Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (84 page)

“Did you see that movie about the Cuban guy?” she asked. “It played here for a while, but I wouldn’t go. Someone told me a dog gets killed in the first fifteen minutes, so I said forget it.”

I reminded her that the main character died as well, horribly, of AIDS, and she pulled into the parking lot, saying, “Well, I just hope it wasn’t a real dog.”

I wound up buying cigarettes at Tobacco USA, a discount store with the name of a theme park. Lisa had officially quit smoking ten years earlier and might have taken it up again were it not for Chessie, who, according to the vet, was predisposed to lung ailments. “I don’t want to give her secondhand emphysema, but I sure wouldn’t mind taking some of this weight off. Tell me the truth: Do I look fat to you?”

“Not at all.”

She turned sideways and examined herself in the window of Tobacco USA. “You’re lying.”

“Well, isn’t that what you want me to say?”

“Yes. But I want you to really mean it.”

But I had meant it. It wasn’t the weight I noticed so much as the clothing she wore to cover it up. The loose, baggy pants and oversized shirts falling halfway to her knees: This was the look she’d adopted a few months earlier, after she and her husband had gone to the mountains to visit Bob’s parents. Lisa had been sitting beside the fire, and when she scooted her chair toward the center of the room, her father-in-law said, “What’s the matter, Lisa? Getting too fat — I mean hot. Getting too hot?”

He had tried to cover his mistake, but it was too late. The word had already been seared into my sister’s brain.

“Will I have to be fat in the movie?” she asked me.

“Of course not. You’ll be just…like you are.”

“Like I am according to who?” she asked. “The Chinese?”

“Well, not all of them,” I said. “Just one.”

Normally, if at home during a weekday, Lisa likes to read eighteenth-century novels, breaking at 1:00 to eat lunch and watch a television program called
Matlock.
By the time we finished with my errands, the day’s broadcast had already ended, so we decided to go to the movies — whatever she wanted. She chose the story of a young Englishwoman struggling to remain happy while trying to lose a few extra pounds, but in the end she got her plazas confused and we arrived at the wrong theater just in time to watch
You Can Count on Me,
the Kenneth Lonergan movie in which an errant brother visits his older sister. Normally Lisa’s the type who talks from one end of the show to the other. A character will spread mayonnaise onto a chicken sandwich and she’ll lean over, whispering, “One time, I was doing that? And the knife fell into the toilet.” Then she’ll settle back in her seat and I’ll spend the next ten minutes wondering why on earth someone would make a chicken sandwich in the bathroom. This movie reflected our lives so eerily that for the first time in recent memory, she was stunned into silence. There was no resemblance between us and the main characters — the brother and sister were younger and orphaned — but like us they’d stumbled to adulthood playing the worn, confining roles assigned to them as children. Every now and then one of them would break free, but for the most part they behaved not as they wanted to but as they were expected to. In brief, a guy shows up at his sister’s house and stays for a few weeks until she kicks him out. She’s not evil about it, but having him around forces her to think about things she’d rather not, which is essentially what family members do, at least the family members my sister and I know.

On leaving the theater we shared a long, uncomfortable silence. Between the movie we’d just seen and the movie about to be made, we both felt awkward and self-conscious, as if we were auditioning for the roles of ourselves. I started in with some benign bit of gossip I’d heard concerning the man who’d played the part of the brother but stopped after the first few sentences, saying that, on second thought, it wasn’t very interesting. She couldn’t think of anything, either, so we said nothing, each of us imagining a bored audience shifting in its seats.

We stopped for gas on the way home and were parking in front of her house when she turned to relate what I’ve come to think of as the quintessential Lisa story. “One time,” she said, “one time I was out driving…” The incident began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended, unexpectedly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car. Like most of my sister’s stories, it provoked a startling mental picture, capturing a moment in time when one’s actions seem both unimaginably cruel and completely natural. Details were carefully chosen and the pace built gradually, punctuated by a series of well-timed pauses. “And then…and then…” She reached the inevitable tailpipe, and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn’t the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain of guilt and suffering.

