Alexander Bruno had been hospitalized in Oakland as a child, for burns. He’d spent almost a month there, including six days in intensive care.
Since that time, he’d never stayed overnight in a hospital, apart from his adventure at Charité. He’d barely entered a doctor’s office. The helplessness he endured now, in recovery from his meningioma’s resection, had formerly seemed to him purely a condition of childhood. It mingled in his imagination with his mother’s reality zones—the Marin cult, his and June’s tiny apartment in the Berkeley flats, the plaster-casting workshop on San Pablo Avenue, even the homeless shelter where he’d visited her after he’d begun living with the waiters at Chez Panisse. Now he seemed to have been force-shifted by sense memory back to that time.
Where was Bruno, now? The answer to his unasked question had come repeatedly, in voices bearing accents Filipino, Thai, and Mexican, voices now sympathetic, now impassive and hurried: “You’re in the hospital, sweetie. Rest.” The voices might add, “That’s right, your face is covered, you’re on a ventilator, but stop touching it or we’ll have to tie you.” Or: “You breathe good now. No need talk.” He’d been informed of his status until he believed it and could recover the belief upon waking anew. It was then he began to knit it together with the memory of arriving at the hospital and placing himself in their care. The chubby, vivacious Scottish woman, who’d joked to him about offering him a cocktail as she plunged a syringe not into Bruno’s flesh but into the tangle of plastic tubing taped across his hand.
What he couldn’t conjugate was what he somehow recalled of the time between—between his intake, that was, and his immobilization now. Those events comprised a film reeling on a screen in the dark, glitchy with blood and feedback, from which he had to avert his awareness. And so, under the night of his bandages, seduced by the resemblance of one set of beeping, whining bedside machines to another, so long ago, and dislocated by blindness from any purchase in time and space, Bruno lapsed gratefully into a trance of memory.
•
He’d been burned by a pot of hot coffee. It had spilled on him while he sat at the breakfast nook of the apartment on Chestnut Street, the summer he turned eleven, just before the explosion of his puberty. Not coffee, actually, for the top of the Chemex was full of boiling water that hadn’t trickled through the grounds and into the bottom of its hourglass form—it was the water that had seared him when the pot tipped.
June, who’d poured the kettle into the top of the coffeepot, was destined to award herself the guilt; who was there to contradict her? Bruno, however, blamed himself: The pot had been placed on a wooden trivet, shaped like a turtle, with four wooden balls for feet, one of which had come off. The trivet had been the product of a fifth-grade shop class. Once finished, it had struck Bruno as a gift his mother would cherish, despite the abject disinterest he’d felt in the tasks of cutting the turtle template, applying the feet, and a glossy laminate. He wasn’t the sort of child to come home with stacks of drawings, parental valentines, glaze-globbed ashtrays. The turtle’s foot had come off by virtue of Bruno’s shitty gluing job—he’d done this to himself.
While the grounds belched harmlessly onto the plate of toast before him, the boiling water arced and splashed. It scalded Bruno along one bare forearm, his chest, stomach, and groin. It soaked into the Jockey underwear that had been his only sleeping costume the night before, in an apartment lacking air-conditioning. His mother, after one shocked interval of disbelief, had moved with swift efficiency, stripping off the underwear and plunging Bruno into a cold, shallow bathtub. Tatters of his skin floated gently free in bands at his inner thighs, where the underwear’s thick seams had held the boiling water against him for crucial instants longer. These memories, and of her transportation of him to the emergency room, were kaleidoscopic, not sustained. Though Bruno must have been screaming, he recalled the sight of his own flesh unspooling from his body dispassionately, as if a page in a photo album. It was his weeks of recovery in Alta Bates hospital, laden with tedium and wonder, that had become a personal experience. He’d had his first orgasm there.
He’d been placed first in the ICU, under a sheet tented by an iron framework to prevent contact with his damaged skin. His burns were largely first- or second-degree, over half his skin surface. The third-degree burns were limited to those bands along his inner thighs and a small patch of his hairless pubis, where the underwear’s fly had similarly trapped the boiling water. His penis had escaped damage—no miracle, since it was at this point barely larger than a hazelnut. At the start, though, the distinction between these burns and the others seemed moot, given how the second-degree wounds began peeling like accelerated sunburn. In the first twenty-four hours Bruno was in danger for his life, he understood later, from dehydration and the risk of uncontrollable infection across so much scalded flesh. Gloved hands smeared him nearly up to his neck in gel, while intravenous lines flooded his veins with nutrient fluid.
Bruno spent the next days under that tented sheet returning to himself. “Hospital” turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts. These women, mostly matronly blacks, treated the burned boy with affectionate exasperation, as an object blockading their efficiency and a confidant in their war on the obtuse and elusive doctors.
After a five-day stand in the ICU, his crisis passed, and Bruno had been moved to a quiet, ugly ward, into a room with an empty bed for a companion. The rate of attention slowed to a crawl, days yawning into chasms. Bruno succumbed to boredom, but there was something else as well. Though June appeared at his bedside, he was more often alone. His school friends weren’t allowed to visit, if they’d even learned of his accident during summer break. The nurses weren’t interested in him, and Bruno’s burn injuries kept him bedridden, incapable of exploring the ward. Daytime television—soap operas, talk shows, game shows—was useless to fill the void. For the first time, it felt, Bruno was away from the babble of other children, or of June and her friends or boyfriends, who struck him suddenly as no different from children. With the toppling of the coffeepot he’d lucked out of his regular state, that of the intrusion of other voices into his mind.
By the accident of his injury, at eleven, Bruno had floated loose of the prison of his childhood, like an inmate of an open-roofed cell swimming to freedom in a flood.
He heard the talk the nurses conducted over his head, and the muttered remarks of the doctors as they glanced at the clipboard attached to the bed frame at his feet. None of it was directed at Bruno’s attention, nor was it concealed. Bruno’s invisibility at the center of this set of actions freed him to perceive his own outline, possibly for the first time. Emptied of his involuntary self, Bruno could refill the container with whatever interested him. He could manage the thoughts and feelings of others, those things that had formerly overridden his boundary, and manage which of his own thoughts and feelings leaked out for exhibition. He only had to understand his curse as a gift to control it. And, unlike a curse, a gift could be handed back or abandoned.
A nun came to his bedside. She seemed old to Bruno, at least by comparison to his mother, though the nun would probably only have been in her forties, he’d think later. She wore jeans and white tennis shoes and a cotton blouse with her brown-and-white habit, and a large pendant cross at her breasts. The nun wanted to know where his parents were, and Bruno explained that he had only a mother, and that she was “working”—he didn’t know what June was doing with her days while he was in the hospital. Based on how she spent them in Bruno’s company, no guess was safe.
