“A father is just not how I feel right now, Rod.”
You’re touched that Dr. Wall is making an effort this way. He is so wooden, it’s obvious he hasn’t had much practice. Or is he just afraid of losing his star patient?
You go on thinking about Charles while Dr. Wall does a second reading.
“Well,” he announces, “it worked again!”
Day two passes like a day in a tropical fever ward. Even when the first cycle of pills wears off, around three p.m., everyone is flattened. The women doze, go out to the washroom or for a short walk—nobody feels like walking for long—or to purchase a pretty much futile coffee. Sunetra wandered off to the TV/computer room after the last blood draw and has not been seen since. The baritone in the bed above you is still asleep, turned to the wall, the collar of a grey fleece tracksuit visible where the blanket ends. A beige near-afro of curls like wood shavings. Huge black sneakers on the locker. Eleanor, still in her hairnet, is propped on her bed with Harry Potter on the lectern of her knees. Every fifteen minutes or so she turns a page. On the upper bunk, Hong slumps against the wall with her laptop open on her thighs, greasy hair tied back, lips moving while she reads. She improves her English by studying Scripture, she says; she has the full text of the King James Bible on her hard drive. Han, prone on her mattress, is browsing Cosmo. Maybe she’s given up on trying to study while here.
“Listen to this—champagne contains traces of lithium. So it’s a natural mood-booster.”
Wen takes out an earbud and says, “Could losing all this blood hurt us? I mean, in combo with the drugs?”
“That’s what they’re trying to find out, dear,” Eleanor says without looking up. “If the drugs are dangerous.”
“What means ‘graven’?” Hong asks Eleanor, who’s helping with her English.
“It means ‘carved,’ I believe—isn’t that correct?” Eleanor squints over at you.
“What’s the sentence?” you ask.
“They’re really not taking much blood,” Han says. “Oh, and it’s a myth about the bubbles making you drunk faster.”
“Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands. Isaiah 49:16.”
“I guess it would mean more like ‘cut,’ ” you say. “Like with a razor or piece of glass.”
Hong nods firmly, as if mechanically locking the definition in place. Eleanor beams at you and says, “I can always tell the bright ones. I ought to have taught school!”
You know this is a cue of some kind but you’re too weary to respond.
“Wouldn’t mind a drink about now,” Wen says. “Not champagne. A shooter and a pint. And a smoke. That’s the only time I still want one.”
Ruth, on her back with her eyes closed, rolls dramatically toward the wall as if brusquely ending an argument with an invisible bedmate.
“God!” says Wen. “Aren’t we even allowed to talk during the day?”
“I have commandments!” Hong says, holding up a piece of paper that must be the contract you didn’t bother reading. “It says, to talk in the dorm in the day not forbidden.”
Charles is back. Charles who donates blood and always makes a show of not needing a rest afterward. He has a nice-looking face and a slim, waifish body—a combination highly appealing to girls who wear layered black and listen to Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen—but he hates his body and weight-lifts with punitive diligence. He’s one of those twenty-three-year-old guys who always seems to be shimmering with rage, and the rage comes because the world will not ratify and reward his brilliance. That he has yet to provide the world with firm evidence doesn’t occur to him. The world should just sniff it out on him. And where does it come from, you wonder, this deep, aggrieved conviction of one’s genius? What a luxury! Even in your last year of high school, when teachers were all telling you you were brilliant, a talented writer with a great career ahead, university, grad school, anything you chose, you found it hard to have faith in yourself. Yet in every class there was a student—usually a boy, though not always—who, while getting far less encouragement than you, still stubbornly believed in his own radiant destiny.
After you gave blood together at a clinic, Charles said, “Hey, they say I have A+ blood!” He cocked an ironic eyebrow, yet you sensed he was secretly chuffed. All the same, you felt for him—more and more as you grew intimate with his better features, his idealism, his earnest curiosity. You knew he suffered. In a world where there isn’t enough importance to go around, men like him, who need a lot of it, will always be disappointed.
