In my hospital bed, hardly able to move, I heard about Milan’s boat ride, and my first reaction was envy. Long before the attack I had watched a Meryl Streep movie, Let Them All Talk, most of which happened aboard that very ship. I remembered thinking that the movie wasn’t much, but the boat looked amazing.

  I spoke to Milan before he sailed. “I want to go on that boat too,” I said. “Maybe when I’m better we can do it together.”

  “Yes, Dad,” he said. “You’ll get better and we’ll go.”

  It felt good to dream about a happier future.

  * * *

  At the Day Fifteen mark, I was walking up and down the hospital corridors without assistance. I was much less frail in voice and body. The army of doctors that inspected various parts of me during the course of each day expressed satisfaction, even surprise. The top man, a surgeon with the improbably gastronomic name of James Beard, said it might soon be time to send me off to rehab. The good people at Rusk in Manhattan said they were ready for me. The ambulette was ready. “Just a couple more days,” I was told.

  My stitched-up eye was doing okay. My left hand was still immobile in its splint, but I was told they would remove that at Rusk and begin physical therapy. The little bags attached to my body were taken away, because nothing was leaking into them anymore. Hopefully, no more liquid would collect beneath my lung. All the stab wounds and gashes seemed to be closed. Even Dr. Pain didn’t need to squeeze any more saliva out of my face. Dr. Eye, Dr. Hand, Dr. Stabbings, Dr. Slash, Dr. Liver, Dr. Tongue—all began to sign off.

  “I think we can take the staples out,” I was told by Dr. Staples on Day Seventeen. “Everything seems to have healed pretty well.”

  “When they are out,” I asked, “can I shave?” I had seventeen days’ growth of beard hair around the wounds in my neck and face. It felt itchy and uncomfortable.

  “Not for a while,” said Dr. Staples. “Give it a couple of weeks.”

  Snip-snip went the cutters, and the metal staples fell out. Some snips were painless, others stung, but all of them felt good. At least I wasn’t being artificially held together anymore.

  One of the doctors brought me a gift of chocolates from the “best artisan chocolatier in Erie.” Another brought Eliza and me hot dogs, also the best in town. Nurses rustled up eyepatches for me to try on. They weren’t comfortable, but the thought was kind. Everyone was happy. One of the nurses told Eliza, “Very few people walk out of here.” Meaning, most leave in body bags.

  Day Eighteen. I was wearing clothes, rather than a hospital smock, for the first time since I arrived…a T-shirt, tracksuit pants, sneakers. I was to be taken in a wheelchair through the hospital to a discreet loading bay where, we hoped, there would be no media attention. We didn’t want it to be known that I was being moved to New York City. We wanted a media blackout, to let me recover quietly, without prying eyes or ears.

  Time to go.

  New York City in the late afternoon, shining in the sunlight. It did my heart good to see it again, its jolies-laides streets both generous and mean, so much talent in the air, so many rats underfoot, its people striding forth in summer shorts, its parks brightened by young girls in flower, its rusting metal bridges, its pinnacles, its terrible road surfaces, its everything-at-once-ness, its inexhaustible abundance, its crowded excess, and construction sites and music everywhere. Home. As the ambulette moved through Manhattan I had the feeling of being back in my right place. I had left this busy sanctuary nineteen days ago and been trapped in a paradox: almost killed in the misleadingly peaceful gentleness of one distant place, and then saved in another faraway neighborhood of unsafe streets. Every minute of my time at Hamot I had felt like a fish out of water, in spite of the skill of surgeons and the kindnesses of nurses. I have always been a big-city boy—Bombay, London, New York. Cities’ stories were my story too, and here again was my preferred ocean, this story-sea of concrete and steel in which I had always preferred to swim.