I instinctively reached for the notebook I keep in my pocket, and she grabbed my hand to stop me. “If you ever,” she said, “ever repeat that story, I’ll never talk to you again.”

In the movie version of our lives, I would have turned to offer her comfort, reminding her, convincing her, that the action she’d described had been kind and just. Because it was. She’s incapable of acting otherwise.

In the real version of our lives, my immediate goal was simply to change her mind. “Oh, come on,” I said. “The story’s really funny, and, I mean, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it.”

Your life, your privacy, your bottomless sorrow — it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it. Is this the brother I always was or the brother I have become?

I’d worried that, in making the movie, the director might get me and my family wrong, but now a worse thought occurred to me: What if he gets us right?

Dusk. The camera pans an unremarkable suburban street, moving in on a parked four-door automobile where a small, evil man turns to his sobbing sister, saying, “What if I use the story but say that it happened to a friend?”

But maybe that’s not the end. Maybe before the credits roll, we see this same man getting out of bed in the middle of the night, walking past his sister’s bedroom and downstairs into the kitchen. A switch is thrown, and we notice, in the far corner of the room, a large standing birdcage covered with a tablecloth. He approaches it carefully and removes the cover, waking a blue-fronted Amazon parrot, its eyes glowing red in the sudden light. Through everything that’s come before this moment, we understand that the man has something important to say. From his own mouth the words are meaningless, so he pulls up a chair. The clock reads 3:00
A.M
., then 4:00, then 5:00, as he sits before the brilliant bird repeating slowly and clearly the words, “Forgive me. Forgive me: Forgive me.”

Richard Selzer

 

RICHARD SELZER
, the son of a family doctor, was born in Troy, New York. He attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, and earned an MD at Albany Medical College in 1953. He is the author of
Rituals of Surgery
, a collection of short stories; two volumes of essays,
Mortal Lessons
and
Confessions of a Knife
; and a volume of essays and fiction,
Letters to a Young Doctor.
In 1991, he contracted Legionnaires’ disease and went on to document his recovery in
Raising the Dead: A Doctor’s Encounter with His Own Mortality.
He retired from practicing surgery and teaching at Yale Medical School in 1986.

 

I heard the other day that Hugh Franciscus had died. I knew him once. He was the Chief of Plastic Surgery when I was a medical student at Albany Medical College. Dr. Franciscus was the archetype of the professor of surgery — tall, vigorous, muscular, as precise in his technique as he was impeccable in his dress. Each day a clean lab coat monkishly starched, that sort of thing. I doubt that he ever read books. One book only, that of the human body, took the place of all others. He never raised his eyes from it. He read it like a printed page as though he knew that in the calligraphy there just beneath the skin were all the secrets of the world. Long before it became visible to anyone else, he could detect the first sign of granulation at the base of a wound, the first blue line of new epithelium at the periphery that would tell him that a wound would heal, or the barest hint of necrosis that presaged failure. This gave him the appearance of a prophet. “This skin graft will take,” he would say, and you must believe beyond all cyanosis, exudation and inflammation that it would.

He had enemies, of course, who said he was arrogant, that he exalted activity for its own sake. Perhaps. But perhaps it was no more than the honesty of one who knows his own worth. Just look at a scalpel, after all. What a feeling of sovereignty, megalomania even, when you know that it is you and you alone who will make certain use of it. It was said, too, that he was a ladies’ man. I don’t know about that. It was all rumor. Besides, I think he had other things in mind than mere living. Hugh Franciscus was a zealous hunter. Every fall during the season he drove upstate to hunt deer. There was a glass-front case in his office where he showed his guns. How could he shoot a deer? we asked. But he knew better. To us medical students he was someone heroic, someone made up of several gods, beheld at a distance, and always from a lesser height. If he had grown accustomed to his miracles, we had not. He had no close friends on the staff. There was something a little sad in that. As though once long ago he had been flayed by friendship and now the slightest breeze would hurt. Confidences resulted in dishonor. Perhaps the person in whom one confided would scorn him, betray. Even though he spent his days among those less fortunate, weaker than he — the sick, after all — Franciscus seemed aware of an air of personal harshness in his environment to which he reacted by keeping his own counsel, by a certain remoteness. It was what gave him the appearance of being haughty. With the patients he was forthright. All the facts laid out, every question anticipated and answered with specific information. He delivered good news and bad with the same dispassion.

