A Hologram for the King (27 page)

Somewhere near dawn, a car arrived.

Alan walked to the driveway, where Yousef was waiting.

—This is Adnan. He'll take you to Jeddah.

Adnan stayed in the car, looking tired and unhappy. Yousef opened the back door and Alan got in.

—I'm so sorry, he said.

—I know, Yousef said.

—It's important to me that you're my friend.

—Give me some time. I have to remember what I like about you.

Alan tried to sleep on the drive back but couldn't. He closed his eyes under the white sun and saw only the face of the boy, the face of the men, Yousef's placid expression when Alan turned away from the valley and saw them all. An expression that spoke of suspicions confirmed.

When he returned to Jeddah, though, he would see Dr. Hakem and she would open him up. Then he would know what was wrong with him, and she could rip it out.

A
LAN WAS NAKED
beneath a wispy blue smock, in a waiting room in a Saudi hospital about which he knew nothing. He was about to have a growth removed from his neck, one that he still suspected was attached to his spine, sucking away some significant part of his spirit, his will and his judgment.

As he lay on a mechanical bed in a white room, Alan felt glad to be away from the fortress in the mountains. Since leaving, he'd spent a day and night asking himself, What have I done?

The answer was Nothing. He had done nothing. But this brought little relief. Relief would be the task of Dr. Hakem.

He was at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, where he had been admitted and asked to strip and stuff his belongings into a plastic bag. Now he was sitting on the bed, feeling cold in the papery smock, looking at his possessions, reading the plastic bracelet
he'd been given, looking out the window, wondering if this was the turning point, after which he would be a sick man, a dying man.

He waited for twenty minutes in the empty room. Then forty.

—Hello!

Alan looked up. A man had entered, pushing a gurney. He arranged it next to Alan's bed.

—Yes now, the man said, and indicated that Alan should move himself onto it.

Alan did, and the orderly, perhaps Filipino, covered him carefully with a blanket.

—Ready now, he said, and they left the room. They traveled a dozen grey hallways before finally reaching a humble room of track lighting and cinderblocks painted powder blue. He had not expected an operating table, but there it was, and he was asked to move himself from the gurney and onto it. He had foreseen something like a dentist's office — small, private, a step removed from the consulting room where Dr. Hakem had seen him. Now he worried that everything had become more grave. Again he had the feeling his concerns were warranted: this proved that lump on his back was very serious, the results of the operation more pivotal.

But where was she? There was only one person in the room: a man in scrubs, perhaps a Saudi, standing in the corner. He had looked to Alan with what seemed like hope, as if he thought the man being wheeled in was a personal friend. Seeing it was only Alan, his face fell and turned into a sneer. He removed his gloves, deposited them in a bin, and left. Alan was alone.

Moments later, the door opened and a young Asian man walked in, pushing a machine on wheels. He nodded and grinned at Alan.

— Hello sir, he said.

Alan smiled and the man began an elaborate process of preparing his machine.

—Are you the anesthesia man? Alan asked.

The man smiled, his eyes bright and happy. But instead of answering, he began to hum, loudly and almost deliriously.

Alan leaned back and looked at the ceiling, which told him nothing. He closed his eyes, and within seconds found himself close to sleep. If not for the crazed humming of the Asian gas-man, he would have nodded off immediately. People died during surgery, he thought. He was fifty-four, old enough to die without causing too much consternation. His mother had died of a stroke at sixty. She'd been driving through Acton, on her way to visit a cousin, when it happened. Skidding off the road, her car collided with a telephone pole, causing no real damage to herself or her car — she'd almost missed it. But she wasn't found until the morning, and by then she was gone. To die alone, somewhere in the middle of the night, on the side of the road. Alan saw it as a message: in death, you can hope for dignity but should expect disarray.

—Hello Alan. How are you feeling today?

He knew the voice. He opened his eyes. Dr. Hakem's head blocked out the light. He saw only a smudge of her face.

—Good, he said, looking around. Somehow the room was now full of people. He counted six or seven, all wearing masks.

—I'm glad to see you, she said, her voice like cool water. We have quite an international group here to help with this procedure. This is Dr. Wei from China, she said, indicating the gas-man. He'll be our anesthesiologist. Dr. Fenton here is from England. He'll be observing.

She introduced the rest of the members, from Germany, Italy, Russia. They were nodding, only their eyes visible, and it was all too quick for Alan to keep track of exactly who was who. Lying on his back, naked but for a blue cape worn backwards, Alan did his best to smile and nod.

—When you're ready, you can turn onto your stomach, Dr. Hakem said.

Alan turned, his face now in the starched pillow, smelling of bleach. He knew he was exposed, but immediately a nurse placed a sheet, then a blanket, on his legs and lower back.

—Is that warm enough? Dr. Hakem asked.

—Yes. Thank you, Alan said.

—Okay. Do you feel comfortable turning your head to one side?

He turned to his left and flattened his arms against the table.

—I'm going to prep the area around your growth, she said.

He felt her untie his gown at the top. Then a wetness on his skin. A sponge, dabbing. A rivulet of water speeding down his clavicle.

—Okay. Dr. Wei will now inject the area with a local anesthetic. There will be a few stings from the needle.

Alan felt the sharp entry of the needle just below his cyst. Then another entry to the left. And then another, another. Dr. Hakem had promised a few, but now Dr. Wei had stabbed him four, five, and finally six times. If he didn't know better, Alan would have thought the man was enjoying it.

—Can you feel this? she asked. I'm pressing on your cyst.

He felt something, but he said no. He didn't want to be oversedated. He wanted to feel a version of the pain, however muted.

