Flashback (1988) (2 page)

“Okay, Toby, you’re going to go to sleep now. Just relax, listen to the music, and count back from one hundred like this. One hundred … ninety-nine … ninety-eight …”

“One hundred … ninety-nine …” Toby heard his own voice say the words, but he knew he wasn’t speaking. “Ninety-eight … ninety-seven …” He felt icy cold water being swabbed over the space between his belly and the top of his leg—first over the lump, and then over his peenie. “Ninety-six … ninety-five.”
Please stop. You’re hurting me. Please
.

“That’s it, y’all, he’s under. Ready, Jack? Team?” The voice, a man’s, was one Toby had heard before. But where? Where? “Okay, Marie, turn up the speakers just a hair. Good, good. Okay, then, let’s have at it. Knife, please …”

The doctors voice. Yes, Toby thought. That was who. The doctor who had come to see him in the emergency ward. The doctor with the kind eyes. The doctor who had promised he wouldn’t …

A
knife? What kind of knife? What for?

Then Toby saw it. Light sparked off the blade of a small silver knife as it floated downward, closer and closer to the lump above his leg. He tried to move, to push himself away, but the strap across his chest pinned his arms tightly against his sides.

For a moment, Toby’s fear was replaced by confusion and a strange curiosity. He watched the thin blade glide down until it just touched the skin next to his peenie. Then pain, unlike any he had ever known, exploded through his body from the spot.

“I can feel that! I can feel that,” he screamed. “Wait! Stop! I can feel that!”

The knife cut deeper, then began to move, over the top of the lump, then back toward the base of his peenie. Blood spurted out from around the blade as it slid through his skin.

Again and again, Toby screamed.

“That’s it. Suction now, suction,” he heard the doctor say calmly.

“Please, please, you’re hurting me. I can feel that,” Toby pleaded hysterically.

He kicked his feet and struggled against the wide strap with all his strength. “Mommy, Daddy. Please help me.”

“Metzenbaums.”

The blade of the shiny knife, now covered with blood, slid free of the gash it had made. In its place, Toby saw the points of a scissors pushing into the cut, first opening, then closing, then opening again, moving closer and closer to the base of his peenie. Each movement brought a pain so intense, it was almost beyond feeling. Almost.

“Don’t you understand?” Toby screamed, struggling to speak with the reasoning tone of a grown-up, “I can feel that. It hurts. It hurts me.”

The scissors drove deeper, around the base of his peenie.

“No! Don’t touch that! Don’t touch that!”

“Sponge, I need a sponge right here. Good, that’s better. That’s better.”

The scissors moved further. Toby felt his peenie and his balls come free of his body.

Don’t do that … don’t do that….
The words were in his mind, no longer in his voice.

Again, with all his strength, Toby tried to push up against the strap across his chest. Overhead, he saw the doctor—the man whose eyes had been so kind, the man who had promised not to hurt him. He was holding something in his hand—something bloody—and he was showing it to others in the room. Toby struggled to understand what it was that he was showing, what it was that was so interesting. Then, suddenly, he knew. Terrified, he looked down at where the lump had been. It was gone, but so was his peenie … and his balls. In their place was nothing but a gaping, bloody hole.

In that instant, the strap across Toby’s chest snapped in two. Flailing with his arms and legs, he threw himself off the table, kicking at the doctors, at the nurses, at anything he could. The bright overhead light shattered. Trays of sparkling steel instruments crashed to the floor.

“Get him, get him,” he heard the doctor yell.

Toby lashed out with his feet and his fists, knocking over a shelf of bottles. Blood from one of them splattered across his legs. He ran toward the door, away from the hard table … away from the strap.

“Stop him! … Stop him!”

Strong hands caught him by the arms, but he kicked out with his feet and broke free. Moments later, the hands had him again. Powerful arms squeezed across his chest and under his chin.

“Easy, Toby, easy,” the doctor said. “You’re all right. You’re safe. It’s me. It’s Daddy.”

Toby twisted and squirmed with all his might.

“Toby, please. Stop. Listen to me. You’re having a nightmare. It’s just a dream. That’s all. Just a bad dream.”

Toby let up a bit, but continued to struggle. The voice wasn’t the doctor’s anymore.

“Okay, son, that’s it. That’s it. Just relax. It’s Daddy. No one’s going to hurt you. You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.”

Toby stopped struggling. The arms across his chest and under his chin relaxed. Slowly, they turned him around. Slowly, Toby opened his eyes. His fathers face, dark with concern, was inches from his.

“Toby, can you see me? It’s Daddy. Do you know who I am?”

“Toby, it’s Mommy. I’m here, too.”

Toby Nelms stared first at his father, then at the worried face of his mother. Then, with an empty horror swelling in his chest, he slid his hand across the front of his pajama bottoms. His peenie was there, right where it was supposed to be. His balls, too.

Was this the dream?

Too weak, too confused to cry, Toby sank to the floor. His room was in shambles. Toys and books were everywhere. His bookcase had been pulled over, and the top of his desk swept clean. His radio was smashed. The small bowl, home of Benny, his goldfish, lay shattered on the rug. Benny lay dead amidst the glass.

Bob Nelms reached out to his son, but the boy pulled away.

His eyes still fixed on his parents, Toby pushed himself backward, and then up and onto his bed. Again, he touched himself.

“Toby, are you all right?” his mother asked softly.

