Surgery

“There is no chair here,” said his mother, “worth sitting in.”

It was noon on Wednesday in Tempe and seven in the evening in London, and he was on the step under the narrow window, and she was in a hospital bed in a room he had never seen, and he could hear it: a softer quiet than the stairwell at home, with a machine in it somewhere making a small regular sound, like somebody tapping a pencil on a desk while they thought.

“Is it a nice room?”

“It is a very nice room. It has a window onto a wall. Your father has brought the cushions.” A pause. “Both of them. He has put one on the chair for himself and one behind my back, and a nurse has taken the one behind my back away because it is not regulation, and he has put it back, and she has taken it away again. They are on the fourth round. I think he is winning.”

“Winning,” said his father, from somewhere near her, with satisfaction.

Frederick put his free hand flat on the concrete beside him.

“What time?”

“Eight. He says four hours, which means five, which means that I will be asleep at one in the morning your time and awake by your breakfast, and you will have had a very boring night.” The long breath, lifted, and let go. “He wanted a Tuesday. The Tuesday went to a man from Kent who was worse than me. I am very glad for the man from Kent.”

“Mamma.”

“Yes.”

“There’s an aeroplane at five.”

There was a silence on the line from London. It was not the long one. It was the silence of a person who has been expecting a sentence and has her answer ready and does not want to use it.

“I know,” said his mother. “Ebba told me at lunch. Sergeant Kimura told Ebba this morning that you had asked across the road about the five o’clock.” She did not sound angry. She sounded as though she were holding something carefully in both hands. “Fredde. Don’t.”

“I’d be there by the afternoon. You’d be awake. I could just…”

“You would be over the sea.”

He stopped.

“At one in the morning, your time, when the man with the clean hands begins, you would be over the sea. Somewhere south of Greenland, in the dark.” She said it quite evenly, in the voice for papers. “Your father was over the sea once. For four days. I flew over the same sea the next morning to get to you, and I looked at the water out of the window the whole way, and I have never told you what that was like, and I am not going to now.” A breath. “I am not going to be asleep tomorrow with you over the sea. I could not bear it, and the worst of it is that I would not even know I was bearing it.”

The machine in the room in London tapped its pencil.

“No,” said his father, near her, quite quietly. A breath. “Sea.”

Frederick looked out of the narrow window at the car park.

“All right,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll come in the summer.”

“Come in the summer,” said his mother, “when I can walk to the door to let you in. I would like you to see me walk to a door. I would not like you to see me in this bed, with this window, and a nurse who will not let your father have his cushion.” She was nearly laughing. “Your aunt is here.”

“Aunt Caroline?”

“She came from Potsdam on Monday. She is staying in Kensington and she has been here every day since, sitting with your father, reading the newspaper, and saying nothing whatever, which is exactly what he needs. Tomorrow she will sit with him in a room down the corridor that has a kettle in it.” A pause. “She will answer the telephone, Fredde. Your father’s telephone. If you ring, she will answer it, at any hour. She says that is what godmothers are for, and that she has waited twenty years for somebody to ask her to do something.”

“I’ll ring.”

“No,” said his mother. “You will wait. They will ring you. Your father will ring you, when it is done. He has asked to.” A pause. “He has been practising.”

“Practising,” said his father, near her, with dignity.

---

Theo rang at seven, which he never did on a Wednesday.

“It’s not Sunday,” said Frederick.

“I know it’s not Sunday. I’ve got a calendar. I’m a doctor.” There was the sound of a door, and the noise of a corridor behind Theo going away. “Nearly a doctor. Where are you?”

“In the room.”

“Is Tyler there?”

Frederick looked at the bed by the window, where Tyler was sitting cross-legged with the headphones on, in the forest, saying “Who’s on wood?” to Finland.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Theo. “Right. Do you want to know what they’re going to do, or do you not want to know? Either’s fine. Most people don’t want to know. Kate didn’t want to know when Dad had his knee done, and she was in nursing school.”

“I want to know.”

