Phase Six

by Jim Shepard

  He nodded a little, like he’d already been giving that some thought. “Well, it’s not like otherwise I would’ve been fine,” he said.

  “I’m just sorry to put you through any more than you have to go through,” she said.

  He turned off the TV like it had started to bother him. “Everything we’re selling in this business: it’s all some version of ‘It’s not always your fault,’ ” he told her.

  She teared up, unexpectedly, and then blinked the tears away. They were not only for what he’d been going through, but also for herself. It was like there’d barely been time to recognize what had been amazing about being together, and then it was gone.

  “When you’re working with someone you want to pretend it’s only all about what they’re going through,” he said. “That’s why therapists always sound like they know what you need even when they don’t.”

  They drank their beers for a little while. He was looking at the TV as if it had continued to disappoint him even after it had gone off.

  “There’s so much we never talked about,” she finally said, and he sighed. She gave him an apologetic wince when he looked over at her.

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” he answered.

  “I just feel like…” she began, and then petered out. “You just should know that you still take up a lot of space in my head.”

  He let that sit for a minute. “That isn’t about me,” he said. “That could be just what happens.” He thought for a minute, and then added that it was maybe Heidegger who’d noticed that whatever withdrew from us then drew us along by its very withdrawal. “Basic rule of middle school,” he said when she didn’t say anything in response.

  “I mean, in the middle of all of this I’m thinking about you,” she said.

  “It is hard to believe,” he commiserated.

  “People were like, ‘He’s the one you need for this? You really need him to work with this kid?’ ”

  “Yeah, that was what I was thinking, too,” he said.

  “Everyone’s probably like, ‘Should we have left her in charge of this?’ ” she continued. “ ‘Maybe we should’ve brought in somebody whiter?’ ”

  He smiled. Their joke when they’d been going out had been that she’d only gotten into graduate school on Algerian affirmative action. She’d confided to him on one of their first nights together that her classmates had always complained to her that she made it look easy, and he had floored her by responding that it probably had been easy, once you set aside the eighteen-hour study binges and the weeping and the agonizing and the rage at your own limitations. She had mounted him again, once he’d said that, and had informed him that she wasn’t used to being seen with that kind of clarity, and he had put a hand to each of her hips and had said, “You’re welcome,” and had arched his back so she felt even more filled up by him.

  She rubbed her eye, remembering, and finished her beer, thinking how restorative it would be if every so often someone said, I’d really like to be with you. “Everybody thought I was crazy to call you and you’re probably going to prove that I was right,” she said.

  “Could be,” he said. “Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Let’s see,” she resolved. And she stood up, and bent over, and gave him a little air kiss, and then left.

  Sometimes Even a Blind Squirrel

  The next morning Branislav had Jeannine bring Aleq crayons and paper, and Aleq took both and immediately started drawing all over the paper. He explained through the translator that this was how you made a wolf fish, and these were the long lines you set for them, and when he was finished he held it out to Jeannine, and to the tablet lens.

  He asked what the date was. After the translator told him, he said, “On June 11th I’ll be twelve.”

  “That’s your birthday?” Jeannine asked. In response he did some additional scribbling on the pad.

  She sighed so loudly that Branislav said in her earpiece, “Just give him a second.”

  So she stood by the bed and clasped her wrist with her hand as if to mime patience. Aleq drew for another few minutes. When he finished, he kept his attention on the pad, and said something that he seemed to be having trouble putting into words. The translator waited for him to go on, and then said, “He says that sometimes he makes up in his head a picture of his friend Malik remembering him.”

  Jeannine looked out her window and could see Branislav across the way giving that some thought.

  “In the picture Malik is remembering Aleq?” Branislav asked.

  The translator passed the question along, and Aleq nodded.

  They gave Aleq another minute to draw, and then Branislav asked him what having a picture like that in his head had been like, and Aleq told him that he’d taken that picture and put it in a box, and then put the box in another room, and then put the room in another house.

  There was a long enough silence following that that Jeannine figured Branislav had no more idea how to respond than she did. Then Branislav told him that it was okay to have remembered what he remembered and to have forgotten what he forgot, and when Aleq didn’t say anything in response, Branislav told him again. It seemed to take the translator longer to translate it the second time.

  Aleq returned to his drawing like he needed the privacy. He flipped the page he’d been working on and started something new.

  “Do you want any more colors?” Branislav asked him, and after the translation went through, Aleq looked critically at the box of crayons Jeannine was still holding, and then said no.

  After another three or four minutes, he turned the drawing around to face Jeannine and the tablet lens the way he had with the wolf fish drawing. This time the colors were mostly black and red and there were a lot of lines going in all directions, and you had to look twice to see that there was someone inside the box in the center.

  Branislav waited for Aleq to say something about it, and then finally, when he didn’t, told Aleq that the worst thing Aleq could imagine had already happened to him. Aleq waited out the translation, and then seemed unsurprised at the claim.

  Jeannine moved closer beside him and put a hand on his bed. He went back to looking at his drawing.