The nun asked if she could sit and read to him, but when it turned out she had the Bible in mind, Bruno asked whether they could play cards instead. She located a deck and they played gin rummy. At first she let him win. He didn’t guess this; he read her mind. Then he deliberately angered her by pointing it out, and she tried to win, and he beat her anyway. It was with the nun that Bruno first experimented with the control and limitation of his boundary. He’d detected the nun’s conscious intentions, and also her helpless desires, the craven and keening portion of her brain, but now he simply shuttered those out. He only wanted to know what cards she held.
When he grew bored he let the nun win a game, then said he was tired.
The same method worked on June when she visited the hospital. At first, Bruno opened to her as always. His mother was typically hectic, fearful, preening. Flirtatious with the doctors and subservient even to the nurses, situating herself automatically on the lowest rung on any available ladder, arousing Bruno’s contempt in the process. She asked repeatedly how long her son would have to remain hospitalized, and spoke openly of her fear of the mounting costs to attending doctors who even Bruno saw had no interest, nor the capacity to influence her situation. Anyway, she’d default on these bills, something Bruno knew already too—June might be the only person in the room with any doubt of it.
And then, as with the nun, Bruno simply retreated behind his own newly discovered boundary. He tuned June down, then out. In fact, he found once he had done so that it was difficult to tune her in again.
It was his encounter with the whirlpool attendant that sealed the transformation. In the last ten days of Bruno’s hospital stay he’d begun to move gingerly to the bathroom by himself instead of using the bedpan. The majority of his burns had resolved into tender new flesh, and his treatment now centered on just the small areas of third-degree burns—his inner thighs and the patch above his penis. These areas remained raw and had to be salved against infection and to prevent scars. In this regimen, once a day an attendant ferried him, by wheelchair, to a strange, seemingly desolate wing of the third floor, into a room containing a large steel whirlpool. The hydrotherapy, a doctor explained, was believed to stimulate growth of new tissue and minimize scarring. There would be scarring, this doctor and others hastened to say, despite Bruno never having asked.
The whirlpool attendant was an angry black man with a salt-and-pepper beard and no bedside manner. His lack of solicitude was so total it was a kind of electricity, an assertion; this being Oakland, the man might have been a former or current Black Panther in his time away from the hospital. Each afternoon he delivered Bruno to this room, which was several degrees warmer than the rest of the hospital, and indistinct apart from the titanic whirlpool. The attendant then stripped Bruno of his gown and seated him in the water, on a steel bench bolted across the tub’s center. Once the water was switched on, and a strong current swirled around Bruno’s body where he sat on the bench, the attendant took a chair against the far wall to count the minutes. The metal tub vibrated steadily, its noise precluding talk. Afterward Bruno found himself lifted free and laid on a paper-covered table, and his wounds were regreased with a heavy yellow balm different from that which the nurses upstairs employed.
The second day, the attendant observed Bruno watching and volunteered a comparison.
“This stuff was used on napalm cases in Vietnam. I saw it done bunch of times myself.”
He was a veteran. It wasn’t a surprise. There were so many, both black and white, haunting Berkeley and Oakland, working as school custodians and liquor store clerks, or homeless in wheelchairs like the one in which this man pushed Bruno. Bruno had met them as a small child, too, at the guru’s compound in San Rafael, men dressed as hippies who bragged of killing—a sniper’s head count, or at close quarters, one swift punch to the throat. Like these men, the attendant’s mind seethed with defiance, even as he preferred to imagine he eased through situations like a Buddha, or a jazz musician tempered to a different key and tempo than those around him. Enormous energy was involved in the man’s not understanding how much he broadcast violence at a glance.
Bruno, fascinated and terrified, said nothing.
“They didn’t use it on civilians back then, it was still an experimental thing,” the veteran continued. “Tested on the battlefield.” He then added, as kindly as might be possible for him, “It’s good stuff. Do you good.”
The attendant spoke as though he’d somehow prescribed this treatment himself, as a special favor to the boy. But no. Bruno knew no such prerogative existed. The connection of this medicine to whatever the man had witnessed during the war was either fantasy or happenstance.
Bruno, surprising himself, said, “I’m going to go there someday.” He hadn’t intended this as a provocation, let alone cruelly. He only felt that he craved destinations, anywhere far from where he was. To hear a place named was to have this desire given a focal point.
“What, Vietnam?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t know why anybody’d wanna do that.”
In fact, Bruno was destined eventually to spend many months in Ho Chi Minh City and Vung Tau. For now, the remark returned the attendant to silence, though his mind still boiled in Bruno’s direction.
Bruno’s third time in the tub, the orgasm came unbidden. His erection had been trapped between his leg and the metal seat, which vibrated when the waters spun to their peak. He’d already accustomed himself to the dreamy, amorphous feeling the seat induced, when it culminated in a pitch of sensation he couldn’t have known to bargain for. Then the magic vanished, to wonder at. Everything had happened, and nothing at all—nothing, Bruno imagined, that would have given him away, not over the grinding whir of the motorized pool. Yet when the attendant lifted Bruno free again, the man appeared to find something objectionable and applied the yellow gel roughly, with cavalier distaste.
Bruno didn’t care. He simply ceased absorbing the veteran’s surly charisma, that whole crude turmoil of envy and contempt. He blunted his own shame at exposure, or fear. Any deference toward blacks, inculcated by his mother and her circle, this he shed too. On his next visits to the whirlpool, Bruno walled himself in a silo of bliss. The game was solely between himself and the vibrating tub, while the attendant was quarantined to one side, as if sealed in plastic. Sensing his irrelevance, the man’s fits of conversation ceased. The attendant was reduced to a function of the hospital, on a par with the wheelchair and elevator.
Alexander Bruno at eleven had become exquisite.
Still waiting to be proven was what he’d become exquisite for. To what purpose or for whom, beyond himself. Yet after discharge from the hospital, returned into June’s care, to his mother’s Berkeley, and to the schoolyard of Malcolm X Elementary, Bruno was no longer subject to the unwanted migration of thoughts or feeling across his boundary of self. His gift, once discarded, was a lost toy for which he barely troubled to search. What remained was the sporadic luxury of testing another, as he’d tested the nun. Hello, can you hear me? No? The absence of reply was only a relief.
