…Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
THE OVERUNIFORMED OFFICER AT PASSPORT CONTROL REMINDED ALEX that 9/11 had cast a long shadow. Gun, cap, and wooden face, the official scrutinized him as if he represented the entire terrorist threat to the U.S.A. Lights flashed and a computer whirred. The officer’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. Then benignity was restored, Alex’s passport thrust back into his hand without comment beyond the obligatory “Have a nice day.”
Alex’s attention was markedly elsewhere, already in the lecture he would give his students on the current thinking on cell communication. He found himself moving to security absentmindedly, placing his briefcase on the belt, moving to the scanner, following another passenger through the ritual: he was hardly aware of his physical actions. Something was bleeping. A man behind him, immaculately dressed, three or four places away, hadn’t taken his eyes off Alex. Now other heads were turning.
To Alex, the whole dreamlike sequence was surreal, his brain and physical motions partially paralyzed with fatigue. Then the harsh voice of authority suddenly broke through the moment. “Empty your pockets, sir,” and Alex realized he was being addressed. “Put your change in the dish and try again.”
Alex understood the officer was affecting a New York ironic sense of humor, which he was sure the man didn’t truly feel. Without alarm he was reaching deeply into his overcoat pockets, producing a fistful of coins in one hand and a small plastic bag containing a paperback in the other. The officer was taking the bag, glancing inside, showing it to a colleague, then indicating simultaneously that Alex should place his coins in a tray next to the book. He added his cell phone.
“Extraordinario, este libro,” the second officer seemed to have murmured, so inaudibly that Alex was almost sure he hadn’t spoken at all. He looked up quickly, and for a tiny moment it was as if they were sharing a personal secret. Then all sounds were on alert, a harsh flat beep assaulted the air, and the first officer, stony-faced now, invited Alex to do it all again. Alex returned through the scanner, and was still watching the second officer with a quiet smile, when a flash of awareness made him suddenly produce a fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.
“That’ll be the offender, yes-siree bob.” The main officer had the look of a satisfied FBI agent who has just closed an important, life-threatening case. “I’m afraid we’ll have to relieve you of this, sir.”
A din was erupting around the scanning equipment, other passengers grumbling about the delay. From the most detached perspective, Alex was aware that he was shrugging, not quite apologetically. His mother had given him the pen years ago, when he got a place at Cambridge, and he wasn’t going home without it.
He made eye contact with his interrogator, and somehow smoothed over the rising tension. “I’m very attached to it. Could we ask one of the crew to take it for me, let me collect it at the other end?”
The officer was nonplussed, and inspected Alex’s name engraved on the pen. “That’s highly unconventional, sir. But I consider it a peaceable suggestion. Let’s see what we can do.” He handed the offending item to his colleague, who had been smiling drily and subtly communicating assurances to Alex for a heartbeat. Now he took the detail of his flight to arrange things, and was suddenly giving back the other items, making real contact as he handed Alex the book.
“E muy metafísico, sí?” Alex was wishing his Spanish was stronger, but the officer was delighted to have any answer in his language, and nodded gently. “It’s a long flight, and I’ve seen the films. This will be better company.”
The officer passed over a receipt for the pen, nodding him on. The whole incident had surely not occurred. But the odd humanity of the encounter had touched Alex, and strangely, he was aware that he hadn’t even thought much yet about the book that had forged this transient bond—never mind really knowing what it was about. Extraordinario, indeed.
He was still pondering the book and the pen when the crisp English tones of the stewardess recalled his attention. Alex reached for a blanket to combat the tiredness that was making him feel the chill, and stared at the little volume in clear plastic. It had been thrust into his hand by a very sympathetic, clear-speaking South American doctor, just as he had been driven away from the conference on his way to stay in New Jersey. “This may give you an insight into the madness of trying to find the difference between spirituality and reality. Have a good trip home: and buena suerte.” She had touched his arm warmly, and then vanished.
