The Surgeon

by Jeff VanderMeer

  By this time I could not tell you exactly what I was doing. I felt imbued with preternatural, instinctual knowledge and power, although I had neither. What I had were delusions of grandeur spurred on by alcohol and the words of my friends, tempered perhaps by memories of my parents’ art. Lucius held the lantern and kept muttering, “Oh my God” under his breath. But his tone was not so much one of horror as, again, morbid fascination. I have seen the phenomenon since. It is as if a mental list is being checked off on a list of unique experiences. By the time I had finished, I knew the dead woman as intimately as any lover. We took her down to the sargassum bed and we laid her there, floating, tethered by one foot using some rope. I knew that cove. I’d swum in it since I was a child. People hardly ever came there. The sargassum was trapped; the tide only went out in the spring, when the path of the currents changed. The combination of the salt water, the preservatives I’d applied to her, and the natural properties of the sargassum would sustain her as she made her slow way back to life.

  Except for the sutures, she looked as if she were asleep, still with that slight smile, floating on the thick sargassum, glowing from the emerald tincture that would keep the small crabs and other scavengers from her. She looked otherworldly and beautiful. Lucius gave a nervous laugh. He had begun to sober up. “Any suggestions on what we do next?” he said. His voice held disbelief. “We wait.”

  “Wait? For how long? We’ve got classes in the morning. I mean, it’s already morning.” “We wait for a day.”

  “Here? For a whole day?”

  “We come back. At night. She’ll still be here.” ***

  There’s nothing in the nature of a confession that makes it any more or less believable. I know this, and my shadow on the beach knows it, or he would have talked to me by now. Or I would have talked to him, despite my misgivings.

  I haven’t seen Lucius in forty years. My shadow could be Lucius. It could be, but I doubt it.

  Part II

  In the morning, for a time, neither Lucius nor I knew whether the night’s events had been real or a dream. But the cart outside of our rooms, the deep fatigue in our muscles, and the blood and skin under our

  fingernails—this evidence convinced us. We looked at each other as if engaged in some uneasy truce,

  unwilling to speak of it, still thinking, I believe, that it would turn out to have been a hallucination. We went to classes like normal. Our friends teased us about the bet, and I shrugged, gave a sheepish grin while Lucius immediately talked about something else. The world seemed to have changed not at all because of our actions and yet I felt completely different. I kept seeing the woman’s face. I kept thinking about her eyes

  Did the medical school miss the corpse? If so, they ignored it for fear of scandal. How many times a year did it happen, I’ve always wondered, and for what variety of reasons? That night we returned to the cove, and for three nights more. She remained preserved but she was still dead. Nothing had happened. It appeared I could not bring her back to life, not even for a moment. The softly hushing water that rocked her sargassum bed had more life to it than she. Each time I entered a more depressed and numbed state.

  “What’s her name, do you think?” Lucius asked me on the third night. He was sitting on the rocks, staring at her. The moonlight made her pale skin luminous against the dark green.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “She doesn’t have a name.” “But she had a name. And parents. And maybe a husband. And now she’s here. Floating.” He laughed. It was a raw laugh. I didn’t like what it contained. On the afternoon of the first day, Lucius had been good-natured and joking. By the second, he had become silent. Now he seemed to have lost something vital, some sense of perspective. He sat on the rocks drawn in on himself, huddled for warmth. I hated his questions. I hated his attitude. Even though it was I who pined for the woman, who so desperately wanted her to come to gasping life, to rise from the sargassum, reborn.

  Everywhere I went, I saw those frozen blue eyes. ***

  Once, before I left home, in that time when I was arguing with my parents almost every day, restless with their world and my place in it, there was a pause because each of us regretted something we had said. Into this silence, my mother said, “You’ve got to know who you are, and even when you think you’ve been treated unfairly still be that person.” I said something sarcastic and stormed out of the cottage—to feel the salt air on my face, to look across the water toward distant, unseen shores. I didn’t know that I would one day find so much more so close to home. ***

  The fourth night Lucius refused to go with me. “It’s pointless,” he said. “Not only that, it’s dangerous. We shouldn’t have done it in the first place. It’s still a crime, to steal a body. Let it go. She’ll be taken out to sea or rotting soon enough. Or put her out

  to sea yourself. Just don’t mention it to me again.”

