by Unknown
Rossini paused, waited for more questions, and when none were forthcoming, turned his attention to the operating table. Moyer was humming along to the classical music as he peeled back the patient’s scalp, revealing the muscle below.
“Have you ever read him?” asked the young resident. “No, I haven’t.”
“He’s really an excellent writer.” Moyer rattled off titles, gave brief synopses, critical evaluations, and one last endorsement for the benefit not only of the older surgeon, but the nurses, students, technicians, and whoever else was within hearing distance. His enthusiasm, Rossini knew, would carry young Moyer far. His only drawback was his looks: apple-pie skin, freckles, frivolous red hair. Quite simply, he looked too boyish to be a neurosurgeon. The public expected old faces that reeked with experience.
His own, for instance.
All furrowed brows and thick white hair and cheeks that were creased with the weight of responsibility. At the age of sixty-two, he possessed just the right mixture of authority and knowledge that people yearned to trust.
Yet what do I really know?
He sighed. Robbin had been correct to question him—he simply was not in the frame of mind to operate. He was thinking too much of his father. He couldn’t shake the image of the old man sitting at his kitchen table, cutting paper dolls out of loose-leaf paper and carefully stuffing them into envelopes—his favorite pastime during the last pitiful months of life.
Alzheimer’s … it had taken him at the age of eighty-six, only a few short months ago, wiping out his memory of everything and everyone along the way.
Rossini had never felt so helpless in the face of suffering. So unworthy of his success.
He glanced at his slender, delicate hands: a super dexterous gift of nature that his profession demanded, enabling him to gracefully probe the most intricate apparatus known to man.
The brain.
Rossini had seen a Mount Everest of brains, all of them with varying capabilities, yet more or less the same. Crack open any skull, he knew, and one would find the same things over and over again: pons, cerebellum, pia arachnoid—a nuts and bolts alignment that he knew by heart.
What makes it work? What triggers the human mind to create the Vivaldi concerto filtering over the speakers, the brooding images of a Goya, the inventions of a da Vinci? What sector of the brain housed genius? Where in the gray matter of Jonathan Lynch did the ideas of his art spring from?
It was the old question that his father, in better times, always chided him with. The chicken and egg metaphor. The physical mechanics of the brain, which Rossini had mastered, versus the metaphysical consciousness of the mind. Which came first?
Rossini suddenly pinpointed the vague sense of dread he had been feeling all day. After thirty years of brain surgery, lectures, classes, and published essays, he was still, beneath the experienced surface, afraid of what he did not know.
The fear brought him back to his childhood and the memory of a book: an encyclopedia with a page of color photos depicting reptile eggs as they hatched. How his skin crawled as a boy, seeing the ugly, scaled heads of alligators and crocodiles erupted through the pure white of eggshell. It was a warning he had forgotten over the years, now springing back into his mind along with the nightmares or his residency, when he dreamt of screaming patients retarded and scarred because of a slip of his hand. Beware the surface, it told him; ugliness lived below, waiting to claw into the world.
4
A neurosurgeon promises relief. He knows my disease and claims to have a cure for it. In my brain, he says, there is a blood vessel (somewhere) pressing against a facial nerve, He proposes to drill my skull open, dig into the mess, find the recalcitrant vein, and either remove or cushion it, thus relieving the pain.
Angela buys it, for all the wrong reasons. She doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to feel responsible. Let the doctors handle me.
What can I expect? She is a child of thirty-eight, grown tall and willowy (beautiful in her way) and emotionally bankrupt.
I wonder about her lover (the one she denies). Does he, can he really know her?
How ironic that the part of me she once loved the most, my writing … my emotional sensitivity, as she used to say … would be the thing that drove her away.
How naive I was to think that she would understand my work.
Yet, in those first years of our life together, did even I understand fully the violent grip my work would have on my life? Like a greedy mistress, it never let me stray, the exclusion of all else.
