The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  He still remembered the feeling just before Tower pulled him out of the Blackfoot that time, the moment he gave in and stopped fighting. His arms and legs unburdening, his chest relaxing, everything sharp and clear as he stood on the border looking across. It terrified him still when he thought about how willing he’d been to give in, the resentment like bile when he was yanked back.

  It had passed quickly, of course, with his first gulped breath (though it returned unexpectedly from time to time, tugging at his sleeve). A chest-burning rush of love shot through him, and he promised right there—tearfully, ridiculously—to be the watchdog of Tower’s newborn daughter. To let nothing happen to little Cicely. Knowing that she would not always be little Cicely, and still believing himself capable of keeping such a promise.

  She cried at her baptism, the icy water splashing across her forehead, running into her eyes. They were tied immediately in that way, bonded by water. Later, he and Tower together taught her to fish the little creek near their house. Pete would come up for the weekend, and they would hike out together through the woods to the chalk creek. She was more interested in the birds nesting in the low cliffs and the viceroy butterflies hovering over the creekside asters, but it didn’t matter. Fishing was to a large extent an excuse, Pete had known that for some time.

  When she was first admitted to Mercy, he tried to replicate the connection by way of a pet betta. It was very much against the rules, but he knew no one would call him on it. No nurse or PA certainly. The bowl sat on the sill in the little window alcove, the fish swimming aimlessly inside and periodically throwing itself against the glass. You could hear it, a little ping every so often. Then it would float slowly toward the surface before recovering and swimming back into its corner behind the little spray of coral.

  Tower took it away before it died, something Pete himself should have done. Its color had faded quickly, no longer iridescent blue but a blotchy gray like the belly of a lamprey. It recovered more and more slowly each time it charged the glass, floating for longer periods on the surface, gills working.

  “You’re an idiot sometimes,” Tower said.

  A nun passed them in the hall, her head lowered to hide her smile. They were always shuffling past, fingering their beads, their black shoes clicking on the tiles.

  “I thought it would cheer her up.”

  “Just fix her. That’ll cheer her up.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yeah you can.”

  He watched the nun’s back, the black cloth off which everything flowed like water. They made him uneasy, the nuns. He couldn’t help feeling they were working against him, with their magic book and their incantations. He’d hear them whispering with patients, catch them glancing secretively at him. In their eyes, he was a partner to the disease.

  “I want to bring in a specialist,” he said.

  “Nobody else,” Tower said.

  “It’s the rule for this kind of thing, Matt. You don’t take care of your own.”

  “Bullshit. That’s the opposite of the rule.”

  “Not here. Not in medicine. You don’t treat family, that’s the rule.”

  “We’re not family.”

  “Close enough.” He thought that might strike Tower as touching, but it didn’t. “Your judgment goes when you’re too close. You can’t make the hard choices.”

  It was true, whether or not it was the real reason for his decision. He considered calling down the hall to the nun, having her explain to Tower how weak and faulty people are, how they can’t be depended on to carry the day.

  “It’s like a fishing guide,” he said. “Think of him like that.”

  “Jesus.”

  “No, really. He knows where to look. And where not to waste his time.”

  When Pete brought Kinnell in, all the way from Pittsburgh, Tower wouldn’t even shake his hand. Kinnell stood there with his hand out, his thin, bluish wrist covered with a fine dusting of talc, the long fingers twitching like worms.

  “This guy’s the best,” Pete said to Cicely. “The best in the world.”

  Cicely tried to smile, to ignore her father’s turned back and be the good patient, but she knew just as well as Tower what it was all about. She had never named the betta. She wasn’t a kid anymore, she knew how these things went.

  The river smelled of sulfur, a plume of steam rose from the far bank. The fish had adapted to it, Pete supposed, taking in the gas and converting it to belly colors and parr marks. Beauty transformed from poison. That was life, right? Though just as often it flowed the other way.

  The girl was looking at her reflection in the water, speckled with falling ash. Her broken stream of talk was a whisper now, but whether it was directed at him or the fish Pete couldn’t tell.

  He took out the pocket dictionary he’d picked up before he left, but the words in it were so foreign, so crammed with peculiar letter combinations that he couldn’t tell one from another. He tried to form a sentence from the bits Einar had taught him at the lodge, but she just smiled back, a bright, tolerant smile that was beginning to wear on him.