He had pocketed the book in its bag in his overcoat, without a proper thought for it, and closed the car door on that world for the time being. Now, as he sank into the generous seat, he turned his attention to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The opening words wove a spell on him. A firing squad. Colonel Aureliano. His father. The memory of ice: crunch. The lines captivated his imagination. He heard the author’s voice whisper in his ear; such was the power of Gabriel García Márquez. He would never have thought to buy the book; what excellent happenstance. Now here he sat, a captive audience with only time.
The stewardess smiled at him obligingly, and offered him the menu and a drink as they reached cruising altitude. “I have your fountain pen, Dr. Stafford. How very traditional of you to use one. Hardly anyone can write properly anymore!” She laughed and showed her lovely white teeth. “I’ll return it to you as soon as we reach Heathrow and clear the plane.” She proffered champagne as a goodwill gesture. “I’m amazed, actually, that they agreed to your suggestion. It must be your air of English tranquillity.”
Alex grinned like a schoolboy, declining the champagne flute but accepting the truite amandine on the menu. He returned to the pirate, Francis Drake, who had destroyed Riohacha in the sixteenth century, unwittingly changing the lives of the people Alex was about to meet on the page. Dinner came; he ate, and read on. A colleague behind him was snoring softly.
There was something compelling in the style of writing. Fatigue rose around him like a great protective blanket. He dozed, as was his wont, reawakening, and reading more, pausing to think about the details and complexities of the book, comparing it to aspects of his own family’s life. Entirely another world, and yet connected. The galleon in the middle of the rain forest: Will, forever on his questing, Quixotic journeys. The woman who was too beautiful to be placed in a grave in the earth, who was magically taken up to heaven wrapped in the bed linen she was hanging out to dry. Intangibly like his mother. The fable-like quality of the subject matter was made real by the narrative style. Alex was sure Will would have read this book, and loved it; he had seen it among the piles of his life that cluttered his own London flat now. His brother had not an investment to his name, but endless shelves of intellectual property, music—on disk and sheet music—books to the ceiling, first-edition Penguins that Siân had threatened him about so often, perhaps one time too many. Not at all a good idea to ask him to choose between “me or those awful, grubby books”—she had given up on tying them into beribboned piles on the shelves to offset their drab appearance. Alex knew better than she which way the choice might go, although now he could sympathize with Siân, given the sprawl they caused. He looked forward to talking to Will about this book, though—wished he could do so now: he knew that the raw emotion and fantasy would have attracted Will. But a fresh realization was born. Although Alex and his brother were two sides of the same coin—Father’s elder son, and Mother’s younger boy—Alex knew there was a deeper level in his own being that he had not truly explored, just as there was a serious side to Will that he did not like to expose. He lamented the tendency well-meaning parents and friends have to typecast their progeny. “Alex is so steady, hardworking, a real logician. He’ll make a wonderful doctor. An impossible act for his brother to follow. Will? He’s just a dreamer, can’t spell a word, head always in a book. Plays the piano like Chopin. But God knows what he’ll ever achieve—he never settles to anything.” Will had traditionally laughed off this kind of comment, saying he’d “rather have been George Sand.” But it must have hurt inside, just as it rankled with Alex that he came off—according to this binary opposition—as ever dependable and by correlation a little unexciting. Their mother knew better and fought familial opinion. “They are intelligent, inspirational men, both of them. Let’s wait and see how they use their hours on this earth.”
Alex needed some sleep, realizing his mind was wandering. This thought was accompanied by a darker one: is everyone all right? This last threatened the quietude of his night hours, but he dismissed it as the product of exhaustion. His father and brother had probably quarreled over dinner, and Alex would have to turn up as usual as the peacekeeper. The sun had kept pace with the pages, and rose in an arc above the purple line of cloud before turning white. The moon just as suddenly paled, and vanished in the sky over the ocean. Is this merely the speed of the plane against the direction of time? Alex mused. He dozed briefly; read on again; and finally folded the cover with the author’s disturbing thought that people who were entrapped in a century of solitude had no second chances on this earth. Which begs the question of redemption in heaven, thought Alex.
