The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Later, when Rosa went up to bed, she found Karen tucked in and reading a book called Journey to Jerusalem. “Did you enjoy your talk with Rabbi Reinman?” Karen asked. She sounded aggrieved.

  “Yes, it was very interesting.”

  Karen gazed at her, waiting for some elaboration. “Rabbi Reinman is an extremely learned man. It’s a great honor, you know, to have him take such an interest in you.”

  “I’m sure.” Rosa took her toothbrush from her overnight bag.

  “You mustn’t brush your teeth!” Karen said, sitting up suddenly. “It’s not allowed on Shabbos. It counts as work.”

  Rosa’s shoulders slumped in dismay. “No one brushes their teeth from Friday night to Saturday evening?”

  Karen shook her head. “We don’t shower or bathe either. You may,” she added, “have a mint in the morning if you want to freshen your breath.”

  Rosa looked at the toothbrush in her hand and then back at Karen. Did her obligations to her hosts extend so far as abstaining from oral hygiene? She was still debating this tricky point of etiquette when the timer on the lights clicked, plunging the room into darkness. She sighed, laid her toothbrush back in her overnight bag, and groped her way to bed.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Somewhere in the Columbia Presbyterian geriatric ward, a woman was crying. Her staccato sobs rang out like a car alarm: AY ay! AY ay! AY ay! Karla, who was standing in the corridor, waiting for a nurse to finish changing the bandages on her next patient, listened with interest. In all the years that she had been working in a hospital, she had never ceased to be impressed by the aural variety of human suffering. There was a uniformity to the way people looked and smelled when they were ill, but the sounds that they made were always deeply personal. Some sniveled. Some boomed. Some screamed like infants. There were drama queens who wailed actual words and sentences—“Oh Go-od, oh, no-o”—and stoics who emitted only muffled sneezes of sorrow. There were even old-school boo-hooers, who cried as if they had learned how from reading comics. The ways to express misery were infinite.

  The door at which Karla was waiting opened now, and a nurse barged out, holding her latex-sheathed hands in front of her like puppets. “You’d better come back later,” she said, glancing bad-temperedly at Karla. “She’s just had an accident with her bag. It’s going to take a while to clean up.”

  Karla went upstairs to the fifth floor. Her next patient was a new intake, and before entering his room, she checked over her notes.

  Jameson, Nicholas, b. 5. 4. 85. Paraplegic since birth. Parents deceased. Living until recently with relative at above address. Currently homeless. No wheelchair. Uses a skateboard for transportation. Admitted to ER 5.19.02, complaining of “pains in his back.” Prelim exam showed severe knife wound in his lower back. Patient claimed not to know how he incurred the injury, but speculated that he had been attacked by unknown assailants while sleeping in the street. Aggressive and uncooperative behavior.

  The boy appeared to be sleeping when Karla opened the door. His face was densely covered in acne and from a distance, he looked as if he were wearing a mask. The nurses had propped him up in bed so that his legless torso lay on the pillows at a 45-degree angle. Karla had a guilty sense that she was examining a natural history exhibit.

  “Nicholas?” she said.

  The boy opened his eyes at once. “That’s not my name.”

  Karla looked doubtfully at the nurse’s childish handwriting at the top of the chart. “It says—”

  “My name is Monster,” he interrupted. “Tha’s what everybody know me by.”

  Karla paused. “I see.”

  He grinned, revealing rotten teeth, and raised his thick, muscular arms in a gesture of monstrousness. Years of bearing his weight on his hands had turned them into something like hooves. His palms were the translucent yellow of parmesan rind.

  “My name is Karla O’Connor,” Karla said, pulling up a chair. “I’m a social worker. I wanted to see if I could help you with a few things. First off, I understand you don’t have a working wheelchair at the moment?”

  The boy looked at her. “I ain’t used a wheelchair since I was six. I jus want the skateboard they took off me when I came in.”

