Muttering to herself, she picked her way past some broken dishware, pots and pans, moving toward a door on the other side of the room. It was stuck, at first, but she put her shoulder into it and squeezed through while Duran remained where he was, gazing around the room, curious about Adrienne’s world.
Which, despite the mess, had so much more texture than his own. There were romantic posters of long ago places and faraway things (Biarritz and the Orient Express), and a series of Tin Tin covers, matted and framed. Stooping, he picked up a book, and was surprised by its subject: Lonely Planet’s guide to Sri Lanka. He picked up another: Trekking in Turkey. And a third: Mauritius, Reunion, and the Seychelles.
“You travel a lot?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, emerging from the other room. “I never go anywhere.”
Duran pondered that as she stutter stepped through the debris of her living room. “Why not?” he asked.
“No money.” She paused. “Do you see a music box?”
He glanced around, and shook his head.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?” Duran replied.
“Do you travel a lot? Have you been a lot of places?”
He thought about it. “Yeah. I think so.”
“Where?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She crossed the room to a small desk and, reaching beneath it, extracted an inlaid wooden box that had fallen to the floor. “Plaisir d’Amour” began to play as she opened its cover and removed two credit cards and a passport. “Voila!”
“Are we going somewhere?” he asked.
“It’s the only ID I’ve got,” she told him. “Everything else went up in smoke.”
She surveyed the mess. She’d thought they might spend a couple of hours cleaning it up, but it was hopeless. Overwhelming. It was going to take a week. But she’d have plenty of time to get into it when all this was over, she reminded herself, because she no longer had a job. She unearthed a few wearable items from the heaps, and snagged her Mason Pearson brush from the bathroom.
She led Duran out the back door, avoiding Mrs. Spears. Together, they walked through the alley to Mount Pleasant Avenue, where they bought a gallon of gas at Motores Sabrosa—only to find a pink ticket waiting for them when they got back to the Dodge.
“Another hundred bucks,” Adrienne wailed. “That’s horrible!” She stamped her foot, which made Duran laugh—which made her even madder. “What does it mean,” she demanded as she got into the car, “when the only thing this fucking city’s good at is parking enforcement?”
Duran shook his head. “It’s probably the end of civilization as we know it.”
The operation was scheduled for eight A.M. the following morning, so Duran spent the night at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, leaving Adrienne to cool her heels in the Mayflower Hotel.
Arriving on the neurosurgery ward, Duran was turned over to an admissions nurse, who fitted him out with hospital pajamas and a robe. A plastic band was affixed to his wrist, and he was taken to a semiprivate room at the end of the corridor. Nurses bustled in and out, taking his vital signs on what seemed like an hourly basis, while his roommate (a much-intubated man) lay comatose and staring.
In the evening, Shaw stopped by with the neurosurgeon, Nick Allalin, a rabbity man with a pinkish nose, large teeth, and a high-pitched voice.
Shaw introduced the two of them, and Duran noticed that Allalin’s hands were amazingly white, as if, when not in use, they were kept in a box. They were the long and muscular fingers of a pianist, immaculate, and perfectly manicured. Designer hands.
The procedure was explained to him for the second time. “Doctor Shaw will make a small incision in your upper gum, just under the nose. Then he’ll tunnel back through the nasal passages to the sphenoid cavity. At that point, he becomes an observer. I’ll be sitting in a special chair,” Allalin said, “next to the table, working a surgical microscope with my foot, so I can see what I’m doing with my hands in close-up—on a monitor. The object is embedded in the hippocampus, and we’ll take it out.”
“How long will it take?” Duran asked.
“Thirty or forty minutes.” He paused, and then went on. “You’ll be sitting up, with your head back, for most of the operation—and semiconscious.
Duran blanched, and Shaw smiled. “You won’t feel anything,” the psychiatrist assured him. “Some discomfort the day after, but that’s about all.”
“One thing I wanted to ask you about,” Allalin remarked, “is your previous surgery. What can you tell us about it?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Duran replied.
The neurosurgeon frowned. “This isn’t your first time,” he told him. “The scar’s right there, under your lip.” Leaning over, he took Duran’s upper lip in his fingers, and rolled it back for Shaw to see. When Shaw nodded, he let go.
Duran worked his lips. Finally, he said, “I think if I’d had brain surgery, I’d remember it.”
Shaw nodded. “Of course you would—unless you’re suffering from amnesia—”
“Which I seem to be.”
“Indeed.”
Shaw gave him another consent form to sign, then left with Allalin when Adrienne called to see how things were going.
It wasn’t much of a conversation. The Valium he’d been given kicked in right after the first hello. And yet, when he hung up, ten or twenty minutes later, it seemed to Duran that he’d heard something in her voice, something that sounded a lot like concern—concern for him. Could it be?
Nah.
In the morning, precisely at eight, a male nurse wheeled him down the corridor to the O/R, where he was intubated and given a series of injections that left him in a state of limp and indifferent paralysis. The operation began some ten minutes later, and proceeded, as nearly as Duran could tell, exactly as Allalin had described.
Most of the time, he kept his eyes closed, listening in a disinterested way to the underwater voices of the surgeons, the rhythmic symphony of the various machines. He couldn’t feel anything, but sensed the movement of those around him, the change in the light as Allalin leaned in, or moved away.
He heard clinks and dinks, instruments being picked up and put down on metal trays. At times, their words seemed to turn into nonsense syllables and he couldn’t understand what they were saying.
At one point, Shaw seemed to say, “Radashay at the semaphore,” and Allalin replied, “Dirapsian snide.”
Once or twice, he opened his eyes, and when he did, the lights in the O/R starred and shimmered. It was almost beautiful, the way it all pulsed in time with the blurred symphony of machine sound.
And then, quite clearly, Allalin announced, “Got it!”
Someone heaved a massive sigh.
And then he heard Shaw say, “Jesus! What the hell is that thing?”
Doctor Allalin’s face swam slowly into focus, fell apart into bands of light, and regained its form. Duran could see his mouth moving in an exaggerated way, but it seemed as if the sound took a long time to arrive.
“Effff.” Like the letter of the alphabet. Duran was tempted to continue with the exercise: “Geeee, Aitch, Eye.” But his mouth was too dry. Then he realized what the doctor was saying: Jeff.
“Wha?” It was as if he had a mouth full of toothpaste.
“At least he’s vocalizing,” Allalin said with an air of relief. He leaned over Duran again, his rabbitlike face slightly foreshortened—he was so close.
“Tell me, Jeff. What is your last name?”
Duran thought about it. He remembered he was in a hospital, remembered he’d had surgery. The surgery must be over. And he was all right. Neither dead, nor blind—nor a vegetable.
“Jeff?” The voice was patient, high-pitched. “Tell me. Do you remember your last name?”
Duran nodded.
“What’s your last name, Jeff?”