  In his face I saw fear, yes, but mostly awareness of a need for self-preservation. This scared me. The dead woman might have enthralled me, but Lucius had become my anchor at medical school. “You’re right,” I told him. “I’ll go one last time and put her out to sea.” Lucius smiled, but there was something wrong. I could feel it. “We’ll chalk it up to youthful foolishness,” he said, putting his arm over my shoulders. “A tale to tell the grandchildren in thirty years.”

  She was still there, perfectly preserved, on that fourth night. But this time, rising from the sargassum, I saw what I thought was a pale serpent, swaying. In the next second, breath frozen in my throat, I realized I was staring at her right arm—and that it was moving. I dashed into the water and to her side, hoping for what? I still don’t know. Those frozen blue eyes. That skin, imperfect yet perfect. Her smile. She wasn’t moving. Her body still had the staunch solidity, the draining heaviness, of the dead. What I had taken to be a general awakening was just the water’s gentle motion. Only the arm moved with any purpose—and it moved toward me. It sought me out, reaching. It touched my cheek as I stood in the water there beside her, and I felt that touch everywhere. I spent almost an hour trying to wake her. I thought that perhaps she was close to full recovery, that I just needed to push things a little bit. But nothing worked. There was just the twining arm, the hand against my cheek, my shoulder, seeking out my own hand as if wanting comfort. Finally, exhausted, breathing heavily, I gave up. I refreshed the preservation powders, made sure she was in no danger of sinking, and left her there, the arm still twisting and searching and alive. I was crying as I walked away. I had been working so hard that it wasn’t until that moment that I realized what had happened.

  I had begun to bring her back to life.

  Now if only I could bring her the rest of the way. As I walked back up into the city, into the noise and color and sounds of people talking — back into my existence before her — I was already daydreaming about our life together. ***

  The quality of the silence here can be extraordinary. It’s the wind that does it. The wind hisses its way through the bungalow’s timbers and blocks out any other sound. The beach could be, as it sometimes is, crowded with day visitors and yet from my window it is a silent tableau. I can watch mothers with their children, building sandcastles, or beachcombers, or young couples, and I can create the dialogue for their lives. How many of them will make decisions that become the Decision? Who really recognizes when they’ve tipped the balance, when they’ve entered into a place from which there is no escape?

  The old man knows, I’m sure. He has perspective. But the rest of them, they have no idea what awaits them.

  ***

  For another week I went to her nightly, and each time the hand reached toward me like some luminous, five-petaled flower, grasping toward the moon. There was no other progress. Slowly, my hopes and daydreams turned to sleeplessness and despair. My studies suffered and I stammered upon questioning like a first year who couldn’t remember the difference between a ligament and a radial artery. My friends stared at me and muttered that I worked too hard, that my brain
had gone soft from overstudy. But I saw nothing but the woman’s eyes, even when Lucius, without warning, while I was visiting her, moved out of our quarters. Leaving me alone.

  I understood this, to some extent. I had become a bad roommate and, worse, a liability. But when Lucius began avoiding me in the halls, then I knew he had intuited I had gone farther, gone against his advice. Finally, at the end of an anatomy class, I cornered him. He looked at me as if I were a stranger. “I need you to come down to the water with me,” I said. “Why?” he said. “What’s the point?”

  “You need to see.”

  “What have you done?”

  From Lucius’ tone you would have thought I’d murdered someone. “You just need to see. Please? For a friend?” He gave me a contemptuous look, but said, “I’ll meet you tonight. But I won’t go down there with you. We meet there and leave separately.”

  “Thank you Lucius. Thank you so much.”