Still, I thought she loved that part of me—even after all this time. After all the hard work constructing unscaled walls from the cold blocks of silence and non-contact and jealousy.
At least the pain stops me from dwelling on her betrayal. It begins at a fever pitch, growing by degrees from the base of my skull, just below the ear. By midday the entire right side of my face is contorted in a dance of pulsating flesh.
Hemifacial spasms, the doctors call it … “spasms” lasting ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Until five minutes respite every waking hour seems as peaceful and comforting as death.
All of my will and desire is squandered in war against pain. Alcohol, drugs, compresses, rage, and fucking blasphemy are my weapons. I spit in its face, scream at it, mock it. Nothing works—except the dream.
The nightmare which carries a whole new dimension of terror, becoming more vivid and real with each endless night.
5
It was her twentieth high school reunion—Shelton High, Class of 1970—and after much bitter arguing, Jonathan had agreed to accompany her. On the drive up, his deafening silence let her know what an inconvenience it was to interrupt his work on his latest novel. Of course, she had no way of knowing then what was truly on his mind.
Shelton was located in upstate Pennsylvania, squeezed between a gap in the timbered ranges of the Blue Mountains. The last curve of highway coming through the mountains provided a perfect overview of her hometown—from the gray water tower at the west end, to the onion-shaped dome of the Russian Orthodox church on the eastern fringe. Bookends that propped up the wooden houses and vanished spirit of a community economically impoverished since the demise of anthracite. Once, Shelton had been the thriving seat of the hard coal region. Now, the majestic woods surrounding the town bore the ugly stamp of strip mining—black gashes of barren soil lined the slopes like open sores, a wasteland of blasted rocks and irregular piles of earth, interspersed with dead trees that rose like skeletons from the ground.
Angela drank too much at the reunion on Saturday night, trying to deaden the nameless misery she felt. And Jonathan, rude and obnoxious in his aloof way, succeeded in alienating everyone—poor Angela, she could hear her old classmates thinking, what a cold bastard she married.
In the hotel that night they did not speak, but went straight to bed, taking separate positions on the strange bed like fighters in a ring, waiting for a bell that never rang.
Jonathan woke her early on Sunday. ‘I want to explore the old colliery before we leave,” he said. “I might use it in my book.”
She was too hung over to argue. After checking out, they rode to the outskirts of town where the abandoned remnants of the Shelton Mining Corporation loomed high up the slopes of Mount McKernan.
To their surprise, they were not alone—at the foot of the mountains they met a tall, thin man with glasses, apparently engaged in some sort of solo archaeological excavation. Bare-chested and sweating in the hot morning sun, he reminded Angela of the weakling in the old magazine ads who gets sand kicked in his face. He was resting when they approached him, a spade slung over one bony shoulder. He greeted them with shrill, nervous energy.
“Carrol’s people, right? He sent you. Bastard. Knew he’d find out. Nosy bastard!” His beady eyes darted behind thick-lensed glasses, an inappropriate, girlish giggle punctuating his last words.
Jonathan explained who he was, and why they were there.
“Name’s Grayer,” said the m
an, after a moment of silence. “Writer?” He giggled, shaking his head, looking away, up the slope. “Don’t want this in the paper. No way. It’s my baby. My discovery. Those conceited twerps at the University think Carrol has all the answers. Well. Just wait. But I don’t want it getting out, you understand? I have more tests. Need to be positive.”
“I’m just here to research a book,” said Jonathan. “I don’t write for any newspaper.”
“Good. You can keep a secret. Come with me. I want to show you something remarkable.”
As they followed Grayer, Jonathan glanced at her and the look on his face—the amused grin, conspiratorial sideways wink—brought her back to the old days when they were literally inseparable. So in love and in tune with each other’s emotions that one of them always seemed to be able to finish the other’s thoughts in words before they were spoken. And how she loved to hear him speak: the depth of his emotions, the passion of his feeling filtering through words to some uncharted center of her being. It was a mind-fuck like none she had ever experienced. Had it been so unrealistic, so absurd a dream to hope that she alone would always be the focus of that passion?
