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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Mine
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“I want you to take a deep breath, Mr. Prasith. Good, now if you can, count backwards from ten for me, ten, nine, eight- that’s good. You seem to be awake. No, no, don’t speak- I know this seems like the opposite of how it’s usually done, and it is. See, I cut the line to the isoflurane, so the room was full of anesthetic gas. That’s why the nurses are out on the floor there. But I still need you conscious for the procedure; this clever little device is a re-breather, scrubs the anesthetic out of your lungs as you breathe. And I told you not to talk- not that you can, because that was the other thing I gave you, a paralytic agent.”
“Don’t be scared, Mr. Prasith. Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry. Mr. Samphan. How could I forget to keep up our little charade? Anyway, where were we? Oh right, your heart’s failing. Now I wonder why that might be? I mean, you had your last full check not seven months ago. The doctor said you were fine, maybe our cholesterol was a bit high, but congestive heart failure just seven months later? I imagine you were planning on having a talk with your doctor about that, weren’t you? Once you’d gotten your new heart?” “Well, you might notice we’ve already made the incision. Customarily, you wouldn’t be conscious for this part, but customarily the anesthesiologist wouldn’t lying unconscious on the floor; you like that I made him spoon with the big male nurse? I thought it would be funny- besides which, I can’t stand homophobes.” “Your eyes keep darting to the cooler. No, I haven’t forgotten your heart, but honestly, why would you want that old thing? Been in some fat man for forty odd years; it probably would have given out on him by the end of a decade, if he hadn’t been stupid enough to scrimp on his diabetes medication. They had to take his foot, but he was greedy and wanted to keep the leg, but the leg got gangrenous, and by then it had gone too far. Still, this heart’s too good for you, which is irrelevant, because I have something better.” “No, don’t try to sit up, you can’t anyway, but it isn’t time for show and tell. Right now I just want to tell you a story while I work. You already know I’m one of the best cardiovascular surgeons in Cambodia, though if it would make you feel more comfortable, I can always, ahem, call it Kampuchea. But what you may not know, what your background checks on me may not have discovered, is I had a family, once. I lived in the west, but my family originally came from the east, in the stretch of land Nixon bombed for fear of communists, which ironically enough gave you and your leftist allies control of the country. And when the Vietnamese, who Nixon had been fighting, finally overthrew you, the west became the seat of your Khmer Rouge.” “Because you couldn’t win, you holed up in the west, far enough from Vietnam to be safe, and to be certain, you salted the earth with landmines. My original family, with my parents, fled Nixon’s bombs, and ended up on the opposite side of the country. Now my new family, it started with my wife, Kalliyan. She was born in the west. We were young and foolish and ignorant of the atrocities of war, and in love enough that when she became pregnant we decided to be married. And from the day of that accident, I thanked my former selves religiously, because I knew in this life I’d done nothing to deserve her.” “Our first daughter we named Chantrea. She remained our only child until I graduated from the University of Health Science in the capital. My son, Nhean, was born after we returned home, and after him a second daughter, Sopheap. What we did not know is that while we were in Phnom Penh, the entire countryside near our home had been mined. By forces under your command.” “Don’t try to speak; you’ll choke on your own spittle at that rate, and I can’t have that- especially not before I finish telling my story. My children and the neighbor’s children liked to play football in the field just past our home. They had played there a hundred times, without any incident, and my children regularly won; how could they not? They had their mother’s legs, long, powerful, but graceful. But on this particular day, my son had the ball, and was making a break for the net. He feinted to the left, and threw the goalie, so he had an open shot at the net.” “The shot went wide. My wife had made lunch, and when calling the children didn’t work, she’d run onto the field and grabbed Nhean by the arm (being a boy, and strong-willed, the girls always followed his lead). He looked to his mother, mewling already about how she’d ruined