The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  “Good afternoon. I am Nurse Nkwele. We will now commence trial C134. In a moment, you will be taking a full regular dose. Afterwards, you may proceed to the cafeteria. Or to the lavatory, just outside in the corridor, to your right. Or for a short walk. But you had best be back and upon your bunks within twenty minutes.” Parade square pronunciation, an abolishing gaze she sweeps across all faces. “Thirty at the most. You should become drowsy and lose consciousness within an hour. Unless you fight it. I don’t recommend that you fight it. Nor that you drink much tea or water before your subsequent doses. You can expect to sleep for at least six hours. That is, until eleven p.m. Certain of you will continue to sleep after that. However, you will be awakened at midnight to receive a second dose and to submit to a blood draw. We will be drawing your blood at four-hour intervals. Mobile telephones to be disengaged between the hours of eleven and the time of your third dose, eight a.m. I will brook no exceptions. Are there any queries?”

  Nurse Nkwele stands before each subject to dispense a pill. She does not move on until the pill has been swallowed. For some time she ponders the greyish girl on her upper bunk, who is throwing her head back like a dummy in a safety film where they repeatedly show a rear-end crash.

  “Relax yourself,” Nkwele commands. “Relax the throat.” The girl’s eyes bulge with panic. At last her tiny Adam’s apple buoys and she exhales and chugs the water in the paper cup crimped in her hand.

  “It’s bitter,” she says in a grade-school voice. “I’m sorry. I’ve a hard time swallowing.”

  “How old are you, girl?”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “Too young!”

  “But … they said eighteen was the legal age.”

  “Which is why you said eighteen. As opposed to, say, seventeen. Or fourteen.”

  “Miss, eighteen is the age that I am!”

  Her voice will break. Nurse Nkwele actually emits a Hmmph! and moves on. As she approaches, you know you should get up, or at least sit up, but inertia, like the pressure of stacked atmospheres, has pinned you. She has to stoop down with the tray.

  “Now—what is languishing you so?”

  Her hands are strong and long-fingered. The wedding ring, a fleck of diamond on a slim gold band, seems incongruous, a child’s pretend ring, too small and the sort of thing a nurse removes before a shift to avoid damage.

  “You have a touch of flu,” she says. “At the least. You should not be here either.”

  “I’m fine,” you say. “Honest.” And you reach for the drug, that enticing, tiny pillow, blue as the walls of a nursery.

  “Expecting honesty here is like expecting song and dance in a fracture ward,” she says in a wide, inclusive voice. “I know which among you are going from clinic to clinic and I would put a stop to it if I were in charge.”

  From across the room, Han and Wen roll their eyes at Nurse Nkwele’s broad back. She’s packed into her white coat like a superhero in a stretchy suit. You swallow. You too find the act difficult at times. At the root of your tongue, the bitter taste registers just late enough that you don’t gag.

  “What are these pills called?” you ask, to switch the topic and because you adore the names of pharmaceuticals—and sedatives are best, little lullabies of syllables.

  “The T81-B. It isn’t named as yet. It isn’t approved as yet. It depends on these trials and so forth.”

  Dormazone, you invent silently. Serenalude.

  “Normally you would come to get the pills yourself,” she says, straightening. “Normally I don’t serve the test subjects. It is different with this trial, of course. You should not be walking around too much. You understand?”

  You understand the part she means you to understand: not that you shouldn’t be walking around too much, but that she doesn’t normally serve people this way.

  She looks upward, presumably at the stranger in the top bunk, and says dryly, “Wake up now—time for your sleeping pill.”

  Lunaquil. Celestanox.

  The bed struts rearrange themselves with grudging reluctance, scraping, squeaking.

  “Ah,” says Nurse Nkwele, “and who have we here?”

  You walk down the long hallway and there’s a window! To the southwest, a flat horizon ruptured by a few distant clumps of apartment blocks: surviving monoliths of a nuked city. How will you live there anymore? A blood-clot sun sinks into clouds of surgical gauze.