She stared at him, wanting to cross the chasm of years and simply feel love again, and for a moment their eyes locked. Then, like a storm cloud blotting out the sun, the light left his eyes, replaced with his own distant thoughts and dreams and the hint of something darker than rain.
Grayer led them to an exposed outcrop of shale at the base of the mountain, and in the reflection of the brilliant sunlight, Angela saw a multitude of shapes imprinted in the rock.
“My babies,” said Grayer, outlining the fossils with a tender finger. “No prior record exists of creatures like this. Of course, I assumed they were among the first. An original link on the evolutionary chain. But my tests! They sang a different tune. These creatures lived in the early quaternary!”
He looked at them as if expecting applause, no longer suppressing his laughter.
“I don’t understand,” said Jonathan.
“Don’t you see? These things. These creatures with their dual heads and little pincers and tiny crowds of legs were contemporaries of man!”
Grayer beamed, running his hand over the rock, heads of sweat sparkling on his forehead. His words, to Angela, seemed weightless. She could see nothing but spherical lines and twisted circles, so tiny that they looked like the letters from some ancient alphabet.
Jonathan exchanged a few more words with the man, and then the two of them started up the slope. As they did, the man called a warning: I wouldn’t go poking around. Not by the old mines.
“Why?” asked Angela.
“Ground’s bad. Underneath it’s on fire. Been burning for years. State’s supposed to put it out some day. You’ll see the steam coming out of holes. But I wouldn’t go walking up there. That ground will give way and eat you.”
“Thanks for the warning,” said Jonathan. “We’ll be careful.
We’ll be careful … we’ll only kill each other.
She couldn’t think of that day any longer. Biting her lower lip, she stared out the hospital window at the awakening world below. It was best to forget all about Shelton and what happened at the old mine—thinking about it was like swallowing poison.
Angela turned away from the window just in time to see a young nurse approaching her down the hall, and immediately she heard the words in her mind: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lynch, but there were complications. Your husband is dead.”
And then her own emotions. Sadness. Pity. Undeniable relief.
“Mrs. Lynch?”
“Yes.”
“I have a message from your husband. He said he had to leave, but he’ll meet you later.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s what he told me.”
“But my husbands being operated on.”
The nurse looked confused. “Oh. I just assumed he was your husband.”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Angela, growing impatient.
“The man you’ve been sitting with in the waiting room.”
“But I’ve been alone all morning.”
“No you haven’t,” said the nurse bluntly. “I saw the two of you earlier. He was sitting right next to you.”
“No one’s been in that room except myself and a cleaning woman.”
The nurse shrugged. “Well, maybe I’m seeing things, but this man kind of stood out. Dressed in black from head to toe. Like an undertaker. Wore a funny black hat. And he most definitely was sitting next to you. But—whatever. I have to get moving now.”
She turned and walked quickly away from Angela, who wanted to reach out and stop her, but instead did nothing. The nurse disappeared around the corner and Angela was left with the empty green corridor.
She thought of her husband’s night terrors: once, during a rare moment of shared thought, he told her about the dark figure that haunted his dreams. A man dressed in black, wearing a black bowler hat. And as she recalled the fear behind his eyes, the look of mindless dread, her breath began to quicken and her chest felt tight.
I need to calm down.
She thought of breakfast. She would find the cafeteria, order some orange juice and biscuits and a cup of tea, then come back and wait. It was the most reasonable thing she had thought of all day. It would give her a chance to get her mind off of Shelton and the recent past. And more importantly, it would get her away from the waiting room.
6
“Someone’s been here before us.”
Joseph Moyer stopped working and glanced up at Rossini, who was staring intently at the square patch of exposed muscle beneath the peeled scalp of Jonathan Lynch.
