On Saying Goodbye: Our Operation in the Middle East
From the Editor’s Desk at The Von Noshrilgram Foundation
The Middle East. Noon. Sun exploding directly overhead in a faded blue sky. Feel that sun, as if through a large magnifying glass hovering just over your head and shoulders. See the bustling marketplace, with its skinned animal limbs hanging, stacked jars of Omani honey and the three goats in the back seat of a Mercedes Benz zipping past towers of cleansers and mounds of vegetables. Hear the honking and haggling. It’s all there. So is a white man, “too much white,” who stands with arms outstretched, shoes beginning to melt into the searing heat of the asphalt like cheese from a grilled sandwich. He glares at his map, slowly rotating it clockwise. He glances up, lost in the blur of heads and shoulders drifting past in all directions around him. His lips move silently. He estimates the total kilometers from his present location to his hometown, counting on his fingers. The map falls to the ground and is trampled…
What motivates one to embark on a life overseas? In what way does one benefit from being that ‘fish out of water’? And, will we ever be the same once we’ve fully adapted to this new world’s charms and sorrows? In fact, will these experiences alter us beyond recognition?
I stand beside my large desk, in my air-conditioned office of The Von Noshrilgram Foundation, peering around the curtain into the world outside, that Middle East. Outside on a tree branch, on the limb of a skeleton of a tree, shriveled birds chirp lethargically in the midday heat and wipe their brows, looking in through the sheets of glass as if to say, “Hey brother, how’s it on the inside?” I feel a pang of guilt. I consider the Middle East operation, its success. The loss...
As I am sure, it is a textbook description, the doctor said it would hurt “just a little” - an understatement, or spoken like a veteran movie critic who just doesn’t have the heart to give away the really good ending. And because of this, specifically, I chose local anesthetic. On the day, the doctor used five needles to “freeze” the dermal layer, and, when he felt that he had been successful at this, began. It was “exploratory”, he said, ‘exploratory’ in the sense that the deeper he delved with his scalpel the more frequently he encountered the conscious part of me quick to announce with a rapid unicycle-like peddling motion of my legs (and one arm) and a Doctor Seusse-ish flow of syllables in search of a sentence that I, Von Noshrilgram Jr began here.
Because it was ‘local’, I could hear everything in, as they say, virtual ‘surround sound’. Indeed, I could hear clearly the cutting and snipping, and, at times, ripping. It sounded as though he was slicing fabric to make finger puppets, then giving up and shredding them, like a petulant child, into tiny unrecognizable bits. (On the other hand, it also sounded like he was de-boning mutton, with a dull knife, so perhaps he was making his lunch at the same time.) I heard it, all: the doctor’s multiple wet burps, the man in a rage screaming at the top of his lungs in the next room, my doctor’s barely concealed chuckling in response to this, the nurse’s comments that the things the doctor wanted were not in the cabinet, “not this one either,” “the one ‘over here’?”, “I don’t know who stocked the shelves!”, “the one over there?” and “check that cupboard then”, “no, not that one, that one.”
And so on...
It was like I was there… But wait! I was.
I imagined my life at that moment as existing on old film reel, and rewound it noisily – our voices and the ambient sounds rising in pitch comically and presenting itself as a code to be deciphered by those who might care sometime in the future - just to the point where the nurse appears in the doorway of the waiting room and announces my name, like a foreign capital he’s never been to and isn’t much interested in visiting, as I read the paper. This time, however, I do not look up spirited and fearless, but watch him from the corner of my eye surreptitiously, watch him waiting for me too patiently, while the other future patients glance up. In this perfect universe I begin to whistle, then remember a dinner date and excuse myself, embarrassed, “Oops! Wrong day!” I shake everyone’s hand and leave with some aplomb. People wave.
While lying on the operating table with my left arm folded beneath my torso and therefore losing all the feeling it once had but gradually being filled with the sensation that little people were angrily hammering stakes into every inch of flesh to secure small pup tents, I attempted to escape to a more comforting place and thought of a pack of dogs two hundred yards away in a valley across the highway who had pursued me with jaws snapping while I ran for my life in a zigzaggy pattern only the week before. They were most probably resting beneath the one tree in the dry riverbed with their tongues hanging out, waiting. Outside on the road in the back of a pick-up truck several golden brown camels glanced out onto the town in a superior, bored manner then a nurse swung the operating room door open and announced, “Ding DONG! Anyone home?!” She sounded like Carol Burnett.
I jerked up, to her surprise.
“Oh!” she said, looking to the doctor, “…Local?”
He nodded.
Afterwards, a strange thing happened. The operation was over. I was in agony. My tumor, the size of an egg, floated to my surprise in the clear plastic container, looking ...lonely. I felt the distance between us. Like an ex-girlfriend you still share some closeness with but know it can’t work out and you’ve both decided to go separate ways, yet… there you both are, both feeling vulnerable, both needing each other... somehow.
Maybe it was only me, but I felt a melancholy. I wondered how it could have all gone so terribly, terribly wrong. I wondered what I could have done differently. What I could have eaten, said, been. If I’d taken a different route, made a different life choice, would it all have still ended up this way? The tumor didn’t have the answer. Then the doctor waved at me cheerfully to get my attention, or perhaps to confirm for himself that he hadn’t accidentally severed some crucial nerve that rendered it impossible for me to form a new thought, and, seeing the blood on his hands, my blood, I passed out.
Three days later, I still feel the pain. It aches. I look out the window, trying to muster the strength to get back to work, to get back ‘into the saddle’, for the old me to return home.
On the other side of the glass several badly groomed birds peer into my large air-conditioned room. One in particular seems to be attempting to lock eyes with me. He glances to his companions. I look down at the palms of my two open hands impotently, as if one more hand might help… If I let a handful of birds in today, what precedent exactly would I be setting? I turn away completely, as many have before today. Out of my vision this bird drive heaves, a particle of sand stuck in its throat. Oblivious, for I’m pondering the Middle East Operation and how I lost a little of myself; I know a decision must be made. I feel my hand on the curtain and know what needs to be done. There are some chapters it’s best to simply leave behind. And there is, of course, the memory of Ivan Von Noshrilgram Sr, celebrated philosopher-botanist, wild game hunter, exotic animal trainer, extinguished firewalker, linguist, writer, humanist lecturer, scholar of the myths of the indigenous peoples of America and terrifier, to perpetuate. I’m still me, darn it.
I’ll find my way.
Still, I wonder what my tumor’s doing right now?