Another psychotropic doze and you decide to get some food, though your appetite is dead, stomach vacant but gassy, as Nurse Nkwele warned might happen. She’ll be back on shift before long, bearing the next dose. You slump up the hallway, stand at the window. The only sign of life in the industrial park is a bird—some kind of swift or swallow?—that keeps plunging straight out of the sky toward the mouth of the chimney of the building next door. At the last moment, over and over, this small diver peels away as if losing faith, then loops up again to try a fresh approach. Finally it triumphs—keeps its sickle wings tucked flat and zips straight down the shaft—and though you’ve been rooting for the bird until now, its final success disturbs you. As if its vanishing was not voluntary; as if it has been sucked into the engine of a private jet.
Another marshy sandwich, salmon salad. It tastes wrong, the coating in your mouth scrambling the flavours. The only other diner is a short, bearded guy in a tank top, doubled over a table, pushing away his paper plate of food—laminated moussaka, oily fries and a “Greek salad” of iceberg lettuce with feta flakes. Now he grips his paunch and makes faint, crooning moans. You’re unsure if you’re meant to hear. Maybe he wants you to ask if he’s okay. Normally you would. You avert your gaze and a pair of dark eyes, banefully watching you from the pass-through counter, look away. The curse of the Inca mummy. You’re feeling a little paranoid. A symptom you should probably report at the next blood draw. Then again, ha ha, what if they should use it against you.
The washroom: your face in the mirror, in unchivalrous overhead light, lips rabid with toothpaste. You’re scrubbing hard, teeth and tongue and way back in your mouth, almost gagging yourself as you scrape away that caustic aftertaste. You look even thinner. Jayla has always told you she envies you your Mediterranean cheekbones. Women with cheekbones, she says, never age.
“Do you think I look green?” Wen asks loudly, her huge blow-dryer in hand. She’s grooming at the next sink, a towel wrapped around her from just above the nipples to just below the crotch. She’s exhaustively waxed. She has swabbed off her metallic blue eyeshadow but still wears pink lipstick.
“I think it’s just the lighting,” you say.
“And I’m breaking out around the mouth. Han said it can be a symptom of like, poisoning? Like if someone spikes your drink in a club, you break out around the mouth the next day?”
“Wouldn’t that be the least of your worries the next day?”
“Hmm, right.” She nods vaguely. “Plus, I’m packing it on. All this lying around. Food’s better than I expected. You don’t seem to be having any problem.”
“Actually, I think you look great,” you tell her, hoping that’ll be the end of it, but in the mirror you see her face snap toward you, a sunrise of colour coming to her cheeks and throat as she smiles. A lovely smile. And you’re glad you said it. Her fingers bracelet your wrist, squeezing. She doesn’t realize the industrial blow-dryer in her other hand is now trained on you, point-blank. In the mirror you see your hair shooting back and your eyes squinting, as if you’re riding a Harley, free and easy, a hot Nevada wind in your face.
“You’re sweet,” Wen says megaphonically. “But you’re so quiet! Are you okay? You want to use my Conair on your hair? I mean, after you wash it a bit?”
“Thanks.”
The blow-dryer goes on sandblasting your face, searing the tear ducts. You’re strangely moved—a combination of Wen’s unexpected humanity and that mirror flash of
yourself as everything you no longer are.
Returning to the washroom just after five, after taking the first pill of the next cycle, you chuck your cellphone in the garbage bin and rearrange things over it. You’ve stopped checking to see if messages are amassing. A sound from the far stall and you recognize the large shoes, black Converse sneakers, that have sat on top of the locker for the last twenty-four hours. They’re facing the toilet. As you stare, something occurs to you. You flee and hurry back to the dorm. You lie on your bunk, hearing the other women talk and begin to slow, slur, go silent, as you wait for your bunkmate to return.
Ruth is mopping her face with a white T-shirt.
“Are you all right, Ruth?” asks Eleanor.
“Holding my own. Thanks.”
“Touch of flu?”
“I’m good,” she says, then adds conclusively: “Thanks.”
Hong asks Eleanor, “What this whole verse means? For thy waste and thy desolate places … shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.”
