Page 360 - The Kite Runner
P. 360

The Kite Runner                       349


          have taken his hands and I have brought them up to my face. I
          weep my relief into this stranger’s small, meaty hands and he says
          nothing now. He waits.

          The  intensive  care  unit is L-shaped and dim, a jumble
          of bleeping monitors and whirring machines. Dr. Nawaz leads me
          between  two  rows  of beds  separated  by  white  plastic  curtains.
          Sohrab’s bed is the last one around the corner, the one nearest
          the nurses’ station where two nurses in green surgical scrubs are
          jotting notes on clipboards, chatting in low voices. On the silent
          ride up the elevator with Dr. Nawaz, I had thought I’d weep again
          when I saw Sohrab. But when I sit on the chair at the foot of his
          bed,  looking  at  his  white  face  through  the  tangle  of  gleaming
          plastic tubes and IV lines, I am dry-eyed. Watching his chest rise
          and fall to the rhythm of the hissing ventilator, a curious numb-
          ness washes over me, the same numbness a man might feel sec-
          onds after he has swerved his car and barely avoided a head-on
          collision.
              I doze off, and, when I wake up, I see the sun rising in a but-
          termilk sky through the window next to the nurses’ station. The
          light slants into the room, aims my shadow toward Sohrab. He
          hasn’t moved.
              “You’d do well to get some sleep,” a nurse says to me. I don’t
          recognize her—there must have been a shift change while I’d
          napped. She takes me to another lounge, this one just outside the
          ICU. It’s empty. She hands me a pillow and a hospital-issue blan-
          ket. I thank her and lie on the vinyl sofa in the corner of the
          lounge. I fall asleep almost immediately.
              I dream I am back in the lounge downstairs. Dr. Nawaz walks
          in and I rise to meet him. He takes off his paper mask, his hands
          suddenly whiter than I remembered, his nails manicured, he has
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