Vital Signs

by Tessa McWatt

  The camp was run entirely by men between, I guessed, twenty and thirty years of age; slim, statuesque men dressed in knee-length light-blue cotton shirts with matching trousers, barefoot or sandaled, with turbans on their heads; beautiful men who clapped to the music of horns and tarabuka drums even if it came from a tape in a car. I saw no women.

  That night we ate an elaborate dinner with the men, seated on mats at a low table in a one-roomed, spacious sandstone building, where we were served bowls of tomato, eggplant, lentils, rice, and one of “meat,” as it was described to Anna when she asked. Two German couples were the only other tourists there and after dinner we all joined in a circle with Helal, Hamada and the others.

  The cold desert night had descended and I desperately wanted to be under the camel blanket I noticed had been laid across the bed in our small hut in the dunes. I squirmed closer to the coal fire in the centre of the room and felt Anna follow me, snuggling close, as though attached by an invisible rope. To distract myself I tried to engage the Germans, but their poor facility with English and my non-existent German soon led to polite nodding and turning again to the music the men began to play.

  Helal played a lute-like guitar, Hamada a tambourine-like drum. Helal sang a line, the other men answered in a Bedouin call and response that sounded personal and yet warlike. The music swirled around us as I leaned in closer and closer to the fire.

  Suddenly, but without missing a beat, Hamada passed his drum to the tribesman on the right and stood, taking up a scarf from the sandy floor, which he tied around his hips.

  And how he danced.

  I call it dancing now, but when he began I thought it must be a mating ritual. His hips pulsed, slowly, erotically, from side to side, back and forth, and he held his arms up above his head and closed his eyes as though he were making love to a spirit that stood before him. And I was sure that ghost had Anna’s shape.

  She sat straight, attentive, with a broad smile on her face that made her eyes sink deeper behind the folds of the Asian dusks and dawns that had created her. A young man stood up, this one much younger than Hamada, only a boy really, and he danced in front of Hamada with a similar rolling, lolling, hip-diving movement. The performance made me even more uncomfortable.

  “They were so beautiful,” Anna said to me later, as I shivered in the flannel pyjamas I’d wisely brought for these desert nights. She wrapped her leg around me, trying to make both of us warm.

  “Well, I guess so, but a little weird,” I said, rigid in my spot on the bed.

  She looked up towards me: “Weird?”

  “You didn’t think so?”

  I sensed her frown. Her leg slid off mine. I’d disappointed her. She had been trying so hard. I knew that deep down she would rather have been home with our children, but here she was, trying, like a pet, to awaken my attention.

  “Such confidence in the movement, so masculine,” she said.

  I swallowed. A dark listlessness descended. I sank into a deep chamber of ennui. And felt it would be impossible to get out of it.

  The next day, with Helal off on a separate tour with the Germans, Hamada drove us across the architectural dunes of the Black Desert, then farther along the edge of the Western Desert en route to the White Desert. The road was lined by desert sculpture—hardened sandy mounds sprinkled with black rock. The shapes were like darker cousins to the skittering beetle mounds we’d seen en route, but suddenly, everything was white. I can only liken our final destination to what the bottom of the sea would look like without the water or the life that thrives in it. The White Desert is nature’s sculpture garden, filled with crisp, bleached white sandstone figures that resembled a rabbit here, an eagle there, a mushroom over there. Odd sprouted mushrooms, with crowns formed from what looked like the finest marble, dotted the landscape.

  We drove through the desertscape, stopping to marvel at spectacular formations, to pick up desert crystals and to walk on this alien terrain. A scorching, stalagmite planet.

  “Look, look!” Anna said as we drove towards another pasture of rock.

  “Ah,” Hamada said, smiling, pointing to where she was staring, both of them fixed on the same object. We pulled up beside an oblong sandstone figure that seemed to have been hollowed out. Hamada was delighted that Anna had spotted it without prompting. He got out of the Jeep first and walked toward the stone object with reverence. I got out next, happy to stretch my legs. Anna seemed to be stuck in her seat, transfixed. What we were all staring at looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

  “A whale,” Anna said, as she opened the door and walked past me. I watched and then followed her, going right up to the carved out figure.

