Night Theater

by Vikram Paralkar

  “Much worse. No government on earth could create a bureaucracy like this. It’s endless. There are probably more officials in the afterlife than there are dead people. The reason the three of us are here, the reason I’m telling you all this, Saheb, is that one official was different, and we were lucky enough to find him. Our story moved him, I don’t know why. We had nothing to offer him, but still he decided to break his laws for us. Please, Saheb, don’t tell my son these things. He’s just a child. He deserves to grow up with some hope about life, maybe even about death.”

  The surgeon just stood, forearm-deep in the teacher’s ribs. Because he had to do something, he tried to return to his work, but his hands kept falling still. The insane turn of the teacher’s narration wouldn’t let him focus, nor would the patina of sleep that, despite everything, kept building over his eyes. How much of the teacher’s account had truly come from the man’s lips, and how much had his own brain fabricated in its exhaustion? He was now passing his fingers in an unending circuit inside the man’s chest, but he still wasn’t sure that the large vessels hadn’t been harmed. The walls had gained a darker tint, and it seemed that the door and windows of this shuttered room would never open again. The two of them—the dead and the living—would continue this conversation until the tiles blackened and crumbled.

  “Is there a God?” the surgeon asked.

  The teacher turned to the wall.

  “Answer my question. You’ve been talking about all these officials, but not about gods.”

  The very act of speech seemed to age the teacher, making him softer and hoarser. “In the afterlife, we called out to God. We recited every prayer we had ever learnt. We searched so desperately that any God with a drop of kindness in Him would have come to us . . . at least shown us some sign. But He didn’t. God is as hidden to the dead as He is to the living.”

  There was a coldness on the surgeon’s face, on the back of his arms. But it wasn’t from the teacher’s words. The surgeon could now feel a hole under his fingers. In the vena cava, right where the vessel entered the heart. How could this be? Surely he’d checked the spot before. Had he himself poked a hole through it with his prodding? No, no, that wasn’t possible. The vessel was in the path of the stabbing. The knife could very well have hit it. The hole didn’t even appear to have a flap in front of it. There was nothing to stitch back into place. He pulled his hand out to take a look.

  The teacher just kept speaking. “There are religions in the afterlife, Saheb. Just not the ones from earth. Even those who were faithful believers in life have to wonder how their priests and holy books could have been so wrong. But that has only led to new religions, made by stitching together shreds of the older ones. Some of the dead claim to be prophets and sages—men of God. They say they can hear His voice, that they want to spread His words to everyone who hopes to be reborn. I don’t understand what they get out of this. There’s no money or land or gold to gather there. Maybe it’s just the sense of power.”

  No, it wasn’t a hole. It was just another clot—a piece that had flattened and plastered itself against the vena cava so that it seemed to the surgeon’s numb fingers like a portion of the wall itself. He had to stop obsessing over this. It would kill him if he kept looking for false alarms in the dark. The large vessels were fine.

  But what could explain the chest full of blood? Not that little rent in the lung?

  The small vessels running in the groove under the rib’s edge were difficult to examine. The angle of light was completely wrong. The knife could very well have cut them, but he’d run his fingers over that area and hadn’t felt anything suspicious. There was really no way to improve the positions of the lamps, so he asked the teacher to turn sideways, arch to the left, and inflate his rib cage as far as it would go so the groove under the rib could catch the light. As the man repositioned himself, the wound, framed by its green drapery, opened and closed like a carnivorous plant smacking its blood-flecked jaws after a feast. It took a few tries, but the man finally contorted himself into a pose that offered a reasonable view.

  The artery and vein were so collapsed that it wasn’t even clear which was which in the groove of the rib. And there was no spurting blood to act as a guide. The surgeon brushed his finger over the inner curve of the rib, but couldn’t find a cut. Maybe it was best to assume that one of the vessels was the culprit, and close them off by tying blind knots on either side of the injury. He started to dissect what appeared to be the artery and vein away from what was probably the nerve.

  “What did your angel, your official, say? Didn’t you ask him about God?”

  “I did, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t like to talk about these things.”

  “And didn’t you ask him how all of this came into existence? The afterlife? The system of officials?”

  “My official wouldn’t say anything about that, either; but there was a wanderer I met, Saheb, a very strange man. He said he’d once been an official. He told me—”

  “Once been an official? How do you know he wasn’t lying?”

  “I don’t. I’m mentioning him only because he told me something that might answer your question. As an official, he’d been assigned to a province, he said. He kept an eye on things, recorded births and deaths. It was boring work, so he decided to play with his subjects. He took the form of a celestial messenger and appeared on earth—”

  “In person?”

  “Yes. He told me that he made his skin glow, just like a firefly. It was a simple trick for him, but it was enough to make any human who saw him drop to his knees. He appeared before a few men, told them that God was willing to offer them great powers if they could please Him with their devotion. The men all left their wives and children, went into caves, ate only seeds and roots, and spent their days in meditation. Some of them almost starved to death.

  “So the official thought, why stop there? He started granting the powers he’d promised. To one man he gave the strength of ten elephants. To another he taught a spell to create fire from air. A third he gave the ability to cause agony with a glance. Awful things happened, and the official watched them, entertained.

