by Ismet Prcic
there was the dusk of the hospital room and the voice kept on saying God is here, even though there was no transition from sleep to waking, no opening of eyes, no realization that one realm was different from the other, just the continuous voice saying God is here until it was Mustafa who was saying God is here out loud in his head and the man across the room was tossing himself against his restraints, tugging at himself, making terrifying monkey faces, exposing cords in his neck and hissing in his throaty gravel:
“Fuck him! Shut up! Fuck him into shards!”
That night, way after visiting hours were over, a short woman shuffled into the room. She had the posture of a reanimated corpse, stiff and bemused, her right hand clutching a bulky, rectangular purse. Her clothes looked worn out, brown pants stretched at the knees. She paused at the door as if to adjust her eyes to the level of light. There was a single, buzzing neon tube in the middle of the ceiling, making the shadows of things throb and the things themselves, the faces, the walls, the furniture, look as though made of smooth bone.
Mustafa shuddered when she, finally adjusted to the room’s lighting, pinned down his eyes with her own. Her face spilled outward into an expression of concern and the welling tears gave definition to her eyes, making them obvious, unavoidable points of focus. She came forward, still not dropping her gaze, put her purse on the chair next to the bed, and laid her tremulous hand on his forehead.
“How are you doing, son?” was what she whispered, smiling excruciatingly.
He knew she was going to say that the moment he saw her. That was the cause of his horror. Because he recognized her as one would recognize one’s personal angel of death. It was not the face, or the clothes, or the mannerisms. He recognized the archetype. She was a mother, all right. But his?
No, not his.
The geezer to the left of the buzzard man wheezed and gargled all night. He coughed and mumbled, yelped and howled, sobbed all night. He cried for the goddamned nurses, for his fucking doctor, for his mother. He cried for God. None of them showed. He kept on crying and swearing all night and then, at dawn, he stopped.
Buzzard man’s eyes, though still crazy, signaled solidarity and relief, full of regret for the passing of human life but also saying about fucking time. He was gagged now, on top of being tied to the bed and on top of being nuts. He was restrained and silenced and in that respect in a similar position to Mustafa’s.
They lay there all early morning, staring at each other with bulging, pain-filled eyes. They communicated commiseration to each other, told each other to hang in there, and eye-rolled when the geezers in the room farted, or rasped, or whimpered. The room slowly revealed all its details as the gray light seeped in through the windows. The trees knocked against the glass with the tips of their branches, urged by the wind.
Around eight o’clock a nurse finally came, wheeling in a cart. She looked like she had worked a night shift in the salt mines and this was her second job. Her feet dragged, her hair was nappy, her movements somnambulistic.
“I have to draw your blood,” she said to the dead man.
The buzzard man first looked at Mustafa as if to say, What the fuck? then mumbled through his gag and engaged the nurse with globular eye contact that wouldn’t be denied.
“Are we going to behave better today, Mirsad?” she asked him, pulling out a metal box from the bottom of the cart and picking out a syringe from it. Mirsad mumbled another garbled response. His eyes darted left and right frantically over his gag.
“See? There you go again. I can’t take your gag off if you keep acting like that.” She took the syringe out of its plastic wrapping. “If you want me to take it off you have to promise to be a good boy and stop yelling and cursing. Can you do that for me?”
Mirsad nodded.
“You promise?”
Mirsad nodded. She zombied over to him and started to untie his gag.
“If you show me you can be good and respectful I might even take off your restraints later.”
The gag came off and Mirsad opened and closed his mouth, stuck his tongue out, tried to work some of the locked muscles loose. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.
The nurse was bent over the dead man’s arm trying to find a vein, not even looking at his dead face. She smacked the spongy flesh under his biceps with the tips of her gloved fingers, mechanically.
Mirsad looked at her with contempt, then at Mustafa to see if he shared his outrage. Her blindness seemed unfathomable to him. He watched her for a few moments longer, opened his mouth as if to say something, thought better of it, and just shook his head. She stuck the needle into the dead flesh.
“Better stick that needle into that wall there,” Mirsad said. “You’ll get more blood from it.”
She gave him a tired look but he was now looking away, toward the window.
“What?”
But it was obvious he was not going to say anything else. The nurse finally looked at the dead man’s eyes, waved her hand in front of them, held two fingers against his jugular and then backed away from the bed, her face flushed. She turned and left the room with a little more urgency, wiping her hands on her scrubs.
Mustafa burst into laughter, which lasted only a second before the terrible pain in his throat came back and silenced him.
