Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  The triage lounge is quiet, but the ward is full of people waiting on beds behind half-closed curtains, most of them hooked up to something, looking grim in blue paper slippers. I continue down the infectious corridor and peer through the windows into the isolation rooms, but I don’t see her. Somehow I find myself in radiology, where I pretend to look for someone named Joe. I make eye contact with no one. I walk under ominous signs and past the arrows to nowhere. Cardiac Ward Disease Management Pediatric Oncology. I go through the doors to a stairwell and take the stairs up a floor, retrace my steps along the hallway back over triage and descend the stairs on the opposite side. I join the red footprints and find my way to the doors of intensive care. Behind me, police and paramedics come crashing into the silence, pushing a gunshot wound alive and groaning on a soaked gurney and I tuck myself in behind and go through the doors into the ICU. I peel off behind a curtain and find myself face to face with a nurse. He’s taking the blood pressure of an elderly man in a gown. “Are you a relation?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m lost. My sister’s here. Last name Wolfe?”

  “Mr. Abrams, your arm is too small for the cuff. I’m gonna get a nurse with a wrist one.”

  Mr. Abrams says, “Whist?”

  “We’re going to take your blood pressure at your wrist. Two curtains down,” he says to me. “They have her on something to stop the seizures.”

  “She’s having seizures?”

  “She’s not my patient. Check with the duty nurse.”

  I go through two more cubicles, pushing the hanging curtains one way and then the other, looking for the openings. In one bed a child sleeps with a tube up his nose. The fluffy white dog in his arms isn’t a plush toy. It growls at me as I pass through. When I get to where Inger’s supposed to be, even the bed is gone.

  THE DUTY NURSE tells me that Inger’s in surgery. There’s a recovery waiting room in the surgical wing on the ninth floor. She won’t reveal what the surgery is. I wait for one of the four elevators with a family of three, a young girl with her parents. When we get in, the father presses nine and asks me my floor.

  “Same,” I reply.

  “Sorry to hear it. Our son Seamus is getting a new liver.”

  “Oh. Well, they’re really good with the transplants here,” I say, like I know something about it.

  “The liver is still on its way from another hospital, but thank god we got one. They told us it’s a good liver, a young person’s.”

  “Don’t be so thankful, Dad,” the girl says. “The only reason Shame’s getting a liver is because some other family lost their son.”

  “I swear to god, Emily.” The doors open on the fourth floor and we wait while no one enters. “There’s no comparison. It’s not Seamus’s fault that the boy died.”

  “Shame is going to have a dead person inside him!”

  “HEY—”

  The mother stops the father from slapping the girl. She’s only twelve or thirteen. Violence is near, I can feel it like heat on my back. It’s a bright yellow rising tide.

  We step out at nine, and the mother, scanning the signs hanging from the ceiling, announces the direction. I hang back. The girl slips her hand into her father’s. “Hey, the information people are over here,” he says, and they change direction, trading the lead like a flock of geese.

  I continue down the hall alone. I can hear my breath coming too hard. I pass gurney after empty gurney, the beds with their sideguards lowered, as if waiting to catch something that strays too near. I’m still sufficiently overstimulated that I can’t put the thoughts together that would help me find a hospital map or think of where they might be keeping her. Finally, I see: The Sam and Connie Litvak Recovery Waiting Room. A laminated sign by the door tells of Shelley Litvak, dead at fourteen. She’s pictured on a bicycle. She’s smiling. Once you’re dead, you look dead in pictures, too.

  THE WAITING ROOM is a large space in two distinct sections. One is bright and the televisions on the walls are all on. The other part is dark and people slouch across the benches with their coats keeping them warm. That’s where the family has gone. They took another route but ended up here as well. I sit in the light half and stare at the news crawl below footage of a fatal car crash. Maybe that’s where Seamus’s liver is coming from.

  It’s well past two in the morning when anyone official comes into the room, but she summons one of the hibernators, a man on his own. A fog of dread descends. Every thought and feeling that I have had, as in I have possessed, as in I contain it in the little vessel of my body, will be extinguished. I’m a being. I can no more give my beingness away than someone can take it from me. Inger thinks she can have it, but it’s mine.

  No one has come looking for me yet. Here I am in the wide open, like I was at the Dominion when I lost my mother, but I’m invisible. At two in the morning, Seamus’s family is given news that causes the parents to sob and the girl to laugh. They are taken away, another story I can’t know the beginning or the ending of. I pick up the phone and dial to the last digit of our home number before hanging up.

  Jimmy must be dead.

  SOMEBODY FROM A VOLUNTEER organization comes by just after sunrise to offer coffee and packages of low-sugar cookies. The news cycle renews. The stories that played until the middle of the night have been winnowed to the most sensational and spiced up with fresher horrors. The sun bangs around inside the elevator foyer.

  More people have arrived in the meantime, families and next-of-kins, and they’re discovering the magazines and choosing where to park themselves. Another doctor enters at last, but he doesn’t call a name. Tall in white and capped in blue. I’d forgotten how much surgeons looked like chefs. He comes directly to me, silent, and I know I’m being summoned; I recognize when things have gone beyond words. I follow him through the warren of back rooms and hallways. The smell of disinfectant hangs in the air and we begin down another corridor of gurneys, but these ones are occupied with every kind of mortal shock. Luckily for these post-ops, they’re unconscious. At the end of the corridor, we come to a frosted glass wall with muted light behind it.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is our quiet room.”

  “It’s pretty quiet up here already.”

  “It’s for a special kind of quiet.”

  My eyes want to bolt from my head. “So she’s gone?”

  “No. But I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture. It’ll be good for her to hear your voice. It’ll give her some strength and maybe she’ll rally. She’s in that room there.” He indicates it with his chin, as if her condition is so serious she might not survive a pointed finger. Then he returns the way we came, at one point reaching down to put the dangling arm of a gurney-bound patient back into place.