“I think it has something to do with overcrowding, don’t you think, Roddy?”
Wen gives you a collegial leer. She’s changing into a T-shirt that says TO SAVE TIME, LET’S JUST ASSUME I KNOW EVERYTHING. Sunetra is snoring—soft, demure little snores.
You nod, still waiting; but you drift off before the eighth dorm-mate returns.
It’s the middle of the night and you’re packed with narcotics and suffering your first insomnia in weeks. When guardian vampire Nkwele slipped in an hour ago to wake you for the blood draw, you were globe-eyed in the darkness, staring at the bunk above you. Rebound insomnia, she explained—it occurs with almost all sedatives, although the manufacturers were hoping that it would not with this one. That way (she said in a whisper thick with distaste) patients would not have to take occasional hiatuses from them. They could sedate themselves nightly. Forever. And some physicians would happily facilitate such a course. She would not, however, if she were practising.
“Plus, I feel uneasy,” you told her, not wanting her to go. Wishing she would sit maternally on the side of the bunk, though half ashamed to explain your fear.
She said she would note down that symptom as well. Uneasy.
Now the big stranger above you is tossing. To your relief, Han and Wen are also awake, Han whispering softly, Wen loudly. Her hearing has been damaged; not everyone can be a rock star but now everyone can have rock-star hearing. She keeps saying “What?” so that Han has to raise her own volume.
“The realm of possibility’s a pretty big place, Wen.”
“So, you really don’t like doing that to Rick?”
“I’m okay with it. But I don’t really like when he does it to me.”
“Oh my God, are you serious? Is he, like, no good at it?”
“I get lonely. He seems so far away. You know?”
“I certainly do not!” Wen shrieks. “I feel like I’m being worshipped.”
After a silence Han says, “So maybe being worshipped is a lonely thing.”
“Not being worshipped is lonelier any day.”
Is the bunk above you moving steadily, vibrating?
“Be quiet, please!” Hong hisses. “There is a time to rest, and we’re on drugs.”
“So go to sleep,” Wen says. “We’re not stopping you.”
“Wen,” Han chides—and it hits you that her accent has all but vanished.
You roll toward the wall. Didn’t Sylvia Plath say, “How I would like to believe in tenderness”? Easier to believe from a safe remove. Think of your sweet uncle, for instance. Or Mega Sister. Don’t think of Charles. Don’t, Charles. Sharing a bed is no safe remove. Please, don’t. When he was about to come that way, he would hold your head down and in your last weeks together he had clamped it down as far as it would go, like a movie villain drowning somebody in a river. And you were drowning, you were choking. No more, you finally said. You called Jayla to talk about Charles and your various concerns and to tell her that you were pregnant and weren’t sure what to do, given his obvious reluctance and his increasing roughness, but you didn’t get as far as the pregnancy. Because when you said, “I don’t even mind doing it like that—usually I like it,” she cut in, “You don’t mind? I love it!” She even loved having her head forced down in a death grip, she said. The thrilling insistence of it. The vehemence. And that word, “vehemence,” was simply not native to Jayla’s vocabulary. Not her style at all. “Vehemence” was Charles’s style.
A numb, plunging sensation in your womb. I have to go, Jayla. Call you later.
You’d already guessed, but had chosen not to know. Jayla, you saw now, had been dropping sadistic little clues. It had been happening since soon after you’d told Charles he was going to be a dad. Apparently that title had scared him enough that he decided to substitute another: adulterer. On a hunch now you called Charles’s just-for-you-or-emergencies cellphone—tied up—then Jayla’s—the same. An hour later you made an appointment and that same day walked to the clinic with a hurricane inside your head and you faked composure and lied about how thoroughly you’d reflected and you signed the forms with a steady hand, had the ultrasound, embarked on the procedure—it was no miscarriage, except maybe in some metaphorical way—and minutes later you were sobbing unstoppably, spasm by spasm feeling your lover and your best friend purged out of you along with the baby-to-be. Best friend? In the stirrups you admitted not only that you’d been the sidekick, the loyal turnspit (you already knew that, of course), but that Jayla had always flirted aggressively with your boyfriends, needing to prove to herself, and maybe to you, that deep down they found her more attractive (how could they not?) and she could win them away from you at any time; they remained yours only out of her immense benevolence. As your body hemorrhaged Charles and your briefer history, you realized with self-disgust how terribly you’d duped yourself about him—how you’d shrugged off erotic dissatisfactions and your recurrent scorn at his pomposities as if these were just puny blips you could work around. In fact, in that hour of emphatic wakefulness, you saw that for months now you’d been sedating your awareness, somnambulating through relationships you were not so much trying to will as to dream into lasting rightness.
