Читать книгу Impuls - Aster - Страница 4

And in her eyes is the unexplored Milky Way;

the unguided stars wander back and forth;

all roads end with Rome someday,

but without Rome the roads will never end.

The student leads her down service corridors-networks of narrow, windowless passageways with dim yellow lights and an endless string of doors without any identifying marks-so it's a mystery to Emily how he navigates through them. They enter the neurology department in two and a half minutes – the familiar break room, the cubbyhole, and the large space of the main part of the ward.

Emily enters Clark's office, holding her breath – if she had messed up or made a big mistake, she would have been reprimanded by either the attending or the head nurse, but not by the neurosurgeon: he has nothing to do with the junior staff, unless, of course, it was his own team.

Clark stands half-turned, his arms crossed over his chest, his white coat sloppily slung over his shoulders, his lips curved into a semblance of a smile.

Emily's spine sucked – fear mixed with a strange kind of awe. If it were Rebecca, she'd have pressed her lips together, relaxed her shoulders, and looked at the whole thing through a spiteful squint. But Emily isn't Rebecca; all she can do is wrinkle the already creased fabric of her gown and wriggle from foot to foot.

Of all the hospital's sixty-thousand-person staff, Miss Clark needed her.

Or…?

– Johnson," the neurosurgeon's heavy stare is almost physically palpable, "is our psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Clark.

Oh shit. Good thing she didn't say a word to him.

Her lungs run out of air as the student who called her here sits down on the padded couch and puts his leg over her leg; but-she's willing to swear! – at that moment, mischievous sparks flicker in his dark eyes.

The prank was undeniably a success.

Charlie had a mop of blond hair, ripped jeans, and a T-shirt with the Beatles emblem on it. Emily mentally excuses herself: Anyone would mistake him for a student intern; only the gray nametag that had fallen off his long robe gives him away as a doctor.

She looks closely: a long black Swatch strap, gray and blue Balmain, and a careless, as if intentionally placed blot on the lower left field of the robe – another famous logo, the name of which she does not remember. An envious sigh – in Britain, doctors are paid almost more than in other countries.

– Miss Johnson…

– You can just say Emily," the nurse says quietly, trying not to be distracted by her thoughts.

Are they brother and sister or husband and wife? Which one is older? And what is this woman's name anyway?

Why is she here…?

Charlie only silently spreads his hands as if answering unasked questions.

– Let's get right to the point. – Clark-whose-woman sits down in a wide, high-backed chair. – They say you spent the morning with a certain patient with a very strange diagnosis, right?

– But we didn't talk for more than half an hour. – Emily shakes her head. – I was only asking…

– You were talking about the mosaic. – Charlie leans his head back relaxed and looks up at the ceiling. – Just so you know, a mosaic, Emily, is part of a system.

– What system? – For the second time today, Johnson feels like a complete fool.

– Her memory, of course.

Everything Emily gives out in response fits into a simple, "Eh?"

– Our brain," Charlie explains patiently, "tries to cover the gaps in our memory with memories from nowhere. Or, if the trauma is too severe, it clings to words, places, actions-and inserts them like missing pieces.

– Like a mosaic," Emily guesses.

– That's right," the psychiatrist nods contentedly. – Her brain is clinging to two factors: it is you, Emily, and the puzzle. The puzzle. A fragment. A stumpy piece of life – whether past or present. And this idea-that she had something to do with it all-is now firmly planted in her head and taking root there.

– Like a virus?

– Exactly. Like a virus.

– She's about to have surgery. – It's like the neurosurgeon didn't even hear them talking. – We're gonna cut her head open again to see how she's doing. – A funny joke from her lips sounds like black irony. – She'll be conscious for a while, and Dr. Clark advises that you should be around. Maybe this way we can provoke… something.

– "Intraoperative brain mapping," Emily says in a cursory voice. Nightly vigils over textbooks have had their justifiable effect – Clark throws her a look full of surprise. I guess she's the kind of person who thinks all nurses are idiots.

– You think there's a tumor in there?

– We don't think anything," cuts off Clark-who-is-anything-woman. – It's Higgins who's thinking. And while he decides it's a good idea to open up her skull and make sure there's no sign of a tumor and her visual center has been removed for some other reason that the CT and MRI don't show. And he doesn't care at all that the scans don't show that very tumor.

– Do you mind? – Emily asks timidly.

– I'm not sure that prying into someone else's head without a good reason is a good idea," the neurosurgeon answers grudgingly. – But Mark insists on reducing all risks.

– By increasing them? – Johnson barely audibly clarifies. Clark-sitting-in-a-chair rolls her eyes.

– That's because nothing just happens," Charlie says. – You can't wake up blind or deaf or dumb and then go about your business in peace. And you can't go blind in a second and keep your eyeballs intact. She doesn't have any external effects, does she? So there must be something inside. – He folded his fingers into little arrows. – So it turns out that in order to know the causes of blindness, we need to know the previous diagnosis. If we know the diagnosis, we know what was treated. We find out what, we find out where and who. – Charlie yawns. – And so on.

Drowned in so much information, Emily finally loses hope of a lifeline.

– But why me?

– You'll sit with her for the whole operation," the neurosurgeon begins to lose patience. – What don't you understand?

Johnson makes a mental note: one of the two Clarks is definitely annoyed with her.