  I was so desperately grateful. I had been living with this secret in my head for almost a week. I hadn’t been bathing. I hadn’t been eating. When I did sleep, I dreamt of snow-white hands reaching for me from the sea. Hundreds of them, melting into the water. ***

  I no longer think of my parents’ bungalow as a trap. It’s more of a solace—all of their things surround me. I can almost conjure them up from the smells alone. There is so much history here, of so many good things.

  From the window, I can see the old man now. He seems restless, searching. Once or twice, he looked like he might come to the door, but he retreated and walked back onto the beach. If I did talk to him, I don’t know where I’d begin my story. I don’t know if I’d wait for him to tell his or if mine would come out all in a mad rush, and there he’d be, still on the welcome mat, looking at this crazy old man, knowing he’d made a mistake.

  ***

  Lucius at the water’s edge that night. Lucius bent over in a crouch, staring at the miracle, the atrocity my lantern’s light had brought to both of us. Lucius making a sound like a crow’s harsh caw. “It’s like the movement of a starfish arm after you cut it off,” he said. “It’s no different from any corpse

  that flinches under the knife. Muscle memory.”

  “She’s coming back to life,” I said.

  Lucius stood, walked over to me, and slapped me hard across the face. I reeled back, fell to one knee by the water’s edge. It hurt worse than anything but the look in the woman’s eyes. Lucius leaned down to hiss in my ear: “This is an abomination. A mistake. You must let it go—into the sea. Or burn it. Or both. You must get rid of this, do you understand? For both of our sakes. And if you don’t, I will come back down here and do it for you. Another thing: we’re no longer friends. That can no longer be. I do not know you anymore.” And, more softly: “You must understand. You must. This cannot be.”

  I nodded but I could not look at him. In that one whisper, my whole world had collapsed and been re-formed. Lucius had been my best friend; I had just not been his best friend. He was leaving me to my fate.

  As I stood, I felt utterly alone. All I had left was the woman. I looked out at her, so unbelievably beautiful floating atop the sargassum. “I don’t even know your name,” I said to her. “Not even that.” Lucius was staring at me, but I ignored him and after a time he went away. The woman’s smile remained, as enigmatic as ever. Even now, I can see that smile, the line of her mouth reflected in everything around me—in the lip of a sea shell, or transferred to a child walking along the shore, or leaping into the sky in the form of a gull’s silhouette. Maybe things would have been different had I been close to any instructors, but outside of class, I never talked to them. I could not imagine going up to one of those dusty fossils, half-embalmed, and blurting out the details of my desperate and angst-ridden situation. How could they possibly relate? Nor did I feel as if I could go to my parents for help; that had not been an option in my mind for years. Worst of all, I had never realized until Lucius began to avoid me that he had been my link to my few other friends. Now that Lucius had cast me adrift, no one wanted to talk to me. And, in truth, I was not good company. I don’t know if I can convey the estrangement surrounding those days after I took Lucius to see her. I wandered through my classes like an amnesiac, speaking only when spoken to, staring out into nothing and nowhere. Unable to truly comprehend what was happening to me. And every night: down to the sea, each time the ache in my heart telling me that what I believed, what I hoped, must have happened and she would be truly alive. In that absence, in that solitary place I now occupied, I realized, slowly and with a mixture of fear and an odd satisfaction that my interest in the woman’s resurrection no longer came from hubris or scientific fascination. Instead it came from love. I was in love with a dead woman, and that alone began to break me down. For now I grieved for that which I had never had, to speculate on a life never lived, so that every time I saw that she had been taken from me, a part of my imagined life seemed to recede into the horizon.

  ***

  “The arm grew stronger even as she did not,” I would tell my fellow cast-away, both our beards gray and encrusted with barnacles and dangling crabs. I’m sure I would have practically had to kidnap him to get

  him into the bungalow, but once there I’d convince him to stay.

