—Can you feel this? she asked. I’m pressing on your cyst.
He felt something, but he said no. He didn’t want to be oversedated. He wanted to feel a version of the pain, however muted.
—Good. You ready? she asked.
He said he was.
—I will now begin, she said.
He created mental pictures to correspond to the pressures he felt, the sounds and movement of shadows above him. There was a series of small cuts, it seemed. The movement of Dr. Hakem’s arm told him this much. After each, with her other hand, she was dabbing the area with some kind of sponge. He felt it pushing against him. Cut, dab, cut, dab. In the background, the humming of the gas man, and from above, the music of what seemed to be Edith Piaf.
—Okay, I’ve made the incisions, Dr. Hakem said. Now you might feel some pulling as I extract the cyst. They can be sticky.
And like that, whatever tool she was holding grabbed at something within him and pulled. His chest tightened. The pressure was extreme. He pictured a hook of some kind entering his back, grabbing at taffy, trying to pull it, snap it loose. He had never had anything removed from his body, he realized. This was new and was not natural. My God, he thought. How strange to have hands inside me. Tools grabbing, scraping. My God. Alan was hollow, his body a cavity filled with wet things, a messy array of bags and tubes, everything soaked in blood. My God. My God. The scraping continued. The pulling. He felt a cloth catching rivulets that had traveled down his neck, toward the bed.
If he got out of this alive and unharmed, Alan vowed to be better. He would have to be stronger. His mother had tried to rally his strength, inspire him. She would read him passages from the diary of some distant relative, a woman living in the woods of what was now western Massachusetts. She had watched her husband and two of her children murdered by Indians, and had herself been abducted. She lived with her captors for almost a year until being returned to her people. She was reunited with her daughter, the only survivor of the attack, and they commenced to build a thriving dairy farm over six hundred acres of Vermont. She survived a heavy winter where the snow collapsed her roof, a beam falling on her leg, which was soon amputated. She survived a smallpox plague that took her daughter, who had just gotten engaged. The fiancé moved onto the farm and ran it when she died, at ninety-one. Would you rather be here, now, Alan’s mother liked to say, or abducted and living in the woods with one leg? She had no tolerance for whining, for any sort of malaise in the midst of the bounty of their suburban life. Forty million dead during World War II, she would say. Fifteen million during the war before. What was it that you were complaining about?
Alan could hear conversations in various languages. A bit of Italian murmuring to his right. Arabic chatter near his feet. And still the cheerful humming from the Chinese anesthesiologist. It was curious that they all put up with it, his demented, frenetic tune, but no one said a word to him. The anesthesiologist seemed to be in his own world, pleased with himself and only glancingly involved in the surgery at hand.
—I’ll be going deeper now, Alan, Dr. Hakem said.
The motion was now that of an ice cream vendor digging, twisting round, pulling. Then more dabbing, wiping. Alan imagined his blood rising upward, spreading across his back, free at last.
He could hear Dr. Hakem breathing, laboring as she pulled and dabbed. There were a series of snapping sounds, as if the gummy substance inside him was resisting all but the most forceful extraction. Alan considered the possibility that her silence was evidence that she had found something. Underneath the benign mass of lipoma, she had found something. Something black and fate-changing.
Alan tried to send his mind elsewhere. He thought of the sea, the tent, what the young people were doing. He pictured them being told of his death here, on this table in this room of blue cinderblocks. What would they say? They would say he liked long walks on the beach. That he liked to sleep in.
He thought of Kit. Kit alone without him. This would be more troubling. Ruby needed a counterweight. He had taken Kit away a year ago, when she and her mother had been fighting. He took her out of school and they’d gone to Cape Canaveral to watch the Shuttle. There were only a few more flights.
The day before the launch, they got a tour of all the facilities. The mood among the NASA people was all over the place — somber, bitter, loose, defensive. A promotional video insisted that NASA was not just putting billions of dollars into rockets and shooting them into space.
Their main guide was a man, just turned eighty, named Norm. He had been with NASA since 1956. He got on the bus, cane in hand, and sat down in front, picked up the mic, and with a deep Texan accent he said, his voice cracking, —This will be my last tour, and I’m glad to be here with you.
Kit talked all the while, which she did when they were together. There were hours on buses, to and from the space center, to and from the launch-viewing site, maybe ten hours together on that bus, and they covered everything. She talked about the crazy roommate, the beautiful but uneventful campus, and how she needed to find some friends soon because she felt rootless and untethered. Alan tried to reassure her the same way he always had.
—I’m the eye in the sky, he said. I can see where you started and where you’re going and it looks perfectly fine from up here. He had used this metaphor since middle school. You’re almost there. Almost there.
Norm took them to the building where mechanics repaired and prepared the shuttles, pre- and post-flight. The Atlantis was there, being readied for its last launch, the last of all launches. There were bustling tours being given all around, but Norm was somber.
—I can’t do these tours much longer, he said. I don’t want to be the guy saying, ‘We used to do this, we used to do that.’
