Dimiter (11 page)

One dealt with peduncular hallucinosis, a rare and bizarre neurological condition in which people who were totally sane saw small and familiar cartoon characters like Porky Pig or Daffy Duck dressed in military uniform, frequently that of the Nazi S.S., while the second of the studies had to do with pain and a remarkable experiment recently conducted at the UCLA Pain Control Center involving a “white-haired man” in his sixties and a very thin board, three feet by three feet, through which had been hammered a hundred nails with their thin sharp points sticking up an inch above the surface. To make sure that no trickery was involved, just beforehand several members of the UCLA medical school faculty had placed the palms of their
hands on the upright nails and agreed it would take only minimal pressure to drive them into human flesh. After this, the white-haired subject removed his shirt and undershirt, lay down beside the board, and then rolled onto it so that his back lay atop the sharp protruding nails. Exhibiting not the slightest sign of pain or even discomfort he remained on the board for several minutes, then “rolled off with a sickening sound of popping as his flesh came off the nails.” Except for one site on his shoulder there was no bleeding on his back, and when the bleeding on the shoulder was called to his attention it immediately stopped. There existed individuals born with “congenital insensitivity to pain,” a most rare neurological disorder in which for reasons still unknown the connection between the nerves that sense pain and the brain’s recognition of pain was missing. But the white-haired man was not one of them. “You’re an interesting person, Maurice,” Mayo muttered, his lips barely moving as he stared at the report. “Some of your creatures cannot shed tears while others were made so as not to feel pain. Did you mean these as a blessing or a terrible curse?”

“Is there anything you need, Doctor Mayo?”

Startled, Mayo looked up.

Looking down at him benignly from in front of his desk stood a tall, bearded, rugged-featured blond-haired man dressed in hospital whites, a sometime volunteer attendant who did basic tasks but spent most of his time reading books aloud to patients.

“Oh, Wilson. Didn’t hear you come in.”

“I was passing and just wondered if you needed something done.”

“Yes, I would like you to teach me teleportation.”

“Beg pardon?”

From the hall, approaching footsteps could be heard.

Wilson’s eyes widened slightly as they slanted toward the sound.

“Haven’t seen you around for weeks,” Mayo told him, a wry mischievous smile in his eyes. “Been on vacation or something, Wilson? Floating around on your back jaunty-jolly on the surface of our scenic Dead Sea smearing hummus all over your face and drinking vintage Manischevitz thinking, ‘Wow! This is life! This is living!’ ” Mayo’s gaze flicked out to the hallway as a red-bearded, brown-robed Franciscan priest hurried by with a rattling of olivewood rosary beads that dangled from a belt made of rope: Dennis Mooney, the cigar-chomping, jovial, storytelling priest was in charge of the Church of Shepherd’s Fields a short distance from Bethlehem in a town named Beit Sahour. On his occasional visits to Jerusalem, he made chaplain calls at Hadassah. Mayo found him tiresome and felt a deep relief he hadn’t stopped for a chat.

Mayo’s glance shifted back to the attendant.

“What did you do to your hand? Is that a burn?”

“Hot stove.”

“Stove shmove! Understand something, Wilson: you can’t build a fire for a marshmallow roast by pouring kerosene on matzohs and then striking a match. Matzohs treated in this way will invariably attack. And stop biting your fingernails for heaven’s sakes. What are you doing prowling around at this hour? Who are you reading to, Wilson? Bats?”

“Oh, well, the Burn Ward. Sometimes they can’t sleep.”

Mayo lowered his eyes and nodded.

“Yes, I know,” he murmured glumly.

“I’m going down to the lab. Did you need something?”

“No. No, not a thing, Wilson. Thank you for asking.”

Mayo’s mood had again turned somber, his bright shield of humor now too heavy to lift into place. Wilson stood studying him intently for a moment, and then mutely turned around and left. Mayo lifted his head and stared after him. Once a month Mayo would drive to Ramallah, volunteering his help at a leprosarium run by an order of Austrian nuns. Once or twice he’d found Wilson there, reading books or bits of news to those lepers who were either illiterate or blind. It reminded the neurologist of yet another “miracle,” this one concerning one of the lepers, an older and heavyset peasant woman who, little by little, had lost her sight. Sitting silent and alone in her darkened cell, she would wince and give a low sharp cry of pain if ever suddenly exposed to bright light. Two months ago her sight had returned. The leprosy was still with her but much of her loneliness was not.

“I need a nose job!”

Samia had exploded into the room, her arms swinging and brushing against her sides making starched cotton swishing sounds. She plopped down into a torn green Naugahyde chair. “There, you see?” She had turned her head to the side, pushing up on the end of her nose with a fingertip. “I need somebody good, really good.” Mayo stared in quiet disbelief as the nurse slumped all the way down into the chair with her legs a few inches above the floor and her size ten shoes thrust out in front of her. “I’ve got Americans coming for dinner next week,” she said. “What do I do? What kind of food do I serve them? Give them Jewish food? Arabic? What?” Hands rapidly gesticulating while her large and dark moody eyes flashed, she then launched into a rapid-fire, breathless soliloquy that bounded from subject to random subject: from the upcoming dinner, to the Golan Heights, to the right amount of lemon juice to use when making
hummus, until finally, her box of non sequiturs emptied, she leaped up out of her chair to browse and scrutinize the photos and sayings on the walls.

“I see there’s lots of new stuff here,” she observed.

“Why not?”

“Was that Wilson I saw coming out of here?”

“Yes.”

“It’s always so peaceful around him. Ever notice that, Moses?”

“No.”