  “But he wasn’t careful. After the men had taken revenge on their neighbors, they started intimidating people in other towns, threatened to kill them and their children if they didn’t bow to them. That’s when other officials began to notice these monsters with abilities that no human was supposed to have. The official tried to cover things up by killing his creations, but it was too late. He was discovered and exposed. His superiors judged him guilty, took away his authority and powers, and sentenced him to the worst punishment possible—permanent exile on the plain of the dead, as one of its wanderers.

  “Whether this man was telling me the truth, or if he was just another one of us, a madman before he died or someone driven mad by the afterlife, I don’t know. He said he had reflected on his actions, he’d changed, repented. Now he only wished to spread the truth. And so he told me that the officials themselves don’t really know if God exists. They have a hierarchy, like a ladder, with steps that go on and on, the lower officials reporting to the higher ones and so forth. No one knows who’s at the very top. No one even knows if the ladder ever ends.”

  The surgeon tied a knot under the teacher’s rib and made two snips with his scissors. He then pulled out the segment of tissue, stretched it between his fingers, held it to the light. One of the cords, likely the artery, had a cut in its wall, right where the knife would be expected to have grazed it. It was tiny, but sufficient in the right situation to pump a man’s chest full of blood. The surgeon kept turning it over, let the light glint off its neat rectangular shape until he was finally convinced that he’d repaired the fatal injury. Then he searched within himself for the slightest trace of relief. He could find none.

  He used two rows of stitches to close the rent in the surface of the lung. A separate puncture, lower in the rib cage, would be needed for the drainage tube. He made a cut in the skin at the
edge of a lower rib, and tunneled the puncture through to the inside, taking care not to injure the diaphragm. He threaded the chest tube from the outside of the chest to the space between the lung and the ribs, and once its tip was high enough in the thorax, he secured the outer portion to the skin with loops of sutures. After confirming that it was anchored in place, he drew the ribs back together and sutured the muscles between them. Then it was time to close the other layers of the chest wall—the muscles, the connective tissue, the skin. Once the drapes were lifted off, the incision with its closed lips made a macabre smile that stretched across the side of the chest. He dressed it with gauze and tape.

  He now had the teacher sit up. Their eyes met, and the surgeon narrowed his and looked down at the man’s neck in a pretence of clinical scrutiny. He’d forgotten where he’d left the glass jar, and he looked around until the teacher pointed to the stone shelf jutting from the wall. The surgeon adjusted the plastic tubes passing through the jar’s lid so that the inner end of one of the tubes was submerged in the water, while the other ended an inch above the surface. To the outer end of the submerged tube he attached longer, flexible tubing, and into the other end of this tubing he twisted the end of the chest tube sticking out of the man’s ribs. The tubes fit into each other neatly. After confirming that the seal around the rubber lid was tight, he asked the teacher to cough. Air gushed through the piping and bubbled to the water’s surface.

  “You’ll have to carry this jar around with you. It’s sturdy, but don’t drop it. Take care not to tilt or spill it either—the end of that tube has to remain underwater, no matter what. Hold this glove to your mouth, and inflate it like a balloon repeatedly for the next hour. That’ll generate enough pressure to inflate your lungs. There’s a lot of air outside them, in the space where all that blood had collected. The air will bubble out as the lung expands to its original shape.”

  He’d kept his watch on his wrist during this surgery, and it told him now the time was a little after four in the morning. Less than two hours to sunrise. Somehow, in the hour and a half since they’d entered the operating room, the teacher hadn’t brought up the one thing the surgeon had feared he would. Then, when asked to step down from the table, the man asked, “Will she live?” The only answer the surgeon could give was “I don’t think she will.” The teacher folded his face into his hands. Even through the walls of the room, the surgeon could feel the pressure of the heavy sky, and of everything beyond it.

  TWELVE

  THE PHARMACIST LEANED AGAINST the entrance of the clinic, waiting for the sound of a bicycle, waiting for the night to return her husband. The boy sat on the steps, examining a pile of boxes a few feet away. The boxes were rustling. He aimed a pebble at one, and a rat ran out from underneath it. With a small ball of cotton as its loot, it fled into its burrow and hid somewhere in the clinic walls.

  The boy’s mother was on the bench, her back pressed against the wall and her head set straight on her neck. She was still in the tattered green gown she’d worn for the surgery. A safety pin held the neckline together. The bandages were a thick white wrap above the gown.

  She called out to him without turning, “Don’t do that, my baby. Don’t damage those boxes.”

  “No problem, really,” the pharmacist said. “I was going to throw them out anyway. He can play with them if he wants.”

  The boy chose a box made of polystyrene.

  The pharmacist knelt next to him. “Do you . . . did you go to school?”

  “Yes.” He began carving pieces of the box away with a thumbnail.

  “And what standard were you studying in?”

  The boy climbed down the steps and returned with some twigs from the mud. “Third standard.”

  “How nice. You’re such a big boy. Did your father teach you in school?”

  “No, he taught the ninth and tenth standards.” He pressed the twigs into the squares he’d carved in the polystyrene.

