There, grasping for his attention, is a scuff mark on the wall, a smeared green streak that he never thinks of but knows quite well; he has seen it a thousand times through the course of his daily existence here, a mark left by a ball the children must have been throwing when they used to jump on the bed, a scuff mark from one of his racquetballs the kids used to steal and heedlessly carom around the house. He feels himself dwindling, the barrier between himself and her is as much of a distraction as this green mark. He must keep going, he must think of someone else. He envisions the woman in the hotel elevator who offered herself to him, who made that remark—what was it, what did she say?—he cannot remember now, something about being trapped in the elevator with him, and this is also no good, a vision of the two of them on the dirty hard floor of the elevator, so he goes back to her, to that impalpable remnant of earliest and purest experience, her warm presence next to him under the blankets, her breath upon his ear exciting him, the presence of a girl in the bed with him enough to make him hard to tell where his hand ends, where it stops it blends into my back, into me, and that is why I fold myself up. His hand pressing firm against the small of my back is too low, pressing me, leading me this way and that. Never again, I said, never again will I let someone touch me, entwine their life into mine. I have made myself inviolate and pure, so now this man must not, must never do what you must have wanted to do, though Father never never believed me. He did know that you must have wanted to and I must have wanted to, so I closed myself off forever so he would know that what he thought about me was not true. I have folded myself up forever, and though his hand is cool and easy to let go, I have closed myself off waiting for you. I have done this thing that is no thing for years upon years, have denied and maintained and kept a completeness whole without any other unto myself, so not even you or any other will defile me, not even you nor any other, that was the thing, he has latched onto it now, having a separate other person next to him who was of the other sex or not so much sex but just different really. He didn’t even know what sex was at that age but just different, a girl in the bed with him bouncing around. They were supposed to be taking a nap so the neighbor woman who was watching them along with Elmer and Louise, the whole wrecking crew, as the parents used to call them, over at Irene’s for the afternoon, and after she had had enough of their running around and screaming, tearing through the house, she simply sent them all upstairs to take a nap, though they must have been at least seven or eight years old, with no direction as to which rooms or beds they were to sleep in, just a weary solemn command to go upstairs, the lot of you, and settle down and take a nap. And Elmer tried to first organize them into some game, hide and seek or Indians, but Louise, haughty Louise, who loved to torment him by sabotaging his plans, refused to go along.
Louise retreated to the mysterious room in the back of the house where a single narrow bed was kept but no one ever slept, and Elmer in the middle room where the sewing machine and all of Irene’s colorful ranks of bobbins whirred, and that left him with her at first just bouncing and jumping on the big queen bed; but then, both of them under the covers, telling stories, talking about who knows what. Laughing—always laughing. And then a hand maybe her hand first, touching. That was it, just a touch, but enough to send him now forward into fullness driving into her swept along by crystal pure revelation of another—any other—and the other in the bed beneath him whom he is touching has become not just anyone but has become me, that is all I have left, only me, because he will not come now, he will never touch me again, and perhaps he never did love me. This beery old man with his hand on my back is not him, and he never will be. There is only one thing to wait for now that you have not come. I pull my head away from his hard crisp collar, from the warm torrent of his breath in my ear. He will never touch me any more than this, and not even Tris will touch me, only one more thing to wait for this one thought has opened him up and engulfed him enough that there is no more thought remaining, only a parallel track of sensation spreading wide beneath him dredged up from the depths of a bed, a hammock, a tumble on the ground, and her bending over to pick something up off the gritty summer sidewalk of the plaza outside the theater.
She bent over and he saw for a quick tender moment the dark gap of blackness between her breasts, the lowcut summer dress revealing a furrow that brings him into the pull of great nothing spread wide beneath him, ever wider the opening goes, in the hammock curled against him her warm summer form of a girl, knees knocking together as they swung, a hand just resting there in the space between the darkness coming, only the full ripe darkness coming to meet me now, not you nor anyone else, not even the gentle slue of the hammock in summer, the giant branches of the pinoak and the moon swinging high against the dusk, not even that can stop the darkness, though in darkness and in light I am even yet becoming more and more a blankness and always finally letting go and finding there is everything and nothing more to do than let these big husky men in their pale blue surgical scrubs wheel her down the waxed corridors of the hospital towards exactly what she does not know. As the lights sail by above her in a kind of rhythm, Holly imagines a melody the glaring fluorescent tubes could produce, a steady procession of tones so monotonous only a machine could generate it; when she hums it in her head, there’s not enough variation for the tones to have been struck by a human hand. They carefully edge around a corner, then two bumps as the wheels trundle over a threshold and into a quieter ward than before. Fewer people walking here, it feels as if she has truly entered the depths of the building, the place where the serious work of the hospital is accomplished. One of the orderlies stares at her breasts through the flimsy hospital johnnie. He can probably see the shadowy outlines of her nipples protruding. Go ahead and get a good look. Won’t be the first, won’t be the last.