“Okay.” He heard Theo sit down on something. “So. They put her to sleep, properly. They open her chest, down the middle.” A pause, to see whether that was all right. It was not, and it was. “Then they put her on a machine. Bypass. It does the heart and the lungs for her, so the heart can stop and they can work on it while it’s still.”

“Stop.”

“They stop it on purpose. With a cold solution. It’s not like…” Theo stopped. “It’s not like it sounds, Freddie. It’s like turning off an engine to work on it. You don’t fix an engine while it’s running.”

Frederick sat on the end of his bed by the door.

“Then he takes out the old valve. The stiff one. And he sews in the new one, all the way round, a lot of very small stitches. That’s most of the time. Then they warm the heart up and it starts.” A pause. “It mostly starts by itself. Sometimes they give it a little shock to remind it. Then they close up, and that’s an hour on its own.”

“And then.”

“And then she’s asleep in intensive care with a lot of tubes, and she’ll look terrible, and she’ll wake up in the evening and be very cross about the tubes.” A pause. “Can I tell you the important bit?”

“Yes.”

“You said he does them on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“Yes.”

“That’s two a week. That’s a hundred a year. He’s been doing it twenty years, probably, if he’s the one they gave a queen to.” He heard Theo turn something over in his hands. “He’s bored of it, Freddie. That’s what you want. You want the guy who’s bored.”

Frederick did not say anything for a while.

“Theo.”

“Yeah.”

“Will you have your phone on?”

“I’ve had my phone on since Boxing Day,” said Theo. “I’ve got Desmond at eight anyway. I’ll be up. Ring me. Ring me when he rings you. Whatever time it is.” A pause. “And Freddie.”

“Yes.”

“Eat something. You won’t. But I’ve said it, so it’s on the record.”

---

Mr Luna came on at ten.

Frederick went down at half past eleven with a book he was not going to read and his telephone, and found that the plastic chair at the end of the desk had been pushed out already, about a foot, and that there was a butterscotch on the corner of the desk in front of it, in its gold wrapper, waiting.

He sat.

Mr Luna was writing a number on the clipboard. 11 p.m. 66. He laid the pen across the crossword and looked at him over his glasses.

“Your mother,” he said.

“Tomorrow. In London. Eight o’clock there.” Frederick looked at the clock over the post-room hatch. “One here.”

Mr Luna considered this.

“Heart,” he said. It was not a question. Frederick had never told him. He had stopped wondering how Mr Luna knew things in about September.

“A valve.”

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and turned the radio down, so that the ball game was only a murmur, two men somewhere on the coast talking in the warm, and went back to the crossword.

At a quarter to midnight Rhys came down the stairs in his sweatshirt, and looked at the two of them at the desk, and went and sat on the bench by the noticeboard with his hands on his knees, without saying anything. At midnight Sam came down behind him with the notebook, and sat beside Rhys, and opened it on his knee, and did not write in it.

12 a.m. 65, wrote Mr Luna.

“Your two,” he said, without looking up.

“I didn’t ask them.”

“No,” said Mr Luna. “You wouldn’t have.”

---

At ten to one his telephone lit on the desk.

It was not his mother’s number. It was Ebba’s, and the message was in Swedish, and short, and he understood from the shortness of it that it had been dictated.

They are coming for me now. They have given me a gown that ties at the back, which is a punishment. Your father has the cushion. Puss. M.

He wrote back Puss, and nothing else, because there was nothing else.

Mr Luna watched him do it over the top of his glasses.

“She go in?”

“Yes.”

Mr Luna looked at the clock for some time, the way he looked at the doors.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we sit.”

---

They sat.

He had thought he knew all the lengths an hour could be. He had sat through a great many, in chapels and in cars and on the dais of the Lords, and in a palace in New Westminster when he was fifteen, for four days, beside his mother and a telephone. He had not known this one. It was the length of an hour in which nothing at all can be done by anybody except one man five thousand miles away with very clean hands, and it went on like a road at night, and the only way to know it was moving was the clipboard.

1 a.m. 64.

