by John Freeman
So there I was standing in front of the nurse in the first hospital, and on that night I was crying with no problem at all. He was trying to reassure me: “Someone will come take care of you, there’s not much I can do personally,” and it was all I could do not to scream: “I don’t think you understand.” In the end a nurse arrived. When she came up to me and asked me why I was here, I spoke, and went on speaking and speaking.
Tania James is the author of the novels Atlas of Unknowns and The Tusk That Did the Damage, and the short-story collection Aerogrammes. She lives in Washington, D.C.
The Liberator
TANIA JAMES
Saeed steps out of the barbershop to find that a stranger has locked her bike to his. The other bike is a Trek, slant-framed and sky blue, with a pink Planned Parenthood sticker over the k. Its U-lock has them both yoked to the rack.
He weighs the lock in his hands. His brother could break this thing. Haider, who calls himself the Liberator, who stole him this janky Rawhide instead of a Giant like Saeed wanted. But the Liberator has to finish his shift at Best Buy.
Saeed texts him anyway. Stuck in Shaw. Someone locked her bike to mine.
The reply comes immediately. Sucks for u.
Take off early. Bring cutters.
The Liberator doesn’t deign to reply.
Saeed picks at the Planned Parenthood sticker. She’s probably at the juice shop across the street, buying a smoothie that tastes like gritty salad in a glass. When she comes out, he’ll be magnanimous. He’ll say he lives out in Takoma Park with his brother, which is closer to true than false. Maybe they’ll swap numbers.
Over the next ten minutes, the playground grows wild with middle schoolers. They climb and curl around every bar, screaming under a bright fall sun. A heavyset boy, bold enough to wear a Cookie Monster sweatshirt, wanders over to Saeed. The boy is low-lidded, a little numb about the mouth. “Mister,” he says, “do you have a dollar?”
“What for?”
“Ice cream.” The kid points to the ice cream truck across the street.
Saeed gives him his grimiest dollar bill. Kid mumbles a thank you and takes his time over the crosswalk, paying no mind to the cars speeding from either direction.
Saeed’s phone hums—a text from his mother.
Where r U? Jignesh is here.
He curses softly. He’d forgotten all about the tutor his mother had hired, some malnourished H-1B with mathematical timing.
Got a problem with my bike.
Three blinking dots indicate her typing something elaborate.
U Liar come now. Hinges has to go.
He can’t help smirking whenever his mother is bested by autocorrect.
The metro is only a block away but no harm in waiting a few more minutes in case the bike girl is a seven. Hinges can wait.
Saeed takes a photo of the bikes, swipes a filter over the image, and posts it to Instagram with the caption: Siamese bikes. Instantly, regret overtakes him. How would anyone know the bikes are locked together? You can’t tell from the photo. This is why he’s got thirty-seven followers. This is the bike girl’s fault, kind of. Why is he waiting around, snapping stupid pictures with stupid captions on account of a feminist seven who can’t work a lock? Fuck this shit. And his shitty bike. Which he’ll have to come back and get tomorrow. He locks it properly and sets off for the metro.
The Cookie Monster kid stops him on the sidewalk. “Hey, mister, can I have another dollar? My cousin wants an ice cream too.”
“Where’s yours?”
“I ate it.”
“Which kind?”
A pause. “I like all kinds.”
“Do I look like a chump to you?”
The kid cocks his head, as if arbitrating an answer that Saeed, all of a sudden, wants to know.
“I’ll take fifty cent,” the kid says.
Saeed heads for the crosswalk.
In the condo next to the playground, Lori Piotrowski takes the elevator back down. A half hour before, she was pedaling up Seventh, off to meet her special friend, boyfriend being too symbolic a term, when she realized she had no wallet. Hastily she locked up her sky-blue Trek and spent about twenty minutes scouring her apartment.
Now, wallet in hand, she steps aside so a man and his little boy can enter the elevator. The boy is wearing a sweater-vest with a pug stitched on the front. “Hi,” she says to the boy, who is staring at her.