An angled hallway leads off to one side. They slow for a moment, then bump open a door. Each room in the hospital seems to have its own inhabitants, who comfortably occupy their niche within the larger environment. This place echoes with the cool, antiseptic flavor of a large tiled bathroom, clean and cheerful, with a staff of technicians apparently awaiting her arrival. Their task completed, the lead orderly, the one she thinks of as her driver, scribbles a note on a clipboard and leaves her in the hands of her next set of caretakers. She hasn’t had this much attention lavished on her since the days of her pending graduation from high school, when the family feared she would not graduate, would do instead something drastic like drop out and run away from home with her boyfriend or get arrested for smoking dope on the school grounds. Now a trim woman in yellow scrubs smiles at Holly and tells her they are going to perform what she calls a short “procedure.”
“All you have to do is lay on your back and remain perfectly still.” She says this in a way that makes it sound as if it will be harder to accomplish than it should. And then Holly sees why. After tugging the IV needle out of her arm and patching the hole with a gauze bandage, the technician helps Holly sidle onto a plastic ledge covered with a band of paper. This ledge juts out from the circular opening of an imposing machine that looks like an oversized dryer in a laundromat with glowing blue lights inside it.
“Lie back and get comfortable. We’re going to take a look and see what’s going on.” Holly allows her head to sink into an overstuffed pillow while the technician pulls a thin sheet over her waist. Then the technician puts her hands on either side of Holly’s head and maneuvers it the way Holly would tilt the head of one of her own customers during a cut. “We need you to look straight up and hold perfectly still for just a minute or two while the scan takes place. It may seem like a long time, but it’s really only a few seconds. The bed will move you into the device automatically, and the X-ray sensors will move across your head, taking thin cross-section pictures.” She places a kind of collar over Holly’s neck; the collar tips Holly’s chin up and holds it in place. “Then the computer will put these slices together to give us a very detailed picture of the whole.”
Holly
imagines the computer arranging delicate slices of her brain, its structures and synapses marred by her many indiscretions over the years. In her drug-induced bewilderment, she wonders whether they can make a mistake, putting the slices together in the wrong order somehow, converting her into a completely different person. Of course they can. Hospitals, or rather the people who work in them, make mistakes all the time, administering the wrong medications, switching the wristbands on newborn infants, sending them home to the wrong parents and wildly disparate future lives. This idea takes hold and evolves into a wish for something very much like this to happen; a mistake that would wipe all the mistakes of the past away.
“Now hold still. Take a deep breath and relax.” The technician adjusts the position of her head one last time, fluffing the pillow up around her. “Just re-lax.”
The hard platform her body rests on begins moving, slowly, almost imperceptibly slow. “Most people like to close their eyes during the procedure. A lot of people doze off and take a short nap.” Holly finds this suggestion incredible. This rigid pallet she is lying on is more uncomfortable than the floor. She can feel the individual bumps of her spine pressing against it, like knobs on the trunk of a tree. And now that it is time to hold still, she is overwhelmed by an urge to twist her head to one side, rebelling against the impervious grasp of the collar tucked under her chin. It has always been this way—whenever someone tells her to do something, she has a powerful impulse to disobey and do the exact opposite.
But she keeps her head still, heeding the words of the technician if only to avoid what she guesses must be the result of any movement: an image of her brain that is scrambled or distorted in some manner. A few inches above her head, the lip of the circular opening to the machine approaches and passes slowly by, absorbing her into it, accompanied by a deep, nearly inaudible humming. Slowly, ever more slowly, her entire head and neck are consumed by the machine. Though her legs and torso extend freely into the open air of the examination room, as her shoulders approach the opening of the machine, the ledge shudders and she has the sensation of being entirely swallowed up by this humming metal box. Now a circular band within the tube begins to spin at an incredible speed, causing the hum that surrounds her to go up in pitch as it carves out a tiny cross section, a picture more finespun and meticulous than any ever taken of her. She closes her eyes to block this image and a vision of Tom sweeps over her, Tom hovering by the hospital bed, his round face etched with a look of concern; Tom holding the door for her on a date, bringing her elaborate gifts she can never live up to, enclosing her within his suffocating attentions, incorporating her into his pleasant but conventional life. Marriage to Tom would be like this, like sealing herself in a box.
For a few moments she allows her eyes to remain closed. Perhaps she does indeed sleep, as the technician recommended. How much time has passed? Two minutes, ten? She does not know. Without a known impulse from her, her eyes are open again, confronted by the harsh white roof of the cylinder, a few inches from her face. A thought comes to mind, prickling between her ears as if it has been transmitted by the high-pitched buzzing of the machine: They will never be satisfied.
