Strangers (11 page)

But she should have remembered her father and his aphorisms, the bits of wisdom that he had collected and with which he had gently lectured or patiently admonished her on those rare occasions when she had been less than well behaved or when she had failed to do her very best in school.
Time waits for no man; God helps those who help themselves; a penny saved is a penny earned; resentment hurts only those who harbor it; judge not that ye be not judged….
He had a thousand of them, but there was none he liked better and none he repeated more often than this one:
Pride goeth before a great fall.

She should have remembered those six words. The operation was going so well, and she was so happy with her work, so
proud
of her performance in this first major solo flight, that she forgot about the inevitable great fall.

Returning to the opened abdomen, she unclamped the bottom of the Dacron graft, flushed it out, then tunneled the twin legs of it beneath the untouched flesh of the groin, beneath the inguineal creases, and into the incisions she had made in the femoral arteries. She stitched in both terminuses of the bifurcated graft, unclamped the restricted vascular network, and watched with delight as the pulse returned to the patched aorta. For twenty minutes, she searched for leaks and knitted them up with fine, strong thread. For another five minutes, she watched closely, in silence, as the graft throbbed like any normal, healthy arterial vessel, without any sign of chronic seepage.

At last she said, “Time to close up.”

“Beautifully done,” George said.

Ginger was glad she was wearing a surgical mask, for beneath it her face was stretched by a smile so broad that she must have looked like the proverbial grinning idiot.

She closed the incisions in the patient’s legs. She took the intestines from the nurses, who were clearly exhausted and eager to relinquish the retractors. She replaced the guts in the body and gently ran them once again, searching for irregularities but finding none. The rest was easy: laying fat and muscle back in place, closing up, layer by layer, until the original incision was drawn shut with heavy black cord.

The anesthesiologist’s nurse undraped Viola Fletcher’s head.

The anesthesiologist untaped her eyes, turned off the anesthesia.

The circulating nurse cut Bach off in mid-passage.

Ginger looked at Mrs. Fletcher’s face, pale now but not unusually
drawn. The mask of the respirator was still on her face, but she was getting only an oxygen mixture.

The nurses backed away and skinned off their rubber gloves.

Viola Fletcher’s eyelids fluttered, and she groaned.

“Mrs. Fletcher?” the anesthesiologist said loudly.

The patient did not respond.

“Viola?” Ginger said. “Can you hear me, Viola?”

The woman’s eyes did not open, but though she was more asleep than awake, her lips moved, and in a fuzzy voice she said, “Yes, Doctor.”

Ginger accepted congratulations from the team and left the room with George. As they stripped off their gloves, pulled off their masks, and removed their caps, she felt as if she were filled with helium, in danger of breaking loose of the bonds of gravity. But with each step toward the scrub sinks in the surgical hall, she became less buoyant. A tremendous exhaustion settled over her. Her neck and shoulders ached. Her back was sore. Her legs were stiff, and her feet were tired.

“My God,” she said, “I’m pooped!”

“You should be,” George said. “You started at seven-thirty, and it’s past the lunch hour. An aortal graft is damned debilitating.”

“
You
feel this way when you’ve done one?”

“Of course.”

“But it hit me so suddenly. In there, I felt great. I felt I could go on for hours yet.”

“In there,” George said with evident affection and amusement, “you were godlike, dueling with death and winning, and no god ever grows weary. Godwork is too much fun to ever get weary of it.”

At the sinks, they turned on the water, took off the surgical gowns they’d worn over their hospital greens, and broke open packets of soap.

As Ginger began to wash her hands, she leaned wearily against the sink and bent forward a bit, so she was looking straight down at the drain, at the water swirling around the stainless-steel basin, at the bubbles of soap whirling with the water, all of it funneling into the drain, around and around and down into the drain, around and down, down and down.…This time, the irrational fear struck and overwhelmed her with even less warning than at Bernstein’s Deli or in George’s office last Wednesday. In an instant her attention had become entirely focused upon the drain, which appeared to throb and grow wider as if it were suddenly possessed of malignant life.