  “They have measured it. Archaeologists. Equal to actual whale. Real ones,” Hamada said. I looked at him incredulously.

  “Oh my goodness,” Anna intoned.

  “Look here,” Hamada said as he took us inside the stone husk through its missing head. He rubbed the wall with his hands. I copied him automatically, feeling what he had intended me to feel: the ridges that were surely once the ribcage of the whale. I sat down. How was this possible here in the desert? Eventually, Anna and Hamada walked back to the Jeep, but I continued to sit in the belly of the whale, for some moments longer.

  As we travelled into the desert, the afternoon sun rendered the white stone brittle-looking, as though it might chip away with a gust of wind. We drove across dunes dotted with iron ore deposits that had formed into dark crystals, metal flowers popping up through the desert sand. The world was inside out and upside down.

  I sat in the back seat of the Jeep; Anna sat in front, asking questions of Hamada as he drove, over the Arabic music that floated from the tape player. After some miles, the Jeep started to sputter and jerk. Hamada stepped hard on the gas, in an attempt to override the problem. Slowing and then hard again. And again, but the Jeep stuttered to a halt.

  Hamada walked to the front of the Jeep, opened the hood and examined the engine. He unhooked the hose which led from the engine to the tank, inspecting it before going to the back of the Jeep, where he dug out some rubber piping. Returning to the engine, he leapt onto the edge of the Jeep’s frame, inserted the pipe and devised a siphon, which, he explained, would let him extract the water that had been added to stretch the cheap black-market fuel.

  “That is normal for Egypt,” he said as he brought the stiff pipe to his mouth and held it firmly between his lips. I felt my knee buckle ever so slightly as he sucked. Anna observed him without emotion, taking in the angle of the pipe in his mouth, presumably grateful that Hamada was saving us from a cruel death of scorching, starvation and blindness.

  I stepped forward.

  “Anything I can do to help?” I knew about cars, having grown up with auto parts strewn about the fields next to our farmhouse near Kleinburg. My father loved getting under the hood of our Ford, always ready to communicate his deep pleasure in the way things connected: plugs and oil and carburetor and ignition.

  Hamada said nothing, of course, and how foolish of me to have expected him to, with that thing in his mouth. Anna did not take her eyes off his lips.

  “Do you remember, Anna?” I say, and I realize that she and I are alone in the hospital room now. I shove the blank paper and drawing in my hands into my jacket pockets. I have no idea where Charlotte and Sasha have gone. Probably off to torture the male nurse—all of them with this power to give such delightful pain.

  Anna looks at me, as though she too has just remembered that I’m in the room.

  “The desert night. The fox we heard around the tent,” I say.

  She stares and seems to be searching her memory. Was I wrong? Had she not been referring to Hamada just now?

  “Anna,” I say again. She moves her mouth as if to speak, but I see how she stops herself. She shakes her head.

  She stares.

  I wait.

  “Anna, please!” I am beginning to lose control.

  I look towards the do
or, dismayed by my own tone. How fortunate we are that my insurance has paid for this private room, where I can yell at my wife with impunity, minutes before she is to have her head sliced open. For God’s sake. My head falls into my hands.

  “Everything okay in here?” a thin, delicate nurse says from the doorway. I look up and nod. Anna smiles at her and waves, and the woman retreats with relief.

  “Anna, I’m so sorry,” I say.

  She shakes her head, still refusing to speak, and I think it’s for fear that I will shout at her again.

  I sit on the bed and begin to cry. Anna raises her hand towards my face, but I intercept it with my own hand. I put my other hand on her shoulder.

  “I meant the night in Egypt. Remember how cold it was?”

  She nods, but I don’t think she does remember. I can feel that cold right now as I stroke Anna’s hand. Her eyes close. Perhaps she is falling asleep. I keep stroking.

