Winter 2007 (3 page)

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Fiction:
The Surgeon’s Tale by Jeff
VanderMeer & Cat Rambo

Part I

Down by the docks, you can
smell the tide going out—surging from rotted fish, filth, and the briny
sargassum that turns the pilings a mixture of purple and green. I don’t mind the
smell; it reminds me of my youth. From the bungalow on the bay’s edge, I emerge
most days to go beach-combing in the sands beneath the rotted piers. Soft crab
skeletons and ghostly sausage wrappers mostly, but a coin or two as well.

Sometimes I see an old man
when I’m hunting, a gangly fellow whose clothes hang loose. As though his limbs
were sticks of chalk, wired together with ulnar ligaments of seaweed, pillowing
bursae formed from the sacs of decaying anemones that clutter on the underside
of the pier’s planking.

I worry that the sticks
will snap if he steps too far too fast, and he will become past repair, past
preservation, right in front of me. I draw diagrams in the sand flats to show
him how he can safeguard himself with casings over his fragile limbs, the
glyphs he should draw on his cuffs to strengthen his wrists. A thousand things
I’ve learned here and at sea. But I don’t talk to him—he will have to
figure it out from my scrawls when he comes upon them. If the sea doesn’t touch
them first.

He seems haunted, like a
mirror or a window that shows some landscape it’s never known. I’m as old as he
is. I wonder if I look like him. If he too has trouble sleeping at night. And
why he chose this patch of sand to pace and wander.

I will not talk to him.
That would be like talking to myself: the surest path to madness.

***

I grew up right here, in my
parents’ cottage near the sea. Back then, only a few big ships docked at the
piers and everything was quieter, less intense. My parents were
Preservationists, and salt brine the key to their art. It was even how they
met, they liked to tell people. They had entered the same competition—to
keep a pig preserved for as long as possible using only essences from the sea
and a single spice.

“It was in the
combinations,” my dad would say. “It was in knowing that the sea is not the
same place here, here, or here.”

My mother and father
preserved their pigs the longest, and after a tie was declared, they began to
see and learn from each other. They married and had me, and we lived together
in the cottage by the sea, preserving things for people.

I remember that when I went
away to medical school, the only thing I missed was the smell of home. In the
student quarters we breathed in drugs and sweat and sometimes piss. The
operating theaters, the halls, the cadaver rooms, all smelled of bitter chemicals.
Babies in bottles. Dolphin fetuses. All had the milky-white look of the
exsanguinated — not dreaming or asleep but truly dead.

At home, the smells were
different. My father went out daily in the little boat his father had given him
as a young man and brought back a hundred wonderful smells. I remember the
sargassum the most, thick and green and almost smothering, from which dozens of
substances could be extracted to aid in preservations. Then, of course, sea
urchins, sea cucumbers, tiny crabs and shrimp, but mostly different types of
water. I don’t know how he did it—or how my mother distilled the
essence—but the buckets he brought back did have different textures and
scents. The deep water from out in the bay was somehow smoother and its smell
was solid and strong, like the rind of some exotic fruit. Areas near the shore
had different pedigrees. The sea grasses lent the water there, under the salt,
the faint scent of glossy limes. Near the wrecks of iron-bound ships from
bygone eras, where the octopi made their lairs, the water tasted of weak red
wine.

“Taste this,” my mother
would say, standing in the kitchen in one of my father’s shirts over rolled up
pants and suspenders. Acid blotches spotted her hands.

I could never tell if there
was mischief in her eye or just delight. Because some of it, even after I
became used to the salt, tasted horrible.

I would grimace and my
father would laugh and say, “Sourpuss! Learn to take the bitter with the
sweet.”

My parents sold the essence
of what the sea gave them: powders and granules and mixtures of spices. In the
front room, display cases stood filled with little pewter bowls glittering in
so many colors that at times the walls seemed to glow with the residue of some
mad sunrise.

This was the craft of magic
in our age: pinches and flakes. Magic had given way to Science because Science
was more reliable, but you could still find Magic in nooks and crannies, hidden
away. For what my parents did, I realized later, could not have derived from
the natural world alone.

People came from everywhere
to buy these preservations. Some you rubbed on your skin for health. Some
preserved fruit, others meat. And sometimes, yes, the medical school sent a
person to our cottage, usually when they needed something special that their own
ghastly concoctions could not preserve or illuminate.

My dad called the man they
sent “Stinker” behind his back. His hands were stained brown from handling
chemicals and the reek of formaldehyde was even in his breath. My mother hated
him.

I suppose that is one
reason I went to medical school—because my parents did not like Stinker.
Does youth need a better excuse?

As a teenager, I became
contemptuous of the kind, decent folk who had raised me. I contracted a kind of
headstrong cabin fever, too, for we were on the outskirts of the city. I hated
the enclosing walls of the cottage. I hated my father’s boat. I even hated
their happiness with each other, for it seemed designed to keep me out. When I
came back from my studies at the tiny school created for the children of
fishermen and sailors, the smell of preservatives became the smell of something
small and unambitious. Even though poor, the parents of my schoolmates often
went on long journeys into the world, had adventures beyond my ken. A few even
worked for the old men who ran the medical school and the faltering mages’
college. I found that their stories made me more and more restless.

When the time came, I
applied to the medical school. They accepted me, much to the delight of my
parents, who still did not understand my motivation. I would have to work for
my tuition, my books, but that seemed a small price.

