Is This It?

a short story

As I sutured up the heart, I must have pricked a tiny blood vessel, as I saw blood begin to slowly trickle a few inches from the suture line. I wasn’t the person to slide into oblivion while I was in the OR, and during one of my past surgeries, I had, once, furiously retorted at a nurse who, clearly, was absent-minded. I later apologized for being so rash and impatient. The site of the the bright trickle awakened in me memories I had for two decades now did my best to repress. I was still having appointments with my psychiatrist every three months. Suddenly, I could remember vividly the chilling silence as I sat at the edge of my bed, my eyes fixed unflinchingly on Daniel’s bed. A tear dropped from my right eye, I did not make any effort to wipe it away.

The police must have arrived because I had a siren. We had carried the mattress and sheets out already, although the police would not have been glad to know we had broken protocol and interfered with the ‘evidence’. The whole place had been in a frenzy a few minutes ago, who cared for pointless police protocols? Our neighbors crowded at the door, and I could see their mouths move, but I could hear nothing of what they said. The white timber of what had been Daniel’s bed had streaks of red on it, the sheets were soaked red, and the mattress weighed a tonne. An emptiness gnawed at my heart; I felt broken and crushed. How was I to assent to the harsh reality that I had lost a friend who had been my roommate for a year now? How would the four extra years of medical school play out without him? How would my life be like henceforth? Questions I could not answer plagued my mind, and I sat there, frozen, wondering why life could be so cruel.

When I met Daniel, I soon noticed he was a reserved and taciturn. I took it to be a little defensiveness given we had just moved in together and we did not know much of each other beyond being acquaintances. We had never had opportunity to interact much beyond those nods of approval we made at each other when we passed one another in the corridors of Kenyatta National Hospital as we ran up and down looking for signatures. Over time things loosened up a little bit, and we became good friends. Unlike so many of my other friends, Daniel had a mysterious air about him. He possessed a kind of dual personality that allowed him to be really outspoken on occasion, especially during bible study sessions or Sunday services in medical school christian union. It was easy to think he was extroverted, but most of the time, at home, he was a hypochondriac, strangely despondent on most occasions. There obviously had to be something wrong with him, but he was unwilling to be explicit about it. Soon enough, however, I got to find out he was a gentleman a little troubled by the affairs of his family. Worry and privation had gotten his mom sick, and his dad wasn’t there to give a hand. So he had to be the dad, something he clearly wasn’t pulling off excellently. At first, I was put off by his constant diffidence and silence, but I began to understand the gravity of his emotional turmoils and was content enough to give him space when I felt he needed it.

Aside his family woes, he had proved to be a gifted and committed writer who would sit for hours before his laptop, with his table covered with open books and sketches of God knows what. While I studied my Pharmacology he studied Leo Tolstoy and other books which as it were, appeared to me like a waste of time. But it was from him that I learnt what it meant to be dedicated to a craft. He would sit for hours engrossed in a book. I pitied myself for being such a poor reader, and for my unwillingness to be ready to spare even a few minutes of my time to read anything else aside my course-work, but here was a voracious reader I shared a roof with, who regarded eating as an inconvenience and who would nibble at his food only to leave it. If he hadn’t needed the food to keep him alive, he might as well have dispensed with it. The awkward thing is that he was so excellent a cook himself, and I was yet to know a friend with such sublime culinary skills. Everyone in medical school knew of his chapatis, chapo chapchap. He would go for hours on an empty stomach, because he was either writing, or reading. He soon became a motivation to me to do even a little reading, because as clear as it was that reading would enrich my life, and deepen my insight about various matters, my will had until then not been strong enough to push me into the discipline. I didn’t have to ask for his help, I just needed to observe and appraise his approach, and imitate it. Only, I kept putting it off.

