A Short Story
“¿Qué me dijo?”
He asked the pretty young woman at his side, upon whose superior fluency with the English language he was, at important times such as these, unabashedly dependent.
He had feigned, though not altogether convincingly, to understand the question I had put to him about his foot a moment ago. Like an uncomprehending child, eager to impress the adult with whom he’s given the rare opportunity to converse, the young man replied to my open-ended inquiry with a tentative nod of the head.
“Yes”, he seemed to say, when I asked him to describe precisely how he injured his foot.
“No Javi!”, the young woman said, with a stifled laugh of endearment. Her winsome smile and vibrant brown eyes served as a welcome contrast to the sterile drabness of the cramped, gray room. With otherworldly delicacy, she leaned over and placed a small kiss on the young man’s puzzled brow–as though it were a dewy gossamer settling upon a windswept morning’s leaf–and said, “El pie–¿cómo te lastimó el pie?”
“How did you injure your foot?”
Frankly, it was a question to which I already knew the answer.
No, no–I’m not omniscient; I’ll be the first to admit that this here white coat confers upon its wearer no such special power! Prior to my entry into his room, which was located near the end of the narrow hallway on the sixth floor of Palmetto General, I had quickly reviewed Javier C–’s chart. I do this for all my patients. Without the foreknowledge of a patient’s condition, his lab results, his allergies, and his prognosis, rounding each day can proceed at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Especially for an old hand like me.
Thus I was, prior to my entry into the young man’s room, equipped with the knowledge that he had, indeed, injured his foot. Although, now that I think about it, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that someone else had injured it for him! Ah yes!–to be sure, it was no choice of his. This is not the type of life-altering event to which one willingly consents, to whose intractable pain one voluntarily submits himself. It was no act of self-violence. It was no mere accident. No–someone did it to him. And whoever that person was, well–he did a mighty fine job of it!
Not just a fine, but a thorough job, in fact, to which the contents of the chart and, now, the physical presentation of the hobbled young man very clearly attested.
Last evening, according to the notes recorded by my colleague Dr. Gilroy down in the Emergency Room, this young man arrived at the hospital with a gunshot wound to the right foot. Not exactly a “run-of-the-mill” case in these parts. It was, according to all who beheld it, quite a shocking scene. From his foot’s dorsal to its volar side, from its roof to its now flattened sole, the bullet went clean through–Bang! Whoosh!–and, judging by the extent of the damage, and the amount of blood lost, was fired at a harrowingly close range.
The point at which his melted sneaker ended and his ruptured flesh began was, I’m told, difficult to locate. It was a veritable explosion of leather and bone, tendons and laces, sinews and “Swoosh” signs tossed in every which way. It was, if you’ll excuse my coarseness, a god—n grisly mess.
The young man was examined and, posthaste, conveyed to the operating theater, into which the groggy podiatrist staggered a little after midnight. Poor fellow, Dr. Oriana is. In his defense, it’s rather uncommon for the foot doctor’s services to be needed at so late an hour. Even on the Fourth of July, when things in Northwest Miami have a tendency to get more than a little unruly, podiatrists aren’t usually roused from their slumbers and called to render emergent aid.
But, last night, this one was
I needn’t bore you with the details from the operative note. As you could probably guess, the majority of the young man’s foot’s twenty-six delicate bones were shattered. Like little shards of glass, they were broken in every which way. Unsurprisingly, their defense proved woefully unequal to the strength of the 9mm round that cut through them like–well–like a 9mm round would cut through an appendage encased in a very thin layer of skin. They were splintered into countless, tiny fragments, suspended in a medium of pooling blood.
Somehow, Dr. Oriana was able not only to salvage, but to reconstruct the mangled foot. His job complete, the good doctor signed off on the young man, whom he promptly handed over to me. As the attending physician, I now presided over his care.
And there I was, asking the luckless, almost footless creature now confined to his bed, “What happened to your foot?”
