Honeydew: Stories Read Online Free PDF

bobolink? You prefer Bird to Coltrane? Yes, many people here were born elsewhere; have you traveled yourself? —a reply intended to blur insult if anyone had heard it; often the entire surgical team was made up of fellows from the Asian rim or the subcontinent, though the surgeon in charge was usually Yankee. Or Jewish. Sometimes Irish. Zeph was Irish on both sides, though his father had not been a surgeon, not any kind of doctor, just a feckless hippie who named his one child Zephyr and willed him a walking stick and did talk jabberwocky.
    When Zeph paid his postoperative visits a few hours after the surgery, the patients did not seem to remember these conversations, and sometimes they did not even remember the man now standing beside their bed with his eyes on their neck. Being forgotten didn’t trouble him. He’d learned also to tolerate the next string of visits to the next day’s batch of surgical patients, though he always entered the room as if he were metal and had neglected to oil himself. He swiveled his eyes until they briefly met the eyes of the person in the bed. He said his silly name. He shook hands if the patient seemed so inclined. He was here to answer questions no matter how trivial they seemed. He sat down, preferably on a chair, on a stool if necessary, indicating that he was in no hurry. He answered the queries and he wrote a note or two on his clipboard, and when the questions were done (though some were repeated and repeated) he took over the conversation, explaining in the simplest lay terms possible the nature of the dope, its duration, its possible side effects, the probability of nasal intubation, and the unavoidable necessity of tethering the patient’s wrists to the side rails. “I’ll be taking care of you,” he said. And then, with a little less effort than earlier, he met the patient’s eyes again. And shook hands, maybe, and said good-bye.
    Now, at 6:30 in the morning, he walked in his paper slippers to the OR anteroom, where he was the first doctor to arrive but the second member of the team there; the scrub nurse was always waiting. She helped him into his mask and gloves and he entered the pearl and silver sanctuary. He checked the treasures in his beloved cart. The other docs padded in. Then the first patient, supine on wheels. Things began.
    This patient was an overweight man of fifty-seven with diabetes and a raging need for a knee replacement.
    “I’m going to insert the needle now, just as I explained,” Zeph said, and even as he spoke, the needle was reaching the necessary nerve. Zeph lowered his head toward the patient’s head so they could speak and Zeph could meanwhile watch the monitors and not get in the way of the surgeons, already clustered at the knee like jackals. “Are you feeling anything in your left foot?” Zeph said, and a nurse scratched its sole. “No,” the man replied. The nurse pinched his thigh. “Do you feel anything in your left thigh?” Zeph said. Another “No.” Zeph announced, “Ready,” in a firm voice never yet heard outside of the operating room.
    The patient told Zeph about sailing: “Nothing like it, you are master, you are jubilant, you yourself are the…are the…”
    “Wind?” Zeph suggested.
    “Out of body…out of mind…you are made of air and sky.”
    “Water?”
    “Marshmallow…peanut butter.”
    Zeph reduced the Versed.
    “Come out with me sometime, Doc.”
    “Love to.”
    The next patient was so talkative that Zeph added diazepam to her IV, then joined in her complaints about children and grandchildren; you would think, if you heard his responses, that dealing with recalcitrant offspring was his life’s interest. The third, a boy with a supposedly operable tumor in his abdomen, was a general. Zeph, unable to communicate with this child sunk in artificial sleep, noted that the tumor was extensive and not completely excisable. The final surgery was a lumpectomy, nice and clean. The woman on the table flirted with