The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “Fucking hell.” Stephen grew more assiduous. “I’m just cleaning it, that’s all. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”

  Jimmy’s father had taken over now. With a few quick pulls he shredded the rest of his shirt into strips, wadding one of them to put against the wound.

  “Mister, I can do it!” He looked positively Biafran stripped down to his undershirt like that, his arms thin as sticks. “Leave it! Let me, please!”

  The blood was still coming. Stephen, with a helpless air, stood aside. In an instant the man had tied a strip around Ariel’s head and pulled it tight, then another, which he pulled tighter still. Ariel, his wails dropped to sobs, didn’t dare to protest.

  The bleeding had stopped. Stephen checked the bandage with a kind of dazed relief. He looked like an ax murderer, completely spattered with blood.

  He took Ariel up in his arms and Ariel clung to him like a tree frog.

  “We have to get a cab or something.”

  “No, no!” the father said. “We take my car! It is very close!”

  They hurried out to the parking lot beyond the end of the lake at a half run, the father pulling his parka back on as he went and Jimmy trailing uncertainly behind them.

  “Je vais te tuer, toi!” his father called out. “Tu vas voir! Je vais te casser la tête!”

  The man’s car turned out to be an ancient blue Datsun that looked like it had done time in a demolition derby, battered on every side and leprous with rust. One of the back doors was held shut with a fraying bungee cord.

  “We can just grab a cab,” Stephen said uncertainly, though there was none in sight.

  “No, no, impossible! I will take you!”

  The man worked the bungee cord and Stephen crawled into the back with Ariel.

  “Jimmy, viens, idiot!” The boy was still lagging behind. His father chased up to him and gave him a swift backhand across the head. “Je vais te charcuter!”

  He dragged him to the car by the wrist.

  “Papa, ça me pince! Ça me pince!”

  “Tais-toi, salopri!” He gave him another backhand.

  Alex had got into the back with Stephen and Ariel.

  “We should go to Montreal General,” Stephen said. “It’s closest.”

  “Oui, oui, monsieur, je le connais! I know it!”

  Ariel’s bandage was holding. There was dried blood all along his cheek but nothing oozing from the pad against his gash. He’d grown quiet and still. Stephen hadn’t wasted time looking for anything like seat belts and was still clutching him to him. It was the first time Alex could remember seeing Stephen hold his son.

  “It’s going to be fine. We’ll be there in a minute. You’re going to be fine.”

  Some question was on Ariel’s lips, but he was holding it back.

  “Will Momma be there?” he said finally.

  Stephen tensed.

  “I’ll call her. As soon as we get there.”

  They had come out to Côte des Neiges. The man was driving at breakneck speed, weaving wildly through the traffic.

  He had been talking the whole time.

  “Je suis très, très désolé, monsieur, je suis très désolé! Il est fou, là! My son is just crazy!”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Stephen said. But then Alex could see him doing the math of what it might cost him with Ariel to take the blame. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. They were just being boys.”

  “No, you are wrong, monsieur! You are wrong! It is not Port-au-Prince here, to break someone’s head because of nothing! He must learn that!”

  At the intersection with The Boulevard the man swerved into the oncoming lane to get around the cars stopped at the light, leaning on his horn. He eased the car into the intersection in lurching increments until the cross-traffic had screeched to a halt.

  “They are crazy, these drivers! They don’t give a chance!”

  It was only a matter of minutes from here.

  “Daddy, there’s blood.” A trickle of red was coming down from the bandage now. Ariel’s eyes had taken on a panicked look again. “The blood’s still coming out.”

  Stephen pressed on the pad.

  “We’re almost there.”

  “It hurts when you press, Dad,” Ariel said, his voice heartbreakingly small.

  “I know. I know.”

  Alex went past Emergency almost daily on his way to see Dr. Klein but had never once popped his head into the ward. It was a busy day. Two laden stretchers blocked the hall and an indiscriminate mass was clustered around the reception counter. Beyond it people milled listlessly in the dingy waiting room, a small TV in an upper corner tuned to Phil Donahue. Despite the unhappy crowd there was an air of calm to the place, a relief after the panic and blood.

