Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  I sleep for most of the first day. The next day, just as the room lights are beginning to turn midday bright, Julien comes to my room. My thoughts are surprisingly focused; the dull fuzz of the anesthetic has worn away and the nausea’s died with it. I can recognize my surroundings immediately, as well as the thin tall man who stands there before me, holding a tray of food that he’s sneaked out from the hospital kitchens.

  “It’s my lunch. I hope you like fish.”

  The aroma of grilled fish provokes in me a strong, gnawing hunger, as well as a distant memory of being at the seaside with my parents when I was five or six, eating spiced fish out of wrapped banana leaves. My hand goes instinctively to my belly, pressing down: someone has replaced the gauze with a small, lightweight bandage while I’ve been sleeping. I feel raw, scraped out, but the incision is already halfway healed; all that really remains is tiredness and a heaviness over my stomach, and this new sensitivity, as if I’ve been stripped of my outermost layer of skin.

  “It’s all right for you to eat now, Julia,” Julien says, as I hesitate. “It won’t hurt you.”

  I don’t like it, his ability to discern my innermost thoughts as easily as he takes my temperature. “What about you? I don’t want to deprive you of your meal.”

  “There’s enough for both of us. They always try to fatten me up. They think I’m starving to death.”

  “We’ll share, then. I’m not that hungry.” I am, actually but, in my state of confusion and discomfort, I find myself craving companionship and kindness.

  I pull myself out of the bed, rearrange my hospital gown with as much dignity as I can, and shuffle like an old woman to the sofa under the window, where we sit side by side, not quite touching, but he’s close enough that the warmth of his skin radiates against my bare arm.

  We eat in silence. The food is unmemorable, the fish slightly cold and rubbery, the vegetables an indescribable color halfway between orange and brown, the rice overcooked. It’s my first solid meal in seventy-two hours. Nevertheless, it is delicious.

  Before this day, I’ve never set foot in a hospital. Whatever small illnesses we suffer in the Panah, we treat ourselves. We’re young and strong; none of us has to deal with grave problems. When it comes time for me to die, Lin’s brisk efficiency will see me placed in the small crematorium at the end of the garden and incinerated within an hour of my death. Where I go after that doesn’t matter much to me.

  I watch Julien’s fingers as he holds his fork, scooping up his half of the fish and the congealed vegetables expertly. I can tell that he’s used to wolfing down these institutional meals. It strikes me that his hands have been inside my body, a fact about which he seems completely unembarrassed. I remind myself that I am just another body in the lineup of bodies that he deals with every day. But does he sit side by side with those other bodies, eating calmly and turning his head to look out the window, his face softening as he looks out on the city and the sea?

  I’ve never really spent any time with a man of my age before. I could have had a brother like him. Or a Husband. Or even a lover, although I bat away the thought as quickly as it comes to me. When Julien meets my eyes, he blushes, and I realized that for all his talents as a doctor, he has no idea what to do with me, now that he’s saved my life. I want to reach out and touch his face, to warm my fingertips against his flaming skin.

  Julien looks around at the room, observing its corners and features, his eyes bright with interest. “It’s a VIP room,” he says eventually. “This part of the hospital isn’t operational yet. That’s why there’s so much furniture in here. If you were a regular patient you’d be on a ward, with others. If you were a man, that is,” he adds carefully.

  I exhale slowly. We are beginning, at last. “How did I get here?”

  “I was waiting for you tell me that, Julia.”

  I look down at the single red dot where he put a needle into the vein on the back of my left hand only a few hours ago. “I don’t know anything. I can’t remember.” It’s true. I can’t remember what happened after I went to Joseph’s apartment.

  He tilts his head away from me, examining me with a sidelong gaze, perhaps as sharp as one of his surgeon’s tools. “Well then, let me explain. Someone drove up in a car and dumped you outside the hospital like a corpse. You would have died if we’d gotten to you just ten minutes later. My question is: who would do such a thing to you? Where were your Husbands?” His voice cracks on the word, Husbands.

  Again, that dreaded assumption that I’m a normal Wife of Green City. I want to escape as fast as possible. How can I run, though, from this wretched room, this wretched hospital, when my body now feels as though it’s made of different parts and pieces sewn together by him, guarded by the machines, and owned by this hospital itself?

  “I couldn’t have been pregnant...” My voice sounds small to my own ears.

  Julien says, “I didn’t keep any of the ultrasound images; I had to delete them. The recordings of the procedure I performed on you, too. Or else I would show you that you were definitely pregnant.”

  “Why?” I say. I need proof if I’m to believe his crazy story. “Why did you have to delete them?”

  “I had to make sure there was no evidence. Otherwise I’d have had to report the whole thing. How you got here. What kind of shape you were in. What we did for you.” He runs his hand through his hair, not for the first time. I’m beginning to recognize it as a sign of his nervousness.

  “And then they’d come find me,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Not just you. They’d take me away, and all the nurses that helped me. There were three of them. I can’t believe they all agreed to keep quiet about this, but they have. For now.”

