It was only in the waiting room outside the obstetrics ward that Patchway felt something different gnawing at him. Snow fell beyond the window glass. Evening and then night. She was suffering in her delivery. He watched the snow fall and nursed this strange thing happening inside of him.
The nurse took him by the arm and drew him into the birthing room. It was jammed with white and someone was screaming. He reached a hand through all that blinding light and felt something that was hair and sweat and heat.
“Patchway!” it cried in terror and pain.
The blinding thing gathered him to her and he gathered her to him and he was astonished. What is all this? Who is this animal? What’s happening to me?
He was pulled around the bed on which the hairy sweaty screaming thing lay in blinding white and found himself dressed and masked and washed.
He stared at a woman’s thighs obscenely spread. Those were no thighs he had ever seen before, not like that. What was he doing in the middle of all this lunacy?
Someone was still screaming out of the white light.
Other people were shouting at him, some screaming at the animal screaming on the bed.
He heard a voice very much like his own say, “Good God, is everything all right?”
“All very normal, Mr. Patchway, come help me here.”
Out of that obscene white screaming light came spurts of blood, gleams of metal, dying screams, a panting cry, a clawing, bloody, white-clotted lizard of human being there in his hands.
“What this?” he shouted in panic. “Oh, what is this?”
Could I have made this? is what he meant to shout. Me? Patchway? After all the wretched things I have done?
Now there was another sound, a sound that subsumed everything else, a sound that was equal to the white light and to the bloody monster in that faraway bed. It was the sound of Patchway’s heart beating next to the heart of his baby.
I love you, Patchway said to his child, or thought he said or thought he heard someone who was supposed to be him say.
He was surprised to hear the words. He was happy to hear the words. He was in love with his baby and he wanted to say the words over and over again and he did.
Then there was only one heart beating.
Patchway looked at his hands with the birth blood on them. He saw all the blood he had made in the war. He did not believe in sin before that moment. He did not believe in the retribution of God or of the universe or of righteousness before that moment.
He heard screams and they were not coming from the monster on the bed or out of all that white light. They were coming from the chill blackness that was inside him and spilling out of him and around him and filling up the room.
Patchway held his baby’s heart to his heart and he screamed.
Agent Orange had killed his baby. Patchway had brought the infection out of his red moment of war. It was his own contraction, one man caught under the hammering Slinky toy.
They buried the baby in the high, sere Plains land with the sound of machineguns all around Patchway. He stood guard by the grave all that day, all that night. When morning came, Patchway walked away from life. What else could he do after so much wrong?
He and she discovered that desperation is not enough to make a marriage. They divorced. And Patchway finished his divorce from life.
Patchway finally released the telephone. He had been staring out into the city but seeing none of it. He pulled open the bedroom door. The servant in her chadur was packing Glynda’s bags. She glared at him from her kohl-rimmed eyes, surprised and satisfied. She had used the bedroom phone to listen in on his conversation.
What did one more listener in a country full of eavesdroppers mean to Patchway? Nothing. How could anything mean any more?
He pulled open the drawer and took out the big revolver. The servant froze in her work, her chadur clenched shut in her teeth, her pharaoh eyes watching him with the revolver.
Patchway laughed a laugh that frightened her and surprised him. What could make him laugh? Nothing. So he laughed again.
He tested the feel of his belly scar and had no pain. He shoved the pistol under his belt, against the scar. She watched him do it.
Love was yesterday, if it ever was. Today was for making money. Money made more sense. Money could not die. He could not kill money. The cosmos did not care how he made money or spent money or did anything else with money.
For a man who had run away from life, money was the perfect thing, the only thing he could make his.
Patchway heard the applause in his ears once more. That was all he had, the applause. And money. And the pistol under his belt beside the scar. And no hope of anything else to the end of his time.
* * *
Ahwaz, Southwest Iran – 1976
The child stealers came at the usual hour, black sheets flung over their distorted bodies, the fabric spittle-stained where it was clamped in brown teeth to show nothing but a triangle of tooth, nose and unblinking black eyes.
Their work-scarred fingers plucked the child from Glynda’s side where she lay on her pallet in the corner of the mud brick cell whimpering her protest in the wrong language, curling around herself in her own black chadur as she sank into the stupor she endured, had endured, would always endure so long as this desert held her prisoner.
Alone again, Glynda clawed up the adobe wall, splitting the stubble of her nails, pulling herself to her feet. She held herself upright at the window of her cell. The pulsing orange nightlight of the city warmed her face.
Glynda stifled her whimpers and rubbed the tears in streaks across her face. She pushed open the window. The stench of the great gas flare towers surrounding the oil city burned her throat and reminded her that all this was real and she was alive and that she could hope.
Hope! Was there such a thing or was it delusion?
What were these absurd memories she carried of a different world before her marriage to Ardjovani where she had food to eat, clothes to wear, men to fawn over her and freedom to dream of the day she would have a child?
Now Glynda had a child and nothing else. Nothing, at all. The child had been hers to bear but not hers to keep.