The boy did not answer. Instead, he pulled his knees to his chest, rolled over, and stared vacantly at the wall.

1

The day, Sunday, June 30, was warm and torpid. On New Hampshire 16, the serpentine roadway from Portsmouth almost to the Canadian border, light traffic wound lazily through waves of heated air. Far to the west, a border of heavy, violet storm clouds rimmed the horizon.

The drive north, especially on afternoons like this, was one Zack Iverson had loved for as long as he could remember. He had made the trip perhaps a hundred times, but each pass through the pastureland to the south, the villages and rolling hills, and finally, the White Mountains themselves, brought new visions, new feelings.

His van, a battered orange VW camper, was packed solid with boxes, clothes, and odd pieces of furniture. Perched on the passenger seat, Cheapdog rested his muzzle on the windowsill, savoring the infrequent opportunity to view the world with his hair blown back from in front of his eyes.

Zack reached across as he drove and scratched the animal behind one ear. With Connie gone from his life, and most of his furniture sold, Cheapdog was a rock—an island in a sea of change and uncertainty.

Change and uncertainty
. Zack smiled tensely. For so many years, June the thirtieth and July the first had been synonymous with those words. Summer jobs in high school; four separate years in college, and four more in medical school; internship; eight years of surgical, then neurosurgical, residency—so many changes, so many significant June-the-thirtieths. Now, this day would be the last in that string—a clear slash between the first and second halves of his life.

Next year, the date would, in all likelihood, slip past as just another day.

Highway 16 narrowed and began its roller-coaster passage into the mountains. Zack glanced at his watch. Two-thirty. Frank and the Judge were at their club, probably on the fourth
or fifth hole by now. Dinner wasn’t until six. There was no need to hurry. He pulled off into a rest area.

Cheapdog, sensing that this was to be a stop of substance, shifted anxiously in his seat.

“That’s right, mop-face,” Zack said. “You get to escape for a while. But first …”

He took a frayed paperback from between the seats and propped it up on the dash. Instantly, the dogs squirming stopped. His head tilted.

“You appreciate, I can see, the price that must be paid for the freedom you are about to enjoy. Yes, dogs and girls, it’s time for”—he took the silver dollar from his shirt pocket and read from the page—“a classic palm and transfer, Italian style.”

The book, Rufo’s
Magic with Coins
, was a 1950s reprint Zack had stumbled upon in a Cambridge secondhand bookstore.

Amaze your friends … Amuse your family … Impress members of the opposite sex … Sharpen your manual dexterity
.

The four claims, embossed in faded gold leaf on the cover, each held a certain allure for him. But it was the last one of the group that clinched the sale.

“Don’t you see?” he had tried to explain to a neurosurgical colleague, as he was fumbling through the exercises in Chapter One. “We’re only in the O.R.—what?—a few hours a day at best. We need something like this to keep our hands agile between cases—to sharpen our manual dexterity. The way things are, we’re like athletes who never practice between games, right?”

Unfortunately, although the principle behind that thought was noble enough, the implementation had given rise to a most disconcerting problem. For while Zack’s hands were quite remarkable in the operating room, even for a neurosurgeon, he had as yet been unable to master even the most elementary of Rufo’s tricks, and had been reduced to practicing before mirrors, animals, and those children who were unaware of his vocation.

“Okay, dog,” he said, “get ready. I’m going to omit the patter that goes with this one because I can see you eyeing those birches out there. Now, I place the coin here … and snap my wrist like this, and … and
voila!
the coin it is gone.… Thank you, thank you. Now, I simply pass my other hand over like this, and …”

The silver dollar slipped from his palm, bounced off the emergency-brake lever, and clattered beneath the seat.

The dogs head tilted to the other side.

“Shit,” Zack muttered. “It was the sun. The sun got in my hands. Well, sorry, dog, but one tricks all you get.”

He retrieved the coin and then reached across and opened the passenger door.

Cheapdog bounded out of the camper, and in less than a minute had relieved himself on half a dozen trees, shambled down a steep, grassy slope, and belly flopped into the middle of a mountain stream.

Zack followed at a distance. He was a tall man with fine green eyes and rugged looks that Connie had once described as “pretty damn handsome … in a thuggy sort of way.”

He wandered along the edge of the slope, working the stiffness of the drive from his bad knee and watching as Cheapdog made a kamikaze lunge at a blue jay and missed.

Do you know, boy?
he wondered.
Do you know that the rehearsal’s over? That we’re not going back to the city again?

He squinted up at the mountains. The Rockies, the Tetons, the Smokies, the Sierras, the northern Appalachians—an avid rock climber since his teens, he had climbed at one time or another in all of them. There was something special, though, something intimate and personal that he felt in the White Mountains and nowhere else; they seemed to be giving him a message—that the world, his life, were right where they should be.

The demands of surgical training had exacted a toll on every aspect of his existence. But of all those compromises and sacrifices, the unavoidable cutback in his climbing was the one he had accepted the most reluctantly. Now, at almost thirty-six, he was anxious to make up for lost time.

Thin Air … Turnabout and Fair Play … The Widow-Maker … Carson’s Cliff … Each climb would be like rediscovering a long-lost friend.

Zack closed his eyes and breathed in the mountain air. For months he had wrestled with the choice of a career in academic medicine or one in private, small-town practice. Of all the decisions he had ever made—choosing a college, medical school, a specialty, a training program—this was the one that had proved the most trying.