  “So if it’s so dangerous, why did you help me? You wouldn’t have had to take any risks. You wouldn’t have to answer any questions afterward, or get rid of the evidence. You’d be safe. Why do you care so much what happens to me?”

  He answers with spirit, “I wasn’t trained to let anyone die on the side of the road like a stray dog.” He pulls on his hair so hard I’m amazed clumps of it don’t come away in his hands. He’s fidgeting, breathing heavily through his nose. But his eyes are intense, fixed on mine, and in that moment I believe him utterly.

  Still, dare I trust him? I’ve never heard of anyone in Green City acting unselfishly, putting someone else’s safety ahead of his own. “But that’s against the rules.”

  “I know. Well, we’ll see what happens. For better or worse, we’re in this together now.”

  I stand up abruptly in a show of strength to conceal the turmoil inside. “I have to use the toilet.” A cramp ripples across my belly and I grit my teeth, my vision blurred with tears of pain and confusion.

  “Do you need my help?”

  I use his offered arm to push myself away from him. “I can do it myself. Don’t look at me,” I add, and am pleased to see him flinch.

  He averts his eyes as I wobble to the small door of the bathroom cabin. Once inside, I lock the door behind me, lower myself down to the toilet. Relief is slow to come, stopping and starting, causing pain deep in my pelvis.

  I think back desperately to every assignation, every Client. I’ve been obsessing over it all the time—those men the only explanation I have for Julien’s wild assertions. But no matter how many times I go through the lists, the names, visualize their faces, nothing clicks. The answer’s not going to come to me like this. Maybe I’m just imagining it so this impossible scenario makes sense somehow.

  Grinding my teeth, I rip a piece of toilet paper off the roll on the wall and shred it to pieces, throwing them on the floor. The toilet flushes itself, and my heart skitters along uneven beats. I have to touch my face to reassure myself that I’m still here, alive, if not whole.

  A voice calls out through the door. “Are you all right, Julia?”

  “Yes.” I unlock the do
or and go back to the room. Julien is standing at the window gazing at the sea, his back turned to me, as I’d requested. I walk slowly over to him and we stand side by side, looking in the same direction at the tall wind turbines, sentinels guarding the coastline against an enemy that might never come. We’re just like them, but we know the enemy is going to come, sooner or later.

  I lower myself down to the sofa. “So I was pregnant.” How hard it is to say the taboo word; in the Panah, we never talk about it, as if mention of the word is enough to bring about conception. I can’t look Julien in the eyes.

  “About five weeks, maybe six, yes.”

  “And it went wrong. So you had to take it out.”

  “I had to remove the fallopian tube, where the pregnancy had implanted itself. It’s not supposed to do that.” His tone is kind, but still professorial, a little condescending, as if he’s explaining things to a child.

  I’m struggling to not cry. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “I would have obtained your permission if you were conscious. But I didn’t have a choice. You would have died.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s a medical fact. It’s one of those unfortunate risks of pregnancy. I know it’s a tough burden for women to bear.” He shrugs, then he sits down next to me again on the couch. “Did your Husbands know?”

  “I didn’t even know,” I say, needing to make it very clear to him that all of this is a lot more complicated than he thinks.

  He nods. “Sexual reproduction is far from perfect. But considering our circumstances, these days, it’s all we have, really.”

  “I didn’t consent.”

  The skin near his eyelids flickers. “To the operation? I know, I explained...”

  “Not that.”

  “What are you saying?” He stops short.

  “If it happened,” I swallow hard, “it happened while I was asleep. Or unconscious. I don’t remember anything.”

  Furrows appear in his forehead as if time and worry have troweled them in so deeply that they spring to life at the slightest provocation. And I know that this is a big one. “Your Husbands?” he says, gently. So he’s heard the stories, about Wives and what really goes on in Green City marriages. But that’s not my problem right now.

  “I don’t have any Husband. I’m nobody’s Wife. I’m not even supposed to be here in Green City. I’m illegal.”

  Julien’s eyes slowly change from warm blue to cold and unforgiving gray. His pupils narrow and he shifts away so our arms and knees are no longer close enough to touch. My bare feet are naked and vulnerable next to his white shoes. There’s a spot of blood on the right one. Is it mine? Does he understand, at last, who and what I am?

  After a long pause he speaks again. “I’ll go back and look again at your tests.” His voice is calm, his expression neutral. But now he realizes fully what he’s done. Only now does he know that when he opened me up like a gutted fish, he reshaped my world, but also his, and linked his fate inextricably to mine.

  I’m overcome by weariness, sudden and bewildering. I want him to go away. “I think I need to sleep some more.”

  “No,” says Julien. “Don’t sleep. Walk as much as you can. I’m sure you want to get out of here as quickly as possible. It will speed things along if you walk.”

  He’s already got one hand on the door as he gives me these instructions. He’s the one who wants to get out of this room as fast as he can; I’m the one who can’t escape. I glance toward the window—if only I could open it and fly out, straight back to the Panah. But I will be here at Julien’s pleasure, for as long as he wants to keep me here.