The radio said that somebody had won, and began to read the scores from other places, one after another, like the names of stations. Rhys on the bench sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the doors. Sam turned a page of the notebook and did not write on it. Across the road, over the dentist’s, the one window had its light on and its blind halfway down, and at a quarter past one it went down another inch, and then, after a while, it came up again, the whole inch, which it had never done.

2 a.m. 63.

Mr Luna filled in the crossword, in pen, one word every few minutes, and every so often he pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk, which was an invitation, and Frederick took one, and did not eat it, and put it in his pocket with the others. By half past two there were five.

“You can eat those, son.”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mr Luna. “Keep ‘em. I’ve got a whole bag.”

---

Tyler came down at five past three.

He came down in the dark blue hoodie with the sleeves over his hands, the way he came down on the nights when the vending machine was the only thing in the building that had what he wanted, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the lobby: at Mr Luna, and Rhys and Sam on the bench, and Frederick in the plastic chair with a book he had not opened.

“Hey,” said Tyler.

“Hey.”

Tyler did not go to the vending machine. He stood at the bottom of the stairs for a while with his hands inside his sleeves. Then he went back up.

He came down again four minutes later with a bottle in each hand.

He put one on the desk in front of Frederick. It was blue, and cold from the little fridge, and it said Glacier Freeze on it in letters made of ice.

“It’s electrolytes,” said Tyler.

“I know.”

“I gave Christina one. In October.” Tyler sat down on the floor, with his back against the front of the desk, under the paper sun that said IGNACIO, and opened the other bottle. “She drank like a third. Then she gave it back. A nice Swedish lady says thank you.” He drank some. “I didn’t know she was, like. The queen one. Then.”

“I know.”

“Is she still the queen one?”

“No. Not since the first.”

“Right. Right, right.” Tyler looked at the bottle. “So she’s just a nice Swedish lady now.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose she is.”

“Cool,” said Tyler, and seemed satisfied. He drank. “My grandma had the heart thing. The pacemaker thing. We sat in the hospital in Parma for like six hours. My mom brought a cooler, like for a ball game. And my grandpa didn’t talk for six hours, and then the doctor came out and said she was fine, and my grandpa stood up and said she’s going to be unbearable, and she was.” Tyler looked at the doors, and the dark arcade, and the four trees in the light from the lobby. “So that’s what happens,” he said. “Usually.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Mr Luna wrote a word in the crossword.

“I fell asleep,” said Tyler. “In January. When you told me the king thing.”

“I know.”

“How did it end?”

Frederick looked down at him.

“Mostly he reads,” he said.

Tyler considered this for some time, against the front of the desk.

“That’s the end?”

“That’s the end.”

“What’s the middle?”

On the bench, Rhys closed his eyes.

Frederick looked at the top of Tyler’s head, at the hood, under a paper sun with a night porter’s name on it; and it was three in the morning, and there was nothing whatever to be done for two hours except wait, and he found that he wanted, very much, to tell him the middle.

So he did.

He said that mostly a king was told things. Every day, in a box, by people who knew more than he did, and he read all of it, to the end, and wrote his initials on it in pencil to say that he had. He said that the point of it was not what he did but where he was: that there had to be somebody at the end of the corridor who could not be voted out of hearing it, so that when the people who did the real work had done something very hard they had somebody to come and tell. He said that it was a bit like keeping a fire going for people you would never meet. That you did it every morning, and nobody noticed, and that the day you didn’t was the only day anybody would.

He stopped.

Tyler was asleep.

He was asleep sitting up against the front of the desk, with his head on one side against the paper sun and the bottle of Glacier Freeze held upright in both hands in his lap; and he had been asleep, Frederick thought, going back over it, since about the fire.

Mr Luna looked down at him over the desk.

“He do that every time?”

“Every time.”

“Huh,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword. “Must be a good answer.”

---

4 a.m. 62.

5 a.m. 62.

At half past five the sky in the glass doors went the colour of slate, and the four trees came out of the dark one at a time, and a bird in one of them said something short and was answered. Rhys had not moved from the bench in five hours, and Frederick understood that he was not going to, and that it was not a duty.

