The Surgeon

by Jeff VanderMeer

  A sip of tea and no inclination to divulge his own secrets. The sea beyond the window is the source of the biggest changes for me now. It goes from calm to stormy in minutes. The color of it, the tone of the waves, varies by the hour. Over the months, it brings me different things: the debris of a sunken ship, a cornucopia of jellyfish, and, of course, strands of sargassum washed up from the bay.

  “I was insane,” I tell him.

  “Of course you were. With grief.”

  Youth is a kind of insanity. It robs you of experience, of perspective, of history. Without those, you are

  adrift.

  ***

  Back to the libraries I went, and back again and again. But it was as if the floors had been swept and I could not trace my own footprints. In those echoing halls, I found every book but the one that would have helped me. Had my long-ago counterpart, standing there deliberating, thought about stealing the book? No matter now, but I found myself reliving the moment when I had slid the tome back into the stacks rather than hiding it in my satchel with at first horror and then resignation. I even visited the remnants of the mage’s college, following the ancient right wing of the library until it dissolved into the even more crumbling walls of that venerable institution. All I found there was a ruined amphitheater erupting in sedgeweeds, with a couple dozen students at the bottom, dressed in black robes. They were being lectured at by a man so old he seemed part of the eroded stones on which he sat. If magic still remained in the world, it did not exist in this place. All I had left were the more modern texts and the memory of a phrase among the signs and symbols I had used to animate the arm: “Make what you bring back your own.” Each time I took the arm out of the box, it came garlanded with thoughts I did not want but could not make go away. Each time, I unraveled a little more. Dream and reality blended like one of my parents’ more potent concoctions. Day became night and night became day with startling rapidity. I had hallucinations in which giant flowers became giant hands. I had visions of arms reaching from a turbulent, bloody sea. I had nightmares of wrists coated with downy hair and mold. I stopped bathing entirely. I wore the same clothes for weeks. Her skin’s briny taste filled my mouth no matter what cup I drank from. Her eyes stared from every corner. ***

  “What did you do then?” my guest would prod once again. He’d have finished his tea by now and he would be wanting to leave, but ask despite himself. “Don’t you know, Lucius?” I’d reply. “Don’t you remember?” “Tell me anyway,” he’d say, to humor the other crazy old man. “One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school’s operating theater and performed surgery on myself.”

  A rapid intake of breath. “You did?’

  “No, of course not. You can’t perform that kind of surgery on yourself. Impossible. Besides, the operating theater has students and doctors in it day and night. You can’t sneak into an operating theater the way you sneak into a cadaver room. Too many living people to see you.” “Oh,” he’d say, and lapse into silence. Maybe that’s all I’d be willing to tell my Lucius surrogate. Maybe that’s the end of the story for him. ***

  One night, sick with weariness, with heartache, I took the arm to the medical school’s operating

  theater and performed surgery on myself.

  It wasn’t the operating theater and I wasn’t alone. No, my friend was with me the whole time. Me, tossing the proverbial pebbles from some romantic play at the window of Lucius’ new apartment one desperate, sleepless night. Hissing as loud as I could: “Lucius! I know you’re in there!” More pebbles, more hissing, and then he, finally, reluctantly, opening the window. In the light pouring out, I could see a woman behind him, blonde and young, clutching a bed sheet. Lucius stared down at me as if I were an anonymous beggar. “Come down, Lucius,” I said. “Just for a moment.” It was a rich neighborhood, not where one typically finds starving medical students. Not the kind of street where any resident wants a scene.

  “What do you want?” he whispered down at me. “Just come down. I won’t leave until you do.” Again, that measured stare. Suddenly I was afraid. He scowled and closed the window, but a minute later he stood in the shadow of the doorway with me, his hair disheveled, his eyes slits. He reeked of beer. “You look like shit,” he said to me. “You look half-dead.” Laughed at his own joke. “Do you need money? Will that make you go away?”

