“In Bangkok?” I ask.
“Yes!”
I get off the call as quickly as I can. For several minutes, I stand absolutely still on the path. I’m a few meters from a haphazard stack of granite slabs, rising from the mud that has been lightly churned by sheltering sheep.
Why was my father on the phone to Johan the night he landed in Bangkok? What were they talking about? And why did I never know about this conversation?
It’s a bright, cold February day and the land seethes with energy. In all directions, tors topple their rocks like spilled lava. Ancient, lichen-covered trees reach up on either side of my path, hungry for the sun. I climb up the pile of granite slabs and look at the sky. There are a few tiny knots of cloud scudding past the radio mast over at Princetown, but mostly it’s just me under a polished cold plate of perfect winter blue. I breathe deeply, arms outstretched.
And it’s now that Johan returns to my system. It’s now that I’m flooded with that old longing, the great physical need he always roused in me. I allow myself, finally, to feel him in my body, the sensation of his mouth touching the skin near my ear last week. It lasted a second, no more, but it’s still imprinted, no matter how hard I scrub. I allow and allow, and I feel the vibrations of him, us, the old wired-in desire in every cell.
Abruptly, I jump off the rock and carry on walking. I am vulnerable to all sorts of thoughts, if Johan isn’t a straightforward villain. I must keep moving.
Twenty-seven.
Six weeks later: Stockholm, March 2023
On the very first day of my placement, Yanika takes me into an emergency duodenal perforation. As I follow her down to theater at a brisk pace, she tells me the patient has peritonitis and probable sepsis. “Which is better in an emergency scenario like this,” she asks casually, “laparoscopic or open?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard.” She suddenly swerves right past a rail of lead vests, hanging inert like sentries.
“How could I possibly answer that without assessing the patient? What if she’s got a load of adhesions from previous operations?”
Yanika runs into her office to grab her glasses. “Very good!” She’s smiling, as if I’m a four-year-old who’s just written her first correctQ.
“Yanika, I’ve only had six years off.”
“Six years might as well be six decades to some of the consultants you’re going to encounter. The fact that it was mental health–related will make it even worse.”
I had ultrapremature twins, for fuck’s sake!I manage not to say. She knows. She wishes only to prepare me. And I am prepared, I realize as I pull on a surgical cap. My body was built for this. It doesn’t matter what she or anyone thinks.
The operation is chaotic. The patient, who’s had a hole in her bowel for three days now, is catastrophically unwell and within ten minutes is on an adrenaline infusion. In a situation like this, Yanika’s job is to get the patient on and off the table as quickly as possible—she needs to be back in intensive care. But at every stage, Yanika hits walls. The patient’s clotting is abnormal, her liver is failing, she’s losing hemoglobin in her urine, and she’s hypothermic.
I watch from my step on the periphery of the action, completely absorbed. I have no consciousness of my own heart beating, my feet on the floor. There is only the patient’s body, bleeding, fighting, flagging.
—
Thirty minutes later, I watch my most cherished mentor call time of death.
“Welcome back, Carrie,” she says when she leaves.
I stand in the theater long after she has gone, watching two nurses washing the woman’s body. One of them is talking to the body as she prepares it. The floor still bears pools of mucky irrigation fluid. In the next room I can hear another anesthetist preparing for an incoming case; soon this theater will be readied for the next patient on the emergency list. Not even death allows us to pause, in this world.
I feel around my body. Am I still here? The earth seems to have shifted; everything and nothing has happened. The health care assistants are cleaning the room; one of them is on the phone trying to find a suitable space for this woman’s family to come in and say goodbye.They work silently to remove all signs of mayhem. The patient’s face is covered now by a sheet.
It’s been six years since I last stood unarmed on this battleground: confronting the tearing fragility of life, the game of roulette the universe plays with us during our short time on earth.
And yet, here I am. Two feet on the ground. Saddened, shocked. But earthed. In fact, the main message I am receiving from my body isI need some water.
This was a message I never used to hear. I’d go hours without water back then—without food, rest, not so much as thirty seconds in a toilet cubicle to take some breaths. I don’t know what’s changed since then, why I’m able, now, to hear myself. Maybe it’s just time. Time spent on the moor. Or perhaps the past few years of real happiness and stability, the first period of its sort in my life.
I go off to get water and then I call Robin.
“What are you eating?” I ask, after he’s updated me about the kids. (Raffy: has self-reported the medical condition “too many bogies.” Maeve: considering becoming a jockey when she’s older.)
“Spaghetti hoops on toast,” he says. “With two sausages on the side. I know the face you’re pulling, and I couldn’t give two figs.”