At eight minutes to six his telephone lit on the desk.

It said Dad.

He picked it up and did not answer it at once, and Mr Luna put the pen down on the crossword, quite gently, parallel to the edge of the page.

He answered it.

“Frederick,” said a woman’s voice. “It’s Caroline.”

He knew the voice. It was low and English and very exact, the voice of a person who had spent her life handling old things with gloves on, and he had heard it once on a path by a lake in Potsdam, saying something to him in Swedish that he had never repeated to anybody.

“Aunt Caroline.”

“Your father is here,” said his aunt. “Beside me. He wants to tell you himself, and he has asked me to hold the telephone for him, because his hands are not very steady at the moment, and I am not going to say anything else, because it isn’t mine to say.” A pause. “Here he is.”

There was a small sound, of the telephone being held, and moved, and a chair.

Then nothing.

He waited. He did not fill it. He sat at the end of the night desk with five butterscotches in his pocket and his roommate asleep at his feet, and waited the way he had learned to wait in the September he was fifteen, because if you filled the space the word went away and did not come back; and five thousand miles away, in a room with a kettle in it, he heard his father breathe, and look for it, along the corridors, opening doors.

“Door,” said his father.

Frederick shut his eyes.

A breath. Another. Then, quite clearly, as though he had carried it all the way down a long corridor in both hands and set it down at last:

“Open.”

---

His aunt said the rest.

She said it in the exact low voice, briefly, in order, as though she were reading it off a label: that it had taken four hours and forty minutes; that the new valve was in and working; that the heart had started again by itself, without being reminded; that the surgeon had come out to the room with the kettle himself, in his green, and shaken her brother’s hand, and said that it had been very ordinary, which she understood to be the highest thing he said; and that his mother was asleep, and would be asleep all day, with a great many tubes, and would wake in the evening and be very cross about them.

“Ring her tonight,” said his aunt. “Your tonight. She’ll be awake and furious and she’ll want to hear you. Don’t ring before.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.” A pause. “Frederick.”

“Yes.”

“He has been sitting in that chair since a quarter to eight with a cushion on his knees,” said his aunt, “and he has not said one word in five hours, to me or to anybody, and I have known him all my life and I did not know he could do that.” Another pause, a shorter one. “Your mother told me once that you wait for his words without filling the space. I thought you would like to know that he can wait too.”

Then she gave him back to his father, who said, “Good,” and then, after a long time, “Sleep,” and rang off.

---

Theo answered before it had rung once.

“Freddie.”

“It’s done.”

He heard Theo sit down on something, very suddenly, in a corridor of the medical school two thousand miles away, and breathe out, all of it, the way a lineman breathes out at the end of a play.

“Told you,” said Theo. His voice had gone. “Bored guy.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” A breath. “Okay. Okay, Freddie.”

“You said okay three times.”

“Doesn’t count,” said Theo. “I’m a doctor.”

---

At six Mr Luna wrote the last number in the column.

6 a.m. 62.

Then he put on his jacket and turned off the radio, and the day porter came in through the glass doors with her hair up in a pencil and a coffee, and looked at the two officers on the bench and the King in the plastic chair and the boy from Parma asleep against the desk with a blue bottle in his lap, and said “Morning,” as though it were any morning, and went into the back office.

Mr Luna came round the end of the desk with his thermos.

He stopped beside the plastic chair. He looked down at Tyler for a moment, and then at Frederick.

“Is it twenty-four?” said Frederick.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses for a while.

“No, son,” he said. “Those are the other kind.” He tucked the thermos under his arm. “This was just a night.”

At the doors he stopped, with his hand on the bar, and looked back across the lobby, the way he did every morning at six, to see that everything was where he had left it.

“You call your mother,” said Mr Luna.

“She’s asleep.”

“Then you call her when she wakes up,” said Mr Luna. “A text is not a call,” and pushed the bar, and went out into the arcade, where the light was coming up gold through the four trees, and the birds in them were all talking at once.