Trust Me by John Updike Read Free Book Online

sharp amusement down into Carson’s face. She had an accent, Slavic of some sort. She said, “You don’t protect enough.”
    “Protect?” he croaked. He saw why slaves had taken to clowning.
    She thrust her thumb deep into his belly, in several places. “I shouldn’t be able to do that,” she said. “You should go through the ceiling.” The idiom went strangely with her accent.
    “It did hurt,” he told her.
    “Not enough,” she said. She gazed sharply down into his eyes; her own eyes were in shadow. “I think we shall take more blood tests.”
    Yet Carson felt she was stalling. There was a sense, from beyond the white curtains, percolating through the voices of nurses and policemen and agitated kin in this emergency room, of something impending in his case, a significant visitation. He closed his eyes for what seemed a second. When he opened them a new man was leaning above him—a tall tutorial man wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, a button-down shirt, and rimless glasses that seemed less attachments to his face than intensifications of a general benign aura. His hair was combed and grayed exactly right, and cut in the high-parted and close-cropped style of the Camelot years. Unlike the previous doctors, he sat on the edge of Carson’s narrow bed. His voice and touch were gentle; he explained, palpating, that some appendixes were retrocecal—that is,placed behind the large intestine, so that one could be quite inflamed without the surface sensitivity and protective reflex usual with appendicitis.
    Carson wondered what dinner party the doctor had been pulled from, at this post-midnight hour, in his timeless jacket and tie. Carson wished to make social amends but was in a poor position to, flat on his back and nearly naked. With a slight smile, the doctor pondered his face, as if to unriddle it, and Carson stared back with pleading helpless hopefulness, mute as a dog, which can only whimper or howl. He was as weary of pain and a state of emergency as he had been, twelve hours before, of his normal life. “I’d like to operate,” the doctor said softly, as if putting forth a suggestion that Carson might reject.
    “Oh yes,
please
,” Carson said. “When, do you think?” He was very aware that, though the debauched hour and disreputable surroundings had become his own proper habitat, the doctor was healthy and must have a decent home, a family, a routine to return to.
    “Why, right
now
,” was the answer, in a tone of surprise, and this doctor stood and began to take off his coat, as if to join Carson in some sudden, cheerfully concocted athletic event.
    Perhaps Carson merely imagined the surgeon’s gesture. Perhaps he merely thought
Bliss
, or really sighed the word aloud. Things moved rapidly. The shifty legal-aid lookalike returned, more comradely now that Carson had received a promotion in status, and asked him to turn on one side, and thrust a needle into his buttock. Then a biracial pair of orderlies coaxed his body from the bed to a long trolley on soft swift wheels; the white curtains were barrelled through; faces, lights, steel door lintels streamed by. Carson floated, feet first, into a room that he recognized, from having seen its blazingcounterpart so often dramatized on films, as an operating room. A masked and youthful population was already there, making chatter, having a party. “There are so many of you!” Carson exclaimed; he was immensely happy. His pain had already ceased. He was transferred from the trolley to a very narrow, high, padded table. His arms were spread out on wooden extensions and strapped tight to them. His wrists were pricked. Swollen rubber was pressed to his face as if to test the fit. He tried to say, to reassure the masked crew that he was not frightened and to impress them with what a “good guy” he was, that somebody should cancel his appointments for tomorrow.
    At a point and place in the fog as it fitfully lifted, the surgeon himself appeared, no