Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  She was not Patient X anymore, but Mrs. Faro. Julien couldn’t place the name, familiar as it sounded. Perhaps one of his schoolteachers was called Faro, or he’d known a boy with that name. It was a long time since he’d felt like a boy, or thought of his days in school. In the space of these short hours he felt like an old, old man.

  He leaned his head against the cold window and let his eyes grow unfocused, soothed by the white-capped waves fighting each other on the water’s uneasy surface. He put his hand on the window to steady himself: it was cold outside, too, the sun barely making a dent in the gray clouds. He thought idly of his sweater, wondered whether it would be warm enough for him on the way home. He wondered why the woman in the bed wore no wedding rings.

  “Dr. Julien?”

  “She’s doing well,” said Mañalac, nodding his approval. “Strong girl.” Julien started at the sound of Mañalac’s voice. George and Mañalac stood back from the bed, the girl lying in it, her head and shoulders propped up by pillows. Her eyes were closed and her mouth lay slightly open, revealing the white tips of her teeth.

  She looked anything but strong to Julien. Patients were at their most vulnerable post-op, no matter how many antibiotics and bio-healers were pumped into them to speed up their recovery. Yet as much as infection threatened her, the possibility of discovery and denunciation added an extra sheen to the pale translucence of her unmoving body.

  “What should we do now?” George said. “Do you want one of us to stay with her?”

  Julien studied the girl, trying to pinpoint when he’d acquiesced to the plan laid out before him by this mysterious force, or person, whatever it was, who was responsible for her. And how could this benefactor have known that he would break all the rules to save her life? That he would instinctively agree to shelter her until that benefactor came to claim her? But how would he monitor her while shielding her from the prying eyes of everyone else at the hospital, much less any Agency spies that might be wandering the corridors?

  “No, I’ll stay here with her for now. Start over with your new shift, tell them if they ask that you were with me. Inform Ram, too. None of you have to worry about this anymore. It would probably be best if you just forget all about it.”

  “My tracking record?” said George. “It’s been almost three hours now. If anyone checks, they’ll know where I’ve been.”

  “I’ll fix it,” said Julien. He didn’t have access to the hospital records the way the woman’s benefactor did, but he would try to make it look as if all three nurses were carrying on their normal hospital routines.

  George nodded, then left. Mañalac hung back, shuffling from foot to foot.

  “My shift’s over. Ended an hour ago. I can come back whenever you need me, Dr. Julien.”

  Julien clasped Mañalac by the shoulder. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I won’t forget this.” His fingers tightened on Mañalac’s sleeve for a moment, then let go. Mañalac nodded, embarrassed. Then he too disappeared.

  When Julien was alone with the woman, he sat down in the soft chair opposite her bed and watched her sleep. Color was seeping back into her face, her cheeks turning from ivory into a sunrise. Her chest rose and fell smoothly, a bow slowly moving back and forth across the strings of a violin, sounding out long, clear notes of rest and healing.

  Julien was still too young, too low in status to be assigned a Wife through the Perpetuation Bureau. His only chance of romance would be to strike up a relationship with one of the female robots in the hospital that smiled and moved their heads, extended their arms and legs, breathed in and out in a maddening verisimilitude that allowed men to pretend, for just a while, that they were human. Compared to the real women he’d known—his mother, an aunt on his father’s side, a grandmother who’d died when he was young, the robots were perhaps a little lacking in spontaneity or vitality, but they’d been engineered to be warm and pliable enough.

  The first weekend after his eighteenth birthday, Julien went with two friends to the decrepit downtown area of the city known as Red Town, searching for a brothel that would accept the “comfort money” given to them by the Perpetration Bureau. Sleeping with a prosbot was something that everyone did at least once, if only to prove they were real men. It wasn’t something you bragged about, but single men had needs, and this was the only legitimate way to satisfy them. Thinking that it would help men control their impulses toward real women, the Bureau subsidized the first visit to a prosbot when men came of legal age, so it cost next to nothing. After that, it was true, some men became addicted to the physical release; others, to the deception that these were real women who cared about them, who truly liked them, who enjoyed their company, not just their money. Visiting prosbots could become an addiction as much as any of the rest of the pharmacological cornucopia that Green City had to offer.

  A visitor spent an hour in a private room with one of the prosbots. Any act was allowed, as they had been constructed more sturdily than the anatomical ones in the medical school; they only were not allowed to willfully damage or dismember them.

  Julien found no real pleasure in the female’s limbs around his neck, her synthetic lips on his, or her recorded voice; his body responded, but it felt like cheating on an exam or stealing money. Immediately afterward, the emptiness in his head and the pit of his stomach made him want to weep. He decided that he would not return. He would wait for something better, more human. And yet it was depressing to think that any woman he’d end up with would have two other husbands, at least.

  At the same time, Julien decided to sacrifice all hopes of companionship in return for professional success. So far he’d been on target, working days and nights, taking on extra hours and emergency calls that had gotten him noticed by the hospital administrators. There was even talk that he might be promoted in the next year if he kept the pace up. He’d be the youngest doctor in history among the ranks of the elite surgeons; he might be deemed worthy enough by the Bureau to have a Wife sooner rather than later.

