Chapter 8

Kreeger turned the chair back into the gaudy restaurant and looked over at the table of familiar smiling faces, faces that belonged to young pathologists who had driven him to the verge of madness. Now it was almost over and nothing seemed to matter any more. Why had he cared so much, he asked himself. He watched them drain endless glasses of alcohol, trying to impress their elderly tutor, Yap, who seemed to be now on the verge of passing out. They seemed to be enjoying themselves much more without the restraining presence of the foreigner.

The doctor focused his eyes as if they were the viewfinder of a camera attached to a wide-angled lens, holding the whole room steady for a brief moment, before releasing the shutter: his eyes closed, imprinting the scene before him on his conscious mind. It was not that he particularly wanted to remember what was out there, indeed he did not want to do so, he was simply testing himself while under the influence of alcohol. He went through the photographic plate, starting on the left. The nervous waiter with acne standing near the food hatch; the long table pushed against the wall, laden with plates, bowls, and cutlery; the crystal chandelier hanging too low over the only occupied table in the large room—eleven seated people. He went through each of them, putting names to the faces . . . .

He opened his eyes to check; he had missed one of the waitresses—a gangly teenager with buck teeth and drooping shoulders. Where had she appeared from? he thought. The loud clock on the wall, ten past two, where was that? He stopped, blaming the alcohol.

The doctor had been able to perform prodigious feats of skill with his memory since he was an infant, as long as anyone in his family could remember. Playing-cards face down on the carpet memorised and picked up in sequence; scenes from a movie redrawn into a sketch book; characters from a story dreamed about in his sleep. But it wasn’t until he went to medical school that he had honed the ability into the time-saving skill of mental photography. He used it first with textbook diagrams of splayed bodies, a confusion of tissue, organs, lobes—all of which had to be placed and named; and later in anatomy classes, where it was also a way to distance himself from the stinking dissected bodies pinned out on the benches in front of him. He could seal the image cleanly in his mind and then draw up the required diagrams and reports from a safer distance, away from the blood, the stench, but missing nothing. He passed exams with distinction. Later, when he started in the hospital operating theatre, it had saved lives. He could take an entire image of a patient’s opened body to an intricate diagram in a textbook or on a flickering screen of a computer monitor, where he would swiftly compare and update, before taking the new images back to the patient and the job of saving life. In mid-career when he switched from life to death, becoming a pathologist, the skill reverted to being a time-saver again. The urgency of the operating room disappeared. He could finish reports quickly and get back to his academic pursuits, or his new love: flies.

Kreeger looked over at the gangly waitress, the one he had missed in his snapshot, as she carried a dish of colourful balls over to the noisy table, where it was greeted with a cheer. Recently his talent had been slipping—he was getting old? He wasn’t practising enough? He no longer cared about it? And now sitting at the edge of that garish restaurant, half drunk, he realised it was nothing special anymore; anyone who tried could have done better.

He ran his tongue over his teeth and around his gums; the usual film of grease had settled during the meal; he touched the small soap bag in his inside jacket pocket that he had got into the habit of carrying everywhere and looked around for the bathroom.