Low

by Anna Quon

  “I know it must seem strange to you,” Samantha said, “But I wish everyone could design their own bodies. That way you’d get exactly what you want.”

  Adriana thought about it. If she were to design her own body what would it look like? She imagined herself with wavy auburn hair, pale skin and startling, turquoise eyes. She would still be a woman but a striking one, one that people would notice when she walked down the street. One that Peter would notice, if the truth be known. Adriana turned that idea over in her mind. She had been trying to fade into the background for such a long time. Did she really, secretly, want to be noticed?

  Samantha’s eyes were open, shining with tenderness, tinged with sadness. What kind of life must she have led? Adriana wondered. To be in a body that you feel doesn’t belong to you. It would be a nightmare of a kind, a terrible, unending solitary confinement. Like being locked in TQ every day of your life.

  Neither of them spoke, as the light shrank between them in the fading afternoon. Something made sense, finally, to Adriana. She realized that in this one life every moment counts; not a second is without meaning or import. The time she spent in anguish or boredom, meant something, was part of the path she was following. She had always thought the secret of this life was to be happy and that she was failing miserably—but the idea that her suffering had meaning gave her a sense of hope.

  Samantha’s eyes closed again and she looked perfectly at rest. Adriana closed her eyes too. She was nowhere, nothing, a dust mote. She pulled her knees up to her chest, shivering with cold.

  Samantha began to snore, and Adriana watched her as she slept, her leonine head propped up on the pillow, her huge hand dangling. Adriana wondered if she ever regretted becoming a woman, whether she’d ever thought she’d made a mistake. It was unthinkable to Adriana that a person could be so sure that a decision was the right one as to forever alter who they were. But given the chance to design her own body, wouldn’t she have done the same thing?

  Adriana’s mother stood there, arms crossed. She had a bemused smile on her face. For the first time it seemed her mother wasn’t sitting in judgement on her. Adriana felt relieved, elated even.

  Samantha smiled in her sleep, a bubble forming at her lips, like a newborn baby.

  Chapter 30

  They found Redgie’s body washed up on the shore by the Dartmouth ferry terminal. Adriana didn’t hear about it until his son, whom Adriana had never seen visiting him, came to pick up his belongings. The man looked tired and haggard, though he couldn’t have been more than 40. Marlene sat and rocked in the common room, moaning softly to herself. Marlene’s nurse that day, a woman with dyed black hair and a beauty mark on her cheek, spoke to Redgie’s son in low tones. He approached Marlene with a plastic grocery bag in one hand. “I understand you were a good friend of Redgie’s,” he said. Marlene paid no attention, continuing her rocking. Redgie’s son hung the grocery bag from its handles on the back of the rocker. “Something to remember him by,” he offered helplessly. He turned and walked out, his shoulders bowed.

  Marlene kept rocking. Her nurse, walked over and took the bag off the back of the chair and put it in Marlene’s hands. Adriana could see it contained Redgie’s fur hat—his prized possession—and a well-worn Bible, the gold gleaming on the edges of the pages. Marlene stopped rocking and looked at the objects on her lap for a long time, before she touched them, tentatively. She opened the Bible to one of the dog-eared pages to examine it. A slip of paper fell out.

  Adriana knew Marlene would have a hard time bending over the pick it up so she slipped over, scooped it up and handed it to Marlene. Marlene held it in her hand a long time, and Adriana couldn’t help but read it. In large, ragged handwriting it said: “Jesus says; brush your teeth three times day, for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

  Marlene handed the paper to Adriana. “I can’t read,” she said quietly. “Can you tell me what it says?”

  Adriana read the words on the paper, shakily. Marlene nodded sagely, and opened the Bible to another slip of paper. Adriana read, “Pray every day and wear clean pants.”

  Marlene began to cry. “Redgie only wanted the best for people,” she sobbed. She closed the Bible on her lap and put the fur hat on her head. Wiping her nose with the back of her hand, she stood up and knocked on the door to the nursing station. The student doctor, Colin, was in the back, working away on a computer, but he looked up when he heard Marlene calling to him. His shoulders sagged slightly, his chest was thin and a long tie dripped from his collar. Adriana thought she knew what he’d look like when he was middle-aged and balding.