  Even a few days earlier that would have hurt me, but I was too far gone to care. “I need you to come down to the medical school.” “Not in a million years. We’re done. We’re through.” I took the arm out of my satchel and unwrapped it from the gauze in which it writhed Lucius backed away, against the door, as I proffered it to him. He put out his hand to push it away, thought better of it.

  “She came back to me. I burned the body, but the arm came back.” “My god, what were you thinking? Put it away. Now.” I carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the satchel. The point had been made. “So you’ll help me?”

  “No. Take that abomination and leave now.” He turned to open the door.

  I said: “I need your help. If you don’t help, I’ll go to the medical school board, show them the arm, and tell them your role in this.” There was a wound in me because of Lucius. Part of me wanted to hurt him. Badly.

  Lucius stopped with his hand on the doorknob, his back to me. I knew he was searching furiously for an

  escape.

  “You can help me or you can kill me, Lucius,” I said, “but I’m not going away.” Finally, his shoulders slumped and he stared out into the night. “I’ll help, all right? I’ll help. But if you ever come here again after this, I’ll…” I knew exactly what he’d do, what he might be capable of. ***

  My parents had a hard life. I didn’t see this usually, but at times I would catch hints of it. Preservation was a taxing combination of intuition, experimentation, and magic. It wasn’t just the physical cost—my mother’s wrists aching from hundreds of hours of grinding the pestle in the mortar, my father’s back throbbing from hauling buckets out of the boat nearly every day. The late hours, the dead-end ideas that resulted in nothing they could sell. The stress of going out in a cockleshell of a boat in seas that could grow sullen and rough in minutes.

  No, preservation came with a greater cost than that. My parents aged faster than normal—well-preserved, of course, even healthy, perhaps, but the wrinkles gathered more quickly on their faces, as did the age spots I thought were acid blotches and that they tried to disguise or hide. None of this was normal, although I could not know it at the time. I had no other parents to compare them to or examine as closely.

  Once, I remember hearing their voices in the kitchen. Something in their tone made me walk close enough to listen, but not close enough to be seen. “You must slow down,” she said to him.

  “I can’t. So many want so much.”

  “Then let them want. Let them go without.” “Maybe it’s an addiction. Giving them what they want.” “I want you with me, my dear, not down in the basement of the Preservation Guild waiting for a resurrection that will never come.”

  “I’ll try…I’ll be better…”

  “…Look at my hands…”

  “…I love your hands…”

  “…so dry, so old…”

  “They’re the hands of someone who works for a living.” “Works too hard.”

  “I’ll try. I’ll try.”

  Part III

  I’ll try. I’ll try. To tell the rest of the story. To make it to the end. Some moments are more difficult than others.

  When Lucius discovered what I planned to do, he called me crazy. He called me reckless and insane. I just stood there and let him pace like a trapped animal and curse at me. It hardly mattered. I was resolute in my decision.

  “Lucius,” I said. “You can make this hard or you can make this easy. You can make it last longer or you can make it short.”

  “I wish I’d never known you,” he said to me. “I wish I’d never introduced you to my
friends.” In the end, my calm won him over. Knowing what I had to do, the nervousness had left me. I had reached a state so beyond that of normal human existence, so beyond what even Lucius could imagine, that I had achieved perfect clarity. I can’t explain it any other way. The doubt, in that moment, had fallen from me.

