[Can't you hear them?]
As the people involved in the operation were swept up in unprecedented excitement, the patient asked this question.
Kraft could imagine the scene: the celebrating crowd had gone quiet, like a school of fish noticing a film of ice forming on the water. They hadn't fully understood what was happening, only that something as intangible and self-evident as the cold had changed in their surroundings.
The patient, who had just recovered from a serious illness, was in high spirits. He even had a glass of wine that day. But every so often, he would suddenly turn to look somewhere, with the reflex of someone who thought he'd heard his name.
He was certain he'd heard voices, and that they were calling to him, though they belonged to different speakers and he couldn't make out what they were saying.
"It was like a crowd of uninvited guests had slipped into the room." That was how the owner of the notes described it.
It would have made sense to explain this as an imbalance of bodily fluids caused by blood loss during the operation. For instance, a lack of hot Red Fluid might have made the cold White Fluid relatively more active, causing heightened mental sensitivity.
But the patient's short-term subjective feedback didn't support the diagnosis, and the voices seemed to be coming from increasingly clear directions.
During a follow-up visit several days later, they found the patient trying to pry up a sewer manhole cover beside the hospital wall with an iron bar. The scars on his sturdy arms had healed, and new granulation tissue had nearly grown over the sutures, which they planned to remove in stages.
[They're down there.]
Something must have gone wrong. The note-taker was certain of it, and carefully documented the case