by Bex Brian
We smelled of ochre, of sweat, of goat’s milk. The dirt kicked up by the singers’ dancing clung to our ankles. We were standing in between the distant lights of the lodge and the lone fire of the singers.
“It’s like being in a smoky bar,” I said. “There is no way to avoid getting the smell on your clothes, in your hair.”
“Come let me smell your hair.” Ralph pulled me close and buried his nose in the crown of my head.
“Oil and sweat.”
“Better than oil and water,” I said.
We picked our way by torchlight back toward the lodge. I was aware, outside the sphere of our drunk and our bobbing light, of the panic that still accompanied us. When we reached the concrete slabs laid before our cabin’s door, Ralph stopped and sat down.
“It’s not any better having seen the singers, is it?” he asked. “I’m sorry.”
“My father told me once that this place was impossible,” I said. “I thought it was just his malarial confusion.”
“Strange thing to say, ‘Impossible.’”
“It is.”
“But perfect. Everything’s impossible. I should be bouncing.” Ralph lay back on the still warm concrete. “I tried again, you know, just before I got my first job at the BBC. That Saturday morning show about zoos. Last chance, I thought, to escape and do nothing. Went and had another operation to have the tendons around my knee stretched. But other parts of my body had grown stiff; my wrists hurt. I miss that clarity. The here and now defeats me. I married Mary when I realized I would never bounce again.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear this.”
“You should. It won’t be any better for you.”
“For me, or with me?”
“There might be a respite.”
I sat up and searched the ground in front of me for the bottle of whiskey. Ralph put his hand on my back. I turned around to see if I could catch him unawares, to see if his offer of a respite was an admission of love. But with the torch switched off, I couldn’t make out his face.
Sonia showed up last night. I thought she was a ghost. Surprised the hell out of me. Except, of course, Sonia is real, and I was so ridiculously glad she was alive that I forgave her the terror she caused me when, in my night-bent confusion, I felt this apparition poke me. Right away she started making demands. Her nerves were on edge, I could tell. First thing she wanted from me was a promise that I wouldn’t alert the night nurse to come and nab her. I wondered, of course, if that was not exactly what she wanted, but runaways have a lot to uphold and returning is always a failure. Fine, I told her after she threatened to move all my small comforts—my water glass, my morphine button, my night-light switch—just beyond my reach. No one, she made me swear, was to know she was here, ever.
“Not even Dr. Luc?” I asked, fully awake now, watching her as she patrolled the perimeter of the room like some sort of feral animal.
“Ach, not him, especially not him,” she said with a frown.
“What happened to the grand love affair?” I wanted to ask, the reason for her flight, but she had such a sour expression on her face, I didn’t dare.
“Smells like shit in here,” she said, stopping at the end of my bed.
“Well, it’s a hospital . . . ,” I said.
She stood tasting the air. “It’s like when you chew on tinfoil.”
“Who the hell does that!”
“Metal, yes, metal.”
“That’s my leg,” I told her. “I think the rods are starting to smell more than the wounds.”
Sonia recoiled and looked like she might throw up. You would think she’d be used to my leg by now. How quickly they forget.
“Speaking of smelling like shit,” I said. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“This is my country, you know,” Sonia said, lighting up a cigarette. “My home.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” I shot back, somewhat hurt by her snippy attitude. I hadn’t asked her to come wake me up in the middle of the night. “So you went to your mother’s place?”
“Are you fucking crazy,” she said, blowing her cigarette smoke out in a heavy rush. “No, I have friends.” She shook her head. “They’re pretty fucking boring too, but they know the ropes.”
“Of what?”
She ignored that question, merely pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Have you got any money?”
“What for?”
“What do you think?”
“What do you think?” I asked back.
“You must have some. That book you wrote about your father, it made you lots of money, no? And, you are a married woman.”
“Trust me, that doesn’t connote wealth.”