  She clapped her hands in delight. “You’re making a house.”

  “It’s not a house.” He placed the box upside down on the floor. There were vertical twigs in the door and windows. “It’s a jail.”

  She started, glanced at the boy’s mother. With her neck held stiff, the woman had been looking at her son’s creation from the corner of her eye. She looked morose, resigned.

  “Is it for the men who did this to you?” the pharmacist asked.

  The boy just adjusted the twigs.

  “Bad people never end up happy,” she said. “Sooner or later, they’re punished. I believe that.”

  “It’s not for them.”

  “For whom, then?”

  “It’s for us.”

  The boy had turned the box, placed it so that its door was facing the entrance of the clinic and its sides were parallel to the walls of the corridor. The pharmacist, despite herself, reached out to touch the boy, but then, remembering how he’d shrugged her off earlier, pulled her fingers back.

  His mother held her hand out toward him. “Come.”

  The boy walked on his knees to her, leaned against her leg with his cheek pressed to the side of her thigh. She passed her fingers through his hair, tucked a few strands behind his ears. The pharmacist saw the woman’s eyes go once again to the clock, the hands of which were moving so slowly that she wondered if the presence of the dead had somehow drained its batteries.

  The door of the operating room creaked open, and the teacher stepped out. Physically he didn’t look any different from when he’d entered, except for the glass jar in his hand and the tube sticking out from under his shirt. But his face appeared wooden. The boy ran to his father and pressed his face to his side. The man cupped his son’s head, moved him away from the tube.

  The boy touched the jar. “What’s that?”

  “I need to talk to you,” the man said to his wife.

  “The operation went well?” She pushed herself up with her hands while balancing her neck.

  “Yes, everything’s fine.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’ll tell you.” He gestured to the back room.

  The boy looked alarmed. “What are you going to talk about? I want to come too.”

  “We’ll be back in a few minutes. Stay here.”

  “But why? What is it? Why can’t I come with you?”

  “Aai and I have to talk about something. A few things. We’ll be back soon.”

  “You can stay with me,” said the pharmacist. “I’ll get you some glue and scissors. We can make a nice house out of this.”

  “It’s not a house.”

  The boy stamped on the box, made a hole in it with his heel, flattened the walls. With a kick, he sent it flying out of the clinic.

  His mother began to bend to his height, but then seemed to remember her tube. She held her son against her pregnant belly, scolded him in a voice that had nothing but love in it.

  “What is this? Is this any way to behave in front of Saheb and this nice madam? She’s just trying to help you. Why shout at her?”

  The boy twisted his mother’s gown in his fists. “Why don’t you tell me what’s happening? Why does Baba want to talk to you? The two of you are always hiding something.”

  “Why would we hide anything from you, my prince? There’s nothing to hide. I’m sure it’s just something ordinary, boring. Like when Baba used to read the newspaper and you just wanted to look at the pictures, remember? I’m sure Baba wants to talk to me about something like that, something that wouldn’t be interesting to you.”

  The pharmacist forced a smile as she brought the smashed box back into the corridor. “We can still fix this. We can make whatever you want—a jail, a police station, anything. I have a lot of boxes. Come, sit with me while your parents talk.”

  The man and his wife left the boy with the pharmacist. She did all she could to get his attention, but he kept turning to the door they’d closed behind them.

  Saheb was trying to sit on the bench, wincing as he did so. The
pharmacist knew how bad his back could get, with the slipped disk or whatever he had. It took him some time to settle there and release the arm with which he was propping his weight up on the bench. Then he raised his finger and held the tip close to his face. A small red drop squeezed out of it. The wood of the bench had splinters, she’d been pricked enough times herself. But Saheb just kept looking at the growing drop with a strange expression. “I’ll get some tape,” she said, and he, as if startled, shook his head and rubbed the drop off between his thumb and fingers.

  She found the scissors, glue, and some colored paper in the pharmacy, laid the pieces of the boy’s jail out on the floor of the corridor, and glued the sides back together. Once that was done, she started cutting another cardboard box into long strips to make a fence. The boy showed no interest in any of this.

  “They’re discussing the possibility of another surgery.”

  It took a few moments for the boy to realize that Saheb was talking to him.

  “Another surgery? When?”

  “Now, before the sun rises.”

  “Why?”

  The pharmacist stopped her scissors midway through the cardboard. Saheb was speaking to the boy as if to an adult. Actually with more patience than he’d ever shown any adult. The boy listened without interrupting. When Saheb was done, the boy had questions, some of which Saheb answered. She’d never heard him say “I don’t know” so many times before.

  Then the door of the back room opened, and the teacher and his wife returned to the corridor. The man nodded. “Doctor Saheb.”

  Saheb closed his eyes, stood up, stretched his back. “We’ll be back soon,” he said to the boy. “You’ll stay with her, won’t you?”

  The pharmacist smiled and widened her eyes at the boy despite the ache in her chest. The boy did not argue, just stayed with his head lowered. His mother remained where she was, looking away, her eyes still dry, very dry.

  The surgeon entered the operating room once again, this time with the teacher and his wife in tow. He felt crippled with fatigue. The woman held his hand as she climbed up on the operating table.