He and Will had sometimes debated such philosophical questions when not arguing whether Gary Sobers or Ian Botham was the more complete cricketer. He had forgotten that part of their relationship. Interesting, the depth of thought they had shared when they were boys; but Alex realized he hadn’t been much help on the subject of immortality when their mother died. He could see his brother now after the funeral, a cigarette propped in his mouth while he thundered angrily through Chopin’s emotive Fantasy Impromptu. Dreadful habit that he’d resumed while their mother was ill: thankfully he’d given it up again since. And his music too, it seemed.
What had changed? Only time really—especially Alex’s absurd lack of it. Will had coaxed him to open up about the pain of his failed marriage to Anna; tried to talk a little himself about the sadness of his break with Siân. But Alex wouldn’t, couldn’t, make the time for these confidences anymore. Each of them exercised their own avoidances, though their intuition of each other was occasionally enough support. Oh, Will, I have missed you—even if you are a pain in the arse a lot of the time, Alex thought, and tried to pull his brain back to reality. He was sure this nostalgia for his younger brother’s company would fade as soon as he spilled noisily across Alex’s calm Chelsea space again. Within a week Will would have taken over his kitchen, insisting on doing the cooking and dirtying every pan in the process. He laughed quietly and stared at the back cover of the book.
“Cabin crew: ten minutes to landing.” The stewardess touched his shoulder as she helped him pull his seat forward, and picked up the last remaining glasses from the tables around the cabin. Moments later the familiar thump came as the wheel locked into place, and Alex felt the huge plane slip nervously sideways like a show horse dancing as it approached a jump; it straightened, dropped gently to the ground, and galloped down the runway, until the noise of the reverse thrust broke the spell and he was home.
Given the mass of humanity that spewed from the many overseas flights at this hour of the morning, Passport Control was remarkably cheerful and civilized. “Good morning. Thank you, sir. Welcome home, Dr. Stafford.”
The stewardess found Alex at baggage claim. “You’ll want this. Mightier than the sword, and all that!”
She flew on past him as the pen that had written so much of his history appeared in his palm. He hadn’t time to thank her. Alex switched on his cell phone as he waited for the bags to come through. He had seven messages. With fast-track clearance, a wonderful perk with the superior class of flight, he was wheeling his luggage away as his world froze: “Alex, it’s very serious about Will, I’m afraid. More than I knew in my last message. Please, please call me as soon as you get this. I’ll certainly need your advice.” His father’s voice was hoarse.
He let two more messages play out before he stopped them, taking him deeper back into time as the earlier calls came up after the latest one. His face was gaunt as he ran from the terminal building.
“16:43: DO YOU WANT TO SHUT DOWN?”
“Do I ever!” Jane Cook blurted out. She clicked “Yes” and closed her laptop. She sat at her desk, slowly picked up the phone, then put it back on the cradle. She put off calling her little girl for the moment. She was so late—beyond late—that she couldn’t face another apology just now. Well, at least someone would benefit from the hours of extra time she’d put in, she thought.
Most of this particular job had been set up on the assumption that the donor would not recover. Sometimes the work went for nothing, but it did reduce the time between death and receipt, which was vital. The second phase of the job could now fall into place if everything went according to plan. Poor Lucy had already had one letdown in the last forty-eight hours: everyone marshaled, only to find that the heart wasn’t up to it—a second-tier organ, which had sounded good, but ultimately didn’t make the grade. She didn’t want that to happen again now.
As many as forty people would be involved before the operation was completed, and at this stage there were still a great many unknowns. The spate of calls and e-mails she had just finished had told Senior Nursing Sister Cook that the helicopter’s ETA was approximately ten minutes from now. The push of another button on her phone confirmed that the heart should be here in a further fifteen to twenty minutes after landing.
The Heart Transplant Coordinator checked her watch. A little over an hour and twenty minutes would have elapsed from the time that the first surgeon had harvested the organ from the donor and transferred it to its special transportation container for its arrival at Harefield. Not bad, all things considered. This was not strictly the best way of dealing with organ movement, but no mobile life-support system had been available to move the donor complete, so the heart had been harvested in situ and the organ moved to London. The team had performed with punctilious dedication, as always. People knock the NHS, Jane thought, not for the first time, but where else in the world would you get all of this on the health service?
