Page 361 - The Kite Runner

350 Khaled Hosseini

neatly parted hair, and I see he is not Dr. Nawaz at all but Ray-
mond Andrews, the little embassy man with the potted tomatoes.
Andrews cocks his head. Narrows his eyes.

In the daytime, the hospital was a maze of teeming, angled
hallways, a blur of blazing-white overhead fluorescence. I came to
know its layout, came to know that the fourth-floor button in the
east wing elevator didn’t light up, that the door to the men’s room
on that same floor was jammed and you had to ram your shoulder
into it to open it. I came to know that hospital life has a rhythm,
the flurry of activity just before the morning shift change, the
midday hustle, the stillness and quiet of the late-night hours
interrupted occasionally by a blur of doctors and nurses rushing
to revive someone. I kept vigil at Sohrab’s bedside in the daytime
and wandered through the hospital’s serpentine corridors at night,
listening to my shoe heels clicking on the tiles, thinking of what I
would say to Sohrab when he woke up. I’d end up back in the
ICU, by the whooshing ventilator beside his bed, and I’d be no
closer to knowing.
After three days in the ICU, they withdrew the breathing tube
and transferred him to a ground-level bed. I wasn’t there when
they moved him. I had gone back to the hotel that night to get
some sleep and ended up tossing around in bed all night. In the
morning, I tried to not look at the bathtub. It was clean now,
someone had wiped off the blood, spread new floor mats on the
floor, and scrubbed the walls. But I couldn’t stop myself from sit-
ting on its cool, porcelain edge. I pictured Sohrab filling it with
warm water. Saw him undressing. Saw him twisting the razor han-
dle and opening the twin safety latches on the head, sliding the
blade out, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. I pictured
him lowering himself into the water, lying there for a while, his