“There’s too much blood,” he said quietly.
Moyer nodded. “Bipolar.”
Lipinski handed him the two-pronged instrument. Using the electrical current that ran through the bipolar coagulator, he sealed off the offending blood vessels that had been severed in his efforts to reach the skull. When he finished, the scrub nurse squirted a thick stream of saline solution over the area, irrigating the wound and removing the excess fluid with a suction device. For a few seconds this was the only sound in the room, the gurgling suction momentarily overriding the blips of Giovinco’s monitors. The Vivaldi had blended into the white, scrubbed walls.
“Can you see what I mean?” asked Moyer finally.
Rossini could see it clearly now—the muscle beneath the scalp normally resembled red, raw meat. That was not the case with Lynch; gray, gristle-like trails laced the muscle. Scar tissue, as if someone had sliced a road map in the tissue. It shouldn’t have been there, and Rossini’s earlier sensation of dread was exacerbated by that fact.
“He wasn’t opened before,” said Moyer, roughly probing. “But this is clearly scar tissue.”
A shrill voice cut the room neatly in half: “I don’t believe this, Ben.”
Both doctors turned and saw Giovinco standing away from the sterile screen that hid his instruments and technicians, his head tilted back, nose sharp and uplifted as if sniffing the incompetence in the room. “I want to see the file again.”
“I’ll handle it, Phil,” said Rossini.
Giovinco ignored him and addressed the circulating nurse. “I want it now.”
Avoiding everyone’s eyes, the young nurse moved off her chair to retrieve the file.
“Wait.” Rossini raised his voice slightly, stepping away from the operating table. “I’ve been through the file a half-dozen times. Jonathan Lynch has never had brain surgery.”
“Then why the scar tissue?”
“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”
“Well, you better find out,” snapped Giovinco, tilting his head aggressively forward. “It’s all fine and well to tell these students not to worry about time when they’re in surgery, but in my profession a few seconds either way can mean the difference between life and death.”
Rossini tried to speak calmly, conscious of the stares from the students, but h
e could not entirely resist the urge to bite back. “No one’s trying to denigrate your job, Phil,” he said. “I was merely trying to point out that brain surgery is not like a ten-minute lube job. Now, if you need to refresh your memory on the patient’s file, by all means do so. I’ve memorized it.”
“I’m through now,” interrupted Moyer. “Time to drill for oil.”
Rossini stared at Giovinco. Despite his age, the older surgeon was in superb condition, possessing the squared-off shoulders and stocky build of a middleweight boxer, and though he knew a physical reaction to Giovinco’s pompous remarks was highly unprofessional, nothing would have delighted him more than to take the anesthesiologist into the next room and pound some humility into him.
“Let’s continue,” said Rossini. Giovinco—perhaps reading his mind—grunted his disapproval and vanished behind the screen.
The harsh sound of Moyer’s cranitone drill filled the room. The skull was thick and resistant and the drill bit revolved fiercely into the white bone as chips of skull misted the air.
“That’s it,” said Moyer, ten minutes later. He stood back and surveyed his work: a hole in the skull gaped back at him, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, an opening that revealed the dura, a leathery membrane that was the brain’s last defense. As a resident, this was as far as Moyer’s experience and knowledge allowed him to go.
“Fine,” said Rossini, moving into position. “I’ll take over from here.”
Moments later, he was back in control, where he needed to be—working, cutting into the dura, his previous anxiety fading—nothing was better for his soul than work. Moving gracefully, he hit his marks without any wasted motion. Peeling back the protective membrane, he had a clear view of the cerebellum—nice ass, he thought lewdly as he used the shining retractor to lift the twin halves, exposing the nerves at the base of the brain.
“Microscope, please.”
The circulating nurse moved behind him, struggling with the massive surgical microscope that loomed above her like an eight-foot metallic giant. “Let me give you a hand,” said Moyer. “This is like trying to roll a boxcar.”