  As the sun sank in the White Desert, the sky turned the colour of a cantaloupe. We drove a few more un-sputtering miles, the Jeep’s fuel now cleansed of the destructive water. We searched for a suitable site to stop for the night, and eventually pulled up in the shelter of a bleached sandstone beetle. Hamada unpacked and began to set up camp. I looked on, helpless, knowing better than to offer assistance, but Anna didn’t suffer from the same inhibition. I watched as she took out our food supply and laid out the vegetables on the grand Bedouin rug that would be our dining room that evening. While Hamada tended the fire, slowly turning sticks to even out the flame, waiting for the wood to become ash and charcoal, and then repeating the cycle, Anna began to peel potatoes and then wash them in a basin with water from the plastic jug that Hamada had set down beside her. It was as though they had done this hundreds of time before, together.

  “Here,” he said, after noticing she was struggling to make the knife work without a cutting board or hard surface. He took the knife from her, held a potato in his other hand, and with a movement that looked like the delicate polishing of a stone, the potato was diced, magically. I watched Anna’s face change like an old-fashioned animation cartridge—each minute gesture captured in successive frames: Anna curious, Anna bemused, Anna wary, Anna delighted and Anna radiant.

  “Hamada,” she said, as though the sound of the syllables gave her pleasure.

  He grilled chicken on the fire, as the potatoes boiled over the gas cylinder camp stove. To accompany the meal we had more of the red sorrel tea that I’d quickly grown to love. We ate in silence, I remember. It was my silence, I realize now, but at the time I was certain that it was theirs. The sky grew dark, but above us the stars were like hundreds of small fires in call and response with our own.

  Again at night the desert turned intensely cold. I couldn’t step away from the fire without thinking I might die from exposure in a place that just a few hours ago had made me swoon from heat. Hamada made a faint noise—and Anna stirred as though recognizing this as the signal to retire to our tent for the night. Hamada stood and put out the remaining flame in the firepit with his bare foot. I watched Anna turn back in time to catch the last dab of his toe on the log, which he flicked over into the sand, allowing the remaining embers to glow, their faint whisper rising to the stars. I saw her shudder.

  I stood and followed her into the small nylon tent, my shoulders twitching with the unbelievable chill of the brittle night.

  “God, it’s freezing,” I said, a statement so obvious that I instantly felt foolish in front of my own wife. I dared to take off my shoes so that I could slide into my sleeping bag, hoping the extra layer would quell my shivering. I looked up and caught Anna’s eye; her face gave away nothing.

  I heard a noise outside, a kind of skittering that couldn’t possibly have been a human. But what then? A snake? A rat? I heard Hamada groan in the distance. His bed of rugs, woven saddlebags and camel blankets was in the open air, under the full canopy of stars, and somehow warm enough for him.

  Anna dropped down to her knees. She pawed at the sleeping bag in which I had entombed myself.

  “Wasn’t that an amazing day,” she said. The beam of the flashlight, which was perched on her cosmetics bag, illuminated the corner where the red nylon panels of the side and top met, making our tent look slanted—a lopsided cubist tent.

  She pulled my sleeping bag down.

  “What are you doing?” I pleaded, grabbing the edge of the bag and holding tight to stop the warmth from escaping. She didn’t look up, but I felt her smile. Her silhouette widened, her hand loosened my grip and, leaning her head towards my lap, she pulled the sleeping bag down to my knees.

  “Anna,” I said, and I thought I heard the skittering outside again, louder this time and possibly human.

  “Shhh,” she whispered, and touched my face ever-so briefly. She unclasped my belt and slid my fly down. I freed my leg from the sleeping bag and lost track of the skittering sound, then of sound altogether as I swelled at the smell of her hair in the tent, the lopsided angle of her head silhouetted against the nylon wall as she bent over and kissed my cock. And again, gently, one touch of her lips. I throbbed in response. Another kiss. And another.

  She took me in her mouth and held on. She swirled her tongue over the small vein at the base of the head, where she knew it would have its greatest effect. And then, suddenly, I pictured Hamada’s face, the pipe that led to the gasoline tank, and I softened.