As it happens, Nietzsche shared his birthday with King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the first Hohenzollern after a disappointing string of Habsburgs. Nietzsche’s father, having served as a tutor to the royal family’s children, was thrilled by so patriotic a coincidence. He was gladdened by what could be understood as nothing short of a cosmic sign of the most favorable sort. The boy was thus named for the monarch before whom his royalist parents enthusiastically bent their knees and worshiped, but over whom, in the golden kingdom of ideas and philosophy, he would reign.
“¿Cómo te lastimó el pie?”
Undeterred by his earlier display of childlike incomprehension, the young man turned his head, fixed his hazel eyes on me and, without blinking, replied, “Una fiesta. I was at a party–a party for Independence”.
The brave words, intent, at all costs, on making themselves heard, marched through a wrenched grimace of pain. It was as though they were made to run through a mile-long gauntlet, at whose end no comfort, no relief was waiting. With their strained utterance, it was clear to me that an adjustment to his medications would be needed. I retrieved the small yellow notepad from my left front pocket, clicked into life my trusty ball-point pen, and scribbled down a reminder to increase both their frequency and their dose.
“For independence?”, I inquired, momentarily forgetting the date as I jotted down the words
“Si. Yes, for the Four of July. De Julio. A holy day in America”.
“A holy day?”, I asked, now glancing up from my ink-marked pad. I was momentarily struck by his use of such a sanctified term.
“No, no–holiday, Javier”, the young woman intervened, correcting him as would a patient schoolmistress her errant but earnest pupil. “The Fourth. The Fourth of July. And it’s pronounced ‘holiday’”.
“No, no–holiday, Javier”, the young woman intervened, correcting him as would a patient schoolmistress her errant but earnest pupil. “The Fourth. The Fourth of July. And it’s pronounced ‘holiday’”.
“And your celebration evidently went awry?”, I said, motioning to his bandaged foot, unable to suppress my sardonic impulse. For that, on more than a few occasions, I’ve been chided. Never too severely, but never without just cause, as the chief of medicine is apt to remind me. Too often it gets the best of me, but my character is not one that will permit, at this latter stage of my life, any serious amendment. Even if it’s for the better.
“Yes”, the young woman replied, on behalf of her pain-stricken partner, to whom an old Anglo-Saxon word like awry would be, she knew, hopelessly foreign.
Dilating on the events of last night, the young woman continued, “Javier and I attended a Fourth of July celebration. It was held yesterday afternoon. Later in the afternoon, around dusk. It was, by and large, a peaceful event. Family, friends, swimming, barbeque–nothing extraordinary. Nothing too special. Oh! Except that it was the very first Fourth of July that Javi ever experienced. That made it rather special, no?
¿No era especial, mi amor?
Her inflection sought concurrence, with which Javier’s nodding head readily supplied her
“Oh?” I said.
“Oh yes”, the young woman replied. Her name, I ascertained from the earlier exchange between the two, was Lorena. “I’ve experienced many Fourths in my life. Many. You see, my family emigrated from Cuba when I was just a girl–a hair before my twelfth birthday. I remember it vividly. And fondly. Yes–as though it were yesterday. It was an uncertain, but a happy time. As though we were given a fresh, blank canvas on which to paint our future. The boundaries of our palette were unlimited, from which no color, no matter how bright, was precluded. To draw whatever image we wanted–an image into which we could then breathe life. We’ve lived here in Hialeah ever since”.
“I see”, replied I, before gesturing to the incapacitated young man, to whom I posed the question, “And you–are you from Cuba as well?”
Stirred by the mention of his homeland, the young man perked up and said, “Yes–Soy de Cuba”. As he did so, the look in his eye changed. The alteration was subtle but–for a veteran physician like me–readily discernible. His countenance stiffened. His forehead tightened and his brow furrowed as the hue of pride–tinctured by a speck of poignancy–quickly suffused his steely gaze. I hypothesized, based on the evidence laid out before me, that the young man had only recently departed the land in which he was born. He’d only recently touched upon these American shores.
