Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  I looked past her, through the windows of Intensive Care, where the medical personnel, who never assume a story’s ending, clustered at the railings of Brock’s bed. One came toward us, nodded.

  “Are these the friends?”

  There was an ominous tone to his voice, accusatory and defining, as though we were somehow responsible. I looked at the man’s hands and arms—cuticles scrubbed into nonexistence, the dark hair on his knuckles and wrists at odds with the sterility of his skin.

  “Do you understand he probably can’t hear you? Don’t try to shake or startle him. There’s no response at this time, but he might—” He stopped, considered the mother’s face, how she had caught the word might and how he mustn’t be responsible for instilling hope. “Sometimes, not very often but it’s not unheard of, it’s not impossible that he could conceivably respond to your voice. We’ve seen it in these cases. The comatose patient is unpredictable. You’ll have five minutes.”

  Comatose. I mulled the word as John and I followed the man into the dark room. Iridescent lines and numbers radiated from the monitor screens. A nurse leaned into the light of the observation window, checking her clipboard notes.

  Brock was on his back, sleeping, it seemed, except for the tubes and bandages and dried smears of blood across his jaw and throat. He wore no gown, just the hospital sheet stamped ST. JOSEPH. Down the hall a woman howled, in pain or rage, I couldn’t tell which.

  I smoothed the sheet, realized as I took in this man, whom I had known before he was a man, that even in the heat of hard rides and late summer hunts I had never seen his bare chest. He was modest, like my father, who would never think to strip below his undershirt in front of a woman not his wife.

  I leaned over Brock, smelled the sharp blood odor of his breath. If I had been alone, I might have touched him there, where the twin wings of his rib cage met, touched with one finger the softness that rose and fell with the delicate pulse of a newborn’s skull. I slid my fingers beneath Brock’s hand, felt the cold, talcum smoothness of his palm. What was it about hospitals that forced everyone’s temperature to the level of just-cooled wax? I looked at the monitors. Nothing quickened. Nothing slowed.

  The green-suited man stepped in, moved to the bed. He pulled Brock’s right eyelid back, pointed a thin flashlight at the pupil, let the lid drop, made notes on the clipboard. Outside the door, Brock’s mother stood waiting.

  “Did he move? Anything?” I shook my head. She slumped back in her chair. “Three days, they say. After that, there’s not much to hope for.”

  I wanted to tell her what I once knew of faith. Hadn’t I believed that my hands held the power to draw from the sick their disease, that I could raise a cripple from his bed? I thought of those meetings, the need I had felt to move toward one believer or another and say to him, to her, “I feel what you feel—the pain is here,” then cup the ear pulsing with infection, the spastic back. Whatever part of me throbbed or ached or twitched with injury was mirrored in the body before me. Touch, pray, believe. The pain would sharpen, then fade.

  Something had worked in me then. In the months to come, I would stand beside Brock’s bed, hold his fingers like the delicate offering of a maiden, close my eyes and remember the heat that had come to my hands. But I could not pray for him. The words were no longer mine.

  THE DOCTORS MOVED BROCK from one hospital to another, then, finally, his family brought him home. Although his eyes were open, he focused on nothing. His body made its own demands: his arms twitched, his fingers jerked to satisfy an itch. He groaned loudly and smacked his lips. His body went rigid with the urge to defecate. Each day it was the same: the sight and smell of a nineteen-year-old body gone back to its child’s ways. No matter how attentive his mother, some puréed food remained to be tongued and pushed from the corners of his mouth. He sweated the sweat of a man against the plastic beneath his bedding. His urine flowed strong and yellow through the catheter and into the bag. When he belched, mucus fluttered in his throat.

  I see it as a turning point now—that time after Brock’s accident, when John struggled to balance his studies with the demands of football, when he became more and more bitter. He quarreled with his parents; more often than not, he spent his nights with me. As though punishing themselves for their own continued existence, John and the other young men who were left began to fight, first with rivals in the parking lots of bars, and then with each other. My last memories of our small tribe together involve scenes of drunken brawling, the girlfriends fretful and pleading from the sidelines.

