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D
octor Moses Mayo began each day as if expecting the world would end that night. He could find no other way to endure its griefs, the quiet terror of living in a human body. Waking at dawn’s cool touch each day, by seven he was hunkered down at his desk munching poppy-seed bagels and sipping sweet tea as he greeted
The Jerusalem Post
’s grim headlines with a murmured, “Who cares? The world is ending tonight.” But this early March morning he found a different path. In his narrow staff quarters at Hadassah
Hospital’s medical school, the neurologist awakened in the tunnels of night with a quietly pulsing sense of dread. Wide awake, he lay still, staring up into darkness while he listened to the whirring and the flurry of his thoughts. He had dreamed. Something strange. But what? He sat up, turned on a bedside tensor lamp, and squinted down at the tiny brass moonfaced clock ticking loudly in the hush of a circle of light. Mayo groaned. It was minutes after 2
A.M.
The neurologist sighed, swung his feet to the floor, and was cradling his lowered head in his hands when an overwhelming sadness, a depression, fell upon him. What was it? he wondered. The dream? Dully staring at his curled-up bony white toes, Mayo moodily wriggled them up and down. One of his patients had died the night before. Despondency and guilt always followed, he knew. Was that it? Or was it still the mad horror in the Psychiatric Ward, the shocking murder that no one could comprehend? Mayo scratched at his scrawny chest through the flannel of a red and white striped pajama top. No, he decided: neither one. He stood up and his feet made fleshy padding sounds as he entered a white tiled bathroom where he turned on the light, gripped and twisted a spigot, and splashed cold water onto his face. In the pipes, wakened air clanged and rattled, then abated.
Yes, shut up
, Mayo thought,
there are sick people here who are sleeping
. “Not me, though,” he murmured aloud. “Not me.”

Drying off with a threadbare, faded blue towel, Mayo paused in his tentative dabbing and rubbing to meet his own gaze in the cabinet mirror, where grieving green eyes in an angular face beneath a bristling of iron gray hair stared back with the sting of recrimination. “Incompetent!” Mayo murmured bitterly. “Fraud!” He was brooding about the patient who had died. Flopping the towel back onto a hook, he stared into the
mirror at a quiet birthmark, a milk white oval indentation palely nestled near the corner of his drooping right eye. “Come on, what did I dream?” once again he asked himself. Nothing came and he turned away.

And then suddenly the dream opened up its heart to him, beginning with a Christ Child aged about five. Wearing only a dhoti and brown leather sandals in addition to a stethoscope dangling from his neck, he was solemnly conducting grand rounds through the Neurology Ward as he led a procession of note-taking medical students to the bed of the blind man he had famously cured at the Pool of Bethesda. The Child’s expression was mild and sweet and his body was shrouded in a faint white glow as he nodded at the blind man reassuringly. “We meet again,” he told him with a smile. His head propped on pillows, the miracle’s recipient did not respond but lay rigidly still, his eyes wide with suspicion and apprehension. The Child unhooked his chart from the bedstead, scanned it, replaced it, and then turned to the students who lifted their clipboards and pens to take notes.

“What we have here is a genuine miracle,” announced the Child. He pointed to the patient with an index finger at the top of which an inch-high Band-Aid was wrapped, “This man was blind from birth,” he recounted, “so I applied a bit of spittle to his eyes with my fingers and then asked him if he saw anything. He said, ‘Yes. I can see. I see people. But they look like trees that are walking around.’ ” At this the formerly blind man appeared to relax, as if at last understanding that the group had not come to accuse him of some crime or perhaps a lack of adequate appreciation, and the miracle of sight was not about to be reversed. He shut his eyes peacefully and nodded as if in confirmation of what he was hearing. “So I gave him a second
application,” said the Child; “but no spittle this time, just my fingertips touching his eyes. And right away he saw everything without distortion. And
that
, please observe, was the actual miracle: it was that
second
laying on of my hands.” The Child glanced around at the students who were rapidly scribbling on their clipboards and pads. “Now can someone tell me why?” he asked them benignly. A young woman with violet hair raised a tattooed hand that was clenched in a fist, and when it opened a pure white dove fluttered out. “Yes?” the Child said to her, his eyebrows curving upward expectantly.

