The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (2 page)

If this had happened with a dog, why couldn’t it happen
with a man? This possibility, the infinite and infinitely fantastic possibility,
established the always so immediate limitations of reason. All that polite
reasoning he planned to use with the robbers in the cave showed itself to be
just one form, a form contiguous with life’s many violent insanities. Reason is
one mode of action, nothing more, and it has no special privileges. The fact
that he had extended its reach to cover everything, like a panacea he hoped
would make up for the shortcomings of action, was simply a personal quirk, and a
very symptomatic one: it showed his true colors and the error in which he lived.
Because those eminently reasonable characters he so much admired and whom he
modeled himself after (like Mariano Grondona), were considered reasonable only
pour la galerie
— that’s how they made their living — but they also
had a real life in which they were not reasonable, or they were only
intermittently and carelessly so, depending on the circumstances, as these
things should be. In order for action to be effective, one had to depart from
the purely reasonable, which would always be an abstract way of thinking devoid
of any truly practical use.

One could depart through realism. Realism was
obviously a representation, but precisely for this reason it could become a
spontaneous way of being when applied to an entire discourse. Realism was a
deviation from the reasonable; a theory pointed to a path that was a straight
line, but the realistic man who knew how to live followed one that was
roundabout and had twists and turns . . . each one of these detours away from
the straight path was by nature and intention Evil. It didn’t matter that it was
an attenuated Evil, one without consequences; its essence was still Evil, and it
had to be for the detour to be effective and for realism to be created, and for
reality to be seen through realism, finally, real reality, so distinct from the
pale fantasies of reason . . . Perhaps there, in that eminently benevolent
utility, resided Evil’s purpose.

An ambulance siren broke through the quiet morning air of
the neighborhood, apparently in a great hurry but also apparently taking a quite
roundabout route, coming and going through those small and empty streets as if
it couldn’t find its way. The physical phenomenon that makes a siren sound
different when it is approaching from when it is departing, even when the
distances are equal, is well known. That difference allowed Dr. Aira to
reconstruct the intricate route the ambulance was taking. This is what he had
been doing for the past few minutes without realizing it, absorbed as he was in
other thoughts and memories; now, with the dog hurling itself at him, he became
alarmed when he realized that the sound, with all its comings and goings, was
drawing a circle that was closing in on him . . . There it was again, that
cursed ambulance, which had been pursuing him in dreams and throughout wakeful
nights, in fantasy and reality, always driving with its siren blasting along the
uncertain edge of two realms! Fortunately, it had never caught up with him. Like
in a nightmare that is never consummated but for that very reason is even more
nightmarish, at the very last minute, just when it was about to catch him, he
would escape through the center of the labyrinth, though he never knew exactly
how . . . That was the moment of extreme danger, with terror ripping through the
seams of reality, when he would transfer that sense of danger to some other
element, as he had just now done with the dog, thereby establishing a continuum
and crossing over that bridge, heading in the opposite direction of that fear .
. .

The siren’s sudden escalation to ultrasound, combined with
a screech of brakes just inches away, shook him out of his daydream. The scene
plunged into a present where there was no room for thinking. That’s why he
needed a few seconds to realize that the ambulance had found him and that he
didn’t know what to do. The unthinkable had finally occurred. The dog, caught in
the middle of its leap by harmonies only it could hear, did a somersault in the
air, then began racing around in circles.

He turned, gathering up his scattered dissembling
reflexes, and adopted a casual expression, one of almost indifferent curiosity.
Two young doctors were getting out of the ambulance and starting to walk toward
him (in any case, they were only a step away) with a decisive air, while the
driver, an enormous black man in a nurse’s uniform, got out of the side door and
started walking around the vehicle. He froze, pale and with his mouth dry.

“Dr. Aira?” said one of the doctors, as if he were
confirming rather than asking.

He nodded briefly. There was no point in denying it.
He still couldn’t believe that the ambulance, after such a long time, after so
many twists and turns, had actually reached him. But there it was, materialized
and white, so real as to be almost unbearable. And it had lifted him out (the
doctor’s words had proved it) of that urban anonymity where one watches
ambulances drive by . . .

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time; you can’t
imagine how hard you’ve made it for us.”

“At your house,” the other said, “they told us you had
gone out for a walk, and we went out to find you . . .”

The driver joined the group and interrupted, jokingly:

“No chance in hell we would have imagined you’d walk
straight down this street!”

The others chuckled with complicity, eager to get to the
point; all three had spoken at once, and therein ended the introductory
chat.

“I am Dr. Ferreyra, pleased to meet you,” said one
of the doctors, holding out his hand, which Dr. Aira took mechanically. “We have
a desperate case, and they have requested your intervention.”

“Come, let’s continue our conversation in the ‘living
room’ so we don’t waste any more time.”

And in a split second, and with worrying ease, they
were inside the ambulance, the huge black man was behind the wheel, and they
took off like lightning — the siren wailing, trees and houses slipping past like
screen shots, all accompanied by the dog’s furious barking . . . Dr. Aira’s
attention collapsed with the excess. The two young doctors were talking
constantly, taking turns or overlapping, their eyes flashing, their handsome,
youthful faces bathed in an invisible sweat. He heard them (too well) but didn’t
register what they were saying, which didn’t worry him at the moment as he was
certain that they were simply reciting the script they’d memorized, which they
would be able to repeat as many times as necessary; perhaps they were already
repeating it. The first thing he asked himself, once he was able to think again,
was why he had agreed to get into this vehicle. He justified it by saying that
it had been the simplest thing to do, the one that created the fewest problems.
Now all he had to do was get out and return home; they were not going to get too
carried away with this masquerade, because then it would turn into a kidnapping,
and they would get into trouble with the police. His only concern now (and it
didn’t present an insurmountable obstacle) was to refuse their requests and
suggestions, refuse everything.