  Jimmy’s father broke the calm in an instant.

  “Please! Please! This boy is bleeding, we must pass!”

  Somehow he managed to get them through to the triage nurse, a big-boned matron who stood stone-faced at her counter like Hecate at the gates of hell. She looked them over, taking in Ariel’s bloodied bandage, Stephen’s bloodied clothes, without batting an eye.

  “He’s cut his head,” Stephen said, then seemed to feel foolish at stating the obvious.

  The nurse peeled up an edge of the makeshift bandage to take a look. She seemed almost on the verge of sending them back to the end of the line.

  “It hurts, Dad,” Ariel whispered.

  She glanced at her chart.

  “Go on,” she said finally. “Curtain Four.”

  Stephen was pulling money from his wallet, holding it out to Jimmy’s father.

  “For the shirt,” he was saying. “Pour la chemise.”

  “Ah, vous parlez français! No, no, monsieur, vous êtes fou? No money, monsieur, impossible!”

  Stephen headed down the hall toward the cubicles, Ariel still clutched to him.

  “I’ll make it up to you. Leave your number with my friend.”

  “No, no, I wait to see if the boy is okay!”

  They disappeared around a corner. As soon as they’d gone the man’s energy seemed to drain from him.

  “C’est mal, ça,” he muttered, pacing the waiting room. “C’est mal.”

  Jimmy was already working the room, thumbing through magazines, watching the traffic coming in through the doors.

  “How old is your son?” Alex said. “Quel âge?”

  “Ah? Jimmy? He is six. A good boy, a good boy. But sometimes very wicked.”

  A gloom had come over Alex. It was all this fathering, maybe, the pitfalls of it. All that blood. Alex had never been much good in a crisis. His nieces and nephews were forever getting hurt in his care—once, one of Mimi’s kids had got his foot jammed in a grate on the farm and had gone totally limp in Alex’s arms when he’d come to free him. Alex was sure he was dead. He came to in a matter of seconds, of course—he had some sort of fainting disorder—but afterward Alex couldn’t shake the feeling he’d had when the boy had gone limp, the immediate urge to get rid of him, to hide the evidence, to put this broken thing out of his sight.

  The image kept playing in his head of Ariel grown suddenly vicious, of Jimmy swinging his rock. It was hard to believe those had been the same children as the tiny-voiced one in the car, as the one roaming the waiting room, now all innocence and wonder. They’d been nothing but animals then, bundles of instinct. The most dangerous creatures on earth, he’d read somewhere. He wondered how he could ever be trusted with that, how he’d ever be up to it.

  A woman burst into the ward looking as if she had just stepped out of Holt Renfrew, high-heeled and silk-blazered and coiffed, her shoulders padded out like a linebacker’s. She made straight for the triage nurse.

  “Je cherche mon fils,” she said loudly.

  All eyes were on her now except the nurse’s, who finished the form she was working on, checked her charts, took a sip from her coffee cup, without so much as looking up.

  “His name?”

  Alex wa
ited for the inevitable language war, but the woman shot back in perfect Westmount English, “His name is Ariel. Ariel Macleod.”

  The nurse had already turned to the next person in line.

  “Check Curtain Four,” she said, to the air.

  Alex couldn’t believe it: it was Stephen’s ex. A moment later Ariel’s voice rose up from the cubicles, in a breathless tone Alex had never heard from him.

  “Maman! Maman! Je suis blessé!”

  “Mon trésor, mon trésor, mon trésor!” As if they had been separated for weeks by some holocaust. “Filleul, qu’est-ce que c’est passé?”

  “Je suis blessé, maman! L’enfant noir m’a agressé!”

  All of this could be heard clear as a bell in the waiting room. Even Phil Donahue seemed momentarily hushed by it. Alex wondered if it sounded as bad in the original as it did in translation: The black boy attacked me.

