Austin smiled insincerely, no doubt adjusting his professional assessment of how well Peter was doing. ‘Yes, there are days I quite fancy coming to work naked,’ he joked, ‘but the feeling passes.’
Peter smiled in return. One of his flashes of pastoral instinct, like the one he’d had about Lover One’s inconsolable sadness, came to him now: this doctor, this ruggedly good-looking New Zealand male, this man called Austin, had never had a sexual relationship with anyone.
‘I want to thank you,’ said Austin, ‘for taking our conversation seriously.’
‘Conversation?’
‘About the natives’ health. About getting them to come to us so we can check them out, diagnose what they’re dying of. Obviously you’ve been spreading the word.’ And he smiled again, to acknowledge the unintended evangelical meaning of the phrase. ‘At long last, one of them has.’
Long last. Peter thought of the distance between the USIC base and the ????? settlement, the time it took to drive there, the time it would take to walk. ‘Oh my . . . gosh,’ he said. ‘It’s so far.’
‘No, no,’ Austin reassured him. ‘Remember Conway? Your Good Samaritan? Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with the signal strength of some doodad he installed at your church. So he went there again, and lo and behold – he came back with a passenger. A . . . friend of yours, I gather.’
‘Friend?’
Austin extended his hand, motioned towards the corridor. ‘Come with me. He’s in intensive care.’
The term stuck a cold spike into Peter’s guts. He followed Austin out of the room, down the hallway a few steps, and into another room marked ‘ICU’.
Only one patient lay in the spotless twelve-bed facility. Tall IV drip stands, gleaming new and with transparent plastic sheaths still hugging their aluminium stems, stood sentinel by each empty bed. The lone patient wasn’t hooked to a drip, nor was he attached to any other tentacles of medical technology. He sat erect against pillows, tucked up to the waist in pure white linen, his faceless, hairless kernel of head-flesh unhooded. In the great rectangle of mattress, designed to accommodate American bodies the size of BG’s, he looked pathetically small. His robe and gloves had been replaced with a thin cotton hospital gown, pale grey-green like stale broccoli, the colour Peter associated with Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, but that didn’t mean he was Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, of course. With a shame so intense it was close to panic, Peter realised he had no way of knowing who this was. All he knew was that the ?????’s right hand was wrapped in a bulbous mitten of white gauze. In the left hand, he clutched a shabby toiletries bag – no, it wasn’t a bag, it was . . . a Bible pamphlet, one of Peter’s hand-sewn assemblages. The paper had been dampened and dried so many times it had the texture of leather; the loose strands of wool were yellow and pink.
Seeing Peter enter, the ????? cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled by the minister’s bizarrely unfamiliar raiment.
‘God ble?? our reunion, Father Pe???er.’
‘Lover Five?’
‘Ye??.’
Peter turned to Austin. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why is she here?’
‘She?’ The doctor blinked. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached for a clipboard on which a single sheet was clamped, and, with a scrawl of a pen, he amended the patient’s gender.
‘Well, as you can see from the bandage,’ he continued, escorting Peter to Lover Five’s bedside, ‘she’s sustained a hand injury. A very serious hand injury, I must say.’ He motioned to the gauze mitten. ‘May I?’ This last question was directed at the patient.
‘Ye??,’ she said. ‘??how.’
While the bandages were being unwrapped, Peter recalled the day of Lover Five’s injury: the painting falling from the ceiling, the bruise on her hand, the fervid sympathy offered by her fellow ?????. And how, ever since then, she’d been protective of that hand, as if the memory of that injury refused to fade.
The white mitten dwindled in size until Austin removed the last of the gauze. A sweet, fermented smell was released into the room. Lover Five’s hand was no longer a hand. The fingers had fused into a blueish-grey clump of rot. It looked like an apple that had sustained a bruise and then been left for weeks.
‘Oh my God,’ Peter breathed.
‘Do you speak his . . . do you speak her language?’ said Austin. ‘Because I’m not sure how to get proper consent here. I mean, not that there’s any alternative to amputation, but even explaining what a general anaesthetic is . . . ’
‘Oh . . . my . . . God . . . ’
Lover Five ignored the men’s conversation, ignored the putrid mess on the end of her wrist. With her uninjured hand, she opened her Bible pamphlet, deftly using three fingers to flip to a particular page. In a clear voice unhampered (thanks to her pastor) by impossible consonants, she recited:
‘The Lord give them power in their bed of pain, and make them whole again.’ And, from the same page of inspirational selections from Psalms and Luke: ‘The people learned the good new way and followed him. He welcomed them and helped them know God, and healed all them who needed healing.’
She raised her head to fix her attention on Peter. The bulges on her face that resembled the knees of foetuses seemed to glow.
‘I need healing,’ she said. ‘Or I die.’ Then, after a brief silence, in case there was any ambiguity that should be clarified: ‘I wi??h, plea??e, ???o live.’
‘My God . . . my God . . . ’ Peter kept saying, ten metres down the hall, as Austin leaned against the edge of his consulting room desk, arms awkwardly folded. The doctor was tolerant of the pastor’s emotional incontinence – he wouldn’t dream of telling him that nothing was achieved by all this groaning and fist-clenching and agitated face-wiping. Even so, as the minutes ticked on, he became more keen to discuss the way forward.
‘She’ll have the best of care,’ he reassured Peter. ‘We have everything here. Not to blow my own horn, but I’m a pretty good surgeon. And Dr Adkins is even better. Remember the great job he did on you? If it sets your mind at rest, he can do her as well. In fact, yes, I’ll make sure he definitely does her.’
‘But don’t you realise what this means?’ cried Peter. ‘Don’t you fucking realise what this means?’
The doctor flinched at the unexpected cursing from a man who was, as far as he’d been given to understand, a bona fide Christian minister.
‘Well, I appreciate that you’re upset,’ he remarked carefully. ‘But I don’t think we should jump to any pessimistic conclusions.’
Peter blinked tears from his eyes, allowing him to see the doctor’s face in focus. The ragged scar on Austin’s jaw was as conspicuous as ever, but now, rather than wondering how Austin got it, Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death. The wounds on Peter’s arm and leg (healing still), the scabs on his ears (gone now), every trifling scratch and burn and rash and bruise, thousands of injuries over the years, right back to the ankle-bones he’d broken the week before he’d met Bea, his skinned knees when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid, the nappy rash he’d probably experienced as a baby . . . none of them had stopped him being here today. He and Austin were comrades in stupendous luck. The gouge in Austin’s chin, which must have been a gory mess when it was first inflicted, had not reduced the entire head to a slimy lump; it magicked itself into fresh pink flesh.
Nothing shall hurt you, said Luke. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, said Isaiah. The Lord healeth all thy diseases, said Psalms. There it was: there it was, plain as the scar on this smug doctor’s face: the perpetual reprieve the Oasans called the Technique of Jesus.