Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [234]
THE OAKS AND MAPLES outside the window of his room are wild men with their heads on fire. He shuts his eyes, but the view inside his eyelids is the same nightmare. His nerves are lancinating cables under his skin that send jolts of electricity to his muscles. He is so tremulous that when he brings a glass of water to his lips, he has spilled most of it before he can take a sip. He pukes his insides out, till he imagines the lining of his stomach is smooth and shiny like a copper pot. But the impulse to run is gone. He has put one or perhaps two oceans between him and the place he flees.
Eli Harris and another man, a doctor perhaps, judging by his detachment, leave him tincture of paregoric in a tiny bottle by the bedside. Thomas fails to see it at first, imagining that the peculiar scent of aniseed and camphor is a hallucination. But once he spies the bottle he drinks it as if it holds redemption. The antiseptic odor fills the room, and then it comes off his breath. It is the tiny amount of opium in paregoric that gives him some ease, or so he tells himself. Surely it isn't the alcohol base of the tincture. He is done with alcohol.
The only two women he has ever loved have died, and though one death occurred years before the other, they became superimposed in his brain. It made him lose his mind. He fled. He ran without knowing where to or what from. He has now run far enough. He has no memory of how he arrived in New Jersey from Kenya, except that he has a benefactor, Eli Harris.
A week passes, measured not in days, but in cold sweats and night terrors. It is two weeks before the agitation and the shakes ease, and before the ugly little invertebrates begin a retreat. For so long they have been on his skin and on the edge of his sheets, scurrying to the periphery of his vision when he turns to look at them. Now they retreat to the chitinous underworld from where they came.
There is bread and cheese by his bed, sitting on a newspaper that is two days old. The paregoric bottle is empty. A pitcher of water has been refilled. When at last he feels it safe to take his chair to the window, the leaves have gone from carrot to brick to crimson and every hue in between, a palette beyond the imagination of any painter. He sits there like a statue, grateful for being able to sit, to see things for what they are. Leaves spiral down, each descent unique and never to be repeated. A million voyagers leave their invisible trails in the air.
One morning he is steady enough to go downstairs. A sparrow hops on the warped wood of the porch, the varnish flaking under its feet. Stone sees the ginger kitten inching forward from the wisteria, its shoulder blades gliding like pistons under its fur. He wonders if he is hallucinating. The kitten's unblinking eyes are locked on its prey. The bird tilts its head like a coquettish woman to regard man and beast.
Just when Thomas thinks the tension is unbearable, the kitten pounces, but the sparrow hops easily to the railing and out of reach. Thomas feels something crack inside, releasing him from the torpor that stifled his movements and slowed his thoughts. He has emerged to a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.
HE KNOWS THE CEILING in his bedroom better than he knows his body. He has studied the molding. The decorative grooves are even in depth and width. He sees the handiwork of a craftsman. A clumsy amateur later subdivided the house with plywood partitions and with prefabricated doors. But the master's imprint is there to see.
At first he credits the paregoric for the curious phenomenon, but it continues after the paregoric is long gone: like a cinema