  The cafeteria is not a separate room but a service counter cut into the wall and, in front of it, a roped-off area that fills and blocks the hallway. There are some white plastic tables and chairs where a few people sit alone—two women, one man. By the entry/exit on the far side, an easelled sign reads MALES ONLY PLEASE THIS SIDE OF CAFETERIA. You enter from the women’s side, passing a blank sign and glancing back: WOMEN ONLY ON THIS SIDE, PLEASE! You’re in a small demilitarized zone of gender overlap. Curious dates must occur here, guys full of tranquillizers or erectile dysfunction drugs trying to flirt, groggily or urgently, with gals on hormone replacements or prescription laxatives; just as in real life.

  Only the face of the attendant shows above the counter, which is not especially high. She has a sepia headscarf, the dark and sun-dried face of an Inca mummy. You’ll have the ham and tomato on brown. Scowling, she counts out your change in a rhythmic, alien mutter, as if casting a curse. You slump at a table near the payphone. The bread is waterlogged. The tomato tastes sinister—bitter green. Drug T81-B? A life, you guess, can become mere aftertaste. You shuck the black clamshell of your cellphone and tap a button: as expected, another message from Charles and another from Jayla. You’re about to snap it closed when you see a call coming in silently.

  It amuses you, slightly, to think of dozing off mid-conversation.

  “Jayla Harviss,” you say.

  “Roddy! Finally! Where are you?”

  “Scarborough.”

  “God, what are you doing out there? Fuck, I’ve been so worried! And Charles, he’s been worried sick about where you are. We’re all worried about you. Charles actually went to your place yesterday and let himself in—well, both of us, actually.”

  “Sorry about the mess.”

  “Mess …? God, just … are you all right, then?”

  “You didn’t like Charles at first,” you tell her.

  “What?”

  “Worrying about me has brought you closer together.”

  A pause, then: “Like I said, Rod—we’re all worried. We don’t know why you just, like, disappeared.”

  “You must have a mutual theory by now.”

  “Roddy, you … what? But … you know how there we are for you, Rod! Roddy …?” Her voice, brash and laughing, has a throttled thinness now. You imagine the pupils in her lovely lavender eyes: constricted, all but gone. “Roddy … you sound really weird. Are you—”

  “Fine, but the sedatives should take effect any moment, so I better go.”

  “Sedatives. Oh my God! Should I be, like, calling someone? Roddy!”

  “It’s … let me see. Serenalude. I just took one.”

  “You … bitch!” She sounds like Jayla now. “Don’t fuck around with me this way!”

  “But I don’t,” you say, the bitter taste refluxing in your throat and mouth. “I don’t fuck around with friends. Or with friends’ friends.” And you clip the phone closed on her tiny chatter, the voice of a genie who no longer holds sway over you.

  The older woman, her beehive dismantled, now wearing a hairnet, pulls the covers to her chin, then sets her open Harry Potter face-down on her chest. She says brightly, “Let’s introduce ourselves. We’ll go in a circle, clockwise. I am happy to begin.”

  Wen, prone on the bunk, and Han, standing beside it in a bra and thong, pulling on her pyjamas, roll their eyes again, though it seems perfunctory, lacking malice.

  “I am Eleanor Morris. I am from Thunder Bay, but I just moved to Toronto to take care of my old father. He’s over ninety now. My sister helps some. I do these sessions every now and aga
in to make a little money for us—and to take a break from Dad!”

  She removes her glasses with both hands and, turning carefully in bed, places them in the schnauzer slippers aligned on the floor next to her. An arm of the glasses goes in either slipper, each wide lens a windscreen over the eyes of either dog.

  The Asian woman above her says, “Me, I am Hong. Come to Canada last summer. From China. Chengdu. But no work here. The, the relatives”—for a moment she fights the word, then pins it impressively—“give no help here. Mayo. Because I am Christian now, I think. That’s all.”

  Both women in the next bunk are silent for a second, politely waiting each other out. Then the bearish woman in the lower bunk says, “I go by Ruth. I’m a paralegal. Work with homeless folks, mainly women.” Her clipped voice has a tightly managed tone. A big, confident voice undercut by something. Is that how the drug is hitting her?