  Over a cup of tea in the living room I’d say this as he looked at me, incredulous. “Something in the magic I’d used,” I’d say. “There was a dim glow to the arm. It even seemed to shimmer, an icy green. So I had succeeded, don’t you see? I’d succeeded as well as I was ever going to. Magic might be almost utterly gone from the world now, but it still had a toe-hold when we were both young. Surely you remember, Lucius?”

  In the clear morning light, the old man would say, “My name isn’t Lucius and I think you’ve gone mad.” And he might be right.

  ***

  Ultimately, the love in my heart led to my decision, not any fear of discovery. I couldn’t bear the ache anymore. If she no longer existed, that ache would be gone. Foolish boys know no better. Everything is physical to them. But that ache is still here in my heart. It was a clear night. I stole a boat from the docks and rowed my way to the hidden cove. She was there, of course, unchanged. I had with me jars of oil. I had a hard time getting her from the bed of sargassum into the boat. I remember being surprised at her weight as I held her in my arms in the water for a time and cried into her hair, her hand caressing the back of my head.

  After she was in the boat, I took it out to where the currents would bring it to deep water. I poured the oil all over her body. I lit the match. I stared into those amazing eyes one last time, then tossed the match onto the oil as I jumped into the sea. Behind me, I heard the whoosh of air and felt a rush of heat as flames engulfed the rowboat. I swam to shore without looking back. If I had looked back, I would have turned around, swum out to the burning boat, and let myself be immolated beside her. As I staggered out of the water, I felt relief mixed with the sadness. It was over with. I felt I had saved myself from something I did not quite understand. ***

  “What happened then,” old man Lucius would say, intent on my story, forgetting the thread of his own. “For three days, everything returned to a kind of normal,” I’d tell him. “Or as normal as it could be. I slept. I went out with a couple of the first-years who didn’t know you had abandoned me. I felt calm as a waveless sea.”

  “Calm? After all of that?”

  “Perhaps I was in shock. I don’t know.” “What happened after the third day?”

  My guest would have to ask this, if I didn’t tell him right away. “What happened after the third day? Nothing much. The animated right arm of a dead woman climbed up the side of my building and crawled in through the window.” And with that, Lucius would be frozen in time, cup cantilevered toward his mouth, shock suffusing his

  face like honey crystals melting in tea.

  ***

  I woke up with the arm beside me in bed. I tried to scream, but the hand closed gently over my mouth. The skin was s
mooth but smelled of brine. With an effort of will, I got up, pulled the arm away, and threw it back onto the bed. It lay there, twitching. There was sand under its fingernails. I began to laugh. It was after midnight. I was alone in my room with a reanimated, disembodied arm. Her arm. Her hand.

  It had come to me from the depths of the sea, crawling across the sea floor like some odd creature in an old book.

  What would you have done? I remembered Lucius’ comment that the arm displayed the same mindless motion as a wounded starfish.

  I took the arm downstairs and buried it in the backyard, weighed down with bricks and string like an unwanted kitten. Then I went back to bed, unable to sleep, living with a constant sense of terror the next day.

  The next night, the arm was in my room again, last remnant of my lost love. I buried it three more nights. It came back. I tossed it into the sea. It came back. I became more creative. I mixed the arm in with the offal behind a butcher’s shop, holding my nose against the stench. It came back, smeared with blood and grease. I slipped it into an artist’s bag at a coffee shop. It came back, mottled with vermillion and umber paint. I tried to cut it to pieces with a bone saw. It reconstituted itself. I tried to burn it, but, of course, it would not burn. Eventually, I came to see it meant me no harm. Not really. Whatever magic bound it, it did not seek revenge. I hadn’t killed the woman. I just hadn’t brought her fully back to life. In return she hadn’t come fully back to me.

  ***

  “So then you kept it locked in a box in your room, you say?” “Yes,” I would tell my shadow. “There was no real danger of discovery—no one came to visit me anymore. And I rarely went to classes. I was searching for answers, for a way out. You have to understand, I was in an altered state by then.” “Of course.”