She dropped the soap and, with a bleat of terror, jumped back from the sink, collided with Agatha Tandy, cried out again. She vaguely heard George calling her name. But he was fading away in the manner of an image on a motion picture screen, retreating into a mist, as if he were
part of a scene that was dissolving to a full-lens shot of steam or clouds or fog, and he no longer seemed real. Agatha Tandy and the hallway and the doors to the surgery were fading, too.
Everything
was fading but the sink, which appeared to grow larger and more solid, super-real. A sense of mortal danger settled over her. But it was just an ordinary scrub sink, for God’s sake, and she had to hold on to that truth, clutch at the cliff of reality and resist the forces pulling her over the edge. Just a sink. Just an ordinary drain. Just—

She ran. From every side, the mist closed around her, and she lost all conscious awareness of her actions.

•

The first thing she became aware of was the snow. Large white flakes sifted past her face, gently turning, lazily eddying toward the ground in the manner of fluffy airborne dandelion seeds, for there was no wind to drive them. She raised her head, looked up beyond the towering walls of the old high-rise buildings that shouldered in around her, and saw a rectangular patch of low gray sky, from which the snow descended. As she stared into the winter heavens, momentarily confused as to her whereabouts and condition, her hair and eyebrows grew white. Flakes melted on her face, but she slowly realized that her cheeks were already wet with tears and that she was still weeping quietly.

Gradually, the cold impinged upon her. In spite of the absence of wind, the air was sharp-toothed; it bit her cheeks, nipped her chin, and her hands were numb from the cold venom of countless bites. The chill penetrated her hospital greens, and she was shivering uncontrollably.

Next she became aware of the freezing concrete beneath her and the ice-cold brick wall against her back. She was squeezed into a corner, facing out, knees drawn up to her chin, arms locked around her legs—a posture of defense and terror. Her body heat was being leeched away through every contact point with pavement and masonry, but she did not have the strength or will to get to her feet and go inside.

She remembered fixating upon the drain of the scrub sink. With unmitigated despair, she recalled the mindless panic, her collision with Agatha Tandy, the startled look on George Hannaby’s face as he had reacted to her screams. Although the rest was a blank, she supposed she had then taken flight from imaginary dangers, like some madwoman, to the shock of her colleagues—and to the certain destruction of her career.

She pressed harder against the brick wall, wishing that it would suck away her body heat even faster.

She was sitting at the end of a wide alley, a blind serviceway that led into the core of the hospital complex. To her left, double metal doors led
into the furnace room, and beyond those was the exit from the emergency stairs.

Inevitably, she was reminded of her encounter with a mugger during her internship at Columbia Presbyterian in New York. That night, he had dragged her into an alleyway much like this. However, in the New York alleyway, she had been in command, victorious—while here she was a loser, descendant rather than ascendant, weak and lost. She perceived a bleak irony and a frightening symmetry in having been brought to the lowest point of her life in such a place as this.

Premed, medical school, the long hours and hardships of her intern year, all the work and sacrifices, all the hopes and dreams had been for nothing. At the last minute, with a surgical career almost within her grasp, she had failed George, Anna, Jacob, and herself. She could no longer deny the truth or ignore the obvious: Something was wrong with her, something so desperately wrong that it would surely preclude the resumption of a life in medicine. Psychosis? A brain tumor? Perhaps an aneurysm in the brain?

The door to the emergency stairs was flung open with a rattle and a screech of unoiled hinges, and George Hannaby came out into the snow, breathing hard. He took several quick steps into the alley, heedless of the risk posed by the quarter-inch skin of slippery new snow. The sight of her was sufficiently shocking to bring him to a lurching halt. A ghastly expression lined his face, and Ginger supposed he was regretting the extra time and attention and special guidance that he had given her. He had thought she was especially bright and good and worthy, but now she had proved him wrong. He had been so kind to her and so supportive that her betrayal of his trust, although beyond her control, filled her with self-loathing and brought more hot tears to her eyes.

“Ginger?” he said shakily. “Ginger, what’s wrong?”

She was able to respond only with a wretched, involuntary sob.

Seen through her tears, he shimmered, blurred. She wished he’d go away and leave her to stew in humiliation. Didn’t he know how much worse it was to have him staring at her while she was in this condition?

The snow was falling harder. Other people appeared in the doorway through which he had come, but she could not identify them.

“Ginger, please talk to me,” George said as he drew near. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what I can do.”

