A small curtain divided the ambulance longitudinally. They pulled it back: there was the patient, strapped to the stretcher. So they’d brought him here! Those wretches stopped at nothing! “All’s fair in war,” Actyn must have thought.
The two doctors leaned over him with such intense, professional attention that they forgot about Dr. Aira; they checked his IV, his pupils, the blood pressure monitor, the electrical activity in his brain, the magnetic ventilator. The ambulance was one of those new intensive care units. The patient was a man of about forty-five who had evidently undergone radiation therapy because the left side of his skull was bald, and the ear on that side showed mutations. It almost seemed authentic. . But he shouldn’t think. He turned and looked out the window. They were still driving straight down the same street where they’d found him, still at very high speed and with the siren blasting, racing through intersections like an arrow, one after another after another. . Where were they going? The houses, swept away like exhalations in their wake, were all small and humble, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. They seemed to be accelerating constantly.
He started paying attention again because they were talking to him. They drew a clinical profile of the utmost gravity. The two doctors’ self-assurance was astounding; they used technical vocabulary as if they had been brought up surrounded by electronic circuits. All the machines were turned on, and they illustrated the points they were making by pointing to a blinking curve, a decimal number, an insulin intake chart. They had everything divided into zones on an undulating tridimensional grid that trembled on one of the screens like a multicolored cube of gelatin; they focused in on the numbers, which they entered into a wireless pocket keyboard.
“Are you familiar with this technology?” Ferreyra asked him upon noticing his astonishment. “It operates with induced evolving boards, made of dual proteins. Would you like to try?” he asked, handing him the keyboard.
“No! I’m afraid of doing something foolish.”
“You see, all these marvels of science cannot prevent. . ”
Yeah, yeah, you can’t get me to bite that. Where’s the camera? It had undoubtedly been easy to hide among all those machines, and Actyn was probably watching him at that very moment, surrounded by his henchmen, recording everything. Now he understood why the ambulance kept driving in a straight line without turning down any side streets: turning interfered for a few instants with the transmission of the image, and Actyn didn’t want to miss a single second; this worried Dr. Aira, for it indicated that all they needed from him was a momentary slip. .
What were they telling him? Had they reached the core of the issue?
“. . your gifts, Dr. Aira, though from our strictly rational point of view. . ”
And the other, at the same time:
“. . everything possible is being done, technology helps use up all possibilities of action. . ”
What this meant was that the deployment of incredible machines hastened the intervention of magical healers like himself, for conventional medical science could almost immediately reach its insurmountable limit. Which established a link between him and them, making more plausible their request for his intervention.
And what might that intervention be? To bring a goner back to life? Pull him back from the very brink of death. As if that were something out of the ordinary! Wasn’t this what always happened? Didn’t everybody in extremis get rescued? That was the normal mechanism of interaction between man and the world: reality would search for one more idea, search desperately for it when all ideas had already been thought. . and it would find it in the nick of time.
Of course they were hoping to see the exotic and picturesque part of the operation, the grotesque magical ritual, the touch of the ridiculous that they would know how to draw attention to, the blunder they would publicize in the tabloids, the failure. And of course he would not give them that pleasure.
Because all of this was the same as a medical “hidden camera,” the difference being that they could no longer catch him off guard; they had already tried so many times that all they could do was risk “hiding the hidden,” hoping to slip it in between levels.
He watched them talk, his attention waxing and waning at irregular intervals, as a result of which the two enthusiastic and youthful — almost frenetic — faces he had so close to his began to seem unreal. And they were, he had no doubt about this, though only up to a certain point; because they did belong to two human beings of flesh and blood. The intensive use of hidden cameras in the last few years (in order to pull off all kinds of pranks, but also to catch corrupt officials, dishonest businessmen, tax evaders, and criminal infiltrators into the medical profession) required using up actors at a phenomenal rate, for they could never be employed a second time because of the risk of blowing their cover. They had to always be new, debutants; they couldn’t have appeared on any screen ever before, not even as extras, because given the high degree of distrust that had infiltrated society, the least hint of recognition was enough to ruin the operation. And that same, constantly increasing distrust forced actors to be constantly getting better, more believable. It was astonishing that they didn’t run out of them; of course, they didn’t need to be professionals (with the new Labor Contract Law, they were not strictly required to be members of the union), but in cases where a lot was at stake, it must have required a difficult decision to place the success or failure of an operation in the hands of an amateur.
These two were really good; they not only handled the jargon perfectly but they even had the gestures, tics, bearing, and voices of doctors. . Perhaps they were doctors who were collaborating with Actyn out of conviction; in that case, they were new recruits, because Dr. Aira knew all the original fanatics. Actyn had the necessary prestige and charisma to keep acquiring new adherents to his cause, which he called the cause of Reason and Decency. But it was a fact that doctors were also human beings, subject to the vicissitudes of incurable diseases, and whoever got “burned” in front of Dr. Aira would then be unable to use his services, even if the case was desperate. Hence Actyn’s only option was to seek active supporters among the ranks of the youngest doctors, those who would least consider their personal risk. This explained why these two were so young.
Of course there was also the possibility that this was a real case. A very remote possibility, one in a million, yet it persisted as a pure possibility, lost among all the possibilities. In a different era, before these cursed spy technologies had been perfected, it would have been the opposite: the possibility that this was a performance would have been so improbable that he wouldn’t have even entertained the idea; in those days, whatever happened was inevitably considered real. But there was no point in lamenting the good old days, because historical circumstances formed a block: everything would have been different in days gone by; you wouldn’t have been able to record a blunder in order to broadcast it urbi et orbi, but miracles were accepted as a matter of course, because the precise boundary between what was and was not a miracle had not yet been established.
If he could trust in the existence of true symmetry, he might be able to hope, now that this boundary had been clearly drawn, that the corresponding boundary — the one that divided blunders from what were not blunders — would begin to dissolve.
Because blunders were a tributary of spontaneity, and without it, they would vanish like an illusion. In this respect, Actyn might have gone too far, and he might now be entering the arena where all his efforts were automatically sterile. Ever since he had decided to turn all his firepower against Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures, he had burned through stages, unable to stop because of the very dynamic of the war, in which he was the one who took every initiative. In reality, he had overcome the first stages — those of direct confrontation, libel, defamation, and ridicule — in the blink of an eye, condemned as they were to inefficiency. Actyn had understood that he could never achieve results in those terrains. The historical reconstruction of a failure was by its very nature impossible; he ran the risk of reconstituting a success. He then moved on (but this was his initial proposition, the only one that justified him) to attempts to produce the complete scenario, to pluck one out of nothingness. . He had no weapons besides those of performance, and he had been using them for years without respite. Dr. Aira, in the crosshairs, had gotten used to living as if he were crossing a minefield, in his case mined with the theatrical, which was constantly exploding. Fortunately they were invisible, intangible explosions, which enveloped him like air. Escaping from one trap didn’t mean anything, because his enemy was so stubborn he would set another one; one performance sprung from another; he was living in an unreal world. He could never know where his pursuer would stop, and in reality he never stopped, and at nothing. Actyn, in his eyes, was like one of those comic-book supervillains, who never pursues anything less than world domination. . the only difference being that in this adventure it was Dr. Aira’s mental world that was at stake.