Promiscuous Unbound

by Bex Brian

  PROMISCUOUS UNBOUND

  PROMISCUOUS UNBOUND

  Bex Brian

  Copyright © 2003 Bex Brian

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brian, Bex.

  Promiscuous unbound : a novel / Bex Brian.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4776-0

  1. Women—France—Fiction. 2. Hallucinations and illusions—Fiction. 3. Hospital patients—Fiction. 4. Morphine habit—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.4.B75P7 2003

  813′6—dc21

  2002033015

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  For Charles

  Dawn. A wintry light. Lukewarm consolation. I know what is going on outside even though I can’t see it, hear it, smell it. Merchants, corpulent and sly, are running up the gates of their shops, not giving a shit about who above them they wake with their terrible clatter or raised voices. The first customers enter past windows of cheeses cradled in nests of honeyed-colored packing straw, warm bread neatly stacked, pâtés and jellied meats, glistening with fat, never melting or spoiling behind the spotless glass. But here I am being sentimental about shit that used to really bug me. Always found Paris stifling. A city in aspic.

  Have I slept? I don’t think so. I . . . hovered. Morphine sure isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Shouldn’t it be erasing the dull dread of expected pain and the claustrophobia of lying in the same position day after day? Maybe I need more. When I get out of here, I swear, I will never lie on my back again. Not even when . . . No; don’t even think about that.

  Why would I want to sleep anyway? Horrible, fast, flashing dreams. Running, jumping, tripping dreams. And that Frankensteinian jolt of life which seizes my leg and makes my harness sway and clatter, perfuming the room, like an altar boy’s censer, with the scent of disinfectant, metal, and flesh.

  I am not healing. The swelling has not gone down. The bruising has not come up. My bandages are still soaked. I am starting to hate the look of reserved disgust on nurse Marcel’s face, as if my poor leg were no better than a rotten joint of meat. I wish he’d pay attention to what’s good. Look at my toenails. They’re beautiful. Bright red. The night nurse did a nice job. I’d like her to do it again, but that would ruin the experiment, cover any evidence that they are, in fact, growing.

  It’s funny to think that moments after I was struck I thought it was my head that had been crushed. My nose pressed up against the curb, gurgling sounds in my ears—what else was I to think except that my brains had gone to liquid under the wheel of a truck, were burbling out and swirling down the gutter to the sewage grate to join the river of human filth beneath the Parisian streets?

  But it was my leg, only my leg. They have already taken out the few stitches my forehead required. Only my leg, and yet I still can’t conceive of the damage I’m told has been done to it. Hip: crushed inside out. Thigh: snapped. Knee: popped off. Shin: all shardy bones poking through the thin veil of skin.

  No wonder I am not healing. Where to start? I can feel the confusion within. The white blood cells, the corpuscles or whatever the hell it is that swarms to the rescue. They are overwhelmed, spinning crazily, hands on their heads, mouths agape with no clue as to what to do. What was it my father used to have me do? Bite the heel of my hand whenever I hurt myself. “Can’t feel pain in two places at once.” Well, Dad, you were wrong. I feel pain, feel it all over. I am pain. I am an American lying in a French hospital in the heart of Paris with my leg smashed to bits. I am shut up inside the cloistered walls of the Hospital Saint Denis with Sonia, a teenage boarding school escapee with heart palpitations, as my only source to the outside world.

  My low-frequency-tuned ears are able to pick up only sounds within the hospital, nothing beyond, none of the constant thrum of a city, the cars, the trucks, the horns, the people. In here just sick silence. There should, at least, be the clean, crisp lines of a modern hospital around me, but other than the white, metal-framed bed and the bent white metal chair, the room I am in is old, very old: warped walls, sagging floors, thick melting pane-glass windows. Yesterday I begged her, “Tell me anything, anything that’s not this.”

  “Just trees,” Sonia said with a sigh, turning back to me.