  And still we danced, to whatever music came down to us from the band or the deejay, on the dance floor or in fields mown down by last harvest, the pickup doors thrown wide and every radio tuned to KRLC, the keg on the side and fire in the middle, our shadows tying us to the black shroud of sky.

  Those seem impossible hours when we threw ourselves, drunk and reeling, into the morning. Perhaps it is because of what has happened since to so many of our number—violent death, alcoholism, grief-stricken marriages, and lost children—that I see those last weeks with John as dark and foreboding. Or maybe it’s because I now know what my own future held that I remember the days closing down around me, the nights longer, swallowing the light.

  I would not know it then, but John would have given me all that he could, and I would have taken all that he could offer. Over the next several months, what held between us began to unravel, and we lost the tenderness we once shared—the way he came to me after hours on the playing field, how I kissed his thighs, his ribs, the bruises so deep they rose like oil from the bone. I didn’t realize that I was beginning another journey, a journey that would take me even farther away from my father, my family, away from all that had once sustained me. I didn’t know that over the next two years I would lose myself in a wilderness so dark and foreign that no one could find me. For a time, I would believe that there was no road back, and I would exist that way: my eyes closed, my hands fisted, unable to see, unable to remember the secrets of my passage. I would lie beneath blankets and shiver with cold, dreaming the coyotes outside my window, dreaming the river, dreaming a deer gone silent in its bed, hidden in spring fern and hemlock, holding still, so still the ravens gave up their vigil, took flight from the branches, and disappeared, black stars in the bluest sky.

  “YOU’VE GOT TO DRIVE TO WORK A different way each day.”

  Mr. Hampton, the large, ruddy-faced president of Idaho Fidelity, held up a map of the city, its main arteries highlighted in red, little arrows pointing to the heart of our building. “Keep a schedule in your car so you know which way you’ve come. Take a different street home. Don’t take that route again for a couple of days.”

  The tellers, secretaries, loan officers, and janitor sat in a half circle. The janitor was taking notes.

  We’d been notified the day before that a 7:30 A.M. meeting had been called. I’d groaned, already dreading the lost half hour of sleep. All these precautions seemed nonsense, anyway, motivated by the kidnapping, botched ransom, and death of a banker’s daughter somewhere in the East. Lenders across the country had decided that anyone connected to financial institutions—family, tellers, janitors—was at risk of being nabbed and held for millions of dollars.

  I yawned, recrossed my legs, listened to the scritch of the janitor’s pencil. Friday was a painful prelude to Saturday, when I could sleep until noon and not be bothered by rules and directives. I half hoped that John might stop by, but he came to me less often now. We had agreed that we were too young to be so serious. Part of me realized that I was better off without him, that he was no longer the well-mannered high school boy with whom I had fallen in love. His perpetual drunkenness was a kind of self-destruction I didn’t understand, and when he came to me late at night, bloodied from yet another parking-lot fight, I scolded him while dabbing at his wounds with a peroxide-soaked rag.

  “Kim, are you listening?” Mr. Paul, our vice president, was demonstrating the silent alarm. I straightened in my chair
and nodded, wishing that some thug would abduct the skinny man with his Vandyke beard and manicured nails.

  Despite the bank’s insistence, I drove home from work that afternoon the same way I had come. My apartment was only eight blocks away, and it seemed silly to zigzag through the neighborhood like a lost tourist. I was tired of the rules, the sour face of Mr. Paul. I wanted to get away from the parking lots soaking up heat, sticky beneath my heels, away from the businessmen in their ridiculous suits, who eyed me over their fives and twenties, who touched my wrists with their pale dry hands.

  “YOU WANT TO HAVE YOUR CAKE and eat it too,” my mother scolded whenever I complained about the boredom of my job, my dissatisfaction with the men I dated. What did I want? Most often, the answers came to me in the negative: I wanted not to have my mother’s life, defined by domestic service and silence. I wanted not to be bound by fear of a man’s displeasure, his anger and strength. I did not want to need a man to make me feel safe. What I longed for was someone with whom I might share all the sides of myself, someone who could teach me both the signs of animals and the language of man. I wanted to lie beneath stars in a meadow ringed by cedar, have my lover whisper to me the names of distant constellations.

