Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [54]
The theater doors swung open.
All eyes turned to the figure that entered.
But it was only wide-eyed Gebrew, priest, servant of God, and watchman. The covered bowl he carried held the injera and wot, and their scent was added to that of placenta, blood, amniotic fluid, and meco-nium. Gebrew had hesitated to come into this sanctum sanctorum. He held the food container in front of him, unsure if it were the ingredient that might save the day. His eyes almost popped out of their sockets when he saw, on the altar of this hallowed place, Sister Mary Joseph Praise opened like a sacrificial lamb with Stone's hand in her chest. He started to shake. He put the food on the floor, squatted down against a wall, pulled out his beads, and swayed in prayer.
Stone redoubled his efforts. “I demand a miracle and I want it right now,” he said, his body rocking back and forth. He kept it up even when the heart had turned mushy in his hand, and he was shouting now. “The bloody loaves and fishes … Lazarus … the lepers … Moses and the Red Sea …” Gebrew's chanting in ancient Geez matched Stone, call and response, as if Gebrew were translating because in this hemisphere God didn't know English.
Stone looked up to the ceiling, prepared for the tiles to part and for an angel to intercede where surgeons and priests had failed. All he saw was a black spider hanging down from its web, with its compound eyes taking in the scene of human misery below. Stone's shoulders slumped, and though his hand was still in Sister Mary's thorax, he was now merely caressing her heart, no longer squeezing. His chest heaved, tears falling onto the body of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. His head fell forward so it rested on his arms, which rested on Sister's chest. No one dared approach. They were transfixed by the sight of their surgeon so defeated, so destroyed.
AT LONG LAST he looked up, seeing as if for the first time the green tile going halfway up the wall, the swinging green door to the autoclave room, the glass instrument case, the bloody uterus with its necklace of hemostats lying in the green towel, the blue-black placenta right next to it on the specimen table, and the jade-colored ground-glass windows through which sunlight filtered. How did these things dare to exist if Mary did not?
That was when his eyes fell on the twins, no longer in their copper throne; that was when he saw the orange halo of light that surrounded the two boys. Somehow both children were alive, bright-eyed, one of them seeming to study him, the second one now as pink as the first.
“Oh no, no, no,” he said in a pitiful voice. “No. That was not the miracle I asked for!” When he withdrew his hand from Mary's body it made a gurgling sound. He left the theater.
He came back with a long broom. He brushed the spider off the ceiling, and then, with his heel, he ground it into the tile.
Matron understood he was intent on blasphemy; in case the arachnid was God, he was killing God.
“Thomas,” Hemlatha said, using his first name, which sounded strange on her tongue in Operating Theater 3, because they were always formal here. By this time both babies were in Hema's arms, wiped off and suctioned and swaddled in receiving blankets. The one in whose skull Stone had tried to drill a hole had aspirated some amniotic fluid but now seemed recovered; there was a big pressure dressing in