One person in—what? ten million?—might spot him in his hiding place. Well, one had, eventually. Edgar Falk. This, Bruno, lying beneath his mask of bandages now, didn’t want to think of. He thought of Falk too much. How often had Bruno rehearsed his trajectory from his exquisite isolation, the sultry implacable hauteur that had conveyed him to Chez Panisse and beyond, to his first passport and flight, to the first of so many private clubs and casino back rooms, to the night a decade ago, at White’s in London, when he’d met Falk and become exquisitely enslaved?
No. Bruno, who usually preferred never to recollect at all, now languished in memory of the years after his burn injury. Sixth grade, seventh, Berkeley High. The reminiscences Stolarsky had tried to spur—now they came freely. The changes in his body, so soon after, the wild swift attainments of height and jawline. Hair covered his pubic scar, making it irrelevant. Girls, and women, when Bruno removed his underwear, never saw what he might have feared they’d recoil from. He’d need to point out the scars to have them noticed at all, and then they gained useful sympathy. See, he’d joke, it’s like I’m wearing phantom underwear! Bruno’s easy discovery of sex was only matched by the speed with which his teen conquests curdled into ennui. He needed games with a more definite score.
Flashman? Yes, he remembered the books now. And others, traded with boys like Stolarsky as talismans: The Ginger Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. The books Bruno poached from the hippies’ shelves, from the Soup Kitchen’s free box, devastated every platitude the hippies claimed to exalt. Flashman had indeed been Bruno’s idol, for an instant, sure. Except the point was that Bruno, like Flashman, was his own idol.
Bruno floated loose of June’s orbit. The busboys and waiters he fell in with at Spenger’s and then at Chez Panisse schooled him in what he’d pretended to know already, things he’d glimpsed in books and films and from Roxy Music and Robert Palmer on MTV. Matters concerning himself and the world and how one might be induced to glide along the surface of the other. The busboys and waiters introduced him to cocaine and to the after-hours life of dining staff, in bars that closed at five and six in the morning. It was there that he’d seen his first real gamblers. He spotted them at pool tables and card games, or at the bar, trading one-upmanship in sly or obvious anecdotes. For the time being Bruno couldn’t sort the winners from the losers, and he left them alone. It occurred to him now that by present standards he’d have rated them losers, to a man.
Then again, lying here, how else to rate himself?
It was soon after escaping Spenger’s, to the more rarified atmosphere of the Gourmet Ghetto, that Bruno had come under the tutelage of Konrad, a failed ballet dancer, a proud accentless Polish émigré and the café manager at the elite restaurant whose telephone he’d answer with the clearly enunciated words “Cheese Penis.” Konrad’s months-long siege on the sixteen-year-old Bruno’s homosexual virginity was abandoned with the declaration that the boy’s looks were a tragic waste; only afterward had Konrad’s mentorship begun. Once Konrad showed Bruno how to dress and walk, Bruno didn’t know how he’d managed either to that point. When, at an after-hours card game at a house perched on Wildcat Canyon, owned by a dissolute history professor who’d opened his hot tub and billiards room to the Chez Panisse staff, Bruno had begun with regularity taking money off waiters five and ten years his senior, it was glowering Konrad who’d informed Bruno that poker wasn’t a gentleman’s game. And yes, it was Konrad who’d introduced him to backgammon. The café manager played the game with a severe focus, though he refused to gamble himself.
Konrad also taught lessons in behaviors others believed unconscious: the correct place in a room to rest one’s gaze, and how to arrange one’s limbs in parallel and turn one’s hips in counterpoint, to make a pleasing, classical composition. Konrad wasn’t so much feminizing Bruno—the impression Konrad himself conveyed wasn’t feminine—only encouraging him to be aware of how he could make his newly strapping body both unthreatening and fascinating. In many ways it was as if Konrad were extending the principles Bruno had discovered in the hospital. Where Bruno had sealed himself within an internal distance, Konrad taught him that same distance could be externalized, worn as a cloak of unapproachability, rendering you hypnotic to others. The result was to induce the same longing you concealed.
The deeper magic was this: In the process of layering performance onto the outside of his container, Bruno could forget what the container disguised. All and anything was eligible for this amnesiac relief.
For years after Konrad had been dismissed from Chez Panisse, and departed Berkeley overnight, Bruno felt the café manager’s tutorials as a somatic language rustling inside his body. Yet until this second recuperation, under the long night of gauze and bandages, he’d forgotten even Konrad’s name. Now it was returned to him, like excavating a single jigsaw puzzle piece from beneath a sofa cushion. Could Konrad be found, Bruno wondered? Was he still alive, or an AIDS casualty? But no. The impulse was hopeless, sentimental. Bruno had done nothing more than regain a lost name. It meant nothing.
Why had Stolarsky wanted to save Bruno?
What was his life for?
Bruno had nothing but his questions. His chest shuddered. Air wheezed and whistled in the plastic tube and Bruno knew it was himself he heard, that beneath his bandages the numbed flesh of his face convulsed in sorrow. Whether his ducts could produce tears was anyone’s guess. He wouldn’t feel them if they could.
Yet all this, ancient formless memory and grief, was preferable to the alternative: remembering the surgery as if through Dr. Behringer’s eyes.
Day and night, sleep and waking, past and present, all had lost their definition, until one morning Bruno was awakened by a Japanese nurse. He knew she was Japanese because she said, “My name is Nurse Oshiro, I’m from Japan”; he knew it was morning because she declared it so. She then removed his breathing tube and told him to swallow. With that, though his eyes remained bandaged, Bruno rose from his miasma. It was as if Oshiro had thrown a line into his well of dread and memory and drawn him up toward the light—though not so far that he could see.
Attempting speech, he produced a shredded whisper and a surfeit of pain.
“You want to write me a note?” asked Oshiro.
“Yes.” The word came out wrecked. She understood nonetheless.
She brought him a small plastic slate and a blunt marker. “You write what you need to say. I’ll wipe it clean.”
WHERE IS MY DOCTOR?
“Your doctor’s been here three times. He talked with you, you don’t remember.” He felt her seize the slate, and return it to him. He wrote again.
AM I DYING?
“It’s a big success, everybody told you already. We told you lots of times. This time, you remember.”
Oshiro’s tone was ceaselessly chipper and admonitory. It gradually dawned on Bruno that she bore some special authority in his case. She’d been appointed his taskmaster, to teach him to swallow, to suck from a straw, and to cooperate with the management of his bedridden body, which, according to Oshiro, the nurses and orderlies were tired of negotiating during his long fugue. He must learn to help in their efforts to change his sheets and shift his bedpan.
“See,” said Oshiro, “you’re not too lazy!”
IT HURTS.
“You have to move, it’s good for you. Soon you’ll walk to the bathroom. Tomorrow you’ll eat.”