  But who? The fraternity boys bored me with their beer-guzzling games and hands brushing my breasts. The cowboys took me to the Villa for biscuits and gravy at midnight, ate without a word, then chaperoned me back to my doorstep, where they thumbed out their chew and waited politely to be asked in. The church boys had shied away long ago, although I would sometimes catch them driving by after Sunday-evening service, cruising my apartment as though they might catch a note of something decadent, calling to them like a siren’s song.

  “But you need a man,” my mother insisted, and I believed that she thought any man was better than none. The idea of living alone horrified her; if her husband were to leave, she would become prey, made vulnerable by her inability to keep her man clean and content. She and my father had this understanding between them—that with her attendance to his needs, she bought herself both shelter and shield.

  If such were the case, I’d do without, I said. I had my guns and my knives. I was taking karate, “the way of the empty hand.” I’d have my brown belt by fall.

  My mother sighed, shook her head. This was a rebellion of a different kind, one she believed no less dangerous than my early flight from home. I was defying my nature, refusing my role. When would I stop wanting to act like a man, stop wanting to be one? I wanted too much, always, too much.

  I was waiting, for what I wasn’t sure. It was more than the reliability of a biweekly paycheck, the sound of John’s Chevy pulling into the driveway, the voices of friends coming to pick me up and take me to the bar. It was something else, distant and unnameable. It was in the light that turned the dry hills to the north the colors of gemstones: amethyst and topaz, jasper and jade. It was in the slight wind that came off the river and up the valley, bringing with it the smells of sage and locust and something of the sea. I would sit on my kitchen counter, bare feet in the sink, smoking, pressing my lips lightly against the window screen, tasting the dust and warm rain, my breath sieving through wire, rising, disappearing into the shadows of sycamore, and I would study the air, feeling as though I were the eye at the hurricane’s center, bedeviled by calm, unable to move as the world spun away around me. When all that was left for me to see was my own dark reflection in the glass, I would make my way to bed, where I could prop myself against the headboard and read until dawn.

  I read the story of the Scottsboro Boys, wrongfully accused of raping a white woman. I read Portnoy’s Complaint and Catch-22 and Fear of Flying, interspersed with thin tales of tortured romance: the soldier who desired a princess, the countess who desired a sailor, the sailor who loved the plantation owner’s daughter, the daughter who lusted for her father’s prize slave—the story always the same, less graphic and vulgar than the books I’d found in my uncle’s room, but the same. Always the woman at first refusing, the man wanting and pursuing, then, too many times rebuffed, turning away, so that she must somehow win back his favor. I was drawn to the mysteriously charged eroticism produced by such battles of wills—how badly we want what we cannot have, how we savor the struggle, how the prize is so much sweeter when harder won.

  Yet I hated the games I felt forced to play, the luring of men and then the denial. Perhaps my mother was right—maybe there was something male in me. I wanted to be both pursuer and pursued, dominate and submissive, predator and prey. At times my fantasies were romantic gambols, breathless near-unions, heartbreaking separations, the desperate anticipation of release. Other times my dreams took a turn that I could only interpret as dark: I was the one directing and demanding, the one whose strength could overwhelm, the one who could force compliance.

  During those hours alone, when I allowed my mind to follow its fancy, I came to the deepening belief that there was something freakish in my nature, something dangerous and destructive. I could not imagine speaking of my fantasies to John, who believed that sex suited men but who was made uncomfortable by a woman’s taking undue interest in the practice. Some nights, when John was not with me, I found contentment in the Harlequin paperbacks; other nights I waited until the traffic had left the streets, then made my way to the twenty-four-hour quick mart, where I bought the adult magazines and books that promised something more graphic than rippling biceps and heaving bosoms. I blushed beneath the knowing eye of the midnight clerk, who took his time bagging my purchases. Back at my apartment, I could lock the doors, draw the blankets close, and be alone with my saturnalia of words.

