Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Andrew said he could—although he was less sure of that than he was of his own desire for a serious look under the blanket—a look at one of those things alive. And for the second time since he’d fled Eliada, Andrew felt himself fill up with a terrible shame.

He made himself smile around it—pushed that shame down, and to make sure it stayed there said again:

“I can help her. Perhaps.”

15 - A Wicked Cut

Andrew rose early in the morning, and took stock of both his equipment and his circumstance. He had not, since departing Eliada, done a close inventory of the physician’s bag, so he did so now and was pleased to find the bag well-equipped if not precisely modern.

There was morphine and alcohol in a row of phials, packed alongside several thick rolls of gauze. There were other things as one might expect: a flexible stethoscope and a hammer; a small concave mirror and scissors; a roll of suture thread and steel needles. At the bottom of the case was a mahogany box containing a surgical kit that Andrew thought might have dated back to the Civil War, given the rust-specked bone-saw and the ebony-handled trepan tucked among the scalpels and clamps. Andrew would have liked more gynaecological equipment—all he could find was an antique speculum tube that’d been carved from ivory and might be adaptable for vaginal examination. But given that he was not precisely aborting or giving birth to a child—given that he was not entirely sure what he was going to find inside poor Loo—he thought he might make do.

The circumstance was more troubling. His bad hand was only a part of it. In the relative darkness of the dawn, the cabin where Loo rested was nearly pitch black. And it was filthy. The risk of sepsis was enormous in the confines of this place. He asked the woman who was staying with Loo to throw open all the windows, but it was not enough to resolve either difficulty.

There was nothing to do about his hand, either—other than enlist Norma, who had some experience with midwifery, to assist where she could.

As to the cabin?

“We will have to perform this procedure outdoors,” Andrew finally declared, and Norma agreed.

“I’ll find a table,” she said.

“And clean bedclothes.”

“Clean bedclothes. Anythin’ else?”

By mid-morning, Andrew counted a dozen people helping set up the outdoor surgery. He supervised for part of it, but it soon became apparent that Norma was a quick study, and he wasn’t needed. So at her urging, he took his bag and went back inside to look in on his patient.

She was awake and more alert than the night before. The two of them were alone in the cabin, and it seemed to Andrew that she was smiling at him.

“Hello, Loo,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

She mumbled at him, in a slow, damp drawl. She was definitely smiling. He could see her teeth—short, plaque-covered stumps that peeked out under glistening lips. She mumbled again, and grunted.

“I’m Dr. Waggoner,” he said, and pulled up a stool beside her. “Going to try and make you better. Do you understand?”

Loo made that grunting sound again, and her eyes squinted as though she were trying to pass stool, and Andrew shocked himself by flinching, a sliver of disgust and horror pricking his middle. The girl was enfeebled through no fault of her own; and she had been raped by—by some inhuman thing—and here he was, trained to heal all infirmity, turning away in what? Disgust?

Horror?

He bent forward. “I am going to check you,” he said. “Can you lie still for me?”

Then he set about her second examination.

Loo was still running a low fever, her heart sounded fine, and there wasn’t much congestion in her breathing.

“Good girl,” said Andrew, and Loo mumbled back. “Now,” he said, “I am going to look at your belly.”

The sheets and blankets were stiff and stank from days of stale sweat. He had to literally peel away the tattered bottom sheet.

Andrew gasped. Even in the dim light, he could see the mottled discolouration across her, dark bruising from beneath her breasts to her pelvic bone. He traced with a finger one of the two thick scars that Nils Bergstrom had left. With his other hand laid flat, he felt for movement—anything, any sign of the thing in her uterus. He felt nothing but the girl’s breathing.

So he took the stethoscope, and after warming it first in his hand, set the chest-piece against the flesh above her navel. And he listened.

§

The two things missing from the physician’s bag that Jason Thistledown had stolen for him were the two things that Andrew dearly wished he had: a pencil and a proper notebook. With those two things, Andrew might have written down a proper clinical description of the thing he heard twisting and gnawing inside the belly of the poor idiot hill girl.

As it was, Andrew Waggoner took the stethoscope away, looped the rubber tubing and put it back in the bag. He returned to Loo’s bedside. He felt her forehead for fever, checked her eye movement with a finger, and even tapped her knee to see if it might jolt, which it did.