  “I imagine you must be here,” Eleanor says, “because they keep taking away the funding for work like yours?”

  “It’s not really that.”

  “Well, it’s a crime, in my opinion.”

  Silence. When the South Asian girl on the upper bunk realizes Ruth the paralegal is finished, she says, “Oh, I’m Sunetra. Just trying to save money to go to school in the fall! At Ryerson. Are you in school?” She looks straight at you, then across at Han and Wen. In unison Wen says, “No,” and Han says, “Part-time—biology, York.”

  They look at you expectantly. You’re still on your feet, though wobbly, fumbling to tuck the sheets over the rubber mattress cover, a stoned nurse trying to change a comatose patient.

  “It’s Roddy. I’m taking a little time off school.”

  “That is the coolest name,” says Wen. “Do your friends call you Rod?”

  “You can if you like.”

  “Right fucking on. Hot rod. Hot name.”

  “And what about you?” Han says, looking at the motionless shape above you.

  “I think she may already be fast asleep,” says Eleanor, squinting blindly. “Has anyone talked to her yet?”

  No answer.

  “Roddy is short for Ariadne,” Han tells Wen.

  “Doesn’t that mean, like, spider or something? In Arabic?”

  The door blows open: Nurse Nkwele with her clipboard held to her bosom.

  “It is now a quarter to six. Unless anyone objects, I will close the main light.”

  Beside the door, a Henry’s Moon nightlight glows in a socket. An odd, homey touch. A nursery touch. You’ve given up on making the bed. The mattress is quicksand.

  Your own soft gasp wakes you. A Cyclops with an eye of blue laser light looms above, prodding at you. Now you feel the needle—not entering your arm but already there.

  “It’s just a blood draw, girl. You go back to sleep.”

  “You’re done?”

  “Likely you’ll not even remember.”

  Your eyes close. Must be four a.m. Nurse Nkwele moves on, her passage tracked by the faint shunt of a cart’s wheels, her rubber soles professionally silent. Murmuring now to someone else. The door swings, a triangle of sallow light fans open, closed. Surgical tape pinching the down of your forearm. You never felt her apply it. Nothing for a while, a dreamless gulf, then Charles, in the form of a fog named Marcus Welby, seeps into your twilight. The fog doesn’t look like Charles but of course you recognize him. He’s explaining why he sometimes tucks his sweaters into his belted jeans and khakis. It accentuates the V-shape of the male torso! His bleached hands carve a strident V in the air. You’re semi-conscious now. Late Sunday breakfast in a diner booth. You’re not a smoker but you miss the smell of cigarettes now that smoking is banned in restaurants—it was part of the experience of the hungover, sex-sore, greasy spoon brunch.

  “But it looks strange,” you say.

  Charles strokes his stubble. See, he means, I have stubble! I look incredibly manly with stubble! Bestowing a patient smile, he says, “To a woman’s eye, better a good body in unstylish clothes than a shapeless body dressed in style.”

  “That’s the women’s eye-view, is it?”

  “Untucked is shapeless,” he sums up. “QED.”

  “You’ve canvassed a lot of female opinion?”

  He blinks behind his eyewear. “One picks this stuff up. I overhear conversations, I see a sentence in a magazine, or something in a book by a woman. I triangulate.”

  “Anyway, Charles, you don’t have a V-shaped torso”—as soon as you say this, you repent of your cruel candour—“and you look good the way you are. You’re good untucked!”

  “But it’s about the success of the illusion!” he cries. “That’s what matters these days!” He’s doing an MA in philosophy and wants to be a “public intellectual,” the sort who appears on TV semi-shaven and says relevant things in a cool way. In other words, a rock star. (Too bad about his clothes sense.) He talks on vehemently, desperate to win his point. His hands are small and soft, but in motion they’re dynamic.

  A cellphone bip-bips light years away. Have you not turned off your cellphone? But it’s been off for weeks. So why did you even bring it? A therapist might see your decision as a positive sign, leaving one valve of contact unclosed. To you now it seems a symptom of weakness.

  Someone answers in a whisper. Right above you. A low whisper—low as in soft and low as in baritone. Low for a woman.