  Out of the silence, Branislav told her, “Show him the photos you want to show him.” It startled her, but she immediately opened the relevant window on the tablet while he explained to Aleq that some people had gotten sick in Nuuk and it was important to find out if any of them had come from Ilimanaq or had been there recently. As soon as Aleq seemed to understand, she started her slide show of the first thirty-three infected. She had only gotten to number seven when he reached a hand to the screen.

  “He says that’s Mr. Hansenip, his grandparents’ neighbor,” the translator told them.

  “Halle-fucking-lujah,” Jeannine breathed.

  “That’s it,” Hank exulted in her ear. “I’m already texting Atlanta.” She’d forgotten how many people were listening in.

  “Good work, everybody,” Emily told them all. Somewhere Jeannine could hear someone else cheering, as well.

  “Tell Aleq thank you from all of us,” Branislav finally told Elias.

  Elias translated. “He says you’re welcome,” he said. And then, after another quiet comment from Aleq, he added, “He wants to know if now you’re not going to talk to him anymore.”

  X

  Valerie Landry and the Steamroller

  She remembered somebody telling her that she needed to give him her ID and DOB pronto, and the chief attending leaning over her wherever she’d fallen near the admissions desk and harshly telling whoever it was that they already had all that information. She remembered having stayed in bed as long as possible that morning, hoping it would all go away, and that when she’d finally figured she had to break the news to her mother and sister, thei
r shouting and panic had continued for so long it had made her physically crouch in the kitchen on her way out. She remembered registering that in their outrage they shouted their concern even as they shrank away from touching her, and remembered telling them that she’d call, and that they should in the meantime stay indoors and keep away from all visitors, and to call the hospital if they started to have any kind of fever.

  She remembered seeing bags and suitcases and even shoes scattered along the roads as she drove in. She’d known her fever had to be really high. Her head had felt banded with a vise. She’d driven so methodically, blank with terror, that the other drivers behind her had laid on their horns and then had accelerated around her.

  She was in a room with three or four other patients. It might’ve been the room in which they’d lost Abraham. The infectious disease guy was in the bed closest to the window and on a respirator. She wasn’t on a respirator. She hoped that was a good sign.

  She needed to call to see if her mother and sister were okay, but her phone was gone, and when she tried to ask the nurse where it was, the nurse didn’t understand her. She thought the nurse was Jen, and tried to say her name, but by then the nurse had left.

  It devastated her to think that her mother and sister might be getting sick even after she’d left them, and that the effects of the mistake of going to see them might go on ramifying. Maybe that was what people meant by immortality, some part of her told the other.

  She thought maybe it was also a good sign that she could still joke. The woman in the bed next to her looked to be suffering even in her sleep, and Val tried to call someone’s attention to it but no one came by.

  She realized the wheezing noise was her and that she was continually trying to take large breaths, as though someone had knocked the wind from her. She’d been so healthy her whole life that this was a new realm for her physically, and she remembered with some shame while she was lying there holding her chest how often her patients’ claims of terrible pain had been embarrassingly foreign to her.

  Other people were wheeled in. A mother who was DOA, though her baby was alive. Her husband was easy to spot as the only person in the hall who looked like the world had ended. She watched him follow the bed when the mother was wheeled out. A resident she didn’t know cursed while trying to put an intravenous line into the baby.

  Then it was later and she was so dizzy she couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes. The head nurse, Janet, was telling her that a Dr. Howlett had called and asked if he should come over, and it took her a minute to register that that was Kirk, and she told the nurse no, and then, after the nurse had left, wished that she’d said yes. She remembered that once he had taken her to his parents’ house when they were gone for the weekend, and while he’d slept after they’d had sex, she’d found herself tiptoeing around in exploration, and like in a fairy tale, every door but theirs had been locked.

  She had soaked through her sheets and was aware of someone changing them. It was cold when the new sheets were flapped down over her before they were tucked in. The dirty sheets and their smell went away and the chief attending came in. He asked if she wanted some soup, or maybe a little ginger ale. He said they also had sparkling water. He talked to her as though she still had likes and dislikes.

  She got him to lean forward so he could hear her. After a few tries, she got him to understand that maybe with her reporting to him what being sick with this thing was like, they could figure it out.

  He told her that first she had to rest.

  “Maybe we can figure it out,” she told him again. She was amazed at how much energy it took.

  “How’re we going to do that?” he asked. “I don’t have any ideas and you don’t have any ideas.”

  She told him that maybe that was their advantage: that they wouldn’t have any biases.

  “Biases?” he asked. “We don’t have any insights.”

  She smiled. She closed her eyes, and when she came back, he was still there, though no longer in the chair. She wanted to tell him she loved his sense of humor. She wanted to tell him she loved him. He was on his second marriage and had three toddlers but he still snuck back to the hospital once his kids were finally down for the night to help out on other shifts.

  When she came to, it was dark outside, and he was looking in on her again. She couldn’t see if he was smiling behind his mask. He told her that if she felt a little better and got her appetite back, she could eat some of the pudding cups he’d saved for her.