  INGER LIES ANAESTHETIZED in the hospital bed, a tube coming from the inside of her elbow and another one going into her nose. A respirator hose disappears down her throat, and a glowing red clip pinches her finger. She wears a plush white turban of medical gauze.

  She’s breathing on her own, but her skin has a waxy cast. The wall behind her looks like the cockpit of a spaceship with flashing lights and buttons behind protective clear plastic boxes. I can read the blood pressure monitor. She’s at 82 over 58, not enough pressure to water hanging plants.

  I pull up a chair. An eyelid trembles but not enough for dreaming. There’s no sign she knows I’m here. The half-dozen machines connected to her chatter and sigh like ladies at a book club. The heart line on the pulse monitor keeps moving in peaks and valleys like it does on television when there’s still hope. “One day people are going to understand what you’ve done,” I say to her.

  Her gauze bonnet is very white. Because the lights are dimmed, it seems extra vivid, like a lighthouse emerging from fog. I want to unwind it and see what’s under it. One piece of surgical tape keeps the wrap closed. It comes away easily. A second piece of surgical tape secures a deeper layer. In black marker, the words NO BONE are written across the tape. I peel it away and k
eep unwinding.

  Her hair is really bad. She has bandage-head on the right side and she’s bald on the left except for an open porthole of skull about the size of a nickel. Through it, red rivers flow over ivory dunes. Surgical plastic is stapled to her scalp. “Is that where we are right now, Inger?” I toss the gauze onto the bed.

  Morbier asks: What does it mean that she is profoundly asleep but you are awake?

  Well, I answer him, maybe it means there’s an afterlife.

  Be serious, Jean. You have just looked into the woman’s brain. What did you see?

  Just meat. Red and yellow and white meat, like you’d see in a butcher’s window.

  We used a medical auger. It’s like a drill. We put a three-quarter-inch hollow bit on it. The bone popped right out.

  A strip of gauze drapes Inger’s throat, limp against her clavicle. The respirator inflates and deflates her chest. I stroke her head, the half with hair on it. She’s in no shape to answer any questions or confess. I have to go straight to sentencing.

  I get on top of her in the bed and hold her between my knees. She opens her eyes and looks at me shining as I make two turns of her throat with the gauze. She watches me, but there’s nothing behind her eyes. I pull the gauze closed over her windpipe but I can’t draw it tight. She’s a part of me.

  I hear her voice in my head. It says, Do it, Jean. Be yourself for once.

  I pull the respirator hose from her throat. Inger emits a wet gurgle as I press my thumbs into her neck and feel for her ribbed windpipe. I compress it. Her eyes go wide. I breathe in. One two three four. I breathe out.

  One two three four.

  Inger’s pupils tighten and her focus travels beyond my shoulder, high above me. Her mouth opens in awe.

  I look up, and there’s one on the ceiling now, hanging down, clinging to it with her fingers splayed against the sound-proofing tiles. She’s wearing her red crying coat and her short hair is dripping wet. She gazes down into our eyes and the machines start going crazy. I keep the pressure on Inger’s throat until the nurses come running. One of them sticks her head in the door.

  “Code blue!” she shouts.

  The corridor springs to life. Nurses fly in, pushing diagnostic machines and carrying IV bags. The resident in his green gown dances through, holding the end of his stethoscope high in the air. I get off the bed and navigate the room through the flow of personnel. They’re paging the specialists, and shadows rouse in the quiet room and stand at the door. It opens and her husband and their kid emerge, their faces drained of colour. They walk by me like I’m a ghost.

  I see Ian is in the quiet room as well. Unlike the two men with him, he’s not wearing his uniform. I can’t help but laugh. How many men does it take to bring me to justice? He must think I’ve really lost it, running to him with tears pouring down my face. He takes me in his arms. He strokes my back. “Oh my god, Jean. I thought you were dead!”

  “I’m not!” I push away to see his face. “But she is.”

  The uniforms have emerged from the quiet room. They’re getting impatient. “These boys want to ask you a couple of questions, okay? Then I can take you home.”

  “Of course! Just show me the way.”

  I’ll agree to anything now. Look how agreeable I am! I just want to go home. I love my life. I love my children! This was just a rift. In my perception, or someone else’s. In my thinking, my beliefs. And I believe Cullen Gossage now. I believe in the transmission layer because it’s everything everywhere all the time. It’s the only thing I’m certain I’m in. I’m in the rift.

  I follow one of the “boys” into the quiet room. It’s very calming in here. I can’t believe how light I feel.

  I take a seat and wait as he gets the elastic band off his notebook and finds a new page to write on. He clicks his pen to life. “Let’s start with your full name,” he says.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to Ellen Levine, my agent, champion, and friend.

  Thank you to my editors Martha Kanya-Forstner and Kiara Kent, who lavished love and attention on this book and helped it become itself.

  My gratitude to Ashley Dunn, for getting it into all the right hands and me to the right places, and to everyone at Doubleday Canada who saw the book through with such warmth and professionalism.

  To Joanna Knooppathuis, Liz Phillips, Linda Redhill, Esta Spalding, Linda Spalding, and Kevin Temple: love and squalor for reading earlier drafts of this novel and for being brilliant and fearless in their feedback.

  I am indebted to the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for essential support at different times during the writing of this novel. I’m grateful to live in a country, a province, and a city that supports the arts.

  In the spring of 2017, as the fictional timeline of this novel was expiring in the “real” world, the city’s Parks, Forests and Recreation division razed Bellevue Square to the ground. My regards to the City of Toronto for enthusiastically illustrating some of the themes in my work.

  Bellevue Square is part one of a triptych of novels called Modern Ghosts.