Читать книгу Night Theater - Vikram Paralkar - Страница 13

FIVE

THE LIGHTS IN THE operating room flickered on. The faintest trace of formaldehyde still hung in the air. Glazed tiles with bluish veins covered the walls to a height of four feet. Many were chipped and broken. Despite the pharmacist’s regular scrubbing, grime had settled into the grout, and the paint on the wall above, once a shiny white, was now blistered with green geographies of mold.

A loop of sturdy metal hung from the plastered ceiling. The large tungsten reflector lamp that was intended to hang from it had never been delivered, vanishing, like so many things, into the bureaucratic ether. The room was lit instead by a fluorescent tube mounted high on one of the walls, and by two tall Anglepoise lamps that the surgeon himself had purchased. Together they cast a modest illumination, suitable for minor procedures such as the suturing of shallow cuts or the extraction of glass shards, but certainly not for any real surgery. Only a lunatic would suggest doing anything here in the middle of the night.

These last few years, the surgeon had wondered if he had the right to operate at all any more. With a well-lit surgical field, he might still have trusted his skills. But in this room, where lamps cast shadows, concealing more than they exposed, every nerve or blood vessel or loop of bowel could hide in a dark corner and conspire to brush against his scalpel’s edge. It was impossible to operate safely here. Inflamed appendices, gall bladders, bowel obstructions—he sent them all to the city hospitals. What did he have to offer anyway? No nurse, no blood bank, no light. If a patient had to die, she would die from her disease, not from his surgery.

A glass cabinet on the wall housed his instruments—relics of his past. It was the pharmacist’s job to keep them sterilized and bundled in thick green cloth. Their shine was rarely marred by use. The surgeon would just unwrap the green wombs and sort through his collection, arrange his tools by size and type, hold them up to the light one by one as though approving them for surgery, until he could no longer ignore the absurdity of this farce.

“These need to be autoclaved,” he would say, and drop them back on the tray.

“Yes, Saheb.”

The instruments were sterilized far more often than they were used, but the pharmacist never complained. She would just wrap them back in the squares of cloth, pack them into fenestrated metal boxes, set them in the autoclave drum, and wait while the machine steamed and whistled. Then she would extract the contents with sterile gloves and stack them back in the glass cabinet until the surgeon felt the need to inspect them again. Because of this pointless routine, all the instruments in the cabinet were always ready for surgery. And they were ready now.

Still, it was just a humble set of implements—basic tools for mundane surgeries, nothing very specialized. The dead seemed to think him a magician, with mystical devices and superhuman powers. How many disappointments was he destined to inflict on them?

And what agonies? The surgeon had worried about this since the beginning. Would they feel pain? He had no equipment for anesthesia—no propofol, no thiopental. And even if he did, how could the drugs work on the dead without a bloodstream? He might have to crack their chests open without the basic luxury of lowering them into slumber. Did they understand that?

To these concerns, the teacher said, “Our wounds don’t hurt. We don’t even feel them. It’s part of our state. We won’t feel any pain for the rest of this night.”

“And what about tomorrow morning?”

“We’ll have life and blood at dawn, Saheb, so I assume we’ll also have pain. When that happens, we will endure it. We’ll endure whatever we have to.”

The surgeon knocked on the door of the pharmacist’s house. The pharmacist stood at his side, wringing her hands as though trying to scrub them clean of some unseen stain.

Her husband opened the door. “What is it, Saheb? You here? At this time? Is there a problem?”

“Yes, a problem. You could call it that.”

“Go get Saheb a glass of water,” the man said to his wife, but his eyes didn’t leave the surgeon.

“No need for water.” The surgeon waved his hand. “This will seem like a strange request.” It struck him, after he’d spoken, that these were the same words with which the dead had begun explaining their predicament.

“Saheb?”

“Walk up the hill with me.”

The clinic sat on the hillock like a lantern. They walked in silence past the houses and huts of the village, and then, once they had started climbing, the surgeon spoke in slow, careful words, some of which he had to dig out of a vocabulary he’d never dreamed he’d use. The windows of the clinic seemed to grow brighter with every step. The moon had not risen, and it was as though the foot of the hillock were the rim of the world, with only nothingness beyond it. When they reached the top, the surgeon found himself short of breath, as if he’d hiked a great distance, and he stopped speaking.

A few yards from the entrance, the pharmacist’s husband squatted on his heels and slapped his hands to his cheeks. A string of fearful questions poured out of his mouth. What good could possibly come of this? The only reason ghosts ever came back was to harass the living. What if they wanted to possess them all? Haunt them and drive them mad? Maybe even kill them?

The surgeon, exhausted by his own incomprehension, offered answers that barely convinced even himself. What right had he to the allegiances of these two? It humiliated him to be placed in this position, but how else would he get through the night? The pharmacist just knelt at her husband’s side and avoided the surgeon’s eyes.

The man would run, and he would take her with him, the surgeon felt sure. It was futile to hope for anything different. And why indeed should the man not do as he wished? If corpses could walk, what remained to guide any other action?

A silhouette moved in the clinic’s light. The teacher’s son was leaning against the entrance. With the bulb at his back, his outline threw a long shadow across the bright strip that stretched from the clinic door, out over the grass. Behind everything was the sky—an inky spread with pinpricks of white. When the surgeon’s eyes met his, the boy inched back into the corridor, and his face fell in the bulb’s light. He looked guilty, as if he knew he didn’t belong there, in this place and this world. The boy’s parents appeared behind him. “What are you doing here? Saheb told us to wait inside,” said the teacher. He cast a nervous glance at the pharmacist’s husband, then at the surgeon, and began to lead his son away, but the surgeon gestured for them to stay.

The pharmacist clutched her husband’s arm. “There they are, there they are.”

“Yes, there they are,” said the surgeon. “The dead. They’re here to regain their own lives, not to steal yours.”

The pharmacist’s husband slumped back. He rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, trying perhaps, as the surgeon had tried not that long ago, to scrub away the hallucination. The surgeon himself, observing the dead for the first time from outside his clinic, was struck by how like the living they looked, standing there surrounded by bulbs and benches and discolored paint, as though the corridor were the place where all the entities of this world and the next could blend together seamlessly. Nothing more than a doorframe separated the dead from the living now, and who could say in that moment who stood on which side?

The pharmacist rose, helped her husband up. The surgeon looked away, tried not to eavesdrop as they murmured to each other. Nothing he could say would accomplish more than the sight of the dead themselves.

“If you think this has to be done,” said the pharmacist’s husband, his lips a dull white, “we trust you.”

“If you want to leave, go now.”

“You have done more for us, for the villagers, than anyone else, Saheb. We are in your debt.”

“If you want to go, I understand,” repeated the surgeon, perversely hoping they would take the opportunity to fly. “Really, I understand.”

“We can’t leave you here. We’ll do whatever you tell us. The rest is in God’s hands.”

The surgeon nodded. It was the most he could manage by way of gratitude. His face felt permanently carved in a grave expression of foreboding. He turned and made for the clinic.

The teacher came up to him at the steps. “I was wondering, Saheb, if you think it’s wise to involve more people in this. The fewer who know, the better, don’t you think?”

“There won’t be any more,” said the surgeon. “And without these two to help me, you might as well prepare for your second death.”

Responsible now for both the living and the dead, he dragged himself up into the corridor. The teacher appeared to have more to say, but the surgeon was in no mood to hear it.