the fire,” she said.
He turned, quickly, checked her face for something, some sign, who knows, and went on walking.
“What do you mean,” he said, not like a question.
She’d said the wrong thing, of course; she’d never gotten the hang of small talk, of how to be casual enough with all the questions you were supposed to use to learn about another person. There was an etiquette to it, a pattern that seemed to be natural for everyone else but which Viv ruined, overthinking every word. Overanalyzing every exchange, aware there were shortcuts and codes, but what were the rules, it was a gamble. So she was always saying dumb things. Really, what it came down to was the peculiar deficiency of not understanding how to be known by anyone. She didn’t want to give too much away. In fact, she was embarrassed to even be seen bending down to the tray of a vending machine, retrieving a bag of Fritos from the drop bin. How could a person stand to always be seen desiring, and taking. Not just food, either—anything coveted. To Viv, every kind of hunger felt vulgar, and that was an embarrassing kind of shame.
To Ronny she said, “What’s the rush, when I saw you before you were running, that’s all, now you’re walking so fast, it was a dumb joke you know—forget it.”
She’d caught him off guard and it was uncomfortable, a shift that put him under inspection, because when had she seen him before tonight, he wondered, running?
“Yeah, well,” he finally shrugged. Something bothered him. Half-heartedly he tried but could think of nothing to say.
Ronny kept his head down. They walked in awkward silence, got past another block without talking. Ronny smoked as he walked, and pictured each house they passed going up in flames, thinking how you could see every second ending if it was set on fire. Every second burned off the present.
The Doctor was looking for the blueprint. Drawer after drawer he lumbered his way around the office, a map of the ribcage in his head. Last night he’d dreamed the wings again and the dream gave him an idea. More of the rib, dismantled, would make the wing frame more flexible; keep the frame too stiff and motor impulse would suffer. Of course! Stiffness was fine for soaring, was preferable even, but would be detrimental for ascent.
On his second lap around the room, after considerable rifling through the file cabinet, he found it. He unrolled the blueprint and smoothed it flat across the table. With his charcoal pencil he scratched a panel from the ribcage and shaded it in. In this manner he sharpened the planned angle and extended the webbing, which would be stretched from the fat around the torso and rewoven. He sketched the incision and diagrammed the positioning of the scalpel and the wing, penciled in notations about which measurements to take later. Brilliant, yes, it was, it was making sense. The Doctor studied the drawing with its additions for a minute more, then shuffled back across the room to the desk and filed it safely away in the only drawer he could lock with a miniscule key.
It was late afternoon and he was off to his rounds. First patient was Kneecap. He’d skewered his leg on an access road at 120 miles per hour when he lost control of his motorcycle. Re-networking the threads of ligament beneath the new cap had been laborious work; so far the graft seemed to be tightening as well as could be anticipated. The rest was up to nature. Nature would take its course. For starters, traces of tar and mica remained in the shin and the thigh. For the Doctor, this conjured visions of metallic skin. Impervious to scarring, he thought. Chain mail.
Next patient was Nose, the retired debutante from Orlando. She’d come in for a reformative nose job and he’d reshaped it, hopefully for the last time. It was set perfectly but due to complications he would keep her overnight. Besides, it would be good to keep her around if only since, incidentally, she was his focal point in the argument he planned to wage for the Board that afternoon, the abbreviated version of which went:
If repeat elective cosmetic surgery is legitimized medically and ethically and according to strict guidelines (he had memorized his part of the dialogue), those same guidelines must conceive of—must fathom (fathom, yes) the various and important possibilities of elective surgery to challenge the extremes of the human condition beyond vanity: a re-envisioning of the human condition.
It was elementary; actually, it was practical. Of course there were no counterarguments for fixing gruesome aberrations—Kirschner wires and cutaneous reconstruction—or for amending physical hardships with, for example, cleft palate surgery; of course not: the body begs swift repair. Waging normality, though, and spending thirty-something years reinforcing the status quo when there was more to do—when they were long past the time, long overdue, for invention—that was a shame he could no longer endure. In fact, it was downright ludicrous to continue to endure—good God, it was a burden. To be sure, a body that isn’t broken doesn’t require fixing. But invention, enhancement; the unprecedented adaptations the human form might withstand, to think of it: the new body, the super-human body—that was the work of the extraordinary. That was what the Doctor’s tools were for. He (for one) was not there to trade in vanity, he would make that clear. No, his oath was to restore the delicate system of body with function. But. Reinventing that system—yes. Yes, they must.
Shuffling down the corridor he had gruff nods for the orderlies and nurses and residents he passed. What he looked like to them, he knew, was an old man, unstylish and disheveled with or without his surgeon’s coat and clipboard. They had no idea what he was planning, what miracle he was setting into motion just a few doors down the hall from their respective offices and labs. They did not, could not, fully grasp his—his monumental—expertise as a plastic surgeon. He could tell they were blind to his immensity; he knew they thought he was nuts, and old—as old as their grandfathers, in some cases. And yet, his delicate stitch work and his impeccable bone sculpting were renowned in reconstructive units worldwide. He was cited in their texts, for Christ’s sake. His reputation was considerable. They were defenseless when confronted with his genius. They were held captive by his genius. And, most unfortunately for them, the Doctor thought, most unfortunately for them, they could never, the lot of them, fully comprehend nor prepare for what would come next. Because what came next . . . what came next would be his glory.
Overnight it had gotten colder, shifting the last week of November into an official cold snap that began in the earliest hours as ropes of sleet and by mid-morning glazed the roads over completely, shut everything down. By early afternoon, branches and power lines overlapped in a shiny grid. The storm went on and on. Viv had spent the entire day in bed. Her encounter with Ronny the night before had left her feeling depressed and out of sorts. When she finally left the bedroom to put the kettle on, she hadn’t even bothered dressing, just buttoned a long-sleeved shirt over what she’d slept in, a thin-as-paper slip and her underwear. She was, she decided, done with the world of other people. She settled in the living room with her tea, covered herself in the guestroom quilts, and flipped through an issue of National Geographic from 1971, the only thing she could reach without moving from the couch. She read an article about Lenin called “The Social Catastrophe,” and didn’t think about Ronny. She didn’t think about Ronny. She didn’t know Ronny. She had no reason to feel as if she’d lost something. She was fine. She was fine in the house of a missing man, fine in a town that wasn’t hers, fine on her own. She didn’t exactly need other people in her life, and didn’t exactly miss them when they were gone, except for certain fleeting, companionable parts of them. She didn’t miss the entire, overlapping history of a person because people were generally messy and selfishly dramatic and took up too much room. Vivian preferred not to commit to drawn-out, exhausting relationships and endless compromises and dim stains on bed sheets. It had always seemed like something her exes appreciated about her, how she didn’t altogether want them in ways they didn’t know how to be needed yet. They were happy to test the give and take, the physical measures of desire, and that was all, and that was enough for her, too. Nights, Vivian found, were easy. Mornings were unavoidable—naked bodies done with their nakedness and cold, and unfamiliar socks balled up on the floor, and someone politely pretending to sleep while someone else politely turned toward the door—but those were short-lived. A person would eventually be dressed and you could