Sweet Jesus

by Christine Pountney

  Zeus had a rubber stethoscope that played ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and this is what he resorted to now. For Lalia, Zeus had to wipe down his toolbox and all his props with isopropyl swabs and, in addition to his face mask and gloves, wear a pale blue surgical gown and cap. It was because of her immune system, which was weak, though her spirit was so strong.

  Standing outside her room, he put the stethoscope into his ears and pretended to listen to his own heart. He could hear people talking on the other side of the door and wondered whether he should come back later. He knocked and Mrs. Deluca answered and immediately broke out, with frantic delight, Oh look, Lalia, it’s Signore Zeus!

  Lalia loved Zeus so much. It almost shocked him how firm she could be in her demands for him. Today, she didn’t want him to leave. Even as the doctors talked to her parents in hushed tones, she insisted that he stay. Zeus pulled a joke syringe out of his gown and squirted a murderous red ribbon at the doctor, for Lalia’s sake, and she had giggled right through his speech, while her parents wept quietly into their hands. Zeus caught her father’s eye and it was like the eye of an animal in the jaws of a trap – fearful, uncomprehending. It was at moments like this that Fenton’s father would appear to him, smacking the foot of the hospital bed the way he’d pound the dinner table, and bellow his rousing encouragement, A gag is a gag is a gag! Don’t fuck with the joke, Zeus! Sometimes it’s all you’ve got!

  The previous time he saw her, Lalia had patted him gently on the back of the hand, in a maternal way, as if she knew he needed reassurance. The kids could always tell. They know everything, a nurse had told him once. Astonishing in their wisdom and thoughtfulness, giving encouragement when they were the ones who were suffering.

  More tests were required and Lalia was transferred to a gurney with a clear plastic tent. Before she was wheeled out of her room, Zeus took out his pocket watch with the terrycloth dog and wound it up and snapped it open and read in her eyes hope, heartbreaking courage, and a little plea to save her. He waved goodbye and one of the wheels on her gurney spun wildly as they pushed her down the hall.

  He went to Sam’s room, but Sam wasn’t there, so he flapped over to the nurse’s station in his big shoes and was told the boy had been taken to ICU the night before.

  Zeus laid his hands on the counter to steady himself. He considered taking off his costume and laying it neatly at the nurse’s station. He could walk out of the hospital in his underwear and never come back. He went into the staff lounge and lay down on a cold vinyl cot.

  He must have fallen asleep because it was nearly midnight when he woke up with a start. He took off his surgical gown, put on his morning jacket, and flippered conspicuously out of the ward. In a faint-hearted attempt at dignity, he took off his long, flat brown shoes and tucked them under his arm like two folded newspapers.

  The suspended glass walkway that joined the upper levels of the north and south sections of the hospital was one of his favourite places. He liked how it hissed with the unseen circulation of air, as if it had lungs in a perpetual state of exhalation. The walkway was a bright glass vein of bluish light. The glass itself glowed, who knows where the fluorescence was hidden. Zeus padded silently into the tunnel, eleven floors of thin air beneath his feet, and stopped at the halfway point. Between his socks, cars nosed along the street below – and one tiny pedestrian, who seemed engaged in conversation with a mailbox. He looked out over the cityscape. Office towers shining like stainless steel appliances in the moonlight. The moon was so full and bright it seemed to surpass the potential of mere reflection. Zeus raised his thumb like a painter and covered it. The moon was the size of his thumbnail.

  It wasn’t hard to make a thing disappear. And when it was gone, you sometimes wondered whether or not it had ever existed. Would it be that way with Fenton? The thought made him feel as if he was coming apart, like aspirin in water.

  Hey, Zeus! This was from a young doctor rushing through the glass corridor, lab coat open, holding a can of Diet Coke. You’ve got to have your shoes on, it’s regulation.

  Zeus waited until the alarming disruption of her sudden appearance had subsided, then he bent forward to place his shoes soundlessly on the floor and slip them back on.