Being a Sunday, the anticipated twenty minutes around Heathrow airport shrank to less than fifteen. “Very nearly perfect,” was the team leader, Senior Cardiac Surgeon Mr. Amel Azziz’s, only comment as he checked out the organ and test results. “Not at all bad,” he had added with a satisfied countenance. “God,” as he was known among the staff in private conversation, had pronounced in his laconic manner that he was in his heaven, and all was right with the world. Jane knew that Lucy King would be safe in his hands.
“Tissue matches, blood types all look significantly better than we have a right to ask. I presume everything is in place, so I can go and scrub up.” He looked at Jane over the rim of his half-glasses, and she was pleased to have pleased him. “Unless you have a problem that I should know about?”
“Not at all. Everything is in order, sir.” The epithet was only half teasing. She had long ago earned the right to call him by his given name, but she liked “sir,” or “himself” when she was talking about him affectionately to others.
“Of course it is, Jane. I have complete faith.” His eyes twinkled at her. And of course it was. After all, wasn’t she the best coordinator on any team? That was why she worked for God. And she thought the world of him, professionally speaking, but she would never let him know as much. And in his turn, he knew beyond all certainties that she would never let the side down. Every detail had been taken care of, from the moment the donor had been declared dead from a massive brain hemorrhage. The scan showed no activity, and the life support was left in quiet symphony with the spirit, whatever that meant. That had been hours ago. As the donor had carried a card, there had been no question about going ahead: although the next of kin, who had been at the hospital at the time of death, had also signed the consent forms. Copies of everything were already in the files and on the computer.
The phone rang again, drawing her back to her station, demanding attention. This time the call took Jane by surprise. Everyone and everything had been called, checked, and double-checked. So this could only mean a hitch. Azziz made eye contact with her, a question inflecting them. She nodded reassurances at him, belying her real reaction. “Damn,” she thought out loud, censoring her worse language in front of the doctor when she realized the single word had escaped her.
Her family would not see her for dinner anytime tonight. “Another working weekend, Mama,” little Sarah had said. “When do I get to see you, I mean really see you?” She had wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and wouldn’t let go when she came to say she was off early this morning. People with families shouldn’t take on these jobs. Jane barely stifled the thought, then turned to the job at hand in the blink of an eye, with total professionalism.
She ended the call with a finger on the pulse, got a new dial tone, and phoned out in the same motion. “Hello there, James. Can you fill in for me at once?” She nodded a few times to herself, once to Mr. Azziz, said, “Oh, that’s grand,” and put the handset down. She rolled her eyes. “That was a call we could have done better without,” she explained to God, the Irish inflection in her voice helping her to sound upbeat. “I thought he was on call—according to my paperwork—but we’ve had no success contacting your preferred immunologist. Apparently he’s a day late getting back from a conference. His secretary can’t locate him—although she insists he was rostered off for his birthday today. Anyhow, Dr. Lovell will fill in for us—he’s still in the building and will be here in five minutes, and we won’t need him for long.”
Jane Cook personified efficiency, and communicated control to the transplant surgeon. Secretly, she was irritated. She was working over her weekend and wouldn’t get home to her family for a nice, cozy Sunday lunch. An extra day away on the firm, do you mind! No one would say “boo” to a consultant. Birthday or not, if you’re on call, you’re on call. Jane had images of a glass of fine wine in a smart country pub with the family all there, cell phone switched off thoughtlessly. But she smiled at the world, and congratulated herself that everyone on her team was a top dog.
Azziz read the thought staining her brow like a cloud blotting the moon. “Well, I think we might excuse Dr. Stafford on high days and holidays, don’t you? These trials only wrong-foot mortals, Jane—never you. Never do you lose the thread.”
