Dragged into Darkness (15 page)

“You have your instructions,” Troy replied.

Nurse
Kuo
glanced at
Ensmann
for confirmation.

“Gareth, I can’t let you do this.  Hell, I can’t let me do this.  Our medical licenses are at risk here.”

“Then I’ll do it alone.”

“You can’t.”

“But I will.  I have a responsibility to my patient.  This patient asked me to remove both legs.  Removing his legs will cure him.  How can I say no?  I have his consent.”

The operating theater was silent.  The surgical team stared at cracks in the ceiling while the two doctors exchanged burning glances.

“Can we get on now?” Troy asked.

Ensmann
shook his head.  “We’re going to burn for this.”

***

Troy was too busy trawling his neighborhood to answer the persistently ringing cell phone.  Anyway, he knew who it would be.  It would be his office or the state medical board asking why he had removed both of Mr. Arthur’s legs and not one.  He didn’t know what the fuss was about.  Todd Arthur was overjoyed with the amputations.  For the first time in his life, he felt complete.  As far as Troy was concerned, he’d done the right thing.  He had a happy patient, one far happier than the patient who had first come to see him. 

But none of this mattered.  He was searching for the woman with the birthmark.  However, after thirty minutes, he had come across neither the woman nor her poodle.

His preoccupation with the poodle-woman dogged him when it shouldn’t even have been a priority.  He had other things to worry about.  An investigation by the state medical board to determine negligence on Troy’s part was in full swing.  His medical license had been suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.  The only thing going for him was that against legal advice, Todd Arthur wasn’t going to file a suit.

Troy made it his lawyers’ business to save his practice.  That was why they were paid the big bucks.  He made it his business to find the poodle-woman.  Every day, at the same time, Troy drove the street where he had first seen the woman.  After two days of fruitless searching, he widened his search to mornings, afternoons as well as evenings.  When that didn’t work, he expanded his dragnet to cover Beverly Hills and beyond. 

Although the poodle-woman was at the forefront of his search, he came to realize that many others were in similar need of his services.  Everywhere he went, he found deformity.  In a convenience store in West Hollywood, a Korean clerk had a callus on her middle finger as big as her fingernail.  Troy quizzed her and discovered it had come from holding pens and pencils too tightly as a child.  Waiting to pay for gas, he noticed the man in front had crippling arthritis that reduced his hands to angry claws.  A Safeway checker failed miserably to hide a harelip under his moustache.

Troy knew he could help these people.  He understood their deformities were a source of great personal pain.  From the stories he’d heard from his patients, he guessed all the tricks these people had tried to conceal their ugliness. 

Deformity was everywhere, in all corners of society.  He didn’t have to see it; he could listen to it.  In stores, he overheard conversations about clothes never fitting because legs were too long or too short.  In restaurants, people complained they could never do anything with their hair or their thighs were too fat.  These people had problems and nothing ever worked, but he had solutions.  Surgery could do wonders.

He handed out his card to people who needed his kind of special help, with varying results.  Some wanted to know what he could do to help them.  Others didn’t give him the time of day.  Several got angry.  But it didn’t matter.  He would help them all.  

Weeks passed and he neither came across the poodle-woman, nor received any calls from the people he had handed cards.  He checked in with his office.

“Janice, Dr. Troy.”

“Doctor, I wish you’d return your calls.  Things aren’t going well with the investigation.  Your lack of cooperation doesn’t bode well.  You really need to speak to Dr. Johansen as soon as possible.”

“All in good time, Janice.
  What about the patients?”

“Dr. Troy, your license had been suspended.  You aren’t authorized to speak to your patients.  All your existing patients have been referred to other doctors.”

“No, not those patients.
  I’m talking about new ones.”

“New ones?”

“Yes, I’ve been meeting a lot of people on the streets, giving out my card.”

“Doctor!”

“I think there’s a lot we can do for people out there.  And I think education is the problem.  If people understood what options were available, we could help a lot more.”

“Doctor.”

“Janice, no need to sound so concerned.”

“But, I am.  It explains the calls.”

“Excellent.  We received calls?”

“Yes, dozens, but all were inquiring into plastic surgery.  I had to explain that you didn’t perform cosmetic enhancements, just amputations.”

“Can you fax me their contact details?”

“No.  After I explained, no one was interested.  They were appalled.”

