by C. E. Smith
Why does a portrait have to have a background at all?
Last night he woke thinking he was still in that basement keep with Nick. The impression was so powerful that even after he recognized the bedside lamp and glowing clock, he wondered if the last six months had passed in a dream. All the therapist here can tell him is that he’s experiencing mild anxiety related to PTSD and alcohol withdrawal. She means well, and she might even be right about one thing: if he were drunk, he would probably be more at ease with the world around him.
The world. He keeps coming back to that word but can’t say exactly what he means by it. Perhaps he should take a cue from Rory and surround himself with flames and title his picture Drone Attack.
After six months in a blighted pit, how could he be expected to pick up where he left off? He finds himself missing Nick, even Akbar and Sajiv at times. To think of them dead almost saddens him, even as he feels the stub of his finger, even as those bolt cutters flash before him yet again. He keeps going back to that cliché: he left behind a part of himself. Not a literal part – Tarik made good on his word and sent their severed fingers to the headquarters of International Medical Outreach. Or so he heard on returning to Atlanta. Perhaps he should have given IMO an address for delivery. His finger might have served as a grim keepsake, a desk ornament in a jar of formaldehyde. Perhaps their therapist – who often seemed to be quoting from a pamphlet on PTSD – would have pointed out the ‘therapeutic value’ of reclaiming the lost part.
But at the time of his return he was preoccupied by the death of his father and all the paperwork and mail at the care facility and funeral home, not to mention the storage unit holding all of his father’s useless possessions, over a thousand cubic feet of dust and garbage interspersed with the occasional item of sentimental value. He has yet to sort through it all, but in one of the boxes he discovered a cloth sack with a drawstring, and inside it the military-issue pistol that had once belonged to his grandfather – the very pistol he and Owen used for shooting cans on their uncle’s farm in rural Pennsylvania.
An unexpected challenge of re-entry was finding a place to live. He’d been evicted in absentia, having gone months without paying his rent or responding to the notices passed under the door. His belongings had been left outside in what sounded like a free-for-all yard sale. The insurance company requested a list of what was lost. The value of the furniture, appliances, and electronics totaled more than five thousand dollars, the most his renter’s policy allowed, so there was no need to include the particular items he actually cared about. He didn’t mention the tattered pair of wrestling shoes he’d worn during his five years at Penn State. Nor did he mention the brown bag under the sink, his cache of Xanax and Valium. Perhaps a member of the grounds crew, recruited to carry furniture, discovered it and kept it for himself.
His Honda still sat in the parking lot of the apartment complex – not that he could drive with a cast reaching from hip to ankle. Shrapnel had fractured his femur and torn his femoral artery. The damaged vessel swelled to the size of a man’s fist and almost certainly would have ruptured and killed him if surgeons in Germany hadn’t operated in time.
That first night back in Atlanta, after retrieving his father’s ashes from the funeral home, he took the train downtown to Grady Hospital where, to his pleasant surprise, his ID badge still gave him free food in the cafeteria as well as access to the residents’ call room. After eating he tried to sleep in one of the free bunks, but the intern’s pager went off every five minutes. The intern, who had heard about Burkett and his kidnapping, pressed him for details when not fielding calls. He even offered a prescription for Lortab, which Burkett declined even though it might have helped the chronic itching inside his cast.
Far more tempting was an anesthesia cart in the hallway. A drawer protruded just enough that he could tell it was unlocked. He stood before it, leaning on his crutches. He wondered how many other drawers were unlocked, perhaps all of them. The Librium or Versed he would have to inject, but everything he needed was there in the cart: needle, syringe, swabs, and tourniquet. A minute passed, maybe two, before a tech emerged from the bathroom to claim the cart. When it bumped over a threshold, Burkett could hear the jangle of glass vials.
He wished someone could offer a prescription for his finances. Even if the surgical practice hadn’t requested that he pay back the signing bonus, a portion of which remained in his checking account, it wouldn’t have been enough to cover his med school debt, back taxes, or unpaid rent. Or his credit cards, which had drawn the attention of collection agencies.
He was eating his meals in the hospital cafeteria and sleeping at the Wayfarer, a nearby motel, when Véronique Six came to interview him for a book she was writing. She put him up at the Marriot, though not in a shared room: it was clear from the start they wouldn’t be having sex. She referred to their past intimacy, if at all, in only the most oblique terms. He might have tried to coax her away from her journalistic scruples (and the fiancé back home) but restrained himself on account of either some scruple of his own or the physical limitations of a fully casted lower extremity.
Over his months of captivity, Véronique received several calls from someone named Sunir, who demanded twenty million dollars in ransom. It’s unclear how much effort she expended in producing those funds, but she prolonged the negotiations as long as possible, in part by referring to Burkett as her fiancé. She even traveled to Khandaros for a meeting with an intermediary. After the intermediary failed to appear, her magazine published a piece on a ‘hostage crisis involving an American surgeon’.