  Jimmy’s father seemed oblivious.

  “It is the boy’s mother, no?” He looked suddenly revived, as if the day had been saved. “She has come!”

  The voices behind the curtain had been lowered. Alex edged toward the cubicles until he could make them out again, Stephen’s guilty murmurs and then his ex’s barely restrained barrages.

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it. And you wonder why I don’t leave him with you.”

  It was not going well. To worsen matters, Stephen had had Ariel that day only on special dispensation. It had been bring-in-a-toy day at his kindergarten, and Ariel didn’t like sharing his things.

  There were a few muted exchanges Alex didn’t catch, but then Stephen’s voice rose up suddenly sharp.

  “It was his own fault, for Christ’s sake. He pushed the kid!”

  There, Alex could almost hear it, the death knell of defeat.

  A pause, before his ex staked her flag.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re taking your son’s side, at least. It’s so typical.”

  It was some time before Stephen emerged. The doctor had come; there’d be a few stitches, maybe a scar.

  “You guys might as well go.” He looked utterly worn out, deflated. “It’ll be a while still.”

  Alex didn’t like to leave him alone with that woman.

  “I thought your ex was Quebecoise,” he ventured timidly.

  “On her mother’s side. On her father’s she’s pure Westmount WASP.”

  Jimmy’s father had fallen asleep in an armchair in the corner and Jimmy had wedged in next to him to watch the TV, an arm draped unthinkingly over his father’s, as if the volley of threats in the park had never happened. They were both still in their parkas.

  Jimmy gave his father a thump to wake him.

  “Ah! Je m’excuse, je m’excuse!”

  There was the whole ritual of leave-taking to be dealt with, more apologies and assurances, money proffered again and again refused. Alex followed Jimmy and his father out and was on the point of accepting a ride from them when he glanced at his watch and realized he would hardly get home before he’d have to come back for his appointment.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I have a friend here to visit.”

  The man scribbled his number in a matchbook.

  “You will call, yes? You and your friend, we can have a drink. No children, ha!”

  Alex looked at the matchbook: Emil. He could already feel the guilt settling on him of knowing he would never call.

  “Tu es chanceux, toi!” the man said to his son, cuffing him playfully and pulling him to him as if, against the odds, he had managed to come out on top of some difficult contest. “You are lucky! Next time they throw you in prison!”

  Then from across the parking lot came the clatter and roar of their car speeding off with the same urgency with which it had arrived.

  – 2 –

  Alex hadn’t lied about having a friend to visit. For almost three months now, Esther had been a more or less permanent resident at the General. She had come in during an exacerbation late in January and had emerged since then only for a disastrous week when she had smashed half the dishes in her apartment trying to look after herself and had fallen from her wheelchair getting into the bath and broken her wrist. From there, she had deteriorated rapidly. Alex could hardly bear to look at her now, so much a shadow of herself had she become, though his sessions with Dr. Klein had fated him to almost daily visits, something that had raised his already overinflated stock with her family and made him feel ever more the impostor.

  He had nearly an hour to kill until his session and decided to squeeze in his visit before it. Esther’s room, in E-Wing, was accessible only from the main lobby, four or five floors up from Emergency over on the mountain side of the building. He climbed around by the outdoor staircase so he could fit in a cigarette, though he was thoroughly winded well before he had reached the top. He had to quit, he told himself, for the hundred millionth time; though this time he was determined. Already he had managed to go most of the morning without one: he didn’t like to smoke around Ariel, even if Stephen didn’t seem much concerned. Children noticed these things, Alex thought. It was like litter, or suicide: set the example, and your children followed.