Lorena, sensitive to his reaction (indeed, attuned almost to the minutest amount of cortisol emitted into his veins; their bond, I could tell, was incredibly strong) reached out her gentle hand and placed it on his shoulder. Its muscles, very lean, swart, and well-defined, were tense. With affection, Lorena rubbed the taut extremity, and, in a few seconds’ time, the provoked young man’s ire was all but assuaged.
“Javi and I grew up together”, she said, in response to whose soothing, sing-song voice, the young man’s hardened visage and torso mellowed even further. “We lived just outside Cienfuegos, a moderate-sized city about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Havana. Maybe more. Our families were very close and very similar. For that reason, they were equally disliked by the government”.
With the utterance of that final word, “government”, a little smirk overtook the corner of her lip. There was something mischievous, perhaps even contemptuous in the way in which it curled.
Normally, the exigencies of rounding would pull me away from my listening to the further development of such a story. I seldom had the time, and very rarely the inclination, to endure the long, detailed, almost Odyssean autobiographical accounts into which it was my patients’ wont to drag me. I suppose, for that reason, I’d acquired the reputation of being somewhat brusque. That, I think, is the word with which my name was most often associated on the patients’ discharge surveys. The chief of medicine told me so.
Be that as it may, for Lorena and Javier, I was not only prepared, but very eager to make an exception. In them, between them, I sensed something profound. Something real but ineffable. I wanted to dive more deeply into their heroic tale, head first, and be led by them to its mysterious depths.
“Disliked by the government, you say?” I asked.
“Yes”, she said, unhesitatingly. It was, for her, as much for him, no mark of opprobrium, no demerit, no scarlet letter with which to announce one’s shame, but a silver badge to burnish, a cherished prize to flaunt, a glittering pin with which to adorn one’s lapel. “Fiercely disliked, in fact”, she continued. “Needless to say, we were not for Castro. Neither Fidel nor his vile brother, Raúl, nor anyone else, for that matter, who presumed to wield power in the name of those detestable thugs”.
Again, upon hearing the name “Castro”, the young man’s body stiffened. He seemed, all of a sudden, to forget about the surgical pain that plagued his elevated foot. The political pain, the personal pain, the emotional pain was evidently far more acute.
Governed by habit, I glanced up toward the monitor beneath which the tense young man laid. On it, I could see that his blood pressure was raised and his heart rate was elevated. Tachycardic, the blinking light informed me. I feared it was, if only temporarily, a bit too high. Of this, I made a mental note, as I promptly returned my attention to Javier
In a fit of disgust, the young man clenched his fists, flared his nostrils, and said, “!Castro! Ese hijo de pu–”
“Javi!” Lorena interrupted, with a tone of firm admonishment, by which the young man’s passion was, in an instant, subdued.
“I’m sorry”, said she, as though responsibility for the young man’s unguarded eruption lay with her, “You have to understand, the name ‘Castro’ has left a rather–how shall I say?–disagreeable taste in the mouths of many Cubans. In that of many Cuban-Americans, at least. I can’t speak for those who remain on the island–only for those, like us, who have defected. Those who have sought a better life elsewhere. Yes–a disagreeable taste. A certain sourness, you might say, indelibly etched on the palate that no subsequent sweet can negate, and no sorbet cleanse. It’s no sooner muttered than spit out, like aged vinegar or rancid milk”.
The vividness of her language caused me momentarily to cringe. I decided that she was, in two languages, a natural poet.
I recovered and she continued: “Fortunately, my family was able to escape his depredations years ago. Much sooner than his. Thank God for that. As reformers, as dissidents, as freethinkers, we were persecuted, no doubt, but we were able to flee. We were able to escape and come here. Javi’s family–well, it wasn’t as lucky”.