  Arriving at Rusk was somewhat macabre, because everyone was anxious that I not be seen, preferring an anonymous arrival that didn’t alert the news media to my presence in the city, for security reasons. So Eliza put a scarf over my face, and my stretcher was brought out of the ambulette and placed on a gurney, and I was wheeled anonymously through unknown space. It felt a little too much like being dead. I tried to brush that thought aside as I was brought scarf-faced into an elevator and up to a room and then the scarf was removed. This first room had nowhere for Eliza to sleep, even though she had arranged with Rusk that that would be possible; we had to wait and then move to a second room.

  I was back in the city, on Seventeenth Street and Second Avenue, and yet I wasn’t really back, because I couldn’t tell anyone I was there. My feelings of elation evaporated. Once again I felt dragged back into the ugly past, the days of being “in hiding” in Britain, living at “undisclosed locations” with armed police officers, far from everyone I loved. There were armed police officers outside this room as well. But at least Eliza was inside it, and Milan was on his way. The Queen Mary 2 had arrived in New York the day before. Eliza’s sister, Melissa, had met Milan off the boat. We had rented an Airbnb place for him on the Upper East Side. Our home was a question mark. Eliza had arranged for ADT security services to come and give the place a serious security upgrade—cameras, panic buttons, all of that. I thought it was better that Milan not stay there. For one thing, the block was newly infested by paparazzi. Melissa drove him to his rented apartment and he settled in, and then, the next day, I arrived and he came to see me. Before he entered my room, Eliza sat with him in a small visitors’ room and told him what to expect—my injuries, my fatigue, and the rest.

  It was an emotional reunion. My energy level was low, but I was overjoyed to see him. He told me later that he had dealt with most of his grief and fear about what happened to me during his long solitary passage across the ocean, so that by the time he arrived in my room at Rusk he could just be happy to see me, and to see that I was chatty, telling jokes, “still being Dad.” I’m glad he never saw the worst of it, although he was distressed by the bandaged eye, the hand in its splint, the scarred chest, which he wanted to see even though (or because) I told him that the scars made my torso look like a subway map. It was enormously uplifting for me to have him there, and for him to see, as he told me, that I could get up and walk.

  Optimism flooded through me—optimism, my great weakness or my great strength (depending on whom you asked and on my own mood as well). In Voltaire’s Candide (whose full title is Candide, ou l’Optimisme), the hero’s positivity in the face of the world’s horrors is close to idiotic. (If this is the best of all possible worlds, then those parallel universes must be hellish indeed.) When I wrote my novel Quichotte I lampooned my own nature by making my title character an optimist of the Candidean kind. And now, bedridden and gravely injured as I was, I began to believe that the worst was past, that Milan’s arrival was a sign that a corner had been turned, and happy days would soon be here again.

  A bell rang to signal the end of visiting hours, and Milan left for the night. Soon afterward my bladder informed me that my optimism was premature.

  There’s no elegant way to put this. I had been having trouble urinating. I would feel the urge and reach for the bedside urinal, but then there was a blockage. There would be considerable discomfort, but not much else. They brought in a machine that could find out how full the bladder was. It was dangerously full, they said. What followed is almost too awful to describe.

  My first catheter.

  Dear reader, if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact. I had passed my seventy-fifth birthday without having this vile ignominy inflicted on me, but here it was. Let me just say that the noises coming out of my mouth during the procedure were sounds I had never heard before. It was my penis begging for mercy.

  Not to linger too long upon this issue: The urination problems continued. The urge to urinate, the near impossibility of doing so, the discomfort of trying and failing, the bladder filling up. I began to dread the periodic visits of Nurse Bladder with her Bladderometer. And I had good reason to dread them.

  There was a second catheter experience during my time at Rusk.

  And a third.

  Only then did one of the doctors, Dr. Genius, begin to wonder if something in the cocktail of pills and injections I was being given at regular intervals might be causing the problem. He even identified the medication—I thought of it as Evilomycin—that was the probable culprit. They stopped giving it to me, and within hours there was a transformation. It felt as if a dam inside me had opened its sluice gates. And what had felt nearly impossible suddenly became easy again.