  “Only trees. Are you sure?” I asked.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Noise. Noise that tells us we’re smack in the middle of a fucking city.”

  Sonia opened the window by its chipped iron clasp and leaned all the way out. “I know where we are.”

  “Where?”

  “At the back.”

  I had to turn away. There’s not a room in the world I’ve been in where I didn’t look under the beds, open the closets, listen through vents, know the front way out, the back way out, and the streets beyond.

  Forget it. Think of something else. Listen. There goes the first one. Now the next. The early-morning trooping to the bathroom. Some men, lucky men, have to wait until their morning hard-ons wilt. I can hear them coughing. Can just see them scratching around the itchy mount of stitches that close over their refurbished hearts, livers, and kidneys.

  Closer now it’s Sonia’s turn to join the zombied procession. As for me, I’ll have to wait. It’s at least two hours until that sanctioned hour of the morning when an efficient army of nurses fans out through these rooms and roughs the bedridden into consciousness so that we can be fed pills, jabbed with needles, turned over, washed, fed, and set upon cold bedpans.

  If I could invent anything it would be a warmed bedpan. Better yet, a secret bedpan. No tin-roof-clattering-in-the-rain effect. No cold steel slipped beneath the bum. No walleyed nurse waiting. The silent pee. To pee alone. The humiliations of being bed-bound. Unceasing.

  Like clockwork now, two rooms down, the last of the flushes. The pipes, strapped to the side of the building, gurgle and hiss. Look at me listening to pipes. I’ve become a Peeping Tom of sounds, a greedy little hoarder of everything that happens to float by my pricked-up ears. But what’s the point? Sonia breathes, her stomach gurgles, she mumbles in her sleep. These are just facts. The mystery remains. To go deeper. To hear what she is thinking. Now that would be something. What does a seventeen-year-old boarding school escapee with heart problems dream about? Not running, jumping, tripping dreams, that’s for damn sure. If form follows, then right now, this second, she stands in her dreamscape among school friends. She notices that they are all pulsating. She sees their temples throbbing, she watches the rhythmic rise and fall of their chests. They look, as they sway slightly in girlish unison, like weeds caught by the same current. It’s then that she realizes she is not one of them. Nothing pulsates in her, nothing beats.

  Is that the crazy, scary dream you are having, Sonia? If not, what then? Are you reliving moments from earlier tonight, when you and Dr. Luc thought I was sleeping and you gave him that noisy blow job? Those sounds. Dr. Luc, with his short grunt of acquiescence. He didn’t sound anything like Ralph.

  Ralph.

  Don’t
think of him. These dawn hours will only distort the heartache. But I miss him, I miss the singsong laughter, the wild body spasms, the startled look on his face. What I would give to have been the one, the first one, to excavate that untapped trove of adolescent desire which still resonates in him twenty years on.

  Stop.

  It’s gone, over, like most marriages: a victim of confusion. That’s what it is. Not so much the end of love as the birth and wild growth of confusion. And confession. Don’t forget confession. Great marriage smasher confession is. Not that I confessed. I kept my secrets. Ralph should have known to keep his.

  I wonder where he is now. It is less than a month that separates us, but it’s already gone, my ability to feel him, to know what he is doing wherever he is in the world. Can it be true that I’ve lost it so quickly, or is it that I am not myself, my human radar dulled by this infernal morphine drip?

  I want him to come to me, now, this second. To materialize. “We’re only atoms,” he often said. “A table could be a steak if it was so inclined.” Then split your atoms, Ralph. Send a copy of yourself, a ghostly apparition who will look down on me and say, “My wife, my wife, my poor wife. Look at her, all smashed to bits.”

  My jaw is popping. Loudly, with each chew. Haven’t I enough bones out of whack? I had Sonia lay her ear against my cheek just before she abandoned me to see if it was audible to the world.

  “That’s disgusting,” she said, curling her lip. “Your jaw, it is cracking.”