“Are they–are they still alive?”, I asked, engrossed by the story and, for that reason, heedless of decorum. Perhaps it was wrong of me to ask; I feared, having posed such a sensitive question, I’d misstepped. My curiosity led me too far and I quietly reprimanded myself for having encroached upon the realm of impropriety, from which I couldn’t now gracefully retreat.
“Javi is”, Lorena replied, raising her hand to sweep away the rebellious forelock that had settled upon his brow. “And thanks to you and your colleagues, I think he has a long life ahead of him yet”.
“I haven’t a doubt”, said I, warmed by the confidence entrusted in me, and amazed by Lorena’s soothing aura. Her poise was preternatural. The sense of calm that she was able to instill not only in him, but in me defied all explanation.
My focus restored, I then said, “We’ll ensure that there’s no infection. An antibiotic, a general one, taken daily by mouth, will be prescribed. That, and oral pain medications. They’re to be taken with food. He’ll need crutches for a while–maybe six weeks. He’ll have to refrain from bearing weight through the foot, of course. Follow-up x-rays will be scheduled in two months. At that point, if the bones have healed, and the sinews are secure, we can probably fit him for a boot. It’s an unwieldy thing, but useful”.
She nodded, thankful to have received a clear-cut plan for the immediate future. In Spanish, she relayed this information to Javier, to whom the prospect of crutches and a walking boot were obviously unappealing. His reaction to the words “seis semanas” disclosed as much. While I felt bad for the young man, it couldn’t be helped. She explained the importance of allowing the foot its requisite time to heal, and he buried his objections beneath a heavy sigh and a pursed lip.
At last, both acknowledged their understanding of and commitment to the plan.
I then asked, “Going back to how this all happened–how did his foot happen to find its way beneath a bullet?”
“Ha!” Lorena laughed, “That’s some way of phrasing it! Long after our party finished, Javi and I went for a walk. It was just before eleven o’clock and, in the wake of an amazing fireworks display, the streets were still bustling. Miami was electric. Isn’t it always? Music, firecrackers, pots and pans–a cacophony of sound and joy. Everyone was celebrating the birth of this great nation. We strolled past a bar, a seedier one to which the locals go. No sooner had we passed it than a group of men erupted from the front door. There were maybe, oh I don’t know, Javi–¿Cuántos hombres había fuera del bar?”
“Ocho”, he replied, “Más o menos ocho”.
“Eight men”, she continued, “Big, hulking, monstrous beasts–gang members, I think–already engaged in a fight. A stray elbow struck me, here”, she rolled up her sleeve and pointed toward a dark purple bruise that had settled just above her elbow, “and Javi leapt to my defense. No sooner had he shielded me and addressed my assailant than a handgun was brandished. The man wielding it expected Javi to cower. He didn’t, and was shot in the foot for his troubles. For his bravery, really. Before Javi hit the ground, the gang of men had fled the scene. Probably to resume their fight elsewhere. I know that it’s a cliche to say that it ‘all happened so fast’, but, in this case, it really did. The whole scene couldn’t have lasted more than two minutes”.
“Cobardes”, grumbled the laid-up young man, as he reflected on his traumatic, unevenly-matched encounter, “Todos son cobardes”.
“Yes”, Lorena concurred. “Tienes razón, mi amor. Every last one of them. Cowards”.
I shook my head. “Unbelievable”, is all that I could manage to say.
From what I could gather, if he’d only just arrived here, the first quarter of this young man’s life was spent under the tyranny of Castro. By the grace of God, he survived its inhumanity, its
barbarity, its savage indifference to life, its unremitting hostility to freedom, its baldfaced aversion to the truth, and its ravenous cupidity. He was, by an equally impressive display of our Heavenly Father’s omnipotence, able to come here to America. To the land of freedom. To the land of dreams. To the land of goodness and truth, and milk and honey, upon whose golden shores an untold number of immigrants have wished to alight.
And how was he received by this free, true, good, and blessed land?