  Marlene handed him the Bible. “This was Redgie’s,” she said. “He’d have wanted you to have it,” she said. “I can’t read it.” The student stood with the Bible in his hand. Adriana could see he didn’t want it or anything that reminded him of Redgie, but as painful as it was, he accepted it from Marlene.

  Adriana pictured Redgie standing at the edge of the harbour, the hurricane roaring around him. In his hands were strips of paper—his messages—that he wanted to float free in the water, to be carried away to those in need. But the wind grabbed them from his hands and blew them over his shoulder. Redgie bent down to release the papers into the water but like a giant hand, the surf came up and grabbed him, pulling him into itself. For a moment he flailed, then was sucked under. Adriana was pretty sure the student doctor pictured it that way too. His eyes glistened, dark and painful.

  Adriana felt frozen in place. Marlene, wearing Redgie’s fur hat, stood proudly before making her way to the kitchen. She was full, Adriana thought, leaving her sorrow behind her like a rag. No one could take away the fact that she had loved a man who had gone out to stop the hurricane and died trying.

  That afternoon, Adriana dreamed of Redgie surrounded by the hurricane like a vine that curled around him. He was struggling to speak but only garbled words came out. Jeff began to cut away the vine with a machete but he kept cutting himself, so that by the end, they were both covered with blood.

  Adriana cried out in her sleep and woke herself up. The room was grey and cold. She felt weak from the dream but from out of nowhere a surge of determination not to remain there coursed through her. Adriana got out of bed and went out into the hall, looking for someone to talk to. There was no one in the common room, except for an old woman who had fallen asleep on the couch.

  Colin was sitting in the nursing station reading and looking like he needed a nap. Adriana saw the book in his hands was Redgie’s Bible. It reminded her of her mother’s Bible which sat unopened on the bookshelf in her bedroom, dog-eared and worn. Adriana knocked on the half door to the nursing station and smiled when he jumped, his hair dishevelled as though he’d been sleeping.

  “Hi Adriana,” Colin said.

  “Hey,” Adriana said, lifting her hand in greeting. “Could I talk to you?”

  Colin looked surprised. He put Redgie’s Bible to one side.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me get a nurse.”

  Adriana shook her head. “Can we just talk in the common room?”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  Adriana sat down on the couch facing the window and turned off the TV with the remote. Colin straightened his tie, crossing his long legs at the ankle in front of him. He looked more serious than usual. Not surprising, given the circumstances. Adriana wasn’t sure what to say. She almost would have preferred to sit there silently with him, but she didn’t think he was the type to be comfortable with silences.

  “How are you feeling today?” Colin asked. It was the lamest of the lame questions in the doctor’s arsenal. But Adriana took it at face value. How was she?

  “Terrible,” she said. She began to talk about the things that had been on her mind—Jazz and the abortion, Jeff’s suicide attempt, Redgie, and the fact that she was afraid of what the future would hold for her, if she had a future. The student doctor, who had at first looked
miserable and preoccupied, listened intently, nodding here and there but not interrupting. Eventually Adriana felt emptied, at peace. The student doctor looked full, almost round.

  Maybe, Adriana thought. Maybe she had misjudged him and he was okay with silence. Maybe she was the one who couldn’t bear the air waves flat-lining between her and another person. But soon the student doctor, uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, obviously excited. “You’ve shared a lot, Adriana,” he said. “You’ve had a lot on your mind.” Adriana thought that was stating the obvious, but she nodded.

  “I think the key is to take it one day at a time, one small step at a time.” Adriana resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Colin said, “I mean, everyone has their fears and their hopes. Everyone, no matter who they are. But if you let yourself just focus on what you can do today—instead of what you did or didn’t do yesterday, instead of what you should do tomorrow—it gets easier.” Adriana didn’t follow the logic. “I mean,” said the student, earnestly, “We only have this moment. Yesterday is lost to us and tomorrow is unknowable. What’s the point of pulling our hair out about it?”