Next he endured Oshiro’s removal of the heart monitoring stickers and redundant IV lines, the litter strewn everywhere on his body. Then, horribly, she dethreaded the catheter from his penis. Bruno’s reward for answering Oshiro’s beckoning him back to life was to undergo one painful and humbling effort after another.
Not that Bruno imagined he had any choice in the matter.
“Tomorrow we will change your bandage, too,” she said, when he was exhausted.
MY EYES?
“Your eyes stay closed tomorrow, the gauze stays on. Doctor has to see your eyes.”
AM I BLIND?
“I told you, Mr. Bruno, everything went good, you’re very lucky. You should be happy.”
I AM HAPPY.
“Good, now go to sleep.”
Another day passed under the fresh bandage before Behringer came to examine Bruno’s incisions and invite him to open his eyes.
This was a spell of wretched boredom. Bruno had started sitting in a chair beside his bed. After permitting himself to be guided to the bathroom once or twice, he’d begun shrugging off the attendants and nurses to grope his way there himself—it wasn’t so far. His voice returned, a rasp but recognizable. He’d eaten, gelatin at first, and broth, then as swallowing grew less painful and he gained confidence in the disconcerted muscles of his face, soggy sandwiches and vegetables cooked to a paste. Nothing he ate, however, conveyed any taste at all, and Bruno made lavish complaints to whomever presented the portions of flavorless goo.
His irritation gave him courage. They switched on a television in his room, and Bruno demanded they switch it off. It was replaced by nothing, by the sounds of the machines and the nurses in the corridor and at the station at the end of the corridor, sometimes the sound of another patient’s doctors in discussion with that patient’s visitors. None of this diverted him, but neither did it bewilder him as the television had. For one thing, he could command they close his door and leave him alone; sometimes they complied. The other nurses had accepted his preference for Oshiro, and so they handled him lightly, with minimal talk, navigating his petulance as if he were a blind boorish lord, though no matter his complaints, they never apologized for anything. Increasingly they ignored him. For this, he began to abuse them under his breath, in arch tones, like a blind boorish lord. Of course it was Bruno who owed the apology; Oshiro informed him of this.
Night lasted forever. Bruno believed he never slept.
His second hospitalization revealed none of the mysterious depth or savor of his first. There were no whirlpool orgasms, no nuns to perplex. In these stark days, even his grasp of those recollections, which had overrun his first hours after the surgery, slipped away. What did such tatters of memory amount to? Now Bruno could picture the green, pocket-size paperback of Flashman that he’d carried in his trench-coat pocket—so what? He wouldn’t stoop to retrieve it if he saw it on the street, so faint was his curiosity.
Oshiro prepared the patient, and his room, for Behringer’s arrival. The ripple of quickened attention preceding a major doctor’s entry to the ward had become familiar to Bruno.
“He’s taking off your bandage today.”
“Who, God?”
“You’re a foolish man.”
“He who shall not be named, but comes bearing scissors?”
“It’s important to make the room dark, Mr. Bruno. Your eyes will be very sensitive.”
“So you hope. Or not sensitive at all. I could be free to stare at the sun. Or sleep with the lights on.”
“No, Mr. Bruno, they tested your eyes.”
“That’s good enough, then. I have eyes that pass tests. We can leave the bandages on.” Bruno felt on the brink of being driven from a sanctuary, into the unknown.
“Tsk tsk.” At her most censorious, Oshiro resorted to syllables, clicking sounds, as if she were scouring out a puppy’s soiled crate.
At that moment Bruno felt the man enter the room—in fact, understood that the man had already entered, had indeed been listening to Bruno’s moronic bantering for who knew how long.
“Sure, leave ’em on, if you want. But you’d be cheating us both of a gander at my masterpiece.”
It was the voice of Bruno’s champion and nemesis, the man who’d murdered his face. A man who addressed his quarry always in the superior and ebullient tone of a being utterly apart from his species. He was a god, perhaps, or at least a kind of medical Santa Claus. The air had dropped, seeming cooled and depressurized instantaneously, as if the room had been ejected like a capsule into space. Or possibly this was the air of the operating room; the neurosurgeon carried it around with him, a barometric and refrigerated wrongness.
“Did I frighten you?”
Bruno had raised his hands, involuntarily, lifting his IV tubing with them, his palms facing outward as if to fend off savagery from the direction of the voice.
“Frighten me? No … no. You surprised me.”
“It’s Noah Behringer.”
“Of course.”
“I heard you forgot my earlier visits.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the resection was a triumph. I can answer any questions if you like. We’ll have a follow-up MRI, of course. But I took out your tumor, Alex.”
“Nurse Oshiro explained it to me.”
“I mean, I’m thrilled with what we did in there.” The neurosurgeon seemed in search of adoration, a victory lap. Bruno couldn’t be bothered. He rotated his raised hands slightly, miming an examination of them through the baffling thickness that bound his face, and which so far as he knew was all that was holding it together.
“What will I see when you remove the bandage?”
“Ha! Aside from me and your beautiful nurse, you mean? Who knows? Light sensitivity shouldn’t bug you more than an hour or two. There could be some lingering fuzziness. My only concern is that the optic nerve may retain a phantom image of what you called your blot. Something like the visual-field equivalent of tinnitus. It may take some time for the receptors to reeducate themselves, now that they’re relieved of the pressure, but they’re adept little guys, receptors. Should we find out?”
Bruno soothed himself inside the blizzard of terminology and what passed for doctor wit. He lowered his hands and allowed Behringer to approach his face. Oshiro too. Her touch was known to Bruno, hands that worked with the same brisk chiding precision as her talk. Surgeon and nurse clipped and fussed at his edges, then levitated the weight of the bandages, like a clay mask, from the raw sealed mystery of what lay beneath. Bruno’s eyelids remained shut beneath individual pads of gauze, around the periphery of which air now circulated, awakening the scourged contours of his former skin.
Behringer carried on intermittently jabbering—“You’re healing beautifully,” and so forth. Bruno barely heard. He felt himself rise through veils of stupefaction in the direction of a world vaster and more blazed by light than he’d recalled. He’d been a cave creature, sealed in mud and measuring distance in pebbles, in grains. The world was huge.
There remained some miles to cross to make contact with it. He still wasn’t freed, Bruno now understood. The hands continued. Behringer merrily clipped and snipped, while Oshiro, teasing gauze membranes from beneath his eyes, opened him like a flower.
At the last layer it felt as if they’d lifted Bruno’s nose and cheeks away to expose his uncooked skull. He felt no pain, though he was surely still dealt numbing medications through the vents of his inner elbows. Was this cultivating brutal addictions Bruno would need to sweat off later? He supposed he’d be grateful in any case.