  At the ICU they weren’t allowing visitors, but he went and stood outside the room Sam was in. Behind the door, he could hear a woman’s voice, elevated, urgent. She began to shout, This is completely unacceptable! Where’s the goddamn doctor! I want my son moved to another department – now! Her voice sounded disembodied, unnatural, like the voice of someone being electrocuted, or possessed. There was a low murmur, in a man’s voice. Quiet male anguish. Zeus wanted to burst in and do a silly routine, make Sam laugh. That’s what he should’ve done, to hell with the rules. Make him laugh again when, all around him, people were choking on their grief. But he couldn’t do it. Zeus no longer had the heart, or the stomach, for this kind of thing anymore. Not for anything anymore. He took a few steps down the hall, then went back to the room. He pried off his feathery orange wig. He hung it from the door handle – a ritual of defeat – and walked away.

  In the morning, Fenton was having trouble breathing. Zeus was crying and Fenton said, I think it’s time to go. Zeus packed him a bag and accompanied him to the hospital, where a doctor they’d both met before was on duty. She did a quick assessment and told them Fenton had pneumonia. He was admitted and given a bed in a shared room. He looked so thin and sickly, Zeus wondered how he’d failed to notice the extent of it. It was only now, against the white sheets, that he realized how yellow Fenton’s skin had become. His hair was dark and matted against his forehead. He had an oxygen tube taped under his nose and an IV inserted into the back of his hand. Even his hands, on top of the sheets, looked strange, like they didn’t belong to him. Zeus touched one of them. It was surprisingly hot and dry. Oh Fenton, he said. I don’t know what to say.

  What’s there to say? Everything’s obvious now. And what isn’t, no longer matters. Fenton coughed and put a great effort into adjusting himself and sank back into the same position.

  You’re my best friend, Zeus said and pulled the curtain around the bed and carefully got in beside him. What am I going to do without you?

  Fenton rolled over slowly and did what they’d done for many years – he spooned Zeus. It made Zeus feel protected, cared for. It gave his body such a warm deep pleasure, almost childlike, to be cradled this way. He realized how tired he was. He didn’t want to go anywhere ever again. He could feel himself falling asleep.

  Remember when we were in the truck, Fenton whispered, and I told you I was in the army? His voice was so close to Zeus’s ear, it woke him up.

  There’s more to it, he said. Something I never really got over but didn’t understand until a year ago. I think it’s why I got sick.

  What do you mean? Zeus said.

  We were sent to Lebanon, Fenton said. There’d been these massacres in the refugee camps there. The Israelis were blamed, but it was the Lebanese Christians fighting the Lebanese Muslims. Fenton’s lungs began to whistle and he rolled onto his back and gave a sudden, ripping cough.

  Zeus got a glass of water from the bedside table and lifted Fenton’s head so he could take a sip through a white straw bent sideways at its accordion hinge. He lowered him back onto the pillow and lay down beside him again. Zeus told him maybe it was better he didn’t talk so much, but Fenton said he needed to tell him.

  We got there at the end of the war, Fenton said, but it was still awful. We saw a lot of bodies. I remember there was this baby on the ground. She wasn’t crying. Just lying there with these huge, wide eyes. Right where she’d been dropped. Tiny hands trembling in the air from shock. Nobody was picking her up.

  For a moment, Fenton stopped talking and the room filled up with all the familiar hospital noises – a blowing air vent, a beeping monitor.

  There was a boy there too, he said. Somehow he became my responsibility. He was bawling his guts out, just hysterical, and I couldn’t stand i
t. I couldn’t get him to stop. He was six or seven years old. We carried chocolate bars for the kids. I mean, they were given to us by the army, to win them over, pacify them. I gave him a chocolate bar so he’d stop crying. I must’ve given him about ten of them because I didn’t want to hear him cry again. Your parents have been murdered. Here, kid, have another Hershey’s bar. What the hell else was I supposed to do?

  But you were just a kid yourself, Zeus said.

