The doctor motions to Harold, who joins the others at the tent. He is aware of an ambient sound of machines. A nurse operates a console like something from a recording studio. A monitor graphs an undulating line: his wife’s heartbeat. Across the tent, a row of nurses stand, their faces uniformly serious. Harold focuses on one nurse whose brow comprises thin utilitarian lines above searing blue eyes. When she suddenly raises those eyes to his, he winks reflexively, then feels a buzz of shame.
He cannot see any part of his wife’s body. Still, it feels dangerously devious to be here, so close beside her. His instinct tells him to hide. But Harold reminds himself that she is anesthetized. Entirely unaware of his presence.
Dr. Warren moves a sheet to one side, and Harold finds himself staring down all at once at a small patch of bare brain. He looks away involuntarily. What have they done with the piece of missing skull? Is the hair still stuck to it? There are so many questions, but he can’t keep them together. His heart quickens. Looking up, he takes stock of the surgery room and feels disoriented, as if awaking in an airplane thirty thousand feet above land.
Harold looks back down. He concentrates on maintaining an air of calm, confident superiority; an air he’s mastered over the years. Nonetheless, he feels increasingly conscious of eyes upon him. He stares at the brain. The window itself is disappointingly tiny, revealing just a glimpse of a pale reflective substance. Over this surface runs a faint, spidery red road map. Blood vessels, Harold assumes. Exposed within its drab skull, the brain strikes him as a delicate animal whose stone shelter has been removed. A snail in an overturned shell. It is amazing to think that every human thought and action arises from this weird matter. There is something divine about the sight of it, and Harold thinks he can detect a hush beneath the low bustle in the operating room, as if in religious observance.
He stares for another moment. Then, all at once, his hand reaches toward the brain. His rubber glove is thin as a condom and, like a condom, he would prefer not to wear it. But when his little finger makes contact, the texture of the brain is gloriously discernible. Wet and gelatinous, like custard. It feels marvelously supple—not the dense muscle he’d imagined. He is unsure of what this particular lobe represents, with what expertise he is meddling, but he pushes the thought away and tries to memorize the moment. This is the highlight of a lifetime, he knows, something he’ll never experience again.
He removes his finger as quickly as he’d positioned it, before Dr. Warren can take it away. The surgeon stares, stupefied. Harold nods authoritatively and stands back, letting the team close in, shielding the view of his wife.
The whole episode cannot have taken more than two seconds. There is still a thrill in Harold’s hand, spiking his blood. He stands back from the table, feeling a sweet numbness in his own brain. The operating room is eerily quiet, with only the sounds of shifting fabric and the occasional clink of metal. Harold is not sure how long to linger. It is somewhat comforting to be in the room; it takes away the fear of an emergency happening out of his sight. But finally Dr. Warren catches Harold’s eye and nods curtly toward the door.
Harold returns to the waiting room, feeling conspicuous, oversized. Most of his neighbors are still there, largely unchanged. One man now holds his head in his hands, perhaps coping with bad news, or taking a nap. A mother and daughter play cards together cheerfully, as if this were their living room. The receptionist sits at her desk quietly, with hair like coral, pasted in solid swirls against her head. No one approaches her to ask after anyone. It isn’t like the movies. There is no urgency here, no tears.
Harold takes a seat among the others, clutching his secret. As he sits, a wheelchair passes through the room slowly, bearing a very elderly man with thin, bare legs and feet in beige ped socks. An IV drip rolls along with him, and a glum nurse. The man gazes straight ahead, as if looking upon an enthralling, faraway place. It comes to Harold in a sudden dart that he will be like that someday. Carol will push him in a wheelchair just like that. Maybe, he thinks. If he is lucky, she’ll still be there to push him.
The nurse wheels the old man out of sight, her wide rump emphatically not belonging to Carol. Harold feels a horrible, baffling loss as he watches the man disappear.
Later, a nurse comes out to the waiting room and calls for him. He rises expectantly, and the nurse approaches and hands him Carol’s necklace. For a moment he feels certain, deep in his bones, that his wife is dead. He teeters on the lip of that canyon, feeling its cold wind rise up to his face. But then the nurse grins and tells him that Carol is ready to see him.
The recovery room is small with wood paneling, like a sauna. Carol sits up in a cot, looking small in her yellow nightgown. Her legs are bare up to the knees. Harold pulls up a chair and gives her a loving smile. There is a white bandage, cartoonlike, around her head. Nothing can improve on the old-fashioned bandage, he supposes, wrapped around heads for millennia.
“How do you feel?” he asks.