Bruno thought of the coins placed on a dead man’s eyes: The procedure was reversed now. Oshiro relieved his lids’ burden, then told him to wait. She gently rinsed a superglue of sleep gunk from his lashes, painting saline with her cotton swabs downward across his cheeks as if bathing him in tears. He rolled them open.
Blurriness, yes, and double vision, until he could rein the split scene together, a mild muscular effort, still painless. He did retain a version of the blot, one which hovered translucently at the center of sight, a thing seen but not seen. Glitches peeled at the rim of his vision’s field, too—as if the blot had been shattered, then swept to the far horizon of his gaze. Yet none of this was impairment enough to prevent the ruin of his romance with the formerly unseen world. Bruno’s sight worked well enough—too well—to deny the crushing fact that there was nothing worth seeing.
God? Not even Santa Claus. Bruno had been mutilated by a pompous hippie in a corduroy suit. Oshiro was round-faced, short, pleasant, and a totally inadequate harbor for erotic fantasies Bruno had no clue he’d constructed until the instant they collapsed. The two figures stood in a room the size and vitality of a faded Polaroid. Bruno had been laboriously revived into a world unworthy of the name. If it were a page in a magazine, he’d have turned it.
“Don’t touch,” commanded Oshiro. Bruno’s intubated hands had again drifted up, near his face.
“So, your eyes work,” said Behringer. “I can see you’re tracking.”
“Tracking?”
“Be patient if there’s some overlay, or floaters.”
“Can I define you as a floater?”
“That depends. How many noses do I have?”
“The same number as you have beards, and half the number of your eyes.” Bruno was tired already.
“He’s joking! And he looks great, doesn’t he?” Behringer’s heartiness seemed not so much false as slipshod. And irrelevant. The surgeon had no purpose here. He’d had his way with Bruno and could muster nothing better than boorish gloating.
“I can just imagine,” said Bruno. “My mouth feels like you sewed it on upside down.”
“Ah, well, heh, we didn’t actually remove your entire mouth. Sure, you’ve got some healing to do, but the latest stitching techniques are miraculous. The nurse is going to show you how to maintain the incisions to minimize scarring, you can do it yourself—”
“Does it involve a whirlpool?”
“Sorry?”
Bruno waved his hand, without shifting it from where it lay on his gown-clad thigh. He didn’t wish to be corrected again.
“Do you want to use a mirror?” Behringer spoke gently for the first time. Bruno suspected this meant it was a bad idea. He’d already glanced into the rounded black eye of the TV mounted high in the corner, which displayed the same dire Polaroid, only reversed: two solicitous pygmies before an elongated straw man, one who lay vein-sucked by an array of devices. The features topping the straw man’s withered form, too minuscule to examine in the screen’s reflection, were easily imagined. A former face, crazy-quilted into a semblance.
“No, thank you,” Bruno said to the offer of the mirror. His jigsawed exterior was the least of his problems. The vision he’d suppressed came to claim him now: his memory of his surgery as he’d suffered it through the anesthesia. Bruno had seen his own face converted into a flesh culvert, the root-gully voided by a toppled tree. He’d undergone a dream-voyage between two milky planets he was fairly positive had been his own unhinged eyeballs.
How to explain this to Behringer? “There’s something I need to tell you,” Bruno began.
“Of course.”
“I can … read minds … again. I can read yours.”
“That’s terrific. How about scent? Can you read smells?”
“Sorry? Smells? No, nothing.”
“See, I heard you were complaining about the food—that’s less a tongue thing than a nose thing. Not that with the food here you’re missing much.”
“It mostly tastes like rubber or shit.”
“It mostly is! No more phantom barbecue odors? You were babbling about pork ribs before you went in.”
“No … no.”
“We didn’t damage the olfactory nerve, I don’t think. The ‘old factory,’ I call it. Sometimes it takes a while, like a system reboot—”
“You don’t understand. I watched you operate.”
“Well, that would be impossible, but anesthesia can provoke some wild hallucinations.”
“I saw the whole thing.”
“Your eyes were, uh, let me just suggest they were securely out of commission.”
“I didn’t need my eyes. I saw it through yours.” Bruno couldn’t stop himself. He’d grown more certain of his miracle and catastrophe, and the need to make Behringer grasp it. No matter how flippantly he spoke, the surgeon was party to Bruno’s disjointing.
“Nurse, will you excuse us? Mr. Bruno and I should talk alone, I think.”
It seemed absurd to require Oshiro to leave the room, she was already so diminished. But so was Behringer and the room. Doctor and nurse, a pair of canceled postage stamps on a scrap of envelope. Had Bruno grown enormous, or was the hospital so small? He observed that though the surgeon had relied upon Oshiro to rehabilitate his victim, Behringer couldn’t recall her name. Bruno, for his part, wanted to object that Oshiro should be allowed to stay, but couldn’t find the strength. He watched her go, the only witness to what the bearded imp had done to him and still might do.
But no, Behringer was a reputed famous healer, he’d operated out of charity, munificently. He and Bruno were meant to be on the same team. These detrimental effects were wholly unintended. Bruno only needed to explain.
“When I was a child …” he began, slowly. Each word dredged from the past should be essential. What had happened was so strange. He’d have to forgo irony and indirection completely. “When I was five, I lived with my mother in an encampment in San Rafael—”
“I see.”
“The adults around me … this was, you know, the seventies …” No, this wasn’t the approach, he saw he’d lose his audience. A surgeon after all, not a priest or shrink, not a confessor. A surgeon’s million-dollar minutes, ticking away. “But that isn’t important. There used to not be any boundary, between myself and other people—”
“Yes?”
“You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before. I could read minds.”
“Oh, sure.”
“I mean, it wasn’t a pleasant thing.”
“I imagine it would be sheer hell.”
This was easier than Bruno had bargained. “Well, yes, actually. I developed some defenses—”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Dr. Behringer, did you … keep what you took from me?”
“Keep?”
“The thing.”
“Oh, huh, it doesn’t really come out in one coherent piece. The opposite, actually. But for biopsy, sure, we kept segments.”
“Right, well, I ask because, when I speak of my defenses, it appears you took one out. The blot. I know you meant well.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I developed the blot as a barricade. When you said it was pressing on things, deforming their function—apparently it was meant to restrict the kind of thought leakage that I suffered during the surgery.”
Behringer retreated from the bedside. Brow furrowed, he clamped his hand over his lips and beard. The postage stamp now was a commemorative one, a depiction of Sigmund Freud in slippers, pacing in his study.
