Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [141]
I'm sure Hema believed that a prurient interest in a woman's anatomy took me to that page in the textbook. And perhaps it did, but that wasn't all there was to it. Would she believe me if I said that those musty old books with their pen-and-ink drawings, their grainy photographs of people parts contorted and rendered grotesque by disease, held out a special promise? Kelly's Obstetrics and Jeffcoate's Gynecology, and French's Index of Differential Diagnosis (at least in my childish way of thinking), were maps of Missing, guides to the territory into which we were born. Where but in such books, where but in medicine, might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained? Where else could I understand the urge in me (was it homicidal? Id lie awake at night wondering) that did away with the army man, and then the simultaneous urge to keep it concealed and to confess? Maybe there were answers in great literature. But I discovered in Ghosh's absence, in the depths of my sorrow, that the answer, allanswers, the explanation for good and evil, lay in medicine. I believed that. I was sure that only if I believed would Ghosh be freed.
ON THE THIRD WEEK of Ghosh's abduction, I walked to the front gate in the morning, just as St. Gabriel's sounded the hour, which was Gebrew's command to allow entrance. The narrow pedestrian opening permitted just one person at a time to come through. What prevented chaos and a stampede was the sight of Gebrew in his priest's garb.
Two men jostled each other, high stepping over the frame of the gate like hurdlers. “Behave yourselves, for God's sake,” Gebrew admonished. Next came a woman who stepped over gingerly, as if getting out of a boat and onto the dock. As the patients took turns to peck like hens around the four points of Gebrew's handheld cross—once for the crucified Christ, then for Mary, then once for all the archangels and the saints, and then for the four living creatures of the Book of Revelation—and waited for Gebrew to touch it to their forehead, order was imposed. These visitors to Missing feared illness and death, but their fear of damnation was greater.
I studied the faces, each one an enigma, no two alike. I hoped that the next face would be Ghosh's.
I imagined the day my “real” father—Thomas Stone—would step through the gate. I imagined myself standing here. I'd be a doctor by then, and I might be in my green scrubs, taking a break between surgeries, or in my white coat with a shirt and tie beneath. Even though I had no photograph or memory of Stone to go by, Id know it was him right away
I knew what I'd say to him: You're much too late. We went ahead with our lives without you.
CHAPTER 28
The Good Doctor
IAWOKE WHILE IT WAS NOT YET DAYBREAK. I ran as fast as I could in the dark to the autoclave room. This was the thought that woke me up: What if Sister Mary Joseph Praise could intercede and free Ghosh? My “father” would never come, but what if my birth mother was just waiting to be asked? I hoped she wouldn't hold my long absence from her desk chair against me.
Seated, staring up at that print of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, seeing only faint outlines as I hadn't put on the light, I felt as if I were in a confessional, but with no desire to confess. I was silent for ten minutes or so.
“You know for the longest time I assumed that all babies came in twos,” I said. I was making conversation. I didn't want to get to Ghosh or the favor I sought right away. “Koochooloo's pups came in fours and sixes. At Mulu Farm we saw a sow with twice that number.
“We are identical twins, but the truth is we aren't exactly identical. No, not the way a one-birr note is identical with another birr note in all but the serial number. Shiva