The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  Your new apathy, this inner deadness, isn’t all bad. There’s a sort of relief. A remission from all concern. Like the obliterating fatigue of a sleeping flu. Or heroin? Is this why people crawl into bed with hard opiates and stay there? Let the manic world go on chasing its tail—a yelping, spinning blur—you are in a ravine of stillness, silence.

  Your parents and Mega Sister keep leaving messages: Uncle Lambros and Aunt Foula want you to waitress again at the Agora, even if you are too skinny and therefore a poor promotion for your uncle’s excellent food. The messages don’t mention your skinniness. Such references ended some while back, your parents and relatives increasingly concerned. Not that anorexia was ever your problem. You always ate all the food your aunt and uncle would ply you with, before your shift and after—the weight just wouldn’t adhere. A bestiary of barbecued meats, roast potatoes drenched in olive oil, sautéed rice, boureki, kataifi, galaktoboureko, volcanic flaming cheeses … The problem was, you were an awful waitress. Forgetful, befuddled, clumsy. Unable to achieve that winning, waitressy charm, somewhere between aloofly formal and invasively familiar. Oh—and your Greek stunk.

  You grope among uncertain objects under the bed for the tiny cellphone, to call your uncle. Lifting it is like hefting a curling rock—another thing you’ve lost interest in doing. Twenty-six messages in all, four from Charles of the tucked-in sweaters and three from Jayla, alleged best friend. You stopped checking email ten days ago.

  “Theo Lambros,” you say thickly.

  “Roddy!” he says in his cigar-smoked, mafia rasp.

  “I’m sorry, I …”

  “Ochi, den pirazi, pethi! You’re going to come back to us? I can give you a shift tonight, one of the girls is got a cold.”

  “You know I’m no waitress.”

  “You’re evolving! We work at it! The customers like you, also.”

  “But you fired me.”

  “Just my temper,” he says, and you picture him shrugging, big grin, splaying his fat hands. He says, “That man … he was city councillor and the saganaki, it’s like napalm. But come back. Your parents worry, you have no idea. You sound so tired. You’re not eating?”

  “I’m starting another … I’m starting somewhere else, tomorrow. That’s the thing. But thank you. Could you let them know I’m all right?”

  “A new job? Where is this new job? You work in another restaurant?”

  “You know no other restaurant would give me a job.”

  “So, where?”

  “It’s … a clinic. A medical institution, of a kind.”

  “You’re serving in their cafeteria!” he roars, not in the tone of someone who has cracked a mystery but of someone crushed by betrayal.

  “I’m not,” you say, and to pre-empt his next question you tell him, “I’m not working in the kitchen either.” There are businesses in the world besides the food service industry, you want to add, but say nothing. This is just so exhausting.

  “You’re a nurse, then? But you haven’t gone to school for nurse. Not a janitor?”

  “Please don’t worry. It’s nothing like that.”

  “You haven’t gone to school at all yet! Five years now!”

  “And they’ll pay me well.”

  “Of course! How else to get someone to work for a stranger?” His voice has the pitch of mystified contempt he uses when speaking of the doomed world beyond the frontiers of the Community. “Be careful! Don’t get sick from all the sick people! Are you saving money to go back to school?” (The relatives keep expecting this of you, the best student the family has ever produced; your uncle still informs customers that you’re “taking some time off.”)

  “Please tell Mom and Dad I’m fine. I might try to call them when the job is done.”

  You set the phone down and sprawl back amid your rancid sheets, spent to the last dram. You don’t think you’re ill, physically. It’s more that things mattered and now they don’t. You used to read ravenously. Now all curiosity has fled the premises. Your soul has dozed off for the duration. Is it shock, still? Guilt? Sounds like depression, but minus the ripping, visceral pain, the hurtling dread. Instead, a vacancy. Painless paralysis. Hard to believe your skull and ribcage are packed with pink and diligent organs, earnestly and ignorantly toiling, as in a coma victim.

  All you want to do these days is sleep.

  You might as well be getting paid for it.