  Karla nodded. Nicholas had created such a fuss when the ER nurses first attempted to part him from his skateboard that he had very nearly been sectioned in the psych ward. He was meant to be using a wheelchair while he was in the hospital, but the nurses said that whenever he was left unattended, he hoisted himself off the chair and went swinging down the hospital corridors on his hands.

  “Well, you can’t use a skateboard in the hospital,” Karla said. “It isn’t safe. I can promise you, your skateboard will be returned to you when you leave.”

  “Fucking safe!” The boy exploded. “It’s a lot safer than the fucking wheelchair.”

  Karla smiled. “I’m sure you’re right about that. Wheelchairs can be pretty awkward. Still, I think it might be useful for you to own one—for, you know, places where they don’t allow you to use your skateboard.”

  The boy was silent. While Karla waited for him to respond, she made a mental inventory of the lunch she had brought from home: a container of cottage cheese; one small apple; a diet mint. She had already been bad this morning and consumed two almond croissants on her way to work; to stay within the 1,500-calorie allotment prescribed by her current diet, she would have to throw away half the cottage cheese and skip dinner.

  Nicholas made a sudden, sputtering noise. “Fuck off!” he shouted. “I don’t want you in here!”

  Karla nodded forbearingly. “I won’t be long, Nicholas. I want to talk to you about your living situation. If you give me the go-ahead, I’d like to make some calls this afternoon to see about—”

  “You gonna put me in a shelter?”

  “Well, I would hope we could come up with something better than that.”

  “I ain’t going in no facility!”

  “You don’t want to go on sleeping on the street, do you?”

  “There’s only retards and spazzes living in them facilities. They don’t even keep them clean.”

  “But Nicholas—”

  “I’ve got a place to live.”

  “Your aunt’s, you mean?” Karla had spoken to the furious aunt on the phone that morning.

  “No! I don’t care what happens to him anymore. The little bastard took my money and when I told him to give it back, he come at me with a knife! He can stay on the streets for all I care…”

  “I’ve called your aunt, Nicholas.” Karla said. “She’s not willing to have you back just now.”

  Nicholas closed his eyes. “She’s fucking about.”

  “Well, maybe, but—”

  “She’ll take me back.”

  “She says you stole from her.”

  “Fuck off!” he roared. “Amount of times she’s taken my disability money!”

  “All right—”

  “Fuck off!”

  Karla folded her arms tightly against her navel.

  “Please don’t shout, Nicholas…”

  “You fucking come in here and accuse me of thieving!”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Nicholas. Your aunt—”

  “Fuck off! Fuck off!”

  In his distress, Nicholas began to heave his trunk from side to side. As he did so, his nightgown rode up to reveal two glossy, tapered stumps poking out from his adult diaper. Pointing at the diaper, he began to cry. “Why…why’d they gotta put me in this?”

  “I don’t know,” Karla said quietly. “Have you been having problems in that…?”

  “I ain’t gonna shit myself!” he sobbed. “I ain’t a baby!”

  “Nicholas…” Karla placed a hand on his shoulder.

  In a flash, he reared up, grasping her neck in his great yellow hands and tipping her off her chair onto the bed. Her face was now pressed into his truncated lap; and her legs were hanging off the side of the bed, kicking helplessly in the ai
r. She tried to scream, but the only sound that emerged was a muffled squawk. His grip grew tighter. She could feel him twisting at her neck as if it were a recalcitrant bottle top. He’s going to kill me, she thought.

  For many reasons (not least among them that her corpse would be found wearing a skirt clearly labeled XL), Karla did not want to be killed. But she was a practical woman, accustomed to managing her expectations, and she had already gone a considerable way toward accepting the fact of her own demise when she felt a sudden, intense pressure on her back. Someone had clambered on top of her and was attempting to prise Nicholas’s fingers from her neck.

  There was a sound of running footsteps, followed by cries and shouts in assorted registers. The struggle to free her seemed to go on for a very long time, but at last Nicholas’s hold relaxed, and the person who had been sitting on her back dismounted. She rolled over. A crowd of nurses and porters was now surrounding Nicholas. Through the tangle of their arms, she glimpsed the boy’s terrified face. His eyes were rolling wildly. His teeth were bared in a snarl. “Please don’t hurt him…,” she cried.