  So there I am, a year ago, Fenton said. I’m sitting in this cab and the driver says, I know you. I say, no you don’t. He says, yes I do. You were in Lebanon. No, I wasn’t. It was such a long time ago. I hadn’t thought about it in years. I’d put it out of my mind. You gave me chocolate when my family was killed, he said. Nobody knows I was there. How could this guy know? I didn’t know what to say. I started to cry, right there in the cab. I apologized – he said it was okay. When we got to my door, he wouldn’t take my money. I thought, why is this guy being so nice? What had his life been like? He’s a cab driver now in Chicago, and I’m a clown, working with kids, still trying to pacify them with little gifts of sweetness, right in the face of death.

  Fenton made a gasping noise, like he couldn’t get enough air. His lungs were an abandoned barn, something cavernous, with rafters. Zeus could hear pigeons in there, flapping their wings in the dust. But that story’s a good sign, he said. It’s optimistic. It shows how things we give away can sometimes come back to us, that the things we do, whether we know it or not, can have a good effect.

  You don’t understand, Fenton said. I was in the army. I was trained to kill people. I was involved in that killing, and it was after meeting that man again that my body started to break down. I thought, why? Why did I meet him? Was it to take me back to that moment in Lebanon? Or to a moment just before that, when my father sent me to the army in the first place and I didn’t refuse? Because what enemies did I have? Talk about Jewish duty. It was my duty to refuse. It’s everybody’s duty.

  Fenton had to stop and rest.

  That’s what I’m guilty of, he said, in the smallest voice. That’s why I’m dying. It’s why we’ll all die.

  No, it’s not, Zeus said.

  I wanted to do the baby swap with you, Fenton said. I wanted to see Lalia and Sam. How can God live with himself? Why does he always take the best children?

  Norm flicked back and forth between election coverage and the baseball game – one moment a CNN anchor talking to a holographic image of a correspondent in Dallas, and the next, Cheeter making a dive for the ball and hanging for a second parallel to the ground before catching, in his tan glove, that little white snowball with such quick and unnatural precision it was as if a plug had been pulled in the earth and the first two things to get sucked down were Cheeter and that baseball.

  Norm pressed a wrong number on the remote control and found himself staring at the Weather Channel. A jazzy instrumental version of a U2 song was playing. A map of the world spun and threw up the temperatures in London, Stockholm, Cairo, Marrakesh. There was something about the jaunty blind optimism of the music and the authority over the planet and knowing what the weather was in some faraway city that made him feel lonely here in this small apartment, full of melancholy and something to do with brotherly love.

  He turned off the TV and went outside onto the balcony and rummaged through a shelf made of milk crates until he’d gathered up a small plastic pot, some newspaper, and what remained of a bag of soil. He took these things into the kitchen and laid them on the table. In a shotglass of water, an avocado pit hung suspended from the lip of the glass by three sewing pins. When they got home the day before, Norm had noticed that the pit had sprouted while they were away, a small white tongue was pushing its way out of a crack in the stiff brown shell.

  When the phone rang, his hands were furred with soil. He picked it up delicately, so as not to get it dirty. It was Hannah’s sister.

  So you’re finally back, Connie said. I’ve been calling for days. I wasn’t sure when you were coming home.

  We didn’t get any messages, Norm said.

  Well, you know me, she said. I hate talking to a machine. And I guess you could say it’s been pretty bad over here. Things are kind of rocky at the moment. I mean, who ever said life was going to be easy, right? And her laugh rang hollow, a desperate jackal, waiting on the outskirts of camp. I honestly don’t know how things are going to turn out, she said. I suppose only time will tell.

  They had only met a few times and Norm had found Connie distant and hard to talk to, but something was pouring out of her now that he needed to catch. He wanted to feel solid for her. He nodded and then matched his gesture with words. Time’s a healer, he said and could think of nothing else to say. All he had for her was sympathy, though she wasn’t making it clear exactly what had happened. There was no judgment.

  It’s just that everything’s such a mess right now, she said. Maybe Harlan needs to go see a counsellor. I mean, we could all use a bit of counselling after this. And again there was that forced jovial laugh.

  Norm understood there was embarrassment and there was shame. He knew from Hannah that her sister was the kind of person who had a strong idea of the shape an admirable life should take. How different the sisters were from each other, it seemed. As Connie spoke, Norm was holding the phone with his shoulder and rinsing his hands. He dried them on a dish towel and looked at a picture of Hannah’s niece and nephews taped to the fridge. Their faces were so beautiful. How are your kids?

