Page 360 - The Kite Runner

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