  A nurse appeared with a hypodermic needle, and squeezed herself into the scrum. “There!” she exclaimed a moment later, brandishing the needle triumphantly.

  Nicholas went limp.

  All the shouting ceased. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the panting of the nurses and porters. “Are you all right, miss?” a voice said.

  A middle-aged, brown-skinned man with a large, crumpled face and a prodigious crag of nose was standing over Karla. His heavy-lidded, slow-blinking eyes seemed to bespeak great gentleness of purpose.

  “Are you all right?” he repeated. “I’m afraid I may have hurt you when I got up on your back.” All around the edge of his lips there ran a thin line of pale, slightly raised skin, like the thread of pith on a tangerine segment. Karla had a crazy urge to test its softness with her finger.

  “Miss? Can you hear me?” he said.

  She sat up slowly and raised a hand to her throbbing neck.

  “Would you like some water?” he asked. He passed her a plastic beaker.

  He was a large man, she saw now, with hands and ears built to the same monumental scale as his nose. She estimated that he was a good thirty pounds overweight. (It was often assumed that Karla, being a fat person, had more forgiving aesthetic standards than other, slimmer people, but this was untrue. Years of attending to her own physical failings had made her, if anything, more closely attuned to the nuances of bodily imperfection than most. Her girlfriends, many of whom took guilty reassurance from the fact that they were Not-as-Fat-as-Karla, would have been shocked to discover how unsparing she was in her assessments of their figures.)

  The porters were trooping from the room now, casting deferential glances at her as they went. A nurse approached Karla. “You all right?” she asked. She was a blond, pert-faced woman, very tidy and clean. Her pastel pink scrubs had little teddy bears printed on them.

  “I’m fine,” Karla said.

  “Don’t get up right away,” the man urged. “Take it slow.”

  “And you are?” the nurse asked him.

  “I work downstairs,” the man said. “In the newspaper shop.” He pointed through the open door to a trolley of newspapers and magazines standing in the corridor. “I was just doing some deliveries,” he said, “and then I heard shouting—”

  “I see.” The nurse touched her cheek, her hair, as if reassuring herself of her own fragrant neatness. “Well, I think we have the situation under control now, thank you.”

  The man looked at Karla. “Will you be all right if I go?”

  Karla was reluctant to appear to be endorsing the nurse’s rudeness, but she did very much want to be left alone. She nodded.

  “Okay,” the man said. “Take care.”

  “Thank you for helping,” she called out after he had left the room. But she could not be sure that he had heard her.

  The nurse turned to Karla and rolled her eyes conspiratorially. “Arab,” she mouthed silently.

  An hour or so later, as Karla was passing through the lobby on her way to eat lunch in the hospital garden, she spotted the man who had assisted her, through the glass front of his newspaper shop. He gestured for her to wait. A moment later, he came out.

  “Shouldn’t you be lying down?” he asked.

  “No, no, I’m fine. I didn’t thank you properly before. I’m very grateful to you for coming in like that.”

  He waved his hand. “Please. Anyone would have done the same.”

  “I’m sorry that that nurse was so…unpleasant to you.”

  “Oh, her. She didn’t like me, did she?” He pursed his lips in an imitation of the nurse’s prudish expression. “I think we have the situation under control now.”

  Karla laughed, surprised by the accuracy of his mimicry. And then, because she did not want him to think that she regarded the racism of the hospital staff as a laughing matter, she shook her head sternly. “She’s not a nice woman, I’m afraid.”

  The man gestured at the brown paper bag in her hand. “Are you having your lunch outside?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be okay if I ate with you?”

  Karla hesitated. She was shy of eating in front of strangers. She gestured at the shop. “Don’t you have to…?”

  “No, I can close it. I just put a sign on the door.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure!”

  He held out his hand. “I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Khaled.”

