by Colin Harvey
"The doctors say that it's not uncommon for more… mature… survivors of attacks to suffer stroke-like symptoms. The important thing was that they stabilized it quickly. You need to give yourself time to heal." She rubbed his shoulder, keeping her voice close to a croon, "Where do you want to sleep tonight? Alone, or with me?"
"Isn't it your night with Doug?"
"We'll swap over." She had slept with him the week before, and it had calmed him in the night, when the dreams otherwise fractured his sleep – and theirs as he yelled his awakening – into hour or two-hour long shards.
"Let's decide later." He squeezed her hand with his free one and stood unsteadily.
"Why won't you take up the Department's offer of counseling?" Leslyn said.
"Because," Shah said. He couldn't actually articulate why. It would feel like giving in sounded so lame. "I'd rather use how it feels right now as fuel, and run on that."
"How does it feel?" Leslyn whispered. Her eyes were still the hazel of her youth, but now the soft skin had given way to crow's feet, and her mouth was turned down in an expression of perpetual disappointment.
"Like my head is a vast warehouse. I swear I can hear the echo of my thoughts where there should be memories." He picked up a leather-bound book. "I found this yesterday." He opened the clasp, allowing it to fall open at a random page. "It's my father's journal from when he arrived, full of profound insights like 'Went to buy new stroller for Junior.' That's how he always refers to me. Three letters: J-n-r. That's what I was, a junior version of him."
Leslyn stared at it. "It's a Filofax." Then her training reasserted itself. "Sorry, daydreaming. Well, Pervez, by all means sail on a voyage of self-discovery, but don't kill yourself. Come, sit down. I'll bring you some soup. Tomato and basil, from the garden."
"I'm not one of your bloody patients, Sister Calea," he grumbled, but half-heartedly, and she kissed his cheek when he fell back into the chair.
He stared at the entry he'd found yesterday: March 3rd, 1980. A boy! A bouncing bonny boy, as one of the nurses described him, born to Rasheed and Afsoon Shah in Schenectady, New York. My young American – I'll play him that lovely David Bowie song I heard on the radio the other day. I'll teach him baseball and hockey, to love ice cream and hot dogs – or do they contain pork? Does it matter if they do? Perhaps he will take some other faith; it will be his choice. We will call him Pervez, after my friend from Dubai, who helped smuggle us out when the world was falling around our ears. A boy!!!
Shah stared at the page, almost overcome at his father's optimism, comparing it to the remote, tired figure he remembered. Had he got it that wrong?
March 4th, 1980. The news is full of images of screaming 'students' and Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. Stories of anti-Iranian abuse here in the Land of the Free. Can they not see that we are as much victims as them? I should not complain. For all that the FBI still want to see me and wring more information than I have from me, America has taken us in. Until this passes, we must keep our heads down.
Shah put the book down, and thought of the clip he'd found the day before. That was what that cop O'Riordan was remembering. It had been the only clip Shah had found when he'd entered his parents name into the search parameters. It had been a burn, long after the event, but it had been painful that the only memory of his father he could find had been so full of sadness.
Shah levered himself out of the chair and tottered across his room, holding his traitorous body's urge to stagger in check. He sat in front of the console and picked up its attached scanner, fitting it onto the shaven patch on his temple, then pulled the hood over his head. He'd tried to surf the web 'bareback' but found the outside world impinged too much.
Leslyn had had to show him how to do it. When it came to performing tasks that should be automatic his warehouseempty mind was unable to do things that were easy for Leslyn and Doug.
Inside the hood the world seemed very far away. It muffled sounds, blocked odors, while no light penetrated the thick lining. Sometimes, as it had earlier, the hood helped, depriving him of sensory distractions. Other times, like now, it simply created a vacuum into which an overwhelming rage – worsened by having no tangible focus – slipped like a dark fog. He had found the memory of a dementia sufferer a few days earlier, and it was both familiar and strange at the same time. Strange because of the jumble of memories shuffled into randomness, but familiar in its sense that the world had been somehow tipped on its side.
Shah tried to shut the rage out, but it refused to go away. He said "Shah, New York.", but when the list of clips scrolled down in his mind's eye, nothing jumped out. Nor did anything block the thought that he had six weeks to somehow regain his knowledge of the world. He tore off the hood and crossed to the window. Thoughts whirled like butterflies within his mind, and he suspected that some of them were the ghostly shadows of memories of the attack itself. The doctors had told him what had happened, and warned him although his memories were gone, the mental bruising of the trauma was still there, made even worse by having no perceptible cause.
He paced up and down until he shook with fatigue, and had to prop himself up against the table. Only when he felt his legs buckling did he finally concede defeat, and sit down.
This time bareback, he reattached the scanner and studied again the download of meeting Leslyn, the only thing of his that he'd been able to track down, wondering whether he had been lucky enough to track a bit of his memory that had been ripped, or whether he'd simply posted it to the web himself long before. Wonder how I can tell the difference? He thought, then wondered whether he'd always been so obsessive about memory, or whether the attack had made him so. He'd read stories of people made compulsive by such events.