He didn’t expect everyone to go for the idea.  It took courage to go through with the procedures he performed.  But he had never received a complaint after an operation.  People thanked him for his work.  Not having one new patient to follow through wasn’t right.

“Not one?”

“No.  I thought it was a hoax—that someone bogus was giving out your card to discredit you, to help build a case against you.”

“Janice, do you have any of the callers’ details?”

“No.”

“I’m struggling with this one, Janice.  I’ll call you back.”

“But what about Dr. Johansen?”
Janice demanded.

“I’ll talk to him later.”

“But, Dr. Troy…”

Troy hung up.  He sank into his chair.  How could he help anybody if they weren’t willing to help themselves?  Janice was a waste of time.  She didn’t understand what these people were going through.  Only he did.  And he was the only one qualified to speak to them.  He called Janice back and told her to redirect all calls through to his home phone.  Janice protested.  But Troy was insistent, to the point of reprimand.  She conceded.  Now nothing could blight his doctor/patient relationship, no interfering doctors, no ill-informed personal assistants, no one.

His answering machine racked up messages but not from potential patients.  Janice,
Ensmann
and Johansen made up the bulk of the calls.

It was depressing.  Here he
was,
a healer with no one to heal.  The situation was made worse since he knew people out there needed him.  Well, if the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed, then…

***

“Can I speak to Mary, please?” Troy asked the slim-faced Asian girl at the checkout.

Her face showed suspicion.  “Who’s asking?”

“Dr. Gareth Troy.”  He showed his identification.  “We spoke a week or so ago about some treatment.”

“Most doctors don’t do house calls, especially at this time of night.”

“I’m not most doctors.”  Troy smiled.

The girl shouted Korean to the back of the store.  The woman with callus that Troy had spoken to appeared.  There was another exchange in Korean and the older woman beckoned to Troy.  She led him into the rear of the store and into a small office.

“Do you remember me?”  Troy took the seat offered to him.

She nodded.  “Yes, you doctor.  You can help with my finger, yes?”

“That’s right.  I can help and I want to help.  I can help with your deformity.”

Mary frowned. 
“My English not good.”

“I can help you with your finger.”

“Yes.”  Mary nodded again.  “You make pretty for me.”

Troy smiled.  “I make pretty for you.  Let’s do it.”

“How much?”

“Free of charge.”

Mary looked doubtful.

“Honestly, Mary.  The operation is free.  I just want to make people happy.”

“When do I come to the hospital?”

“We don’t need a hospital.”

“No hospital?”  Mary gave Troy the same look he had received from the checkout girl.

“I can do the operation here.  It’s not a major procedure.  It would be over in minutes.  Do you have a bathroom?”

“Maybe I should talk to my daughter.”

“What’s to talk about?”  Troy rose and offered a guiding hand.  “Let’s do it.”

In the bathroom, the fluorescent lighting hummed.  One of the tubes flickered spasmodically.  It was a distraction but not a problem.

Troy explained what he was going to do.  He used fifty-dollar words straight from medical school.  He found it subdued his patents.  They trusted him because he sounded in control.

He swabbed Mary’s middle finger with antiseptic, which stained her skin olive.  He injected an anesthetic into the flesh where her hand met her middle finger.  The finger ballooned, cartoon-like.

“In a minute or two you won’t feel a thing.”

Mary didn’t look convinced.

He patted her shoulder.  “Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon.”

When he was satisfied that Mary was suitably anesthetized, he held her middle finger like he was taking her fingerprint and placed it on the edge of the sterilized sink unit.  He told her to keep very still and held her hand in place.  His other hand slipped inside his bag.  He brought out a cleaver.  He was careful to shield Mary from the gruesome sight of his medical tools.  Under normal conditions, he would have had a privacy curtain between him and the patient.  Good misdirection would have to do today.

He didn’t know why Mary was screaming.  The blow had severed the finger neatly and cleanly and he knew she was totally anesthetized.  She couldn’t have felt a thing.  But she spewed manic Korean.  She held up her four-fingered hand and stared at the pulsing stream of blood flowing down her arm.

“See how beautiful your hand is now?  No more ugliness.”

But Mary wasn’t seeing it his way.  She beat his chest with bloody fists, wailing the entire time.

The bathroom door flew open.  The Asian checkout girl burst
in,
then froze.  Confusion muddied her features until she spotted the amputated finger with the unsightly callus.

“What have you done?” she demanded.