  “So you’ll do it?” I asked again.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Lucius growled, and I had a fleeting notion that he would kill me rather than do it when he said, “But not at the operating theater. That’s madness. There’s a place outside the city. A house my father owns. You will wait for me there. I’ll get the tools and supplies I need from the school.” Desperation, lack of sleep, and a handful of pills Lucius had been able to steal served as my only anesthetics. I had no idea, even with Lucius’ help, even with my knowledge of preservation powders, if it would work. In effect, it might have been the equivalent of an assisted suicide attempt. I lay spread out on the long dining room table of that house while Lucius prepared his instruments, knowing that these minutes, these seconds, might be my last among the living. The pain was unbelievable. I jolted in and out of consciousness to hear Lucius panting like a dog. Lucius sawing. Lucius cursing. Lucius cutting and suturing and weeping, blood everywhere, me delirious and singing an old nursery rhyme my mother had taught me, Lucius bellowing his distress in counterpoint. “I never want to see you again,” he gasped in my ear as he finished up. “Never.” I smiled up at him and reached out with my good arm to touch his bloodstained face, to say “It’s all right, Lucius. It’s going to be okay.” And: “Thank you.” The pain burned through my skull like a wildfire. The pain was telling me I was alive.

  When Lucius was done, he slumped against the side of the table, wiping at his hands, mumbling something I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t important. All I knew was that my own right arm had been consigned to the morgue and the woman’s arm had replaced my own. Lucius saw to it that I got back to my apartment, although all I have are vague flashbacks to the inside of a cart and a painful rolling sensation. Afterwards I spent two feverish weeks in bed, the landlady knocking on the door every day, asking for the rent. I think Lucius visited me to clean and check the wound, but I can’t be sure.

  My memory of that time comes and goes in phases like the tide. ***

  In the end, the same sorcery that animated the woman’s arm saved me. Over time, I healed. Over time,

  my new arm learned to live with me. I worried at first about gangrene in the place where the arm met my flesh, but I managed to prevent that. In the mornings, I woke with it as though it was a stranger I had brought home from a tavern. Eventually, it would wake me, stroking my forehead and touching my lips so delicately that I would groan my passion out into its palm. It was the beginning of my life, in a way. A life in exile, but a life nonetheless, with a new partner. Lucius had helped me see to that.

  So it was that when I went back to my parents’ bungalow, I had a purpose and a plan. They met me at the door and hugged me tight, for they hadn’t heard from me in months and I was gaunt, pale.

  I did not have to tell them everything. Or anything. I tried to hide the new arm from them, but it reached out for my mother as though gathering in a confidante. What did it say to her, woman to woman? What secrets did it spell into her hands? I had to look away, as though intruding on their conversation. “What will you do?” my father asked.

  As my mother held my new arm, he had run a fingertip across it, come away with a preserving dust. I wanted to say that I had come to ask his advice, but the truth was I had only returned after I had settled my fate. In the days, the hours, before everything had become irrevocable, I hadn’t sought their counsel. And he knew that, knew it in a way that filled his eyes with bewilderment, like a solution of cobalt chloride heated to its purest color.

  “What will I do?” I knew, but I didn’t know if I could tell them. My father had his hand on my shoulder, as if needing support. My mother released the arm and it returned to me and tucked its hand into my pocket, taking refuge. She had not yet said a word to me. I told them: “I’ve signed on as a ship’s doctor. I’ve enough experience for that. My ship leaves for the southern islands in three days.” The arm stirred, but only barely, like an eavesdropper that has overheard its own name.

  Lucius’ father owned the ship. It had been Lucius’ last favor to me, freely and eagerly given. “As far from the city as possible,” he said to me. “As far and for as long as possible.” My father looked crushed. My mother only smiled bravely and said, “Three days is not enough, but it will have to do. And you will write. And you will come back.” Yes, I would come back, but those three days–during which I would tell them everything, sometimes defiant, sometimes defeated and weeping–were my last three days with them. ***

  Even in the shallow water near the bungalow, you learn to find shapes in shadow, if you look long enough. Staring into deep water as it speeds past and sprays white against the prow of a large ship, the wind lacerating your face, you see even more. But I never saw her. I never saw her. I don’t know why I expected to, and yet on all of the hundreds of voyages I took as a ship’s doctor, I always looked. The sailors say mermaids live down there, with scaly hair and soft fingertips and cold, clammy kisses. I cared for none of that. I yearned to see her face by

  some strange necromancy, her blue eyes staring up at me through the ocean’s darker blue.