  When a patient discovers that it’s the medicine that’s making him sick, frustration can boil over. I tried to keep my feelings under control, but I may have partially failed to do so. The nurses were understanding. Nurse Bladder kept checking up on me, but now the news from the Bladderometer was good. Everyone was relieved. And nobody apologized for prescribing the Evilomycin.

  (A medical condition caused by medication is an iatrogenic disorder. Excellent term for a not-excellent thing. I learned it from Martin Amis’s wife, Isabel Fonseca. Martin had found it, of course.)

  I wasn’t completely in the clear, however. The medicine-induced problem had created a secondary problem: a severe urinary-tract infection. At least two weeks on antibiotics would be necessary to get rid of that.

  * * *

  Milan had been researching knife attacks. “Dad,” he said, sitting by my bed, “there are so many cases where somebody gets stabbed just once and dies. And you got stabbed like fifteen times and you’re still alive.”

  I nodded. “You know,” I told him, “the fictional character with whom I now most strongly identify is Wolverine.” The X-Man with the superheroic “healing factor.”

  That got a laugh. “Yeah, but without the claws, Dad.”

  Now that Milan was with us, Eliza could take some time off. She had barely left my side since her arrival in Erie, but now she could have a bit of a break—she and Milan could take turns at my bedside. The day at Rusk had a full timetable, physical therapy alternating with occupational therapy, with inspections by doctors and nurses in between. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon when the day’s work was finally done. Milan came to see me for the afternoon shift, and Eliza arrived later.

  We had also decided that the “bed” provided for Eliza was too small, too rudimentary, too uncomfortable for her to use. “It’s crazy for you to have to try and sleep there,” I said, “when your own bed at home is just a taxi ride away.”

  She was worried about going home. “What about the paparazzi?” she said.

  “Fuck the paparazzi,” I said. “Get a good night’s sleep.”

  * * *

  After that I was alone at night. I was trapped in a bed that had an alarm switched on so it would scream if I tried to get out of it unaided. This did not feel like freedom. My whole world had shrunk down to the size of this screaming bed, and hospital beds were not really for sleeping in. They were for keeping you in your place while people came in and out at all hours to check your vital signs, draw blood, feed you medication, and ask you how you were feeling. Why the police officers sitting outside your room felt that 3 a.m. was the best time to tell one another risqué jokes, and then laugh raucously, was unclear. Why the best time to draw blood was 4 a.m. was not explained to me. Why Nurse Eye needed to come in and turn on bright overhead lights to change my bandage at 5 a.m. was likewise unexplained. By 5:30, the hospital was fully awake, its day had begun, and I could forget about sleep.

  As can readily be gleaned from the above paragraph, I was beginning to go a little stir-crazy. Outside my window, seven floors below me, I could hear the music of the city: the ambulances, the fire trucks, the police sirens, the SUVs with their windows rolled down blaring hip-hop to the heavens, drunken revelers laughing and weaving their way home. These familiar sounds pleased me, but also underlined a melancholy fact: I was in my city but not, as yet, fully a part of it. The knife had severed me from my world, cut me brutally away, and placed me in this screaming bed.

  During those empty sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. When a knife makes the first cut in a wedding cake, it is a part of the ritual by which two people are joined together. A kitchen knife is an essential part of the creative act of cooking. A Swiss Army knife is a helper, able to perform many small but necessary tasks, such as opening a bottle of beer. Occam’s razor is a conceptual knife, a knife of theory, that cuts through a lot of bullshit by reminding us to prefer the simplest available explanations of things to more complex ones. In other words, a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral. It is the misuse of knives that is immoral.

  Whoa, I told myself. A hard pause. Wasn’t that the same thing as saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”? Was I falling into a familiar trap?

