Vital Signs

by Tessa McWatt

  “Six or seven. They’re cunning, but you know, so sweet, almost like dogs. The black fur barking digging dogs in Harewick.”

  “Harewick?”

  “In Sussex—headless dogs.”

  “And the goats? Are they headless?”

  “You’re being silly,” she says angrily and looks over at me. She thinks I’m playing with her damaged frontal lobe. “Make the cart less heavy and shuffle the wheels so it runs straight, with bright pink magnifying glasses. There’s no poem for the poor old foot.”

  I nearly step on the brake, but there is too much traffic. I have to keep going. No animals, but she has said something that feels obscenely familiar. Then she’s off again.

  “The fleecing child came back. The one with the yellow hair and the slanted eyes. Do you remember her? She wanted to take our cake that day at the picnic. She was so thin. Her cold eating bones, her makeshift chariot. She brought the beans—it was her.”

  “Anna,” I say to interrupt her, and to stop my dreadful feeling of shame for having started this.

  “Wet, sarcastic hibiscus,” she says, and when I glance over at her I see that she has three fingers up, having counted each of the words. Wet. Sarcastic. Hibiscus. Confident she has been successful, she peers out the window. I wonder if she’s seeing something I should take note of.

  The bubble in my wife’s brain has put her in the very act of living rather than the ordering of it. Language is the action itself. I am desperate to be as alive as that. But I am a slave. Guilt—not gilt—chains. If I tell her, then maybe they’ll drop away from me. If I tell her, there might only be us, together.

  We finish the drive in silence and arrive home to the quiet of our land, which hums with insects and the reach-reach of the growing crops and the weeds that surround them. It’s only five o’clock, and the endless July evening stretches out awkwardly before me. My desire to toy with Anna’s mind is as strong as my wish to understand it, so it’s best to avoid her.

  I take a long, meandering walk through the asparagus field, now rid of its spurs and gone wild with tall, frolicking ferns. I find myself at the edge of the cornfield. I breathe in deeply. There’s a smell to the stalks of corn that is erotic, but it’s a childhood lust. I enter the field and walk along the rows carved out by the plough, in among the stalks that shove me side to side, nudging me to feel disgust, or sorrow, at all I have never become. But I resist their bullying and walk straight through, until I reach the other side.

  I do not get lost.

  I pick another row and do the same thing, walk straight through, and I think about what Dr. Mead told me when he gave us the original diagnosis. The aneurysm is only a symptom of something else. Some of its possible causes are brain tumour, trauma, a genetic disease that affects collagen, or polycystic kidney disease. These causes obviously range in degrees of seriousness, and will be tested for, but there was one other possible cause I haven’t been able to shake from my thoughts, one that has haunted me: infectious material from the heart.

  I leave the corn to its humming and return to the house. Resolved. Intent.

  Upon removing my shoes in the hall entrance, I hear a whisper. Then an intake of breath less urgent than a gasp. The whirring of the washing machine in the final stages of the cycle muffles the sound. Our machine is modern, European-designed, and very, very fast; I follow its hum.

  When I arrive at the laundry room door I stop just before I might come into view. I see her leg, her thigh, with her other leg curled over it in a squeeze, forming a crest at her sex. Her hand is cupped over the muff of hair there and it works in rhythm with the spin of the washer. Her legs tense and relax. Tense and relax. I step forward and peek around the doorframe into the room and gaze at Anna’s face, as it concentrates on the spin, and reach-reaches … My wife is spinning inside. My lust rises, then stalls when I recognize how unnecessary I am just now. Her face tightens and her eyes roll back.

  And there. Just there. My naked wife, with a lethal, peanut-sized swollen vessel in her brain dictating the entire history and future of her being, comes.

  She comes to the hum of the washing machine.

  I stumble forward, halfway to my knees, but quickly right myself and disappear to the kitchen with my shame.

  FIVE

  I am wrong to say Sasha was never sick again. There was another time, another visit to the hospital, but the circumstances were very different, and that time I was the one with the fever.