  From the mountain, the hospital presented an entirely different face than the grim, institutional one it had from Côte des Neiges. It was several floors shorter, for one thing, more human-scaled, and instead of rising over a snarl of traffic it gave on to the wooded slopes of the mountain and the spa-like gardens of the Shriners. The lobby, however, had been under renovation for as long as Alex had been coming here, so that the pastoral calm of outside quickly gave way to the disorder of a work site, exposed duct work everywhere, dangling wires, unpatched drywall, an array of cement-caked scaffolding forever standing either half-built or half-dismantled like some giant child’s Meccano set. It was a lot like entering his own apartment building, in fact, with about the same likelihood that the lights would be dead or one of the elevators would be out of service, as if here, too, the owners were trying to wear down the residents until they fled the place and the rents could be jacked up. Meanwhile the lobby itself was slowly taking on exactly the urban chic of a condo conversion, the front entrance opening out to a soaring expanse of stained glass and a trendy-looking coffee bar going up smack dab in the center of the space complete with marble counters and hi-tech trim.

  Esther was on the top floor, in chronic care. Up here the ancien régime still reigned, as if nothing had changed since the fifties, the same floors in checkerboard cream and brown linoleum, the same pastel green walls, the trolleys stacked with chrome bedpans and with packets of gauze and surgical gloves. There were the bleachy linen closets, the funny hospital hush, the ever-present medicinal smell—what was it? antibiotics? some kind of cleanser?—that lay over everything and that immediately conjured up every hospital visit he’d ever made as a kid to their endless web of wounded or dying relations. It ought to have been off-putting, all of this, but it wasn’t. Instead it had the feel of an old-style institutionalism, familiar and instinctively comforting, almost Soviet in its air of worn-but-serviceable paternalism. What his visits most reminded him of were the hours of reverie he used to spend in church as a kid—things didn’t necessarily get better in these sorts of places, but at least they seemed put off for a while.

  Esther was alone. Her father had paid to have her moved to a private room, which was probably costing him a small fortune, though she didn’t seem in much of a position to enjoy the luxury of it, asleep most of the day or lost in a kind of lethargy that might have been the effect of whatever drugs they were giving her or just her body’s slow shutting down. It had been several weeks now since she’d been able to manage anything like a conversation. Initially this had been because of some medical complication that had reduced her to just a hoarse sort of aspirating, but now she didn’t even make the effort much. Writing was out of the question—a lot of her muscles had seized, and her hands had frozen into claws that made holding things nearly impossible. About the onl
y way in or out now was through her eyes, though these so often had a trapped look that Alex didn’t like to dwell on them.

  Her bed was surrounded by appliances of various sorts. The main one, oddly, which her father had had to buy, since the hospital didn’t stock it, was a device whose stubborn, phlegmatic purpose was to keep her body temperature constant. Its technology was of the most basic sort: there was a big monitor at the foot of the bed, and then a water-filled pad that stretched out over her mattress and heated or cooled as her temperature fluctuated. Esther had complained of it: it was like lying in her pee, she’d said once, then her laugh.

  Esther was asleep. The curtains at her window were drawn, and the room was dim with the crepuscular graininess of filtered daylight. For a long time Alex just sat there watching her, the heave of her chest as she breathed, the digital flicker of her monitor as her temperature rose a tenth, then fell again. Just a single sheet covered her, the hieroglyph of her body clearly outlined in it, legs splayed but relatively straightened, thanks to the cuts they’d made behind her knees after her muscles had started to lock. She was wasted almost to nothing now. Her cheeks were sunken, all the blush on them gone; her hair had thinned to the wispy sparseness of an old woman’s. How many times he had thought of this body since that night she’d come on to him, how many shades of feeling it had brought up in him. So much strangeness seemed invested in it even now, that it should house this person and be her and also turn on her like something alien. In Alex’s mind Esther had become utterly inseparable from her body, so much did it define her and his relationship with her, and yet always he felt this as a betrayal, a failure to see past her surface and know her in some more essential, uncorrupted fullness.

  No one had ever quite put it in these terms, but they were on a death watch now. The smallest infection, a virus, a cold, and she could turn. Each time he stepped into her room he felt a chill, not knowing what killer might cling to him.

  “It’s great that you come,” Lenny said, his constant refrain. “Her mind’s still working, I know that. I know the real Esther is still in there.”