With a bullet through the foot–with a blow that will forever haunt him; a limp that will forever chase him; and a scar that will forever serve as a reminder of his adopted nation’s birth.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you”, I said.
It wasn’t lost on me that I was apologizing for something over which I had absolutely no control. And, yet, it was something for which I felt, I know not why, I had an unspoken duty to answer. Despite our disparity in years, the gap in our educational attainment, and our unequal fluency with the English tongue, I was beginning to feel a strong connection with this young man. A very strong connection, indeed. While I couldn’t begin to imagine the shocks of pain by which his entire body was intermittently racked, I was empathic to his suffering. Not so much to the pangs of physical torment to which, as soon as I got around to ordering it, a stronger opioid would surely deliver some relief, but to the personal and political aches that can never be adequately palliated, and the generational scars that refuse fully to heal.
Javier wasn’t alone in feeling that kind of pain.
I felt it as well.
You see, like Javier, I too came to America in the hope of escaping a repressive regime. In my case, it was the Soviet Union, from which I ran away on the eve of its inglorious collapse. Upon the completion of my residency at Moscow Central (still regarded as the nation’s premier medical institute) I became, at no small danger to myself and my family, politically vocal. I was, so to speak, roused from my dogmatic slumber. I was restive. Until that time, I’d been unquestioningly faithful to the party line. From the Marxist-Stalinist mode of living, working, and thinking, I dared not stray, lest my prospects of becoming a licensed physician be jeopardized, and my lifelong aspirations, in an instant, dashed.
But, as I approached my late twenties, something stirred within me. It was as if my soul had quaked and, out of the gaping breach that formed, a yearning for freedom, for true freedom, exhaled its long stifled breath. Like a barbaric yawp, it called out, but was received only by a silent void. To its desperate, inarticulate cry, nothing clear replied.
In search of clarity, in search of answers, I turned to books. To what other source of light would one go, after all, when in pursuit of real enlightenment? When desirous of lasting moral improvement? When aspiring to something greater?
The trouble was that enlightening books were difficult to come by. You see, in Soviet Russia, at that time as well as this, the press was unfree. You might even say that it was enslaved. It was fettered by an ideology hostile to any word that wasn’t its own. Books critical of the regime were unconditionally prohibited. It’s not difficult to understand why; the administration had to uphold the facade of infallibility, the outward show of executive competence, the ruse of benevolence, justice, prosperity, and wisdom if it was to maintain the people’s ignorant loyalty and the world’s dutiful respect.
Thankfully, I found that the obstacles to enlightenment weren’t insuperable. No doubt, they were forbiddingly high, and mortally dangerous, but their summit was never fully out of view. It shone like a north star to which my soul could be fixed. I realized that my yearning for freedom was echoed in the pages of truly great books that I could, in a roundabout and perilous way, get my hands on.
In order to circumvent the censors, samizdat material was distributed among my new circle of friends. In Russian, the word means, self-published. It was, I can assure you, a more laborious process than you might think. Nowadays, every Tom, Dick, and Harry can “self-publish” an ebook on Amazon. This was different. Samizdat material was usually reproduced by hand–word by word, line by line, often from a distant language. It was a rather Medieval way to preserve and disseminate knowledge, not unlike the methods by which twelfth-century Christian monks spread the works of Aristotle.
And yet, was not the Nicomachean Ethics eventually spread to every corner of Europe? Did not his Politics inform every tyrant and democrat, and his Poetics every tragedian and comic?
The desire for knowledge will always prevail, for it is, as Aristotle reminds us, in man’s nature to know.
In order to satiate my ravenous hunger to know, to be, in effect, a good Aristotelian, I consumed just about every naughty book that was spread before me. It was a veritable banquet of banned works, a delicious fare of canceled material upon which, every night after my grueling twelve-hour shift, I excitedly dined. In the opinion of the state, it was a damnable diet, but it was one from which I grew strong. Doctor Zhivago, The Gulag Archipelago, We, the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and–my favorite of all–Nineteen Eighty–
“Doctor?”