  As I lie in the hot dark with Anna asleep beside me, a chorus of tree frogs breaching the dense blackness outside, I remember the events leading up to Egypt, a dozen years ago. Those last few moments of my innocence.

  “What do you think of these?” Anna had asked me, enthusiastically, as she posed on the stairs. She was wearing a dress cut above the knees, and she twisted to show me the back of her calf and the thin seam of her romantically old-fashioned stockings. I felt my stomach lurch, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, and giggled nervously.

  “I’m wearing stockings,” she said, turning back to face me, her excitement now deflated. She stood with her arms at her sides, waiting to see if I would say more. I stared at her legs; though still slim, there was a sagging at the knees that I hadn’t noticed before. She was turning forty-seven, and the dress she wore was the “little black dress” she had decided she needed to celebrate this birthday, “before it’s too late.”

  She had become anxious about the idea of closing in on fifty, as though suddenly sensing her mortality. “Oh my God,” she’d say when she noted friends and colleagues who were reaching the milestone that year. When Susan had turned fifty in July and Anna threw her a special party on our back lawn, my wife seemed to take on the half-century as if it were already her own. My job as host was to put steaks on the barbeque, and I was happy to have a specific task and not to have to engage in small talk about education cuts and increased class sizes. As I was tending to my duties, I overheard Anna make a flippant comment about old ladies, and I was touched and amused by the response she received from the teenaged Charlotte. “Mom, you still smell nice,” she said. “Old ladies smell weird.”

  For the night of her birthday I’d suggested a dinner out at Canoe, a chic restaurant on the fifty-fourth floor of the TD Bank tower, which Susan had recommended. Anna had made an effort with the black dress, which showed off not only her legs but exposed her arms as well. I tried not to notice the looseness of her triceps as she raised her arms to push her hair behind the ears.

  “You look great,” I said, hoping to restore her enthusiasm and recapture mine.

  “It’s a full moon,” she said, and I knew that the confluence of moon and birthday was significant to her, that it meant something magical, which she wanted me to share in; but I was too tired for magic.

  I desperately needed a holiday. Our children—18, 16 and 13—had filled our house with grunge and garage music, had insulted me too often with their that’s-so-seventies-Dad opinions, and I was starting to feel undervalued at work. Undervalued and slowly withering. I had shone in the years of new standards in international pictograms, a craze that had begun with the Munich Olympics and continued through to Montreal 1976, for which I had perfected the curve of a man boxing, the distinction of a figure playing volleyball or badminton, and the angle of an alpine slalom. That craze had begun to subside. The standards for public information, culminating in ISO 7001, were being set in place. While I branched out and created designs for an ever wider variety of firms, my creativity was consumed by making a living.

  On that evening in September, at the end of our extravagant meal, we looked out over the lights of the city. Anna had ordered oysters, foie gras and lobster, fully indulging in this treat. I could see our reflections in the window, surrounded by the vaguer figures of other diners. The scrambled light and the reflection of candle flickerings made me feel as if I was inside a malfunctioning kinetoscope, its sprockets entangled, images superimposed in error. I
had to close my eyes against the soupy, disorienting panorama. We polished off a dessert of chocolate mousse and vanilla wafers and I sat, full, tired and silent over coffee, as Anna opened the gift I had bought with Susan’s guidance. She took the gold necklace with the topaz pendant out of its delicate box and placed it around her neck, happy, I believed, that I had been tasteful in my choice.

  She smiled up at me. “It’s beautiful.”

  I was thrown by the bit of chocolate and wafer caught between her teeth. I noticed, too, the mascara, clogged like black sleep, in the tear duct of her right eye. I hurried us through the final rituals of our meal. I wanted to be home. Asleep.

  As we got in the elevator to descend to the parking garage, I looked again at Anna’s face. The black sleep was still there, and now, in the fluorescent lights of the confined space, I saw that the caking foundation makeup was doing the opposite of what it was intended for, highlighting instead of hiding the dry lines around her eyes and the splintered creases around her mouth.

