I Am an Executioner (4 page)

On the other side of the moat, Kitch and great hordes of humans watched and admired; and then, one by one they started to climb over the wall, and wade through the moat—so eager were they to reach us. Soon, great armies of people were crossing over into the tiger compound, and they came running up my hill. There were so many of them that I couldn’t protect my delicate babies from their heavy feet. They trampled right over my cubs, mashing them down in their oblivious rush, and the strange old man with thick glasses and rubber gloves came around and picked up my dead babies and dropped them into a plastic bag, and I was distraught. But then Kitch came to me. He stopped and patted me on the head, and scratched me behind the ear. He told me it was okay. He said the tiger babies were gone, and it was okay, and he was gone, and that was okay too. And I realized that as he petted me, he was beginning to crush my head, like wet sludge in his hand. His fingers were deep in
my brain, and he was massaging it into a pulp, and it felt good, in a way, but it terrified me also, because I knew I would soon be lost in oblivion.

When I woke up, it was dark. I had the aching hunger that stretched my ribs. The droning noise from the sky was harder and closer, and I knew soon I would have to get up and keep moving, to stay out of the reach of the rifles. But at that second, this thought didn’t bother me. I had that morning feeling again, that feeling I had when I first realized that I loved Kitch, and the world had made a brief and wonderful kind of sense.

Everything seemed so clear again, everything that was horrible was sensible, and everything was good, and I understood it all. I looked down and saw that the row-your-boat lady had fallen asleep with her head resting on top of me. She was curled into a ball, with her head nestled right up against my haunches, as peaceful as could be, and I thought, She is a wonderful person. I love you, row-your-boat lady, I said to myself, as I opened my mouth wide and worked my teeth into her soft stomach and pulled up her viscera.

She gasped just once, without even opening her eyes—sharp and sudden like she had just had a wonderful surprise. And then she stopped, never exhaling.

It felt so right, killing her like that. It moved me. I didn’t do it from anger or from hunger; nor was it an act of recklessness, like with that poor little human baby. A word that comes to mind is
instinct;
and yet I know I
chose
to kill her. I chose to kill her, and it felt inevitable, and it made me sad and happy all at once. I set myself to my work, and when I had ripped out and eaten every organ and every sweet strip of flesh that I could peel from the row-your-boat lady, when I had sucked down even the soft rounds of meat in the cheeks of her face, when she was just a shiny hub of bone and muscle, I turned around and picked up the human cub. It took me just two bites to crunch and pop and slurp and swallow the whole thing, and I was crying as I did so. I had never felt so much love in all my life.

NONE OF US WERE SURPRISED WHEN
we heard Gopi Kumar had been fired from his job at CompUSA. We imagine he came home and bragged to his wife that at any minute his manager would realize what a mistake she’d made and beg him to take his job back. Manju would have breathed out hard and told him, “Go to the unemployment office anyway and fill out the forms” (as Gopi eventually did). But what Manju didn’t know—what none of us understood—was that Gopi had already decided to make his living by impersonating a doctor.

In fact, within three weeks of that day, Gopi had signed the lease on a small office in Manvel, a good hour and a half from where he lived, a place where he hoped none of us would run into him. He told his wife he was looking for a job, and later he said he had found one, as a television salesman. But he would come home those days carrying as many books about medicine and surgery as the Doakum County Public Library System possessed. Every evening he pored through them, making margin marks with his pencil, consulting the Internet for clarification on difficult points; and Manju would have stood in the doorway and watched, in her weary way.

“You’re not supposed to write in library books,” she would
say. Manju was a secretary in an insurance agency, and it seemed to us she was shy in public, a little insecure—the sort of woman who always wore saris, and who would respond in Tamil when you spoke to her in English. But we also noticed she had grown to be bold at home with him, because when you are married to a man like Gopi, a man who is always going to be a bit oblivious to those around him, you can be a little loud and say what you think and still not risk offending.

“Why not? My taxes pay for them,” Gopi might reply.

“As if you pay all your taxes. What are you reading, anyway?”