  “So-so. But I can’t talk now. I’ll tell you tomorrow how it’s going.”

  That fanning flash of light again, Nurse Nkwele thrusting in like a Valkyrie.

  “Turn it off or I will take it from you.”

  “But—”

  “Or I will take it from you.”

  Further currents vessel you warmly and you imagine they will soon perfect a sedative that banishes all dreams, even memories.

  Dr. Wall, haggard but happy, is reading your blood pressure in his office. It smells like he smokes in here. It smells like he sleeps in here. It’s eight a.m. and an ancient day nurse has ushered seven of you (the inmate in the bunk above you has been hard to rouse) into the doctor’s drunk tank of a waiting room, then re-drugged you. A troupe of ghouls: Sunetra asleep on Eleanor’s shoulder, Han and Wen leaning into each other, head to head, lips open, eyes shut. Hong nodding over a laptop. Ruth’s big arms buckled hard across her torso as if to suppress her trembling; eyes scrunched closed, brow damp.

  Dr. Wall calls you in first. “And how was my star patient’s first night?”

  “Okay, thanks. That pinches.”

  “Especially with a small arm like yours!” He pumps with vigour, his tongue touching his upper lip. “This should be interesting. Hope you don’t mind if I, uh, make some clinical notes on you.”

  “Is Ruth okay? That large woman, the paralegal. She’s got the shakes.”

  Absently, eyes fixed on the gauge, he says, “Not to worry, Ms. Kanakis. I’m watching her and that’s all just tickety-boo.”

  “I hear something happened with an earlier sedition trial …”

  He blinks, then shows his pleasure. His incisors are white, canines yellow.

  “I mean sedative trial!” you say.

  “See, that’s one of the symptoms! This is good—this is what we were expecting!” If his hands were free, he’d be rubbing them together. “By essentially paralyzing the verbal/logical part of the brain, this drug makes it possible for neurotics and worriers and so on to achieve a state of restful sleep. But! There’s a bit of a hangover, especially after a double dose, and sometimes the wrong words come out. Fascinating, huh?”

  A faint pneumatic sigh as the sleeve releases.

  “Yup, you’re still reading low. I’m wondering if this might be an unusual rebound effect of the presumed pregnancy.”

  You stare at him.

  “Your blood tests suggest you were recently pregnant. The low BP coinciding with it might be a complete ‘coincidence,’ sure, but I find the correlation pretty suggestive. You were recently pregnant?”

  “I miscarried. It was ea
rly on.”

  “And did you have a history of low blood pressure before?”

  Suddenly you’re too depleted to respond. You look down, bite your lower lip to steady it. Too late.

  After some moments Dr. Wall, now stiffly sheepish, says, “Sorry about the miscarriage.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re real common, more common than people think,” he adds, and he proffers what he has—data and stats—as consolation: “Up to 45 percent, in fact, according to one school of thought. And some feel the incidence is rising, possibly as an effect of, and this is fascinating, a general weakening of the gene pool due to the way the usage of antibiotics has, uh, prevented the natural triage among weak and strong offspring over the last forty or fifty …”

  It was a shock, the pregnancy. A real stress horse. Within days it altered you, like a potion or a serious illness. For one thing, it made you fall in love with Charles, who until then you’d been unsure of. (You see now that you were also tickled at the thought of presenting your parents with a tiny blond Anglo bastard.) After five days, sure of your feelings, you gave Charles the news. Nervously you feigned neutrality, so as to draw a candid response, but he must have sensed your excitement. “That’s amazing!” he exclaimed, though with the look of a man congratulating a rival on winning a huge fellowship. He pounced, embraced you, hid his face behind your ear.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “NOTHING!” he said, rending your eardrum. “But … are you sure we want to do this?”

  “Others,” Dr. Wall says, “blame environmental toxins, especially those with long half-lives in the body.”

  “But I don’t understand, Charles. A few days ago you were talking marriage.”

  “But I know it’s hard. My ex-wife miscarried when we were not much older than you. We came here from the States after college, in ’68. The war. I went to med school here. Really I wanted to be a researcher.”