The third night of the hurricane brought widespread power outages and gales that lifted cattle from the ground. On the competing news channels, weathermen called the storm by completely different names, hoping that if they could guess its true identity, maybe they could beg for it to stop. So far, viewers knew the hurricane as Sir Rick, Lady Penelope, Priscilla, Carlotta, Mohammed, or Eduardo Faustino Montenegro-Montalbán (hijo).
On Canal 6, the crew lit candles and announced a forced, awkward moment of silence. Its new meteorologist, a freakishly tall, skinny post-teen, peeked out of one eye at his colleagues’ breasts. Canal 7 played submitted home movies of the destruction—mudslides wrestled trees from their roots, concrete houses from their foundations, and children from their mothers’ arms. In an especially morbid video Jorge Gamboa commanded be shown on a continuous loop (he’d run out of rye and moved onto rum), a young man from the canton of Upala gave two thumbs-up and dived from the tall branch of a ceiba tree into a swollen river that had swallowed half his village. But before he could hit the surface of rushing water, a detached, octagonal stop sign came flying into the shot, bisecting the young man at the waist. Jorge Gamboa whispered into his microphone that nothing was more tragic than easily preventable irony.
In his office, Dr. Gallegos gathered his belongings and prepared to leave the hospital. He had purposely stayed until nightfall, knowing he could avoid a large part of San José’s outgoing traffic. He had recently returned to his office from the hospice ward on the third floor. The electricity had gone in and out all evening. By his calculation, several of his patients on life support had been resurrected six times since nightfall. Tomorrow morning he would wonder if one could rack up frequent-flier miles in the afterlife. For the moment, though, he felt disgusted by the hospital’s busted backup generator, and the board of directors’ unwavering refusal to repair it. In every board meeting, he brought it to attention, and every meeting shot down. But parked outside his office window, a neat line of alternating black and white BMWs glinted next to the hospital’s main entrance. A row of expensive piano keys. His own top-of-the-line white BMW completing the keyboard.
“Easily preventable irony,” he muttered.
Relishing his own hypocrisy, he slumped in his leather chair and opened the patient file that had been troubling him all day—a manila folder labeled TERESA CEPEDA VALVERDE.
“Doña,” he said aloud. “¿What will happen now?”
He reexamined the MRI results delivered this morning. The multiple scans revealed what resembled a fried egg in the patient’s brain, dead center in her temporal lobe. The mass’s dark yolk meant tissue had been necrotizing, and surrounding it, a treacherous white cloud of anaplastic cells exploded in all directions. These cells would devour the lobe, spreading to the other parts of her brain if left unsupervised. Without a biopsy, he couldn’t know the tumor’s exact type; but having worked so long in this godforsaken government hospital, he had seen perhaps hundreds of these fruit-size tumors too late—malevolent cherries, oranges, and pomegranates all degenerated into the brain and shut it down like a factory. Machine by machine, cell by cell.
Glioblastoma, he decided. A tumor uncommon in a woman, but perfectly plausible considering her age. That factor—her body’s sixty years and its trembling frailty—would make a biopsy almost impossible. Observing the menace of the tumor’s halo, he deduced its age to be about three months. Having had no treatment so far, he knew that should have been her life expectancy by now.
They would have to act quickly if they were to prolong what fleeting life Doña Teresa had left. Still, her age worried him. Radiation or chemotherapy might end up killing her more quickly than the cancer. Removal of the tissue was out of the question. High-grade gliomas grew back religiously. Mala hierba nunca muere, his mother would have said. And well aware of public health-care bureaucracy, he wouldn’t be able to concretize an appointment for a month. A month they desperately needed.
With the tumor reaching so far into Doña Teresa’s temporal lobe, Dr. Gallegos expected the onset of seizures. Its rapidly multiplying cells would rewire electrical currents, affecting sensory information and motor functions. The cancer would claw deep into the recesses of her memories, rewriting them—or erasing them altogether.
Very soon, she would be a woman without a past, a present, or a future.
Reviewing the notes he’d jotted down, he decided on symptomatic therapy in the meantime. Lamotrigine for the seizures and dexamethasone to reduce cranial swelling. But time and the health-care system were against them (as was usually the case). He considered writing, filling, and delivering the prescriptions himself tonight. But checking her address, he realized Barrio Ávila was too far to make the trip during a hurricane.
Across the avenue from the hospital, palm trees succumbed to the storm, crushing Japanese motorcycles and stands selling lighters and Coca-Cola. A thick wall of lightning closed in on San José. Jagged bolts crashed down on fast-food restaurant signs. Static traveled through the rain, ensuring that every drop touched stranded pedestrians’ skin with stinging, disconcerting shocks.