Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [272]
I closed my eyes and clung to Shiva. I cradled him, his skull buttressed against mine and now wet with my tears. I felt physically vulnerable in a way I'd never felt when we were a continent apart, as if with his death my own biology was now altered. The heat was rapidly leaving his body.
I rocked Shiva, wedging my head against his, remembering how for so long I was unable to sleep except like this. I felt despair. I didn't want to leave this bed. Chang and Eng had died within hours of each other, because when the healthy one was offered the opportunity to be freed from the dead one, he declined. I understood so well. Let Deepak give me a lethal dose of morphine and let my life end this way, let my respiration cease, my pulse fade and then disappear. Let my brother and me leave the world in the same embrace with which we began in the womb.
I PICTURED SHIVA getting the telegram, his coming to me, then putting himself at risk to save me. Would I have done the same for him? Perhaps when he saw me, he'd felt the way I did now: that it didn't matter what might have transpired between us, but life would not be worth living and would end soon if something happened to the other.
His body continued to lose heat in my arms as if I were drawing it away, siphoning it over. I remembered the two of us running up the hill in a relay, carrying a lifeless and cold child to Casualty, the parents trailing behind us. He was now that lifeless child.
The minutes passed.
Ultimately it was the rude coldness of Shiva's skin, the terrible separation it delineated of the living and the dead, the disarticulation of our bound flesh, that forced me to a new understanding, a new way of seeing us in the face of such rapid attrition, and this is what I came to:
Shiva and I were one being—ShivaMarion.
Even when an ocean separated us, even when we thought we were two, we were ShivaMarion.
He was the rake and I the erstwhile virgin, he the genius who acquired knowledge effortlessly while I toiled into the night for the same mastery; he the famous fistula surgeon and I just another trauma surgeon. Had we switched roles, it wouldn't have mattered one bit to the universe.
Fate and Genet had conspired to kill my liver, but Shiva had a role in Genet's fate, and hence my fate. Every action of ours turned out to be dependent on the other. But now by a brilliant and daring rearrangement of organs, ShivaMarion had readjusted. Four legs, four arms, four kidneys, and so on, but instead of two livers, we had downsized to one. Then karma and bad luck took us even further, forced further concessions: we lost ground on his side, a few organs died. Okay—just about everything on his side died, but we retained half his liver, and it was thriving. What we had to do now was economize further, go halves again, tough measures for tough times: two legs sufficed, so also with eyes, kidneys. We'd go with half a liver, one heart, one pancreas, two arms … but we were still ShivaMarion.
Shiva lives in me.
Call it a far-fetched scheme that I conjured up to allow me to go on … Well then, it allowed me to go on. It gave me comfort. It dried my tears, helped me untwine my arms and legs from the body that we were discarding. In the eerie quiet of that room, so primed for machines but with the machines all silent, the blinds closed, and with an icy corpse next to me, I felt Shiva was instructing me. He had rowed over from the sinking ship and he was telling me to think this way, and it was just Shiva's kind of logic. One being at birth, rudely separated, we are one again.
THEY WERE ASSEMBLED outside, a ghoulish receiving line was what I thought at first. But they couldn't know what had just transpired, and so I didn't blame them. Their hearts were in the right place. Thomas Stone, Deepak, Vinu, and so many of my nurses and nursing assistants— my friends, my Our Lady family before they became my