You returned, gutted, and collapsed in your bachelorette. Sent Charles a last email: Baby gone. Say nothing to anyone. Say nothing more to me. “Vehemently,” R.
A vile, acrid paste spreads across your palate and your throat, starting to seal it like a diphtheria membrane. When you half wake, the flavour in your mouth is a milder version of that taste. Processional geometric dreams, like dreams in high fever. A dream of triangles, V-shaped torsos, deltas of androgynous pubic hair, pup tents of old canvas with humid, mildewy interiors. A cut-out creature with wedge-shaped body leglessly running in space. The stress horse? Sad seahorse, flushed by a tide of tears from the womb of its one chance. I am sorry. Your cot is teetered so your head is down, feet near the ceiling. Your bunkmate has augured a hole through the upper mattress. The hole is smooth and clean as if the mattress is solid pine. An eye peering. Your “paranoid” intuition is right, your bunkmate is a man. Of course. Enrol as a woman in a sedative trial and “sleep” in a dorm full of potential victims. Just pretend to swallow the pills.… You have to get out. You try to rise but you lie rigid, teeth gritted, a coffined cadaver. Try to call out a warning but your larynx has been excised by Dr. Wall. Your mouth gapes. The springs of the upper bunk scream.
You wake in shudders, staring up. By the light of Henry’s Moon you see the upper bunk is unsagging, vacant. And someone is afoot in the room, moving softly.
“Stop!” you call out. Why has your voice shrunk to zero? You’re still paralyzed—can’t even open your eyes.
A firm hand on your shoulder.
“No!”
“Dear? Miss Kanakis? Are you all right?”
It’s Nurse Nkwele, her brow-lamp lasering down, a mother ship returning.
“I t
hought you were the man above me,” you blurt. “From the bunk above me.”
“Man?” She sounds so weary, so unsurprised. “You have been having a dream.”
“Where is he?”
“Gone, they took her downtown. Earlier in the night. She never should have been permitted to enrol.” Nurse Nkwele sits beside you. “She was ill, that woman. I should not be telling you this.”
“Thank God. I mean—thank God he … What did she have?”
“Judging by how she presented, a malarial condition. She has been doing volunteer work in Central America, on and off. I suppose she needed to make some quick money here. If I were to diagnose, she was having a mild relapse at the time she arrived, and the drugs, reducing her resistance, triggered a worse one.”
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you? Not a nurse.”
“I am a nurse. But you are correct.”
Correct—that word people use when they want to confirm that you’re right but keep their distance.
“My Nigerian credentials are not sufficient here. This night shift pays decently. In a few years, I’ll go back to school here. Another two or three years of school.” She straightens and stiffens. “I will have that blood now.”
“May I ask a question?” It seems easy here in the night dorm, Nkwele’s face anonymized under her blinding lamp and you essentially stoned.
“So long as your question is less personal. I have said more than is professional.”
“It is personal,” you say, “but it’s not about you. Ouch,” you add.
“Ask.”
“Can love just happen, or do we always choose?”
Nurse Nkwele sighs. “Example, please.”
“Your lover and your best friend, say. Love just happens to them, they can’t choose not to be in love, so they are in love. And they do act.”
She chuckles softly. “Such a North American idea, that. No. I would say that in such a case, there is always malice. Malice, not love. Malice in masquerade as love. Or a desire for power, in masquerade. So many things pretend to be love, do they not? The trick is not to believe the outer symptoms.”
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