In the interest of exclusivity, she hadn’t discussed her phone conversations with anyone outside her magazine, so the article and subsequent cascade of TV reports came as a shock to Beth and those on the American side who had taken pains to keep her husband’s predicament from the press. They feared the slightest media attention could tip the scales in favor of public execution. But as it happened, the stir of publicity served only to bring the two captives closer to release.
Around the same time, Beth received a demand more realistic than the twenty million the FBI had managed over those many months to negotiate down to ten. The latest number – three million for the release of both prisoners – suggested a renewed desire on the part of the jihadists, finally, to free rather than kill Burkett and Nick. Of course she had no way of knowing that their severed fingers, perhaps that very day, were traveling by parcel post to the IMO offices in Miami. IMO tapped into their formidable network of donors and raised nearly two million dollars, with further pledges covering the difference. IMO’s president was ready to transfer funds to an anonymous Swiss account, but negotiations stalled when the kidnappers, having been bombed by a drone, failed to supply proof of life.
At the sound of tires on gravel, Burkett folds his meager self-portrait and limps toward the house. After weeks of physical therapy, he’s now able to walk without a crutch. Having progressed from bed to wheelchair to walker to crutches, he’s proud to be free finally of artificial support – not counting the metal rod in his femur or the stent in his femoral artery.
In the living room, Beth rocks her sleeping baby in a detachable carseat. His first thought, to his shame, is relief that he failed in his preposterous attempt to sleep with her – relief that there is no question as to the child’s paternity. He hasn’t seen her in the months since his return, except in the occasional magazine or talk show. She has been lionized in the media for her efforts to free her husband, traveling in the third trimester of pregnancy between Khandaros and Washington and managing to gain support from even the most jaded and elusive politicians.
‘Hey, stranger,’ she says as they embrace.
It was on YouTube that Burkett saw her speech at Nick’s memorial service. ‘The brevity of this painful life is one of its many consolations,’ she said at the lectern. Burkett’s injuries prevented him from making the trip, and perha
ps it was better that way, since everyone there, Beth included, would have questioned the justice of his surviving instead.
The baby grizzles, so she releases it from the harness of the carseat and lifts it into her arms.
‘He looks like you,’ Burkett says, although in truth he can’t tell. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Owen,’ she says.
‘I like it.’ He hesitates and says, ‘I guess I’m surprised you didn’t call him Nick.’
‘We’d used that one already,’ she says.
Burkett gives her a puzzled look, so she adds, ‘We had a stillborn son almost five years ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he says.
How did Nick never mention that in all the time they spent together? Of course the fault is partly Burkett’s own. Did he ever seek to know the man? Only after his rescue, during the seemingly endless hospital debriefings, did he learn that Nick had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor many years earlier.
On the coffee table he recognizes the canister of his brother’s remains. Someone has secured the cap with duct tape.
‘You could have sprinkled the ashes in Mejidi-al-Alam,’ he says.
‘If that’s what you’d wanted you’d have done it yourself,’ she says.
It is what he wanted – or at least he can’t think of anything better. But he’ll never visit that place again, even if things have been relatively stable since the secession – since the formation of that caliphate in the south, the Islamic Republic of South Khandaros, known to the world as South Khandaros. So strong was public support for a separate nation that after the death of President Djohar, the staunchest of unionists, many of his allies turned sides in favor of the referendum. And it wasn’t long after Burkett’s escape that an overwhelming majority of Khandarians from the north and south alike voted in favor of secession.
‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Will you go back? Will you resume your post at our clinic?’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m taking Owen to Mozambique. There’s an IMO clinic in a village there with a tremendous need.’
‘I imagine the political situation is more stable.’
‘Even if I had a strong desire to go back to Khandaros – which I don’t – IMO wouldn’t have it, not after all that’s happened.’
‘You’d think the fence would change their minds,’ Burkett says. A modern version of the Khandarian Wall, an electric fence, so far covers thirty percent of the border.
‘The fence is ridiculous,’ says Beth. ‘A decade from now, people are going to look at the hideous thing and ask, “How did anyone ever think this was a good idea? ”’
‘Have the bombings stopped now that the extremists have their own country?’
‘I wouldn’t say stopped – more like slowed down. The upper level Heroes have gone from being guerilla warriors to parliamentarians.’
‘A place on earth for those who prefer the dark ages.’ He thinks of Asadullah and his sister. ‘Pity not everyone lives there by choice.’
‘Before the official sealing of the border, there was a three-month period when residents of the south were supposed to be able to leave.’
‘How many came?’
‘Fewer than expected,’ she says. ‘Supposedly there were intimidation tactics. A lot of northerners have relatives in the south who weren’t able to get out for one reason or another – an imprisoned family member, confiscated property, so-called emigration taxes, whatever. A good reason to maintain the clinic in Mejidi-al-Alam is to offer shelter and work for those who escape from the south.’
‘So you’ve kept in touch with friends from the clinic?’
She nods. ‘Hassad and some of the others.’
‘How is he?’ Burkett asks.
‘He’s the one in charge now that Nick’s gone.’
‘I’m glad to hear it’s in capable hands.’
