Night Theater

by Vikram Paralkar

  “Didn’t understand? What do you mean? Wouldn’t angels be all-knowing?”

  “Well, those are two different things, Saheb: knowing and understanding. I’ll give you a simple example. The angel knew that the living like to fly kites, but never understood why it was such a popular thing, why it should deserve a special day of celebration, why people would drop everything and climb on rooftops for it. There are no kites in the afterlife. There’s no wind there, not even really a sky . . . there’s just that plain. I tried to explain to him the joy when something that’s nothing more than a square of paper stretched across two sticks catches the breeze and goes up, up . . . so high that sometimes you can’t even see it against the sun, so high even birds won’t get near it. I tried to explain it a few different ways, but none of them made any sense to the angel.

  “And so I told him that it felt like toying with death. It was like tying your life to a thread, sending it out to a place over which you had no power, working all day to keep it from being lost, and then, in the evening, if you were lucky, pulling it back unharmed, admiring its colors again, and storing it in a safe place for another time. That’s when the angel understood. That was his language, Doctor Saheb, the language of life and death.”

  The teacher’s story was like a bizarre fable—something a priest might deliver in a religious ceremony. But there were no flowers here, no lamps or burning incense to make the unreality more palatable. The surgeon felt a constant tightness at the base of his throat. He had to loosen it occasionally by swallowing the spittle in his mouth.

  “What do these angels look like?”

  “They look human, just like everyone else. No shining eyes, no aura of light. They don’t ride on any animals, they don’t fly, they walk on their own two feet. Our angel was about my height, shorter than you. He looked a little overweight, but I think their bodies are just disguises they wear in front of us.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “It became a regular thing. I would call for the angel, and he would appear. I would ask that we be sent back, and he would smile and decline my request. And then he would ask his own questions. I have to admit that even though the likelihood of returning to life seemed to diminish with each of his visits, I still kept calling for him, just to see what new question he would bring me. I’ve always wanted to help people see things in different ways. That’s why I became a teacher. When students couldn’t understand something that seemed obvious to me, I took it as a challenge to figure out what the basic misunderstanding was, and use that to explain things better. I don’t want to suggest that the angel was my student, of course not. I wouldn’t even dare call him a friend. But I valued the time I spent with him, answering his questions.

  “And then, during one of his visits, when I wasn’t expecting anything at all, he said that there was something he could do for us. Something that was within his power.”

  By now the surgeon had freed the spleen of the scaffolding that had held it up against the diaphragm and the other organs. He checked its surfaces and prepared to tie off the vessels that would, in life, have fed it blood. The teacher had paused, so the surgeon looked up at him, signaled that he was still listening.

  The teacher glanced at the pharmacist. “The very first thing the angel said to me was that all of this had to remain secret. I can tell you, Saheb, you have every right to know. But I beg you, none of this can leave the clinic. We were ordered to keep it to the smallest number of people possible. Forget the rest of the world, even the rest of the village cannot know of this.”

  The surgeon nodded. He turned to the girl, who nodded as well, though with some hesitation.

  “The angel told me that there are limits to what any single one of them can do. Each has a few specific powers. They can perform what we would consider miracles, yes, but only with the skills of four or five put together.

  “He offered to send us back, but he didn’t have the ability to fix our wounds. He couldn’t manipulate human flesh, he said. We would have to return just the way we were. That was enough to dash all my hopes. What were we to do then? Bleed to death again? Empty our lives into the mud? The angel said he could help us in one way—he could keep us from coming alive for some time. He could keep us like this—bloodless, the way we appear to you now—but for no more than one earthly night. That was all. While everyone was asleep, we would have to get our wounds fixed. Blood would start flowing through us at dawn.

  “Now, Saheb, you can imagine what I thought when he said this. The offer sounded hopeless enough already, but the restrictions didn’t end there. He reminded us again and again that what he was offering was completely forbidden. Apparently, angels can be punished too. By even talking about helping us, he was putting himself at risk. He told us that his power extended only to a small village—this village. He couldn’t allow knowledge of this plan to ever spread outside it. No other angel could ever be allowed to see us. We could never cross the boundary. If we tried, our bodies would drop like corpses right there, and we would be pulled back to the afterlife. It also meant that we could never visit our old town; never see our families. We wanted life, didn’t we? Well, now we could get it, with all of these conditions binding our hands and feet.

  “But I should bite my tongue before I say another ungrateful word. Please understand, I’m not blaming the angel. He was offering us the very best option he had. But still, to be sent here after sunset, with just a night before we died again . . . it seemed so pointless. Until he told us that within this village lived a very skilled surgeon.”

  The surgeon felt his hands go slack. “The angel mentioned me? Your angel specifically mentioned me?”

  So his paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified, was it? There was a prickle in his hair, a wash of fresh sweat, new rivulets tickling their way down the sides of his neck and face. He pretended to stretch his shoulders, turned his neck this way and that, and looked up at the ceiling so that this sudden wave sweeping over him wouldn’t be so obvious.