“I need it back,” said Bruno, wishing to be absolutely clear.
“Yes, we’ve seen more of this,” said Behringer, as if talking to himself. “It’s the power of suggestion, of course. The notion of intraoperative consciousness has pervaded the popular imagination in the form of horror movies and television talk shows, but as with so many popular nightmares, it’s much rarer than anyone realizes.”
“I had it when I was a child,” said Bruno.
“Intraoperative consciousness?”
“Mind reading.”
“Ah. But, Alex, in a procedure like yours, we monitored your nervous activity by means of what’s called ‘evoked potentials’—that’s what the surgical neurologist was there to do. We know whether you were in or out. You were out. Zonked, more dead than alive. In fact, it’s the intensity of the anesthetic fugue that explains your bewilderment and paranoia—that, and the steroidal regimen, which I’m going to restrict for you now, beginning immediately.”
“You listened to Jimi Hendrix.”
Behringer looked at him sharply, then issued a single laugh, one so abrupt and bitter in tone that it was nearly a shout of rebuke. “Very good! You saw the poster in my consulting office.”
“I need back what you took from me.”
“It isn’t there to give back. And I wouldn’t—put it back. I can’t believe I’m even answering these questions of yours, Alex. You’re suffering from a marvelous delusion. Unprecedented, actually, in my experience.”
“Listen, Doctor. Will you just do one thing for me?”
“That depends what you mean.”
“My things. When I was admitted for surgery, the nurses gathered up my clothes and possessions. I was told they’d travel with me to my recovery room—”
“Yes,” said Behringer. “Of course! That’s so.” He seemed unnaturally delighted by this prospect. “Let’s find them!” The surgeon moved to the narrow closet beside the bathroom. In Bruno’s unsteady passages in and out of the toilet, wheeling his tubes on a metal stand, it hadn’t occurred to him to try the closet’s handle. He lacked the energy to spare.
“Well, look at that,” said Behringer. The closet revealed Bruno’s clothes, neatly folded onto shelves, apart from the sweatshirt, which hung, falsely formal. On the highest shelf, his cell phone and charger, his wooden backgammon set, a ziplock baggie containing balled dollar bills, change, and the keys to the apartment at the Jack London Apartments, and a twice-folded San Francisco Chronicle he’d been reading in the surgery intake waiting room, a week or a lifetime earlier. Behringer treated this dreary cache as a revelation. “That’s the ticket! You need to get up and out of this place. You’ll feel more like your old self in your own clothes—”
“Those aren’t my clothes.”
“You don’t recognize them?” The surgeon sounded giddy and panicked at once.
“No, I was wearing them, they’re just not really my clothes.”
Behringer presented Bruno’s phone as if it were a prize in a game show. “You want to call your friends?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Your pal in Berkeley—”
“Not right now. There, you see that wooden case?”
“This?”
“Thank you.” Bruno took it between his trembling hands, rattled it slightly, confirming its contents. He unclasped the top.
“Are we going to play a game?”
The Sigmund Freud figure standing before Bruno was ersatz. Nevertheless, he was all Bruno had to work with. Bruno concentrated himself on the fact that it was this toy person who had split him open, that indeed, he’d been sent across the ocean to meet the one man capable of that act, and therefore also capable of reversing it. Everything was circular. In much the same way, it was in Bruno’s childhood hospitalization that he’d obviously gained the protection of the blot—though how it had been induced in him, by salve or whirlpool or orgasm, presently mystified him—and now it was in his second that he’d been robbed of it! But Bruno couldn’t afford to dwell long on the perversities of his fate.
He widened the case just enough to draw out the Berlin paving stone. The daubs indicating the pips of the die had blackened and flaked. He doubted Behringer would notice them, and just as well, since the surgeon might be concerned about biological contamination. Then again, it was Bruno’s own blood, in fact had seeped from his nose and so would be restored to its right place, in his head. But this was all too much to explain.
Bruno held the cobblestone out to Behringer. “Use this.”
“What is it?”
“That isn’t important.” Bruno spoke carefully. “Use it to replace what you took.”
“What I took?”
“Put it here.” Bruno lifted his tubes, to draw a finger just short of contact with the bridge of his nose, or whatever disaster now dwelled instead between his eyes. “I want it put back.”
“Put back? That was never in you!”
“It’s the right size. It’s the right … thing.” Re-install Berlin, he wished to say, but he couldn’t risk confusing the neurosurgeon.
“Remarkable,” muttered Behringer.
“It was a simple mistake,” said Bruno. “I don’t hold it against you.”
“We’ll have to continue this conversation another time,” said Behringer weakly.
“When?” Bruno felt no hope of seeing the pixilated clown-doctor regain his stature, let alone reclaim the wild confidence that had allowed him to inside-out Bruno’s head in the first place. Bruno wondered if he’d erred mentioning Jimi Hendrix, the evidence of Bruno’s mind reading which had seemingly left the neurosurgeon irreversibly rattled.
“When you’re feeling more like yourself.”
“That’s the whole point. I feel too much like myself.”
“Time is the great healer,” said Behringer, in a tone suggesting he knew he’d offered up the greatest lie ever told.
“Please—” said Bruno.
But the rapidly diminishing figure opened what appeared to be a tiny flap in the corner of the Polaroid—Bruno supposed it was actually the door of the hospital room—and wordlessly exited the picture.
The face—you’d call it a face, certainly—wasn’t bad. It wasn’t Alexander Bruno as he’d been before, and it wasn’t not-Bruno, either, but a fascinating amalgam, flesh turned dough, swollen and mottled, here and there puffy or sagging, in other cases lightly flaking, and everywhere joined in sections to adhere to his skeleton’s contour. This puzzle-putty grew increasingly sensible, alert to the fiery caterpillar of the incision knitting it together, and operable by his old and instinctive muscular reactions. He could make the face smile, for instance, without much pain. Oshiro, who used a six-inch cotton swab to stripe Neosporin along the length of the seams, encouraged it. Bruno smiled for her at least daily.
He used a mirror to examine the face until he grew bored with the effects. When surveyed up close, these approximated NASA stills of a blasted moonscape. Meanwhile, if he allowed Oshiro to hold the mirror at a certain distance the reflection offered a bleary approximate self, a stand-in he found barely worth the effort. There was no right proximity for his self-seeing. Any close-up was all useless turmoil, while the wide shots were too generic to tell him anything at all.