The words linger, twisting around on themselves, coiling into a ball. She wonders whether the machine can register any of her thoughts; at the moment she is thinking this, the machine is taking another slice of her head, transcribing the exact structure and contents of the brain. She has convinced herself there is a great deal of truth to this statement: They will never be satisfied, the lawyers like Tom, the doctors and nurses. Her mother. The ones who are always probing and measuring her. The old woman who watched the girls last night and gave her that moment a that momentary look of disdain. They see everything; they know.
I LAY MYSELF down in the garden, the garden will keep me whole. I lay myself down in the garden, the garden will keep me sanctified and whole. And Enrique, God bless him if he ever thought to wake up on a Sunday morning and roust his family to church, might look out from the back kitchen window and see me lying here in this mouldering damp plot of earth and wonder what the crazy old gringo lady has gone and done now. But he never does get them up and out to church, though the bells of St Monica’s are loud enough when they call the early mass to make the sashes rattle. He sleeps right through it, up past midnight, up when I got home last night with his three fat children watching television too loud, and even the bells of the second mass only wake him up and get him to the porch in his t-shirt and baggy sweatpants reading the paper with his hair standing on end. So Enrique will not see me, nor anyone else even if they happen to look out from the second-story windows of the houses on either side. They will see now that I have crouched down bearing my weight on the butt of my hands in the dirt and lain myself, my heavy decrepit body, down in the dirt, still damp, wet with dew.
There is no one left to see me, for I am covered up now in the flowers of my garden, in the tender tall fronds of the snapdragons and cone flowers, tall stalks of their stems lifting all around me, a forest from the red dusk globes of the cone flowers draping over me, a canopy of loose amethyst umbrellas. The snaps on their gabbling stalks, luminous, lavender and bronze, they cover me up, they genuflect and shield me, tired and still empty where I was ever hollow from lack, like a seed, like a grain of wheat falling into the damp earth, fallow, slow. Slow in the weight of me, all encompassed now in this great ungainly husk, still sanctified and whole, the entirety of my burden still sanctified and whole.
Was there ever one moment when I could have let go of my penitence, my impudent idea of showing, always showing him that—no—that is not what I was, that is not what I did. I am instead this: An emblem of forsaken need. When he said to me, well, if you’re not going to get a man, you have to get a job, dry and hollow I became out of spite of him, of them, of you, Tris, yes you. I said, no, I will show you I never was what you thought of me. I never did that, and sure enough here I am with no one left to witness it but the canopy of leaves dumbly filtering the light, only this, Elmer’s garden now mine as well and the great pinoak still here, still observant now as it once was of the girl I was before, when I was still light enough and free and not defined by a lack, by the weight of a lack drawn upon me. And blanketing like a hollow in my chest, I went about my business, my job, my chores, my meals, my life sideslipping the hollow every day and night, circumscribing the lack. Yet I did have things, I had many things in life to reprise me, to satisfy and drag through justifying days. They never left me, this great husk the body is a plenitude of pleasure, so who’s to say that one is more preferred above another? Whole afternoons I ate and ate, I soaked in television, and these things are probably superior because they are pleasures of one’s own, they are only unto me contained within that hollow, and did he not say that any one who loves his life will lose it, and anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal?
I had no regard for my life here on earth. He said it and yes, Karl would agree. He who hates his life in this world preserves his life forever and ever. I only did what ever it was that proved convenient. I circumscribed my self, my daily coming and going, ever smaller, folding in upon my self. Karl would agree, he would see it now as sanctified and whole. When he came here from Philadelphia with Dennis, he pried my life open gently, like petals of snaps, and let me have companionship, in his authority it was not wrong.
Those years with him and with Dennis were enough to let me know that even a lack is something too, even this hollow is enough to keep my self vigilant to sacrifice, to maltreat, to proficiently maintain the lack and hollow is enough to pinion a semblance of living, to promise myself what he promised me too, which is another chance at longing, another evidence of his love, his beauty, his sin. In the cast of pewter light filtering through the August sky cloudspun and dulled, Elmer, your garden is still lovely. You would be happy to know it. Even the colors filtered through the Sunday pewter morning light. He was praying in a certain place. He said to them, when you pray his last sermon, and the
light filtered through St Monica’s windows, lavender and bronze, his last sermon and mine here.
Will they call her about the hair? They should. I have not left much, and neither have I asked for much. They should call her, and she should do it, in case. It is one last vanity, but it is not much. They should do it in case you Tris—in case one last time. But the porcelain vase is broken, the beautiful vase I threw, it flew, I did it myself against the wall, and shattered. It flew into a bright star of fragments, the fundament, the firmament, the first and the last and the moment is broken, never one whole together again. Ever here and ever smaller, folding myself in the wainscoting a crack and the fragments scattered in porcelain dust on the floor. Darkness and shadow creep from the leaves, interweaving the pewter Sunday sky.
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