And then he would turn to her and say, “Mind your own business,” or, “Don’t you have enough work to do that you don’t have to stand there and bother me?” or, “You should try reading yourself one day, you might learn something.”

“And you’re such a genius yourself,” Manju would answer. Or she might instead hold her tongue, deciding it wasn’t important enough to continue provoking him.

Of course, when Gopi went to sleep or stepped into the bathroom, Manju would peep into the books herself to see what was engrossing her husband, and this is why some people say that she must have known and chosen not to stop him—that she was just as responsible as he was for all that happened later. After all, Manju herself told the story of the day in India when Gopi had gotten so fed up with the traffic outside their house that he had assembled a police uniform using his father’s old air force khakis and gone out into the road. He had issued homemade tickets, ripping them up in exchange for boisterously negotiated bribes, stopping only after Manju pretended to call and report
him
to the police. Obviously, they say, Manju knew her husband had a history as a charlatan, and when she looked in those library books, she should have reached the logical conclusion.

But the people who say this don’t understand that there was more than one logical conclusion. During their twenty-one years
of marriage, as everybody knows, Manju had been unable to have a child, and seeing the books her husband brought home, with their graphic photographs of women’s parts, of glistening uteruses and palsied vaginas, of dead, blue-green fetuses and rash-covered nipples, she might just as well have thought her husband was feeling the loneliness of being childless and almost old, and was seeking again a cure for a problem they had long ago decided would have to be left to the whims and the graces of God.

We liked Manju so much, and we miss her. She had a beautiful voice, and always we asked her to sing at our functions. She would sit down with crossed legs and clear her throat and the room would quiet and parents would hush their children. Then the voice would come out of her, low and quavering and full of awe and sadness, singing of beautiful, dark-skinned young Krishna and how she loved him and longed for him, how she lay alone and burned for him but never could be with him. And when she sang like that we would notice a hollow space in our own chests, and we would feel that space filled with a sweet longing we couldn’t understand, and our eyes would grow hot and wet. When people talk about Manju and her husband and what they did and what happened to them, they should try to remember that people have depths.

The office space Gopi rented with his and Manju’s small savings had previously housed a veterinary clinic, and Gopi would have liked it because it seemed to require little work to convert to a proper medical office. It was a small storefront in a low-rent strip mall on a quiet country highway, separated from other businesses by a grassy field where a dozen long-dead oil pumps stood like big-beaked birds, a field where in the summer grazed cheaply fed hamburger cows.

It was the sort of place where in the mornings young men
wearing baseball caps and Stetsons gathered in the parking lot and stood there until the sun grew hot, then moved into the thin shade that rimmed the building. Gopi would have seen them when he arrived in the mornings to clean and prepare, their hats bobbing outside his office window as they waited for the pickup trucks that arrived by ones or twos, and for the men inside the trucks to point out the ones they wanted.

One day, Gopi offered one of these waiting men thirty dollars to help clear trash out of the closets and wash the walls. The man seemed happy to do it. His name, as everyone knows by now, was Vicente, and he had a big smile and looked to be about twenty-three. Gopi asked him where he was from, and Vicente answered, “Puebla, Mexico. You?”

“Madras, India,” said Gopi.

We picture Gopi and young Vicente sweeping the little poops and pet foods that lay scattered on the floor. They tossed out the rusty small-animal cages stacked here and there and scrubbed the strange stains on the small metal examining table that stuck out from one wall. They followed without luck in the walls and dark closet corners the knocks and noises that Gopi was convinced were the scamperings and squeals of someone’s lost and forgotten pet; and when they were finished, the place still smelled stubbornly of urine, but Gopi was pleased.

To make the office seem complete, Gopi ordered over the Internet a phone, a scalpel, forceps, scissors, gauze and cotton, rubbing alcohol, bandages of various sizes, rubber gloves, a microwave oven, and, from a friend who worked in a hospital in India, a small supply of prescription drugs.

