he caught himself blinking.
There was something in his field of vision.
He blinked again, and it didn’t go away. He shook his head quickly, knowing this was useless. No change. Tiny black spots, just two or three. Up a bit and to the right. He closed his right eye, leaning against the counter. Standing in the empty kitchen, listening to the sound of his heart.
II
In the hour before dawn, the city is private and surprisingly cheerful, optimistic; hopeful, in the dark, of the coming day, the sunrise a slow dilution of shadow, a grey wash over the sky, tinged gently with pink.
On the Danforth, a handful of people sat in a coffee shop drinking espresso. A man and a woman, who met here every morning before work; he was bearded and aging, she was younger, black-haired, round-faced. Another woman in a second-hand army parka, reading a newspaper. A policeman buying muffins to take away. These were the ones who rose early and ventured out with the wind, at the coldest time on the clock.
Across the river, among the towers of St. Jamestown, a Somali girl tightened her head scarf, zipped up her red jacket and set out on her bike to deliver newspapers, and on the street an Iranian man who had once been a doctor cleaned vomit from the back seat of his taxi. A woman put a pan of milk on the burner of her stove, and stared at the creamy ripples on the surface.
The subway began to run, the first train on each line half-empty, the second and third filling up as the rush hour gathered mass and density. Underground bakeries drew fresh pastries out of metal ovens, the sweet hot smell of dough and yeast touching the platforms.
Alex left for work early. He had barely slept anyway. The floaters in his right eye were a shock, maybe more of a shock than they should have been, and he was far too anxious, too wound up to sleep, only skimming and plunging for a few hours through tangled twilight dreams. It was a relief to be outside, to drink hot tea with milk and sugar from his plastic travel mug as he rode the College streetcar, the world solidifying around him. On the northbound subway, a tall and muscular Buddhist monk, with orange robes and a shining round head, was fingering a circlet of wooden beads, a tiny secret smile playing over his lips, as he listened to three girls across the aisle from him having a nearly unintelligible giggling conversation on the general theme of chocolate cake.
Alex arrived at the hospital during the hollow quiet of the morning shift change, his footsteps audible in the lobby, and went up to his office, unlocking the door and booting up the computer. When he checked his voice mail, he found a message already waiting for him – an unexpected work call from the cardiac OR, scheduled to start within an hour. He downloaded his mail, looked it over quickly, then collected his equipment and took the elevator up to the surgical floor.
In the prep room, he reached into the rack for a green gown, tied on a mask and slid disposable gloves over his hands. Despite the gear, he would not be sterile, not fully scrubbed in; that was the normal procedure, the photographer only ambiguously part of the team, outside the sterile field. Thus the first and most unbreakable rule, that he and his camera must under no circumstances touch anyone or anything.
He could hear the music through the door, so he knew that Walter Yee was doing the surgery today; Walter, usually over the objections of the team, played REM relentlessly, and insisted on singing along with his favourites. He did not sing well. They were in the early stages of the operation when Alex arrived, the chest already opened. Walter was humming ‘Losing My Religion,’ his gloved hands moving delicately among the veins and arteries.
‘Hi. I’m Alex Deveney, I’m the photographer,’ he said for the benefit of anyone there he didn’t know, and moved towards the table. Walter gestured with his head to indicate where he wanted Alex to stand.
‘Can we get a picture of this before I start working?’
Alex nodded, framed a shot of the chest cavity, the heart’s red throbbing muscle and glistening fat, then kept shooting as Walter placed a clamp on the largest artery and gestured for the infused medication that would paralyze the tissue.
‘So who got caught in the traffic jam last night?’ asked the anaesthetist.
‘That was the subway thing, wasn’t it?’ said one of the nurses. ‘I saw something about it in the paper this morning. Somebody smelled a funny smell or something, and the security guys went crazy.’
‘Girls fainting, I heard,’ said a resident.
‘Oh yeah, I was there,’ said Alex. ‘It was very strange, private-school girls just crashing.’
‘Probably dieting themselves to death, poor kids.’
‘No, they were having rashes and stuff. Thought they’d been poisoned. It looked like some kind of hysterical thing.’
‘I’ve never liked the word hysteria,’ said Walter thoughtfully, as he cut into the heart and began to open it, exposing the cavities. ‘I don’t find it helpful. And it has a bit of a gender bias, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, the wandering uterus.’
‘Oh my God, my uterus has escaped!’
‘It’s taken off down Yonge Street!’
‘Can I move over there, Walter?’ asked Alex. ‘I’d like to get some shots from the other side.’
‘Hang on a second … yeah, okay. Linda, squeeze over for Alex there? Thanks.’
‘Anyway,’ said Alex, ‘you can call it somatization if you want. I spent half an hour convincing myself I didn’t have a rash. Like instant cutaneous anthrax or something.’
‘And we’re letting you into the OR? Standards are really slipping.’
‘But if we don’t, the terrorists have already won, right?’
Walter was singing again as he probed the mitral valve, professing along with Michael Stipe that he was Superman and that he knew what was happening. Alex took some longer shots of the gowned figures clustered around the table, then moved in closer and focused on the thick meat of the heart.
‘Tell you what I saw on the subway this morning,’ said the resident. ‘I saw the kid who owns evil.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Really. I got on and there was this kid, this teenage boy, holding this big old box, like a computer box or something, and he’d written on it in pink marker: CAUTION, DO NOT OPEN. CONTAINS EVIL. The pink marker was what I liked.’
‘Do you suppose it was true?’
‘My thinking is, why would someone lie about a thing like that?’
Alex zoomed the lens onto Walter’s careful hands, coated with the patient’s blood. ‘David, could you come over here?’ the surgeon was saying. ‘I think you’ll be interested to see this.’ The resident shifted around the table, and Alex moved back, wondering what it was that was interesting and hoping he’d gotten a good picture of it.
Where he was standing now he could see the man’s face, slack and still, his mouth distorted by the breathing tube. He thought of this man getting up and walking away, damaged and healed. The heart cut open and motionless, this man as dead right now as anyone would ever be, short of the final death. He stepped back and photographed Walter leaning over the man, touching his heart with a knife.
The boy with the box of evil sat in the cafeteria of his high school, the box on the table beside him, eating a hamburger and feeling unusually cheerful. He hadn’t heard about the problems on the subway the day before, and didn’t know that a security guard had phoned in an alert while he was on the train, though it would have made him happy to know this.
He was a medium-sized boy with brown hair and thick glasses, and he had carried the box with him into every one of his classes that morning and sat it on the desk. When anyone asked him what it was, he said it was a prop for a play, which was almost sort of true.
The box had previously