The Wonder Garden (8 page)

When Harold approaches Dr. Warren with his new idea, the surgeon responds with a blunt mix of disbelief and admiration. They sit together at O'Reilly's, at their usual table. Their meetings have become a favorite ritual of Harold's, and he suspects they are a highlight for the doctor, too. He has continued to meet Harold after their failed scheme, as if nothing untoward has happened. Now, the doctor shakes his head.

“I thought brain surgeons were known for being mavericks,” Harold says.

It's true. He's heard that they are addicted to adrenaline: juggling patients' lives in their hands, screwing nurses in the locker room. Of course there must be quiet, steady neurosurgeons, too—men like himself, with stable marriages and rain forest sound tracks at home. Even after their hours of conversation, he still isn't entirely sure which type of surgeon Dr. Warren is.

“Who's going to complain about it?” Harold presses. “I'm the only one who would complain. I'm the only one who would sue.”

Harold actually flashes a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills for effect. The surgeon looks gravely at it.

“And I'm the one who
won't
sue over a certain botched diagnosis.”

Dr. Warren is silent. Harold tucks the cash away in his jacket pocket and pats the bulge that it makes.

The girls come home, and the night before the operation, the Christensens gather for dinner at a high-end Spanish restaurant. This is Carol's idea. She's been wanting to try the place for years, she says, but no occasion has ever seemed special enough. It's as if she expects this dinner to be her last. She orders paella and a pitcher of sangria for the table, but there is a weight in her eyes, as if she can't bear to look at her family. Even the girls are subdued as they take turns filling their glasses.

“Listen, kids. Carol,” Harold speaks with conviction. “I'm just as nervous about this as you are. But you have to look at the facts here. Modern science is more precise than you realize. Operations like this happen hundreds of times a day, all over the world.”

His daughters nod and force smiles. Carol looks down at her plate.

“It's more dangerous to cross a busy street than to have surgery nowadays. And these surgeons are experts, remember. They wouldn't operate if they weren't very, very confident of their success. Their own careers are on the line, after all. Think of all the lawsuits. They wouldn't do it unless they were sure.”

The more Harold speaks, the more certain he feels about the truth of these words. He looks at his younger daughter, only nineteen. She is on her second glass of sangria, but nobody stops her. Tonight is beyond such trivialities as underage drinking. Harold watches her chew a wine-soaked orange rind and feels a rising apprehension. She is too young to be motherless.

Later that night, as he watches his wife cleanse her face with a tissue and cream, the apprehension returns. He feels it as a push inside his chest. His wife drops a used tissue into the trash, draws a new one out of its box, and pats her face in the mirror. For a moment, he questions his plan.

As Carol lies in bed beside him in her yellow nightgown, Harold tries to sort the problem out logically. He is not a man accustomed to second-guessing himself. He lies still and tries to shepherd his thoughts into a rational row. They will all make perfect sense together, he is sure, even if they are disjointed and unruly now.

He remembers dissecting a cow's heart in school. He feels keenly again the thrill of encountering on the outside those secrets that belonged on the inside. He hadn't been brought up with religion, but he felt he was touching a machine manufactured by God. He stood at the front of the class and explained what he knew about ventricles and valves and the unknown motor that made the pump run. A girl wrinkled her face as he put a finger in the aortic artery. Harold squeezed the heart. He stood holding the heart, memorizing the cool smooth feel of it, until the teacher asked him to give it back and sit down.

His wife rustles in the bed. She wants to talk, he can tell.

“What is it, honey?”

Carol is quiet for a moment.

“I'm afraid,” she says softly into Harold's arm.

“Oh, you know there's nothing to be afraid of, sweetheart. It's a safe operation.”

“It's brain surgery. What if I die, or end up brain damaged?”

“Yes, it's brain surgery. But they do it all the time. You won't die, and you won't be brain damaged, I promise. You'll be much better when it's over.”

“I think I'd rather have the fits.”

Carol's face is still pressed against his arm. He looks down at the top of her head, the waves of meandering hair that he's looked down upon for years. Just a single prod to the correct fold of her motor cortex, he knows, could cause her knee to bend or fingers to curl. The thought brings a sense of almost excruciating intimacy.

