by Bex Brian
“Tell me,” I say, “what do you know so far?”
“She didn’t marry because he was clean.”
“Sonia told you that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It was just an idea, a seventeen-year-old’s idea.”
“Why did you marry your husband?”
“At the time, it felt impossible not to.”
“Like it is impossible to call him now.”
“Maybe. What’s the husband like?”
“I can’t say. I only met him for a few minutes.”
“He doesn’t want anything more to do with her?”
“Well . . .”
“I bet he couldn’t cope. I imagine expectations were betrayed. Perhaps she did love him because he was clean and then she found his house was dirty. Or it could have been the lovemaking. Hard to be married so quickly, then make yourself believe that you know the man on top of you. But that’s impossible too, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“To really know the man on top of you. Anyway, she ran away, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” she said, getting up to leave.
“Flight or escape,” I wondered aloud, but the doctor seemed not to hear.
Why don’t I call Ralph? I don’t know. I love him still. I believe I told him that I loved him even before I knew him. He assumed the wrong thing, of course, saw me seeing him on the flicking screen: Ralph McCrimmon, the renowned zoologist seen most Sunday nights on the Discovery Channel. I meant something a little more a priori, cosmic, meant-to-be-ish. Who knows, maybe I was purposely forcing the issue. One can’t help but think it would be harder for a husband to leave if he believed Fate had a hand in the coupling.
But love came hard for me and was too strange. Must have slept with twenty different men in the first few months of our marriage just to calm myself down. Because the truth now, if it’s possible: Ralph became for me a universe. Infinite, unfathomable. I am a little more elemental. The perpetual couplings behind my marriage’s back, the brevity and illicitness, offered me an anchor against such frightening depths, or heights: the universe, so far, never beneath our feet. For an hour or two there was none of the assumption of understanding. The problem, mine at least, was that I could never conceive of Ralph even when he was right on top me. Not sex. That’s a whole other ball game. Rather, when he sidled up to me unexpectedly, gently pulled my hips toward him and rested his lips between my shoulder blades, or, if we were out, as I sat at the bar and he would crowd in behind me to create a closed space, his long arms encircling me until his hands could grip the bar, these signs of affection always left me facing outward, and when I turned back and looked up at him, I couldn’t see him clearly, as if a dewy condensation blurred the handsome lines of his face. Without a face you really can’t have true knowledge. You can’t even have sex.
Perhaps I should offer this up to Madame deBuchard as my reason for not calling Ralph. Tell her that even in this battered state with all these drugs making me at once drowsy, puffy, sweaty, and hopped up, the one cogent part of my brain now conjures only a rollicking dick parade. In my dreams too. And when I wake—that word is entirely wrong for the muted roll into consciousness that is the lot of the heavily sedated—I’m often still in the throes of a dream-inspired orgasm. Rolling over, reaching out to recall, to recapture perhaps another second of my mind-mate’s feathery touch, I can’t help but to give him a face, and it’s never Ralph’s.
They are all looking at me. Up? Down? I wish they would decide. Dr. Ricard has his hand resting lightly on my arm. He is the boss of this particular construction site; no hard hat, though. They are very worried, and are trying, without much success, to explain the pain. One spreads his arms, one widens her eyes, one breathes through her nose like a horse. But the leg has to be lowered sooner or later. My once red toenails are now just crimson tips. Sonia is getting quite a kick out of this and wants to know if I will faint.
“Probably.”
Dr. Ricard’s soft, dry hand must be picking up the low sonar of my frayed nerves because he has decided, for today at least, they’ll only lower the harness an inch or two.
“Bien?” he asks.
“Bueno,” I say.
Marcel comes forward. There are two release points. They must be loosened at the same time. Military precision is required. We all murmur. It’s very interesting. My doctor mans one knob, Marcel the other. On three.
“What happened?”
“You fainted.” Sonia smiles.
We are alone, it’s dark, so I must have been out for a long time. I have a new perspective. My foot no longer obscures the bathroom door, no longer cuts the TV in half. The room seems big, wide and open.
“Did I scream first?”
“You said, ‘Holy fucking Jesus Christ.’ And the nurse with the fat ankles?”
“Yes.”
“She crossed herself. The doctor yelled at her and told her to give you a morphine shot.”
“Sounds exciting.”
Sonia shrugs. “The refugee, she came by to look at you.”
“She did?”
“Sure, lots of people did. You are the famous American.”
“Famous for what?”
“Being American.”
“Well, that was easy,” I say, noticing that someone has clipped off my crimson toenail tips. “It’s unnerving to think that these people only come to look at me when I am passed out.”
“The sound of your pain brought them. You were an accident all over again.”
“What did the refugee do when she saw me?”
“She peed on the floor.”