his shot, but she was no longer listening.” “She had heard stories of the mines, stories that seemed like so much gossip in our protected little world. But she knew when she stepped in that spot on that field, she knew they were real, and she knew what was about to happen. She threw Nhean as hard as she could as the mine went off.” “My son was made deaf by the explosive; Kalliyan did not survive, though she did not die immediately.” “My wife’s sister took my children, and she was right to do it. I could hardly function, certainly couldn’t care in any meaningful sense for myself. And it would have broken me to fail my children, too.” “You took something from me, and I believe enough in Karma to think I should give you something in return. Don’t sit up, just move your eyes, look into the mirror I’m holding over you. Disconcerting, isn’t it, to look inside yourself like that. I know, it’s difficult- even with suction there’s still an awful lot of blood. Here, follow my finger. You see this, here. It’s too circular, geometric, to be organic. Now look here, in the corner, do those numbers mean anything to you? MN-79. I imagine that takes you back. And I can tell from that look in your eyes, I chose wisely. China, Belgium, Russia, the US, you put a lot of mines in your country, but the MN-79 is Vietnamese. I do not know you for a racist, but certainly, the idea that the Vietnamese will be the ones to finally kill you must sting.” “You’ll notice I had to rig it differently, or the weight of your organs pushing down on you would have just set it off the first time you sat up. And honestly, if my goal was to simply blow you up, I’d have done it and left by now. But trust me, any attempts to remove it will set it off; anyone foolish enough to give you so much as the Heimlich will set it off. In its current condition, your heart will give out within the month. The mine will not last near that long.” “Now I’m going to begin sewing you up. Incidentally, you won’t remember this. Not at first, anyway. Side effect of the paralytics and anesthetic. You’ll remember things slowly, details coming back to you in pieces, and at first you’ll doubt it all, doubt that any of this could be true. And when eventually you come to realize that it is, you will be resigned to it.” “I must admit, I lied, earlier, or misled, maybe. I didn’t do anything to your heart. That was all you. The cost of drowning your conscience. Your other doctor was either a hack, or, more likely, he recognized you. General Prasith. You were a Brigadier, right? I can never keep track, though I guess I’m more interested in your time as a Lieutenant Colonel, anyway.” “It was years after the Vietnamese kicked you the hell out of power, but like a tick dug into a dog’s ass, you refused to be chased out, determined to kill the host as soon as be burned off. You couldn’t win militarily. The monstrous things you’d done in power ensured no one would ever willingly give you control again. And you knew that even the UN couldn’t turn a blind eye to your horrors forever. But still you could have pulled a Mengele, run off to South America to die peacefully on beaches you didn’t deserve. Instead you and your kind stayed, and mined the countryside. And really, that’s all of your biography that’s relevant. Pardon the slapdash suture- but as I see it there’s no point in wasting the effort on a cadaver. ” “I was, I was granted amnesty by, by King Sihanouk himself.” “Damn, I’m sorry, I must have used too little gas. Let me just adjust that, now, if you could, say all the letters in the alphabet backwards. The last letter of the alphabet is not “A,” and no, no, it isn’t “J” either. So you can’t. That’s good. Means you’ve got just enough. To test it, I’m going to lean in real close, close enough you could reach up and choke the life out of me, and tell you: you’re going to die. I’ve killed you already. Hmm. Got a wiggle out of the left pinky.” “Now, one last thing, another dose of the isoflurane. Once you’ve breathed this in, you’ll go to sleep, then I’ll shut off the supply. You and the rest of the staff will wake up slowly to find the work already done. The heart I’m taking back to a friend at the University of Health Sciences, to give to someone who might deserve it. At this point all that’s left is to breathe in, deep. Really? You’re going to hold your breath like a petulant child? I can stand here for quite some time- we have the OR reserved for another three hours, and you can only hold your breath until you pass out, at which point your body will breath in anyway. You can count backwards from ten, or I’ll do it for you. Ten, nine, there you go, nice deep, gasp, eight, seven, six… five…" |
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