The boy says nothing.
“I like your sweater,” she says.
The boy looks up at his father and says, “I don’t want to talk to her.”
The father places his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “You don’t have to,” he says.
This is what she gets for talking to strangers: skepticism and disdain. It’s the same on the wards. Nearly every patient she meets is appalled by her ignorance, her youth, her surname. Even the nice ones are unsettled by the thought of leaving their health to a first-year resident. Rightly so. On Lori’s last rotation, she was supposed to give a vaginal exam to a grossly obese woman who whooped when Lori’s fingers went questing into her anus.
Still wincing at the memory, Lori comes out of her building and halts.
There’s a guy messing with the lock on her bike. Right out in the open! Nervy as city squirrels, these thieves, darting into and out of condo garages. That’s how her last bike got stolen. She waits for him to produce a pair of cutters; that’s when she’ll pounce. Instead he consults his phone, something professorial in the way he’s stroking his chin. After a while he walks away, stopping to chat with a little kid he seems to know.
By the time she gets to her bike, the little kid is walking her way. Her lock looks somehow wrong, and then—oh. Oh. She searches the sidewalk for the bike guy, who is stepping into the crosswalk.
“Miss,” says the kid, “do you have a dollar?”
“Sorry, one sec—hey!” She calls after the bike guy. “Hey, wait!”
He turns his head and a car slams into his legs, tossing him through the air before the street pounds him flat. The car—a Camaro—brakes sharply, then swerves around the body and speeds on, tires twisting around the next corner. She runs to the body: facedown, limbs spread. “Hi,” she says to his ear, “hi, do you hear me? What’s your name?” The bike guy rolls onto his side. Bits of gravel stubble his cheek. He’s so young. He watches her as she bends close to his mouth and feels his breath wisping against her cheek.
She finds the pulse in his wrist, bucking against the press of her fingertips. She checks his head for blood or signs of injury. “Let’s get him off the street,” someone says, and before she can protest, the bike guy is being shouldered to the curb.
There she sits with him and waits for the ambulance. On the opposite side of the street, schoolchildren cluster and gawk until an older woman herds them away. The bike guy stares through them, looking like a child waiting for someone to slip his socked foot into a sneaker. Lori tries to keep him talking. What’s his full name? (Saeed Hassan Seyal.) Where does he go to school? (Takoma High.) What’s his address? (2310 Ritchie Avenue.) Who is he taking to prom?
He blinks at her, his expression bored and disoriented. “I’m seeing like two of everything.”
“Are you dizzy? Do you feel sick?”
“I don’t think I can ride my bike.”
“I’ll take care of your bike. I’ll get it to your house.”
He names his bike—the Rawhide—and hands her his key. When she asks for his cell number, he can’t remember the last four digits. He has her write her name and number on the back of his hand. The blue ink of her pen spreads like cracks in porcelain.
The paramedics arrive, siren lights sparkling. A cop is scratching her description of the Camaro into a small notebook while she strains to keep an eye on Saeed Seyal. A paramedic presses a palm into his abdomen, and he sits there holding up his shirt, so tame to the touch of strangers it’s as though his body isn’t his.
She doesn’t get to speak to Saeed before they lay
him on a gurney and load him into the ambulance. The kid in the Cookie Monster sweatshirt runs up and passes a sneaker through the closing doors.
By the time she gets Saeed Seyal’s bike upstairs, Travis has texted her ten times, in quick and angry succession. He has been waiting in the lobby of the movie theater for thirty minutes. They could’ve gone to their neighborhood theater, but as her attending, Travis insists on going where none of their colleagues will see and report them.
Come over, she texts. Something happened.
It takes him an hour to reach her apartment. In all that time, she has swiped the hair from her sink and placed herself on the futon, her thoughts disappearing into the bottomless black of the TV screen.
“What’s going on?” Travis says, stepping into her apartment, bringing with him a whiff of fruity shampoo. He looks around the room. “Whose bike is that?”