  Julien was completely exhausted and suddenly felt a desire to lie down next to the woman in the wide hospital bed, to curve himself around her body and put his arms around her, bury his face in her hair, and simply close his eyes and drift away. It would be such a clean forgetting, a knife cutting time into before and after. It wasn’t his habit to seek comfort from another person in that physical way. Yet feeling the warmth that came off her like waves and inhaling the scent of her skin and hair, he longed for relief by her side.

  Julien settled himself into the chair next to the bed and closed his eyes. He thought about how he’d taken out pieces of her flesh and blood and removed the life growing inside her. Her body had been violated enough by his hands. He would not impose himself on her even more in what remained of this day. Besides, she was married to J. Faro, whoever that was. He fell into sleep as quickly as a child in its mother’s arms.

  Sabine

  When I was eleven, I began to ask my mother questions. “Why do you only have one Husband?” She sat at her dressing table, carefully blotting her face with powder. She had a drawer full of makeup that she used only on special occasions. Women weren’t encouraged to paint their faces too much, to avoid drawing attention to themselves when they went out.

  She dabbed powder under her eyes, first the left, then the right. Her mouth was pulled down into a funny shape, one that I imitated when she was gone, looking in the mirror and pretending I was applying makeup to my face too.

  “Our family is different,” she said. “One mother and one father and one child.”

  “But my friends—Irene has three fathers, Jana has two. There’s one girl in the class above me who has four!”

  “Do you want to have more fathers?” She turned to me and watched my face carefully.

  I felt bad saying yes. “I don’t know.”

  My mother’s hands fell into her lap. She bowed her head for a second, deep in thoug
ht. When she lifted it again, her eyes were clear, guileless as they looked into mine. “It’s my fault, Sabine. I can’t have more children, so they don’t want me.”

  For years afterward, I believed her. When I was old enough, I imagined the pain my mother endured, the humiliation of monthly examinations, the prodding and poking of her body. For years in my mind she lived a martyr to infertility, a poor invalid who had to make monthly declarations that her body had failed her and Green City.

  What I didn’t know is that instead of submitting to the rules of the Perpetuation Bureau, my mother defied them. She had been bribing a doctor who faked the results of her hormone tests, so she got classified as temporarily infertile. This momentous lie exempted her from having to marry two, three, or four men. The lie bought our family years of normality.

  When I turned twelve years old, the doctor was exposed and betrayed by one of his patients. Panicked, my mother confessed everything to my father, who urged her to pledge herself as a loyal rule-abiding citizen of the Green City. When questioned by the Agency, she said she was ignorant of the doctor’s actions.

  The doctor was swiftly arrested, underwent a public trial, and was eliminated. All the women he’d helped were ordered to take more husbands immediately. They wouldn’t be punished; the doctor corrupted them, led them astray from their paths. They could earn forgiveness in return for their complete obedience from then on.

  My mother waited in dread for the notification, knowing that it would come soon. Probably on a Monday morning, when the most important missives arrived through the Network to the families of Green City. There was no question of my mother rejecting the assignment, of even choosing the Husband.

  But before the notification ever came, my mother died, suddenly. When the Officials visited and the crews came to take my mother’s body away, they labeled it a suicide. They painted a compelling portrait of my mother’s mental state before her death. The psychological counsellors sent by the Agency wrote in their reports that the guilt and anxiety my mother underwent was too much for her; it drove her to an impulsive, impetuous decision to remove herself from our lives, so that we would be spared more repercussions of her rebellion.

  My father accepted the official version of events. I was sure it wasn’t true. She would never leave me like that. They probably knew she’d refuse to take another husband and quietly eliminated her, stole her life from us as if she were their property. She had no more moves left, so they checkmated her, and left us to live with it forever.

  I often relive the moment when I found my mother in the bed, face down, clad in one of her afternoon robes, a flowing blue kaftan slit high up the legs to afford her freedom of movement. I wait to see her head move, her legs shift, the usual signs of her waking up.

  I wait and wait and wait.

  Then I touch her hand, shocked at how cold it is, and I begin to scream.

  An alarmed neighbor calls the emergency line. When the ambulance arrives, the paramedics cannot pry me away from her body. I’m clinging to her, begging her to wake up. “I’m sorry, Mamma, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it! Please wake up now.”

  I lay in bed for countless nights after she died, half terrified, half hoping that I would see her in my dreams; she might be laughing and happy in them. Sometimes I was afraid to fall asleep and sometimes I couldn’t fall asleep because I believed that she’d killed herself because of me.

  Hissing, a soft beeping, a low hum from deep somewhere—inside me or outside?

  Is it morning already? I should get up, they’ll be waiting for me.

  Hearing muffled sounds, like being underwater. Rising, rising, the surface not far above my head... Sharper now. That’s a door opening. Closing again. Opening. But why?....oors in the Panah never make any noise.

  My mouth is dry. My throat hurts—

  I’m cold, so cold. Shivering—

  A tube snaking out of my nose, smelling strangely antiseptic, delivering the purest air I’ve ever breathed, a cool breeze whistling into my lungs.