She bit her lip, tried to repress her tears, but instead she began to sob harder than ever. In a thin, blubbery voice that sickened her with proof of her own weakness, she said, “S-Something’s wrong with me.”

George stooped down in front of her. “What? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

She had always been able to handle any trouble that came her way, unassisted. She was Ginger Weiss. She was different. She was a golden girl. She didn’t know how to ask for help of this kind, of this degree.

Still stooping in front of her, George said, “Whatever it is, we can work it out. I know you’re fiercely proud of your self-reliance. You listening, kid? I’ve always stepped carefully when I’m with you because I know you resent being helped along too much. You want to do it all yourself. But this time you simply can’t handle it alone, and you don’t have to. I’m here, and by God you’re going to lean on me whether you like it or not. You hear?”

“I…I’ve ruined everything. I’ve d-disappointed you.”

He found a small smile. “Not you, dear girl. Not ever. Rita and I have had all sons, but if we could’ve had a daughter, we would’ve hoped for one like you. Exactly like you. You’re a special woman, Dr. Weiss, a dear and special woman. Disappoint me? Impossible. I would consider it an honor and a pleasure if you would lean on me now, just as if you
were
my daughter, and let me help you through this as if I were the father you’ve lost.”

He held out a hand to her.

She grasped it and held on tightly.

It was Monday, December 2.

Many weeks would pass before she learned that other people in other places—all strangers to her—were living through eerie variations of her own nightmare.

2

Trenton, New Jersey

A few minutes before midnight, Jack Twist opened the door and left the warehouse, stepping into the wind and sleet, and some guy was just getting out of a gray Ford van at the foot of the nearest loading ramp. The van’s arrival had been masked by the rumble of a passing freight train. The night was deep around the warehouse, except for four meager patches of murky yellow light from poorly maintained, grime-dimmed security lamps. Unfortunately, one of those lights was directly over the door through which Jack had exited, and its sickly glow reached precisely far enough to include the passenger’s door of the van, out of which the unexpected visitor had appeared.

The guy had a face made for police mug books: heavy jaw, a mouth that was hardly more than a slash, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and hard little pig eyes. He was one of those obedient but pitiless
sadists that the mob employed as enforcers, a man who, in other times, might have been a rape and pillage specialist in the armies of Genghis Khan, a grinning Nazi thug, a torture master in one of Stalin’s death camps, or a Morlock from the future as imagined by H. G. Wells in
The Time Machine.
To Jack, the guy looked like serious trouble.

They startled each other, and Jack did not immediately raise his .38 and put a bullet in the bastard, which is what he should have done.

“Who the hell are you?” the Morlock asked. Then he saw the canvas bag that Jack was dragging with his left hand and the lowered pistol in Jack’s right hand. His eyebrows shot up, and he shouted, “Max!”

Max was probably the driver of the van, but Jack did not wait around for formal introductions. He did a quick reverse into the warehouse, slammed the door shut, and stepped to the side of it in case someone out there started using it for target practice.

The only light inside the warehouse came from the brightly lit office far at the back of the building and from an overhead bank of widely spaced, low-wattage bulbs set in tin shades, which were allowed to burn all night. But there was sufficient illumination for Jack to see the faces of his two companions—Mort Gersh and Tommy Sung—who had been following him. They did not look as happy as they had been only a couple of minutes ago.

They had been happy because they had successfully hit a major way station on the route of the mafia cash train, a collection point for narcotics money from half the state of New Jersey. Suitcases and flight bags and cardboard boxes and Styrofoam coolers full of cash arrived at the warehouse from a score of couriers, most of it on Sunday and Monday. Tuesdays, mob accountants in Pierre Cardin suits arrived to calculate the week’s profits from the pharmaceutical division. Every Wednesday, suitcases full of tightly banded sacks of greenbacks went out to Miami, Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and other centers of high finance, where investment advisers with Harvard or Columbia MBAs, on retainer to the mafia—or
fratellanza,
as the underworld referred to itself—wisely put it to work. Jack, Mort, and Tommy had simply stepped in between the accountants and the investment advisers, and had taken four heavy bags full of cash for themselves. “Just think of us as one more layer of middlemen,” Jack had told the three glowering thugs who were, even now, tied up in the warehouse office, and Mort and Tommy had laughed.