The Syndrome Read Free

stop on what sounded like gravel, and the lights winked off on the ceiling. Then the car door slammed, and the walls trembled. People talking in Swiss-German, and the rear doors opening with a yank. A rush of fresh air, and then the gurney began to move underneath him.
    “Where’m I?” A funny building, barely glimpsed—but modern. Then a face, looming in front of his own.
    “Not to talk.”
    And then they were inside. Down a long hallway, and into a brightly lighted room. Where he was left for nearly half an hour, his mouth getting drier and drier as he stared at the clock, high up on a glazed, ceramic wall.
    “You’re very brave.”
    The voice came from the end of the gurney. It wasOpdahl’s voice under Opdahl’s eyes, staring at him over the edge of a surgical mask.
    The tranquilizer was history by now, and McBride found himself able to speak without much difficulty. “What’s happening?” he asked. And then, when no reply was forthcoming: “What are you
doing
?”
    “Vec,” Opdahl said—but not to him.
    A needle appeared—McBride saw it for the best part of a second, then felt the sting just below his elbow. Instantly, everything began to slow down. His heart seemed to start and stop, as if he’d been punched in the chest. And, suddenly, he couldn’t get his breath. He was suffocating, and the realization made him panic. And as the panic rose inside him, he lunged, lunged reflexively against the straps that bound him. He was determined to stand. If he could stand, he could breathe. But the straps wouldn’t budge, or—not that. It wasn’t the straps. It was him. He was paralyzed, as immobile as a butterfly under glass.
    Opdahl leaned closer to him, so close that McBride could feel the older man’s breath on his face. Then the point of a scalpel touched his throat, just above the breastplate, and he felt the knife cut through the skin. “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” Opdahl whispered, though McBride had not made a sound. “It’s going to be all right.”
    But it wasn’t.
    He was dying. He might as well have been underwater, encased in concrete, or buried alive. Airless and frantic, he felt something enter the wound in his throat. Whatever it was, it tore at the tissues in his neck as Opdahl worked it into him. Then a machine began to pump from somewhere behind him and, suddenly, he was breathing again—or the machine was breathing for him. He couldn’t tell.
    The older man checked the pupils of McBride’s eyes, shining a penlight into the back of his head, oblivious to McBride himself. Then McBride felt himself being cranked into what was almost a sitting position. A moment later, a large machine was rolled to the side of the operatingtable, even as a second machine—itself about the size of a refrigerator—whirred into operation. McBride recognized the first device as an operating microscope, and guessed that the second was a fluoroscope, capable of generating live X rays throughout an operation.
    Opdahl hove into view again, as someone wheeled a television monitor up to the operating table. It rested on a little stand, glowing brightly, and McBride’s eyes were drawn to it. With a sickening sensation, he realized that the man on the screen with a trache tube in his throat was himself.
    “You’re going to be all right,” Opdahl promised. “Not to worry.” Then he reached for one of the surgical instruments that lay in a steel tray at his side. “We’ve given you eight milligrams of Vecuronium—that’s why you can’t move. It’s a paralytic.” He paused. “But not, I’m afraid, an anaesthetic.”
    Then he nodded at the small monitor next to the table. “I’m sorry you have to watch this,” Opdahl told McBride, “but it’s a part of the procedure.” With that, he turned to the nurse, and nodded. Wordlessly, she stepped behind McBride and, reaching toward him, seized his upper lip between her thumbs and forefingers. Then she pulled it back, exposing his upper gum.
    Opdahl leaned in,