There were so many things I disliked about Daniel; for one, he could at times be brusque and so standoffish, and was at times so moody I wondered what the issue was. At times, you would talk to him and he would be silent as if he had not heard you, or his words would be so measured as though it was meant to pass an implicit message: ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ He could be a little rude, in that polite kind of way. Because he never was patronizing, it was easy to put up with his other foibles. Courtesy of him, I had made great strides and improved on my scripture intake, and had become more consistent and committed in my prayers. Until we met, my academic ambitions seemed to have stifled and choked out the spiritual habits of prayer and scripture intake, but now, I was witnessing a transformation, for which I was very glad. God might have just sent him into my life to make sure I didn’t fall off the wagon.

For the stonge Christian we knew him to be, Daniel’s writings, blurred moral lines. In his some of his pieces, there seemed to be moral questions that he was unwilling to address. He sometimes was so vulnerable in his writings that I cringed a little while I read them. Why did he have to be so open about his mess, sometimes exaggerating things to the point where I am sure many people misinterpreted his life? I at times felt some his writings were out of place, a little unbalanced. Yet there always was genius behind them, there was a lot of my own unspoken thoughts and fears in them. Here was a writing that was fearlessly authentic and uncompromising, a kind of mirror that allowed people to gaze in and see their very own reflections. You could hear your voice in the prose, and you could see yourself in the characters, sometimes it was fiercely accurate and the inferences people made were insane. Yet he did not mind, he in fact, seemed to relish in that effect; speculations.

His writing could be light-hearted on occasion, but even in such moments of levity, his work felt soaked with his own character. There seemed to be an overarching theme of bitterness and cynicism in most of what he wrote. A keen eye revealed a man drawn to the macabre and grotesque, always talking about suffering, break-ups and divorce. He spoke of love, but there never were happy endings. Soon, it was clear most of his writings were very autobiographical; there simply was too much of him in there. Or they were voyeuristic and so vicarious.

His personality could not allow him fall in love, so he made characters fall in love, and then break apart. As he clocked in the hours, doing nothing else, I noticed that much as what he was accomplishing with his writing was enviable, I pitied him; I pitied him for the hours he spent writing instead of living, for the fun he denied himself, and for the time he wasted not reading medicine. But he had defined what a passion was, and that had motivated me. I had thought myself a writer, I saw him and never have I again called myself one. I now know I’m not, and I would never want to be.

Over time, his writing became a little uncomfortable reading, there was so much scenes and characters that were clearly fished out of his environment, encounters and experiences. He was making real people into characters, and something felt wrong about it. If not fictional, his writings were a man so vocal about his flaws, to the point where it felt so irrational, and uncalled for; he was always preaching of the mess that he was. He was a mess alright, but he was a great person if he chose to be, and he could make good company. His jokes were scathing at times, but they won a lot of cracks of laughter, he seemed armed with witty banters on his sleeve. He could be so good it was impossible not to love him, but he could be so bad it felt impossible not to hate him. I’m sure there’re many of those who loved him and also hated him. Life has never been so enigmatic.

At night, on September 27th, on Daniel’s birthday, our circle of friends met to celebrate and converse a little. The talk, that ended up stretching into the night, had began with unrestrained and unending retorts and attacks on each other’s misfortunes . For boys, heartbreaks were something to be laughed at, so it was so awkward when Daniel recounted in precise details his ‘love story’. I had never thought the man could be so enamored by love, yet from the way he spoke, he truly was in love. He had never talked about any lady with so much fondness and softness, with so much passion.

Given the austerity we had come to know him for, the confession was so unexpected; oh how I wanted to see the lady that had taken the reins of the old man’s heart! She clearly had to be the most beautiful woman in the world, or she wouldn’t have broken through my roommate’s a cold heart. He seemed to have blown his chances, because green as he was in matters of love, he had ended up being careless in how he had expressed his emotions, and had pushed away a lady he wanted. The whole thing sounded so foreign, since when did Daniel fuss so much over a lady. Was he just looking for sympathy? ‘I am not sure what exactly I should do,’ he said. We never answered that directly, we just made a fun of the fact that he was even in love in the first place. ‘You will handle it well, don’t fret so much about it.’ Tony said. Afterwards everyone else left.