She describes how she witnessed a guy getting hit by a car, leaving out the part about her U-lock. “Wait,” Travis says, “how’d you get him to the curb? Did you move him?”
“Not me, someone else.”
“But didn’t you tell them about immobilizing the neck?”
“Stop it,” she says. “It feels like you’re pimping me.”
“I’m not pimping you.”
“I hate that that’s what it’s called.”
She wants to describe the sound the body made when it landed, the fat thump like meat tossed on a scale. She can’t. Not with Travis rubbing circles on her back like a masseur-in-training.
“It’s good you were there,” he says, followed by a careful pause. “But with a trauma, you’re always worried about cervical fracture, so you really shouldn’t move the patient. You really should immobilize the neck.”
The next day, during a break at work, she calls Saeed to arrange a time to deliver the bike. His voice mail is full. She Googles him to look for an e-mail address, and lands on his Facebook page. He looks hopeful and handsome, eyebrows gently raised as if surprised by someone to the left of the camera. The latest post begins Our most beloved son and brother, and a cold heat fills her face. Janaza will be held tomorrow . . . led by his elder brother Haider . . . buried in the Muslim portion . . . To Allah We Belong and To Him We Return.
She is late to rounds. Travis is pimping the group without mercy, going from person to person with a single question that no one knows the answer to.
“Hematoma,” she says, before he gets to her.
Travis looks at her, surprised. She usually remains quiet during rounds. “What kind?” he says.
“Does it matter? His hemoglobin is dropping, he was on Coumadin.”
“Retroperitoneal hematoma.”
“That’s basically what I said.”
Travis raises his eyebrows. “So by your logic, all hematomas are basically retroperitoneal hematomas?” A snicker from one of his minions. “Is that what you’re saying, Dr. Piotrowski?”
That night, over the phone, she dumps Travis.
“Is this because of the hematoma thing?” he asks.
“No, it’s because you wash your hair with Herbal Essences.”
“Lori.” He sighs. “You were late, and you were being weird and aggressive. How did you expect me to respond? Is it something else? Is this about that car accident?”
She cuts him off to say her mother is calling.
Next, she doubles down on her to-do list. She orders several cacti online and signs up for a composting service. She donates a goat to an impoverished woman through Heifer International and is sidelined by the YouTubing of baby goats. She calls her sister and leaves a message. She rents an SUV for the following Saturday with the goal of folding down the seats, loading in the bike, and driving it to the Seyals’ house.
Saturday arrives. She never claims the car.
She finds Saeed Seyal on Instagram. She lingers over the last picture he took, of their bikes locked together. His caption: Siamese bikes.
Beneath this, someone wrote Rawhide had a way with words. the Bard of Takoma Park RIP
Saeed wish we hung out more. U seemed like a really cool guy. fuck that driver IMO he shld burn in hell.
Saeed Im praying for u and ur family.
The comments go on and on, hundreds of them, sealed with black hearts and cryptic emojis.
Again, Lori rents an SUV, and again, she cancels. The Rawhide continues to lean against her wall, acquiring the permanence of furniture.
One day, walking down her block, she’s stopped by a voice calling, “Miss! Hey, Miss!”
On the other side of the street is the little kid in the Cookie Monster sweatshirt. He’s sitting on the wall that borders the playground, bouncing his heels off the bricks. “What happened to the guy?”
She starts toward him, and stops, as if they’re divided by a rickety rope bridge instead of a crosswalk. For weeks, she has avoided the crosswalk, preferring to cross at the stoplight at the end of her block. But the boy, watching, still as an elk, reminds her that she is a grown woman and so she joins him on the other side, by which time her mind has been drained of euphemisms. “He,” she says to his sneakers, “died. He died.”
The sneakers go still. “He didn’t look like he was dying.”
“Sometimes it happens that way. You can’t always see the bleeding when it’s somewhere deep.”
The boy scans the street, his expression inscrutable.
“Was he your friend?” she asks.
“He gave me a dollar for ice cream.”