  Books and passion—the two became inseparable, and what fed one fed the other. There was a kind of desperation I felt, as though there would never be enough time for both, as though I couldn’t read and learn and know fast enough to feed the engine of my mind and body. I wanted more now; I needed to know now. Such appetite could be cultured and trained like a gentlewoman’s topiary, or it could run wild, grow rampant and rapacious—it could swallow me whole. My father had recognized and directed my ravening curiosity. Out from under his husbanding eye, I felt the vines twining, kudzu and bamboo, the ground growing feral beneath my feet.

  I WAS COUNTING the final minutes until closing when the red Corvette Stingray pulled up at the bank’s drive-through window. That first time I noticed only the car, the man’s long fingers and shaggy black hair, his eyes, which were crazy blue. He was not handsome—a large nose, a pronounced Adam’s apple beneath the nest of his beard. When I counted his money, I did not have to look up to know that he was watching my face instead of my hands.

  And that’s what I remember most, the way he watched me. I was not yet twenty. My long brown hair was layered and curled, my fingernails polished, my makeup carefully applied to bring out the blue of my own eyes. I might have expected a man to look at me, perhaps even allow his glance to linger. But this was different. The man in the ’Vette settled into his gaze as though it humored him to do so.

  I thumbed out the bills for him, counting by twenties, slid the metal box from my closet of bulletproof glass. When he asked my name, I told him, and he smiled. I remember the smallness of his teeth, his ease. Even with other cars lined up behind him, he took his time slipping the money into his wallet, lighting his cigarette. He seemed to swallow the smoke, letting a thin line of it escape each nostril before raising an eyebrow my way.

  I watched him pull into traffic, checked my watch. Friday with its long lines and mill paychecks seemed never to end. A few more minutes and I could lower the shade that read SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED and be gone for the weekend.

  Please let me balance tonight, I thought. One nickel off and we’d all have to stay, six women at six windows, counting and recounting. The girls, they called us. We were mostly loyal to the bank, more so to one another. No one complained if another didn’t balance. Everyone stayed, checking the debits and credits, lighting up a cigarette because the bank was closed and the customers wer
e gone. It looks bad, we were told, for a woman to smoke in public. The men could smoke at their desks—Mr. Paul, Mr. Hampton, who ushered customers from his office to our windows with a sweep of his Salem.

  It was Mr. Paul we answered to, and I believed he hated us all, perhaps women in general but especially me, the youngest of the tellers. I had broken all the rules of the bank at least once, and now I was breaking another: no chewing gum while on the teller line. Bent over my work, I was startled by Mr. Paul’s hand appearing beneath my chin. I dutifully spat the gum into his palm. His nostrils flared in distaste as he carried the wad to the wastebasket, turned his hand over, and dropped it in. The customers watched him, then looked at me. I shrugged, embarrassed like a child is embarrassed, shamed, and stricken with helpless anger. People shuffled, coughed. I began my count over.

  “HE’S A DICK,” Charlene said later, lifting her chin and blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

  I nodded, glad to be balanced and out of the bank, at the bar with Charlene drinking daiquiris. Charlene was New Accounts, moved up from teller because her line was always longest. She had a way with people. She had red hair, green eyes, a Barbie-doll figure, a smile that meant something. I loved seeing her change out of skirts, nylons, and high heels into the tight Wranglers and manured boots of a weekend rancher. She was twenty years older than I was, and I was both puzzled and pleased by her attention.

  Tony, Charlene’s boyfriend, had shown up at the bank that afternoon on his way out of town, catching the door just at closing, just as Mr. Hampton slid his key into the inside lock. Everyone had watched as Tony strolled across the lobby to Charlene’s desk. He wasn’t tall, but he was solid and probably a little mean the way cowboys can be. He’d leaned toward her and smiled, then slid out his tongue, a quarter balanced on its tip.

  I thought I might be a little in love with Tony myself. If I told Charlene, I knew what she would say: “You think you can handle him, honey, you go right ahead.” I wanted to be like that: in control but with an edge. I could never find that fine line between the bad girl and the good, and right then I felt like a failed audition for both.