Door 4:  The surgery and the revolution

For some time now, which means as long as she can remember, Xie has considered the hypothesis that no one exists besides herself, and if others do exist, they are so unknowable as to be, for all practical purposes, non-existent.

She is simultaneously aware that there is something wrong with this hypothesis, but what that is, eludes her, and does it matter? No, she concludes it doesn’t, at least not tactically. The resemblance of everyone to herself, for instance, has not escaped her notice, and has gone a long way towards forming this theory of a self-projected world, an inner world turned inside out, that, and the realization that anyone or anything outside herself is absolutely unnecessary to the business at hand.

She is led, then, through the broken emergency room doors of the abandoned hospital, led by a premonition down the cold corridors where steel gurneys lie overturned and the tiled floors are sugared with crushed syringes. A false air-raid siren, perhaps, has caused them all to seek shelter, even the sick, all but the infirm taking to their feet to escape the imminent catastrophe, and the others, well, who knows, wheeled off to protective underground bunkers, presumably by the staff.

Xie is not sleepwalking through this sick mall but her occluded senses have an underwater quality that suggests that the hospital is literally submerged, overwhelmed by floodwaters when the levees broke shortly after that series of muffled concussive explosions that no one remembers hearing forty-five minutes before dawn…

The elevator is the scene of a crime, or perhaps, a human sacrifice, it’s all a matter of perspective. It’s the very absence of a body that leads one to suspect this, but it would be impossible to say how. It’s not the blood, for there is none, nor torn clothes, or even a discarded ceremonial weapon: there are only a scattering of feathers. The elevator is operational, by the way, in contradiction of all logic, because the hospital is otherwise without power, even the emergency generators have been disabled. It is obviously an inside job—and it is thorough.

Xie gets out on the third floor, Ward North. Halfway down an identical corridor, identical, that is, to all the others she’s traversed already, the elevator doors close abruptly behind her and the elevator heads up in response to a call signal. Whether Xie believes in their existence or not, someone else is in the hospital, someone who may at this very moment be in pursuit of her with what bad intentions are anyone’s guess.

Though a sense of urgency has thus been added to the proceedings and herewith duly registered, it remains a sense merely: that is, Xie does not betray by expression or gesture any urgency whatsoever. She continues to move down the corridor as before, as if this were the only way she could move, which it is: almost floating.

It’s in Room 304 that she attains the climax of this episode, behind a heavily armored door festooned with all the usual dire warnings declaring it off-limits to anyone but those “authorized,” “licensed,” “sanctioned,” etc, and wearing the protective garments strictly required by the State against unnamed “biohazards.”

The door, of course, is unlocked.

They’ve seen to everything.

The room that opens to her isn’t a conventional surgery, that’s apparent immediately, it looks more like a staff break room, only much smaller than you’d expect such a room to be. There is none of the usual machinery and fittings of a typical surgery either. The room, in fact, is relatively bare except for a six-foot conference table, an empty bulletin board, and a looted vending machine.

Surrounding the table is a small grouping of characters in blue surgical scrubs covered with dark wet stains. Let’s be precise here: there are four figures standing around the table, all but one masked. They have a smug, conspiratorial air about them when they look up, as if they are sharing a private joke at your expense, or as if they’ve been caught red-handed (in this case literally), at something clearly inappropriate, but circumstances favor them and their greater number give him an advantage. In other words, their collective posture and expression conveys an attitude of defiance, as if to say, “Yeah, so now you’ve seen, and what of it?”

On the table, which they enviously surround, the thing this grim crew seems to guard, to greedily possess, even protect, by the very positions of their bodies—this thing can best, perhaps only, be accurately described as a botched surgery. There is a body, white, too white, of indeterminate age and sex frozen in a position of extreme contortion. At its center is an alarming hole, heaped around it meat and pulped gristle, an excavation made for god knows what purpose—waiting for who or what miracle or miracle-worker to repair…but no, that’s not it at all; it’s a hole made for no purpose whatsoever, the way children, in the old game, attempt to dig to China. 

The lower extremities are covered by a bloody sheet. The upper body is exposed to view, smooth as soap. The victim’s head (yes, “victim,” not patient, is the correct term, for this could in no way be voluntary) is turned toward the door where Xie is standing, the jaw unhinged, throat tendons straining, eyes rolled back. It’s difficult to tell if it’s alive or dead, the expression, overall, recalling nothing so much as the iconography of tortured martyrdom without the benefit of anesthesia or belief in God. The face, though transfigured by pain, is somehow familiar to Xie, like an indecipherable echo of a line of perhaps once familiar poetry, like any one of three dozen or more lovers who’ve orgasmed beneath her.

“What is this place?” Xie asks herself out loud, the question largely rhetorical, as usual.

The others don’t move, but remain looking up, in frozen tableau, as previously described. It’s the doctor who answers.

Doctor? –what doctor? Others? What others—and how?

There is no one here, as always noted.

It’s the ghost of a doctor, or another figment of Xie’s imagination. That’s the most probable explanation. But, no, it’s not that at all, not exactly, not entirely. It’s more like the film of a doctor, and a makeshift surgical team, too. The image is projected on the wall by a hidden projector. The immaterial doctor is looking up from the ruined body on the table accompanied by his three erstwhile immaterial assistants in masks and gowns. He, as previously noted, is wearing a gown, but no mask, that hasn’t changed. A cigarette dangles from his lip. The tools of the trade are in his hands, scalpel in one, forceps in another, both held prissily in an affected manner, like a Yale man at his filet mignon at the club. He grins. He hasn’t shaved in days, you notice.

“Experimental sex surgery,” he says, with a sly, insinuating wink.

It’s at that moment that the fake air-raid siren goes off again and gun-fire starts popping at the head of the hallway which the paramilitary security unit has finally accessed via the broken elevator.

It’s long passed time to escape, or to wake up, and Xie, frozen to the spot, all the exits sealed, has left herself no other choice but to face what comes next, to enter unwillingly through a door that leads deeper into this enigmatic fantasy.