She was completely soothed by Azziz’s charm and confidence in her. Never mind indeed, James Lovell was a first-class doctor, and was already at hand. All she had to do was tell the patient about the change. She didn’t think that would be a problem. Mr. Azziz was probably not all that happy, she realized, but he’d live with it. He liked to have the people he knew and trusted around him, and he liked to be a little dependent on Alexander Stafford. The Sphinx, he called him. “May not always say much, but he sees absolutely everything and knows more than he will tell you,” he had once confided to Jane about him, although he knew she would have been more comfortable with the said doctor if he had been more obviously exuberant—and more easily understood. She was prone to mistake his slight reserve for unexpressed criticism of others, which Amel knew was unjustified. “He’s a calm and rational young man, but never in the least judgmental of other people’s ideas and foibles. I like him.”
Anyway, thought Jane, right now they’d have to do without their all-knowing “Sphinx”; he was either in somebody’s airspace or had gone incommunicado for his birthday. There was nothing more she could do for the next twelve hours, so she would get some food and a little rest. She was on standby, “just in case,” and couldn’t go yet.
“Don’t worry, Jane. I’ll tell the patient myself.” It would disappoint her, though—just how much, perhaps he alone knew.
He made a short detour en route to the operating room. “Lucy, you look especially lovely today. Now you are in my hands, and Allah’s, for the next few hours.”
She smiled through the haze of her premed, and looked softly haloed with her jet hair against the pillow framing her pale, Romanesque face. There was no light, no shadow, and her features seemed almost erased—and Mr. Azziz was considering that her appearance seemed far too surreal for someone who had been fighting a treacherous disease and was now on the point of life-changing surgery.
“I can manage it,” she spoke with surprising strength, “being a guest of yours and Allah’s for a few hours.”
But the surgeon recognized a glimmer of fear behind the outward confidence. “We are going to go somewhere magical together, all of us now.” He looked at Lucy as though she were a highly intelligent child. “Dr. Stafford, I am very sorry to say, can’t be with us for the present. It seems to be his day off, and he is nowhere to be found, or perhaps he has not yet come back from his trip—otherwise, I know it was his intention to come in and support you, and he would want to do so. But I have checked the tissue matches myself this time; and we additionally have Dr. Lovell just for today. You will have Dr. Stafford back the day after tomorrow at the latest—and you won’t know a great deal about it before then.”
Lucy felt thoroughly flattened at this news. She had so much respect for Dr. Stafford, and she had come to the realization this week that she had grown to rely on him being somewhere around her. He was the gentlest soul she’d ever met; and she would rather not make such a journey into the dark unknown without his particular lightness of being there in the room. But her thin veil of energy was mistaken for the effects of medication by everyone except Mr. Azziz, whom, like Alex Stafford, no subtlety escaped. He smiled and patted her thin hand.
Jane Cook thought him amazing as he almost imperceptibly assuaged any sudden doubts about the operation Lucy might have harbored. His seemingly serene bearing gave a level of reassurance to everyone, staff and patients alike. It made them believe that in his hands nothing could go wrong, in spite of the dire warning that had to be given to each patient before they signed up. Amel, more than any other surgeon Jane had worked with, was special.
She’d call Sarah after tea. Her dad had taken her to the park this afternoon; it looked lovely outside in the late afternoon, and all the rain from the past week had cleared away. She picked up the pile of files from her desk, and headed for the wards.
As they squeezed her hair into a cap and loaded her onto the gurney, Lucy glanced—without truly focusing—on the hazy colors of her patchwork. This was the life she had stitched together over the last few months, ever since she had brought Chagas’ disease back with her from Colombia. She was twenty-eight, and looked nineteen with her illness; but she took every day as it came like a wise old crone. She had patched a story in gem-bright colors or pastels as the mood dictated, for weeks on end. Her huge tired eyes rested briefly on the last piece she’d done: a heart on the wing rising toward the tiny sliver of moon, in a night sky. She meant it as a reminder of her mother flying away when she was little—a flight from which the mother had never returned, and the child never recovered. It was a sea change in her life. But now, in the nebulous space she occupied with the anesthetics taking hold of her, she saw the winged heart in a new light, about herself, which she hadn’t contemplated before. Her lids gave up, and folded her into a divine sleep.