Given how late into the night we had slept, I had trouble waking up early enough, but I was up before Daniel. I had a patient I was following up in the surgery ward and I wanted to go have a look at her before the ward rounds. She had had an appendectomy. Despite appendectomy having a relatively good prognosis, her condition seemed to be deteriorating. I had seen her for the past three days and I had strangely grown fond of her. She reminded me of Daniel, because she also spoke of being a mess. She was a literature teacher at a well known high school and she had at the head of her bed beautiful stickers that said ‘get well soon’. They must have been brought by her students. She told me she had divorced her husband a month ago. She was among the patients who could be so open to a point taking her history felt so awkward, but I liked her for it. When I arrived, I found her bed and side-table cleared, the bedding changed, and the sheets neatly spread.

‘Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ I said stopping a nurse walking past me, she slowed down and turned to me, a look of disinterest painted on her face. ‘Did Mildred get transferred to another bed?’ ‘Mildred! Oh!’ she sighed heavily as her features softened, her eyes looked distressed, and hesitatingly, she said, ’Mildred overdosed on her paracetamol tablets, she was rushed to ICU. We lost her at 5 a.m this morning. I felt so broken, but patients dying was a reality KNH was inuring her students to. Only that at times, you would not be exactly ready to know that a patient you had seen just days before was now gone. After clerking another patient with case of an obstructed bowel, I ran to Kamukunji in the afternoon to get a pressure-cooker we intended to use for boiling our cereals. By evening, I came home tired and worn out, and so got into bed immediately after having my supper. Daniel usually had a meeting in KNH on Monday evenings and he would come home a little late into the night.

That night, I dreamt we had gotten back together with my ex, and she was in the kitchen preparing lunch for me, but I caught her poisoning my food. I confronted her and a fiery expostulation followed during which my phone blared. ‘Who is calling me!’ I shouted angrily as I reached for the phone on the counter. I almost fell off my bed as I turned. It had been my alarm. 4:20 a.m had come so fast, I had just shut my eyes a moment ago. Today’s devotion was to be at Okello’s place, I cringed to think I would have to battle the morning’s chilling cold given that it was several blocks away from where Daniel and I stayed. I contemplated going back into the blankets but I remembered I had a busy morning.

Groggy-eyed I walked across the room to put on the lights. As I turned back I hit my big toe on the corner of the bookshelf behind which the switch was. Eiii! I winced in pain. As I turned back limping I noticed a red stain on the floor. I touched it and realized it was blood. Whose? Just then another, much larger drop, splashed on the tile. I raised my gaze to Daniel’s bed. I had not heard him come in. There beneath his bed was a pool of blood, still fresh, more gently trickling from under his mattress. ‘Daniel! Daniel!’ I shouted as I pulled the sheets away and tried to rouse him. I had never seen so much blood in my life, at least not yet.

There with a knife by his side, Daniel lay motionless; the peach t-shirt he loved wearing, was soaked in blood with eight stabs. I froze. Aside his open mouth, his face looked peaceful, and he obviously had not struggled to give up his life, he had let go willingly, happily as well, perhaps. Were it not for the stabs, and the blood, anyone would have thought he was sleeping. I wanted to shout for help, but I only squealed.

“Doc! temperatures are falling, the patient is hypothermic!” I had an insistent faint voice. “Keep her stable, we will be done in just a few more minutes,” I instructed the anesthesiologist as I hurried to finish up with the sutures. “Cauteriser, please.” I felt a tear drop into my face mask. I couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel. How could a man so upright, a diligent born again Christian, someone who had for a long time been an inspiration to so many, why did he have to do that to himself? Why would he butcher himself? For what? I felt like letting out a holler. All that sorrow made my chest feel as though it had crashed onto my heart. I needed to make an appointment with Rita, my Psychiatrist, as soon as I was done with this operation.

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A kind of part two, maybe?

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