Ahlan, Shaykh, he said, his hand firmly gripping the door panel to keep it from swinging shut immediately.
As-salaamu alaykum, I said, but only after I was inside.
How are we? he asked, turning to wedge himself in behind his desk where, still standing, he began shuffling papers, looking for whatever there was that pertained to me. He sat down, all the while staring at his sheaf of papers and riffling among them busily.
We will have to operate.
I didn’t say anything. I was afraid I might stammer or that my voice would come out weak and trembling.
Are you afraid?
I responded, of course, with a passage from the Holy Book. Say: We will not be afflicted but by what God has decreed for us. But as I said it, my voice was as weak and tremulous as I had feared.
You are not going to die, he said, looking at me. Looking into my eyes, a smile on his lips. I couldn’t help thinking how devious that smile looked.
Without an operation, what—
You would die. Not today, not tomorrow, not even a month or two from now. But . . . .
His voice was neutral, as if he were waiting to find out from me which of the two possibilities I would choose.
I didn’t have anything to say. Or maybe I was just taking my time, not because I didn’t know what I wanted or what my choices were but because I felt uncomfortable, and even uneasy. I was stalling. I needed to give myself time. To leave a space between what I had heard and what I would say.
Will the operation change me?
It is a difficult operation, and a long one too, because we have to take out some organs and replace them with equivalent devices that perform the same functions.
And a dangerous one?
He moved his head in a way that suggested he hadn’t understood, or perhaps that he didn’t give answers to questions such as this.
What I mean is, while I’m in there being operated on, will . . . ?
In medicine nothing is completely certain or guaranteed, but in this hospital we have performed operations like this many times.
He did not go on but I understood that what he was implying—and wanting me to understand but without him having to say it—was that the patients who had undergone this surgery had not died. That when he came out of the operation room after performing one of these procedures, his patient would still be alive.
But when you go in you will sign a document clearing us of responsibility, he said. He repeated a sentence from the lesson he had dictated to me when he first informed me that I was ill. He had said then, and he said again now, that in this hospital doctors do not hide anything from their patients.
I repeated the question he had ignored. But will I still be like I am now?
It is a difficult procedure. There are things that will change in your body, I mean in the way your body functions.
Now I did not want him to go on. That was because his expression had changed and his serious-looking professional smile told me he was about to instruct me on all the changes I would experience and what I would lose with every alteration. As I saw and took in the look on his face, he realized that I had absorbed as much as I could handle for today. He said we would talk about all of these matters once I was in the hospital, and as he said it he gave me a wink to remind me of all those people waiting out there for his attention.
When do I come back?
We are not in a great hurry. Arrange your affairs and then get in touch with me.
When he opened the door for me he seemed already to be looking toward whichever person would come in next. When I crossed the threshold into the waiting room and was standing in their midst he said a quick word of farewell, and added, I’ll be waiting for your call. As he spoke he gave me that particular doctor’s look, which he almost immediately shifted elsewhere, already focusing his concern on his next patient.
Once outside his office I was immediately aware that my body was suddenly drenched in sweat. I had to resist a strong urge to lift my turban completely off my head so that I could wipe my hand over my skull to try to get rid of the perspiration that had collected thickly enough to seriously dampen the turban’s edges. I turned to the receptionist, who said she didn’t need anything from me right now. She gave me a card with a number so I could contact her or the doctor. Turning away I saw my nephew standing in exactly the same spot as when I’d gone inside, keeping his gaze steadily elsewhere so that he would not be looking at me in my state of awkwardness. I don’t know why I stared down at the card she had given me, as if I needed to make out something written there, even though this little gesture slowed me down and exposed me for a few additional seconds to the stares of everyone in the room. There in front of them all I seemed to be moving in slow motion as I put the card in my pocket. As if I were putting off the uncomfortable moment of actually leaving the room, which was awkward for me because it meant readying myself to have to say as-salaamu alaykum as I walked slowly toward the door, where my nephew stood stiffly upright waiting for me.
It was better for me, his patient, not to hear in advance what would happen to me. And then, also, there was the tone of voice. It had fallen on my ears as a slightly threatening voice. I didn’t find it at all a neutral voice, as he might call it or describe it. And he hadn’t told me anything he didn’t want to tell me. We will talk when we are in the hospital, he said. He sounded exactly like a schoolteacher I once had and remembered well. I recall that teacher saying to us, Now close your books, we’ll finish our reading tomorrow. It’s what he said, years ago, and it’s what the doctor might as well have said to me today.
Fine. It would be better for me if I learned on my own, after awakening from my operation, what parts of my body I had lost. Or it would be better not to wake up at all. That seemed easier than trying to calculate in advance how I would feel then and what I would be missing.
Over here! This is the way to the car, Bilal was calling out to me, alerting me that we were on the wrong course in heading in this direction down the street. I obeyed him and changed direction to follow him. He had taken the lead, I knew, to spare me having to use my own head to remember where I had parked the car. And anyway, I had let him walk ahead of me so that he could clear a path for me through the crowd of pedestrians.
The car is close now, he said, pointing to the intersection where we would turn.
In the films I have seen in my life, people near death are always making decisions about what they will do in the time remaining to them. One character says he is going to live as he has always dreamed of living, while another declares he will try out things he has never experienced before, like traveling to other countries. Someone else decides to stop shouldering the responsibilities that have brought him to this state of exhaustion. He declares he will stop working immediately and will spend the rest of his time pondering all the years of his life that have somehow just gone by. In those films it was as if none of these characters could see anything in life except the passage of time itself. Anything to life but time, and they divided that time into perfectly equal segments, the first segment no different than the final one. The time that was left was all about the life that was left. They didn’t set aside any time for the fear of death, specifically for that fear.
I would not die. That’s what the doctor said to me, either evasively or as an outright lie. What they mean when they claim that they are telling the patient everything about his illness is that they are telling him half of what they know. They have to keep something back, something for themselves alone to know. Otherwise how could they ever reassure a patient