—Good. You ready? she asked.

He said he was.

—I will now begin, she said.

He created mental pictures to correspond to the pressures he felt, the sounds and movement of shadows above him. There was a series of small cuts, it seemed. The movement of Dr. Hakem's arm told him this much. After each, with her other hand, she was dabbing the area with some kind of sponge. He felt it pushing against him. Cut, dab, cut, dab. In the background, the humming of the gas man, and from above, the music of what seemed to be Edith Piaf.

—Okay, I've made the incisions, Dr. Hakem said. Now you might feel some pulling as I extract the cyst. They can be sticky.

And like that, whatever tool she was holding grabbed at something within him and pulled. His chest tightened. The pressure was extreme. He pictured a hook of some kind entering his back, grabbing at taffy, trying to pull it, snap it loose. He had never had anything removed from his body, he realized. This was new and was not natural. My God, he thought. How strange to have hands inside me. Tools grabbing, scraping. My God. Alan was hollow, his body a cavity filled with wet things, a messy array of bags and tubes, everything soaked in blood. My God.
My God. The scraping continued. The pulling. He felt a cloth catching rivulets that had traveled down his neck, toward the bed.

If he got out of this alive and unharmed, Alan vowed to be better. He would have to be stronger. His mother had tried to rally his strength, inspire him. She would read him passages from the diary of some distant relative, a woman living in the woods of what was now western Massachusetts. She had watched her husband and two of her children murdered by Indians, and had herself been abducted. She lived with her captors for almost a year until being returned to her people. She was reunited with her daughter, the only survivor of the attack, and they commenced to build a thriving dairy farm over six hundred acres of Vermont. She survived a heavy winter where the snow collapsed her roof, a beam falling on her leg, which was soon amputated. She survived a smallpox plague that took her daughter, who had just gotten engaged. The fiancé moved onto the farm and ran it when she died, at ninety-one.
Would you rather be here, now
, Alan's mother liked to say,
or abducted and living in the woods with one leg?
She had no tolerance for whining, for any sort of malaise in the midst of the bounty of their suburban life.
Forty million dead during World War II
, she would say.
Fifteen million during the war before. What was it that you were complaining about?

Alan could hear conversations in various languages. A bit of Italian murmuring to his right. Arabic chatter near his feet. And still the cheerful humming from the Chinese anesthesiologist. It was curious that they all put up with it, his demented, frenetic tune, but no one said a word to him. The anesthesiologist seemed to be in his own world, pleased with himself and only glancingly involved in the surgery at hand.

—I'll be going deeper now, Alan, Dr. Hakem said.

The motion was now that of an ice cream vendor digging, twisting round, pulling. Then more dabbing, wiping. Alan imagined his blood rising upward, spreading across his back, free at last.

He could hear Dr. Hakem breathing, laboring as she pulled and dabbed. There were a series of snapping sounds, as if the gummy substance inside him was resisting all but the most forceful extraction. Alan considered the possibility that her silence was evidence that she had found something. Underneath the benign mass of lipoma, she had found something. Something black and fate-changing.

Alan tried to send his mind elsewhere. He thought of the sea, the tent, what the young people were doing. He pictured them being told of his death here, on this table in this room of blue cinderblocks. What would they say? They would say he liked long walks on the beach. That he liked to sleep in.

He thought of Kit. Kit alone without him. This would be more troubling. Ruby needed a counterweight. He had taken Kit away a year ago, when she and her mother had been fighting. He took her out of school and they'd gone to Cape Canaveral to watch the Shuttle. There were only a few more flights.

The day before the launch, they got a tour of all the facilities. The mood among the NASA people was all over the place — somber, bitter, loose, defensive. A promotional video insisted that NASA was
not just putting billions of dollars into rockets and shooting them into space
.

Their main guide was a man, just turned eighty, named Norm. He had been with NASA since 1956. He got on the bus, cane in hand, and sat down in front, picked up the mic, and with a deep Texan accent he
said, his voice cracking, —This will be my last tour, and I'm glad to be here with you.

Kit talked all the while, which she did when they were together. There were hours on buses, to and from the space center, to and from the launch-viewing site, maybe ten hours together on that bus, and they covered everything. She talked about the crazy roommate, the beautiful but uneventful campus, and how she needed to find some friends soon because she felt rootless and untethered. Alan tried to reassure her the same way he always had.

—I'm the eye in the sky, he said. I can see where you started and where you're going and it looks perfectly fine from up here. He had used this metaphor since middle school.
You're almost there. Almost there.

Norm took them to the building where mechanics repaired and prepared the shuttles, pre- and post-flight. The
Atlantis
was there, being readied for its last launch, the last of all launches. There were bustling tours being given all around, but Norm was somber.

—I can't do these tours much longer, he said. I don't want to be the guy saying, ‘We
used
to do this, we
used
to do that.'

Most of the NASA employees they met that weekend would soon be out of jobs. They were not the stuffy technocrats Alan expected. No, they were folksy, quick to muse, to drift off while talking about a certain flight, the weather a certain day when the shuttle shot through a hole in the clouds.

Something pierced Alan's chest. It felt like a railroad tie, thick and blunt. His body tensed.

—I'm sorry Alan, Dr. Hakem said.

The pain dulled. The movements returned to a certain rhythm,
dependable in its order. There would be a scooping, a scraping, a pulling, then a moment of relief when Alan guessed some extraction had been made. Then the dab of the sponge, a pause, and more excavation.

It was interesting being this, a cadaver, an experiment. Who said
man is matter
? He felt like something less than that.