  Adriana was usually resistant to such platitudes, but something made her stop and consider the implications of what the student had said. She had thought about it on her own—her one life was all she had. She could imagine what it would be like to float free from time, but that was not what life was really like, and not what Colin meant. He was talking about being fully present in the moment, fearless, absorbed, engaged. For some reason the idea terrified her.

  Colin could see Adriana was anxious about something. “Does what I said make sense to you?” he asked. She nodded, then shook her head. She started to weep, and put her hands in front of her face. Everything seemed too much…especially the task of walking, one foot in front of the other, into the future, when the responsibility for those steps laid squarely on her own shoulders.

  “Adriana.” Colin said, touching her hand. “It’s okay. We’re all just doing the best we can.” He looked ashamed that he had upset her.

  She tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault. She knew what he was saying was right and it was supposed to be comforting, but she couldn’t shake the idea that, for her, the path through life was a battle against rust and weeds.

  Colin looked like he was going to cry too. He was not much older than Adriana really, and he had had to deal with the death of a patient. It might have been his first death. The first of many in the career of a doctor. How weighty a burden that was. She thought she could imagine how it felt. Adriana wiped her nose and tried to smile, which was the most comforting thing she knew how to do. Relieved, he smiled back “Are you okay now?” he asked. Adriana nodded, even though it felt to her as if she were trying to climb a waterfall.

  Colin stood up. He was rumpled from head to foot, as though he’d gone to bed in his clothes and was just now waking up. “I guess I better get back to work… I mean, to the thing I was doing on the computer,” he said, flustered. Adriana smiled for real when he turned and she saw the back of his shirt flapping behind him. If talking to her wasn’t work, she supposed she could take it as a compliment.

  Adriana stood up. She wore her street clothes, with a johnny shirt like a bathrobe on her back. She was half patient, half civilian. Did she need to choose? She walked to her room, where Marlene was sleeping soundly, her snores like the roar of a lion. Adriana sat on her bed and watched. It was normal here, to find someone new in your room, without consultation or warning. She’d wondered how long it would be before someone took Samantha’s place for good, wiping away every trace of her.

  Adriana knew Marlene was living with a hurt so deep it must burn inside her. She knew what it was like, to be so full of pain that the only relief is sleep. There was something healing about it and about the dreams that persisted in some pocket of the brain while the world kept turning, relentless and unforgiving.

  Adriana thought about her hippocampus, how it had seemed to float free in the slosh of her brain. Somehow, she had given up the delusion that her brain had liquefied, that her memories were in danger because the hippocampus had escaped its moorings. Such a strange preoccupation, she thought. Where do these ideas come from, these odd, outlandish notions that populated the minds of the mentally ill? She realized that for a long time she had been preoccupied with the past, and that the fear of losing it could well have sparked the fiction that something had gone haywire with her brain. She was almost nostalgic for the time when the weirdness made sense, when everything seemed to be part of a pattern that had its own logic.

  She looked up at the ceiling. It was just a ceiling, with blank tiles and nothing gleaming from their holes. Without the cameras behind them, and without her mother glaring at her, Adriana felt alone. For the first time in a long while, she experienced melancholy—not the grinding depression she’d been under for months but a kind of beautiful hopeless longing. It was actually the other side of happiness.

  Chapter 31

  Jazz called in the late afternoon. Adriana hung on to the phone with both hands. “Thanks for coming to see me,” Jazz said in a small, flat voice.

  Quickly Adriana said, “Your mum told me.” Jazz didn’t have to explain anything. Adriana could tell she didn’t want to say a lot in front of her mother. “Jazzabel, don’t worry,” Adriana said, “About anything. Everything is okay.”

  Jazz let out a breath. For once Adriana was the parental one.

  “Okay,” Jazz whispered. Adriana wished Mrs. O’Connell would go get herself a coffee, so they could talk. She heard Jazz’s mother rustling and speaking in a low voice to her daughter.

  “I have to go,” Jazz said.

  In her best grown up voice, Adriana replied, “Girl, you eat your applesauce. I’ll call tomorrow.”