  “Thank you,” she told him. She wasn’t sure he heard.

  She told him that he needed to call her mother and sister. She needed to hear how they were doing. He put a hand to her forehead, like he understood, but she didn’t think he did. The latex felt warm on her skin. A nurse appeared beside him and they talked, and then the nurse shook Val’s shoulder a little, and told her in a louder voice that she was probably soon going to get more uncomfortable than she was now. The understatement made Val smile again, and as if to acknowledge the nurse’s heads-up, she shut her eyes tightly. She was still wheezing, but she concentrated on staying focused on these people she cared about as if working out a promise with herself. The nurse’s eyes over her mask looked at her in a different way, like she was now mostly an object of inquiry. The chief attending asked the nurse if anyone had been in here besides them, despite the sign, and the nurse said she thought that someone had, and the chief attending made an exasperated noise and told her that there was a metaphor for you: everyone here ignored the writing on the wall.

  The chief attending patted Val’s hand while she wheezed and told her that the next few hours were probably going to be crucial, and that he thought she was going to come through this and be all right. “Thank you,” she said again. “Jeffrey.” She hoped he caught her use of his name. She remembered reading someone—Feynman?—noting that it took very little energy to scramble an egg but that all of the resources of science couldn’t reverse that process. But after trying to pass that along to Jeffrey and the nurse, she gave up.

  Then they were gone, and the lights had been lowered, and she was frightened again. Her headache was worse. She thought about the way they all knew what they were headed for but they still started their days with the hope that it wouldn’t be so.

  The ward seemed quiet. Somewhere far away she could hear someone arguing. She held still, waiting.

  She was aware that she had her mouth open. The infectious disease guy by the window had extended his hand out from under his covers and had spread his fingers on the glass. Looking at them, she almost returned to that state of calm that she knew she’d never retrieve again.

  She had to call Lori. Even when they couldn’t talk about anything else, they could always find something to complain about when it came to their mother. She had to call her mother. She had to tell her that she knew her mother had been the smart one, all along. She had to tell her that Val had always been a little unnerved by the devotion to both her girls that she’d always known was beneath all of her mother’s complaints.

  She needed their voices in her ear. She needed her phone. She needed to embrace them until they could feel how much she adored them. But when she turned her head, everything pendulumed, and the light in the hall swept away from her, and siphoned with it the hallway itself, and the ward beyond.

  Everyone Still Around from Ilimanaq

  After he looked at their pictures and told them about Mr. Hansenip and everyone got excited they left him alone for two days. A nurse he didn’t like brought him his meals. He asked for the computer and she brought it to him, but the man with the beard wasn’t on it. Aleq tried clicking on the little window where the man had been and nothing happened. Nobody brought him anything to put in his ear. He watched videos of snowboarders and skimobilers crashing when attempting jumps.

  The second day he swiped through the photos of the graves. Malik had been put near the main g
ate of the cemetery and his grandparents near the back. Somebody had written their names on the crosses, but that was all.

  The plastic thing with the sand that went from one capsule to another was still on the little table near the bed. He turned it over, and every so often after the top capsule had emptied he turned it over again.

  Nobody had brought him the hat they told him they were going to get him.

  The crayons and paper were still on the table too. The nurse he didn’t like had taped up his drawing of the wolf fish near the door.

  He swiped back to the photo of his grandfather’s cross. His grandfather had told his grandmother that he didn’t want a cross, that he wanted seashells on his grave. He always teased Aleq that after he was gone Aleq would only notice when he went looking for the gooseberry jelly. His grandfather liked gooseberry jelly on sliced bread and whenever he shared anything with Aleq he always said after the first bite, “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  He always had to have his dogs nearby and said it was so he could hear what they were talking about. His answer to every question was maybe. He never liked how impatient Aleq got when they were baiting hooks for the long lines, since first you had to clear off the hooks that still had the old rotten bait on them. He still used lichen as an insulating layer in the bottom of his boots. He did all his cleaning before Christmas with buckets of melted ice. He used his teeth to pull his knots tight.

  He always said he was a hunter even though he hadn’t gone out on a boat in years, and he’d turned in his commercial license for a noncommercial certificate, though Aleq still remembered when they had gone out, when Aleq was little, and the way he had broken through ice of whatever thickness with a long narrow pole, and then had had Aleq use the plastic scoop to clear out the loose pieces, and the way when he’d closed in on a seal, doing his belly crawl, even his dogs had stopped panting. On bad days he’d shot some gulls or kittiwakes coming back in, so at least they’d come back with something. When it was getting colder he’d always swung the boat’s steering wheel slowly all the way back and forth to use the prow to cut a fanlike pattern through the forming ice. And after he’d stopped hunting, he’d gotten jobs cleaning the school and the community center, and he’d also filled in if the forklift guy had been sick and stuff had needed to be unloaded. At about the same time, he’d stopped going to the dentist, since he’d said it was always just bad news.