After two weeks of preparation, Gopi was open for business. At a copy store he had made a small sign advertising the alias he had decided on:
DR. RAJU GOPALARAJAN, MD; WOMEN’S DIFFICULTIES AND ALL OTHER MATTERS
. Now he would have taped this sign in his window. We imagine he wore a white lab coat from the local uniform-supply store, and the stethoscope
that had arrived in the mail that morning, and now he put it on his ears and listened to his own heart. The sound was clear and strong, and Gopi felt overjoyed at how well he had done. Then he danced, just for a minute. Afterward, sitting down behind his desk, he grinned his little-boy grin. Then there was quiet. No strange creatures stirred in the walls, no one rang on the telephone. And in the quiet and the stillness, the sound of Gopi’s own beating heart returned to him, and for a brief moment, the poor man saw himself as if from a distance. He saw himself as we see him, sitting alone in an office on an empty country highway. A doctor? He wondered if he should have started in a smaller way, working from a room of his house, prescribing medicines for his friends, writing doctor’s notes for their children. But even that prospect now seemed absurd. His face grew warm with the dawning realization that he had made a ridiculous, a gigantic mistake.

As a tension began to form in his left shoulder and the base of his skull, Gopi tried to remind himself that he had to do this in the biggest possible way, so that people would feel that he was a doctor. But the panic remained, and Gopi felt desperately a need for the company of people, so he walked outside and stood among the men on the sidewalk.

“Good morning, fellows,” he said to them. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his lab coat, and his stethoscope draped over his neck.

“Good morning,” they said back. Gopi recognized Vicente and some of the other men, and when they saw him now in a doctor’s white coat (he would have looked quite smart), one man said something in Spanish, and another said, “You’re the doctor?”

Vicente added, “We didn’t know you’re the doctor. We thought you were making up the office for somebody else.”

“I’m the doctor,” Gopi said.

“Good morning, Doctor.” Vicente smiled, and Gopi’s tension disappeared.

Then Vicente’s friend rolled up the cuff of his jeans and showed Gopi a rash of ugly white-and-black bumps on his shin, and all the men gathered around to look. And this is how Gopi Kumar, aka Dr. Raju Gopalarajan, got his first patients.

Like many of us, Gopi had wanted to be a doctor his whole life. Those of us who knew him back home remember how he thought himself a martyr for having abjured the field early on, after seeing the families of friends thrown into crisis by the necessity of paying enormous bribes to the medical school admissions committee. When his friends asked how he had done on the qualifying exams, Gopi, who had done abysmally, felt an indignant pride in telling them his score was irrelevant because he would never subject his father to the burden and indignity of groveling before those goondas.

He quit college and worked for a time as an orderly in a hospital in Madras. It wasn’t work fit for a Brahmin, some people said, but he loved hospitals. He found them exciting. He’d had to lie to his father about what his actual duties were: picking up bloody dressings from the floor, handling the warm, wet test tubes of other people’s urine. The doctors never liked him much—he didn’t cringe and salaam, like the other orderlies, and they hesitated to give him the most menial chores, yet resented any slight resistance he offered when they did.

He met Manju around this time. At lunchtime and after work, Gopi had taken to sitting in the commissary of the college he had once attended, where he still had some friends, and talking to the girls there. He made headway with his imitations of various professors and his intimacy with the ins and outs of the college bureaucracy. And he bragged about the jobs he would one day get, the car and motorcycle and house he would eventually own, and about the life he would find one day in America. He said he had visited America once: the floors there were covered in soft carpets, and cool air and warm air was pumped from
the walls, and anyone could become American, it was in the laws, and he knew it, and he would do it. And when he talked like this, in his confident manner, Manju thought he seemed, in a way, magical. It was weeks into their romance before Manju realized that Gopi wasn’t a student—he was an orderly in a hospital who came to the campus only to meet gullible girls. But by then, she told herself, it was too late. Manju was in love.

Her mother, of course, would be scandalized. Even some of her friends back then were scandalized. Manju had always been a shy and proper girl, they say, the last person who should have gone in for a love match.