Wonderland (52 page)

Roderick Perrault smiled ironically at Jesse, as if he guessed that Jesse’s thoughts and this burden of knowledge, this burden of omniscience, were painful to him. He seemed always to know everything. The skin of his head had tightened with the irony of his total knowledge, emphasizing his small, shrewd, monkeyish skull.

“Yes, we knew before we operated,” Perrault said softly. “But either a man dies or he does not die. Nature rebels against these twilight states; there is something obscene and confusing about them. They violate our definitions of reality. Improvement is not a definition. It is a joke, a gag-line. We have improved the man into a swine so that he might lay himself down among the other swine in contentment. Is that what we want, Jesse?”

Jesse stared. The sound of his name on this man’s lips—the famous Dr. Perrault, who called no one by his first name—Jesse was Perrault’s Chief Resident at LaSalle; he had been awarded this position over at least eight other third-year residents he knew about who had been
anxious to assist Perrault, and certainly there had been other applicants he had known nothing about.

“Here. Read this again,” Perrault said, handing him the folder.

Jesse had no need to read it, since he had written up most of it. But he opened the folder obediently and scanned the material.

Statsky William. 48. Subarachnoid hemorrhage … a right posterior communicating artery aneurysm … two days later a second hemorrhage
.…

Perrault had performed a clean little miracle of a craniotomy; Jesse had assisted him, an eager pair of hands and an eager pair of eyes, precise as a machine. Another resident had stood by. Hours had passed timelessly, drained away like the bright blood, Perrault’s instruments flashing and darting in the intricate maze of a man’s brains. Jesse had been hypnotized by the performance.

And now—

A mute patient. Leaden skin. Eyes that would not focus, would not see.
Akinetic with left hemiparesis. Intracranial occlusion
.… Pages of melancholy news. Isotope cisternographies, looking like fingerprints blotted with too much ink. Jesse leafed through the report and felt a terrible weariness rise in him.

“And Mrs. Statsky.…” Perrault muttered.

He took out a crumpled white handkerchief and blew his nose.

“People live. People die. But in between, in between these two states, they cry out against nature itself, they are obscene and most destructive to a happy interpretation of the universe. I do not wonder at Mrs. Statsky’s hatred of me.”

“She doesn’t hate you,” Jesse said at once.

Statsky was the owner of an aluminum company, called Standard Aluminum Products. Over the past several weeks Jesse had spent so much time in Statsky’s room that he had begun to feel himself a member of Statsky’s big, gregarious, wealthy family, the college kids showing up blunt and breezy in their camel’s-hair coats, the sisters teary-eyed and vicious, the wife overcome by furs of cerulean mink, ermine, whatever exotic and foolish skins that were expensive enough for her. Jesse felt how they grabbed at him for his identity, his sympathy, his good will, as if he had some control over Statsky’s bad luck, being so close to the great Roderick Perrault.

“Everyone understands that this is no one’s fault,” Jesse said wearily.

Perrault said nothing. He remained sitting in his swivel chair, hardly moving. Five minutes passed. Another five minutes passed. Jesse adjusted himself to the wait in silence and was prepared for a sudden angry movement on the part of the older man. But Perrault only took a cigarette out of a pack on his desk, moving numbly.

“You don’t smoke?”—the eyebrows lifting in polite, distracted surprise.

“No.”

“Ah, my good little doctor. My better self. My six-foot self,” Perrault said.

He sat for another space of time, without lighting the cigarette. His face was drawn together into a rigid, masklike set of features, terribly lined. Jesse leafed through the folder again, wondering if he had overlooked anything. Here was a story, a short story not yet complete; when would it be complete? Death completed all these reports. A dismissal from the hospital was temporary and unsatisfying, really; only death put an end to questions of health and recovery.
There was once a man named Statsky
. Two years of high school, educated “on his own.” Partnership in a meat-packing company. Partnership in a paint company. In asbestos siding. In aluminum siding. Married to a woman with a slurry, intimate voice, an ex-beauty, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago stock specialist. Worth ten, fifteen million.

It made no difference.

Perrault was stroking his forehead without affection. He treated himself rudely. After several minutes he glanced at Jesse, as if just remembering him. “Ah,” he said, “you are waiting for our conference on Bruce Dahl.”

Dahl was scheduled to be operated on that morning. He had been in the hospital before; in fact, Jesse had been allowed to do much of the work, the removal of a fast-growing tumor. But the tumor had been seeded out of cancer in the left lung and now it had reappeared in the brain. Perrault had become strangely irritated with Dahl.

“Him again! Him again!” Perrault had muttered.

A peculiar desperation to his voice, an almost flighty, flippant anger.

Jesse had wanted to tell Perrault that it was not Dahl’s fault that the initial operation had been a failure. Enough that he had lost the whole
upper lobe of his left lung. Enough that he had survived a vicious postoperative recovery period, dazed and wasted. He had stepped into Perrault’s professional life as a sweet, friendly man, a builder of suburban shopping malls with plans to put great areas of the United States under pavement and temperature-control domes, and his friendliness had subsided in a matter of days to stark, staring, childish pleas to Perrault.
Help me. Save me. If it’s a question of money …

He suffered spectacular seizures, convulsions that involved the entire body. First his thumb would begin to twitch, then all his fingers, then his entire hand, then his arm … and so on through the body … and he would have periods of confusion, near blackouts. Though Perrault was always reserved in the presence of his patients and their families, staring much of the time out the window or at the floor, he had been enthusiastic at first about the Dahl case. “I’m going in after it,” he had said. “I’m going to send my boy in after it.” His face had wrinkled up with a muscular, intense joy.

Then it had been discovered that Dahl had cancer in the lung, and Perrault had been crushed as a disappointed lover. He had been betrayed.

