Coming Up for Air

by Sarah Leipciger

  This woman. Her face was serious. Her hands solid and cold as metal. She moved the ultrasound wand over the inside of Anouk’s arm with one quick flourish, and tied the tourniquet tightly so that Anouk could feel her pulse blipping against the rubber sash. The nurse cleaned the area with an antiseptic-wet cotton swab and laid a sterile drape over Anouk’s arm. She was a marvel with the local anaesthetic; Anouk scarcely felt the needle going in. While they waited for the numbing, the nurse unwrapped the blue paper from the instruments, and, when she was finished doing that, she told Anouk about the risks and side-effects, which Anouk already knew by heart. Infection, clots, bleeding and bruising. She asked if Anouk had any questions. No questions, but Anouk had to sit up so she could cough, and spit into a cup. The nurse waited patiently until she finished and was lying still again.

  Anouk stared at the wall, aware of the proximity of the nurse. Could smell her soap, the detergent in her clothes. Could hear her breathing deeply through her nose. No pain, only pressure. There was a rectangle of slightly paler paint on the wall where some poster or frame once hung. Again, the plastic covering of the ultrasound wand circling the inside of her arm.

  ‘Huh,’ said the nurse. The room filled with a pause.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your veins are being tricky.’

  ‘They’re tired.’

  The veins always got the blame. More pressure, another hole pierced in her flesh. It wasn’t painful, only grating. Like the whine of a mosquito in the ear. There were many steps to the process: the insertion of a thick needle, a guide wire through the needle, and then the catheter pushed along the guide wire. Once that was done, the needle and guide wire were removed and the catheter flushed with saline and capped. Five or ten minutes staring at the wall, and finally Anouk looked at what the nurse was doing. Blooms of dark blood decorated the green drape and still no needle in her arm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the nurse. ‘Luck is not with me today.’

  So at least Anouk’s veins were not to be blamed. Now it was fortune.

  Being on her back made the lungs worse, so Anouk had to sit up again and cough. This time, the fit lasted for several minutes. And then the whole procedure had to be repeated from the beginning because her arm was no longer sterile, nor was the drape or anything else. The nurse was beginning to crack.

  Success took an hour. The anaesthesia was fading and Anouk could feel the bruises of the failed attempts at threading her vein. She was exhausted and this wasn’t over. There would be another room, another specialist. An antibiotics test and instructions on how and when to administer, doing it herself, at home. At home. That’s why all of this was worth it.

  * * *

  And days later, antibiotics still pumped through Anouk’s body, expedited by the large vein next to her heart into which the catheter delivered the drugs. She was itchy, all over; a bleeding, gritty rash had developed in her armpit. She was propped up on the couch with a blanket in her mother’s living room and staring at the ugly, broken branch of deer antler Nora kept on the mantelpiece. Computer on her lap, another attempt at the artisan and his cheese. He worked out of a warehouse on Ontario Street, a few blocks west of Parliament. The area had for many years been derelict. This, at least, was interesting. Empty warehouses and small, defunct factory spaces being taken over and converted into studios. There was a story to this part of the city. Toronto a hundred years ago. Steam issuing from factory stacks and maybe an organ-grinder on the corner with a monkey. A boy selling newspapers plastered with gossip. Horses and whalebone corsets and cholera. Here now. The snap of a story just visible, a silver belly-flash from a fish deep down. But the drugs she took, they were strong. And what was the point anyway.

  The cheesemaker used vinegar instead of rennet in the curdling process, and therefore his cheese was suitable for vegetarians. To concentrate made her sweat. The harsh, white fug of the antibiotics. The front window was open a crack and, even with the cool air coming through the room, she was hot. But also she was cold. She kicked the blanket from her legs and listened to the sounds from outside. An airplane somewhere. Or maybe not. A streetcar. Always a streetcar. Birds. A strange crackling she couldn’t place.