When he'd experienced his meeting Leslyn half-dozen times, he played O'Riordan's memory of bullying his father. He realized that he was clenching and unclenching his fist. He replayed it again, squeezing it for a meaning like juice from an orange. Father was a detective in the Shah's secret police in Isfahan before the Ayatollahs took power. They emigrated to the US, he scribbled on a piece of paper he'd kept at hand. He was murdered when I was eight. It was believed it was an exile's execution by an overseas supporter of the Ayatollahs but no one was ever brought to trial.
He paused, and wrote: Was Father's murder the reason I became a cop?
XXII
Dawn sunlight crept across the walls as Leslyn paused on the white-plastered mezzanine between the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors. She put down the Perhaps Bag. Doug had taken the name from the string bag which Soviet housewives took with them wherever they went: "Perhaps there will be potatoes, or meat," they would say. He liked to grumble that today's erratic food supplies were as bad as the days of communist Russia.
Leslyn felt every day of her fifty-five years, but took deep breaths, ignoring the pain shooting up her calves from her varicose veins. She had just finished an eight-hour shift, and the walk home was just too much.
When she'd been a teenager early in the century people had said, "Fifty's the new thirty," and fifty-five year-old women seemed impossibly glamorous. Everyone had believed that life would keep getting ever longer, that soon sixty would be the new thirty.
Now it was the other way round: thirty year-olds looked sixty.
Leslyn took one last deep breath. "Daydreaming won't get this shopping home," she muttered, then wondered why she was being quiet. The building was half-empty, like much of Manhattan, the skyscrapers too tall to be livable for anyone but the young, the fit or the crazy.
Leslyn was out of breath again before she was halfway up, but momentum kept her going. Low blood sugar made her hand wobble, and her key only scratched at the lock.
Before she could try again, the door swung open and Doug gave her a tremulous smile. "Heard you coming." He gave her a passionate kiss on the mouth which she half-avoided. She was too tired for that now. He took the hint and extricated the bag from her fingers.
"I stopped at the morning market," she sai
d of the erratic gathering that sprang up several times a week on the corner of Canal and Church, showing him her bargains.
"Ooh, imported luxury." Doug found a home on a cluttered shelf for the couscous, put the lamb in a fridge that was nearly as old as they were and equally given to groaning, and, switched on the kettle.
"How's he been?" Leslyn said in an undertone.
"More nightmares," Doug murmured.
"I heard at the market." Leslyn lowered her voice. "There's been another attack – this time it's a guy. Beaten and wiped."
"Should we tell him?" Doug's features took on a sudden animation. "Morning, Pete!"
"Hey, Leslyn," Shah mumbled from the doorway. "How's the worker?" Dark rings made it look as if someone had punched his eyes, although the real bruises had now faded, four weeks after the attack.
How much did he hear? "Tired, but give me six hours and I'll be good as new."
"That's good."
Doug was studiously concentrating on making tea. "You want some?" He poured water into a third cup.
"I found a memory of us meeting," Shah said.
"No!" Leslyn said. "In Denver?" She saw anguish flicker across Doug's face, felt for his hand and gave it a quick squeeze.
"M-hm." Shah bobbed his head. "I was there for a conference. I tried to find when it was, but couldn't."
"Lot of old records lost now." Leslyn longed to be able to take her mug to bed. "That was toward the end of when people could journey across country. If it had been just a few years later, we'd never have met, and I'd never have followed you to New York." She turned to Doug and hugged him. "I'd never have met you, either." Doug smiled, but talk of her and Pete's pre-Doug relationship always made him uneasy. Leslyn added, "Travel nowadays, that's for the rich and the powerful, isn't it?"
"I'll turn down the bed for you," Doug said, vanishing from the room.
Shah exhaled heavily. "I found the memory last week, but I thought it might upset him. I should have just kept quiet about it altogether."
"Living with us must sometimes be baffling." Leslyn added, "But Doug finds it equally hard, you know. He's bending over backwards to try not to make you feel like a stranger, to help you fit in."
"Trouble is," Shah said, "right now I feel like a stranger, even to myself."
Leslyn said, "You're learning everything again, questioning everything; it's like we're shining a big searchlight on the marriage, and all the cracks in it. When Doug joined us, he made it clear that he didn't want kids, which suited us." She sighed and yawned. "But maybe us staying together wasn't such a good idea – perhaps separating then might have been better."
Leslyn knew that she risked opening a Pandora's Box by mentioning her, but couldn't help it. The urge to ask was overwhelming, like a chickenpox scab and Leslyn suspected picking it would be equally messy. "Do you remember anyone from before the attack?"
"Like who?"
"A girl called Aurora," Leslyn said. "Something happened."
"Did I…?" Shah clearly realized that this was significant, but not how, and Leslyn breathed a little sigh of relief.