Should he mourn his beauty? Bruno found it difficult to bother. He’d never doubted his looks nor their effect on others, yet a life spent hanging on the fall of a die or the turn of a card had inured him to the abrupt loss of what was never earned in the first place. The thing that mattered, enduring such disaster, was one’s comportment: not what lay on the table between yourself and another player, but one’s inner mask. If he followed this logic to its conclusion, Bruno might be waiting for a new deal, another pair of numbers, a next face. What he glimpsed in Oshiro’s mirror was just a bad roll. He might have to pay now for a run of facial luck that had gone decades. If it was the gambler’s fallacy that luck could be cumulative—well, he was a gambler.
Or again, Bruno might be dead already and not know it. If he was dead, he could live with that.
If only Behringer had found a way to mutilate his name as well as his features, Bruno could pass from the small purgatory of his recovery anonymous, broke, yet by the logic of his destruction indebted to no one, including and perhaps most crucially his former self. Bruno’s expectations that Behringer could do anything for him besides save his life—a paltry gesture, it turned out!—had collapsed. This freed Bruno from contrasts of before and after. Where he presently dwelled, this archipelago of bathroom, television, and gurney, notions of fortune or beauty seemed fatally preposterous. When Oshiro had trained him to apply his own balms, and to massage the anesthesia cramps from his own thighs and calves, when he’d been weaned from his last tube and his digestion could tolerate any old garbage, not just hospital garbage, Bruno felt ready to slink off ungratefully into the faceless crowd. He wouldn’t beg another plane ticket, in fact wouldn’t accept one if offered. He might live under a bridge.
On Bruno’s tenth day in the hospital, Oshiro began preparing him for something, though she wouldn’t say what. Behringer, perhaps spooked by their last encounter, hadn’t visited again. Could anyone besides the neurosurgeon sign his discharge? Oshiro wouldn’t say. Yet she was shooing Bruno like a cat to the door.
“I’m not ready,” he told her, when she insisted he dress in his street clothes and visit the dayroom, a dry run for expulsion. “I’m still sick.”
“No, the doctor fixed you, Mr. Bruno.”
“People stay in the hospital for weeks or months after a surgery like mine.”
She shook her head. “That’s the old way. You’ll recover better at home. You stayed too long already.”
“I have no home.” This was a simple enough declaration. In another life Bruno might have uttered it across a backgammon board, with brittle vanity, to the envy of a club man who’d only dream of saying the same.
“With your friends.”
A shudder went through him. “What friends?”
“A mister and missus. They’ve been looking after you. The missus was here while you were sleeping.”
“Miss Harpaz?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Nice lady. They’re taking you home tomorrow.”
With that his despondency collapsed on itself, a dead star turning black hole. He’d been kidding himself. His ruined face, his shredded costume of defenses, these were sufficient only to this poor room. Sufficient only to the witness of Oshiro. Bruno had standards, after all. He was a terrible snob. His hands flew to his face, as if to contain what had ruptured. His hands weren’t enough. He felt the grease of his jigsaw-stitchery imprint to his palms.
“I … can’t be seen.”
“Don’t be foolish, Mr. Bruno. You look good.”
“Never. I won’t even go to the dayroom.”
“You must do this, please. Your discharge is tomorrow. Your friend will come.”
“I forbid her to.” Bruno’s claim of authority was surely absurd. He had none. Hearing Tira Harpaz’s name introduced into the pale void of his recovery made Bruno realize he’d been working to forget it—Tira’s name, and Keith Stolarsky’s, and the conundrums that lay behind them. Why was Tira coming, and not Stolarsky, if Stolarsky was supposed to be his friend? What was Stolarsky’s motive in paying for the surgery? Only amusement? Did Stolarsky have such surplus lying around? It was possible. It was always possible. Money pointlessly pooled, to extents few believed, few who’d never been in the practice, as Bruno had, of siphoning the pools. Yet if Stolarsky was so wealthy, why was he so juvenile, so squalid, so unrenovated? Where was his entourage? Money magnetized flattery and avarice, drew to itself toadies, under names like adviser or secretary, those who’d stalk the perimeter, jealous of the incursion of others like themselves. What was Keith Stolarsky’s stake in Alexander Bruno? And why had he been jovially shoving his girlfriend into Bruno’s lap?
Perhaps Bruno would find out. With the blot obliterated, his childhood porousness restored, Bruno might find Stolarsky’s motives naked to him. Yet Bruno could only think of how he’d be naked to Stolarsky in turn.
“I need a mask,” he said to Oshiro, in terror.
“What?”
“For my face. For my head, a covering of some kind. I won’t see anyone, or leave this room, until I’m protected somehow.”
Oshiro stood and stared, a rare heartbeat of stillness in her campaign forever to be adjusting, cleaning, or correcting some part of Bruno’s setup. Her face, round and smooth, was a sort of mask. Sadly plain, forgettable, the wrong sex, yet Bruno could envy its impassivity. Could Oshiro imagine how it felt to gaze out through his own detonated minefield?
Her indefatigable pragmatism cut in. “Would you like to try a post-surgical mask?”
“There is such a thing?”
“Certainly. They call this a compression garment. It’s made of fabric that can breathe, a very good device. You see this mostly with plastic surgery patients.”
“Do they … cover the whole face?”
“With holes for your eyes and mouth, nostrils. You don’t want that, we can’t help you. Then you better hide your head under a blanket, Mr. Bruno.”
“No, no, I want that, very much.”
“I have to get a referral from the attending doctor, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Please.”
“I’ll bring a selection. Will you promise to visit the dayroom?”
“I promise.”
He felt her relief. Bruno had absolved Oshiro of his existential conundrum, in favor of a task to accomplish. The patient wants masking? Let him be masked. In this, the nurse’s impulse wasn’t so different from Behringer’s: to hustle Bruno into street clothes and be shed of him. Bruno had to grow accustomed to his new role as an unwelcome guest. It mirrored his earlier life, in which he’d made his living as a form of human decoration, a perfume or mood to amplify an evening. Now he had the power to improve a scene by exiting it.
Oshiro, wizard of competence, cleared any paperwork hurdles at the nursing station, and within the hour returned to present him with a small array of the masks. These resembled Mexican wrestlers’ costumes, or items from a masochist’s toy kit, only purged of florid decoration in favor of the uniform sallow color of a Band-Aid, with neatly tailored Velcro fasteners for ease of removal. They roused some feeling of solace in Bruno. He allowed himself to touch them, the fine antibacterial mesh, both grainy and smooth, and warming to the touch, like the skin of a robot designed to soothe the elderly or dying.
