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.Sloane loosened the bandage andpeered between the cupped hands.A floral pattern of intes-tine wound sinuously between the fingers.From beneath aneyepatch festoons of clotted black blood looped the cheek ofthe third man. Soak it off with peroxide, Sloane ordered, and theloosened patch gave suddenly with a sucking sound.Stillstuck to it came the torn and empty globule that was the eye.Sloane pointed to the boy with the abdominal wound. That one first.Send ahead that we cannot handle anymore majors for six hours.It ll take that long for these three.Six hours.At least.Tell them to send everyone they can on toUi Jong Bu if possible.Otherwise, we ll take them, but onlythe minors.They must give us six hours.The boy with the belly wound was lifted to the highwooden table.Sloane punched open a can of ether andstarted dripping it into a cone over his face. Breathe deeply.Blow it away.Don t fret.You re safenow.I m not going to let anything happen to you.When youwake up you ll be fine, just fine.Trust that.He dripped the ether until the hands holding the intes-tines fell softly away to the sides. Here, Jang.Drip this.Slowly.One drop every three sec-onds.One drop, three seconds.No more, no less.You get it?One drop every three.Jang nodded eagerly and began to pour the ether.Sloanewatched him for a moment. Not so fast.Too fast, no good.You be careful or I ll getsomeone else. As though there were someone else.51 Pour that alcohol.Hands and my arms.There that senough.He rubbed his hands together fiercely, cleaning undernails with other nails.He was thinking about the inside of theabdomen and what he would find there when he entered. Now more.He splashed the alcohol over his arms and let it drip offhis elbows. Again.All right, now the instruments.At each order the men jolted into action.He saw howclumsy they were, naive, driven into automaticity by theirawe of that pink and crawling loop of bowel, their own near-ness to it.He scrubbed the abdominal wall around thewound with soapy water and outlined a rectangle of skinwith towels.Inserting his index finger into the wound along-side the intestine, he drew the scalpel down across theabdomen.A bloody stripe appeared.He stroked again withthe blade.The yellow fat lay parted at the base.Again, thenagain until the stray loop was joined by its fellows.Heinserted the retractors. Hold these just like this.Yoon took them. Pull harder.Yoon pulled. Now don t move until I tell you.Good.Bring the otherlight over.Come on bring it over.He was barehanded as usual.Long since, he had run outof rubber gloves.He grasped the bowel and began to with-draw it.He would have to examine every inch of it, makingsure there was no perforation.Let there be no leakage offeces, no hole in the gut please.Otherwise he d have toresect the pieces, stitch the severed ends together.When thepile of intestines outside the body had grown to a largemound hanging from the incision, he could feel his assistantswatching him in horror.Slowly he surveyed the surface ofthe bowel, running it between the thumb and fingers of onehand, turning it to examine the under-surface.No odor of52feces, no hole.His hand dipped into the cleft, feeling for anyinterruption in the smooth contour of the organs.Spleen.Left kidney.Colon.Bladder.Then around to the right kid-ney, his hand now immersed in the abdomen almost up tothe elbow.Liver.Stomach.Now to replace the bowel. Lift high and hard.Up to the ceiling.The bowel began to slip wetly out of sight. Look out, he s waking up.Pour, dammit faster.The muscles of the abdominal wall tightened and thebowel threw itself up and out of the wound.He leaned on itwith his hand, trying to hold it in.A large coil escapedbetween his fingers and fell across the back of his arm. Pour.Pour faster.Get him down, he s going to vomit.Turn his head to the side.Hold it, keep it down.Don t lethim choke.Now pour, please, pour goddamnitall.Never mindthe mess.He felt the boy s body loosening again, sliding intounconsciousness, the edges of the wound relaxing. Keep going.With infinite care he replaced loop after loop. Lift harder.It was all in. Let s have the sutures.When it was done he said,  You are good good boys.Number one.Put him to bed.Wash the table.Get the next.He pointed to the eye wound.The youth s uncovered eyefollowed his movements, swinging from his hands to his face. Peroxide.Pour it slowly on the gauze.He gently irrigated the eye socket, wiping away clots,picking out loose stringy ends of tissue, bits of vegetationthat had been driven in.There was bleeding at the base, toomuch to let alone.This is going to hurt. Hold his arms and his legs.Grab his head, too.Tight.Hold it tighter.Tighter.He mustn t move.53He leaned down and breathed into the boy s ear, closeenough for his lips to touch. Okay now, it s going to hurt.Try to keep still.Really try.I ll be quick.He prepared the sutures, threading the black threadthrough the eye of a curved needle, then fitting it into thejaws of the hemostat. Now.All of you.Hold him.Tight.Understand? Nomovement.Tied down tight.He mopped the bloody pool out, pressing vigorously, nolonger tender.The body stiffened, became rigid but did notstruggle.When he had the spurter in view he sank the nee-dle into the tissues around it, pulled it through, then sank itagain in a figure of eight.The other eye was shut now, turnedin upon a screaming brain, shutting out the world, utterlyabsorbed in the private agony.He tied the first knot.That sgot it.Then the second and the third. Now pour again.It was washed clean.There was no fresh bleeding. Ointment.He emptied the tube of aureomycin into the socket, fillingit to the brim, packing gauze squares on top of it for pressure. Put a bandage over it, round and round the head.Leavehis ear out.Would you like to have an ear squashed like that?Put him to bed.Clean up, get the next one ready.He stepped out of the Quonset hut and headed for theouthouse, the demands of foreign amoebae tunneling intohis bowel.The night was full of bellowing and bumping.Strange that he had heard nothing inside.He had a periodof weakness as the diarrhea took him.The cramps, the odor,the sweating all over, the bruised and burning hemorrhoids,the sight and the thought of where he was.Living or dyingor even fighting in a place is not the same as being sick there.Dysentery and malaria had combined to establish a kinshipof disease between the Koreans and himself.It drove themtogether.Perhaps therein lay the solution to the struggle of54ideologies, he thought.Give both sides amoebiasis, givethem malaria, give them a common ground of suffering withneither the time nor the energy for war.He bent forward and put his head between his kneesuntil it passed.At least it waited until now.At least no oneelse came to join him.Often he had to suffer with a man oneach side of him.When all three were sick, the place wasunbreathable.With his eyes closed he started to dream a lit-tle but then he roused himself to finish.How he would haveloved to drop down deeper. Surgeons are not for sleeping,he was told during his residency.There s a boy out there whois waiting for his leg.In a much better world they would bothdream deeply without this duet.As he walked down the hillhe had to stop and ask whether that was an aftercramp orwhether he needed the three-holer again.The answer turnedhim around and back up the hill. It just doesn t end, doesit? he said aloud.Such merciless rejection when the bodydoesn t want something in it.Not most of it out all of it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]