“My house is too quiet,” she explained.
“Mine isn’t.”
Acelle’s flat held three people at its most crowded; Joe’s was occupied always by a festival of relatives. Even the basement had been taken over. The only real silence was in the doc’s place on the third floor. Joe could go there anytime, even when it was empty; and when Zeph was there it was as good as empty.
For a few hours each day these children waded, climbed trees, chased rabbits, dissected worms, and built a kind of teepee, which they called Castle 2.
There were three entrances to Castle 1. The wide one, designed for horse-drawn wagons, was now used by ambulances. Another served the parking lot, and had become willy-nilly the main entrance. The former main entrance, with its five arches — four windows and a door — welcomed people who came on foot or by bus, who walked up the numerous stairs to the door or were wheeled up a winding ramp by a feeble relative or, if their arrivals coincided with his, by Zeph.
This was the access that Zeph preferred. At dawn the morning after the party, he climbed the stairs, carrying a knobby walking stick, his legacy — his only legacy — from his father. He went through the big doorway into the old beamed hall and then into an old-fashioned elevator like a cage, and then down to the surgical suites, thoroughly up-to-date. He began the ritual of changing his clothes and scrubbing up. Zeph had a limited wardrobe — he was still paying off college and medical-school debts, would be doing so for years — but he always wore a jacket and tie to work. You would expect these garments to smarten him up. In fact they made him seem more shambling and unaware: a tall loose-limbed guy carrying a stick for no apparent purpose.
“Your stick — maybe there’s a sword hidden inside,” a resident had suggested.
“I’ve never looked,” he fibbed.
As for his head: he had brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other. “Make contact,” his preceptors had urged. “Look at me,” pleaded women of all types. Contact? Look? Not in his repertoire. He had been self-sufficient all his life. He’d gotten through medical school by virtue of a good memory and deft fingers. And despite that continuing interest in the sides of patients’ necks, he didn’t flunk bedside manner; the soft voice and the thoughtful answers to their questions told patients he was in their corner even if he didn’t meet their eyes. Some patients may have even preferred the averted glance.
Zeph’s eyes, if you did get a glimpse of them, were dark blue. When he was giving general anesthesia — he occasionally got nonregional assignments — he leaned over the patient and asked him to count backward from ten and there was a kind of cobalt flash just before seven. But mostly Zeph’s job was regional, continually administering exactly the right amount of blocking drugs to exactly the right nerves, and delivering a little sedation too. The less stuff given, the better, but there must be enough of it to keep pain at a safe distance. Zeph considered all pain his mortal enemy, all patients of either gender his suffering mother, all surgeons dragons indifferent to the cruelties they were practicing. The patients’ conversation during this partially sedated state included long sleepy pauses between phrases and sometimes between words, but the talk only occasionally turned into jabberwocky. The dialogue began in a confidential mode and soon acquired a tone of intimacy, though the topics were unromantic. Bird-watching. Jazz. Immigrants, too goddamn many. Zeph’s responses were invitations to say more, continuing the palaver while his hands and eyes kept busy. What color is the bobolink? You prefer Bird to Coltrane? Yes, many people here were born elsewhere; have you traveled yourself? — a reply intended to blur insult if anyone had heard it; often the entire surgical team was made up of fellows from the Asian rim or the subcontinent, though the surgeon in charge was usually Yankee. Or Jewish. Sometimes Irish. Zeph was Irish on both sides, though his father had not been a surgeon, not any kind of doctor, just a feckless hippie who named his one child Zephyr and willed him a walking stick and did talk jabberwocky.
When Zeph paid his postoperative visits a few hours after the surgery, the patients did not seem to remember these conversations, and sometimes they did not even remember the man now standing beside their bed with his eyes on their neck. Being forgotten didn’t trouble him. He’d learned also to tolerate the next string of visits to the next day’s batch of surgical patients, though he always entered the room as if he were metal and had neglected to oil himself. He swiveled his eyes until they briefly met the eyes of the person in the bed. He said his silly name. He shook hands if the patient seemed so inclined. He was here to answer questions no matter how trivial they seemed. He sat down, preferably on a chair, on a stool if necessary, indicating that he was in no hurry. He answered the queries and he wrote a note or two on his clipboard, and when the questions were done (though some were repeated and repeated) he took over the conversation, explaining in the simplest lay terms possible the nature of the dope, its duration, its possible side effects, the probability of nasal intubation, and the unavoidable necessity of tethering the patient’s wrists to the side rails. “I’ll be taking care of you,” he said. And then, with a little less effort than earlier, he met the patient’s eyes again. And shook hands, maybe, and said good-bye.
Now, at 6:30 in the morning, he walked in his paper slippers to the OR anteroom, where he was the first doctor to arrive but the second member of the team there; the scrub nurse was always waiting. She helped him into his mask and gloves and he entered the pearl and silver sanctuary. He checked the treasures in his beloved cart. The other docs padded in. Then the first patient, supine on wheels. Things began.
This patient was an overweight man of fifty-seven with diabetes and a raging need for a knee replacement.
“I’m going to insert the needle now, just as I explained,” Zeph said, and even as he spoke, the needle was reaching the necessary nerve. Zeph lowered his head toward the patient’s head so they could speak and Zeph could meanwhile watch the monitors and not get in the way of the surgeons, already clustered at the knee like jackals. “Are you feeling anything in your left foot?” Zeph said, and a nurse scratched its sole. “No,” the man replied. The nurse pinched his thigh. “Do you feel anything in your left thigh?” Zeph said. Another “No.” Zeph announced, “Ready,” in a firm voice never yet heard outside of the operating room.
The patient told Zeph about sailing: “Nothing like it, you are master, you are jubilant, you yourself are the…are the…”
“Wind?” Zeph suggested.
“Out of body…out of mind…you are made of air and sky.”
“Water?”
“Marshmallow…peanut butter.”
Zeph reduced the Versed.
“Come out with me sometime, Doc.”
“Love to.”
The next patient was so talkative that Zeph added diazepam to her IV, then joined in her complaints about children and grandchildren; you would think, if you heard his responses, that dealing with recalcitrant offspring was his life’s interest. The third, a boy with a supposedly operable tumor in his abdomen, was a general. Zeph, unable to communicate with this child sunk in artificial sleep, noted that the tumor was extensive and not completely excisable. The final surgery was a lumpectomy, nice and clean. The woman on the table flirted with him and he flirted right back, kept her as close to full awareness as possible. “Have you ever been in love, Blue Eyes?” she giggled.