  In the autumn when Anouk was six years old, Jody, the guy with the chipped tooth, the guy who. Showed up to the house on the river with what looked like a wooden phone booth strapped upright in the back of his truck. It was an old ice-fishing shack that he’d repurposed into a sauna, and he wanted Anouk’s parents to try it out. He planted it on the sand next to the water and showed Red how to load the small, cast-iron oven with wood and heat the metal cask of stones. Anouk and Red spent the whole day in the sauna. She could remember, even now, the hot, wet smell of cedar. The beads of sweat falling from her dad’s beard, his rosy cheeks. Over and over, they ran between the sweltering sauna and the river, and the cold water was like music on the skin.

  Now her legs bristled with the sensation of running through the sand, tiny pebbles grinding into her feet. Water travelled down the coiled rope of her long braid, dripping on to the backs of her thighs.

  She touched her hair, dirty now, cut just below her ears.

  That day. The movement of the river was reflected on the yellow undersides of maple leaves; the thick, resin scent of pine was everywhere, and Red was there was there was there. His hair, even when it was wet, maintained the ducktail moulded by his hat.

  Red died in the beginning of October, a few weeks after Anouk’s nineteenth birthday, only months after he told her he was sick. In the hospital in Pembroke, during his last weeks, she watched her father disappear. The morphine made him do queer things, like pinch an imaginary joint to his mouth, which she had to pretend to light. Sometimes he called her Nora, or Mom. Anouk helped him drink water through a straw, and washed away the spit that coagulated to yellow paste at the corners of his mouth.

  No funeral but two weeks after he died, a remembrance gathering at his house. Friends from the river valley came, as well as Fraser, and Nora. Jody was there, and cousins and teachers and students from the school where Red taught. They made sure it was a celebration. There was a ukulele, a guitar and a French horn. They stood together and kicked at crisp leaves and told stories, releasing the papery smell of dying leaves into the air. Beers and joints were passed around a fire while the sun sank behind the trees, while the light, palpable, changed to gold and then indigo dusk. From someplace distant, the howling and yip of a coyote. So distant that its veracity was undetermined and some of the more drunken of the group speculated that it could have been a spirit howl, that it could have been Red. That solace, that tendency for the bereaved to see signs, to take ownership, in and of everything: this was meant for us, this snowstorm, this sunrise, this song that played on the radio at just the right time. Hand in hand, because Red would have loved that, hand in hand the friends sat still and listened, cock-eared, while the fire snapped and single leaves silently spiralled to the ground around them. It was enough. When the air became too cold, they moved inside and continued to drink, and many went home until only a few were left, and enough time had passed that someone suggested they swim in the river while the sun came up and do the ashes. It was Fraser who first stripped down to his underwear and ran into the water. His hoots echoed north and south up the bank, frightening a pair of finches off their perch. He dove down and came back up dancing, water spraying off his beard and his long hair. Someone else ran in, and then someone else, and Anouk, hugging a cardboard canister to her body, joined them. Down to her underpants, she stepped in fast and walked out until the water was up to her thighs, and lifted the lid of the canister. Inside, a sealed plastic bag. She opened this and looked inside to the ashy brown grit that was her father. His eyes, his hair, his teeth. His bones, skin, nose, fingers, heart, lungs.

  ‘Do I do handfuls, or . . . ?’ She looked to the others in the water. Her body spasmed with cold and her teeth clacked.

  ‘All in one,
’ said Fraser.

  She emptied the canister with a swing of the arm, and the fragments of her father arced through the air and landed on the surface of the water, and seemed to hang suspended there for a moment before they sank. Absorbed by river.

  ‘Did you get it all?’ Fraser asked. ‘Make sure you get it all.’

  She pulled out the plastic bag and turned it upside down and shook out whatever was left. A little drunk, deliriously tired, she said, to no one in particular: ‘I would like you all to do the same for me one day.’

  ‘It’s a good place to end up!’ hollered a cousin.

