Rob kicked a pedal to start an adjacent tap running and started to scrub without talking to her. They were still in a fight. He wet his hands and arms, and began to soap them up. Jemma ran the brush idly over her fingertips, and watched, liking how the water and foam caught in the hair on his forearms, how it matted and curled. Jemma watched the brush travel from the tip of his fingers up to a point halfway between his elbow and shoulder, then down again.
“Stop looking at me,” he said. Jemma continued to stare. Rob hurried his scrub, scooping his hands and arms under the water to rinse them. He sidled up next to her, arms held up in front of him, elbows dripping. “Don’t let Dr. Walnut beat you into the room,” he said, then backed through the door into the OR. It was a rule of surgery, that the most senior surgeon comes last into the OR like a king comes last into the chamber of state.
In her sixteen weeks of surgery, Jemma had perfected the post-scrubbing posture — it was the one thing she had gotten good at. She flexed her arms crisply at the elbow, and splayed her fingers gracefully before her face. She squelched her foreboding, backed into the door, and thrust it open with a commanding blow from her ass. She spun on the ball of her foot, careful not to fling any drops from her wet hands and arms, and gave the scrub nurse a look she hoped would be interpreted as proud — she had learned that scrub nurses tended to ignore you if you were earnest and kind. The nurse handed her a sterile towel. Jemma dried herself, finger to elbow, and tossed the towel to the floor in her best imitation of surgical haughtiness. The nurse helped her into the blue paper gown, and then into the gloves, stretching them at the mouth while Jemma reached her hand into them, the way you reached into a snake hole, or into a toilet. No matter how forcefully she shoved her hand into the glove, there was always a bit of empty finger at the tip that she’d spend the next five minutes worrying and pulling. Like always, it ruined her haughty-surgeon act. The nurse, her eyes made articulate by her mask, gave Jemma a look that said she’d seen right through her.
After the nurse had tied up her gown, Jemma walked over to Rob. He was helping to prepare the body; Brenda lay spread out, already unconscious and intubated, on the operating table, tied at ankles and wrists, arms above her head, so she made the shape of an X. After a nurse finished scrubbing the child’s belly and chest with betadine, Rob put the drape on her. He shook it out with a snap, and then it settled over her, obscuring her face, her neck and chest, her arms and legs. A window in the drape exposed an oval of stained belly five inches across its longest part. Underneath the skin her belly was rotting; she had an infection in the wall of her bowel, flagrant and obvious on the x-ray that Jemma had ordered. “Excellent work,” Dr. Walnut had said, after Jemma had been interrogated by the two surgeons. Jemma had already ordered all the tests that Dr. Walnut wanted by the time he came to see the child. He rewarded her by summoning her — at hour thirty-eight — to the surgery. Jemma would rather have had a kick in the face. Now she’d been awake for forty hours. It was a new record for her.
As Rob smoothed the drape, Dr. Wood raised his little screen, a length of sterile paper that was hoisted north of the shoulders but south of the chin, ostensibly to establish the upper border of the sterile field, but also, and more importantly, to divide the domain of the cranky, rude surgeon from that of the contented and fun-loving anesthesiologists. It was a different world, behind the blue curtain. On this side of it, surgeons scolded at sutures cut too long and too short, at fat retracted with insufficient or overzealous force, and dissected the ignorance of the common medical student, and when there was laughter, it was only cruel. On the other side the anesthesiologists reclined among their puffing machines, discussing films and art and restaurants and golf, and gossiping in quiet voices about the surgeons in the room. How often Jemma had wanted to go there, to the other side, during her sixteen weeks of hell. She wanted to go there now.
Dolores came into the room, followed shortly by Dr. Walnut. The two nurses attended to them simultaneously, and the way they postured and dipped their arms and hands and spun made it seem like they were dancing in synchrony, so Jemma expected them shortly to start into a doo-wop routine. They were the last two surgeons in the world, and representative of their kind, a meanie and a junior meanie. Jemma had imagined them mating, to replenish the species. It would be a sterile procedure, she was certain, involving betadine and steel. Dolores, the resident, would lay a clutch of eggs and make a nurse sit on them until they hatched, freeing an equal number of boys and girls, each the very image of their father or mother, each little mouth already turned down in a perpetual frown of annoyance.
Dr. Walnut was a small man, a cardiac surgeon who’d been frequently slumming in the abdomen since the Thing. He had a pointy nose, and small ears, and round blue eyes. From the nose up he looked better suited to making cookies, or repairing shoes than cutting into children, but his thin white lips gave him away. Jemma thought they must once have been thick and red and luscious, but a professional lifetime of pressing his lips together impatiently had flattened and bleached them. Thin, curly wisps of white hair escaped from under the edges of his surgical cap. The cap was festive, covered with smiling, fat-tired school buses. Such silly little hats marked a person as a native of the OR. The hats were the only thing Jemma liked about most surgeons, and she wanted one for herself, but it was considered uppity for a medical student to wear one, so Jemma had always made do with the frowsy sheer bouffant caps that made everyone look like they were hiding their curlers.
Dolores was as big as Dr. Walnut was small. She had probably been stately like Dr. Tiller, once, before she had decided to become a surgeon. Jemma had watched her make the typical transformation, across her intern year, one that was repeated over and over, through the decades represented in the surgical housestaff pictures that had hung down a dark hall of the medical school. The interns were all lean-faced and sharp-looking; the second-years were puffy and looked tired, the third-, fourth-, and fifth-years looked progressively weary and fat. Surgical interns entered the program healthy, ambitious, and beautiful, but the call and the toxic atmosphere wore on them; their souls shrank to nubbins while their asses bloomed into soft, marvelous pillows, and they became giant grub-like creatures that could perform a one-handed Kasai procedure, but when placed in the sun, made a mewling noise, and asked to be taken in, and to be fed fried food. Vivian said they were corrupt before they started, that the surgical muse called her slaves from among the evil dead, but Jemma disagreed, and had always thought it was sad, even in the most hellish days and nights of her surgery clerkship, even when a lady very like Dolores had ordered her to wear a truncated dunce cap during a pancreatectomy, how they were corrupted, how their bravery was corrupted to hubris, their genius corrupted to cleverness, their compassion corrupted to disdain, their patients corrupted to meat. Dolores’s cap was blaze orange. In the former world she’d been a huntress and an eater of game.
“Well, kiddies,” said Dr. Walnut. “Let’s save this baby, shall we?” He rubbed his gloved hands together till they squeaked. He stepped up on a pedestal next to the table, and was suddenly almost as tall as Rob.
“You’re in my place,” Dolores said to Jemma. Jemma moved, into the place of the scrub nurse, who moved her on. She thought there’d be no room for her, for all that she’d been invited. Dr. Walnut noticed her standing away from the table, and brought her over next to him, so it was Rob who had to step back. Dr. Walnut called for the music to begin — he listened to Ravel while he worked — and then put out his little hand for the scalpel.