Junior tries to straighten his revolver first, then drops it on the floor and begins to weep. Sister Alice puts the razor blade in the fold of a paper napkin, then puts it in a little plastic bag, seals it and chucks it in the waste bin.
“Go to Accidents. And no need to be shy, they get lots of this sort of thing during their night shift.” Before leaving the room, she turns around and says, “And stop screaming. You’ll wake Begum Qaz.”
Eight
Teddy has brought a mauser to his declaration of love. He has brought a story about the disappearing moon as well, but he is not sure where to start. The story is romantic in an old-fashioned kind of way; the Mauser has three bullets in it. He is hoping that the Mauser and the story about the moon will somehow come together to produce the kind of love song that makes old acquaintances run away together.
Before resorting to gunpoint poetry, Teddy Butt tries the traditional route to romancing a medical professional; he pretends to be sick and then, like a truly hopeless lover, starts believing that he is sick, recognises all the little symptoms — sudden fevers, heart palpitations, lingering migraine, even mild depression. He cries while watching a documentary about a snow leopard stranded on a melting glacier.
He lurks around the Out Patients Department on a Sunday afternoon, when Sister Alice Bhatti is alone. She pretends to be busy counting syringes, boiling needles, polishing grimy surfaces, and only turns around when he coughs politely, like you are supposed to when entering a respectable household so that women have the time to cover themselves. Alice Bhatti doesn’t understand this polite-cough protocol and stares at him as if telling him, see, this is what smoking does to your lungs.
Teddy Butt is too vain to bring up anything like stomach troubles or a skin rash, both conditions he frequently suffers from. Boldabolics play havoc with his digestion. His bodybuilder’s weekly regime of waxing his body hair has left certain parts of him looking like abstract kilim designs. For his first consultation with Alice, he has thought up something more romantic.
“I can’t sleep.”
He says this sitting on a rickety little stool as Sister Alice takes notes in a khaki register. “For how long have you not been able to sleep?” With any other patient Alice would have reached for the wrist to take the pulse, would have listened to the chest with a stethoscope, but with Teddy she knows that he is not that kind of patient.
“Since I have seen you” is what Teddy wants to say, but he hasn’t rehearsed it, he is not ready yet.
“I actually do go to sleep. But then I have dreams and I wake up,” he says, and feels relieved at having delivered a full sentence without falling off the stool.
Alice Bhatti wants to tell him to go to the OPD in Charya Ward; that is where they deal in dreams. The whole place is a bad dream. But she knows that he wants to be her patient and Senior Sister Hina Alvi has taught her that when a patient walks in with intent, you listen to them, even if you know they are making up their symptoms. She presses on with her diagnosis.
She can also see the outline of a muzzle in the crotch of his yellow Adidas trousers. He looks like a freak with two cocks.
“What kind of dreams?”
Teddy has only ever had one dream, the one with a river and a kaftan-wearing God in it. The dream always ends badly as a drowning Teddy discovers that he can’t walk on water even in his dream. God stands at the edge of a silvery, completely walk-able river and shakes His head in disappointment, as if saying, it’s your dream, what do you expect me to do? But somehow in this potentially romantic setting, bringing up God and His kaftan and His disapproval seems inappropriate. “I see a river in my dream.” He conveniently leaves God out.
“A river?” Alice Bhatti taps the pen on the register without writing anything.
Teddy feels he is being told that his dream is not sick enough.
“It’s a river of blood. Red.”
Alice looks at him with interest. This Teddy boy might be a police tout, but he has a poetic side to him, she thinks.
“Any boats in that river of yours?” she asks with an encouraging smile, as if urging him to go on sharing more of his dream with her, to go ahead and dream for her. Teddy accepts the challenge. “It has bodies floating in it, and severed heads, bobbing up and down.” He realises that his dream doesn’t sound very romantic. “And some flowers also.”
“Do you recognise any of these people in the river? In your dream, I mean.” Teddy shuts his eyes as if trying hard to recognise a face from the river. He was hoping that somehow his midnight yearning for Alice and his insomnia would walk hand in hand and form a rhyming, soaring declaration of love that would reverberate through the corridors of the hospital. Instead he is stuck with embellishing details of a bad dream.
“I can’t really stop your dreams, but I can give you something that will ensure that you sleep well. And if you sleep well then you might start having better dreams.” She scribbles a prescription for Lexotanil, then puts it aside. “Actually I might have some here. An hour before you sleep. Never on an empty stomach. And no warm milk at night. Sometimes indigestion can give you bad dreams.”
Alice gives him a brief smile. “You might want to change that bandage on your thumb. I hope you didn’t hurt it in a dream.” Then she turns around and goes back to counting her syringes. She does it with such studied concentration that it seems the health of the nation depends on getting this count right.
Teddy Butt stumbles into the OPD the following morning, bleary-eyed, moving slowly. His voice seems to be coming from underwater. There is a sleepy calm about him. Even the muzzle of the gun in his trousers seems flaccid. “I didn’t have any dreams. What did you give me? What did you mix in that pill?” His words are accusatory but his tone is grateful.
“I didn’t mix anything. It was a Glaxo original, supposed to help you sleep. Do you want more?” Alice reaches into her drawer and stops. She notices that he is wearing a little cross on a gold chain around his neck. She shows the slight, spontaneous irritation that natives feel when tourists try and dress up like them. “What’s that thing you are wearing?”
“Just a locket,” Teddy Butt says. “A friend from Dubai got it for me.” The man whose neck Teddy snatched it from was indeed visiting from Dubai. One ear and the side of his face were blown off in an unfortunate accident during an interrogation. The man from Dubai had almost strangled Teddy with his handcuffs before Inspector Malangi put his Beretta near his left ear, shouted at Teddy, “Knee on the left, bhai. Your left, not mine,” and shot him. The chain with the cross was the reward Inspector Malangi gave him for keeping the man pinned down at that difficult moment. Teddy hadn’t killed the man; he was only holding him down. It was his job. If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. If he hadn’t done this job, he would definitely have had to do some other job. And who knows what he might be required to do in that new job? He runs his forefinger along his chain and presses the cross into his chest with the satisfaction of someone who is lucky enough not to have the worst job in the city. He had felt the man’s breath on his knee when he tried to bite him before getting shot.
For a moment he thinks whether he can source a matching necklace for her.
“It’s a cross, not a locket,” says Alice. “Why would a man want to wear jewellery anyway?” She scribbles another prescription for Lexotanil on her pad and turns away.
Teddy Butt is flummoxed and walks off without answering, without asking anything. He goes to his room in Al-Aman apartments and sleeps the whole day. He doesn’t have any dreams, but after he wakes up and starts doing weights, he watches a fascinating documentary about Komodo dragons that hypnotise their prey before going for the underside of their throat.