Light and dark

[1]

FINISHED WITH his probe, the doctor helped Tsuda down from the examination table.

“It appears the lesion extends all the way to the intestine. Last time I felt the ridge of a scar and assumed it stopped there, but when I scraped away just now to help it drain, I see it’s deeper.”

“To the intestine?”

“Yes. What I thought was less than two centimeters appears to be more than three.”

A flush of disappointment rose faintly to Tsuda’s face beneath his strained smile. The doctor shook his head, his hands clasped in front of him against his baggy white smock. “It’s too bad but it’s the reality we have to face,” he might have been saying. “A doctor can’t compromise professional standards with a lie.”

Tsuda retied his obi in silence and turned again to face the doctor, lifting his hakama* from the back of a chair where he had dropped it.

“If it’s all the way to the intestine there’s no way it’ll heal?”

“There’s no reason to think that.”

The doctor’s denial was emphatic and unhesitating, as if to invalidate Tsuda’s mood at the same time.

“It does suggest we’ll have to do more than just clean the canal as we’ve been doing. Since that won’t get us any new tissue our only option is a more fundamental approach.”

“Meaning?”

“Surgery. We’ll resect a portion of the canal and connect it to the intestine. That will allow the resected ends to knit naturally and you’ll be, well, almost as good as new.”

Tsuda nodded without speaking. Next to where he stood, a microscope sat on a table that had been installed beneath a window facing south. Entering the examination room earlier, his curiosity had prompted him to ask the doctor, with whom he was on familiar terms, if he could have a look. What he had seen through the 850-power lens were grape-shaped bacteria as vividly colored as if they had been photographed.

Fastening his hakama, Tsuda reached for the leather wallet he had placed on the same table and abruptly recalled the bacteria. The association was a breath of uneasiness. Having inserted the wallet inside his kimono in preparation to leave, he was on his way out when he hesitated.

“If it’s tuberculosis, I suppose it wouldn’t heal even if you performed what you call fundamental surgery?”

“If it were tubercular, no. In that case it would burrow straight in toward the intestine so that just treating the opening would be ineffective.”

Tsuda winced involuntarily.

“But mine isn’t tubercular?”

“That’s right.”

Tsuda looked hard at the doctor for an instant, as if to determine the degree of truth in what he was saying. The doctor didn’t move.

“How do you know? You can tell from just an examination?”

“That’s right — from how it looks.”

Just then the nurse, standing at the entrance to the room, called the name of the next patient, who had been waiting for his turn and immediately appeared in the doorway. Tsuda was obliged to exit quickly.

“So when can I have this surgery?”

“Any time. Whenever it suits you.”

Promising to pick a date after thinking it over, Tsuda stepped outside.