  I pushed away the image and focused again on her lips. She took me in deeper than ever, it seemed, and then there was nothing in this world but her mouth.

  I came quickly. She swallowed.

  I sat up and looked toward her face, feeling the need to apologize, fearing she hated me then.

  “Darling,” she said, and I felt her face widen again in a smile. “I think a fox has taken the chicken bones.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re not cold now,” she said, feeling my fingers. She pulled the sleeping bag up around me.

  And as my bald wife lies sleeping, in a brief moment of respite from the slow drip that is eroding her faculties, I see her face as first on the list of things that I have never truly trusted. Trust requires a faith, which I have never had, that life will treat me as it should. It requires me to trust death the way I trusted being born.

  I am not half the man Hamada was: a man with three wives, he was required by the laws of his faith, to care for each equally, provide for each identically, and serve all of them wholly. I gave Christine much less than I have given Anna. I have resisted everything that says that service is freedom and that the small acts of forbearance between two people are … are what? They are more than I know.

  I don’t know her.

  She might be going to her death, and I have never known her. Why have I left everything so late?

  “Anna,” I say, gently, trying to wake her, but not wanting to startle her. “Anna?” I touch the side of her face. Her eyes open and she looks at me as though I’ve slapped her.

  “Melting,” she says.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Thimbles.”

  “Sweetheart.” I take the hand that she holds out to me. It is shaking.

  “Miming—” Again she stops. At least she can stop herself now, I think. If she can control herself, perhaps it’s only her tongue that is not working. Her brain, I tell myself, is fine. Is really fine.

  “Anna, we’re ready for you, dear,” says Rosie as she enters, followed by the delicate nurse from earlier.

  “Wait!” I say. “Wait.” The second time more politely, as I turn to confront her.

  Rosie shakes her head at me. “The doctors are ready; we have to go now.”

  I stand in front of Anna, blocking the nurse’s access to the bed.

  “We have to go now,” Rosie says.

  “But the girls aren’t here,” I say, stalling.

  “I’m sorry,” Rosie says, and puts her hand on my arm and gently moves me out of the way.

  I take last night’s drawing fr
om my pocket.

  “Break knack picking stick,” Anna says. I step forward again and slide the drawing in my hand underneath the edge of her pillow.

  “That’s right, dear,” the nurse says, and for a moment I believe she’s telling me I did the right thing, but I feel unravelled.

  “Mom,” Charlotte says as she enters the room. Anna smiles at her, and then at Sasha, who follows behind.

  “Mommy,” Sasha says, and we all notice this regression, but not even Charlotte, who is holding onto the shoulder of her mother’s hospital gown with a terrified grip, would dare comment now. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be right here. I can’t wait to see you when you wake up,” Sasha says, her voice as steady as one of her pirouettes.

  Rosie pulls up the brakes on the bed. I lean in and kiss Anna on her lips, and she holds my head to hers. The nurses wait patiently as I release myself from the kiss and smile at my wife.

  “Okay, then, we’re off,” says Rosie, and with a flourish Anna is wheeled out of the room. I catch her face just in time to recognize that she is terrified. I run along behind her towards the operating rooms and stop just as the restricted area doors swing shut. I am suddenly a character in some TV melodrama that I used to mock my children for watching.

  ELEVEN

  The hospital cafeteria smells like a combination of processed cheese and a wet animal. The stench is so appalling that it overwhelms my attempt to come up with a sign for a public eating place.

  The people in here look like it smells. For the most part they are pale, stringy and sticky-looking, as though baked at a low temperature for too long.

  The napkin I draw on shreds easily; I tear it up. Why didn’t I bring my briefcase from Anna’s room?

  I have been here for nearly forty-five minutes, abandoned once again by my daughters for an errand that involves a scarf for their mother’s head, something that “will make her feel pretty,” they said, even though their mother might never feel anything again. Fred has chosen not to phone me on my cell, but to call the nurses’ station instead, to check in with Rosie. He is keeping his professional cool. The message he left for me said, “Everything going as expected. Will see you in a couple of hours.” What does he know about “expected”?