“Oh, well, even if the blindness was psychosomatic,” she began . . .” But the formerly blind man’s eyes flared open and he cut her off.

“Are you calling me a liar?” he angrily challenged. Above the group the white dove was now circling and diving, making random, quick pecking attacks that drew blood.

“No,” the student responded; “I’m just saying that the cause wouldn’t matter. After many years of blindness, you still wouldn’t have had any depth perception or be able to synthesize shape or form. Remember how it hurt when you opened your eyes? How all you saw was just a spinning mass of lights and bright colors? Sure, your eyes were repaired but your brain still hadn’t learned how to process their data. It takes a month of hard work just to be able to distinguish a few simple objects.” Here the blind man looked mollified, lowering his gaze and mutely nodding in agreement. “No, of
course
you’re not lying,” the student summed up. “It’s
only
if you’d really had your sight restored in that first attempt at a cure that you would have seen men who looked like trees. If the whole thing was a lie you’d have said you saw perfectly the
first
time you were cured.”

Here suddenly the dove swooped down with stunning speed and bit the Christ Child’s pale soft cheek. A gout of blood gushed out of the puncture, splashing on the whiteness of the blind man’s bed and from there to the floor in pumping streams as the dove became a bloodstained winged hypodermic syringe flapping swiftly away to the end of the hall, where it sharply turned a corner and, gleaming, vanished. Then abruptly, and ending the dream, the violet-haired student was standing in front of Mayo dressed in Victorian widow’s weeds. She raised her arm and her hand unclasped to reveal three bright green dew-glistened fruits while her other hand held out a folded-up newspaper. “ ‘Cousin Harriet,’ ” she mournfully intoned, “ ‘here is the
Boston Evening Transcript’
and some lovely poisoned figs
.”

Mayo put a finger to his lips and nodded, thinking that he knew what might have triggered the dream. He’d recently pondered this very episode in the gospel of St. Mark in which the blind man cured at the Pool of Bethesda could at first see only men who looked like “trees that are walking around,” and only saw perfectly and clearly after Christ had repeated the healing action. An avowed agnostic—though the mystery of design in the human body had nagged him to belief in an amorphous intelligence at large in the world, which he would sometimes refer to as “Maurice”—Mayo found the gospel passage baffling. And unnerving. In the time of Christ, cures for blindness were medically unknown. So if the healing at Bethesda hadn’t actually happened, how could Mark have known the symptoms of post-blind syndrome? Mayo lifted a hand and looked at his fingernails as he nodded his head a little. Yes, the dream had regurgitated his musings.

But the winged syringe? The blood? Poisoned figs?

The neurologist finished his waking ablutions, dressed, and
boiled water on a single-burner hot plate for the brewing of a heavily sugared tea in an oversized thick white porcelain mug which he carried with him out into the dimly lit hall where, for a time, he stood silent and still, irresolute, his head bowed down in thought and a hand in the pocket of a medical jacket that, just as with his rumpled baggy trousers, was much too large for his sticklike frame. He seemed not to wear his clothes but to inhabit them. “Miracles,” he muttered. They’d been suddenly as common in these antiseptic halls as the moans of the soldiers in the Burn Ward late at night. On Monday a nurse named Samia Maroon had reported to him breathlessly that she had seen some sort of apparition. And then there was that two-year-old boy in the Children’s Ward with rabdomial sarcoma, a rapid-spreading, always fatal cancer. For weeks the boy’s X-rays had turned up a mass in his chest growing steadily and ominously larger. Overnight the mass vanished. Examining the X-ray, “It’s that damned elusive Pimpernel,” the confounded neurologist had murmured. The boy had also suffered from dysautonomia, a mysterious crippling of the nervous system that afflicted only the Ashkenazim, the descendants of Eastern European Jews, and whose victims were unable to cry or feel pain. Like the cancer, the disease and its symptoms had vanished.
Maurice!
Mayo thought,
The crazy goniff doesn’t play by his own damned rules!
As for the nurse’s apparition:
Couldn’t be!

