Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [235]
AN EARLY WINTER STORM comes over Ocean City and reaches inland by afternoon, first with freezing rain, crackling on the window, and then snow so heavy that when he stands outside it weighs down his eyelashes. It blankets northern New Jersey, five to six inches in as many hours. It shuts down interstates, airports, schools, and all commerce, but he knows nothing of this as he retreats to his room. Ice forms around the edges of his window, leaving a narrow prism through which to look onto a still and ghostly world. It is on this evening that he witnesses a scene from his life which makes him want to end it. He is seated on his bed, staring through that narrow breach in the frosted window. His mind is motionless and hushed like the landscape outside. The only thing that stirs is the ebb and flow of his breath, but even that seems to cease.
Then suddenly, he feels a quickening, as if the wearing away of brain cells has unroofed a lacuna of memory.
What spews out that winter's night is a vivid, colorful, and specific memory of Sister Mary Joseph Praise.
He is simply the observer, a man watching a bird, unaware of the feral cat lurking in the wisteria. This is what he sees, what he remembers:
Addis Ababa.
Missing Hospital.
Work.
He sees himself in the rhythm of operating, of clinics, of writing, forcing himself to sleep, his days full and satisfying. The weeks and months roll by. The master word. Work. And suddenly the machinery seizes …
(He thinks of this as his “Missing Period.” He prefers that to “breakdown.”)
It always begins the same way. He wakes from sleep in his quarters at Missing, wakes in terror, unable to breathe, as if he is about to die, as if the next breath will trigger the explosion. Though he is awake, the tentacles of dream and nightmare won't let go. A terrifying spatial distortion is the hallmark of this state. His bedroom in his quarters begins to shrink. His pen, the doorknob, his pillow—ordinary objects that normally do not merit a second glance—balloon in size. They become colossal and threaten to impale him, to suffocate him. He has no control over this state. He cannot turn it off by sitting up or moving around. He becomes neither child nor man, does not know where he is, or what scene he is reliving, but he is terrified.
Alcohol is not the antidote. It does not break the spell, yet it dulls the terror. It comes with a price: instead of straddling the line between wakefulness and nightmare, he crosses over. He roams in a world of familiar objects turned into symbols; he traipses through scenes of his childhood and through hell's portals. He hears a nonstop dialogue, like cricket commentary on the radio. That is the backdrop to these night terrors in Ethiopia. The commentator's voice is indistinct—sometimes it sounds like his own voice. As he drinks, he loses his fear but not his sorrow. He who has no tears in his waking now weeps like a child. He sees Ghosh—probably the real Ghosh, not a dream figure—standing before him, concerned, the Ghosh lips moving but the words drowned out by the commentator.
Then she is there. He cannot hear her words, but her presence is reassuring, and ultimately, only she stays, only she keeps vigil. She must have been asleep when she was summoned, because she wears a head scarf and a dressing gown. She holds him to her when a new wave of tears appears, and she cries with him, trying to rescue him from his nightmare but, in the process, she gets sucked in. (Every time he recalls this, there is a stirring in him.) In their work together, they share an intimacy that involves the body of another who lays between them, unconscious, naked, and exposed. But this weeping in her arms is shockingly different from their gowned forearms brushing or heads bumping during surgery. Separated