  Anouk folded the bag back into the canister and tossed it on the beach, then splashed out to the water again and swam to where Fraser was. The water was so cold, it reached into her with two hands and stole her breath. Fraser looked at her and his face squared with worry, and she found just enough air to tell him she was okay. She took the black, blood-iron water into her mouth like wine. Felt every marvellous bubble that passed between her toes and crept up her thighs. She ducked under and opened her eyes to the murk, resurfaced and smelled what her river offered up: sand and clay and lily and bulrush and weed, warm granite and coniferous sap and rot and the silver-green glint of a dragonfly’s diaphanous wing, and the life and death and the deep-winter freeze that was coming. She thanked her father for giving her this. River.

  Fraser said, ‘You need to get out now, girl.’

  And she said, ‘Don’t tell my mother.’

  But Nora had disappeared hours before, and so had Jody. And everyone noticed this, but the story was dog-eared by then and nobody cared.

  * * *

  Nora was sitting with Anouk now, in the living room in Toronto where the deer antler collected dust on the mantel. At some point Mel had arrived and they were watching Anouk. Mel was cradling a cup of something hot and she was smiling over the rim of the cup.

  ‘Let me in on the joke,’ Anouk said.

  ‘You were talking in your sleep,’ said Mel.

  ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

  ‘You were howling.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘What were you writing?’ Mel asked, nodding to the computer that was still balanced on Anouk’s lap.

  ‘Nothing.’

  42

  Pieter

  Baltimore, 1959

  I met with miller and Wolf in a sparse office in a Baltimore hospital. The room was clean, a typewriter on the desk, a metal filing cabinet by the door. A few chairs and a film projector on a low table, pushed against the wall. Outside the window, November wind worried at the last brown leaves clinging on to the wet, black branches of the trees that lined the hospital car park. Clouds moved quickly across an ash-grey sky.

  Wolf, a few years younger than Miller, had the hooked nose and flat forehead of an eagle. Jet-black hair. He sat casually in one of the chairs, elbows resting on his knees, while Miller, much broader in the shoulders and thinner in hair, sat at his desk. They were both younger than I, bright-eyed. Miller was a joker, told me he’d expected a Norwegian toymaker to look more like Geppetto, perhaps bearded, wearing a leather apron and smelling of wood and glue. They wanted to compare stories of transatlantic travel – air travel was a novelty in those days – as only months before they’d also been on a plane, to a conference in Norway in fact. That’s where they’d learned about me.

  I told them about my near disaster, having run out of cigarettes halfway through the flight.

  It was small talk. We three were earnest and a little nervous.

  Miller’s assistant brought me a coffee – weak, American coffee. Miller asked me if, prior to having received their letter, I’d known anything about artificial respiration. I wondered then if I ought to tell them about you. Instead, I told them I hadn’t, and that their story interested me very much. Wolf rose from his chair and pulled down a white screen that was mounted on the wall. He then moved quickly to the film projector, and fiddled with knobs and such until it whizzed into action. Miller turned off the lights and we watched a flickering film that showed a man, topless, lying prone on a surface of wooden boards, his arms bent up along either side of his head. The victim. Visible near his head was one knee and also one black shoe belonging to another man, the rescuer, who pushed with flat hands on the victim’s shoulder blades while alternating that manoeuvre with another: grabbing the prone man under his biceps and pulling up on both arms so that his chest was raised off the wooden boards. I recognized that this was the Nielsen method of artificial respiration. The film jumped and the victim was now played by a young boy, and the rescuer, a woman. The camera panned out, giving a wider view, revealing that the demonstration was being performed outside, on a wooden dock, calm black water slipping gently along its edges.

  ‘You can turn it off,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  The film reel whined down to silence and Miller switched the lights back on.

  ‘Works, sometimes. And only if performed well,’ said Wolf. ‘But highly inferior to mouth-to-mouth.’

  ‘All of my data, the blood gases and tidal volumes, was taken from live volunteers,’ said Miller. He told me how he paid medical students to allow him to sedate and paralyse them in order to resuscitate them.

