Mud Vein(35)

For MV

I closed it, and went downstairs to see what Isaac was making for dinner.





Fortune favors the brave. That’s what I repeated to myself as they prepped me for surgery. Except I didn’t say it in English, I said the Latin words: fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat. Mantras sounded better in Latin. Repeat any phrase in the educated fancy-pants language most of the ancient philosophers used, you sounded like a goddamn genius. Repeat the same phrase in English, you sounded like a loon. Who wrote that phrase? A philosopher. I should have remembered his name, but I couldn’t. Nerves, I told myself. I searched for something else to focus on, something that could comfort my decision. I knew that the Bible said something about cutting out your eye if it offended you. I was cutting out my breasts. I thought that this was both my brave move and my offended one. It didn’t matter; most bravery boiled down to nothing more than a strong sense of duty that piggybacked an even stronger sense of crazy. Everything brave was a little bit crazy. I tried to focus on something else so I wouldn’t have to think about how crazy I was. There was a nurse taking my blood.

The nurses were very attentive even when they were sticking needles into my flesh. Oh, sorry honey, you have small veins. This will only sting for a second. They told me to close my eyes as if I were a child. This one didn’t have any problems with finding the right vein in my arm. I wondered if Isaac admonished them to take good care of me. It seemed like something he would do. The hospital room was white. Thank God for that. I could think in peace without the colors breaking through. Isaac came in to examine me. I was trying to be strong when he sat on the edge of my bed and stared down at me with soft eyes.

“Why did you stop playing music?” My voice cracked on the last word. I needed something to distract myself. A truth from Isaac.

He considered my question for a minute, then he said, “There are two things that I love.”

I stopped breathing. I thought he was going to tell me about a woman. Someone he’d loved and that he’d given up music for. Instead he surprised me. “Music and medicine.”

I settled down in the bed with my head against the pillows to listen to him.

“Music makes me destructive—to myself and everyone around me. Medicine saves people. So I chose medicine.”

So matter-of-fact. So simple. I wondered what it would be like to give up writing. To choose something else over what I craved.

“Music saves people too,” I said. I don’t know this personally, but I was a writer and it was my job to know how other people thought. And I’d heard them say it.

“Not me,” he said. “It makes me destructive.”

“But you still listen to it.” I thought of his songs. The ones he’d left me, and the ones he played in his car.

“Yes. But I don’t create it anymore. Or get lost in it.”

I couldn’t keep it out of my eyes, the desire to know more. Isaac caught it.

“How does a person get lost in music?”

He grinned and looked at the lines running from my veins into the IV a few feet away.

“What drugs do they have you on?” he teased.

I stayed quiet, afraid that if I responded to his joke he wouldn’t tell me the answer.

“You let it live in you. The beat, the lyrics, the harmonies … the lifestyle,” he added. “There is only room for one of you, eventually.”

I was quiet for a bit. Processing.

“Do you miss it?”

He smiled. “I still have it. It’s just not my focus.”

“What did you play?”

He took my hand, turned it over until the inside of my wrist was facing up. Then with his pointer and middle finger began tapping a beat on my pulse. I let him for at least a minute. Then I said, “A drummer.”

I had another question on the tip of my tongue, but I held it there when the nurse walked in. Isaac stood up and I knew our conversation was over. In my mind, I replayed the beat he’d played on my wrist as the nurse fit a cap over my hair. I wondered what song it belonged to. If it was one of the ones he’d left on my windshield.

“I’m going to walk you through the procedure,” he said, lowering my gown. “Then Sandy is going to take you to surgery.” He morphed from Isaac the man to Isaac the doctor in just a few seconds. He told me where he was going to make the incisions, outlining them on my breasts with a black marker. He spoke about what he was going to be looking for. His voice was steady, professional. While he spoke tears streamed down my face and fell into my hair in a silent but torrid emotional cacophony. It was the first time I’d cried since my childhood. I hadn’t cried when my mother left, or when I was raped, or when I found out cancer was eating at my body. I hadn’t even cried when I made the decision to cut out the very essence of what made me a woman. I cried when Isaac played drums on my pulse and told me he had to give it up before they destroyed him. Go figure. Or maybe that statement had just broken it all open. My cry felt anticlimactic. Like something more profound should have kicked the last stone out of the dam before it burst open.

He saw my tears, but he didn’t acknowledge them. I was so, so grateful. They wheeled me into the OR and the anesthesiologist greeted me by name. I was asked to count backwards from ten. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was Isaac, staring intently into my eyes. I thought he was telling me to live.