I was a third-year student, just turned onto the wards for the first time, and clerking on Surgery. Everything — the operating room, the morgue, the emergency room, the patients, professors, even the nurses — was terrifying. One picked one’s way among the mines and booby traps of the hospital, hoping only to avoid the hemorrhage and perforation of disgrace. The opportunity for humiliation was everywhere.

It all began on Ward Rounds. Dr. Franciscus was demonstrating a cross-leg flap graft he had constructed to cover a large fleshy defect in the leg of a merchant seaman who had injured himself in a fall. The man was from Spain and spoke no English. There had been a comminuted fracture of the femur, much soft tissue damage, necrosis. After weeks of débridement and dressings, the wound had been made ready for grafting. Now the patient was in his fifth postoperative day. What we saw was a thick web of pale blue flesh arising from the man’s left thigh, and which had been sutured to the open wound on the right thigh. When the surgeon pressed the pedicle with his finger, it blanched; when he let up, there was a slow return of the violaceous color.

“The circulation is good,” Franciscus announced. “It will get better.” In several weeks, we were told, he would divide the tube of flesh at its site of origin, and tailor it to fit the defect to which, by then, it would have grown more solidly. All at once, the webbed man in the bed reached out, and gripping Franciscus by the arm, began to speak rapidly, pointing to his groin and hip. Franciscus stepped back at once to disengage his arm from the patient’s grasp.

“Anyone here know Spanish? I didn’t get a word of that.”

“The cast is digging into him up above,” I said. “The edges of the plaster are rough. When he moves, they hurt.”

Without acknowledging my assistance, Dr. Franciscus took a plaster shears from the dressing cart and with several large snips cut away the rough edges of the cast.

“Gracias, gracias.”
The man in the bed smiled. But Franciscus had already moved on to the next bed. He seemed to me a man of immense strength and ability, yet with out affection for the patients. He did not want to be touched by them. It was less kindness that he showed them than a reassurance that he would never give up, that he would bend every effort. If anyone could, he would solve the problems of their flesh.

Ward Rounds had disbanded and I was halfway down the corridor when I heard Dr. Franciscus’ voice behind me.

“You speak Spanish.” It seemed a command.

“I lived in Spain for two years,” I told him.

“I’m taking a surgical team to Honduras next week to operate on the natives down there. I do it every year for three weeks, somewhere. This year, Honduras. I can arrange the time away from your duties here if you’d like to come along. You will act as interpreter. I’ll show you how to use the clinical camera. What you’d see would make it worthwhile.”

So it was that, a week later, the envy of my classmates, I joined the mobile surgical unit — surgeons, anesthetists, nurses and equipment — aboard a Military Air Transport plane to spend three weeks performing plastic surgery on people who had been previously selected by an advance team. Honduras. I don’t suppose I shall ever see it again. Nor do I especially want to. From the plane it seemed a country made of clay — burnt umber, raw sienna, dry. It had a dead-weight quality, as though the ground had no buoyancy, no air sacs through which a breeze might wander. Our destination was Comayagua, a town in the Central Highlands. The town itself was situated on the edge of one of the flat-lands that were linked in a network between the granite mountains. Above, all was brown, with only an occasional Spanish cedar tree; below, patches of luxuriant tropical growth. It was a day’s bus ride from the airport. For hours, the town kept appearing and disappearing with the convolutions of the road. At last, there it lay before us, panting and exhausted at the bottom of the mountain.