  “Happy birthday,” I said, again. I’d repeated it too often by now, I knew.

  In the full-moon drive home, Anna played a Cat Stevens CD, listening to it with a relish that irritated me.

  That night in our bedroom, she came to me, still in her black dress, as I sat on the bed. I was in a movie. Her movie. She lifted up the dress and straddled me. I closed my eyes, desperately trying to summon the hard-on that would please her. As we made love, I kept my eyes closed, then turned away from her the moment we’d finished.

  “Happy birthday,” I said, and stayed tightly on my side.

  The winter of that year turned bitterly cold, with long, bright days at minus 20 and below, which made my skin itch and increased my irritability. The sunshine was a lie, a trick, and the furnace roared with the rumbling depletion of my salary, thanks to the children who regularly left the front door gaping open in the absent-minded to-and-fro of their adolescent lives. I became desperate. I even went so far as to try to convince myself that time away, even accompanied by Anna, would help. I tried to talk her into a trip by saying that we needed to be on our own for a while. She had no interest in travelling, and told me, as she gathered up the lazily tossed clothes that littered our living room, that the children needed her more now than when they were young because their inner worlds were complicated. To which I loudly said, “BULLSHIT!”

  She sat down and stared at me for some time before looking up to the ceiling where, presumably, she found the words she needed: “You are so selfish.”

  We had taken many trips as a family—to Western Canada, the American South, even the obligatory pilgrimage to Disneyland—but we had not been away on our own since the children were born. I had been to the Far East for business, but she had been unable to accompany me then because the children had been too young.

  She had always complained about March, a cruel month with false springs and bitter winds that were like a payback for hope, so after she took her eyes from the ceiling I caught them, and pressed on. “We need it. Somewhere warm. What about Turkey?” For some reason I still needed her to want to return there, to want our children to know where she had come from.

  And she did it again, just as she had for almost twenty years, since that first time in Fran’s: the eyebrows twitching together and then that smile. I could have slapped her.

  We spent a few days both trying to lead in the abandonment dance—that hardened two-step I eventually had grown so adept at. She watched television with the children after dinner, went to do her part-time teaching in the morning, and came home in the afternoons to attend to their so-called emotional needs. She cooked some meals, I cooked others. We went to bed. She read. I pretended to fall asleep immediately.

  A couple of weeks like this and usually one of us would tire, needing to change up the moves. Anna returned one day from teaching and came to me in the kitchen.

  “Egypt.”

  I looked up from the pot of beef stew I was preparing.

  “I’d like to go to Egypt—see the Nile. The children have all done projects on it at one time or another. I know all about it, but I can’t really imagine it.”

  I went back to my stirring and did not speak. But she stood beside me, waiting.

  “I thought this wasn’t a good time,” I said, finally, taking the stew off the burner. I have never quite managed seamless humility.

  “It’s the perfect time. March, like you said. I’m sorry.”

  I was hers again, much too easily.

  Her presence in Egypt seemed as natural as Nefertiti’s.

  Upon entering the first gate of the temple of Karnak, where the silt had been excavated to reveal graffiti from the kind of travellers I would like to have been—the Indiana Jones-type man who would have carved “Michael” into a pharaoh’s obelisk—I began to feel that everything in my life had led me to this spot. The hieroglyphics—these beautifully carved translations of power—made me feel dizzily small. The temperature was a dry 32 degrees; the sun bore down on my stubborn head, while Anna had wisely worn a wide-brimmed hat that shaded the burgeoning lines on her neck.

  The Nile could have flooded and drowned us then, the pharaoh might have proclaimed higher taxes, the gods might have asked for greater human sacrifices, and I, gratefully, might have been spared the humiliation of my modernity.

  “I am Mustafa,” said our guide, and I felt something between him and Anna instantly. He was an average-looking man: glasses, black moustache, a soft, not muscular build. He shook our hands, and I noticed he held Anna’s longer than mine. “Where are you from?” he asked her.

