Page 33 of In Love With a Master (Interview With a Master 2)

The doctor scowled at me. He reached into his pocket and when he opened his fist there was a dozen or more small white tablets in the palm of his hand.

“You mean these?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “I’ve been taking two a day.”

“And no headaches, right?”

“No.”

The doctor nodded. “Any side effects?”

I shook my head. “Just an after-taste,” I said.

Again the doctor nodded. He turned his hand over slowly and as he did the tablets fell to the ground. “They’re breath mints,” he said.

I said nothing – not for a long time.

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. They’re not even expensive. It’s a cheap brand I bought in bulk.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “No.”

The doctor nodded. “Yes.”

I stared into the man’s eyes and he stared back with complete conviction. “The only reason I doubled your dose was because you were dating that pretty little journalist,” his voice was rock steady. “With the amount of whisky you drink, I figured she wouldn’t want to be kissing someone who tasted like a brewery.”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I felt a sudden giddy vertigo as though my entire reality had suddenly been revealed as a horrific nightmare of illusion.

“I’ve really been taking breath mints?”

The doctor nodded his head again. “To treat headaches you never had. Nacsirmelbon, is just Noble MRI scan spelt back to front.”

I felt everything around me begin to mist over and my vision began to waver like I was staring through a heat mirage. I felt the palms of my hand turn clammy and cold as my fists clutched at the edge of the mattress.

“You’ve been lying to me?”

The doctor nodded. “Yes.”

“All along?”

“From day one,” he said and then he sighed and shook his head slowly. “Son, I didn’t want to make your condition worse than it was – I didn’t even really know the true extent of your condition until it was confirmed by this MRI scan. But I had my suspicions, and so I convinced you that you were taking powerful experimental medication, because I wanted to know what I was really treating before I medicated you.”

I closed my eyes. Suddenly I felt tired, drained of all energy. When I opened my eyes again, my body and my mind felt weary and overcome with lethargy. “You’re a bastard.” The words were no more than a dry croak in my throat.

“That I am,” Dr. De Niro nodded gravely. “But I’m not the one who has misled you about your illness, and nor am I the one you should direct your anger at.”

The words hung in the air, the menace and implications of their meaning clear. Trigg had betrayed me. She had medicated me for headaches that her medications had actually created. She had somehow slipped something into my cocktail at that fundraiser to induce a seizure that she could then save me from. She had lied about the size of my tumor, and in doing so robbed me of a future and made me dependent on her.

I wanted to kill her.

I wanted to hate her.

Crashing waves of dismay flooded over me. My whole body felt numbed by the chilling depth of Trigg’s treachery.

The instinct for revenge overwhelmed me like a dark rage of unholy wrath. I closed my eyes again and my senses swam. I saw an image of Trigg’s face before me. She was smiling, and there was a flash of vindictive triumph in her eyes. I imagined my hands locked around her throat, my thumbs crushing her larynx and choking the life from her. I could see behind my eyes Trigg’s face filling with fear – the same fear of death that had haunted me for so long. I could hear her shrill scream, becoming hoarse and frantic with terror as the life slowly ebbed out of her and my fingers around her throat meshed together until she was strangled.

The vision cleared, the red mist of rage faded. I took a deep breath and held it, and then with a force of will greater than I had believed I was capable of, I crushed down on my rage and cast it off like a great weight.

Dr. De Niro gave me one last long meaningful look and then turned away. He went to a chest of drawers and began removing clothes, stacking them in neat piles at the foot of the bed.

“Doc? What are you doing?”

The doctor looked up at me, and for the first time since I met the man he smiled in a way that looked friendly. “I’m going,” he said amiably. “You don’t need me, Jonah. You need a surgeon, not some overweight, middle aged pill dispenser.”

“A surgeon?”

The doctor nodded. “That tumor is small enough to be removed by surgery. I don’t know,” he shrugged. “It may take two or three operations, but with the right surgeon your chances of growing old are very good.”

I frowned. I knew how dangerous and how delicate brain surgery could be, and I understood that removing a tumor of any size was fraught with risk. “You are saying that I have a good chance, then?”

The doctor nodded. He dropped a neat bundle of shirts onto the end of the bed and leaned in close to me.

“Jonah, the real key to surviving the kind of surgery I’m proposing lays only partly in the skill of the surgeon. The other element to surviving an operation like this is completely in the hands of the patient. You have got to want to live, Jonah. Ever since I moved in to care for you, you have been a ghost – a man waiting to die,” he waggled his finger at me. “If you want to give your surgeon every possible chance to save you then you need to find within yourself the will to live again.”

Chapter 22.

I sat at my desk and stared for long minutes down at the surgeon’s name and number on the piece of paper. The writing was practically illegible – my doctor’s handwriting.

I picked up the phone and made the call to New York. A middle-aged man’s voice came to me on the line, his tone level and steady down the long distance connection.

“Wilton Green.”

“Dr. Green, my name is Jonah Noble. I believe my doctor has been in contact with you?”

The man’s response was instant. “Indeed he has, Mr. Noble. Good to hear from you. I have received the MRI scan that was sent to me, and I also have a detailed letter from your doctor.”

I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. I could feel sudden tension, as if a steel band had been clamped around my head and was tightening. “Thank you. I appreciate your promptness,” I said. “My doctor told me you were the best surgeon in the country for this kind of condition. I’m hoping you will be able to help me.”

The doctor hesitated for a moment, and then said with professional caution, “I think I can.”

I tried to imagine what this man looked like. I tried to picture his surroundings. The number I had been given was a cellphone, not a direct line to a hospital. Was he at home right now? Did he have a wife and children? Was he the kind of man who had retained

his passion for helping people, or was he like some hired surgical gun, who worked for the money and who had lost his compassion?

I had the image in my mind of a man with calm steady eyes: maybe the face of an airline pilot… the kind of man you would feel comfortable trusting your life with.

“I am relieved to hear that,” I said. “Hope is something I had given up on.”

The surgeon’s voice never altered, his tone was professional and business-like, but I sensed an undercurrent of empathy beneath his words.

“I’ve consulted with another colleague on your condition, Mr. Noble, and I must warn you that surgery to remove any sized brain tumor is fraught with dangers and hazards. You must understand there is a great deal of risk involved with the kind of procedure required.”

“I understand that,” I said, and then hesitated for a long moment before asking the critical question. “How do you rate my chances?”

The surgeon’s voice lowered and became grave. “Fifty-fifty,” he said. “You’ve got an even chance of surviving the surgery and living a long and healthy life.”

“And a fifty percent chance that I will die in surgery?”

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath. I could feel a knot of apprehension drawing tighter in the pit of my guts.

“How soon can you operate?” I asked with slow decision.

“Hold on for one moment,” the surgeon said. I heard him set the phone down, and there was a brief murmur of discussion. I couldn’t hear the words, but it sounded like several voices in the background. When the surgeon came back on the line his tone was suddenly clinical. “I can fly out the day after tomorrow,” he said. “That would mean surgery in three days time.”

I felt a sudden chilled sense of shock. “So soon?”

“The sooner, the better,” the surgeon replied. “We need to remove that tumor at the base of your brain as soon as possible. The longer the delay, the greater the chance of complications and the less likely our chances of success.”

I swung the chair around and stared at the blank wall behind my desk.

This was it…

A life and death moment.

I had spent so many months despairing for a future I was never going to have, and anticipating a slow debilitating death. Now my life telescoped before my eyes down to just the next few days.

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