veins
But your artwork came out crooked, I said, exasperated but above all astonished at what he hadn’t seen. Crooked? You didn’t look hard enough, doctor. Lekz cleared his throat as if his years as a smoker were handing him the bill right there. It’s another hemorrhage. Don’t worry, muttered Lekz uneasily, grabbing a handful of his hair and pulling at it gloomily; bleeding a little isn’t so strange after an operation, he said. It’s nothing unusual, he repeated, there’s no cause for alarm. He insisted on calm, talking between his teeth before falling silent, shielded by his magnifying lens. His was not just any silence; it was a silence that emanated from his body. Lekz had stopped breathing. I had also given up on breathing. I was deciding to suffocate myself. It was so much silence that we — and not only us, the people in the waiting room, too — could have disintegrated, the world could have disappeared and taken Ignacio with it. I thought of him with dismay, I wondered about his anxious decision to stay outside. He’d announced it firmly, though at the last second he changed his mind and walked to the door with us. Lekz closed the door in his face. Ignacio must have returned to his chair; he’d be feverishly turning pages of magazines without paying an ounce of attention. Lekz separated his lips, his mouth sucked in air and inflated his infirm lungs, and he interrupted my silence with his words. There’s been a slight flaw. A flaw or a surprising imperfection, it’s true, he admitted. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before now, he murmured with premonitory bitterness. He was so close I could hear his nails scratching his neck, the vein throbbing at his throat. He took off the metal headlamp and explained falteringly that he’d left some ringleted veins uncut, some veins just in the center of the left eye. I left them there, he repeated, punishing himself with the repetition. I was convinced that. I thought. Maybe he was lying to himself and rubbing his eyelids, maybe it was true that in those hours he’d gotten all the veins. And if these were new ones? Veins from these past few days? Lekz was more alone, tenser and darker than his own shadow. I’ve never seen this before, but it’s possible one of my colleagues has. Or several. Or all of them. They can take a look at you. Our clinical meeting is this afternoon. That way we can be sure. I studied his post-Soviet grimace with my double and wobbly vision while he told me that I wouldn’t be asleep, only stunned with a touch of anesthesia. You won’t feel a thing, he promised, while he peered out into the waiting room and asked Doris to reserve a time in operating room four. You’re going to operate on her right now, doctor? said Doris in a sigh, although on the inside what she did was moo over the accumulation of simultaneous tasks. But she was a woman trained to moo at the world and lick the hand of a single man, her owner. Right now, Doris, the clinical operating room, bring in the associates for an outpatient check-up, murmured Lekz with the gentleness of all true masters.
disappearances
The city disappears, the hospital opens its doors and I disappear too, without saying goodbye to anyone amid its forms and fluorescent-lit hallways. This time I have an express ticket, and I use it to enter an operating room stuffed full of eye doctors of varying sizes and shapes, all distorted and a little double. I can halfway make out when Lekz appears in his green suit among the others wearing the same disguise. I halfway realize that they’ve all finished their morning surgeries but have stuck around to witness, along with Lekz, the mystery of my veins. I also half-hear their anecdotes, their condolences, their political comments, but I feel nothing. Nothing, either, when they announce the hit of liquid anesthesia. I only ask that the effect last longer than this collective violation, and much as I hate being manhandled, I decide to give in. I close my eyes for an instant so Lekz can open them again for me in a little while. And now they’re open, little by little. I hear other people’s voices, nearby conversations that I retain but only halfway. Someone utters the word vein and someone else repeats it until they make it disappear. Someone uses the word proliferation. Someone uses the phrase hormone-aided growth. If she were a man this wouldn’t have happened. I know that someone else peers over me and I think something about something, but what? There are bloody words everywhere. I know they are discussing my fate but I know I’m not sure what they’ve decided, and a sip of water reaches my mouth in the recovery room and then tea and bland crackers in a common room full of people. There are no eye doctors, no nurses, no Ignacio. I’m waiting for him to appear and go home with me. They won’t let me leave on my own, I could keel over, I could sue them for damages; I’ll have to stay here another night because Ignacio has disappeared. He’s not going to come tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. You’re never going to come back, Ignacio, is what I say to myself before my blackout.
eye for an eye
I opened my eye, and there was the little girl with the patch over one side of her face, the girl shooting the electric ray of her gaze at me. In that single uncovered eye is concentrated all the fear of hospitals that now falls like an ax onto my cornea. While outside the street revives — a gust or a whisper in the distance — and the sun peers indignantly through the gaps in the curtains to track us with its flame; while light bulbs swayed slightly in the ceiling, moved by the incessant march of Filipinas changing shifts; while I struggled to wake up, the dazzling, chilling blue of her eye had already been awake for hours, aimed at me. I half-closed my own eye, trying to protect myself. (I looked for you, but you hadn’t appeared.) I blinked, unable to convince myself that I’d emerged from an anesthetic void only to fall, struck down by the gaze of a little girl who was waiting for her doctor too. The creature didn’t take her eye off me, didn’t hold back a gram of that pupil. It was her eye against mine, but mine was just an iris tattered by operations, a faltering pupil. Was she a demon, a sprite, a post-op hallucination? At what point had this girl arrived, so little and so bewildered at finding another cyclops like herself? She was a couple meters away, perplexed; she didn’t complain or scratch at the skin around her patch, and I looked away. And in that deflection that was the only possible escape, I realized the little girl wasn’t alone. No. Around the girl were clamped the fingers of someone who must be her mother. Don’t stare at her like that, murmured the woman, and her voice echoed off the room’s high ceilings. Don’t look at her, she’s looking at you, she repeated, though without the slightest modesty she brazenly ran her own eyes over me: both of hers staring at my lack of one. It’s not polite, she explained, though still blasting me with her gaze. My naked eye was looking at the blurry girl, and then the mother, who was wiping the oil from her forehead, and then at the daughter, confused, waiting for something to happen. Have they taken one of your eyes too, I heard the mother say. Did they have to cut out a cancer. It wasn’t a question but rather a recrimination, a reproach that the mother unsheathed to show that her suffering was superior, the suffering of a mother facing her daughter’s single but devastating eye. And then I remembered my mother, my mother thrusting her old eyes on me as we said goodbye, and I thought about Ignacio, his two flawless black eyes, his eyes he didn’t seem aware of; and I also thought I would be left very alone without my eye if I lost it; I’d have an orphan face. And then. If you care so much about your daughter, ma’am, I said, challenging her, daring her to a duel with herself. If the loss hurts you that much, give her the eye that she’s missing. Give it to her right now, though it’s still too big for her.