From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Leif
Leif is one of the two protagonists of Beach Surgery, a military engineer in a state of physical damage and memory loss. He begins the story with three temporary injuries — he cannot walk, cannot see (his eyes are bandaged), and his heart is "out of whack," kept going by a hacked-together external pacemaker with a blinking red diode on his floral shirt. He clutches a massive hand cannon "as though he hopes to fuse it with his bones."[1]
The three injuries map to the three chapters of each half of the story. The name Leif is an anagram of "Life."
Backstory
In a conflict zone near a beachfront, Leif dives from a cliff to save a boy taken by the waves and is smashed unconscious. Katita, the triage nurse who resuscitates him, decides from that moment that "Leif is her tool of change." At the story's climax, white wings push from his shoulder-blades and he briefly flies — before he falls. See the wings.
Appearances across the C. W. Smith oeuvre
Like Katita, Leif recurs across C. W. Smith's works as one of the "instruments of return" — in Saltando (a piano player at a street fair who falls from a boulder into the baths), Leaving/Leading (an obelisk to reach her), Summer Endzone (a settled garden couple), A Billiard Table with Five Balls and Twelve Cues (a UN-conference academic on a Shanbudia island), Pugil (a baker and prizefighter — renamed Max in the standalone version), Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time (a one-armed solar-punk leader), and Their Most August Public Organ. The name is an anagram of "Life."
See also
References
- ↑ Smith, C. W. A Complicated Surgery…, 2020.