With those two syllables, the hard-earned honorific for which I sacrificed so much, the young man interrupted my reverie. I had forgotten myself for a minute. I’d forgotten him. Javier and Lorena looked at me concernedly.
“Doctor, are you okay?”, Lorena asked.
“I beg your pardon”, I said, as I cleared my throat and fumbled for the stethoscope draped casually around my neck. “So sorry. Where was I?”
As I placed the stethoscope’s ear tips into my ears and raised its long, winding elephant-trunk tube, I said, “Just a formality. I have to listen to the breathing of all my patients”.
I then stooped over and placed the cold metal bell on the young man’s chest. I pressed it on one lobe before lifting and repositioning it on another. The vigorous movement of air through the lungs was clear and unimpeded. No crackles, no rattles, very smooth and good. I extended forward to auscultate his upper back. As I placed the bell between his scapulae, I gazed downward at the bed. My focus on the sound coursing through my ears permitted my aimless eyes to wander. They fell upon something red that was protruding from the disheveled mound of white sheets. The contrast caught my attention and, after listening to the young man take an inhalation or two, I inquired by what object my notice had been captured.
As I retook my upright position, I gestured toward the object and asked him, “Javier, what is it that you have there next to you in the bed? The red object, whose corner is peaking out of the blankets? Yes–right there, by your left arm?”
With unrestrained excitement, the young man reached for the red object atop which the lawless mass of sheets had gathered. As though it were a cherished family heirloom in need of constant oversight and solicitous protection, he carefully removed it and displayed it to me.
It was a book.
Across its faded red jacket, the numbers “1984” were emblazoned in white. Below them, the world’s most famous nom de plume, George Orwell, was unpretentiously written. Nothing else adorned the modest cover on which this made-up name and number was inscribed. No foreword. No blurb. No endorsement. I could tell, from the yellow-fringed pages and the little imperfections that marked its frayed binding, the book was quite old. Indeed, it looked as though it were a close relative to the mid-century first edition.
“1984”, Javier said, his voice brimful of pride. “My number one book in English”.
“Your first book”, Lorena said, gentle as ever in her correction. “Your first book in English. Yes, mi amor, it is with this book that you shall become as fluent as a native. Before long, you’ll be speaking like the Queen! Like Orwell, Huxley, Hitchens–Christopher or Peter. Eloquence awaits you, my love. And in less time, I think, than it was conferred upon me”.
Turning toward me, she continued: “Upon my arrival to America, it was insisted upon that I read this book. This one right here. Ha!–can you believe it! There I was, a girl not yet burdened by the monthly mark of her maturity, reading Orwell’s dystopian novel. It so transformed my parents, that they insisted I read it too. Regardless of my age. This is their copy, the first book they purchased when they came to America. They could recall, on the few occasions when censored material slipped through Havana’s tight gates, that the term “Orwellian” was used to describe Cuba. Naturally, they were curious to know the signification of the term. When they found out, they agreed. They said it was ‘obligatory reading’ for any Cuban who comes here and wants to be free”.
“And so it is”, I said, “not only for the Cuban, but for anyone, anywhere, whose guiltless face has been stamped by the proverbial boot”.
On the word “boot”, I glanced at the young man’s bandaged foot.
I then extended my hand to Lorena, which she warmly received. The gratitude with which she showered me was effusive and sincere. It was refreshing to be thanked in so honest a way. I then offered my hand to Javier. I was surprised by the firmness with which he gripped it. Once again, he cast his sharp, hazel eyes upon my aging face. I laid mine upon his. As our handshake came to its conclusion and we detached, I said to him, “Enjoy that book, 1984. Cherish it. Learn from it. It’s my favorite. It has a lot to say”.
Knowingly, he replied, “Si. Claro–a lot to say”.
Finis.