“You’re a stone. He’s a little bit slow. But, oh, that smile! It’s a killer! But why he doesn’t shave off that beard I haven’t a clue. You know, he lives across the street from me. I see him all the time.”

“Geographically desirable, Samia.”

“Yeah, I know. And he’s cute. But too young for me, Moses.”

Mayo looked puzzled.

“Too young?” he said. “He’s
older
than you.”

“No way. Plus he hangs out with lowlifes at the Club 2000.”

“And so how would you know that? Are you stalking him, Samia?”

“Don’t be smart. You know, sometimes when I’d look across the street I could see there’s this guy there in Wilson’s apartment. He’s got the curtains pinched aside and looking down out a window at a fruit peddler clanging his bell. And I see that this guy’s in pajamas. You think Wilson light could be light in the loafers?”

“I doubt it.”

“Wouldn’t hurt if he’d shave off that beard. It covers too
much of his face. Oh, what’s this? Does this mean something? What? Is it a line from the movie?” She was pointing to a caption in bold block letters that Mayo had inscribed beneath the
Casablanca
photo:

I N
EVER
M
AKE
P
LANS
T
HAT
F
AR
A
HEAD

“Yes, it means something.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“You are such a curmudgeon. And what about this?” the nurse asked. “This one here next to Meral when he made that big arrest.” She had moved from a newspaper photo of a uniformed sergeant of police to another of two smiling teenaged boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders. She pointed. “This is you here, right? On the left?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“And who’s the other one?”

“Meral.”

“I never would have guessed it.”

“Why?”

“He’s smiling.”

Mayo stared at the photo with a distant sadness in his eyes as he remembered how three months after it was taken the last of Meral’s family, his mother, had died, and the twelve-year-old Meral had to make all the necessary funeral arrangements.

“What a quiet man,” remarked the nurse. “Is he seeing anybody?”

“What do you mean? A psychiatrist?”

“A woman.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Too bad,” said the nurse.

Then she wheeled around to Mayo with shining eyes.

“Oh, but wasn’t he great with that maniac in Psycho!”

Nesting in solitude on Floor 7, the hospital’s Psychiatric Ward had once harbored two docile schizophrenic inmates, each of whom believed he was Jesus Christ. Six weeks ago one of them had murdered the other. The killer, a captured seventeen-year-old Syrian soldier who had lost his genitalia in combat, had unexpectedly, blithely and without provocation slit his victim’s throat with a twelve-inch kitchen knife, which he afterward held against his own throat while threatening suicide at the approach of hospital security. Locked in this impasse, someone had thought to call Meral, waking the policeman in the dead of night. At the sight of him entering the ward, the young black-bearded killer, at that moment in the midst of a raving preachment he was offering as proof of his divine identity, fell instantly silent, and when Meral walked up to him with his hands held out, palms upward, and in Arabic softly uttered, “
Ibni
—my son,” the knife slipped from the soldier’s grasp to the floor and, bursting into wrenching, wracking sobs, he fell forward into Meral’s arms, reaching around him and gripping him tightly while Meral placed both his hands on the young soldier’s head and said over and over again in Arabic, “Yes, my poor son. I know. I know.”

“He was only amazing,” Samia rattled on as she turned to the wall again. “I mean, there’s something about him that gets you. I don’t know what it is, but you trust him. Okay? You just trust him. So what’s this?”

She was pointing to a plaque reading “Cuba Si, Masada No!”

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What’s—”

The neurologist cut her off brusquely.

“Alright, stop it, Samia! Just stop it! Come on, sit down here and tell me the whole thing again!”

The nurse turned to him with a look of incomprehension.

“Tell? Tell you what?”

“You know very well what.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That whole thing about the clown.”

“Oh, that.” With a limp, dismissive flip of her hand the nurse turned to examine the photos again. “You know I’m really not too sure I can—”

“Stop it, I said! I surrender! All quiet on the paranoid front! Look, I’ve thought it all over, and I want to hear the whole thing again, every detail, every scrap you can recall. This time I’ll listen, Samia. I swear it!”

The nurse’s mask of indifference fell away, and looking touched and grateful, she moved quickly to the Naugahyde chair and sat, this time not slumping down but instead leaning forward with a breathless eagerness to recite once again her story of how on her break at 3
A.M.
two days before, Monday, March the 11th, she had sauntered into the Children’s Ward for a visit with Tzipi Tam, a good friend and the charge nurse on duty at the time, and on the way momentarily paused in wonder on observing that behind the glass partition of the ward a clown in full circus costume and makeup was adroitly juggling three orange-colored vinyl balls for an audience of the only two children in the ward who were awake: a rosy-cheeked two-year-old girl and the rabdomial cancer “miracle” child. Her recitation ended, the nurse leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. Mayo asked if she was sure of the date this had happened. She was.

It was the day that the cancer and dysautonomia had vanished.

“Could you tell who it was?” Mayo asked.

The nurse shrugged.

“You couldn’t?”

“All that makeup and stuff. The red wig. Long and bushy and frizzy,” she said. “Frizzy curls.”

“Surely had to be staff,” Mayo mulled.

“I don’t know.”

“Or someone hired by a parent?”

The nurse’s eyebrows knitted inward.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did any of those children have a birthday?”

“When?”

“That day.” Mayo was remembering his time in California and how parents on a child’s birthday would sometimes send greetings to the place of celebration by way of a clown on roller skates.

But in the middle of the night?
he immediately questioned himself.

“I don’t know, Mayo. Why?”

“Never mind. And how tall was this person?”

“Pretty tall, I think. Big. A big person.”

“Strongly built you mean? Husky?”

“Yeah, both.”

“So then you’re sure it was a man.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”