—into the darkness of the street, and carried by drunkenness and the animating spirit of our youth, stopping only to vomit into the gutter once or maybe twice, we lurched our debauched way up the hill to the medical school, and in the shadows stole past the snoring old guard, into the cadaver room.
I remember the spark to the night, cold as it was. I remember the extravagant stars strewn across the sky. I remember the euphoria, being not just on a quest, but on a drunken quest, and together, best of friends in that moment.
If only we had stayed in that moment.
***
“Preservation is a neutral thing,” my mother told me once. “It prolongs a state that already exists. It honors the essence of something.”
She stood in the back room surrounded by buckets of pungent water when she said this to me. I think I was twelve or thirteen. She had a ladle and was stirring some buckets, sipping from others. Glints and sparkles came from one. Others were dark and heavy and dull. The floor, once white tile, had become discolored from decades of water storage. The bloody rust circles of the buckets. The hemorrhaging green-blue stains.
“But the essence of preservation,” my mother said, “is that it doesn’t last. You can only preserve something for so long, and then it is gone. And that’s all right.”
My father had entered the room just before she said this. The look of love and sadness she gave the two
of us, me sitting, my father standing behind me, was so stark, so revelatory, that I could not meet her gaze.
Looking back at that moment, I’ve often wondered if she already knew our futures. ***
In the cadaver room, we picked a newly dead woman who had drowned in the sea. Probably the daughter of a fisherman. She lay exposed on the slab, all strong shoulders and solid breasts and sturdy thighs. Her ankles were delicate, though, as were the features of her face. She had frozen blue eyes and pale skin and an odd smile that made me frown and hesitate for a moment. It will come as no surprise we chose her in part because her body excited me. Although Lucius’ presence had helped me in this regard, women, for all our boasting, are not drawn to impoverished medical students. Even on those rare occasions, it had been in the dark and I had only had glimpses of a woman’s naked form. The dissections of the classroom did not count; they would drive most men to celibacy if not for the resilience of the human mind. “This one?” Lucius asked.
I don’t know if he still thought this was a lark, or if he knew how serious I was. “I think so,” I said. “I think this is the one.” And, although I didn’t know it, I did mean the words. We stood there and stared at her. The woman reminded me of someone the more I stared. It was uncanny, and yet I could not think of who she lo
oked like. So taken was I by her that I pushed her hair from her face.
Lucius nudged my shoulder, whispered, “Stop gawking. That guard might wake up or his replacement come by at any minute.”
Together, we bundled her in canvas like a rug, stole past the guard, and, by means of a wagon Lucius had arranged—from a friend used to Lucius’ pranks—we took her, after a brief stop at my apartment to pick up some supplies, to a secluded cove well away from the city. For you see, I meant to preserve her tethered in the water, in the sargassum near the rockline. It was a variation on an old preservation trick my mother had once shown a client.
The physical exertion was intense. I remember being exhausted by the time we hauled her out of the cart. Her body would not cooperate; there was no way for her not to flop and become unwound from the canvas at times. It added to the unreality of it all, and several times we collapsed into giggles. Perhaps we would have sobered up sooner if not for that. Luckily the moon was out and Lucius had brought a lantern. By then, my disorganized thoughts had settled, and although I was still drunk I had begun to have doubts. But this is the problem with having an accomplice. If Lucius hadn’t been there, I would like to think I’d have put a stop to it all. But I couldn’t, not with Lucius there, not with the bond between us now. As for what kept Lucius beside me, I believe he would have abandoned me long before if not for a kind of jaded hedonism—the curiosity of the perpetually bored.
It was hard. I had to think of the woman as a receptacle, a vehicle, for resurrection, not the end result.
We laid her out atop the canvas and I drew symbols on her skin with ink I’d daubed onto my fingers.
Holding her right hand, I said the words I had found on the books, knowing neither their meaning nor their correct pronunciation. I rubbed preservatives into her skin that would not just protect her flesh while she lay amongst the sargassum but actually bring it back to health. I had to do some cutting, some surgery, near the end. An odd autopsy, looking for signs of the “mechanical defect” as one of my instructors used to say, that would preclude her reanimation. I cleared the last fluid from her lungs with a syringe.
The Surgeon Page 1