Staring down into his tea, the neurologist sighed and looked wistful; no poppy-seed bagels to be found at this hour.
They don’t drop from the sky anymore,
he mourned. He lurched ahead, disconsolately slouching through the open double doors beside the barred and shuttered counters of a Bank Leumi branch, thus exiting the medical school to cross the dark stone squares of a courtyard and enter the hospital’s main reception.
Two heavyset women were mopping the floor, sloshing water and suds back and forth hypnotically on the beige and black speckle of the tiles. The cavernous and echoing hall that by day was filled with bustle and the chatter of life was now still and deserted except for the two charwomen. And one other person, Mayo saw with dismay. His gaunt face gray with a stubble of beard, a shriveled old Arab in a threadbare dark blue pinstriped suit was seated on one of the cedar benches where the outpatients waited their turn to see a doctor. His spindly frame drawn tightly erect, the old Arab was staring at Mayo intently with an air of hope and expectation.
Meshugge,
thought Mayo,
in the Arabic
velterrein,
completely lost in space.
Softly groaning, Mayo sidled to the bench and sat down.

“Good morning,” he quietly greeted the man in Arabic.

“Morning of roses.”

“Morning of gold. Tell me, why are you here again so early, my brother? We’ve gone through this once before, friend, have we not?” Mayo had recently encountered the Arab while returning from a late-night call on a patient complaining of excruciating “phantom limb” pain. The old fellow had been adamant in his conviction that because he was an Arab he might not be treated unless he was clearly the first in line.

“Uncle, didn’t you get to see the doctor last week?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And he treated you?”

“Yes.”

“So then why are we here now, uncle?”

“Why not?”

Mayo pursed his lips and looked blocked “Why not?” served a function in colloquial Arabic closely akin to the Yiddish “
nu
,” a vague and multifaceted response with innumerable
shades and twists of meaning including no meaning whatsoever. But before the neurologist could narrow the question, the Arab touched his fingers to the side of his head, declaring woefully, “Please. This is new. I have headaches.”

“There’s no need to come so early, though, uncle. Really. Arab or Jew, it makes no difference. Have we still not discovered this, uncle?”

“Well, the war.”

Mayo’s gaze flicked down to the patient application form rolled up in the Arab’s left hand. At Mayo’s glance a faint papery crinkling sound could be heard as the apprehensive Arab tightened his grip.

Mayo looked up at him again without expression.

“Did you fill out the form?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“And did you tell them again that you are Puerto Rican?”

The Arab’s eyes shimmered with guilt and defiance.

“Why not?”

Mayo lowered his head for a moment, then looked up.

“You’re a farmer, uncle?”

“Shopkeeper.”

“Shopkeeper. What do you sell?”

“Souvenirs.”

“Ah, I see. And now business is bad?”

“Yes, bad. Very bad. It’s the war.”

Mayo’s gaze ran a scan of the Arab’s face. And then abruptly he stood up. “Upstairs they will probably X-ray your skull,” he pronounced, “but I am guessing your headaches are due to stress. When the tourists come back you’ll be fine. In the meantime, eat fried green bananas. Doctor’s orders.
They’re rich in potassium, uncle. Your people all love them. They’re a Puerto Rican specialty. Eat them.”

Mayo turned and strode away.

“God be with you,” the Arab called out.

“
Fried bananas
!”

Mayo stepped around a charwoman’s flailing mop and then made his way slowly to a bank of elevators. Finding one open and waiting, he stepped into it and pushed a round black button marked “3.” The doors closed. A slight lurch and then soundless ascension. But on arriving at “3,” Mayo did not get off. He impulsively pushed the black button marked “Mem,” rode down to that floor, and then again pushed the button marked “3.” Because the hospital’s elevators during normal hours were crammed to asphyxiating fullness, Mayo’s sense of untrammeled space was luxurious. At one point, he murmured, “Toyland, please.” He left the elevator glutted with satisfaction.