  The clinic is a hangar-like structure, cinderblocks and green corrugated siding, on the edge of an industrial park in the wind-scavenged steppes of outer Scarborough. At the park’s entrance the bus drops you along with two women in matching peach parkas over grey sweats. A sunny subarctic afternoon. No sidewalks. Snowless lawns hard as Astroturf. Up the middle of the road the matched pals tow dark, wheeled suitcases as big as wolfhounds. You have only a daypack, yet they edge ahead, their trainers flashing, heads down, shoulders high and tight—the slapstick, puffin shuffle of Canadians in winter. You don’t mind the wind’s bee-sting assault on your skin. You haven’t felt so awake in weeks. Neither do you mind the industrial park, finding something here that mirrors your inert inner world, so that for now—for a change—you don’t feel out of place.

  The doctor who draws your blood resembles some minor rock star of the ’70s on a doomed comeback tour. Hair dyed brown, shaggy bangs, the rest hiding his ears, hanging to the collar of his lab coat. A haggard face, overexposed blue eyes. He’s even thinner than you. There’s a nameplate on the child-sized desk: DR. ARNOLD WALL.

  He swabs your inner elbow.

  “Try not to wince,” he says in a tired growl. “I have to do this a lot.”

  There’s a faint skunky smell that you can’t quite place.

  “Which trial are you?” he asks.

  “Sedatives.”

  “You don’t look like you need any.”

  “I just need the money,” you say. “Sedatives pay better.”

  His atrophied face retracts and for a moment his eyes meet yours.

  “That’s why you all come here. I used to serve here when I was a med student. Not like me, now—like you. Test subject. And it wasn’t just to put myself through med school, either. It was to be involved in the trial.” He meets your gaze again, looks away, resumes as if against his will. “It was to make my own observations—I mean, besides being tested by the physician on site. There were a bunch of us like that, back then. We were all fascinated by the process. The science of it. Not like now. Times have changed. It’s all about, about money now. I learned real important things serving here, I can tell you that, and we all, uh …”

  Your silence and frank, receptive gaze always encourage people to blather, to over-represent themselves, till a moment of abashed realization. It’s one of the traits that made you a regrettable waitress—diners would start unreeling their life stories and you couldn’t very well walk away from the table while they yakked. Other diners, noticing, would complain. They wanted you to take their beverage order. They wanted to tell you their life stories.

  “Anyway,” he says gruffly.

  “But it’s for a drug company, isn’t it? I mean …”

  “It’s still science. It’s important.”

  You don’t say “whatever,” but you think it. You used to hate it when people said “whatever.” Now you’re a walking whatever.

  “Your blood pressure,” he says, seizing and shackling your arm in the Velcro sleeve.

  “Oh … shouldn’t that be before you take my blood?”

  He gives you a face as he pumps the sleeve.

  “Technically, sure. But why would you care about that? I mean, it’s not like … not like any of you are interested in the findings—the process of it. No! But you all watch ER and reruns of, of Marcus Welby and you’re eager to tell us all about correct procedures.”

  You wonder if this is where doctors come when all other options are exhausted.

  “My God!” He stares at the gauge with marvelling eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like th
is. How are you feeling right now? Light-headed?”

  “Not really.”

  “Systolic 84—diastolic 43!”

  “I don’t know much about blood pressure.”

  “This is impossible,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not even legal!”

  “What, there are laws?”

  “Not legal for us to employ you, I mean. In the trial. Your BP is way below the normal range. My God!”

  “Could I … do something to raise it a little?”

  He stares at you intently, almost passionately. You stare back. The prospect of returning to your bachelorette, to the city, is unfaceable. Worse is the thought of defaulting on the rent. Having to move home. Your mother’s and sister’s gloating solicitude.

  “I would like to stay, if possible.”

  “Sure—of course.”

  He leans into you. You lean away, wondering if he has misunderstood. His fixed, Rasputin gaze. In a voice almost secretive: “Here’s what you do. Think of something, or someone, that upsets you very much. Fantasize about that person. Or thing. Now fantasize about … confronting them. About attacking them, even. Yes—even injuring them, quite badly. Definitely injuring them! Can you do that now?”

