The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  In the meantime, my mother did what she could to convince Grandma Paul that Arnold was nothing more than a stranger kind enough to give her a ride home from Holbrook, but Grandma Paul was sharper than that—she could see that my mother was not the same girl who had left for Holbrook three weeks before. She moved differently, she had a giddy, wild look in her eye, she even smelled different; Grandma Paul could smell the love on her as if she had rolled in a pile of compost.

  Somehow, Arnold and my mother were able to find ways to meet. There wasn’t much Grandma Paul could do; my mother had changed from a submissive, obedient girl to one who would suddenly charge out the front door and down the dirt road to a prearranged meeting place with Arnold, Grandma Paul trailing behind and shouting curses until her old lungs gave out. My mother would come home late at night or early the next morning, smelling of sex and cigarette smoke, and there was nothing Grandma Paul could do but hope that white guy would come around again so she could personally put the fear of Jesus in him.

  THE ACCIDENTAL FOUR

  SO THAT’S IT: little Edgar woke up from three months of coma and croaked, “No.” Not as much drama as one might hope, but a miracle just the same. That word: miracle. Edgar heard it two dozen times a day at St. Divine’s, heard it so much that the hard-syllabled sound of it made the pain in his head flare like a bad tooth. The nurses, the orderlies, even the doctors, uninclined to any word that smacked of the supernatural, could not help themselves: miracle, miracle, miracle. Edgar was the miracle-boy, a marvel, a saint, the luckiest child on earth. He even had the Mexican women who worked downstairs in the cafeteria coming into his curtained-off area as reverently as pilgrims, pressing their crucifixes to his lips, whispering their prayers.

  And the doctors would not leave me alone either, though they did not come to pray. They came from all over to study me, to find out where the small miracle of my existence fit into their tables and statistics. During those first few months it seemed whenever I woke up there was a new doctor at the foot of my bed, looking over charts, asking impossible questions. Even though I could barely say a word or lift my hand to scratch my nose, they wouldn’t stop with their questions and requests.

  “Will you count to ten backwards for me?”

  “Where am I pinching you?”

  “What color is this pen I’m holding?”

  “Can you roll your eyes in a counterclockwise fashion?”

  “How do you feel?”

  Let me answer that last one here and now: I felt like shit. My skin burned, my ragged nerves spit sparks, my eyeballs throbbed, and whenever I tried to focus on something—a doctor’s bow tie or the face of a nurse—the colors and shapes would shift and melt together, transmuting themselves, until I would fall into such an intense nausea my bones felt like they were vibrating. I would lie with my eyes closed, concentrating on keeping perfectly still, breathing in, breathing out, in, out, slow, slow.

  For much of the time I was awake, which was in those first months only two or three hours a day, I hallucinated. I saw ghosts floating above me, the spirits of dead people come to take me back where I belonged. My peripheral vision was tormented by murmuring phantoms. Sometimes at night I could feel them touching me, a hand placed lightly on mine, a kiss on the forehead, and I would struggle away in such a terror that I would pitch out of my bed, ripping out tubes, tangling the sheets, pulling the IV tree down on top of me.

  After this happened two or three times they put restraints on me, binding me to the bed with canvas cuffs placed on my ankles and wrists, a leather strap across my chest.

  “You bunch a blackhearted quacks!” Art hollered at them the first time the restraints were put on. “This here is a boy, not a got-danged criminal!” To me, it sounded like he was shouting from the bottom of a mine shaft. The orderlies and supervising doctor ignored him as usual. Later that night, Art, grunting and cussing the whole way, climbed down from his bed and came over to mine.

  There were four of us in the room and Art was the only one not completely bedridden—one of his arms was in an industrial-size cast, the left side of his face was collapsed and most of his internal organs were in a state of constant breakdown. All in all, though, he was doing pretty well—he was the only one of us who could tiptoe to the toilet when he felt like it.