  I doze for a fitful hour or two in the evening. I’m startled out of sleep when my hand hits the steel railing at the side of the bed. I jerk awake, breathing unevenly, the darkness disorienting me, making strange monsters out of all the shapes in the room, and I can’t tell where the door is. Then it all comes back to me.

  If only I’d had access to hospital-grade anesthesia all those nights in the Panah, when thoughts marched across my brain like ants, when the mornings were a sick fog and my body felt like it was bursting at the seams with exhaustion. I would have done anything for this kind of rest. And then I remember: that last night at Joseph’s, I had fallen asleep in his bed. Was it because I was finally, utterly exhausted, or was my body, burdened by this deformed pregnancy, already starting to betray me?

  I push away the recollection and try to think of Lin instead. Is she looking for me now? But my mind careens to the moment after I stepped out from the building and looked for the car. I remember the road, the way it tilted and seemed to come up and meet me as I tumbled down. Then this strange room with Julien’s unfamiliar face hovering above me. And all the pain, the disorienting drugs, pointing the way to somewhere in the past, an action against my body that I can’t remember...

  Again I’m straining to pull out the memory: which one of my Clients would do such a thing to me? None of them touched me as far as I know. I don’t recall being injected with anything, being told to smell anything. I’d been pregnant for at least five weeks, according to Julien, so it didn’t happen when I fainted just before coming here. Can I even believe what he said? Maybe I wasn’t pregnant, and this is all a trick, a way for the Agency to capture me?

  Why can’t I remember anything? I press my fingers hard into my eyes. If I press hard enough, will they make me see the truth? Was I awake when it happened, or unconscious, on my back or on my stomach?

  All the faces of my Clients appear in my mind, yet none of them strikes any notes of recognition, any instant of pure and absolute knowing that he was the one. My sense of the hours I spent with those men is expanding and contracting. I can’t pinpoint the moment five or six weeks ago where I may have fallen asleep long enough for one of them to steal his act of sex from my body. That makes him a thief, not just a rapist. But he gave me something in return, something that I lost before I even knew I had it.

  I have to get away from here. I have to run.

  Swinging my legs over the side of the bed before I even realize what I’m doing, I put on my shoes, and began to walk, cringing in pain. My feet hit something lying on the floor between the bed and the door. I stifle my scream. It’s a person huddled in a blanket; I’ve just narrowly avoided kicking him in the head.

  He turns so that the moonlight shining in through the window illuminates his face, his wide-awake eyes. It’s Julien.

  “What are you doing here?”

  His eyes focus on me. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “You can’t just...” He sits up and pushes the blanket aside. He wears a light sleeping shirt, and in the light, his bare, thin arms gleam.

  “I can’t stay here. I have to go back...”

  “Julia,” he says, “it’s not safe. Please don’t do this. I don’t know where you want to go or what you’re going to do. Stay here!”

  “You can’t keep me here.”

  “You’re not well enough, can’t you see that?”

  “Don’t tell me anything more. I have to go home.” I have no plan, but all I need to do is find a display—there has to be one somewhere in this hospital. I’ll send a message to Lin across the Deep Web, to tell her where I am. I still remember how to do it. She’ll find a way to help me, to get me home again.

  “But where is your home?” says Julien, as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. He blinks at me owlishly in the half-light. “You said you don’t come from Green City. Where do you live?”

  “You didn’t tell me why you’re in my room.”

  When he speaks again, after a minute or so, it’s too dark to see but I can hear the blush in his voice. “Keeping an eye on you.”

  “Am I a prisoner?”

  “I’m watching out for you,” he mumbles. “You’re my patient.”
/>   “You do this for all your patients? Sleep on their floors?”

  “No...”

  “So open the door.”

  Any moment now Julien will reach out to catch me by the leg; I’m ready to kick out with all the strength in my weakened body. He slowly rises to his feet, hands raised to show me he won’t touch me. He puts his hand against the door handle, which beeps softly as it unlocks. Then he pulls the door open for me. “Go,” he says, under his breath. I watch him, wary and confused. I’m unaccustomed to an enemy that gives in so easily. “Leave, but do it fast. There’s an emergency exit on the fourth floor; it leads to a corridor which heads north, towards the Old Quarter. But there are alarms everywhere. You won’t even be able to see them.”

  I haven’t even thought about alarms. “I—I just need a device or a display. That’s all. I need to send a—message to someone. Do you have one?”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t let you do that. They track me. I’m a doctor, but that makes me a government official. A minor one. Whatever I do on my device, they can see it.”

  I slump down, feeling trapped.

  “But there’s an office downstairs that staff are allowed to use. There’s something there, I think. A public display or two. I’ve never been, but we all have access. But you’ll have to go on your own. I can’t go there for you. I could be tracked.”

  Not quite understanding I say, “How will I know the right room?”

  “There’s a symbol on the door. Looks like a monkey’s tail. They have it on all the places where there’s display access.”

  “Just in this hospital?”

  “All over Green City. I think. But I’ve never needed to use one.”

  He takes my hand, writes something on my palm with a pen he takes from his pocket. A short series of numbers is glowing on my skin.