  Well, you know. I mean, how do you talk to a child about something like this? Connie said and stopped abruptly.

  Kids are resilient, Norm said.

  Yeah, but that shouldn’t be an excuse.

  It’s not an excuse, he said. It’s a good thing.

  Connie went quiet.

  How easy it would be to fail as a parent, he thought. It had occurred to him that it might be selfish cowardice to avoid that risk in life, but he wasn’t swayed by romanticism. He didn’t feel the need to improve himself. Sacrifice was not an urge in Norman Peach. He had very little, if any, superstition. You had to embrace what you loved in this life. There was no consequence or reward beyond the grave, and unhappiness was all the proof he needed that he wasn’t living his life well.

  Will you please get Hannah to call me as soon as she can? There was a new tightness in Connie’s voice that felt like an accusation.

  Of course, Norm said. She’ll be home soon. I know she’ll want to talk to you right away. Is there anything we can do for you?

  I just really want to speak to my sister.

  They hung up and Norm gazed out the kitchen window at a view of a brick wall so close you could touch it. So close you could throw a wineglass out the window and it would smash and fall into a triangle of dead space below, full of accumulated junk – paint cans, rusty aluminum table legs, an old-fashioned telephone on top of a filing cabinet that every winter expanded to cartoon proportions under the snow. Hannah had done that once, like a drunk pitcher. One knee up, she had hurled a glass across the kitchen. It was summer and the window was open, but only partially. She’d been so impressed with her aim. Why did you do that? he’d yelled at her. It had frightened him. I don’t know, she said, full of smug delight. Hannah was a glass breaker. She had gypsy blood. Get loaded, smash something. That moment when you feel so full, you just have to throw something away.

  Norm was happy with Hannah. He knew he could be happy with her for a long time. It was easy to be with her. She was funny, she made him laugh. And she came with her own checks and balances. She could be moody and selfish and insecure, but when these things made her lash out she would catch herself and apologize. She was self-aware, she didn’t flinch. He’d never known anyone to duck so quickly out of an argument. Sometimes it was so sudden she’d be laughing seconds after accusing him of unforgiveable neglect. Then she’d look sheepish and probably do a little dance to mask her embarrassment. Bury her face in his armpit. And all of this made him want to pl
ease her. He would give her anything but what he knew she truly wanted – a baby. That was his limit and it made him feel churlish.

  It was early evening when Hannah started walking home from the Y. In the fluorescent glow outside a dry cleaners, a midget sat on a stool, playing the balalaika. His fingers had the deft, pudgy articulation of a child’s. He was playing the theme from Doctor Zhivago. Suddenly, Hannah was Lara in the ice castle. She doubled back and dropped a toonie into his case and whispered into her collar, Nostrovia, in her most melodramatic tone. Just to feel the language on her tongue, so redolent of ice and fur.

  She pulled her collar up higher against the cold air. The convenience stores on the way back home had barrels of pumpkins out front, in anticipation of Halloween. At the corner of their building, Hannah noticed how fast the clouds were moving. They were like mauve peonies, the sky velvety and a dark mushroom grey. She could hear honking, and headed through the narrow brick passageway that divided their building from the one next door, so narrow it was hard not to graze the skin off your knuckles when pushing a bike through, reared up on its hind wheel. Norm called it the gauntlet.

  When she came around the back, she saw a woman in the alley, standing by the open door of an idling SUV. She was leaning on the horn now. Another car was parked in front of her, blocking her way out. The woman was wearing high heels and a long ginger-coloured sheepskin coat. She swung herself inside, revved the engine, then got out again. She shouted, Goddamnit! and stomped her foot like a child. A window opened in the wall above her and a young man with tattoos leaned out.

  Asshole! the woman yelled.

  Shut the fuck up, lady. You’re disturbing the whole goddamn neighbourhood.

  The woman shouted, I don’t give a shit because you and your stupid friends kept me up ’til five o’clock last night with your stupid fucking music!