“Trust me, honey. You'll be fine.”

She whimpers slightly and pushes her face harder against him. He wraps her in his arms and squeezes. He will never know anyone so fully, that much is certain. He keeps her tightly in his arms until her breathing slows and she sleeps. He relaxes his hold then and takes a long look at her, the slackened mouth and crinkled eyelids. He lies beside her, feeling his worries wash out in a pool of tenderness.

He can still feel the dinner stir in his stomach, the rice and wine and spices breaking down to a pool of sharp juice. The echo of garlic rises into his mouth as he silently belches. It is the taste of Spain, of their courtship in its early days. All at once he remembers Seville, remembers the restaurant, the dancer. Carol had cried that night, he remembers. She had sat at the table with trembling lips. It was a white frilled top that she wore, that she'd bought at an outdoor market that day. He remembers how it had made her look like a young girl, like a peasant's daughter. The trip had been perfect until then. Carol's face had colored in the sun despite her straw hats. Her skin had been smooth and youthful, and she'd been eager to disrobe in the hotel, with the shades drawn or apart. She had been his then, unquestioningly, and exalted to be far from home.

Why he'd chosen that moment, he'll never know. He understands now that every man keeps a detail or two in a neutral place inside his own brain, and the wise ones never enter that particular cabinet. To speak at that moment must have been a decision brought on by a young man's misguided idea of honor, or an obscure brand of perversity.

“Her name was Jacqueline,” he said.

Carol did not respond. There was a happy buzz in the restaurant, the whirl of the dancer, the aching, adamant guitars propelling everything forward.

The rest of the evening unraveled. He told her the details—she questioning and he answering calmly. He apologized with what was, he thought, inviolable sincerity. The tears came, predictably, and spoiled her face. They finished their meal, or left it, and concluded the rest of the trip in a kind of muffled, vacuumed atmosphere, as if a giant bowl in the sky had descended upon them. In the days after the trip, he wanted to take the words back. He lay beside her in bed and stroked her hair. It had been nothing, he told her, which was true; it had been only a kink in his sanity. They would go back to being the same. She nodded and smiled blandly and said she believed him.

Before leaving for the hospital, Carol puts on makeup. Harold waits, feeling a slight burn of impatience as she spreads foundation over her face, brushes her cheeks with powder, and applies bronze eye shadow. The color she dabs onto her lips is a shade of red more suited to a Hollywood premiere than the operating table. She even puts hot rollers in her hair, the way she used to do when they were first married.

Harold goes out to the living room to wait on an upholstered chair. When Carol emerges from the bedroom, she looks younger, almost pretty. She smiles shyly, and he notices that she is wearing the necklace he gave her for their twentieth wedding anniversary, diamonds in the shape of a heart.

“I don't think they'll let you wear that, honey,” Harold says, coming close. “They'll probably take it from you.”

“Well, it's not going to get in the way of my brain, is it?”

“No, but I'm sure it's hospital policy. You don't usually see patients wearing diamonds with their hospital gowns, do you?”

She is silent, but keeps the necklace on. She is still wearing it when he hugs her in the hospital corridor and they lead her away to the neurosurgery wing.

Harold feels a twinge as he watches her go. It is natural to be worried, he reasons, and ultimately maybe a positive thing. The concern on his face might help him blend in with the other husbands in the waiting room. He imagines that he looks generic, forgettable enough. Just another gray-haired gentleman.

He sits patiently for several long minutes before Dr. Warren appears and signals to him from the corridor. With a friendly nod to his neighbors, he rises and follows.

He doesn't know how the doctor has managed to circumvent security protocol, but with a swipe of an identification card, they are in the surgical suite. Dr. Warren leads him through the fastidious stages of “scrubbing in,” and Harold is frustrated by the exaggerated and time-consuming insistence on sterility. At the scrub sink, Dr. Warren uses his elbows to pump the soap. They are to spend no fewer than ten minutes, each, washing. Harold watches the clock above the sink and feels like a schoolboy again, his eyes fixed on a motionless minute hand. When they are finished, the doctor uses his elbow to turn off the tap. In the sterile prep room, he prepares the surgical gown and mask for Harold and directs him in putting them on. Donning surgical gloves requires a further set of calisthenics. Harold must not touch any unsterile object—even his own face—the doctor warns him, or he will have to rescrub, regown, reglove.