She tugged the veil tighter against the dry chill of the dusty cell. Beyond her window the great oil trucks and clattering masses of this greedy, insomniac city strove at the making and stealing of money.
Could she sell herself to one of those truck drivers? How many would she have to endure to earn the money to escape this place with her son? Would any of them be less brutal than the man she had married?
Glynda straightened the newspapers stuffed for warmth into her cotton leggings. She brushed down the stained wool shift and realized she had lost her figure. The belly that had been sleek and attractive in a cheerleader’s skirt was sunken with hunger. Her legs were gone. Dirty long johns flapped at her shriveled thighs. The full bosom that had won her beaux, had won her first place on the cheerleading squad, had won her Patchway and had won her everything she had stubbornly wanted including her desert prince for a husband, had withered.
She held her hands to the throbbing orange light. There was no flesh on her hands. Just bone and dirt. The raveled sleeves of her long underwear hung from her wrists like half-shed skin.
It was a marvel that her husband had continued to come to this body and spread her and enforce his authority. No one else would have her. Certainly no truck drivers. There was no money to be made under these rags.
Even if Glynda could find money, she had no documents. What of the passport check at any border? She would have to steal from its hiding place the Iranian passport Ardjovani had given her when they wed. But immigration police would insist on her husband’s letter of permission for her to travel, especially with a baby boy.
My husband is dead, she could say.
Then your brother-in-law’s permission, khanoum?
She would not have that, either.
Where is the boy’s passport, lady? the police would ask.
They would send her back in custody, like a caged pet dog to its master.
The beatings would resume.
Hunger twisted her stomach. Glynda cried out as she fell writhing on the mat.
The door to her cell creaked open. The serving girl who squatted there in the hall, wrapped in her own chadur, had shoved open the door to look in.
“Ab!” Glynda cried. “Ab, ab, water, damn you! Khohesh mikonam, ab!”
The child gathered her chadur and shuffled down the corridor on rubber sandals. She brought water and ice. She pressed the glass to Glynda’s lips. “Drink, sister,” she said.
“Is it boiled? Is the water clean?”
“Drink, sister,” replied the child in the little English she knew.
“You’re making me sick! It’s to keep control of me. I’ll die if I don’t get clean water! Chai, chai, bring me chai. Boil it. Boiled tea.”
Glynda collapsed on the pallet, whimpering into unconsciousness.
The serving girl woke her caressing the blond hair that fell from Glynda’s veil and offering her tea in a tiny glass.
Glynda pulled the tea glass to her mouth, pouring the hot and bitter liquid down her throat, feeling the rich pain of it, feeling it cauterize the sickness in her stomach and ease the cramp.
“More!” she cried.
The child poured the glass full.
Glynda saw silhouetted in the doorway of her cell her mother-in-law, a tray of rice, meat bones and bruised tomatoes in her hands, her black veil peaked over her head, where her hair was tied up, to look like some demented Klansman who had grabbed the wrong color sheet from his linen closet.
Glynda laughed, the first laugh she could remember coming out of her since Georgie was born on the one glorious day of her life as a desert princess.
She dropped the little tea glass to shatter on the dirt floor and laughed as tears ran from her eyes and nose. She laughed until something like the color of youth came into her cheeks, her chadur fell from her head shaking out the fleas, her blond hair lank and greasy around her shoulders.
The mother-in-law threw back her head and popped her tongue in disapproval before she shuffled in to lay the tray by Glynda.
“What’s this horrid muck, you monster?” Glynda shouted. She put a hand into the stew and held up the meat. “Beef bones and fat?” She smashed the crockery with the bones. “And this vegetable filth – what is it but the roadside cuttings where the dogs piss. Rice! Al-lah, rice every day! I’m pissing and bleeding rice!”
She flung the plate against the wall and clapped her greasy hands to her face and sobbed, “My baby, my baby, where is my baby?”
The mother-in-law shouted. The servant girl, quailing, hastily plucked rice from the floor and ate it. The old woman had a stick. The beating began.
It was the same day or the day after or the week after or the century after that they brought the baby to her to suckle and she saw the young man in the doorway.
Had he come to her once or twice or every day?
She grew healthier. A miracle! She found she could eat the food. Had it changed or had she? The withered arms began to find shape. Her bosom began to return.
She had the strength to sit up more hours each day, to pull herself up to the window to look into the street with its truck drivers who had in their pockets the money she could earn to escape.
Why had they allowed her to get stronger? Had she been too ill to produce Georgie’s milk? Or did they have to repair the baby factory so Ardjovani could have another child?
She could not escape with two children.
Who was this young man?
Glynda saw him again and this time she spoke to him in Farsi. He answered in English but it was a dream. There was no one to comfort her. No one to steal her baby for her.
He came again when the serving girl was absent, when the mother-in-law was away, when she did not have the baby at her breast. Who was he?
A day, a week, a month, a year. She saw him in her dreams. He was Ardjovani in the good days. Patchway in the good days. All the bright young men of her youth in the good days.
Would she ever be young again?
Was all of youth to be wasted in this cell dropping babies, making milk and withering into a cripple in a black veil?
