Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [127]
This detachment remained with him once he tried to sleep. He was conscious of Susan there, of her body, yet he couldn’t keep far enough away from her, as if merely sleeping in the same bed with another woman was the real sin he’d committed and by maintaining this literal separation he might bolster his claim of innocence should someone burst into the room. Or perhaps it was that he was unaccustomed to sharing the space, since he and Marilyn never did anymore. Either way, his discomfort buoyed him on sleep’s surface. When he finally looked at his watch, it was 4:15. Susan lay facing away from him with the covers off her torso, the sheets forming a V at the small of her back, the braids of her spine as discernible in the shadows as the imprint of a fossil. He propped himself up to look at her face. He’d never woken up next to her, he realized, nor did he know her parents’ names, her middle name, her birth date—all essential facts and stories. He then was gripped by such a panic he had to lie back and drape his arm over his eyes, forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply, slowing his heart to the point where he could begin to believe that this night would end. Over an hour later, out the window, the sky finally turned blue, a tracery of light burning along the edges of the hills, for which he thanked God. The two more hours of rest he needed were cooking the backs of his eyes like yolks and he wanted coffee but didn’t feel like foraging. So he woke Susan and told her to dress, found the keys Michael had left him to his MG, and drove her back to her apartment through this blue world of empty streets—Los Angeles in the morning feeling more like a desert than at any other time of day.
Instead of stopping somewhere for breakfast, he went straight to the hospital and was greatly relieved to see Chappie, who was all grip, all talk, taking him by the shoulder after they shook hands and squeezing it too in welcome, so hard it made Sheppard smile and go limp. Chappie was short but he felt as strong in the hands as someone twice his size. His energy seemed to run through every fiber of his body: the hairs on his arms and ears bristling with the discharge, his eyebrows lightning bolts. No matter how accomplished Sheppard ever became, around Chapman he always felt he was struggling to keep up, and as they walked toward surgery Chappie talked about the upcoming procedure so far ahead of the explanation in his mind that it came out of his mouth in media res. Sheppard, nodding, still felt shaky, but he reacquired focus once they scrubbed in, habit’s blessed restoration of clarity, this presurgical routine priming his brain; and once they entered the OR his fatigue and emotionality fell away, replaced by keenness, by calm. It was an open-heart procedure he was observing today, a magnificent, stirring thing to behold, the incision down the sternum and then the circular saw along the chest bone, which before being split looked, with the ribs and clavicle bones branching off of it, like the back of a giant bug. The stainless steel retractor was inserted, its crank turned smoothly, and there in that rectangular window was the heart, blanketed in purple pericardium, this protective tissue incised and these four triangles lifted away like a present’s wrapping, their ends clamped to the retractor’s rails so that the revealed organ appeared to sit on this splayed canvas as if it were in a hammock. The patient, Chappie explained, suffered from acute aortic valvular incompetence, her condition so critical she required an experimental prosthesis, a caged ball valve with multiple-point fixation rings secured to the ascending aorta. It was an astonishing seven-hour procedure that required a degree of technical precision and reliance on technology Sheppard had never experienced before. I could live like this out here. In joy, on the vanguard, the tip of the spear. He was allowed to implant the replacement valve, an obscenely difficult job given the condition of the woman’s aortic tissue.