She is haunting me. Go away. You’re not even dead. I want to be haunted by dead people. She won’t move and I can’t. Gone mad. Bonkers, crazy, twisted. Tons of words for that slipped knot. Crossed over, from framed panic into boundless madness, no longer held together, mind or spirit. Shape-shifted. The blue-black air is dense with possibilities. She has brought her smell. Rank. Pissy. Four days walking through the summer heat. But there is no earth, no dust. Her smell is high, assaulted by soaps, powders, disinfectants. First she peed, then she shat. Familiar signposts on the untraveled road leading to madness. Now the other patients are weary of her. Sonia is disgusted. Perhaps then she hovers at my door because Sonia is asleep and the refugee knows I know that look in her eyes, the crazy look, the one so familiar in a familial sense, the look of sudden flight—no escaping that, was there, Dad?
My father. I was forgetting him. And now this ghostly woman, whose mind and motive I cannot read, brings him to me. Is there an honor code among the mad? My father. He’s here now. And I am to remember. Flight no different from that of a startled blue jay. Botswana. Lake Turkana. Ellesmere Island. Samos. Remember Greece? One end of the island to the next, just him and me again. (Funny, how he claimed all those trips were on a whim, and yet the feel of menace stalked us, as if in our solitude the world’s darker corners would be revealed.) We had abandoned on a whim the film crew, and the army of young personal assistants who screwed him even though they were paid to take care of me.
A hot bus, smelling of orange rind and diesel fuel, grinded its way up the mountainside. “In a billion years,” he shouted over the roar of the engine, “the sun is going to grow hotter as it burns its fast-depleting fuel. The oceans will start to evaporate, creating a greenhouse effect, so things will get very hot down here, then hotter still as the water disappears. The atmosphere will become just like Venus’s. Can’t live on Venus. We’ll have to move the earth.”
I didn’t understand.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a plan. We’ll rein in a gigantic asteroid with enough gravitational pull and have it pass by to yank us out a little farther from the sun. Do this every few years and save life on earth, if that’s important to you. Of course, if the asteroid hits us that would be that and the sun can go on its merry way to extinction.”
The bus started to careen down the other side of the mountain. He held on to the bar on t
he seat in front. I couldn’t reach and had to fight hard not to rock into him.
“Nobody goes to this part of the island,” he said. “It holds no interest. There aren’t any beaches, although there is a little-used port.”
He was right. We were the only ones to get off the bus. All I could see was a white, hot, empty town square and a lone boy sitting outside a cafe, his chair tilted far back against the wall, a gun across his lap. He was looking cross-eyed at something crawling in and out of his shirt collar. “Look,” I said, pointing, “there’s a giant beetle on that boy.” My father raised his hand to shield his eyes. I was expecting to be told the beetle’s scientic name. As I waited for him to speak I could see the vast, sun-blanched sea stretching far out behind him. And then he was gone. It took me a moment to realize it. The boy and I stared at the space he had just occupied. I don’t remember the sound of his receding footsteps. There was no sound at all. I didn’t dare move.
What happened next? There was no next. The memory stops. A blank hole carved by paralyzing fear. That’s why people are stupid. We expect answers. If I think, if I pray, if I stay still long enough . . . bull-fucking-shit. A blank hole is a blank hole.
I’ll turn and tell her that.
Bad night?” Sonia asks. There is a hard edge to her voice. I kept her up, I bet.
“Why?”
“You were moaning.”
“I dreamt about my father. I kept conflating him with the refugee.”
“Was he crazy too?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes he was very crazy.”
“The refugee is nuts all the time,” Sonia says, looking for her cigarettes. “They are trying to track down the husband so they can sign her away into a mental hospital.”
“They shouldn’t put her away,” I say.
“Why shouldn’t they?”
I can’t tell her.
“Hello?” Sonia raises her brow. “She shits herself every five minutes.”
“The mind,” I say, “can stretch itself out pretty far and still snap back.”
She’s now ignoring me.
“Why do I talk to you? You are a child, a brat who knows nothing.”
“I am not a child,” she screams, turning on me. “I know about war. There’s a man on my very street. No arm. Shot off in some stupid war. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to grab my ass every fucking time I walk by.”
I should laugh, the little bitch. But I don’t. I want to see if it’s even possible to make her feel contrite. “I’d be careful,” I say. “Everyone goes mad at some point. The brain is the enemy. It can turn on you in a flash. Remember how you felt after you escaped that truck driver? What if that fear just stayed? The dark woods you found yourself in, the sight of your ripped blouse, the feel of that fucker’s hand on the back of your neck as he tried to make you suck his dick. No other passing traffic, no lights, nothing, just the sound of your heart, and as you opened your eyes even wider, trying desperately to see in the pitch dark, your heart was doing some awfully weird shit. Like stopping. How fucking scared were you? Now what if that night of feeling completely alone, of not being able to rein in your crazy thoughts stretched into a hundred, or a thousand nights? You’d be shitting yourself too. In fact, it’s amazing that we all aren’t shitting ourselves all the time, because what you felt that night is the truth. The brain’s job—and believe me, it often fails—is to create enough static so we aren’t constantly faced with that truth. Nobody, in their right mind, could cope with that.”