  Five months before, he had rolled his Pontiac into a cement drainage canal. He was ejected, thrown thirty feet before crash-landing on the front steps of a farmhouse, shattering his arm, bursting his spleen, breaking his leg, most all his ribs and a few vertebrae, and pretty much destroying the bottom left half of his face on the wrought-iron rail. As it turned out, he was the lucky one. His wife and two teenage daughters were wearing their seat belts; all three drowned upside down in fetid water laced with insecticides.

  Despite his face, which seemed to have been put together with wire and chewing gum, despite the fused vertebrae in his back and his mangled arm and the highly unpredictable state of his lower organs and his lungs, which constantly had to be drained of fluid, Art, by most accounts, was nearly well healed enough to get his pink slip. But every time someone would bring the subject up, he would begin to complain about some new ailment, convincing the doctors to let him stay a few more weeks.

  That night, he painstakingly climbed down from his bed. I could hear his joints grinding like rusted-out gears. “I’m not a going to let them treat you like this, son,” he said, his face an inch from mine. The smell of his cologne made me so light-headed I felt like I might faint. “We can’t let any of ’em treat us this way.”

  He unbuckled the restraints—it took him awhile to figure them out with only one good hand—then stole every extra pillow and blanket he could find in the room and placed them around my bed, creating a landing pad. That night I threw myself off the bed twice, and both times Art was there to help me back up, make sure I didn’t have any lasting injuries, and to argue with the nurses when they came in wanting to know why the restraints had been taken off.

  “I don’t care if he falls off that dad-crumbed bed every last hour of the day, I don’t care if he splits his head wide open again!” Art yelled at them, crouching over me like a guard dog, the scarred portion of his face glowing pink, the echoes of his words racing madly up and down the halls. “This boy’s been through enough. This boy is a miracle. I don’t think you people understand it. You don’t tie a boy like this up.”

  My night episodes only lasted another couple of weeks, and Art fought with the nurses and doctors the whole time about it. “You put one hand on that boy,” he’d growl at the poor orderlies when they came to put the restraints on, his gold tooth gleaming from the cavern of his mouth, “and I will put my hand on you.”

  When Art wasn’t aggravating the hospital staff, he mostly lay propped against the pillows and looked out the only window in the room, usually half obscured with orange dust from the old Ildicott Mine, which had been bought by foreign money and put back into operation after twenty years of lying dormant. Dump trucks with wheels as big as hot tubs had begun to roll around, moving dirt and slag piles, licking up plumes of dust. All day long the screech and rattle of machinery rose from the old smelter, which was now being brought up to standard. Farther off, mountains of smelt curved and sloped like impossibly high sand dunes, and beyond them the strip mines like gargantuan whirlpools sucking down into the earth.

  At night, when the trucks and bulldozers were quiet, Art would stare out at the steep hills of town, which were jeweled with the lights of shanties and mobile homes perched on limestone outcroppings. Only very late, with the swamp coolers off and most of the hospital sleeping, could we hear the faint silvery trills of Mexican radio trumpets floating across the vast, dark space.

  Art did his damnedest to ignore Jeffrey, who had the bed directly across from mine. Jeffrey could not shut himself up if he wanted to; his mouth did not seem to be his to control. He spouted off about how the cooks were trying to poison us, how St. Divine’s was really a government facility used for human tes
ting, how one of the orderlies, a big swaybacked guy named Herb, had tried to molest him on several occasions and was always giving him meaningful looks.

  Jeffrey also had a compulsion for sudden recitations of poetry and obscure quotations. He would raise his head off his pillow, hold one hand up to the heavens, and in a quavering British accent intone,

  Every Night and every Morn

  Some to Misery are Born;

  Every Morn and every Night,

  Some are born to Sweet Delight;

  Some are born to Sweet Delight,

  Some are born to Endless Night.

  “Ppfft,” Art would always say.

  “William Blake,” Jeffrey would say. “That poor bastard.”

  Only one word could describe Jeffrey adequately: ill. He looked as ill as anybody I’d ever seen. His skin was waxy and yellow, his eyes gray and wrung out. He twitched and coughed and sneezed constantly—it appeared as if half a dozen diseases were having their way with him. He had a long, sparse Fu Manchu and a wispy tuft of hair that rose off his head like a flame.