  There was a peculiar warmth under the cover of the ash, close and dry. The ground was covered with it like black snow, and a layer had formed on the rock that was slick as ice underfoot. This would be a story to tell—volcano fishing. He opened his pack and rooted around for his camera.

  Cicely kept an album of all of his and Tower’s trips, the pictures her way of joining them, of being part of the long chain of friendship. One picture—a shot of him and Tower on the Firehole River, their arms on each other’s shoulders—she’d had made into a sweatshirt. She wore it the day she went into the hospital. Pete found it hanging in the closet, empty and limp-armed, when he went to get a new bedpan liner.

  He and Tower had discussed bringing her along on a trip soon, maybe next year to the Ponoi River. She was old enough, she could handle it no problem. Pete himself had taught her to cast and she’d learned quickly—roll casts, double hauls—she wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up. He had even suggested bringing her this year, but Tower had nixed it. Then she fell down at school, out cold, her belly distended and a fever burning through her. Pete wished he’d insisted on the invitation, if only to let her know she was welcome. You wait too long sometimes, and the chance goes away for good.

  He took a picture looking down the river, and another across at the mountain smoking in the distance. If only he could record it all—the sharp gunpowder smell, the sound that was almost like an inversion, the river and the sizzling flakes receding toward some central mass. The sensation of being perfectly still inside a shifting pocket of sky and earth.

  A school of char swam past below him, moving erratically, darting and weaving like bacteria under a scope. They veered from the wall below him out again into the current. A little downstream, the girl saw them too. She ran to the edge of the ledge calling, sliding at the last second on the slick of ash.

  Pete heard the crack of bone ahead of the splash, saw her flop into the water and sink. He waited for her to claw to the surface and suck in a breath, but there was no struggle, no thrashing of arms and legs, just the water closing over and weaving on through the rocks. The distorted image of the girl hung just beneath the surface, her short hair like a halo of rusty river grass. The current pushing her into the rocks, bouncing her against them.

  We live in water until we’re born, and resemble fish quite closely in the womb. Pete considered the vestigial tail and gill slits, saw a time lapse of the developing fetal face, the halves coming together, seams joining, the nose moving down from the forehead into place. So many things, he knew, could go wrong along the way.

  He followed the bank as far as he could, the girl bobbing up then disappearing, until the river bent into a canyon and there was nowhere to walk anymore. He looped around, over a scarp and down the other side to where the river opened back out, but he couldn’t find her again. Looking up into the canyon, he could see staggered steps of rapids and pools, any number
of places where she could have been caught. He let himself believe for a minute that she’d clambered out somewhere, but he knew she hadn’t. She was up there somewhere, nestled in a gravel bed or wedged in the crook of a boulder. Reversing the process that had created her—her lungs turning back into gills, her arms and legs fanning into fins again.

  Trying to find his way back to the cabin, Pete mistook a knobbed volcanic outcrop for a different one they’d passed that morning and turned west instead of north. Lost again, he topped a rise and found himself on the shoulder of the road he’d driven down the day before, his car cloaked in ash a hundred yards off.

  The engine turned, miraculously, the radio booming to life. Icelandic voices laughed, jabbered. Someone started singing, maybe Bjork, a wail that made him clamp his teeth. He looked in the rearview mirror—lines of ash around his red eyes, along the rim of his jaw. His skin smeared gray in a cracked mask.

  Look what you’ve done to me.

  “Devil fuck,” Einar said. “You’re alive.”

  “Am I?”

  He laughed and slapped Pete on the back.

  “Americans,” he said. “Crazy all the time.”

  A group of Germans had arrived while he was gone. They nodded grimly.

  Einar fixed him a plate of sheep’s head and set two beers by his plate.

  “Where did you go? We looked all day for you.”

  “I’m not sure. I ended up at the Nordura.”

  “You took a wrong turn then.”

  The split sheep’s head stared past him, teeth gritted and lipless.

  “Were there fish?” one of the Germans asked.

  “There’s always fish,” Einar said. “Even when you’re lost.”