Shah had been discreetly bringing women home since
Leslyn had invited Doug into their marriage eight years earlier, ostensibly to provide the company lacking due to Shah's long hours and their mismatched shifts. They had an open marriage so she could hardly complain, and sometimes Shah indulging his libido elsewhere was a relief. None of Shah's occasional and short-lived flings had unsettled her like that stunning young woman.
Normally Leslyn was uninterested in looks – including her own – but the girl had made her feel an old frump. She wasn't sure whether learning that Aurora was a companion had made things better or worse. I've been a dutiful wife and mother for years, for what; so he can bring home a whore?
Shah's next question was so unexpected that it caught her completely off-guard: "Has Doug always been so whiny?"
"What do you mean?"
"I heard him yesterday. Asking you what you see in him. How needy is that?"
Leslyn was surprised by the surge of anger she felt. She had always laughed Doug's clinginess away, but right now she was too tired, and attack seemed the best form of defense, especially since she had hoped that this blank slate might turn out to be less harsh on his co-husband. "He was distressed. How needy would you be if every breath was a struggle?"
"Is this what this place is, Leslyn, a home for lame ducks – first him, now me?"
He's thinking out loud. He can't mean to be as tactless as he sounds. "Since you ask Pete, most of Doug's attraction is that he isn't you. You're pretty much exact opposites. You're dogged and unrelenting as now, to Doug's quicksilver. You're unpretentious, but sometimes I like his little affectations, reading a passage aloud from an obscure novel or burbling about whatever issue or human interest story from the news snags his attention."
Shah didn't seem offended. "When I came into the kitchen yesterday, you were out on the balcony tending the plants. While he read something to you."
"Rex Stout. We both like Rex Stout." Leslyn laughed. "The compost bags!" She clapped her hands together.
"So he was reading aloud with his little finger in the air. Then he started pontificating about it." Shah adopted a clipped, prissy voice: "'My dear Leslyn, the very idea that a grown person could hide beneath compost bags is grotesque and unlikely to fool even a child, let alone supposedly trained detectives'."
Leslyn couldn't help laughing at the accuracy with which Shah mimicked Doug's mannerisms. She'd had no idea he possessed such powers of mimicry. What else has been buried all these years within the old Shah?
"It seems to me that the less Doug knows about a subject, the stronger his opinions."
Leslyn goggled. "Say that again."
"What? The less Doug knows about a subject?"
"Exactly – where did that come from?"
"Dunno. Just thought of it, as far as I can tell. Why?"
"Because you've said it before, Pete. So either you're reaching the same conclusions as then… or your memories are starting to come back…"
XXIII
Sweat, blood, amniotic fluid, and tension form a dizzying cocktail.
The power went off an hour ago, but the nurses and midwives simply switched to manual and battery-operated equipment. It's easy for them; they have no emotional investment beyond wanting to perform as professionally as always, and they have duties to distract them. You wish that you had duties beyond holding Leslyn's hand.
"Regular breaths, now, Ms Calea," the midwife says.
Outside, the corridor resembles a charnel-house. Another airborne virus has mutated, taking three thousand people this week. One of the toughest decisions was whether to come into the hospital at all for the birth, or have the baby at home. But six, even seven apartments have the crosses of tape with the skull and crossbones motifs stuck across their doorways, denoting plague victims inside, so it seems no safer to stay at home.
"On my mark, push," the midwife says, and tells you, "Wipe her forehead, please."
Leslyn shrieks, her vocal cords standing out like rope hawsers, her body straining to expel the baby. The latest shortage is anesthetics, so even if Leslyn wanted it, pain relief isn't available at the moment.
"I can see the crown!" a nurse says. "Oh! The umbilical cord's wrapped around the neck!" He reaches in beyond your sight, in between your wife's spread-eagled legs, and you hear a small snipping sound. "OK, that takes care of that."
"Come on," the midwife urges again, smiling as she sees you recording the scene with your cellphone in your free hand. "One more push!"
Leslyn obliges with another hoarse bawl, squeezing your hand so hard that you believe your fingers may splinter at any moment.
"You're doing fine, Hon," you add.
"The head's clearing now," the nurse says. "One more big, bi-i-i-ig push!"
Anyone would think she was coaching at Flushing Meadow.
Leslyn yells and pushes again, another spasm, and she s
queezes again – two minutes ago you'd had have wagered your fingers couldn't hurt any more, but now you know better.
"Oh, yes, it's a beautiful baby girl!" the midwife cries. They manhandle the dark, blood-smeared little body. There's a slap, and a thin squall joins the adult voices. The nurse wraps the tiny form in towels and says, handing your baby to Leslyn, "You have a healthy baby girl, Ms Calea."
"Perveza." You utter the name you agreed several weeks ago, feeling a vast sweeping sensation of joy at this new life that you've brought into the world, and before you know it, you're wet-eyed at the sheer beauty of her.
"You old fool," Leslyn says indulgently as you wipe your eyes.