First Place
Short Fiction
Dr. Manin was on his way into the elevator to leave the hospital when an interning nurse informed him that the old man in Room 203 had grown back his teeth. Room 203 was Mr. Andersen’s room, and since he had remained unconscious for two weeks, they were simply waiting for him to expire. Dr. Manin thought nothing of it, and would have continued to had not the night charge nurse waited for two hours past her shift to tell him a similar story the following morning. This time, she added that two visiting nuns had proclaimed it a miracle.
When he arrived at the room, Sister Maria and Sister Maria Maria were already present. The nuns had adorned the room with roses and unlit votive candles and were still perfecting the smallest details of a shrine. The room had already taken on the appearance of being lit by an unseen stained-glass window. The blinds were tightly shut, and a pink aura arose from the blend of roses and fluorescent lights. On the wall was a picture Sister Maria had painted of Christ and Doubting Thomas. The patient looked like an Indian effigy or Rameses himself on the barge to the afterlife.
“It is quite all right,” Sister Maria said glancing up. “We have already checked with the nurses about our presence. We are here to watch and stand in the midst of what seems to be a miracle.”
Dr. Manin watched them move about the room. “His funeral must have been like this,” he thought and could see his own grandfather’s silent body. As a small boy, his mother had not allowed him to attend the funeral to see his grandfather tightly packaged and groomed. Since then he had become the theme of repeated dreams.
Dr. Manin had not yet checked the patient. “A silly mistake,” he thought, “someone must have misplaced their dentures.” The nuns moved aside to allow him through. They were dressed identically in gray habits and both held the quality of transcendence, but their faces seemed to mock each other. Sister Maria’s nose was large, but Sister Maria Maria’s nose towered above all conception; and where Sister Maria Maria’s ears were enormous, Sister Maria’s seemed to stretch out into eternity. “There is nothing worse than amorphous nuns,” he thought. He could smell the fresh roses. Dr. Manin lifted up the patient’s loose gums and saw two rows of perfect teeth.
The next day, the tests began and Dr. Manin performed them all himself. If this was someone’s idea of a prank, he saw no necessity in being the brunt of it. First he examined the teeth themselves. They were not as perfect as he thought. They were all stained a subtle yellow and one of his incisors had grown in crooked. Dr. Manin had read once in a medical journal about a man finally losing his last baby tooth at the age of 33. For a while he thought perhaps that Mr. Andersen had never grown his mature teeth and that they had just now finally appeared. But now, all at once? It was almost rational he thought, but dental records disproved that explanation.
So Dr. Manin moved to unrelated regions for answers and checked Mr. Andersen’s reflexes. His ears and throat. The size of his arm as compared to his leg. Dr. Manin was limited to the tests of his specialization, and at last he probed the grand mystery. But his only conclusion was that Mr. Andersen’s body was that of a degenerating old man and the X rays proved his teeth were real.
All of the tests were repeated in the same order the following day. Except for a rash and a change in the solidity of stool, Dr. Manin found no irregularities. An allergy test was performed, which showed Mr. Andersen was allergic to roses. So the room was sanitized and all of the roses were removed. The nuns seemed not to mind at all and continued to watch with all devotion, as they had done since the news of the miracle had reached them. Their presence had aggravated him from the beginning but since the room had lost its pink hue and had regained its sterile white glow, Dr. Manin was somewhat calmer. He saw it as a small victory.
“Perhaps this was how his funeral was,” Dr. Manin thought, “something more simple and plain.” He could see his grandfather in a simple room and casket. It was as simple as the decorations of the room where he last saw him. He remembered. They were watching a documentary on the elephants of Africa. His grandfather stood on his chair and swung his thin arm like a trunk. The boy had never seen an elephant before and his grandfather raised his voice in imitation, howling as his mustache poked alongside his arm like malformed tusks. His grandfather had told him once that he had a mustache like Von Bismarck’s, but to tell the truth, his grandfather did not know whether Von Bismarck had a mustache or not, or if he did whether it even resembled his own. Someone had told him once, admirably, that his mustache was an identical, if not an exact replica, of Von Bismarck’s, and his grandfather had long since resolved that since his mother was German, though the last name Manin hid all record of it, his and Von Bismarck’s mustaches, had Von Bismarck chosen to grow one, would have looked remarkably similar. The boy, not knowing what a Von Bismarck was, assumed it was some sort of pouty terrier.
The boy had never been so close to an elephant. “Grandfather is an elephant,” he thought, and his grandfather swung his arm higher to show his aged teeth. But then there was a crack, and a rattle. Perhaps it was his grandfather’s body under the pulling weight of life, or the infirmities of age, or perhaps it was the boards of the chair finally giving way under the weight of a human pachyderm. His grandfather toppled, his arm still balanced, his mouth still gaping as he lay behind the chair. The boy continued to imitate the high tenor moan of his grandfather long after his grandfather had stopped. He continued until his mother found him, wailing, with his arm above his head, circling the poised body of his dead grandfather.
The constant reverence of the therapist reinforced the image of his grandfather in his mind, but the dreams did not start until medical school and he would dream every night of him. At times, he would be grazing, or running with the herd of a thousand grandfathers, all with their arm pressed against their face. But each time the old man’s presence seemed to punish him and it was because of the constant nightmares that he chose to study geriatrics, thinking that it might atone for something, and release him from his grandfather’s visitations. “Yes,” Dr. Manin thought, “his funeral must have been similar.”