  I move my hands instinctively to pull out the intruding tube, the prongs scratching at my nostrils. At the same time, darkness starts to lift, brightening to red, then orange, and pink. A sunrise behind my eyelids.

  But where—

  My eyes snap open. Nausea claws its way out of my stomach. I retch and try to sit up but the muscles of my abdomen won’t tighten, as if everything is disconnected from my very core. Then I notice the throbbing, aching weight all across my belly.

  I flop over weakly to the right and retch over the side of the bed. Nothing comes out. I’m clutching at my belly with my hands. There are starbursts of white heat when I twist. I press my forehead into the cold railing at the side of the bed and groan with each stab of pain.

  “Wait, wait, wait!”

  In an instant an unknown man is at my side, holding a metal pan to my mouth. “Easy, easy. We don’t want you to burst your stitches. Well, they’re not really stitches, we just call them that out of habit, but we still don’t want anything rupturing after we’ve done such a good job of fixing you up.”

  I barely hear him. My abdomen still throbs, the sensation that someone’s rummaged inside me. I whimper softly, and he pats my back, his hand calming against my spine.

  “I’m sorry, I know it hurts. I can give you more medication for the pain. And the nausea. It’s a common effect of the anesthesia. Luckily the gels we use to knit your skin together after...”

  I raise my neck to try and look down at my stomach, but the smallest movement draws a gasp from somewhere shallow in my chest. At once his hand is behind my head, cradling it until I sink back down on the pillow.

  His hands on my head and back are gentle and firm, holding me where I need support the most.

  “Where am I?” I whisper.

  He falls silent, moving away so I can get a good look at him. I stare at him, trying to recognize this tall, thin man with blond hair and blue eyes. I’ve never seen him before, but he seems more familiar with my body than I am right now.

  I glance around uncomprehendingly at the darkened room, with only a glowing light on in the corner. The large displays that run all along the wall to my left are switched off. Only a small machine beeps softly from an alcove. I look up at the ceiling and see small twinkling lights, arranged in tiny constellations.

  For a moment, I think I might already be dead.

  “You’re in hospital. Mrs. Faro,” he says and looks perturbed when I give him another blank stare. “That is your name, isn’t it? Mrs. Faro—that’s what it says on your records.”

  My records? I don’t have any records. I don’t exist, officially speaking. “Am I still in Green City?”

  His sudden smile breaks the tired shell of his face, giving way to a young boy’s friendly gaze. “Yes, you are. You’re in Shifana Hospital, the best in Green City. And I’m Dr. Asfour...” He pauses. I realize: he’s in complete control of me. For all I know, he could be the reason why I’m lying in this hospital bed, wires running from my fingers like snakes, this flower of pain growing from my stomach.

  A small chirp emits from the monitor. I flick my eyes to the display and see that the numbers on it are rising, matching the drumbeat of my pulse beating faster in my ears.

  The man glances over at the machine, then at me. “I’m Julien,” he whispers. “I’m a doctor here. You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I nod at him, as if there could be nothing more logical than for me to wake up in a hospital, my insides aching. I open my mouth to tell him that my name isn’t Mrs. Faro, it’s Sabine, but the pain momentarily leaves me mute.

  “Why am I here?” My voice scratches against my throat. “What happened to me?”

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” Julien pulls up the chair next to the bed and perches on its edge. He puts his head to one side, like a bird, his blue eyes growing brighter and
his gaze more pointed as he allows me to watch him.

  My eyes are clearer now; I can see the faint blond stubble on his jaw, the slight bags under his eyes. He’s tall, almost spindly, with elongated wrists and a pronounced Adam’s apple at his throat. His long legs stick out from beneath his doctor’s coat. Life hasn’t yet etched its scars on his face; his forehead is smooth and unwrinkled.

  “You’re... too young to... be a doctor,” I say, as scornfully as I can. But my words come out a pathetic mewl. The tube in my nose makes it hard to speak clearly.

  He laughs, a short, explosive sound, as if he’s been sucker-punched. At the same time, his skin turns a shade of scarlet I’ve never seen before. “That’s a great way of saying thank you.”

  Thank you for what? “It’s true. You look younger than... than me.”

  “I’m twenty-six.” His color stays high and bright.

  I frown. “It’s still... not right.” The words aren’t coming easily to me. If only I can just lay my head down on the pillow and go back to sleep. Just drift away, back to the dark water from which I’ve emerged, where there’s no pain, no nausea, no strange man talking to me as if he’s my friend.

  His expression remains pleasant, relaxed. The blue eyes keep searching me for clues. I avert my eyes. “Tell me why I’m here, before I get sick again.”

  He leans back and sighs. The beeps begin to issue faster again from the monitor, and he frowns momentarily, before beginning:

  “Someone dropped you at the doors of the hospital early this morning. You were unconscious and in shock. We had to take you to surgery immediately.”

  “I had an... operation?” That explains all the pain, and his earlier talk of anesthesia and nausea.

  “We found that you had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, which had ruptured in your left fallopian tube. Do you know how long you were pregnant?”

  Pregnant? The word ricochets in my head, bringing out beads of sweat on my forehead and under my arms. The small machine begins to beep faster still.