  No. Because a gun had only one use, one purpose. You couldn’t cut a cake with a Glock, or cook with an AR-15, or open a bottle of beer with James Bond’s favorite Walther PPK. A gun’s only way of being in the world was violence; its sole purpose was to cause damage, even to take lives, animal or human. A knife was not like a gun.

  Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine.

  But was that just a consoling lie I was telling myself? Just meaningless bombast? Did I even want to fight back? There were moments—frequent moments in that oppressive bed—when I felt I’d been fighting for most of my life and maybe the universe was telling me I didn’t have to do it anymore, I could just stop. I could cry uncle and admit defeat. Maybe that was the message of the knife. Victory City would be out in February. My twenty-first book: I was proud of it. I hoped it might be well received. Perhaps that would be as good a time as any to stop, the best exit line I would ever have. Maybe it was time to take the Philip Roth road out of literature and stick a Post-it note on my computer that read “The struggle is over.” In this best of all possible worlds, il faut cultiver notre jardin. Not that I knew anything about gardening, or wanted to learn.

  My first visitor, other than family, was my agent and friend Andrew Wylie. Andrew looks stern but he is an emotional man, and he was close to tears as we embraced. Andrew is a loyal, warmhearted, very intelligent, and very funny man, very different from “the Jackal,” the nickname the book trade has given him. (I think he likes it. It makes him sound dangerous.) He was clear about the best way forward.

  “I don’t know if I can write again,” I told him.

  “You shouldn’t think about doing anything for a year,” he said, “except getting better.”

  “That’s good advice,” I said.

  “But eventually you’ll write about this, of course.”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not sure that I want to.”

  “You’ll write about it,” he said.

  * * *

  The bathroom attached to my room at Rusk had a mirror. For the first time in several weeks, I could take a look at my face. I told the nurse who had guided me into the toilet that I was fine being by myself, shut the door, and faced the looking-glass. Earlier that morning, a second Dr. Staples, a New York Staples, M.D., taking over from the Erie version, told me there were still a few staples left in my neck, hidden by the growth of beard there, and he took them out. So the face I saw in the mirror was at least free of bits of metal holding it together. The wounds had all closed.

  A man sees his reflection and isn’t sure he recognizes himself. Who are you, he asks the figure in the mirror. Do I even know you? Will you at some point turn back into me or is this what I’m stuck with now, this wild-haired one-eyed demi-stranger? “I’m looking through you,” the Beatles sang. “Where did you go?” The man in the toilet talks to the man in the mirror. Are you the ghost of my future? The lips of his reflection do not move. Are you somebody they have brought in to be my replacement? the toilet man asks the mirror man. They think I’ve been miscast in this role, don’t they? They found somebody else, right. They have brought a dead man back to life and given him my scenes. I will be discarded and it will be you instead, and then what happens to me? Where do I go? What about my story arc? How is that resolved?

  The lips of the man in the mirror do not move. There is a slash across the top of his forehead. There is a cut in the left-hand corner of his mouth. He is heavily, messily unshaven. His right eyelid is stitched shut. He is successful in moving his bowels. He is successful at cleaning and wiping himself. His one eye looks sad. His face looks shocked. He is playing his part well.

  The man in the toilet reaches his hand out toward the surface of the mirror, his undamaged right hand. The surface feels soft, like a thick liquid. His hand passes through it, and then the rest of his body is drawn through as well. Now he is the man beyond the mirror and the mirror is behind him and dark. He is the stranger who has to play his part.

  In the looking-glass world, the other, toilet-world can’t be seen. The rectangle of the mirror is dark, like a movie screen before the movie begins. Then the movie begins. He is in the children’s room of his family home in Bombay, aged seven or so, lying on a bed reading aloud from a book. His sisters pay rapt attention. The book is Peter Pan. He knows this scene. It’s a photograph taken by his father with a Rolleiflex camera. Sameen and he both have blowups of the picture on the wall at home. It’s a childhood idyll that masks the truth.