– As a pageant host for one," Charlie smiles. – You need to talk to her and make her listen. She knows you, so we get rid of unnecessary stress and emotional strain on an already overloaded brain.

– But…" Emily looks up. – But I don't know her at all. I was just doing a background check. I'm not sure that I…

Clark-who thinks she's an idiot-waved her hand, silencing her.

– I don't want to hear it," she cuts him off. – That's your job. Or can't you handle it?

Emily is tempted to mutter something like: Actually, it is the job of a neurologist or a psychiatrist or an attending physician, but not of a nurse, who is not related to the patient – but she just nods silently.

After all, it's not like they're going to eat her.

Well, at once.

* * *

When Emily slips into the nurses' room at the end of the day, she feels worse than sick: her legs ache from the unaccustomed running around all over the floors, her head buzzes with thoughts, and her hands, which are now and then administering injections and shots, start trembling treacherously at the end of the twelve-hour shift.

She never got a chance to eat or even drink tea; all she could manage was a couple of sips of water from the coolers, and then she had to run again. Higgins must have thought she was assigned to him, so he kept her busy, both with files and with patients. He would appear stealthily, disappear quickly, and then loom up behind her again, repeating that time was of the essence.

Melissa diverted from her business and sat down next to her on the stiff bench, looking exhausted, too – except her shift was smoothly turning into a night shift.

Well, there's at least one person in the world worse off than she is.

– What's up, Johnson, rough day?

Emily leans her back against the cold metal of the locker and nods, pulling the studs out of her head. The back of her head immediately begins to whine.

– What's to come.

Melissa claps her on the shoulder, is silent for a minute, and then gets up and walks out without saying a word.

Emily changes as quickly as her tired body will allow; she searches in vain for a hair band, but finds none, and decides to leave her tangled, curly hair this way: it is unlikely that anyone will notice her.

Olivia – still vivacious and full of energy – again fails to notice her, and Emily leaves the hospital for Whitechapel. At eight o'clock at night, the street is crowded, with couples and companies lounging on benches, music blaring from cafes and bars across the street, and people trying to cross the street in the wrong place, hurrying to the subway.

Emily adjusts her bag, breathes in the London air and walks slowly toward the crosswalk across from Turner Street.

– Hey, do you need a lift?

She turns around-more reflexively than interested-and sees two figures running out the front door behind her: one in ripped jeans and an acid-green leather jacket, the other skinny, tall, throwing a small leather backpack over her shoulder.

– I'm on mine," a woman's voice came over her.

– Does she still drive? – Laughter in response. – Maybe you should get a scooter.

– Fuck you," the woman replies laconically.

– After you, sister!

She tries to say something back, but the sound of the engine starting and the momentary screeching of the tires interrupt her; the woman's shoulders slump tiredly.

She walks forward seven meters – a little more, and she will be at Johnson's side – and then she flicks the alarm, and the dark blue MINI Cooper flashes its headlights; a minute more, and the roof moves back, obeying an invisible command.

That's the car they were asking about, does it drive?!

Emily sighs enviously again – what could be better than rushing through the London highways in a convertible after a long day at work…?

The light of a passing car illuminates the face of a stranger for a moment, and Emily is surprised to recognize her as Clark.

Without knowing why, Johnson stands and watches until the car disappears in the distance; only then, on her way down to the subway, she smiles to herself: it's a good thing she ended up in neurology after all.

Maybe this is her tiny chance to get better.

The next two days pass all too quickly – both the night and day shifts are devoted entirely to the emergency room: Emily hasn't really figured it out, but some major accident outside the city has thrown her schedule off, turning it into a 24-hour shift. For almost twenty hours she relentlessly bandages, washes, stitches, and injections, filling out thousands of papers at the same time. Nothing is heard from neurology – either they have forgotten about her, or the date of surgery has not yet been set. Johnson hears from the ear that the operation in a deaf boy is going well – but does not pay attention to it: is not enough deaf young men all over the hospital?

By morning, Emily no longer knows where anyone is, doing her job on autopilot, and then, collapsing with exhaustion, she crawls to her locker, where she somehow pulls off her white coat, crumples it into a ball, and throws it on the tin floor.

Nothing, Johnson thinks, in two weekends she will have washed it three times and ironed it four times.

Somehow the fact that she has had to work so hard, as if for an entire shift, makes her angry; but this anger is not bright flashes or flashes of thunder, no; rather a humming and gray longing for calm.

Melissa puts her hand on her shoulder, encouragingly, saying that everything will be all right; but Emily does not react: it seems that if you put a pulse oximeter on her, it will show solid zeros.

And dots.

Mel says:

– You got off easy, Sarah's got three in there – all on her hands.

An outsider would have thought it was children, but Emily knows that one of her colleagues has had three deaths. Not that death scares her – in hospitals, death is always wandering the halls looking for its own room – but it must be a stressful time to lose your mind.

Or not.

Already as she walks away, slipping past Olivia, the perpetually charged battery from the front desk, she hears her holler.

And, fixing a mop of curly, perfectly coiffed blond hair, she smiles and hands Emily a form folded in half:

– Dr. Harmon said to tell you he's expecting you in the operating room tomorrow.

She doesn't seem to have two days off.

* * *

Emily is embarrassed to admit, but she's never been in a real surgery. No, of course, college internships meant attendance, but it was one thing to be in the operating room with a supervisor, another to be in the operating room with doctors like that.