“What fucking word is that? ‘Connote’?”
“It means . . . ,” I started to say, but suddenly I was fed up. “You know what, Sonia? You are being a real pill. Pill, as in fucking bore. What is your problem?”
“I’m tired.”
“So sleep.”
“Too tired.”
“Well, if you will roam around in the dead of night . . .”
“Dead tired,” she said, lying down on my bed as if to prove the point. “You know what happened to me?”
“What?”
“I fell asleep right in the middle of getting laid,” she said, her voice quiet.
“That bad, huh?”
“But it was not sleepy sleep. Something heavier, yet quicker, like I was water swirling down a drain.”
“Did the fucking guy even notice?’
“If he did, it didn’t stop him. He finished up and then disappeared.”
“Where were you?”
Again Sonia didn’t answer me. After a moment she got up from the bed. “So do you have any money?”
“A bit,” I said, nodding toward the drawer. “It’s only what I had on me when I was hit.”
With a fistful of my francs stuffed in her pocket, some of them stained rust with my blood, she leaned over me. “Let’s have a code, so you know it’s me at the door.”
“Alright.”
“Three short knocks, a pause, then three more.”
“SOS without its middle,” I said.
Sonia looked confused.
“But you will be back?” I asked. “It’s lonely in here without you.”
“Of course, this is not much money.”
“No, it’s not.”
And with that she was gone. She couldn’t have been here more than five minutes. Come and gone and me left sniffing the air, aware suddenly of the clash between my cloistered hospital tinny smell and the great rank outdoors that Sonia had dragged in with her. It didn’t make sense, that scent on her, not by the look of her lying on my bed anyway, her face sallow, her lips purplish, her hair like straw. Dead tired. A chill ran through me. She looked, I realized, as if she should have no scent at all. Where had she been? What had she done to herself to make life look so far from her? And her petit mort during sex . . . That’s what they call it, isn’t it? The little death that grabs you every time you come. Or is that only true for men? But Sonia hadn’t been in raptures. Her petit mort . . . Oh, the thought is too terrible. And where did she go when she left? Thank God I only had a few thousand francs. Hardly a windfall. Means she’ll have to come back, maybe as early as tomorrow. And when she does come, she’ll be angrier, I suppose, and infinitely more bitchy, the admittance of need enough to make her bristle. I’ll trump her, ruin her bad mood, I’ll give her money, give her everything I have because it’s the only way I can think of to keep her close. And I’ll dole it out in dribs and drabs, trick her so to speak.
I’m being weaned. One small little drip of morphine, not for the mind, Marcel told me, but to stop the leg spasms. But it’s the mind that’s whizzing all over the place. Sex, sex on the brain. Better than the other thing, I suppose. But why all the little embarrassments? The cringe-inducing memory of terrible vaginal farts marring attempts at pillow talk after you have been rammed by some moron for hours; or the dreadful
habit of some men demanding to be sucked off after they have already been in you. The taste, your taste, self-cannibalism. Don’t forget stray hairs, sticky saliva; surprise deformities and errant cries for the wrong woman. Add, too, the monorhythms, the too-rough touch, and the rabbity thrusts—too short, too long, too quick, too slow, missing the spot.
It’s a crapshoot, alright. But better all the fuckups than going to your grave with only one set of heaving shoulders in your mind. Because there are times, many in fact, when the horniness leaves its localized nest and spreads, a low flame, up and out. Your mouth is horny, your hands, your feet. You pitch and roll under the sheets, you squish your toes into the deep soft rug walking to the bathroom. Once is not enough. Twice barely.
I remember Ralph, humming with the purr of the ship’s engines. I had brought him off. Now, he had turned back to the blue glow of his computer while I, staring at my sun-rouged face in the mirror, flexing my fingers and curling my toes, decided I would go and pace the decks. The all-night bars, one nestled on each deck, erupted depressingly from between shuttered, daytime allures—boutiques, arcades, beauty parlors. I steered clear. My boyish hips, now wide and welcoming, my arched back, needed more than to be swallowed by the truly inebriated.