It took a long time for the nurse to come back with a doctor and two buzz-haired beefcakes in stretched white coats, pushing a gurney whose duct-taped left hind wheel squeaked something awful. They worked fast. The doctor, a frumpy fellow with bloody eyes, ministered to the dead man. He held a pocket mirror to his nose, pulled down on his eyelids and stared into his eyes, picked up his arms and tried to lift them, yanking at the stiff resistance. He ordered the beefcakes to roll the dead man to his side, pulled the dead man’s pajama top out of his pajama bottom and looked at the skin on his back, then chicken-scratched some things onto a sheet of paper clamped to a clipboard. Then he walked out. The beefcakes heaved the cadaver like a grotesque mannequin off the bed and onto the gurney and were gone, too, the wheel going squeakety-squeak down the corridor. The nurse, stuck with the cleanup, peeled off all the bedding into a plastic bag, flipped the thin, stained mattress and dressed it anew. When she left with her cart there was no trace of the dead man.
Nurses spoon-fed the geezers bread and briny, brownish broth. They talked to them like they were children, and the old men were nasty, spitting and cursing, showing them that they were still there. Mirsad kept turning his magnificent, buzzardly profile away from them, refusing his food completely. Eventually, the nurses gave up on all of them and left. As for Mustafa, he couldn’t open his mouth at all and the IV dripped his tasteless breakfast directly into his vein.
“Grandpa,” called a tinny voice from down the corridor and Mustafa and Mirsad both turned to the door. Mirsad chortled as if he already knew everything that was going to happen.
A blonde girl, about five or six years old, in a red hat and a matching Windbreaker, rushed into the room and scrambled to a stop halfway between the doorway and the empty bed. Her noisy sleeves stopped making noise, and although her mouth continued to smile, her eyes dashed open with surprise as she peeled her gaze from the unoccupied bed and then glanced from bed to bed, trying to recognize a face.
“Grandpa,” she repeated with a little less vigor now, her smile already plateauing.
“Grandpa is not around anymore, little girl,” Mirsad told her.
The girl’s face turned red with confusion. Her little teeth bit her lower lip.
“Your grandpa died this morning.”
She just stood facing the empty bed. Mustafa thought that if he had known what Mirsad was going to say ahead of time he would have chucked his IV stand like a spear right into his lunatic, scavenger face, his own pain be damned.
Something popped within the girl and she screamed a normal scream. Mustafa was glad that she had that in her.
She took a timid step backward but never made it all the way to the door. Instead, her mother,
a pasty woman shaped like a pear, plunged into the room and picked her up into her arms, holding the back of her head gently as though she were an infant. She broke into soft, soothing ocean noises, saying shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, and rushed out of the room.
A man poked his head in with a dumb expression on his face. He was gray but there was a ridiculous earring in his ear.
“Where did he go?” His question seemed to be rhetorical, considering the volume and the degree of inflection. Then he met Mirsad’s gaudy eyes and directed his next question at him.
“Where did they take him?”
“Into the sky,” said Mirsad.
The man’s face turned even dumber and he disappeared from the door frame. Mustafa heard him say something to his wife and then yell for a nurse.
“People,” Mirsad said to Mustafa, “they deserve everything that’s coming to them.”
There was a commotion in the corridor and the gray man with the earring barged into the room again, his arms slicing the air.
“He was right here yesterday,” he cried. “We talked about his precious plum tree and I fed him some corn bread. Right here.” He gestured at the creaseless pillowcase.
The nurse who tried to draw blood from his dead father appeared livelier and professionally reserved when she came in this time.
“My condolences, sir,” she offered, looking down at her shoes. “There was nothing we could have done. It was his time.”
Mirsad scoffed.
The man looked at him, then at the nurse. She ran her hand through her nappy hair.
“Are you sure he wasn’t just transferred somewhere?” asked the man.
“I’m sure.”
He went over and sat on the empty bed.
“If it’s any consolation, he passed peacefully in his sleep,” said the nurse with perfect intonation, putting her hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Peacefully, my dick!” Mirsad shouted. “The man was in pain all night! He was screaming and shouting—”
The nurse was already next to him in panic, fumbling with the gag.
“Don’t listen to this man, sir. We had to transfer him from the ward upstairs because there wasn’t any room up there.” She tapped her temple with her left index finger and rolled her eyes pointedly. The man stood up, gawking at both of them, unsure of whom to believe.
“—calling for personnel, crying like a baby because he knew he was dying, and none of you fuckers as much as walked down that corridor, let alone came in to check on him! On any of us!”
She attempted to slip the gag into his mouth but Mirsad snapped his jaws at her, growling like Archibald.
“Don’t touch me! I’ll fuck you into shards!”
She retreated to the grieving son.
“Come with me, sir,” she said, taking him by the arm. “It’s not safe here.” She used his confusion to whisk him away, leaving the buzzard man to scream about breaking people like shot glasses against the fireplace. He tried to wiggle out of his restraints. It wasn’t long before the beefcakes made their return, smiled creamily as they drew curtains between all the beds and, out of sight, silenced the raving man. They silenced him so well that he didn’t wake up until noon the next day, at which point they silenced him again despite the fact that he made no sound at all.