“Sounds like a nice guy.”
“Not that nice. He was mad. I think ’cause you locked your bike to his.”
She nods, her throat wadding up. She feels undone before this kid, all kids, their awful honesty.
The boy looks at her. “You were gonna bring him his bike.”
“I haven’t, yet.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to see his mother. I don’t want to tell her what I did.”
“You’re keeping it?”
“No,” she says sharply. “I mean, no. That would be stealing.”
“So you have it. But you’re not keeping it.”
“Right.”
The boy nods slowly.
“Can I have it?” he says.
It’s nine at night when she rolls the Rawhide up Ritchie Avenue. The metro was nearly empty, the elevator seething with the scent of pee. Pumpkins leer from porches, reminding her of one of Saeed’s last Instagrams. He had snapped a photo from inside a jack-o’-lantern so that a clear blue sky filled its grin and eyes.
At last she reaches the mailbox of Saeed Seyal. A red banister leads up to a porch with no decoration or furniture, the windows hollowed of light. She rolls the bike into the yard and props it against the banister. She slides her letter between the spokes. Three hours she spent on the first draft, which was only a paragraph long yet whose tactility and permanence made her labor over every detail, every word, the margins, the lettering, the look of the thing, as if the recipient might press the piece of paper behind glass.
She wrote: I locked your brother’s bike to mine by accident.
She wrote: I saw him walk away, but before I could reach him, he got hit by that car. I waited with him until the ambulance came.
Beneath her name, she included her number.
There is a noise somewhere in the house, maybe the clap of a cabinet door. She crouches—her whole body waits. When no one comes to the door, she leaves the bike and hurries away, noiseless as a thief.
The next morning, she ventures into the living room, which looks larger without the bike against the wall. She goes to her marker-board and wipes a finger across the word RAWHIDE.
After breakfast, she bikes to the farmers’ market and buys some apples and a squash the size of an infant. She splurges on sunchokes and baby ginger, neither of which she knows how to use, but there is time left in the day to learn. Her geriatrics rotation begins on Monday. For now, the hours lie ahead, open and all hers.
Walking to her b
ike, she gets a call. The name at the top of the screen says Saeed Seyal.
She stares at the name. She lets her backpack drop, possibly bruising the apples. She could screen it. Among her friends, she is famous for screening. But then she thinks of the way she sneaked off in the night, crouching out of some primitive instinct, and the shame of it makes her press Accept.
“Hey,” says a voice that sounds just like Saeed’s, deep and kind of sinusy. “Is this Lori?”
“Yes, this is me, hi—”
“It’s Saeed.”
She hears the distant bleat of a truck backing up, the pop of tennis balls off strings. She plugs her free ear with a finger.
“Saeed Seyal,” he says casually. “You know, from the car accident. You dropped off my bike last night.”
“Saeed.” She catches her reflection, stretched and gliding over the door of a passing car. “I thought. There was an obituary.”
“Yeah, I was in this coma thing, and just when they were about to pull the plug, I woke up.”
She steadies the phone with both hands. It’s his voice, it’s the voice she remembers. “Oh my God. Oh Jesus.” She sinks onto a nearby bench, her face in her hand, bowed by so many emotions she can’t even weep. “Saeed? Are you serious? Is it you?”
“No,” he says. “It’s not.”
“Not what?”
“I’m his brother. I’m the one who found his bike this morning.”
Her hand falls to her lap. “Why did you say you were him?”
“I sound like him, don’t I.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“You thought he was back from the dead, right?”
“What the fuck,” she says softly, “is the matter with you?”
“Well, now you know how I felt this morning. Now you know how it feels.”
Haider presses END and takes a last gulp of Natty Light. He slings the can into the wastebasket; it clanks off the others. Wedged between is her letter.
That morning, he’d gone to get the mail. He turned away from the mailbox to find the Rawhide resting against the banister, unlocked like it was any other day. He smiled for a few seconds like a dumbass. Then his hand went to the mailbox and it took all his will to stay standing.