  Karla, keenly aware of the dampness of her palm, grasped his fingertips loosely. “I’m Karla.”

  He went back into the store to get his lunch and to lock up. When he returned, they walked out to the garden.

  “Let’s sit where there’s shade,” he said, pointing at a tree on the far side of the lawn. Karla nodded, although she would have preferred to sit on a bench. She always felt ungainly sitting on grass. And she was wearing a skirt, so there would be modesty issues.

  When they got to the tree, Khaled took off his jacket and laid it on the grass. “Please. Sit on this. You will get your clothes dirty otherwise.”

  “Oh, no,” Karla protested. “I don’t need that.” Standing over him, she could see the place at the back of his head where he was beginning to go bald: a small spot, round and brown, like a penny.

  “You must,” he urged.

  “What about you, though?”

  “Oh,” Khaled gestured at his jeans. “It doesn’t matter for me. Please. Sit.”

  There seemed no way to go on politely resisting. Karla knelt down carefully on the jacket.

  Khaled produced from his nylon backpack a spoon, a fork, a napkin, and some Tupperware bowls, filled with rice and vegetable stew. “My brother’s wife makes it for me,” he said with an apologetic smile. “It is Egyptian food. I hope you don’t mind the smell.”

  “Not at all!” Karla said, quickly. “I like it.”

  It was true. Whatever he had in his little bowls smelled delicious. Sheepishly, she reached into her bag and brought out her cottage cheese.

  “So…are you from Egypt?” she asked

  “Yes, from Alexandria.”

  “And how long have you worked in the newspaper store?”

  “It is my store,” Khaled corrected her. “I have had it for two years.”

  “Oh, really? That’s great,” Karla’s kneeling position had begun to cut off feeling in her calves and feet. She set about the tricky task of extending her legs in front of her without revealing too much pantyhose.

  “Tell me, what will happen to that cripple boy now?” Khaled asked. “Have the police been informed?”

  “Oh, no!” Karla said. “No, no…I wouldn’t press charges.” She paused. “We don’t actually refer to people like Nicholas as cripples anymore…”

  Khaled seemed not to register this gentle reproof. “I don’t think it’s fair for the hospital to let ladies de
al with people like that,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. He was a wild animal! What if I had not been outside the room when he attacked you?”

  “Well, I’m very glad you were there, obviously,” she said. “But, you know, Nicholas isn’t really a bad kid. He’s just very angry and unhappy.”

  “I must disagree with you. I saw him. He was trying to strangle you! You can’t say someone like this is good.”

  Karla shook her head. “You have to think of what someone like Nicholas deals with every day. I dare say we wouldn’t be very nice if we had his life.”

  Khaled gazed at her admiringly. “You are a very good person. Have you ever done an enneagram test?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s a personality test. You fill out a very detailed questionnaire and then it tells you which one of eight personality types you are. It’s amazingly accurate”

  “Oh.” Karla’s face took on the polite expression that she reserved for hearing about other people’s implausible beliefs.

  “I am sure you’d be a Type Two. The Two is the Helper. Very kind and giving. That’s why you do the job you do.”

  Karla frowned down at the bulky outline of her thighs and carefully placed her pocketbook across her lap. People were always telling her that she was a “born social worker.” In truth, though, her earliest inclination had been toward a career in law. As a child she had loved going to see her father perform in court and had spent many happy hours in her bedroom reenacting important historical trials with her Barbies and her gerbil. It was only in late adolescence that her commitment to a career in law had faded. Picking up on certain familial hints—the mood of rueful skepticism that arose whenever she spoke of law school, her mother’s breezy speculations as to whether she might not be “a bit dyslexic”—she came to understand that she had horribly overestimated her potential. Having realized her mistake, she quickly set about correcting herself, and by the time she graduated from high school, her aspirations had been lowered to a level with which everyone could feel comfortable. Before applying to college, she even took the precaution of asking her parents if they thought college was worthwhile for her. “Of course,” her mother said. “Why not? Perhaps you could do a vocational course somewhere.”