Page 307 - The Kite Runner

296 Khaled Hosseini

frowned. Grunted. Armand smiled; his teeth were blinding white.
“Not yet, Amir,” he said, “but soon. When the wires are out.”
He spoke English with a thick, rolling Urdu accent.
Wires?
Armand crossed his arms; he had hairy forearms and wore a
gold wedding band. “You must be wondering where you are, what
happened to you. That’s perfectly normal, the postsurgical state is
always disorienting. So I’ll tell you what I know.”
I wanted to ask him about the wires. Postsurgical? Where was
Aisha? I wanted her to smile at me, wanted her soft hands in mine.
Armand frowned, cocked one eyebrow in a slightly self-
important way. “You are in a hospital in Peshawar. You’ve been
here two days. You have suffered some very significant injuries,
Amir, I should tell you. I would say you’re very lucky to be alive, my
friend.” He swayed his index finger back and forth like a pendu-
lum when he said this. “Your spleen had ruptured, probably—and
fortunately for you—a delayed rupture, because you had signs of
early hemorrhage into your abdominal cavity. My colleagues from
the general surgery unit had to perform an emergency splenec-
tomy. If it had ruptured earlier, you would have bled to death.” He
patted me on the arm, the one with the IV, and smiled. “You also
suffered seven broken ribs. One of them caused a pneumothorax.”
I frowned. Tried to open my mouth. Remembered about the
wires.
“That means a punctured lung,” Armand explained. He tugged
at a clear plastic tubing on my left side. I felt the jabbing again in
my chest. “We sealed the leak with this chest tube.” I followed the
tube poking through bandages on my chest to a container half-
filled with columns of water. The bubbling sound came from there.
“You had also suffered various lacerations. That means ‘cuts.’ ”