  Both of Jeffrey’s legs were held together with metal pins and he wore a brace that kept the broken bones of his hips from coming apart. It took two orderlies to lift him out of bed and into a special wheelchair so he could get down to the room where they hooked up his distressed kidneys to a machine. A month before I had arrived at St. Divine’s, Jeffrey fell off a three-story building. He had thrown a party on the roof of his apartment to celebrate his engagement to his girlfriend, who they had just discovered was pregnant. At some point during the party, Jeffrey, sky-high on a mixture of wine, marijuana and celebratory merriment, worked himself into an eastern-European-style jig, stomping his feet and clapping his hands over his head, guitars and tambourines pounding wildly, everybody whooping and whistling until Jeffrey jigged backwards right off the roof.

  His fiancée stopped visiting him after only a few weeks. The last he had heard, she had gone to Mexico to get an abortion.

  Had they not been severely disabled, I’m sure Art and Jeffrey would have gone at each other like two cats locked in a suitcase. Jeffrey would rant and rave and Art would say “Ppfft,” or occasionally, when he’d really had it, really couldn’t take any more talk about the Kantian soul, or the puppet war being staged in Asia, or the fascist messages that Broadway plays were full of nowadays, he would blow up, his rumbling voice rising out of him like thunder, and he would shout with such quaking force that the whole hospital would quiet for a moment: “WOULD YOU SHUT YOUR TRAP FOR ONE LOUSY MINUTE YOU GOT-DANGED DING-A-LING!”

  That Art, everyone agreed, had a powerful set of lungs.

  Usually, Jeffrey would sulk for awhile, but he couldn’t help himself; he’d start philosophizing about the possibility that the bedpans we used were made from radioactive scrap metal or that the nurses, who used secret signs and handshakes, were all Republicans, and the whole cycle would start itself over again.

  “What about compassion?” Jeffrey always asked the doctors. “This place is crawling with bacteria and perverts and nobody seems to care.”

  The only thing that could stop Jeffrey’s ranting was a hot look from Ismore, who had been in a car accident (in a hospital filled mostly with the diseased and cancer-ridden, we were known as the “accidental four”) and was now a quadriplegic who breathed with the aid of a respirator. Ismore was a big Indian man with long hair who looked like he had been poured into the hollow indentations of his bed. The only part of him that looked alive at all were his eyes, which radiated a red snapping heat of anger that not even Jeffrey could tolerate for very long.

  Mostly Jeffrey ignored me, preferring to spend his time nettling Art or begging nurses for tranquilizers, morphine, penicillin, Bayer tablets, anything they could spare. But one afternoon while Art was off having some X rays taken, Jeffrey sat up in bed and looked at me for a minute. It was sometime in late November—still hot outside—but for some reason the old baroque radiators had been cranked up and both Jeffrey and I were soaked through with sweat.

  “You know you’re a lucky kid, don’t you?” he said, shivering so hard his teeth clacked together with the sound of ice rattling in a glass. A huge droplet of sweat hung trembling from the tip of his nose.

  Jeffrey waited for an answer, but I didn’t give him one: I knew I was a lucky kid. Every last person I met told me so.

  “I mean, losing your memory, forgetting everything, what could be better? Think of it!” Jeffrey had a faraway look in his red-rimmed eyes, as if he might start crying with the joy this idea gave him. “All the terrible shit in your life, all the guilt, and regret, it would be gone, washed away. You take a little head trauma and—zap!—you’re a new man.”

  He paused again, breathing deeply. “I’m telling you, there’d be nothing better,” he panted. “We should all be so lucky.”

  MRS. RODALE

  FOR ME THERE is no such thing as forgetting, nothing is hazy or vague. I can remember it all: every name, every glance, every word, every throwaway scrap of a moment. The thing I fear most is forgetting, so I have become a hoarder, a pack rat—everything is significant, I throw nothing away.