  When Jazz hung up, it felt to Adriana as though a book had closed. They had come to the end of something, and while it was sad, it was also a relief of a sort. Adriana thought of her sister, and the limbo she occupied. She needed an ending too.

  Adriana returned to her room, and settled into her knitting. Getting lost in knitting was not like getting lost in psychosis—there was a rhythm, a pattern, and a kind of humble necessity to it. Psychosis felt larger than life, out of control, and in some way, wasteful—of energy, health and time. It was a diversion on the path of life, one which weakened a person.

  There was a knock on the door. Adriana looked up, slightly disoriented. Beth entered first, soundlessly and their father, with his arms full of bags and wrapping paper, followed. “Hi, darling,” he said, ebullient but nervous, almost shy. It had only been a few days since they’d seen her but the hurricane had intervened, like a huge semicolon, and none of them were sure of what came next.

  Beth stood at the end of Adriana’s bed and stared at nothing in particular, while Mr. Song, set the packages down. “We’re so happy to see you,” her father said, hugging her head to him. After a long while he let go, and Adriana almost felt displaced, as though she’d been taken by a wave and dropped on a foreign shore. Beth looked adrift too, and Adriana felt a kinship to her that was more than blood.

  “It’s Beth’s birthday!” Mr. Song said, too loudly. Adriana gaped. Of course it was. She had totally forgotten.

  Adriana stretched out her arms to her, saying, “Beth, honey. Happy birthday.”

  Beth moved to the head of Adriana’s bed. Adriana wrapped her in a bear hug, and squeezed her shoulders. Beth made no move to let her go, and in fact seemed to have wilted into her arms, so Adriana kept hugging her, until Mr. Song, beaming his approval, thrust a gift in Beth’s direction. Adriana patted the bed, indicated Beth should seat herself there, which she did, but then seemed not to know what to do next. Mr. Song thrust a clumsily wrapped present toward her. “This one’s from Adriana,” he said

  It was a strange shape for a present. In fact it looked suspiciously like a football, but as helpless as her father was at coming up wi
th appropriate gifts, she didn’t think he’d go that far wrong. It was in fact a football-shaped bowl on legs, glazed a beautiful blue, with a chopstick holder and a pair of wooden chop sticks. Adriana thought he must have bought it at the Japanese store. Was it as close to a Chinese present as he could get?

  Mr. Song handed Beth a mesh bag full of gold foil covered chocolate coins. Adriana felt a pang of something. Those were her favourite birthday present. Had her father forgotten? But Mr. Song patted Adriana’s arm. “Some for you too, big sister,” he said. Adriana smiled, a real smile that made her eyes crinkle and her cheeks round. Beth sat with a chocolate coin in her mouth, watching them both.

  Adriana never enjoyed her own birthday, because she hated everyone looking at her as she opened her presents. Beth didn’t seem to mind—she ploughed through unwrapping the gifts with very little comment. Her eyes looked tired and sad, Adriana thought. She wondered what Aunt Penny would have done for Beth on her birthday. Maybe there was a special ritual of some kind.

  Afterward, Beth seemed defeated by the mound of presents on the bed. In the face of her resignation, Mr. Song nodded to Adriana surreptitiously. Adriana picked up a book of fairy tales that her father had wrapped for Beth and began to read. Fairy tales were full of wicked stepmothers and magic, but Adriana was a sucker for the fight between good and evil. Beth’s eyes took on a faraway look. It scarcely seemed possible that she would be a teenager this time next year, Adriana thought.

  Snow White had a wicked queen of a stepmother to torment her. Sometimes, Adriana remembered, she had pretended her own mother was that wicked witch and that her “real” mother had somehow sacrificed her life to protect Adriana from evil. When Viera died, Adriana felt a terrible gnawing guilt, as though her fantasies had engulfed them both. Since then, she made a point of regarding her mother with an even detachment, which had led to a kind of truce, though an uneasy one. Viera had stood in constant judgement of her, until just recently. Now Adriana was uncertain of what to expect from Viera, whose smile had faded, along with her wickedness.