  “Canada,” she said, then realized from his look that this was not enough. “I was born in Istanbul.”

  He stared at her harder. “Of course, of course, I see. But I thought you were one of us!”

  I needed to fuck my wife then more than I had in several years.

  As the sun roasted my neck pink, Mustafa told us about the king who had died having left no sons to rule. His daughter, Hatshepsut, took the throne despite her sex and ruled Egypt with imagination and determination. Mustafa showed us where she was depicted in carvings and paintings as a male figure, and where her stepson later defiled her image. I felt Mustafa was talking only to Anna, so I retreated into the shadows to listen, while my wife politely nodded her head, again and again. She looked fascinated, and occasionally brushed her hands along the stone to touch what seemed like the manifestation of Mustafa’s words.

  He taught us how to read hieroglyphics, which I had once, long ago, studied. But there, in front of the Obelisk of Ramses II, I felt as though I was finally learning the craft I had been practising for more than twenty years. I knew the symbols for “make” and “life,” and could just about make out the subtle prayers of the scribes for their king and queen or deity. But I had believed that a hieroglyph existed more independently than Mustafa was suggesting. He taught us how to read ideograms and cartouches, to decipher the depictions of battles in the carvings by reading them like a story. I saw the interdependence, noticed how “make” and “life” were only part of a refined, intricate narrative, and the signs became truly meaningful for the first time.

  “There, there, you see there.” Mustafa pointed to a panel depicting a boat being carried by soldiers. “Some colour remains, beautiful colour.”

  I tried to read the other panels in front of me, but my memory of the alphabet was poor. Ankh and Horus’s eye stood out consistently. I comforted myself with them as I strode before the artisans chronicled in the midst of their daily activities—weaving, making pottery, and the paramount fetching of water. Kings were displayed with their enemies below them, and slaves on either side fanning them. Oxen were powerful and cherished. These signs were the yield, merge, and deer crossing warnings of their time. Yield to the King. Merge with the progress of civilization. Honour the beast of burden.

  “But slaves … slaves,” I muttered. “All of this built by slaves.”

  Mustafa stopped in his tracks and look
ed at me. He raised his forefinger and wagged it as though I’d blasphemed. “No,” he said coldly. “Let me assure you: they were not slaves. That is a wrong impression. They were prisoners, captives from enemy nations, yes, but they were workers, paid for their work with food and homes. This is something you have wrong.” Perhaps he, as an Egyptian, knew the truth. Who was I to say? But I couldn’t get the idea of forced labour from my head.

  “Look, look there, you see?” said Mustafa, pulling me away from a panel where I had been examining an image of an ox and cart, and pointing upward. “Hatshepsut and the god of fertility, you see, see there?” I looked to where he pointed, and he pulled me in closer. He rubbed his hand along the wall, and finally I saw what he wanted me to see: the god of fertility’s erect penis was pointing straight at the female pharaoh, and through the sunlight and dust motes and shadow of stone, it was mocking me. “The god Min is often symbolized by an ox—a bull,” Mustafa added and took out his solar laser pointer and shone it on a shaded panel above our heads. His pointer traced a beast in the field; next to it stood Min, brandishing a thunderbolt.

  Later that day, on the west bank of the Nile—the bank of the setting sun, the bank of dusk and the twilight of life, where the Pharaohs built their tombs to wait out eternity—Mustafa took us to Hatshepsut’s temple. He seemed obsessed with this female pharaoh. Built into the east face of the mountain that barricaded the Valley of the Kings from the Nile, the temple was the spot where I have felt the hottest in my life. Mustafa described, again mostly for Anna, how Hatshepsut built the temple here because she planned to link it with her tomb, which was being built, simultaneously, on the other side of the mountain. But the rock proved impossible to tunnel through, even for the Egyptians, and the mountain now stood forever between the female king and her temple. How disappointed she must have been upon her death, Mustafa said.

  Anna smiled at him, knowingly, as I took a step back.