  Worse yet, whether on deck or in my cabin, whether during ferocious, stomach-churning storms or trying to save a man with a jagged piece of the deck forced through his sternum, I wanted a dead woman to tell the story of her life. I wanted to know if she had been a sister, a niece, a granddaughter. I wanted to know if she played with kittens or tormented them. Did she brew tea or drink coffee? Did she have an easy sense of humor? Was her laugh thin or full? How did she walk? What did she like to wear? So many questions came to me.

  Because I had no idea of her personality, I imagined her, probably wrongly, as my double: embarrassed by her parents’ eccentricities, a little amazed to find herself touched by life and led as though by the nose to this point of existence, this moment when I searched a hundred flavors of water for her smile. It wasn’t a moot point. I experienced the sweet agony of living with a part of her every day. At first, I had little control over it, and it either flopped loosely at my side, uncooperative, or caused much trouble for me by behaving eccentrically. But, over time, we reached an accord. It was more skillful than I at stitching a wound or lancing a boil. The arm seemed to so enjoy the task that I wondered if the woman had been a thwarted healer or something similar–an artist of the domestic, who could sew or cook, or perform any arcane household task.

  Sometimes, at night, it would crawl outside the counterpane, to the limits of its span, and lie in the cold air until the shivers woke me and forced me to reclaim it. Then I would besiege it with the warmth of my own flesh until it succumbed and became part of me again. ***

  “Did you enjoy being a ship’s doctor?” my guest would ask, if only to change the topic, and I would be grateful.

  “It was boring and exhausting,” I would say. “Sailors can injure themselves in a thousand different ways. There’s only so much medicine you can carry on a ship.” “But did you enjoy it?”

  “When it was busy, I would get pleasure from doing good and necessary work.” Keeping busy is important. My parents taught me that the utility of work was its own reward, but it also fills up your mind, gives you less time to think. “Sounds like it wasn’t half-bad,” he’d say, like someone who didn’t know what I was talking about. Would I tell him the rest? Would I tell him about the times on the docks or at sea that I saw the pale white of drowning victims laid out in rows and immediately be back in the cadaver room? That some part of me yearned for that white dead flesh? That when I slept with women now it must be in the dark so that the soft yet muscular whiteness of them would not interfere with the image in my head of a certain smile, a certain woman. That I tried to fall in love with so many wome
n, but could not, would not, not with her arm by my side.

  ***

  In time, I gained notoriety for my skills. When docked, sailors from other ships would come to me for bandaging or physicking, giving themselves over to my mismatched hands. My masculinity had never seemed brutish to me, but laid against her delicate fingers, I could not help but find myself unsubtle. Or, at least, could not help but believe she would find them so. And, indeed, the arm never touched the other

  hand if it could avoid it, as if to avoid the very thought of its counterpart.

  I settled into the life easily enough–every couple of years on a new ship with a new crew, headed somewhere ever more exotic. Soon,any thought of returning to the city of my birth grew distant and faintly absurd. Soon, I gained more knowledge of the capriciousness of sea than any but the most experienced seaman. I came to love the roll of the decks and the wind’s severity. I loved nothing better than to reach some new place and discover new peoples, new animals, new cures to old ailments. I survived squalls, strict captains, incompetent crews, and boardings by pirates. I wrote long letters about my adventures to my parents, and sometimes their replies even caught up to me, giving me much pleasure. I also wrote to Lucius once or twice, but I never heard back from him and didn’t expect to; nor could I know for sure my letters had made it into his hands, the vagaries of letters-by-ship being what they are.

  In this way thirty years passed and I passed with them, growing weather-beaten and bearded and no different from any other sailor. Except, of course, for her arm. At a distant river port, in a land where the birds spoke like women and the men wore outlandishly bright tunics and skirts, a letter from my mother caught up with me. In it, she told me that my father had died after a long illness, an illness she had never mentioned in any of her other letters. The letter was a year old.