While he browsed options Oshiro lay his folded clothes and sweatshirt across his knees, and placed his crappy sneakers at the bed’s side, insisting in her quiet way on his keeping his promise of a dress rehearsal. She also withdrew his cell phone and charger, plugging it in within reach at his bedside table, and moved his backgammon set and the folded Chronicle to the shelf beneath the drawer there, to join the paving stone. Everything he’d brought to the hospital, a kit for reentry to a world in which he possessed barely more. In Berkeley, in the apartment he’d been loaned out of pity, there waited his shoes and tuxedo, and a few spare ABIDE shirts.
“This one.” He found the mask with the narrowest eyeholes. The gaps at the bridge of his nose would reveal only glimpses of a jigsaw-self.
Oshiro had learned when best to goose Bruno and when to revert to the solemnity of ceremony. She silently guided his hands to fasten the mask, aiding and instructing him simultaneously—everything was homework for Bruno’s next phase, in which he’d be nursing himself. She drew him to the mirror, placing his clothes in his hands as she did and shutting him into the small bathroom to change. Awarding him the dignity of modesty was another milestone—days earlier, Oshiro had bathed him neck to toe with a rough white washcloth.
Seeing himself in the mirror, Bruno realized why the mask had offered consolation: It recalled Madchen, her mute mouth behind zippered leather. He slipped into his T-shirt and began immediately to abide. Madchen had been the counterforce, the angel who’d attempted to intervene on the Kladow ferry, if it hadn’t been in fact too late. Every person he’d encountered since then had conspired to hurl him into this dungeon, beginning with the monstrous jazz-loving German real-estate speculator, his opponent the night he’d gone to Charité—what was his name? At first Bruno could only think of Bix Beiderbecke.
Wolf-Dirk Köhler, of course. How could he forget? The mask, in containing and hiding Bruno, also restored his memories. And Köhler had been another pygmy. For that was part of being reminded of Madchen, in the mirror—the mask sat atop a full-size human. Straightening his shoulders, Bruno towered in the little restroom, as the bottomless girl in the mask had made a homunculus of her supposed enslaver. Behind the closed door Bruno could hear Oshiro scurrying, preparing his room, moving like a rat in a box. Readying him to be discharged by the rat-pygmy Behringer, into the care of the rat-pygmies Stolarsky and Harpaz. Never trust anyone shorter than 160 centimeters; if the axiom hadn’t existed before now, Bruno had just coined it. What a relief to be thinking clearly again. The cell phone was charged. He’d return Madchen’s calls. Not here, though. Not in this place.
The mask was good, but it wasn’t enough. In the hard overhead light he made out too much, at the eyeholes and around the rim of his mouth. His ears, too, though they hadn’t been carved up and reassembled, looked doofy jutting from the mask. A halo in his visual field, that phantom-limb version of the blot, only heightened the effect. He opened the door, just slightly.
“My sweatshirt, please.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
The nurse handed over the sweatshirt and he closed the door again. “Are you okay?” Her voice was anxious and he understood that the balance had shifted once he’d donned his clothes. He had leverage. In fact, Oshiro was the penitent now.
“Please intercept my friend, I don’t want to see her today. No visitors.”
“If you wish, Mr. Bruno.”
“And tomorrow, I’ll meet her downstairs. I don’t want her coming up to the room, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Bruno had always found the gamblers who veiled themselves behind mirrored shades and sweatshirt hoods laughable. Their feeble armor a kind of fundamental tell. Unabombers, that was Edgar Falk’s derisive nickname. Now, however, the hood cloaked Bruno’s ears and put the rest in shadow, shrouding the pale mask as though in fog and distance. It changed, from something baldly medical, to an apparition. When he stepped from the bathroom, Oshiro stepped back.
Behringer had been right, in fact. These were his clothes.
•
The neurosurgeon made one final appearance, at the last possible moment. He signed Bruno’s discharge—though, as Oshiro had indicated, any attending physician could have done it. Indeed, Behringer left it to a younger doctor to ask Bruno to remove his mask, to make a final examination of his incisions, and to test certain muscular actions, the rotation of the eyes as they followed a penlight through the air, the mime show of chewing and swallowing Bruno had by this time performed a dozen times before.
Behringer presented himself only when Bruno was dressed again and remasked, with his tiny stash of possessions bagged on the bed. A wheelchair had materialized in the corridor outside the room. Bruno knew Oshiro would insist on wheeling him into the elevator and to the curb, where Tira Harpaz waited for him; it might even be required in the hospital’s protocols. It was Oshiro’s last moment, and Bruno had no motivation to deny it to her. She’d moved to the door, and out, when Behringer entered the room.
“I couldn’t be happier,” said Behringer, his tone suggesting the precise opposite.
“To wash your hands of me?”
Behringer ignored him. “Your recovery is exemplary. In my notes I’m chalking up any stray delusional episode to a derangement associated with abreaction to the steroid regimen. Post-anesthetic trauma is a very real thing. But everything in the nurse’s observations suggests a nice turnaround. I’ve no doubt you’ll thrive in an outpatient recovery. Is the mask a comfort?”
“I require it.”
“You don’t! But wear it if it makes you feel better. You’ll freak out cats and children. You’re freaking me out right now.”
“I didn’t have a delusional episode.”
“No?” Behringer’s tone was falsely merry. In fact he seemed on the verge of crisis, as if any interruption to his filibuster would be fatal.
“You couldn’t remember my name.”
“It’s right here on the chart! Alexander Bruno.”
“In the midst of the procedure, I meant.”
“Your hostility fascinates me. Who knows, it might seem entirely reasonable from your perspective. Still, no matter what you say, I’m going to claim you as one of my triumphs, Mr. Bruno. I’m one hundred percent delighted with what happened in there.”
Bruno saw that Behringer had nowhere better to be, or he’d have been there. For all the deference the nurses and younger doctors gave the neurosurgeon, this maestro of disaster was otherwise essentially a thumb-twiddler, helpless to occupy himself until a next disaster strolled through his door. He’d come here killing time, neither concerned for Bruno nor seriously engaged with the puzzle his patient had presented when they last spoke. Still, for reasons of his own, Bruno wished to put Behringer in mind of it again.
“You imagined yourself as a baseball pitcher.”
“Sorry?”
“On the mound at the Oakland Coliseum. Pitching a no-hitter. I don’t know what it meant to you.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Behringer, after a moment. “That sounds like me. But I suggest we discuss it in a few weeks. Kate’ll call you to schedule a follow-up.”
Behringer held out his hand. From appearances, he’d made himself impervious again. This was obviously a generic capacity, drawn out of the doctor’s kit bag. Bruno, weary of probing fissures in the surgeon’s vanity, accepted his hand clasp.
“I’ll look forward to that,” Bruno said. In fact he never saw Noah Behringer again.