  The plaster of the ceiling was plain gray, featureless except for the metal loop embedded in it. From this angle, and with the shadows cast by the lamps around it, the loop looked like an eye, a single sinister aperture set at the center of a gray face. He allowed himself to indulge this theatrical cliché. Why not? Why not see eyes everywhere? Even in the bulbs, hot and unblinking? Examining, documenting. Perhaps this really was a test, not of his belief but of his surgical skills. What was the examiner looking for? Would a certificate descend from the clouds to declare him competent? Competent at what?

  “Yes, Saheb. That’s why he made this offer in the first place. If it weren’t for you, he would never even have mentioned it. He told us to consider everything very carefully. We could refuse if we wished, but he would never offer us this choice again. So we accepted.”

  It was now time to individually tie off and cut the vessels that streamed, bloodless, from the boy’s spleen. The surgeon needed to be meticulous. He couldn’t allow the absence of blood to lull him into complacency. A single untied vessel, and that would be the end—an open tap through which the boy’s life would gush out in the morning. The phalanxes of questions within him would have to wait.

  The surgeon ligated the vessels, freed the spleen, and then scooped out the fleshy organ and placed it on a tray. The boy craned his neck forward while this was happening, but his father patted him back, covered his eyes. The surgeon inspected the liver, the stomach, the intestines, the vessels again. Once he was as certain as he could possibly be that the murderer’s blade had missed them all, he picked a long, thin strip of corrugated rubber from his tray. He threaded it in through the stab wound, and positioned the inner end within the peritoneal bed where the spleen had been. The other end he kept free against the skin on the outside. It would catch and drain any blood that might leak through the vessels and pool in the abdomen in the morning, he explained.

  Then he sutured back the layers of flesh, one after the other. Once the skin was closed and dr
essed, he tried to make the scene less grisly by covering the spleen and the pile of clots with a drape. The boy had said nothing during the surgery, but now he looked impatient, eager to be done.

  “Careful, don’t sit up too quickly. The stitches are delicate. You don’t feel them now, but you could pull them out if you run around too much. And don’t touch the bandages. They need to remain clean.”

  The boy listened with just half his attention, but his father nodded at everything.

  The surgeon began to list to the girl the instruments he wanted sterilized right away, but stopped when he actually looked at her. She hadn’t spoken during the surgery, and the parts of her face visible between the green stripes of her mask and cap were as bleached as the moon.

  SEVEN

  OUT IN THE CORRIDOR, the teacher’s wife clutched her son and covered him with kisses. For the first time that night, their despair seemed to have lifted. The surgeon looked away, wondering if, in his optimism, he had promised too much. Their expectations would be even greater now. And the boy might succumb to any number of complications in the morning.

  Supporting the pharmacist, the surgeon stepped into the night. Gravel crunched under his feet.

  The girl’s husband ran up to them and put his arm around her, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right.” He caressed her hair, pressed her into his neck. She leaned against him, pale and stiff.

  He cast a fearful glance at the dead. “Did they do anything to her?”

  The surgeon compressed his lips and winced, afraid that the family had overheard this needless slander. “Just sit her down somewhere. She’s not used to this. Nothing more.”

  The man led his wife to a flat rock a few yards away. She sat there with her arms wrapped around her ribs.

  During her time in the clinic, the pharmacist had assisted in childbirths and minor procedures, learned how to change dressings, clean ulcers, administer injections. But she’d never taken part in a surgery in which the depths of the bowels were plumbed and the organs carved out. With his mind so crowded with otherworldly matters, the surgeon had overlooked this simple fact. Perhaps it was best he kept her out of the operating room from this point on.

  Apart from the whispering of the dead in the corridor, the silence was almost deliberate—as if the crickets had been bribed and the dogs strangled. The village at the base of the hillock was perfectly still, its houses like polyps erupting from the soil. The rising moon had dusted them all with white talc. They appeared to have receded in the hours after sunset, abandoning the clinic to its unnatural deeds.

  The surgeon returned to his consultation room. From a drawer in his desk, he picked out a syringe, a needle, and two thumb-size glass vials with rubber corks. From a jar of anticoagulant salt on a shelf, he tapped a few crystals into each vial. In another drawer, he found small paper labels. He wrote a couple of words on two and pasted them around the sides of the vials. With his left sleeve rolled up all the way to his shoulder, he tied a tourniquet around his biceps, pulling the end of the loop with his teeth until blue veins bulged on his forearm. Then he guided the needle into one of them, drew the plunger back with a thumbnail, and pulled out half a syringe of blood. This he divided between the vials, tilting and turning them until the crystals dissolved. Some empty polystyrene boxes had been left over from the vaccination drive. He filled one of them with ice cubes from the refrigerator.

  He then began drafting his list. He would have only one opportunity. This wasn’t the time to rush, to forget something important. He wrote and erased, crossed things out, calculated, estimated. Would eight of this item be better than four? Would twenty of those suffice? Maybe the larger ones instead of the smaller? There were limits to what he could ask for, of course. He had to be realistic.