Later, in the silence of that afternoon, a petite young woman with her hair in her face glided into the room as though on an excruciatingly slow conveyor belt, barely stirring anyone. She was in a pair of pink pajamas, the top of which was stretched open, exposing one of her small, pointy breasts. The cuticles around her fingernails were chewed raw. She was walking toward the window in a trance when some nurse finally tracked her down and took her by her shoulders.
“We’re not supposed to be in here,” said the nurse gently, turning her body back toward the door, pulling a flap of pink fabric to cover her puffy nipple.
“Hi, Momma,” the girl said, tonguing the corner of her lips. For a moment Mustafa saw her face: her dead eyes, the deep crimson of her open mouth, and her small delicate nostrils. It wasn’t until she spat on the floor that he realized who she was
“Down! Down!” the Claw yells and we drop Steamboat’s body into the mud and get down. Three or four shells hit in rapid succession, the closest one some twenty meters away. Up the hill, Ninja’s smoke grenade, thrown earlier to cover our retreat, is dying, spurting its last white breath.
“The tree!” the Claw yells through the rain, motioning to an oak halfway between the trenches.
We grab Steamboat’s shoulder straps and start our crawl and drag, crawl and drag. The progress is slow. Chetniks are blanket shelling everything, cavalier with their ammo. Two or three machine guns are blurting their repetitive syllables. Slugs fly over. Our noses in the mud, we blindly crawl backward.
I just keep going and going and the next time I find the courage to look around, the tree is right there, between us and them. I stop, my abdomen in a knot. The Claw stops, too. I can’t take large enough breaths to accommodate the sudden need for them with my face in the muddy grass. I flip and face the ferocious skies. Raindrops grow bigger and bigger and hit my lips, forehead, cheekbone. I pant like Archibald for a while and then push myself under the foliage, sick of being rained on and shot at.
Something forced itself into Mustafa’s mind’s eye with the ferocity of a flashback. He was transported to another place, a small round park completely surrounded by a street (it’s called a roundabout, he remembered,) in the middle of a city he somehow knew was Edinburgh. Everything was vivid. He knew what he was doing there, too; he was in the middle of a play, he knew his next line. Sure enough, there were his fellow actors, too. And even though he jumped right into his role, dropped down and did twenty push-ups, counting out loud in English and forcing his own face into the mud, a part of him was flabbergasted. Flash-forwards couldn’t feel like flashbacks,could they? It simply wasn’t possible to remember a place one had never visited, recall a play one had never read.
He dropped down to his knees with his back to a mighty Scottish oak and said his next line:
“Please, God, give us technical pencils and salvation,” he crooned, his eyes closed, his face turned upward. “Bring back our mothers and let them splash in shallow cognac, O Mighty One. Give us spas for diving and walnut forests for pointy frolicking. Put fear in us so we don’t lose our moral balance. Fuck us into shards.”
All at once the other actors were leaving the park through a hole in a metal fence. Mustafa saw his director (Asmir’s his name) talking to a portly female cop and emphatically trying to explain something. Her small white police car was up on the curb, flashing its lights, the driver’s side door ajar. Passersby were converging on the scene in waves, gawking and sneaking snapshots.
He was alone in the park now, at the center of everything, and the cop came to the fence and pointed at him.
“You have not obtained the proper documentation to perform here, sir!” she said.
“Make our cunts wide so that we feel no pain of birth!” Mustafa screamed his next line.
“You have to discontinue!” the cop went. “This performance is over!”
Another police car pulled up and two male cops came out running. Mustafa turned away from them and approached the tree. He put his head to the ground and got up into the kneeling position again. He did it over and over again, unable to stop himself from performing. Every time he opened his eyes he saw that the crowd was growing in size. His fellow actors motioned for him to stop but he just kept on going down and up, down and up, again and again.
Somebody was taping him with a camcorder. There was a red dot in the crowd. Mustafa raised his head and screamed.
Then: magic. Out of the foliage above, a thick, dry branch broke off with a rich crack, shushed through the leaves, and thudded onto the ground in front of him.
I’m choking. It’s crushing my throat. I’m trying to push it off but can’t. My arms are boneless, fleshy. They bend when I push. I dig my nails
into the bark, fighting for purchase. Twigs and bark fragments hit my face, eyes, fall into my mouth. Bullets are ripping up and down the tree. I cannot inhale. I cannot inhale.
Then I inhale and the air fills my throat, lungs, and mind with pain. I see stars. I exhale.
“Mustafa,” the Claw calls, breathing his rotten breath in my face as I inhale another gulp. But the pain . . . The pain is . . .
Mustafa spun around and around, wielding the fallen branch and laughing. He remembered how he had remembered who he was in the first place. It came down on him like a hammer when the Claw came to visit him in that loony bin, in that hospital room with that birdly man, his neighbor. He had instantly remembered how the Claw had left him in between the trenches all night but had come back before dawn, tied a rope around him, and dragged him down the hill to safety. And spinning around like that he also remembered the Claw’s strange demise later on. But what he still could not for the life of him remember was what it all meant.