  “Oh good,” I told her. “For a minute there I thought it was a ticking time bomb.”

  She rolled her eyes and left. I can hear her now mooning around the nurses’ station. She doesn’t like to be in the room while I eat. I make too much of a mess, never managing to bring a grizzly, gravy-soaked piece of meat to my mouth without some spillage. The blue-haired woman who comes to collect my tray likes to make the tired joke that it would be better if I ate my meal rather than wore it. Today, finally, I told her to fuck off. She went away without bothering to clean me up. For the rest of the day I’ll have to suffer these oily splotches and the discomfort of bread crumbs, intrepid little fuckers, working their way, stealthily, down and across my bed.

  Sonia is laughing like a hyena. She’s trying to make friends with Dr. Luc’s girlfriend, throw her off the scent so to speak. I think she is wasting her time. The woman’s jokes aren’t that funny. Sonia is more likely to rouse suspicion than anything else. I wish instead she would cross the corridor and try and get a peek at the new patient, the one who, if the night nurse’s information is good, was found wandering the streets in a state of acute panic. All week Sonia has been bringing me bits and pieces about her that she’s picked up in her rambles around the hospital. Yesterday’s morsel was that she is a refugee. My first thought? Potbellied children and glassy-eyed women with bundles on their heads trudging along sunbaked mud roads. But the night nurse, having hoisted me up to wash my backside, gave me a smart smack on the rump and sharply reminded me of Kosovo. No drought-baked nakedness. No sun-exposed skin withered to leather. This girl made her trek through the verdant green of a Balkan summer in stonewashed Levi’s, Nike sneakers, and a Boss T-shirt.

  “Nowhere is somewhere,” my father told me once, years ago, in Africa when we were traveling south after a long stay at Kenya’s Lake Turkana. We were alone, a rarity—no film crew, no producer, no deadline. Only each other. Never easy. The fear that the next moment will bear no relation to the last. I chattered away, which didn’t help. The road before us was blocked by ragged bands of refugees from the north. Some, I could see as we honked and nosed our way through, had stopped, laid down their belongings, while others simply kept on moving, with no apparent end in sight. Really it could only have been an internal clock that made the one group decide that there, rather then two miles back where we saw the exact same muddy watering holes and blanched landscape, or two miles on, was the place to settle.

  “But why there as opposed to . . . ?” I kept on asking, waving my hand out the window as if I could grab some meaning out of the stifling air. My father’s admonishment did nothing to lessen my confusion.

  “Nowhere is somewhere.”

  Later, much later, while following a band of Turkana nomads, those storied travelers, we decided we needed a break from their smoky fires and bleating goats. Together we climbed a mountain, our feet knocking loose the crumbly striated cliff face, all of geological history laid bare. I felt, as we scrambled over rock and thorn, as if we were kicking away time itself. At the top, resting against a termite mound, we could see far down below us for miles all around the worn routes traveled for millennia by the nomads, etched in the earth, like the Nazca Lines of Peru. “Nowhere isn’t somewhere,” I thought. Even those in a constant search for water and grazing never, ever veer off course.

  The French. When they are not flouncing around naked, they’re enraged with the government or terrified of British beef. At least, that’s what I’ve been able to glean from the TV, my Sonia-controlled peek at the outside world. I see nothing familiar, nothing that resembles the week I spent in Paris with Ralph just a couple of weeks ago before he left me for good. Paris then seemed like a sleepy, small town, which surprised me. It was early fall, after all, a time when people are usually filled with renewed vigor as they shake off summer doldrums and head back to school and work. But there was none of that. Ralph and I would walk the streets at a lazy stroll, and still we kept getting knotted up behind groups of kids whose kaleidoscopic patterns of shifting alliances made them impossible to pass. The cafes were full at all hours and in the parks, even though the trees had turned brown and each day seemed to grow increasingly windy, one saw couples ambling through, children playing, and lots of distinguished-looking gentleman walking dogs. The whole city seemed to be out of work, and didn’t give a damn about trying to conceal it.