I walked down a sweep of stairs, a dead end most likely, but with my animal energy everything had to be explored. The door to the ice rink clicked and gave way. I thought, for a lark, I would slide across the slick surface just so I could say I had skated on the Caribbean. But no sooner had I steadied myself, remembering too late that I had never skated in my life, than some maniac flew by me. The speed fantastic. No trick of the eye. I clung to the side, afraid I would be spun out of control in the wake of his passing. His speed was so great he seemed to blur into a comet tail of his former self, but it was his costume trailing behind, torn, half off, or half on. I tried once to raise my hand to make him stop, but soon realized I would just have to wait him out, an energy greater than my own.
I had begun to relax, to forget this whizzing demon and was letting my feet slide a little ways out from underneath me. A childish dance but fun in its own way. He must have sensed my flagging fear. I didn’t know motion could be arrested like that. He stopped on a dime, a shower of artificial ice raining down on me.
I propped my elbows up on the mini, mirror-clad boards and pushed my hips out. I knew, before he leaned in for the kiss, of the choreographed perfection that lay ahead.
After once, there was no afterward, not that night, at least. We lay in a heap of glittery costumes. He told me he had always wanted to swing a naked girl by her skates, around and around, marking his spot by the bud between her legs. I kind of liked the idea myself, a man’s equilibrium pivoting round your very center.
“Too bad,” I said. “I’m not a skater.”
Big day. I should have an audience. But there is no chance of Sonia making a daytime visit, noctur nal little rat that she is. Look at me. I’m sitting in a chair now. It’s weird—the whole back side of my body feels like a foreign affair. My shoulders, always powerful, are bird wings, my spine soft almost, soft enough for someone to fold me in half and store me in a box if he wanted to. I don’t even want to think about the state of my ass. I am sitting on hard bones. Stretched out before me is my leg, freed now—save for a few Frankensteinian bolts—from most of the scaffolding that once propped up my repair.
I am waiting for Marcel, who is rooting around some equipment room for a wheelchair. No more the layabout. Soon I’ll be able to beetle around the hospital. It will be a momentous moment, and I, never one to shrink from an occasion, would like a drumroll, a Mahleresque sound track to accompany me out the door. I must get this from my father. He loved to ritualize that end of illness: burning his sheets after a bout of typhoid; gathering the whole crew around to watch him take the last round of powerful antibiotics prescribed to kill the whole host of jungle-borne bacteria that had moved into his joints.
I remember that the swelling in one ankle never did subside and at the age of fifty-seven he became very pigeon-toed. I remember, too, that no matter how elaborate the ceremony, each new illness or injury took a little more out of him and forever after he was a little more bowed. There were nights when every fever, ache, and break seemed to revisit him all at once, a possession so terrible that the convulsions wracking his body would nearly turn him inside out and afterward leave him a fussy old woman feeling drafts, suffering chills, and needing a constant ear to hear all his travails. No one on the crew dared to tell him it was all in his head, although he was quick to tell me that whenever I suffered. Used to make him very angry when I hurt myself. And he always wanted to know exactly how it happened, exactly what stupid thing I had done to bring this injury upon myself. Such a funny reaction for a man who claimed to never question his motives, never second-guess himself.
So forward I’ll now go. Forward forever. I wish I understood the metaphysics of time so that when I finally make the first tentative rotation of my new chair’s wheels, I’ll be able to attach to that simple revolution something seismic: the sloughing off of the clutches of one time in order to be embraced by a newer, different time. Or better yet, fuck with the space-time continuum. With one turn of the wheel I’ll go beyond the constraints of my battered leg and become instantly fleet of foot.
“Ahhh, Marcel, finally. What took you?”
He’s frowning. I think just once he’d like to come in and have me say nothing at all.
