The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [206]
not leave your home for a while—say the first week or two following the surgery. After all this had been said, the doctor asked me again, one last time, if I was still prepared to go through with the operation. This was my last chance to back out. The patient answered the doctor in the brave, defiant affirmative. Then the doctor asked for his fee: everything up front. The doctor was acutely embarrassed even to be discussing money—he was a man of almost aristocratic manners, and disliked the dirty but necessary intrusion of the economic into this conversation. The patient reached a long purple hand into the inner pocket of his jacket and slipped out an envelope, which he slid across the desk. The doctor opened the unsealed flap of the envelope, peeked inside, and counted the money visually without handling it, then rolled open the desk drawer, dropped the envelope in the drawer, and rolled it shut. The doctor nodded gravely. He rose from the desk, pushed in his chair, rolled up his sleeves, draped a white apron over his head and tied the strings in the back. He told me to take off my shirt and lie down on the operating table. I did as he commanded. The thin paper mat on the operating table crinkled under my body and stuck to the sweaty flesh of my back. I rested my sweet head on a little paper pillow, and heard the paper fabric rustle and crunch under my ears. The doctor covered me with a clean white sheet. He billowed it over my body as if changing a bed, and pulled it up to my neck and tucked it under my chin. The doctor clicked on the fluorescent lamps C-clamped to the edges of the operating table. The tubes glowed on—nzt-nzt-ngnzzzzzzzz—stinging my eyes with bright light. Why does it seem at times as if my whole life has been lived out beneath the cold glare of fluorescent lights? The lights of academia, of science, of art, of medicine, of the madhouse. That is my fate, to live beneath fluorescent lights. In my peripheral vision I saw Dr. DaSilva—his body moving quickly and exactly, though with the occasional pops, scratches, blots, and jitters in the old celluloid—as he took a roll of duct tape from the operating table. The primitive restraining device of an illegal physician. I heard the sound of a long strip of tape being unpeeled from the roll. I smelled the incredibly distinctive odor of freshly unpeeled duct tape. With a long band of smelly gray tape the doctor secured my head to the back of the table, then wrapped several more layers of tape around my forehead, until I couldn’t budge it. He did likewise with my arms, until the image of Frankenstein’s monster strapped to the table to presently await his incarnating bolt of harnessed lightning probably became comically analogous. I hesitantly asked the doctor whether these restraints were entirely necessary. The doctor assured me they were a necessary precaution, nothing to worry about. He dabbed alcohol on my forearm, squirted a spurt of clear liquid from the end of a hypodermic needle, knocked it twice with his fingers, slid it deep into a vein and pushed its contents into my bloodstream. Things began to get fuzzy here for me. My sense of time dilated. I felt my body quickly becoming cool and numb. It was a pleasant sensation. Hot and cold at the same time. My breathing slowed faster than my stream of consciousness. I might have muttered incoherently. Lydia—I hope I did not mumble over and over until the anaesthetic took me under—Lydia, Lydia, Lydia… Perhaps the doctor wondered what significance this name had for his patient. What other secrets did morphine unlock from my fading brain? I’ll never know. I woozily observed the doctor wash his hands at the sink as if from a thousand miles away. Somehow I was asleep and awake simultaneously. I could feel the doctor’s delicate hands, I could feel the slight applications of pressure, the deft touches, the surgical flourishes, the cuts. I could just barely feel the doctor mutilating my face with his instruments, and a distant part of me felt the blood running down my cheeks, I tasted it as it dripped a little into my