Under the Knife(30)

Still, there she was, standing in the locker room, staring at herself: Because she now saw another Rita there, as if she’d become a pair of twins. The other Rita was standing about a foot away, holding her gaze.

She raised her hand, thinking that the other Rita would raise hers at the same time, too, like a mirror image; but the other Rita stood there with her arms at her sides, staring back, acting like she was waiting for something.

With the peculiar logic of a dream, all this somehow made perfect sense to Rita.

“What’s happening to me?” Rita asked the other Rita.

The other Rita, her twin, blinked but didn’t answer.

“Am I speaking these words out loud?”

The other Rita said nothing.

She didn’t want to just stand there gawking at herself. So Rita began to pace a slow circle around the other Rita. This also made sense, for no reason other than it just did.

“Is this happening inside my head?”

“Does it matter?” the other Rita replied.

Except the other Rita wasn’t using Rita’s voice.

She was using Finney’s.

And she heard his voice only in her left ear.

Which her dream logic said was just fine. Right as rain.

“So you can talk,” Rita said.

“Yes,” the other Rita said.

“I guess maybe it doesn’t matter whether this is happening in my head or not,” Rita said. “And I guess, well, that I could maybe operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning.”

“Yes,” the other Rita agreed in Finney’s voice. “You’re an outstanding surgeon.”

“Yes, I am,” Rita said. She was now completing her first circuit around the other Rita, who remained still.

“You’ve prepared for every possible eventuality,” the other Rita said.

“Yes,” Rita said.

“Mrs. Sanchez needs you. You need to do the auto-surgeon operation this morning,” the other Rita said.

“Yes,” Rita said.

“Mrs. Sanchez is sick. She needs your help.”

“Yes. She needs my help,” Rita said. She was now well into her second lap around the other Rita.

“You can help Mrs. Sanchez this morning with the auto-surgeon,” the other Rita said in Finney’s voice. “She needs you.”

“Yes, she needs me,” Rita said. She stopped, having completed her second loop around the other Rita. “I can help Mrs. Sanchez. This morning. Using the auto-surgeon.”

Each Rita regarded the other, and in the dream logic, Rita could see both versions of herself at the same time, through two sets of eyes, and it was fine.

Just fine.

“Yes,” both of them said, in unison, and the other Rita no longer spoke with Finney’s voice, but with Rita’s.

“I need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez using the auto-surgeon.”

Both reached their left hands up to their left ears …

… and then Rita was in the hallway, outside the locker room, walking toward pre-op.

She stopped, blinked and looked around.

“How did I get out here?” she said.

No answer.

She shook her head and tried to remember what had happened. She felt as if she’d been dreaming, in the dream talking to a twin version of herself, then …

Then she was here. And the little bits of the dream she could recall were quickly fading into oblivion.

But how? And what had that dream been all about?

It doesn’t matter, she thought. Because I need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez. Using the auto-surgeon.

Of that she was certain.

She started walking toward pre-op again.

Operating would be risky, yes. She knew she wasn’t in the best shape this morning. But she needed to do the operation because Mrs. Sanchez was sick, and Rita needed to make her better.

“I need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez,” she murmured.

“You won’t regret this, Dr. Wu,” Finney said in her ear.

To hell with you, some part of her wanted to tell him. I’m getting out of here. I’m going home and crawling into bed.

But she didn’t say anything out loud, and her legs felt like they belonged to someone else as they took her toward pre-op.

Because, she thought, I have to operate on Mrs. Sanchez.

And Mrs. Sanchez was in pre-op.





SPENCER


Spencer’s Prius glided into the multistory parking garage at Turner Hospital and settled into an empty space. As Spencer emerged, alongside a quiet side of Turner’s main complex, and walked toward the hospital entrance, the new wing under construction came into view. He stared at the construction site as he passed it. He operated on people’s brains for a living but had never outgrown the mindless appeal of watching lumbering construction machinery belch smoke and move super-heavy stuff around.

The new wing was scheduled to admit its first patient in eighteen months, and the site buzzed with frenzied progress. The wing was to be composed of one main, tall tower flanked by two smaller towers. Privately, he had nicknamed them the Holy Trinity, in spite of the fact that many of the rich philanthropists underwriting it were Jewish.

The three emerging towers had the look of one large domino bounded by two smaller dominoes, standing on end, the long ends facing east–west. The main tower topped out at ten stories, its final height, and high enough to provide the topmost floors (reserved for the VIP patients, naturally) with breathtaking views of the Pacific. Some of its bottom floors were already swathed with sheets of bluish-green glass that would, in time, swallow the entire complex.