“This chair was difficult to find.”
“A lot of cripples at the hospital?” I ask, looking at the spare little chair he has wheeled in. Nothing like the American ones, with their Cadillac wheels.
“No, you need one with a shelf for your leg. Like this . . .” He’s struggling mightily with some lever underneath; so far nothing is happening.
“Aren’t the rods in my leg enough?” I say, trying to be helpful.
“No!” he says. I’m afraid he’s about to throw the flimsy chair down in a fit, but now he’s done it; my shelf has popped into place.
“I met a boy once who believed that if you encountered any opposition, you should just give up. Free will, he claimed, was understanding that life should be easy.”
“Madam Vivienne, you make it very hard for me. Everything out of your mouth is different from what I think and believe.”
“It’s not my idea. . . .”
“Come. Put your arms around my neck. I will lift you from under your arms.”
I have the urge to lick his neck, sully the carefully applied layers of deodorant soap, powder, and aftershave. To be in a man’s arms . . . Why couldn’t I fuck him?
“How does it feel?” Marcel is asking.
“Like a chair with a mind of its own.”
“Here is the brake. It stops the chair from moving.”
“I’m aware of the concept of a brake.”
Still, even with it on, the chair’s intentions can be felt. If I am to pass through a portal of time, I fear it will be at warp speed.
“Try wheeling yourself to me.”
“I’m scared.”
It’s true. My fingers are gripping the cold steel handrails, but I cannot for the life of me make them turn the wheel. Marcel is standing before me, his arms outstretched as if waiting for a child to take that first, long-delayed, tentative step. I won’t oblige him.
“I think I need to be alone.”
“You can’t. It’s not safe.”
“I’m not likely to fall out of a chair.”
“People have.”
“Then let’s try something. Go stand about ten feet behind me.”
I’ll pass through the portal ass-backwards. No fear then of my leg, so erect, so aggressively shot out in front of me, meeting any perils head-on. I can feel Marcel behind me; another anomaly to upset his rigid sense of order. But it works and now all afternoon I’ll have the pleasure of remembering his muffled scream as I backed into his shins.
I picked up the phone. I dialed. The fright upo
n me, like all remembered close calls, of how we nearly lost Alastair forever. Nearly lost him twenty years ago because of a silly fight, nearly lost him because my father never, ever admitted, perhaps never even felt, guilt, loss, remorse. So, after all these weeks, I just picked up the phone, but the city code had been changed, a new set of numbers was required. Now because of all those Internet lines, all those fax machines, a number I’d known since I was a child, probably the very first number I ever dialed, was gone.
We were in Africa. I can still see Alastair, his rage at such a pitch he looked like the Tasmanian devil kicking up the sand in the wadi. Sand everywhere. Drought sand made of heavier, coarser, meaner stuff from year upon year without the softening effect of even a little rain. There we were, my father, Alastair, and the rest of his crew, looking pretty sand-blasted and parched ourselves. For weeks we had been tracking the effects the drought had on the breeding cycles of animals. The whole thing was going badly. No water, no babies. Boring shit. At least, until we happened upon an eager anthropologist with a fridgeful of piss. Oh, how my father cackled with delight as this strange man—his rapid-fire recitation a dead giveaway that he had been alone and out in the bush far too long—held up, one by one, his browning vials of urine, his empirical evidence that the women of the tribe he was studying were only able to conceive during the rainy season.
“And if one, usually a very young girl, should get pregnant out of season,” the anthropologist said, gently putting the labeled bottles back in his generator-powered fridge, “it’s amazing, that baby won’t come to term. I’ve seen it over and over. This is liquid gold for me and my thesis,” he joked.
“How do you get the women to piss in your little bottles?” Alastair asked. There was a tone in his voice. He knew what my father was thinking and was not pleased. Of course, my father ignored him. He was delighted with the question.
“Yes! That does seem a feat!”