Harold realizes too late that he will not be able to consult the decidedly unsterile piece of paper he's brought with him—a map of the brain's specialized areas: vision, memory, emotion, motion. He isn't entirely sure exactly where Carol's tumor is located. It had been hard to tell from the MRI scan.

Dr. Warren and Harold enter the operating room together. The rest of the surgery team is already there, waiting. The doctor introduces Harold as Dr. Kaminski, a visiting neurosurgeon from Poland, here to observe the procedure. His English, Dr. Warren explains to the team, is extremely limited.

Harold concentrates on keeping his face muscles loose, relaxed. Skeptical eyes gaze back at him.

“Poland?” a nurse asks.

There is a faint murmur amid the surgery staff.

“All right, everyone, let's go,” Dr. Warren interjects, moving toward the operating table. Harold follows.

All at once, he sees what must be his wife's body in the room, hidden beneath a blue canopy like a pup tent. It reminds Harold of war, of the makeshift shelters used by medics in battle zones, or what he's seen of them in movies.

The doctor motions to Harold, who joins the others at the tent. He is aware of an ambient sound of machines. A nurse operates a console like something from a recording studio. A monitor graphs an undulating line: his wife's heartbeat. Across the tent, a row of nurses stand, their faces uniformly serious. Harold focuses on one nurse whose brow comprises thin utilitarian lines above searing blue eyes. When she suddenly raises those eyes to his, he winks reflexively, then feels a buzz of shame.

He cannot see any part of his wife's body. Still, it feels dangerously devious to be here, so close beside her. His instinct tells him to hide. But Harold reminds himself that she is anesthetized. Entirely unaware of his presence.

Dr. Warren moves a sheet to one side, and Harold finds himself staring down all at once at a small patch of bare brain. He looks away involuntarily. What have they done with the piece of missing skull? Is the hair still stuck to it? There are so many questions, but he can't keep them together. His heart quickens. Looking up, he takes stock of the surgery room and feels disoriented, as if awaking in an airplane thirty thousand feet above land.

Harold looks back down. He concentrates on maintaining an air of calm, confident superiority; an air he's mastered over the years. Nonetheless, he feels increasingly conscious of eyes upon him. He stares at the brain. The window itself is disappointingly tiny, revealing just a glimpse of a pale reflective substance. Over this surface runs a faint, spidery red road map. Blood vessels, Harold assumes. Exposed within its drab skull, the brain strikes him as a delicate animal whose stone shelter has been removed. A snail in an overturned shell. It is amazing to think that every human thought and action arises from this weird matter. There is something divine about the sight of it, and Harold thinks he can detect a hush beneath the low bustle in the operating room, as if in religious observance.

He stares for another moment. Then, all at once, his hand reaches toward the brain. His rubber glove is thin as a condom and, like a condom, he would prefer not to wear it. But when his little finger makes contact, the texture of the brain is gloriously discernible. Wet and gelatinous, like custard. It feels marvelously supple—not the dense muscle he'd imagined. He is unsure of what this particular lobe represents, with what expertise he is meddling, but he pushes the thought away and tries to memorize the moment. This is the highlight of a lifetime, he knows, something he'll never experience again.

He removes his finger as quickly as he'd positioned it, before Dr. Warren can take it away. The surgeon stares, stupefied. Harold nods authoritatively and stands back, letting the team close in, shielding the view of his wife.

The whole episode cannot have taken more than two seconds. There is still a thrill in Harold's hand, spiking his blood. He stands back from the table, feeling a sweet numbness in his own brain. The operating room is eerily quiet, with only the sounds of shifting fabric and the occasional clink of metal. Harold is not sure how long to linger. It is somewhat comforting to be in the room; it takes away the fear of an emergency happening out of his sight. But finally Dr. Warren catches Harold's eye and nods curtly toward the door.