  In this catch-all memory of mine I can see that hospital room perfectly, the single window forever shrouded with orange dust from the mines, the faded checkerboard-tiled floors, the bare electrical wires, black and sinister, twining together in the corners of the ceiling, the polished stainless steel trays, the suspended IV bottles throwing sunlit, watery reflections on the walls. I can even step away for a moment and see little Edgar in his oversized bed, the scars from his surgery not yet hidden by his hair, trying to distinguish the various smells of the hospital—Vaseline, urine, lemon disinfectant, cafeteria grease—and listening to the hive-like drone of the place, the talking, moaning, screaming of the patients, radios crackling, toilets flushing, the beeps and clicks of medical machinery, fluorescent lights buzzing, the high hooting laughs of nurses in the rec room, the deep hum of gargantuan swamp coolers that perched on the roof and pumped the rooms and halls full of wet, boggy air.

  Once a Catholic hospital full of somber statues, old oaken doors and stairways that led nowhere, St. Divine’s had been taken over by the county and now it was the last refuge for the poor, the illegal, the dispossessed who came from all over the vast desert that stretched eastward toward the White Mountains and south to Mexico. In two years, St. Divine’s would be shut down for good, condemned by the county that ran it and bought for a pittance by the mining company to be gutted out and used as a garage for their machinery and trucks.

  Even though I can remember every last smell and sound and sight of that place, my memory begins to betray me when I try to conjure exactly what was going through the lumpy, ruined head of that boy for those first few months of his new life. Edgar, who were you? Besides pain and nausea and delirium, what did you feel?

  I know that everything seemed like one big mystery to him, an ever-shifting puzzle. I know that his immediate concerns took up most of his time: dealing with his headaches, the constant testing by the doctors, trying not to wet his bed in fear when the ghosts came in the night.

  But did he miss his mother? Did he cry for her before he went to sleep, like any kid would? I don’t think he even remembered her then, not consciously—he didn’t think about her. I’m sure he felt a certain longing, a loneliness, but no single twisting in his gut that said, I want my mother. I want her arms around me.

  The first person to ever mention my mother was a state social worker, a black lady named Mrs. Rodale, who had an afro so large and unruly that it seemed to have a personality all its own. I had never seen hair like this, I don’t think I even realized that it was hair, so she was having a hard time getting me to pay attention to what she was saying.

  The nurses had pulled curtains around my bed so we could have some privacy, and Mrs. Rodale sat very close to me in her metal chair, her hair looming like a great thundercloud. She asked me if I was feeling all right, if the hospital staff had been
treating me well, and I kept nodding my head, mesmerized.

  She clutched a small stack of papers which she flipped through for a moment, the huge beaded bracelets on her wrists clacking like billiard balls. She looked exhausted; her eyes were bloodshot and she constantly battled yawns.

  “I’m here to talk about some important things with you, Edgar, I hope that’s alright,” she said. “I know that you might have a hard time remembering, but I wanted to talk a little about your mother. Do you remember your mother?”

  “Mother,” I said, trying out the word, and suddenly I saw an image of her in my mind; her long, blue-black hair that crackled like a dark fire when she brushed it, her slim fingers covered with cheap silver rings. I could smell the waxy smell of the smoky pink lipstick she wore, I could hear her high squeaking laugh. It made me feel dizzy.

  “We asked the staff here not to talk to you about your mother until we could locate her, but we haven’t been able to,” Mrs. Rodale said. “From what we’ve been able to gather, she’s in California, but that’s all we know. Your grandma is in a hospital down in Tucson, she’s a little sick, just like you. If she gets better, maybe she can come for a visit.”

  “California,” I said. I knew about California—it was some kind of island with palm trees—I’d seen it on the TV. I could understand why my mother might want to go there.

  Mrs. Rodale sighed. “We’re going to do all we can to contact your mother. And we’re trying to find any other family you might have. In the meantime, we want you to get all better. The doctors tell me great things about you. Are you happy here?”

  Happy? Nobody had ever asked me that. I nodded, which seemed to please Mrs. Rodale. She smiled at me and said, “Want to touch my hair?” She bent her head close to me, and instead of just running my hand along the surface of her afro, I plunged my hand deep inside it, hoping to find something, I don’t know what, maybe something that would clear everything up, answer all the questions, but there was nothing there, just a fluffy, coarse cloud of hair.