Most of the NASA employees they met that weekend would soon be out of jobs. They were not the stuffy technocrats Alan expected. No, they were folksy, quick to muse, to drift off while talking about a certain flight, the weather a certain day when the shuttle shot through a hole in the clouds.
Something pierced Alan’s chest. It felt like a railroad tie, thick and blunt. His body tensed.
—I’m sorry Alan, Dr. Hakem said.
The pain dulled. The movements returned to a certain rhythm, dependable in its order. There would be a scooping, a scraping, a pulling, then a moment of relief when Alan guessed some extraction had been made. Then the dab of the sponge, a pause, and more excavation.
It was interesting being this, a cadaver, an experiment. Who said man is matter? He felt like something less than that.
At night, in the Orlando hotel, he and Kit ate from the vending machines and watched movies, and tried not to talk about Ruby, or the future with Ruby, the past with Ruby, the wounds of Ruby.
In the morning they took a bus to Banana Beach, the closest site from which to view the launch. Everything there, everything associated with NASA, was stripped down, humble. The fences were rusted. The pavement was cracked. But then, across the water, there would be a spaceship leaving the Earth with manmade thunder.
While waiting for the launch they’d met an actual astronaut, Mike Massimino, there with his daughter. He was funny, candid, self-effacing. He’d been up in two shuttles, including the first one after the Columbia disintegrated on reentry. He looked like an astronaut, clean-cut and silver-haired and sturdy in his baby-blue jumpsuit, but he was taller than average, probably six-two, with a Roman nose and a thick Long Island accent. He talked about spacewalking to fix the Hubble telescope, about the eighteen sunsets and sunrises in any twenty-four-hour period up there, how it made it hard for certain religions — morning prayers, afternoon, evening, very difficult. But it’s good for a Catholic, he said. They just want you to check in once a week or so.
Kit laughed. He talked about how the stars, seen from space, don’t twinkle, that without the atmosphere, they’re just perfect points of light. How his crew, during a rare hour of downtime, had turned off all the lights in the shuttle, to better see them. NASA was ful
l of romantics.
Now Dr. Hakem was reaching further. Alan winced, his body jerked.
—Alan? Her voice concerned, surprised.
—I’m fine, he said.
—I’m going to ask Dr. Poritzkova to help steady you.
Alan grunted in assent, and soon he felt what seemed to be the entirety of a man’s forearm on his head. The weight was great, far too much for the task at hand. Alan tried to shift underneath, to relieve some pressure, to no avail.
Dr. Hakem continued to scrape and pull, and the pain increased. What kind of idiot asks for less anaesthetic? It was too late to correct the situation. He would endure. He had to push through this. His father would laugh at his discomfort, and would want to show him the shrapnel still in his lower back, sixty years after the war. Alan could never escape the difference between what he had or would ever see or endure and what his father had. He could not even that score.
—Alan? Are you okay?
He grunted that he was fine.
And now he saw a night sky. Maybe he was dying. He was dying to the sound of the mad Asian humming. What was that tune?
The pressure on his head seemed to increase. The Russian wanted to make a point, it seemed. Let him push. Alan could handle this. He forced himself to disassociate, to leave the body under assault.
Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we’d lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn’t we? Was that the answer to Ruby?
—Still with us, Alan?
—Yes, he said to the floor.
The forearm pressure increased. It was too much.
—Can you tell the man pushing me down to ease up? he asked.
And the pressure was released, the man making a sound of surprise. As if he had not known what he was doing.
The relief was great.
There had been delays with previous launches. People would come from all over the world and the launch would not happen for days, weeks. But this time, Alan and Kit were there, on the aluminum risers with a thousand others, watching the countdown and expecting it to pause. Expecting it to be postponed. We had made so many mistakes, the countdown seemed to say, we cannot make another. But then it continued. He held Kit’s hand. If this happens, he thought, I am a good father. If I show her this, I have done something.
The countdown continued. When it dropped under 10, then 9, he was sure it would happen but could not believe it. Then 1, then 0. Then the shuttle, miles away and across the water, rose silently. Not a sound. Just a yellow light propelling it upward, and it was not until it seemed halfway to the clouds that the air cracked open.
—Dad.
—Sonic boom.
When the Shuttle disappeared through the canopy of white clouds, Alan cried, and Kit smiled seeing him cry, and afterward he looked frantically for Massimino, to offer himself to anything he needed. I sold bikes, he would say. I sold capitalism to communists. Let me sell the Shuttle. I will help you get to Mars. Give me something to do.
But he didn’t find Massimino. The parking lot afterward was crowded with everyone so happy, so proud, so many people crying and knowing that it was over, and the highways back would be choked, and it would take all day to get back to their hotels.
—Alan?
He tried to say yes, but it came out as a wheeze.
—We’re sewing you up now. Everything went well. We got it all.
XXX.
AN HOUR LATER he was in the same room where he had undressed, and he was retrieving his clothes from the plastic bag he’d stuffed them into. As he was tying his shoes, Dr. Hakem entered the room.
—Well, that was a bit harder than I expected.
She sat down on the stool opposite him.
—It’s tough stuff. Do you feel better now?
