Under the Knife(17)

“Don’t you want to know who I am, Dr. Wu?”

“No.”

“My name is Morgan Finney.”

She stopped dead in her tracks, halfway to the door.

“What?” she whispered.

Rita grabbed the edge of a nearby sink to steady herself.

Oh my God.

“Do you remember me?” he breathed. “Do you remember her?”

How could I possibly forget?

She was clutching the sink with both hands.

Because this time, there was no stopping the panic.

She was terrified.





RITA


“Dr. Wu?”

Rita stood at the sink, a hand on each side of the basin, drawing breath in short, ragged bursts, her lungs clawing for air. She was shaking all over, trying to hold her panic at bay.

I’m hallucinating.

She had to be. That was the most reasonable medical explanation.

But why was she hallucinating about him?

“Dr. Wu?”

She’d seen plenty of patients over the years hallucinate. She’d listened to their lucid conversations with people who didn’t exist, and as they’d described imagined events in their lives in more detail than she could remember the real ones in hers.

There’d been this one patient: a young man suffering from a severe form of inflammatory bowel disease that had caused him so much pain, he’d needed to have a portion of his intestines removed to obtain relief.

She’d first met him in an exam room. He had bright, penetrating green eyes beneath a widow’s peak and wore a yarmulke. His mother had accompanied him: a thin, fretful woman who waved her hands around as she spoke.

He was direct, confident, and forceful without being overbearing. He asked Rita penetrating questions about the surgery that conveyed a firm grasp of the issues and kept Rita on her toes.

He was, without doubt, a really smart kid.

And a hopeless schizophrenic.

It had begun during his second year of med school: inappropriate outbursts in class; an abrupt academic tailspin; long-standing social connections severed without warning. A classic pattern for schizophrenia onset in an otherwise healthy, white male in his early twenties.

Is that what the psychiatrists told his parents? she’d wondered, gazing at the young man’s mother, who’d pawed the air anxiously as she’d posed her own questions. That his age of onset and initial symptoms fit the textbook definition of schizophrenia?

Would they have cared?

She doubted it. He’d been an only child and a source, no doubt, of great pride: graduation with distinction from an Ivy League college, acceptance into a top-notch med school. How must they have felt, watching all their hopes trampled underneath the weight of his paranoid delusions?

His pathology focused on his firm belief that he was Moses—or, rather, a modern version of Moses. He’d explained to Rita that Moses’s second coming had been foretold in Scripture, and that he was Moses reborn. Rita had never heard of a second coming for Moses and told him as much, so he’d pulled a dog-eared copy of the Old Testament from his back pocket and quoted to her passages marked in four different shades of colored highlighter and annotated with dense scrawls in the margins.

His mother had smiled tiredly and twisted her hands.

He hadn’t ranted, or raved. He’d made his case with the eloquence of a skilled trial lawyer. And he’d made perfect sense. By the end of the interview, it made her question, if only a little, if he was right, and everyone else (including herself) was wrong.

I know you don’t believe me, he’d told her, his green eyes drilling into hers. I don’t care. I don’t need you to believe in me.

Rita had looked at the man’s mother, who’d nodded and raised her hands in a noncommittal gesture. Indulgence? Capitulation? Rita couldn’t tell.

His surgery had gone well, and he’d gotten better. She hadn’t seen Moses for a long time. She’d wondered sometimes how he was doing, and what it was like to live in his self-formulated version of reality.

Well, now maybe she was finding out.

“Dr. Wu?”

Or was she? The voice in her head calling itself Morgan Finney sounded so real, and exactly how she remembered him. How could it be a hallucination? It didn’t make sense.

Or did it? After all, that was the whole point of a delusion: It was completely real to the person suffering from it. Maybe she was developing schizophrenia, like Moses, a disease that would slowly choke her off from reality and from everyone she cared about.

Darcy.

Spencer.

The thought terrified her.

Waking up naked in an operating room, with no memory of how I got there.

Now a voice talking to me in my head.

Is this how psychosis starts for me?

Is this how it started for Moses?

Maybe, but …

But she knew schizophrenia was unlikely in her case. It could, she suppose, be some type of early-onset dementia, like Alzheimer’s. But she didn’t think Alzheimer’s usually gave people these symptoms, at least in its early stages.

A holdover from last night, maybe? A year later, her experience with Morgan Finney still pressed heavily on her conscience; and his voice, surfacing with last night’s flotsam, implicated her remorse in whatever was going on.

Delirium.

That’s what it must be, she decided. An acute change in mental state, typically caused by fevers, or surgery, or intoxication—