“What are you saying? The refugee’s brain knows only the truth?”
“Maybe.”
“How the fuck do you know? Are you a doctor?”
“No, but it makes sense.”
“What image do you think is stuck in her brain?” she asks, giving me a sly look.
“What do you think?”
“How about seeing, for the first time, the angry purple of her husband’s dick as it popped out of his underwear.”
“How about looking over your shoulder and seeing your entire country walking to a refugee camp?”
Sonia rolls her eyes. “How about seeing his purple tongue smeared with sausage and beer coming at you for a honeymoon kiss.”
“What’s with the color purple? Besides,” I say, “those are your images. The refugee isn’t a sex-crazed schoolgirl like yourself.”
She is staring at me.
“I wish you had a cast,” Sonia says, stubbing out her cigarette and coming to stand over my leg and the Erector set that inspires no poetry, not like the one I wore after breaking my leg as a kid, the plaster of paris after the fireball heat had cooled and upon which no one could resist etching a ditty or two. “Give me a pill,” a nurse once wrote to honor all I ever asked of her. I painted the whole thing red the night before it was to be sawed off, erased the jumble of graffiti for good. “Then I could write something. These rods, they may be better for you, but they make me want to throw up.”
“What would you have written?” I ask.
“I would have written, ‘Girls with big ears shouldn’t call other girls sex-crazed.’”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
“Shhhh!” Sonia has her finger to her lips and her head is cocked. It’s not possible that she is hearing something before me.
“What?”
“Something has happened,” she whispers, darting out the door.
There’s no escaping the fact that I was haunted last night by the pre-dead. She stole in, stole my sleep and stole my forgetfulness. Father. Father who used to insist that I watch as animals die. Which they did in droves because we had chased them to the point of exhaustion, or trapped them under hot lights in a studiorigged wilderness. It took only a few minutes for those burrowing moles, scavenging mice, or head-swiveling prairie dogs to wilt, grow confused, and list toward death. “Watch,” he’d say in a whisper. “There. Ping! You’d expect rather more, wouldn’t you? But you’ll never get it.”
But I was pre-haunted by the pre-dead. So maybe it’s not quite as simple as Ping!
She hung herself.
It was Dr. Luc’s girlfriend who discovered the body, and then huddled in some corner for hours getting all the attention, even Dr. Luc’s.
“But she was my friend,” Sonia cried into my neck, when she figured out that she would get no attention at all. “I talked to her first. All she did was walk in, see her feet in the air, and run out screaming. Marcel had to cut her down. I was there for that, not her.”
“You can say as much to Dr. Luc tonight.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she sobbed. “He’ll leave and never come back if I say anything.”
She had a point. The cool presumption that brought him to Sonia’s bed in the first place makes him a man unlikely to truck any demands on his finite sympathies. So I held her and told her to describe exactly what she saw. That way she wouldn’t be alone with the memory.
“Her feet were white, her face was blue, and her hands were swollen out like black mittens.”
“And her eyes?”
“I didn’t see them,” she said, lifting her head. “She was falling over Marcel’s shoulder when I got there.”
“Then you are lucky,” I said.
“I don’t feel lucky,” she said.
My neck is still damp now, and I can feel a rash of hot hives starting to heave up. I am allergic to tears but that doesn’t seem to stop my own. I cry. I cried for every one of those damn animals dying in their fake field, dying—and in my childish mind I perceived this to be the greatest horror of all—alone.
“Your tears won’t help, my dear. Everyone dies alone.”
How many times I heard my father say that. Still, I am certain I was haunted by the pre-dead. She stuck her toe in and tested the waters to see where the sea of nighttime might carry her. It brought her to me. Why? I never even met the woman. But I am forgetting something. A feel. A wish for recognition. It was my dream she came for. What was it last night? A dick, a tongue, teasing, teas
ing, and I couldn’t move. Not much of a stretch. But I woke from the moment into fear, leaving behind my low, strong rumble of an orgasm.
There should be no prayers,” Marcel said to me earlier when he came in to work on my leg.
“Why?”
“Not for her. Not here.”
He was furious because they are having a service for the refugee in the hospital chapel. I hadn’t realized that he was such a strict Catholic. It makes sense, though, goodness bound by code rather than the heart. I just wish he hadn’t taken it out on my leg. His soft touch was nowhere to be found.
“Would it make you feel better,” I said, as he yanked at my bandages, “if the service was more to give comfort to the nurses and doctors than a prayer for the girl’s soul?”
“It is the one unforgivable sin.”
“Was she even a Roman Catholic?” I asked. I didn’t want to enrage him further, but I can never remember which God demands what. A slight twist of fate, it seemed to me, and she could be thought of as a martyr. I really am at such a terrible disadvantage around the very religious, because I care so little.
“That does not matter,” Marcel said, shaking his head. “It is the act that matters.”
“Not to some people. And not to her apparently. There is no point raging against something you can’t control, especially while performing delicate bandage changes.”