  But that certainly isn’t the Paris I’m seeing now on TV. Everyone is in an uproar, especially the farmers, who, as the night begins to fall, have had to abandon their unified chanting in order to try and prevent their city-panicked sheep from scattering down narrow streets and disapppearing into . . . what? A wild single life? I suppose the very pluralness of their name suggests that even the boldest among them doesn’t want to be without pals.

  I wish I could actually hear the farmers’ ruckus in the Place de la Concorde. Smell the muddy-rich stink of the sheep, hear the clatter of their hooves echoing along the cobblestone streets. Considering the daily cavalcade of protesting malcontents—yesterday it was truckers clogging up the city with eighteen-wheelers, and the day before potato growers who thought it best to spill their harvest out onto the streets rather than sell them at ridiculously low government-set prices—I would have thought some of this turmoil would be dragged inside here by visitors. But as I hear the evening arrivals it’s all double kisses and tacit reassurances that nothing new is happening either at home or in the world.

  What must the refugee be making of all this? Does she have any sympathy for these causes being so passionately aired? Maybe she identifies with the sheep. It must be so strange for her, riot without danger. The heated emotions, the demands, the threats all conducted in the proper safe cocoon of civilization.

  Of course, she might be completely oblivious. She might not have seen any of these daily eruptions when she was out on the streets, choosing to avoid the huge thoroughfares and concourses, choosing to test her nerves instead on one of Paris’s countless quiet side streets, the very ones Ralph liked to steer me down, hating always the noise of traffic and the crush of people. Somehow the thought of that makes me sadder still. Her precarious balance of realities upset in the end by the immutable, sculpted gray silence of Paris.

  Tides of refugees. Not a brushfire. Yes, that’s what the millions of refugees streaming out of Kosovo looked like on TV—a tide. It was hot and yet all the worry was over how the displaced were supposed to keep warm through the long Balkan winter, and against this backdrop of world crisis there was my o
wn private despair. Ralph was leaving me. We were still in New York, in our apartment, the summer heat upon us. He turned on the TV while I packed for him. Nothing was being said. It was just another trip, another project. Fish this time. Illegally smuggled tropical fish. He needed to be based in Paris. That’s all, Paris being the best place to track the destination of millions of neon wonders illicitly scooped from Philippine waters. “Did you know,” he asked as the first few static pops of an image crackled on our ancient TV set, “that contrary to popular belief the favorite French pet is not the poodle but fish? “How strange,” I thought, looking at the piles of his freshly laundered clothes waiting to be packed, “fish. I’m allergic to fish.” Then the nightly news came on. The picture was faint, washed out by the strong late-slanting sunlight that flooded the living room. Ralph stood in front of the TV for a moment, then turned away.

  “It looks like a fucking brushfire,” he said.

  I stared at the sea-swell of humans and thought him crazy. All those dog-tired people collapsing at the side of the road the moment they were safely across the border looked like so much flotsam washed up on some craggy, shitty beach. Nothing you’d even want to pick through.

  I started to cry. Just then a strikingly pretty young girl appeared on the screen, her face twisted with rage and confusion as she screamed at a news crew, “I am European too. Please, why is this happening to me?”

  She turned away and the camera caught the eye of a toothless old crone who had been listening in. Her look of contempt and merciless glee was such that I thought she might chase down and box the ears of that girl, whose heartbreaking plea would become a rallying point, a symbol spurring on a generation to try and once and for all put a stop to the madness. Then, it was as if the old crone had been exorcised, never to be seen or heard from again. But I have often thought of her. There seemed to be a lesson in her toothless wizened face, a lesson I can only pad around the edges of, but I think it boils down to the fact that there is something both common and yet terrifyingly grand, and undeniable, about action beyond reason. Like my packing Ralph’s suitcase so that he could leave me.