By the second week, Dr. Manin had stopped all of the tests and the nuns seemed more elated than ever. “What reasoning does Science hold that only the Lord can provide?” they asked. Perhaps it had all been a terrible time-consuming mistake, Dr. Manin thought to himself, and had began to believe that Mr. Andersen had not grown back his teeth, but that they had always been there and had somehow gone unnoticed. It was a sound hypothesis though he knew it was untrue, but there was a great comfort in believing it. He had, for the last two weeks, taken all his breaks with Mr. Andersen, either testing or observing him. At times, the nuns would visit other patients and he would be left alone with the old man.
Mr. Andersen was in his eighties and Dr. Manin would sit and look at his wrinkles and small old hands. Though he was a geriatrician, he had never looked so closely at any of his patients. He was not sure if he had ever paid attention or if there was something special in Mr. Andersen. Mr. Andersen actually looked holy, or at least peaceful, Dr. Manin thought.
But then there were those teeth. And the picture Sister Maria had painted of the Upper Room still above Mr. Andersen’s head with Christ standing triumphant, his mouth open wide and his arms outcast as Doubting Thomas’ head peered through His wounds, inspecting the marks of his teacher’s agony and his salvation. All was captured in an abstract style Sister Maria called “salus sanctus.” Dr. Manin found it all too familiar. When Christ came back, he thought, he still had his humanity. His wounds were not erased in some vague genderless eternal life. He was risen. How horrible. Even heaven is full of a host of the misshapen. The stoned and broken-hipped martyrs still exposing their earthly wounds. At the big feast, if he made the list, he would have to sit by some misshape. He would not be able to eat.
As he was leaving the room, the nuns were coming down the hall to continue their vigil, and Dr. Manin for the first time spoke to them.
“How can you believe in something unseen and so unnatural?”
“Oh doctor, we are only of little faith, there are those who hold more understanding than us.” Sister Maria Maria continued, “There was Sister Helen who would sit in front of the Blessed Mother with her rosary day and night, until her Superior made her stop. Some of us thought she had been blessed with the loving Imitation of Christ, for her hands were cut so deep from the repeated Hail Marys that her fingers had to be amputated. She was truly blessed.”
“She sounds compulsive,” Dr. Manin said.
“And there was also the priest who ate the fingers off the statuary at Saint Michael’s. He wasn’t discovered until his beard turned white. Some of us thought he had seen the face of God but his beard had turned from eating so much plaster. He was a paragon, a...”
“He was insane,” Dr. Manin said.
“Ah,” Sister Maria Maria said, smiling at her comrade as if they had been waiting for this moment, as if it were rehearsed or foreordained in some nameless time, on some lofty height. “Ah, they are the blood that breathes the life into the Lord.”
Dr. Manin continued to the nurse’s station. He did not turn back though there was a shudder and a pounding in his heart.
On the Monday of the third week, Dr. Manin was ready to reexamine Mr. Andersen’s teeth; they were all that he could think of. He stopped outside Room 203 to listen, but heard no praying or chanting and felt it safe to enter the room free of nuns. He had heard right, the nuns were not there. But there was no Mr. Andersen either. All the walls were empty and the bed was neatly made.
A nurse still on duty from the night shift recounted every minute of the old man’s death, and of how the nuns tried to revive him. While Sister Maria Maria prayed, Sister Maria got on the bed and lay on the old man, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands like she had read that Elisha had once done. A woman whose mouth had touched no man’s except for a statue of Saint Joseph stretched her body upon Mr. Andersen. Nothing happened, and she repeated it. But he did not sneeze or open his eyes. His body did not even grow warm from hers being pressed so close to his, and the nuns both joined together and prayed for his soul. The nurses let him go gently and other than the peculiar movement of nuns, he died a quiet death. His body had been moved late that night and housekeeping had already readied the room for another patient.
The rest of the day was a blur for Dr. Manin except for the brief moment two nuns came on the floor to visit with patients. They were both wearing light blue habits and one wore glasses. It was not Sister Maria or Sister Maria Maria, but Dr. Manin asked them about what had happened as if there was one great nun consciousness. From the hospital chaplain they had heard. Sister Maria and Sister Maria Maria had decided that it was not a miracle, for no one was healed, and no life had changed. He was simply an old man who grew back his teeth, an absurdity of nature.
“Of course, an absurdity of nature,” Dr. Manin repeated to them. He continued the rest of his shift as if all life was the same technical endeavor as he had always thought it to be. But his mind was torn apart. Not a miracle? Just that morning he had thought about the idea of a miracle without abhorrence and dread. He thought perhaps this was another trick, not as innocent as an old man growing back his teeth, but something much crueler. They had led him to the brink of mystery and had now tossed him in. He could see Sister Maria Maria’s smile and it had changed to something sinister. It was about the nuns’ every presence and it was in that painting of Sister Maria’s.
Before he went to sleep that night he recognized it, but he did not think it though the thought was there. As there was something of Von Bismarck in his grandfather, there was something of his grandfather in that painted Savior. And then the miracle happened. For the first time in 15 years he did not dream of his grandfather. Instead he shook and sweated coldly in his sleep as he dreamt of a thousand howling Christs.