  When he was satisfied—or rather, when he was done—he waved to the pharmacist’s husband. The man was with his wife. It took the surgeon a couple of attempts to catch his eye.

  If indeed this entire fantastic premise was true, and the sun would melt the clotted blood in the vessels of these visitors, the challenges of this night would pale before those that the dawn would bring. Since all medical care would have to take place within the walls of this clinic, the pharmacist’s husband would need to travel to the city for supplies. He would have to fetch intravenous lines, tubing, catheters, sutures, needles, syringes, gauze, bandages, antibiotics, tetanus shots, lidocaine, opiates, sedatives. The clinic would have to be stocked as never before. There were some bags of saline in the pharmacy, and while those would likely not be enough, it was unreasonable to expect the man to bring back more than a few liters. If those ran out too, they would have to make do with boiled, salted tap water and accept the risks.

  But perhaps the most important of these requirements was blood. Who could predict which stitches would hold and which would give way, and what streams would flow unstemmed?

  The surgeon placed the blood-filled vials in a small box and handed them to the man. “List me as the patient at the blood bank. Get four bags. Bring more if they’ll allow you. Make sure they cross-match it well. It needs to match my blood type exactly. O-negative. Look, I’ve written it right here. If you get the correct match, it should be safe to transfuse into anyone.”

  From his safe, he picked out a small bundle held together by a rubber band, and counted the notes before handing them over.

  “This should be enough for everything, I hope.”

  The man’s eyes kept flitting to the window.

  “Perhaps I should first ask you,” the surgeon said, “if you would be willing to let her stay here while you’re gone.”

  The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other without answering.

  “They won’t harm her.” The surgeon hoped his tone was reassuring. “That much I can say.”

  The man fidgeted and scratched his ear, turned the list over a few times. Then he nodded with the resignation of one unaccustomed to challenging instructions. “I should leave now, if I’m to get back before morning.”

  He went to the back room and picked out a bedsheet from the cupboard. Then he slipped out quietly through the corridor, careful to keep as great a distance as possible between himself and the dead, to the point that the surgeon saw him almost jump into a wall when the teacher tried to thank him. There was an old pile of bamboo rods outside the clinic. The man picked a thin one, waved it around to make sure it was sturdy, and fashioned a makeshift sling with the bedsheet. He then walked his bicycle to the pharmacist, spoke to her briefly, and pedaled off. The surgeon watched him through the bars of his window. The railway station was a few miles away. Even if the stars all lined up, it would be at least two hours by train to the city.

  The surgeon walked to the rock. The pharmacist hadn’t moved from her spot since her husband had brought her there.

  “You look tired. It’s very late.”

  She sat looking out into the darkness. The surgeon flicked a mosquito from his neck.

  “You won’t have to be in the operating room with me anymore. I can see that it’s too much for you.”

  The rattle of the bicycle had completely faded by now.

  “But it would be good if I could still have your help. I’ve already used half of the instruments and drapes, and there are two more surgeries left. While I operate on the woman, could you wash and autoclave the used items? You don’t have to stay awake all night—in fact, I don’t want you to. You could turn the drum on and then take a nap in the back room. I’ll wake you when I’m done.”

  She said nothing. The surgeon sat beside her on the rock, his joints making their usual clicking sounds.

  “Maybe I should do a fourth surgery tonight. After I’m done with the dead, I should just replace my knees with oiled hinges.”

  There was a feeble smile at this.

  He was asking too much of her, he knew. It wasn’t fair to expect her to brush aside all her fear and disorientation for his sake, just because he’d taken upon himself this delusion of reviving t
he dead. It would be better if she went home.

  But before he could suggest it, she asked, “Could this be a mistake, Saheb?”

  “Mistake?”

  “The man says that the angel doesn’t want him to leave this village. Isn’t that something to worry about?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s very worrying. Even if your husband returns with every single item on that list, it still won’t be anywhere near to what’s necessary for something like this. But what can we do? We work with what we have.”

  “Forgive me, Saheb, but that wasn’t what I meant. I was talking about . . . about this being a secret. That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re breaking the law. The dead man didn’t say it that way, but he knows what he’s doing. He knows it’s not allowed, coming back like this, like corpses. And now he wants us to break the law too. What if some evil spirit sent them here against God’s wishes? What if it’s a sin to help them? I’m afraid, Saheb. I am nobody to question you, but what will happen to us? Won’t we be punished with them?”

  The surgeon looked up at the sky. It seemed charred, as if some great and distant immolation had finally been completed. When he was the girl’s age, already filled with doubt about everything he’d ever been told, he’d wondered how astrologers assembled all those creatures from the stars—rams and fishes and scorpions. All he ever saw were silent threats—the way the dots of light hung there, deceptively stable from one night to the next, preparing to dash themselves to the earth at the slightest provocation.

  “Ask any priest and he will tell you exactly what God wants you to do. What prayer, what fasts, what lockets and threads to wear. And then ask another, maybe an imam or father this time, and see what answer you get. There are many people who pretend to know God’s wishes. But God Himself never says a word.”