At last the dream spoke to her. “How do you feel today?” it said.
“Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize me?” The dream man was hurt.
Glynda got to her feet, hands on the wall to steady herself, and got close to him. He had Ardjovani’s hawk nose and bushy brows but the hair was black, the face young.
“My husband’s nephew!” she said in despair.
Dream man gone! Hope gone!
Glynda wanted to fall onto her pallet, there to curl up and stop dreaming, but the refreshed strength in her made her suddenly defiant. Her strength and defiance surprised her. She tried to glare at him, feeling pride in being able to glare.
But he was merely puzzled by her expression and said, “I am Reza Horiat. I’ve come to see you many times.”
“What the hell for?”
“To talk about school, of course.”
This dream was a mad man. “Get away from me, you fool.”
“No, no,” he said, anxious. “We’re both alumni of the same university. In Texas! I saw it in your papers that Ardjovani has.”
He had seen the papers she needed to escape from this place.
“So you want to talk about school days?” She laughed and was pleased she had the strength to laugh. The effort weakened her in her stomach and she said, “Bring me tea. Do that and we’ll talk. Boil the damn water first.”
Reza brought tea and she looked at him – a boy about twenty who had seen enough of Texas to know that the whole world is not Iran and that a dusty cell in Ahwaz is no place to hide a Western woman. Perhaps she would not need the truck drivers’ money. One young man could be enough.
“Let’s talk about the old days,” Glynda said.
After their first meeting outside of her dreams, Glynda talked often with Reza. She ate whatever she was given and asked for more of. She put on weight and, when she fed Georgie, the volume of milk passing through her nipple was her gauge to judge her growing strength.
When she was alone in her cell, Glynda exercised to build arms and legs and breast. She demanded water and soap and cleaned herself and called for fresh clothes.
She learned the passive demeanor of the daughter-in-law and she learned a skill she had not expected ever to learn – she learned to obey. What was demanded of her by her mother-in-law, she did. What was expected of her by jailer-husband, she did.
Until the moment she realized the treats she was awarded for good behavior – a chance to walk veiled downtown in the company of the other anonymous women of the household – were meant to distract her from the truth that she was allowed less time with Georgie.
The mother-in-law, whose duty it is to raise her son’s son, had decided the moment had come to cut the tie between baby and mother. To put the boy entirely in the hands of the other women of the house. To leave Glynda to her cell and her few treats until the day Georgie brought home a wife for Glynda to mother-in-law and from whom to steal her baby.
When Reza Horiat made his next visit to her cell, Glynda began to seduce him.
Her seduction skills had withered as had her body. But she toyed with Reza, teasing and promising, watching his puzzled confusion and fright. She laughed at herself for her clumsiness but could see that he considered her a marvel of promise.
Glynda could not know that Reza had closely watched her grow back into something like the shape of the cheerleader she had been. He heard her Texas accent in Farsi and English and dreamed of the girls he had bedded in his American college.
Reza believed all Western women are whores. They had proved it to him in Texas. He was not surprised to discover Glynda plucking at him. He was surprised to wonder how many weeks this ha
d gone on without his recognizing it.
He was frightened to wonder what would happen to him if he made love to his uncle’s wife, even a foreign whore wife. And then Reza thought nothing at all when the moment came that she drew him down on top of her on her mat on the dirt floor.
She was marvelous beyond all the marvels he had experienced with the girls of Texas and the whores of Ahwaz. He was deliriously happy and terrified.
Glynda could see all of that in his face and said to him, “A thousand dollars. That’s what I want.”
He was stunned. He was happy. He was terrified. He nearly cried out, “But what can you do with money here?”
“In U.S. dollars. One thousand of them.”
“But why? What do you want it for? Is this blackmail?” he nearly shouted.
He thought of strangling her to prevent Ardjovani from being told by her that Reza had lain with his uncle’s wife. He thought of flight from Ahwaz, from Iran, from the gold mine.
Then he dug into his trouser pocket and brought out rolls of money – Iranian, American, French – and counted out one thousand dollars.
“Will it be,” he said, terrified and yearning, “a thousand each time?”
He wanted his voice to be bitter and hard but what he heard from himself sounded weak and frightened, the addict yearning for his next fix.
Glynda held the money in her hands and to cover her surprise at winning it so easily said, “It’s only a game, Reza. Come when you please and bring me money. We’ll have a secret joke.”
He was stunned again. “A secret joke?”
“That I am your whore and you are my master.”
He wanted to screw her again. He felt the sudden hunger to do it again.
“Have you another thousand?” she said.
“You have all my money.”
“I am your whore but I want money,” she said. “Next time bring double and you can have double.”
Reza tried to laugh but choked and reached for her tea cup and drank it down.
He thought, At this price she’s the cheapest true-blond whore in Ahwaz, a bargain!
Now he laughed and she laughed, too, a weird, piercing hysteric’s laugh that frightened him. Maybe he should kill her, anyway, but where over this whole planet could he escape a secret policeman as cruel and unrelenting as Ardjovani?
The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved Page 2