Whenever an unexpected incident disrupted his plans, he
would become completely bewildered; as this happened to him fairly frequently,
he had invented a remedy and had assembled a small recuperation kit, which he
always carried in his pocket. The theory behind this solution was that he needed
to restore the use of his senses, one by one, and the certainty that once he’d
recovered his awareness of his senses, his ideas would fall into place on their
own. The kit consisted of: an ampoule of French perfume, whose rubber top had a
dipper immersed in the liquid, which he could remove and rub under his nostrils;
a small silver bell the size of a thimble with a wooden handle; a little doll
shaped like a bear, made of rabbit fur with a velvet cap he could rub his
fingertips against; a quartz die with phosphorescent-colored dots, twenty-one of
them, along with some other colors; and a piece of mint candy. It was so
practical that he could make use of the entire kit in a few seconds. He carried
it in a little tin box in his jacket pocket. But he had to use it secretly,
which was impossible on this occasion, so he left it in his pocket. Moreover, he
didn’t need to recover any particular level of lucidity to do so, quite the
contrary. He knew he had a tendency to think too much, and he could even fall
into his own traps.

They were the ones setting the trap. All he had to do was
get out of it. The trap consisted of making him think until he’d convinced
himself that it wasn’t a trap.

“Forgive me, I still haven’t introduced myself,” the other
doctor said. “I am Dr. Bianchi.”

They shook hands, without having to stretch out their arms
because they were sitting so close to each other on the folding benches in the
back of the ambulance.

This was his indication that they were willing to begin
repeating the explanations, now with the advantage of pretending they were just
filling in details that had been left unclear or ambiguous. And the fact was, in
what followed Dr. Aira managed to catch the word “Piñero,” which he had been
expecting without realizing it. All the persecution he and his art were
subjected to was instigated by the sinister Dr. Actyn, chief of medicine at
Piñero Hospital. All the attacks and the ambushes came from there, and led to
there, to the old hospital in the Lower Flores District of Buenos Aires.

Okay, so what was it about this time? And what was it
going to be about? He knew it by heart: a terminal patient, the failure of
conventional treatments, the family’s anguish . . . The thematic spectrum was so
limited . . . Always the same! All the old miseries, even more depressing when
taken out of their framework of absolute truth, of all or nothing . . . Because
a doctor, as opposed to a patient, could always try again, even when it wasn’t
fictional, as it surely was here. The possibility that it was a lie contaminated
the very truth it was based on: the plausible itself.

A small curtain divided the ambulance longitudinally. They
pulled it back: there was the patient, strapped to the stretcher. So they’d
brought him here! Those wretches stopped at nothing! “All’s fair in war,” Actyn
must have thought.

The two doctors leaned over him with such intense,
professional attention that they forgot about Dr. Aira; they checked his IV, his
pupils, the blood pressure monitor, the electrical activity in his brain, the
magnetic ventilator. The ambulance was one of those new intensive care units.
The patient was a man of about forty-five who had evidently undergone radiation
therapy because the left side of his skull was bald, and the ear on that side
showed mutations. It almost seemed authentic . . . But he shouldn’t think. He
turned and looked out the window. They were still driving straight down the same
street where they’d found him, still at very high speed and with the siren
blasting, racing through intersections like an arrow, one after another after
another . . . Where were they going? The houses, swept away like exhalations in
their wake, were all small and humble, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of
the city. They seemed to be accelerating constantly.

He started paying attention again because they were
talking to him. They drew a clinical profile of the utmost gravity. The two
doctors’ self-assurance was astounding; they used technical vocabulary as if
they had been brought up surrounded by electronic circuits. All the machines
were turned on, and they illustrated the points they were making by pointing to
a blinking curve, a decimal number, an insulin intake chart. They had everything
divided into zones on an undulating tridimensional grid that trembled on one of
the screens like a multicolored cube of gelatin; they focused in on the numbers,
which they entered into a wireless pocket keyboard.

“Are you familiar with this technology?” Ferreyra asked
him upon noticing his astonishment. “It operates with induced evolving boards,
made of dual proteins. Would you like to try?” he asked, handing him the
keyboard.

“No! I’m afraid of doing something foolish.”

“You see, all these marvels of science cannot prevent . .
. ”

Yeah, yeah, you can’t get me to bite that. Where’s the
camera? It had undoubtedly been easy to hide among all those machines, and Actyn
was probably watching him at that very moment, surrounded by his henchmen,
recording everything. Now he understood why the ambulance kept driving in a
straight line without turning down any side streets: turning interfered for a
few instants with the transmission of the image, and Actyn didn’t want to miss a
single second; this worried Dr. Aira, for it indicated that all they needed from
him was a momentary slip . . .

What were they telling him? Had they reached the core of
the issue?

“ . . . your gifts, Dr. Aira, though from our strictly
rational point of view . . . ”

And the other, at the same time:

“ . . . everything possible is being done, technology
helps use up all possibilities of action . . . ”

What this meant was that the deployment of incredible
machines hastened the intervention of magical healers like himself, for
conventional medical science could almost immediately reach its insurmountable
limit. Which established a link between him and them, making more plausible
their request for his intervention.

And what might that intervention be? To bring a goner back
to life? Pull him back from the very brink of death. As if that were something
out of the ordinary! Wasn’t this what always happened? Didn’t everybody in
extremis get rescued? That was the normal mechanism of interaction between man
and the world: reality would search for one more idea, search desperately for it
when all ideas had already been thought . . . and it would find it in the nick
of time.