I remember a sense of
relief at having escaped a trap. It is a feeling I do not understand now, as if
my younger self and my adult selves were two entirely different people. But
back then I could think only of the fact that I would be in the city’s center,
in the center of civilization. I would matter to more than just some farmers,
cooks, fisherfolk, and the like. I would be saving lives from death, not just
preserving dead things from decay.

The day I left, my father
took me aside and said, “Don’t become something separate from the work you do.”
The advice irritated me. It made no sense. But the truth is I didn’t know what
he meant at the time.

His parting hug, her kiss,
though, were what sustained me during my first year of medical school, even if
I would never have admitted it at the time.

***

The brittle-boned old man
stands at the water’s edge and stares out to sea. I wonder what he’s looking
at, so distant. The sargassum’s right in front of him, just yards from the
shore.

That’s where I stare, where
I search.

***

As a medical student, I
lost myself in the work and its culture, which mainly meant sitting in the
taverns boasting. I had picked up not just a roommate but a friend in Lucius,
the son of a wealthy city official. We roamed the taverns for booze and women,
accompanied by his friends. I didn’t have much money, but I had a quick tongue
and was good at cards.

Many long nights those
first two years we spent pontificating over the cures we would find, the
diseases we would bring to ground and eradicate, the herbs and mixes that would
restore vitality or potency. We would speak knowingly about matters of demonic
anatomy and supposed resurrection, even though as far as anyone knew, none of
it was true. Anymore.

Lucius: They had golems in
the old days, didn’t they? Surgeons must have made them. Sorcerers wouldn’t
know a gall bladder from a spoiled wineskin.

Me: Progress has been made.
It should be possible to make a person from some twine, an apple, a bottle of
wine, and some cat gut.

Peter (Lucius’ friend): A
drunk person, maybe.

Lucius: You are a drunk
person. Are you a golem?

Me: He’s no golem. He’s
just resurrected. Do you remember when he began showing up? Right after we left
the cadaver room.

Lucius: Why, I think you’re
right. Peter, are you a dead man?

Peter: Not to my knowledge.
Unless you expect me to pay for all this.

Lucius: Why can’t you be a
resurrected woman? I have enough dead male friends.

During the days—oh
marvel of youth!—we conquered our hangovers with supernatural ease and
spent equal time in the cadaver room cutting up corpses and in classes learning
about anatomy and the perilous weakness of the human body. Our myriad and
ancient and invariably male instructors pontificated and sputtered and pointed
their fingers and sometimes even donned the garb and grabbed the knife, but
nothing impressed as much as naked flesh unfolding to show its contents.

And then there was the
library. The medical school had been built around the library, which had been
there for almost a thousand years before the school, originally as part of the
mages’ college. It was common knowledge, which is to say unsubstantiated rumor,
that when the library had been built thaumaturgy had been more than just little
pulses and glimpses of the fabric underlying the world. There had been true
magic, wielded by a chosen few, and no one had need of a surgeon. But none of
us really knew. Civilization had collapsed and rebuilt itself thrice in that
span. All we had were scraps of history and old leather-bound books housed in
cold, nearly airless rooms to guide us.

Lucius: If we were real
surgeons, we could resurrect someone. With just a little bit of magic. Medical
know-how. Magic. Magic fingers.

Me: And preservations.

Richard (another of Lucius’
friends): Preservations?

Lucius: He comes from a
little cottage on the—

Me: It’s nothing. A joke. A
thing to keep fetuses from spoiling until we’ve had a look at them.

Peter: What would we do
with a resurrected person?

Lucius: Why, we’d put him
up for the city council. A dead person ought to have more wisdom than a living
one.

Me: We could maybe skip a
year or two of school if we brought a dead person back.

Richard: Do you think
they’d like it? Being alive again?

Lucius: They wouldn’t
really have a choice, would they?

Do you know what arrogance
is? Arrogance is thinking you can improve on a thousand years of history.
Arrogance is trying to do it to get the best of the parents who always loved
you.

Me: There’re books in the
library, you know.

Lucius: Quick! Give the man
another drink. He’s fading. Books in a library. Never heard of such a thing.

Me: No, I mean—

Lucius: Next you’ll be
telling us there are corpses in the cadaver room and—

Richard: Let him speak,
Lucius. He looks serious.

Me: I mean books on
resurrection.

Lucius: Do tell…

For a project on prolonged
exposure to quicksilver and aether, I had been allowed access to the oldest
parts of the library—places where you did not know whether the footprints
shown in the dust by the light of your shaking lantern were a year or five
hundred years old. Here, knowledge hid in the dark, and you were lucky to find
a little bit of it. I was breathing air breathed hundreds, possibly thousands,
of years before by people much wiser than me.

In a grimy alcove
half-choked with dust-filled spider webs, I found books on the ultimate in
preservation: reanimation of dead matter. Arcane signs and symbols, hastily
written down in my notebook.

No one had been to this
alcove for centuries, but they had been there. As I found my halting way out, I
noticed the faint outline of boot prints beneath the dust layers. Someone had
paced before that shelf, deliberating, and I would never know their name or
what they were doing there, or why they stayed so long.

Lucius: You don’t have the
balls.

Me: The balls? I can steal
the balls from the cadaver room.

Richard: He can have as
many balls as he wants!

Peter: We all can!

Lucius: Quietly, quietly,
gents. This is serious business. We’re planning on a grandiose level. We’re
asking to be placed on the pedestal with the greats.