Beth fits the baby’s carseat into the frame of a stroller. Outside they follow a path toward the white fence surrounding the property. The other residents, having just finished their therapy session, file past them toward the house.
‘If you’re ever interested,’ she says, ‘I could use a surgeon in Mozambique.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
‘I hope we can count on your support either way.’
‘These days I’m a little short on cash.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘What we need is prayer.’
‘I might be a little short on that, too.’
She offers a brief smile, but all he sees in it is pity.
After a moment of silence, he says, ‘I’ll do my best.’
Words from his brother’s notepad come back to him: Grant me the words to pray as You’d have me pray. What strikes him as odd, remembering it now, is the capital Y. It brings to mind the bloodless incision spanning his brother’s torso.
25
His job at the imaging center in Nashville is to manage adverse reactions to gadolinium, the substance administered during scans. As it happens, such reactions are rare enough to be virtually non-existent, so once he’s comfortable with the protocols and resuscitation equipment, he has nothing to do beyond reading novels and surfing the web. He never expected an immediate return to the operating room, but he’d prefer the kind of job that would at least require him to stay awake.
Other opportunities arise, through Rory Bird as well as IMO – idylls of low-intensity doctoring on the periphery of healthcare: physical exams for an insurance company, medical emergencies at a psychiatric hospital, chart review for a malpractice defense attorney, and the occasional trip on a private jet designed for patient transport, a kind of airborne intensive care unit in which he faces the sometimes difficult task of keeping a patient stable between runways.
A year after his move to Nashville, he takes a job in the emergency room of a small hospital in the suburbs. Rumors of his drug history somehow reach the nursing staff, or so he imagines from a particular manager’s obsessive documentation of his patients’ reports of pain. But there are no discrepancies, and by the second month that manager has begun to regard him with the same attitude of weariness and affection that has earned her the nickname ‘Mom’ among the other physicians.
An elderly general surgeon, impressed by Burkett’s handling one night of a ruptured gallbladder, offers him part time work as a surgical assistant. Burkett scales back his shifts in the ER, even if it means a loss in income. He’d far prefer the steady intensity of surgery to the emergency room, where long periods of monotony are punctuated by spasms of uncertainty.
The surgeon, whose name is Waverly, has the versatility of an old generalist, probably as comfortable with a c-section as a thyroidectomy – not that he does much of either in these days of subspecialization – but he’s developed arthritis and therefore needs a young pair of hands to tie off the leaking ducts and spouting arteries. (Burkett’s shortened finger leads to minor awkwardness with gloves but seems to have little impact on his technique.) The work is steady and eventually even lucrative – he’s able to quit the ER altogether – and it serves as a kind of apprenticeship, a second residency to regain those skills he lost during his two-year hiatus.
It isn’t long before Waverly grants him the status of ‘junior partner’, paying him extra to answer pages at night and manage the scutwork of admitting and discharging patients. Waverly, who boasts of having worked thirty years without a vacation, proves his confidence in Burkett by taking his family to Hawaii for ten days. When the old surgeon finally retires, Burkett slides easily into his role, the only general surgeon in that small hospital.
The women Burkett dates tend to be nurses in their late twenties or early thirties. He would prefer a non-medical type, but his avoidance of bars limits his options. Sex was one of the problems of life that drunkenness made easier. This sober version of himself manages two sustaine
d relationships, both with nurses, and both following the same basic trajectory: an initial attraction followed by growing irritation and finally the pain of extricating himself.
Another obstacle to sex is that women no longer seem to find him physically attractive. They used to respond to his gaze – a look alone would draw an inviting glance or even a smile. But that power eludes him now. Perhaps it is the truncated digit, the residual limp, or the hair that grew back brittle and gray after being shaved for lice. Perhaps they detect his baseline anxiety, the subtle tremor. Not even forty, but he feels like an old man.
He’s lived in Nashville almost three years before he sees Amanda Grey in a shopping mall. He is riding up an escalator when he spots her in the window of a descending elevator. She doesn’t appear to see him. Perhaps she senses a man staring and avoids looking for that reason. The elevator descends into the thicket of an indoor garden, and moments later she emerges with a stroller. He tries not to look at her again, but when his resolve crumbles she is already gone. He imagines her making a quick retreat, ducking into the nearest store. He’d heard about her second marriage, so the baby shouldn’t come as a surprise, but that night the benzo ache is bad enough that Rory Bird has to come over and sleep on his couch.
In those first months after Sapphire Meadow, he’d known no one in Nashville other than Rory, so it didn’t take long for the AA meetings to become the most interesting two hours of his week. There was even an attractive woman, a flight attendant named Elizabeth, but despite his best efforts she took up with Rory instead, which was just as well. The meetings needed to remain free of the problems that seem inevitably to follow his sex life. When Rory and Elizabeth got married, Burkett served as a groomsman – his first time, surprisingly enough. He’d had plenty of close friends, but no one had ever requested his presence at the altar. It was a role better suited to his brother, a groomsman at least four times during their twenties.