  ‘Sounds dangerous,’ I said.

  ‘It is. And expensive.’

  ‘So you want a manikin.’

  ‘Something pliable and humanlike,’ said Miller, ‘where you can get air right into the chest cavity and see it rise. Some sort of balloon would expand where the lungs are meant to be.’

  ‘It has to be female,’ I said, already imagining what she might look like.

  Miller and Wolf smiled at each other. ‘We think so too,’ Miller said. ‘This isn’t for data anymore, or medical folks. This is for members of the public, for teaching. People have to feel comfortable.’

  ‘She can’t be too beautiful,’ said Wolf.

  ‘Or too ugly,’ said Miller.

  ‘And she mustn’t look like she’s dead. Only unconscious, like there is a chance she can be brought back,’ said Wolf. He explained that this, the notion that someone could be brought back from the edge, from that point where life tips over into death, was what attracted him to resuscitation. It’s why he became an anaesthetist. He described how during surgery, the anaesthetist dulls the patient’s vital reflexes, his breathing and circulation, and virtually keeps him alive until the surgery is finished, when the reflexes are restored, and the living body pulled back to the surface.

  I was taken for lunch, and a tour of the city. I was shown around a medical laboratory. We met for a few more days and talked over how the manikin should work. I made sketches. I promised I would return in no longer than six months with a working prototype.

  * * *

  Back home in Stavanger, when I wasn’t in the workshop designing the manikin’s body, I was searching for her face. I studied women’s magazines, newspapers. I looked for her image on the street, on billboards where lifelike drawings of women advertised cleaning solvents and toothpaste, automobiles and shampoo. She wasn’t in any of these places. I looked for weeks until the faces became meaningless and I began to feel desperate. Winter melted into an early spring and in April, at a Saturday party thrown by neighbours, I turned on their new television set and searched the faces I saw there. But the images on the screen were flat and emotionless and revealed nothing.

  I spent a sunny afternoon in the library and found a table in a corner, hidden by stacks, and built a wall of heavily bound books on classical art, hoping I would find her there. Balthus’s Thérèse was too suggestive and Da Vinci’s lady with an ermine seemed to know too much. Manet’s Olympia was too confrontational. The black lace around her neck and the silky, low-heeled slippers on her otherwise naked body suggested she was a prostitute. Schiele’s Edith – too old. The Mona Lisa – too smug.

  Botticelli’s Venus made me pause. What I li
ked about her was the context of the sea at her back and the muscular presence of the wind god Zephyr, puff-cheeked and determined, blowing her to shore. But she was too forlorn, too sexual. I drew her face many times and imagined it in three-dimensional form. And it wasn’t right.

  By June 1960, the body of the manikin was finished, including the tube system that would transport the blown air through the mouth and nose to the inflatable chest cavity. Miller and Wolf telephoned me several times over this period, anxious to know when I would be returning with the prototype. But I still hadn’t settled on a face. I took sketches of your mother, your sister. I even sketched your face, wondering if I could somehow interpret it on to the face of the manikin. But your mother forbade this. The idea that yours would represent the face of someone who might be brought back was intolerable to her. I don’t know what I had been thinking.

  * * *

  Where are you, Bear? Does any of it matter, where you are? Do you miss being alive? Do you feel cheated by the things you’ll never do, by what you’ve lost, this. Food-in-your-mouth life, this. Biting into the flesh of an apple, or melting ice cream on the tongue, life. This. Sand-in-your-toes life. Your mother kissing your sleeping eyes. You could never have known how much we loved you.

  Should I be afraid? Is there memory, where you are? Is there an echo?

  Where you are, I think it’s like a river, and you’re the flow. And every so often, out of the flow, you, me – all of us – we crawl up on to the bank and we do life. That life may be rich and long or it may be tedious. It may be a disaster – it’s a gamble. But the only certainty is that it will end, and when it does, you find yourself the river again.

  River is life and death both.

  43

  Nora