  You wriggle a few inches down the crinkling, tissue-covered examination bed, away from Dr. Wall. You can certainly feel your pulse now, blood sluicing under your chin.

  “See, your organism can’t distinguish between an actual, external stress source and a merely mental stress source!” In his new enthusiasm he runs “stress” and “source” together so it comes out “stress horse.” Like a euphemism for recurring nightmares.

  “Is it working? Should we take another run at it?”

  Lowering his head, Dr. Wall pumps with gusto. Grey roots, constellated dandruff.

  “Okay! This one’s more acceptable, if less interesting. Still a touch low, but legal. I’ll enter this as your figure, okay? This technique always works. Seems everyone has somebody they can bring to mind to … to help them out. Bring the pressure up, or down.”

  “Thank you.” You budge yourself forward and down off the bed, then make for the door. Your knees almost buckle, sloshing with the first adrenaline you’ve secreted in days. Never look a stress horse in the mouth.

  “Just don’t think of ever joining us for a BP medication trial!” he joshes, following you to the door with his clipboard, thoroughly cheered. “I mean, unless you go and marry the guy. Go choose your bunk now. Or grab a coffee. Cafeteria’s at the end of this hall and to the left. As long as this blood clears, the trial starts at five. See you again tomorrow morning! Oh, and I’m sure I don’t need to mention …?”

  By the time you enter the windowless dorm, seven of the eight beds are occupied, by bodies or luggage. Four double-decker bunks that might be summer camp cast-offs or army surplus. Low lockers between them. Walls the colour of overcooked greens, two banks of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling: the sickly atmosphere of a cheap chop suey house at two a.m. You drop your daypack on the lower bunk—someone is already asleep, turned to the wall, on the upper one—and creak down on the mattress beside a little pile of folded, bleach-bright sheets, a couple of thin grey blankets, a foam pillow.

  The pair of friends you saw earlier have already made up the bunk beds across from you. It’s as if they’ve been installed for weeks. On the top berth, the one with the platinum dye job is on her back with MP3 earbuds in place, hands behind her head, eyes closed, toes tapping the rung at the foot of the bunk. Eggplant toenail polish. She has changed into pyjamas and is chomping gum in time to her tunes, some kind of rap/hip hop mix. The other—still in her sweatpants and a salmon tank top, gelled spiky hair with brunette streaks—is in the lower bunk, belly down, propped on her elbows reading a book. In the shadows above her shoulder, a couple of four-by-six photos tacked to the wall: a solemn young man, a grinning husky.

  These women must be regulars. They have that blasé, territorial assurance, and normally, as a novice outsider, never the alpha of any group, you’d feel uneasiness—the need for deference so as to earn your way in—but now, well. Whatever. You sag onto the bunk, look up at the mesh of rust-pocked struts supporting the hammocked mattress above you. Your eyes close.

  “Going to sleep already, are you?”

  It’s the bottom one, you think, addressing her friend, but then in a more intentional tone, with some kind of English accent, she throws out, “You should save it till later.”

  You roll onto your side, politely facing her, though without sitting up.

  “First time, is it? It’s always easy to tell. What’s your name?”

  “Roddy.”

  “There’s a first.” She flips her fat book closed and twists her upper body toward you, as if to show off her plumped-up cleavage. “I’m Hannah.”

  “It’s short for Ariadne.” (Your parents called you Philomela, but you’ve come to insist on your middle name, short form.)

  “Another first,” says Hannah. “You should call me Han. And this is Wendy. Wen.” She nods upward and Wen turns her head toward you, opens her huge blue eyes and nods, then turns away again, stridently chewing.

  “What do you think of Keith Richards, then?” Han asks, then saves you the breath by saying, “The doc. Dr. Wall. Always trying to ‘check my heartbeat.’ ” She inserts the punctuation with fingertips and arched brows. “Trying to get his stethoscope in here.”