It was not likely that the cancer had seeded only a single cell to the brain, so it would be another dark plunge for Perrault, another probable disappointment. He would be left ironic and round-shouldered after hours of work. He had given most of the original job to Jesse and had assisted him, though brusquely, through the long operation. Jesse understood that he had done well, that he had held up well. It did not seem fair now that Dahl should be readmitted with the same problem. Another metastatic lesion in the brain! Another! And so quickly!

“I think I’m ready for it,” Jesse said quietly.

“We will make a ritual of it. Mr. Dahl on the first of every month as long as his cash holds out,” Perrault said.

His sarcasm was rude, blunt, painful. Yet Jesse smiled blindly into it, as if into a blazing light. He was Roderick Perrault’s assistant! He told himself this fact a dozen times a day. He woke each morning very early, with a sense of wonderment, a sense of being blessed. All the years of his life had brought him to this, this almost unbelievable good fortune—He admired Perrault, worshipped Perrault. Let the old man say anything. His words did not matter.

Years ago he had hoped only to do a residency in General Medicine and to work in a clinic, probably in Chicago, dealing with multitudes
of ordinary sick people. Bulletins from the federal government and from the states argued monthly for the need of such doctors. What a shortage of doctors there was, and how much worse it would be in another decade! Jesse had believed he could manage a clinic. Then, as time passed, he had discovered in himself a growing need, a yearning, for what was most difficult, most challenging. Ordinary sicknesses were cured ordinarily. Ordinary chronic sicknesses continued month after month, year after year, ordinarily. When he put in his time as a surgical assistant he discovered that this kind of work, which had not appealed to him, which was so bloody and private and precise, was what gave him most satisfaction. He had come to the attention of Perrault himself. A few words of praise by one of the surgeons, someone’s surprise at Jesse’s thoroughness.… He had been drawn into Perrault’s circle, unresisting.

The inviolable nature of the operating room fascinated him. The timelessness, the intimacy, the conversational bickering and joking that showed how trivial human language was, after all, compared to the work of a surgeon’s hands … the way the self was concentrated, fiercely, in the fingertips.… When he operated under Perrault’s guidance he felt his own fingers drawing out of himself his deepest, numbest, least personal self, and out of the older man, power that was pure control, unimagined until this time.

He was subordinated to it, to this power. He could have explained it to no one, not even his wife, not even his father-in-law—who was very pleased at his decision to stay on for additional years of residency in surgery. He could not have explained it even to Perrault, especially not to Perrault. He was subordinated to this sense of pure, impersonal, brute control, a control of the nerves and the finest muscles: he imagined the waves of his own brain subsiding to a greater pattern, that of Perrault’s, adjusting themselves to his. He felt at times, in the privacy of Perrault’s office, the approach of a dramatic, dangerous moment—a revelation of some kind; the possibility that Perrault might speak to him without irony, frankly, clearly, perhaps with love; the possibility that Perrault might suddenly reach out across his cluttered desk, his long nimble fingers stretched out to Jesse, to Jesse’s own extended fingers—

What if their fingers touched, like that? Innocently and frankly, like that?

On his way to examine a patient he sometimes felt a sense of fear, of childish apprehension. Had he really dug into someone’s brain, had Jesse Vogel really been picking around in a human being’s brain? Small, violent shudders passed over him at the thought of his audacity. He had to tell himself again and again what Perrault seemed to know by instinct and would never have thought of explaining: that the human brain was not sacred. It was not sacred, it was touchable. It was matter. Like anything else: matter, mass, weight, substance, a weigh-able and measurable thing. Beneath the thumb it could be squeezed and prodded like anything else. Once dead, it was dead permanently: it was no miracle in creation. There was nothing to fear.

But he feared it. He feared himself, the possibility of making a mistake … it would be so easy to make a mistake.… Perrault, who never made mistakes, could not understand. It would have been pointless to talk to him. Since Jesse’s first days at LaSalle he had been hearing of Perrault’s indifference, his coolness, his impersonal precision. He lectured his residents in full hearing of his patients, working with a pin to demonstrate where feeling began in a patient’s face or body. “And now here, you see, here it is dead,” he would say in his low, confidential voice, jabbing someone’s cheek. “See? Dead. Nothing. Inert. But here—here pain begins—here is life,” he would say, as the patient flinched or cried out. “Life begins with pain,” he would say. “Life is pain. Pain is life. Do you understand?”

When Jesse was named Chief Resident, one of the men he had beaten out was his friend Jack Galt; but Jack had said bitterly that he hadn’t really wanted to work with Perrault anyway, he had not really wanted to become known as one of Roderick Perrault’s men: “A copy of a copy of a human being.” Jesse had flushed with anger. Helene, hearing this remark, had assured him that Jack had been speaking only out of jealousy and disappointment. Wasn’t everyone jealous of Jesse now? And whose fault was that?
A copy of a copy of a human being
. Perhaps it was true. But Jesse had set out to copy the man, reproducing in his work as a surgeon Perrault’s flawless technique, so that Perrault came to trust him and no one else. He even called him Jesse. He spoke ironically and fondly of him. In Jesse’s hearing he said once that he trusted Dr. Vogel because “when Dr. Vogel operates it is myself operating, my six-foot self.” Sometimes he joked with the nurses, sometimes he was silent and bullying with them, sometimes he teased the other assistants
and the anesthetists; but beneath his surface abrasiveness Jesse guessed at a deeper, droller, even lyric abrasiveness, seeded everywhere in Perrault’s system.

“After my most miserable days I go home and play the harpsichord,” Perrault was saying, lighting his cigarette in a series of quick, finicky motions. “I recommend it to you, Dr. Vogel.”

Jesse smiled self-consciously.

“But of course you have a private life of your own, a domestic life. Your wife and daughter—or is it son?”