—How do you mean?
—Knowing it’s a lipoma and nothing else.
—I guess. You’re sure it wasn’t stuck to the spinal cord, anything like that?
—No. It’s had no impact on any nerves at all.
Alan was relieved, but then his confusion deepened. If there was no tumor attached to his spine, dragging him to these recent depths, then what was the explanation?
—How do you feel? Any pain?
Alan felt feeble, dizzy, disoriented. The pain was sharp.
—I feel good, he said. How are you?
She laughed. —I’m fine, she said, and stood.
But Alan didn’t want her to leave. It felt important to him to keep her close a few minutes more.
—The other doctors seemed to really respect you.
—Well, it’s a good group here. Most of them, anyway.
—Do you do more operations now?
—Excuse me?
—Today. Do you do more of these, or…?
—You’re full of questions, Alan.
He liked hearing her say his name.
—I just have a few consultations, she said. No more surgeries.
He looked at her fingernails, rough and short.
—Is the job stressful? he asked lamely.
He expected her to leave, finished with his inane chatter, but she softened and sat back on her stool. Maybe this was part of the doctor-patient relationship, something she realized she had to do.
—Oh, it used to be. When I did the ER. Now, only sometimes.
—When?
Again her face seemed to say, momentarily, Are we really still talking? —When? I guess when I think I’m at the edge of my abilities.
—Not with a lipoma.
She smiled. —No, no. More like a tracheotomy. I won’t do a tracheotomy. I made some mistakes on one of those when I was a resident. And I get nervous generally. When it gets too bad, I spiral.
—You spiral.
—Just little spirals of self-doubt. You have these?
How far to go? He could go on for days.
—I do, he said, happy with his restraint.
—Do you need anything, by the way? For the pain?
—No, I’m fine.
—You have aspirin? Tylenol?
—I do.
—Use it for the swelling at least.
She stood to go. He hopped off the bed.
—I’m very thankful, he said, extending his hand.
She shook it. —Well, you’re welcome.
He looked into her eyes, granting himself a moment there. There was something tender around the corners, a downward line that said she had seen terrible things and was prepared to see more.
—I wanted to say that I think you’re very strong, he said. I know it can’t be easy doing what you’re doing, here in the Kingdom.
Her posture softened. —Thank you, Alan. That means a lot.
—So do I see you again? he asked.
—Excuse me?
—A follow-up.
—Oh. Sure, she said. She seemed to be recovering from a different train of thought. In about ten days, we can take another look at it. Make sure the stitches have dissolved, all that. If anything comes up in the meantime, you can call me.
She handed him a business card. On it she’d written her phone number. Then she backed out of the room on tiptoes, as if he were asleep and she was afraid to wake him.
XXXI.
EACH OF THE THREE days after his operation, Alan found himself awake at the required time, able to eat and dress in time for the shuttle, which he took to the site with Brad and Cayley and Rachel. They all waited each day, their presentation ready, and the young people passed the time on their laptops, or playing cards, or sleeping. Yousef phoned a few times from the mountains, where he remained, sure that his absence from Jeddah was doing some good. The threats were becoming rarer. Alan urged him to stay until the henchmen assumed he was dead or had left the country. And each day at five, Alan and the young people boarded the shuttle and went back to the hotel, where Alan ate and slept without struggle. Amid these days, though, new things happene
d.
One day, after spending an afternoon on the shore, Alan returned to the tent to find the three young people asleep, all on the long white couch, this time in a new configuration. Brad and Rachel were on one end, she draped on him like a thrown coat. Cayley’s head lay on the opposite end, her hands together, childlike, under her cheek, her legs entwined with Brad’s. He chose not to imagine what had happened or what might happen, and decided not to wake them.
One night in the hotel, knowing it was a terrible idea but he had nothing to lose, Alan emailed Dr. Hakem, thanking her. In a turn of events he thought impossible, she wrote back.
Dear Alan,
I was as happy as you to know that the lipoma was only that. I was sure, but not without a lingering question or two. Now that you are healthy and not facing imminent death, I hope I see you around Jeddah one of these days. I hope knowing you are not dying of a malignant tumor has your spirits high!
Ha ha,
Dr. Zahra Hakem
Alan spent the better part of the next day by the sea thinking of a response, something smart and witty and which might nudge things further. This, too, he assumed impossible.
Dear Dr. Hakem,
My spirits are high indeed — maybe too high? I’m feeling a little dizzy. The cause is mysterious, but I have felt a strange, new, lump in my back. I’m no doctor, but it feels like a rubber glove. Is there a chance you left one in me? Sometimes people leave things like gloves with someone they like, in hopes that the retrieval will provide an excuse to see that someone again.
Yours,
Alan
He knew it was bold, but as he wrote the words, he grew strangely sure that she wanted to see him again, and he was correct.
Dear Alan,
I actually might have left something. I’m thinking a sponge? Maybe part of a snack I ate during the surgery? We were all snacking, so I can’t be sure. I think I need to see you again. Perhaps out of the hospital? We don’t want to worry your insurers.