  “But he’s a doctor, dear,” a voice says soothingly from the back of the dorm. “He’s only doing his job.” In the shadows of a lower bunk sits a middle-aged woman who seems to have sprung from a TV series of decades ago—housedress, matronly spectacles, high-piled turban of liver-coloured hair. She’s cross-legged on the bed and the posture seems paradoxical. The peak of her hair touching the upper bunk. A Harry Potter novel closed in her lap.

  “And what’s wrong with my pulse here?” Han asks, raising a fisted forearm, as if in some Girl Power salute.

  “Well, all I know is he did the same to me, dear.”

  “Anyway,” Han says, turning back toward you, “I reckon he won’t bother you. How do you stay so thin anyway? I think you look fabulous.”

  “You look nice, too,” you say slowly, waves of slumber foaming toward you—up, up the pebbled beach they come with a snoring rattle. You used to have awful insomnia. That seems a foreign life now, another physique. What could be easier than yielding to this mild, voluptuous tide?

  “If I could lose maybe eight pounds,” Han says.

  “Guess it’s hard to exercise at a place like this,” you say, as if the prospect concerns you.

  “Out of the question entirely is more like it. They won’t install a workout room because it would cost them. They say you can walk the halls, or walk outdoors between blood tests, but who’s going out there and where would you fucking walk to anyway?”

  “We will be sharing this room for three days,” the older woman says peaceably, eyes on her opened book.

  “… over to FedEx? So we just lay about. There’s a TV room. This time’ll be worse, too. We’ll all just be sleeping—I reckon.”

  “You mean you haven’t done sedatives before?”

  “Always avoided them,” Han says. “But they raised the pay for them because somebody had, like, a bad reaction last year. That’s what we hear. So now we want to try sedatives, because of the pay.”

  “Someone died?”

  “Nobody’ll give the story. There isn’t even much on the net, just rumours, on blogs and places like that. These people are good. This is quite the little industry.”

  Her accent seems to be set on Intermittent. The older woman, now sitting on the side of her bed, works her feet into a pair of fierce-faced schnauzers with plausible eyes. Support stockings the creepy colour of mannequin skin hug her fat calves. She stands slowly, a hand braced on her lower back. A little, stoic smile.

  “I won’t be a moment, girls.”

  “Bye,” you say. She shuffles across the olive linoleum, picks up speed in
her lapdog slippers, pushes through the swing door.

  “She looks too old,” Han says. “Like, over the limit. And you—you look like you could be under. But no worries.” She glances significantly toward the door and lowers her voice: “We’re all getting round the system one way or another, aren’t we? You’re meant to take a month off before checking in again, but there are these other clinics. Three in Toronto, one in Guelph, one in Kingston. If you bounce around between them you can be doing it all the time. Sometimes your first blood test won’t clear because there’s, like, residual contaminants from the last trial? Then you have to wait a bit, but mostly it’s fine. They don’t ask a ton of questions. I’m putting myself through school like this. Never made so much money in my life.”

  The door swings and a clump of women enter, briskly herded by a nurse, the physical antimatter of Dr. Wall: black, tall, buxom, bristling with vitality. Or is it anger? Her plucked eyebrows converge on a stern crease between her eyes.

  “A few words before we begin. To your bunks, please,” she says in a voice that seems layered like phyllo pastry—a schooled British accent superimposed over others that bubble to the surface on certain words. It’s a trait you know from your relatives. Accents are an acoustical fossil record of an immigrant’s journey. She carries a tray with small paper cups, a plastic pillbox.

  The women spread out to their bunks. The first looks Chinese, around forty, in sunglasses and Bermuda shorts and knee socks and penny loafers. Her tucked-in man’s shirt is the colour of the walls, as if, despite her outfit, she’s hoping to blend in. She scales the rungs at the end of the bunk she’ll be sharing with the older woman, now shuffling back into the dorm. In the next top bunk there’s a small, exhausted-looking South Asian girl—skin grey, not brown—above a burly woman with a raw, blunt, ruddy face. Camouflage headscarf over cropped white hair, loose denim jacket and pants, work socks, German sandals.