  Pete tried to smile, thinking of the rivers as he’d seen them when he first arrived. The clear water, the pristine banks. Now he saw ash sputtering on the surface and frantic schools of char spinning downstream.

  “The Nordura’s a good river,” Einar said. “You got lucky. Good luck with the bad luck.”

  Pete popped an eye out of the sheep’s head and pushed it to the side of his plate. The Germans sipped their beer and took pictures out the window of the low sun behind the ash cloud. Picture after picture.

  “There’s a girl lives out that way,” Einar said. “Her name’s Blin. It means ‘she stares.’ She’s different, I don’t know what you call it in English. We call it Downs-heikenni. A big round face. Happy.”

  “Down syndrome.”

  “She has names for all the fish in the Nordura. She says she can tell them apart.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It’s a nice cabin she has too. Strong and warm.”

  Pete pulled cautiously at the sheep’s tongue.

  “Wait,” Einar said, reaching across the table. He lifted the tongue and smacked the hyoid bone with the back of his knife. “If you don’t do this, a child will never grow to speak.”

  One of the Germans laughed.

  “You have too many superstitions.”

  “Try living here without them.”

  While he was in the big room with Einar and the Germans, the lies came easily to him. He even started to believe them, to grow comfortable around them. What could anyone have done at that point? She was gone, anything he said would have just brought up more questions. Later, alone in his room at the back of the lodge, the lies became harder to accommodate. He told himself various things: If he’d gone in after her, for instance, chances are he wouldn’t have come out again. The water was cold and swift, and he wasn’t much of a swimmer. What good was a sacrifice like that?

  “What is a physician’s most important trait?” his first-year clinical instructor had asked them. They had all answered predictably—compassion, technical expertise, preparedness. And the professor, Hendricksen, had shaken his head, run his tongue across his upper lip at each wrong answer.

  “It’s being willing to walk away,” he’d finally said. Smug and proud in his spotless lab coat. Pete had ridiculed the answer ever since, had modeled his practice around proving Hendricksen wrong. And now here he was.

  Perhaps everyone is a coward, he thought, the only difference is they’re never tested to the point of discovery. The moment of truth never arrives. And within that beautiful bubble, it’s a simple matter to believe you’re who you want to be.

  He watched the night go slightly darker, and closed his eyes. A low buzz of electricity moved through his mind as he lay there. Someone watching would have seen his face twitch, his eyes jerking behind their lids as the vague feeling of something forgotten grew stronger, a thunderstorm moving across dry fields. Then it was there, on top of him, arcing through him.

  The rod. Cicely’s rod.

  He pulled his boots on. The Germans and Einar had all gone to bed. The downstairs room was empty, the last of the fire crackling its thousand red eyes. Outside it was still twilight, as it always seemed to be. He drove for the first few miles with the lights off, watching the landscape materialize and disappear as he moved through it. He found the road after one wrong turn, and pulled over where his old tracks were still visible in the gravel.

  The water seemed less violent when he looked down on it from the ledge, the current almost sluggish. A body would linger for some time before drifting out, you would think. But you couldn’t count on things like currents. Or rivers in general. A river was never the same river twice, as somebody had said. Giving them names was an act of plain desperation, a hopeless effort to hold them in state.

  He found the rod where he’d left it, propped in a notch between two rocks. The bamboo, yellow and translucent as old bone, almost glowed. He lifted it, waggled the tip. It was soft and responsive, an extension of him.

  “It’s not as hard as everybody thinks,” Cicely said as he dozed in the visitor’s chair. She’d been asleep when he came in after his rounds. The medication rose and ebbed in her like that, bringing her suddenly awake and just as suddenly dragging her back down into sleep.

  “What’s not?”

  “Living with this thing. Whatever it is.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Not really. It’s part of me now, you know?”

  There was a name for what she was beginning to feel, though he couldn’t remember what it was. A Stockholm syndrome sort of effect, an irrational attachment to the thing that was killing you.

  “It’s hard for other people,” he said.

  “I know it is, that’s the worst. But I wish you’d tell them it’s okay. Really.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  Her eyes fluttered. The drugs were taking her again.

  “At least tell yourself. You can do that much,” she said.

  But he couldn’t. Not so he’d believe it.

  He could hear the mountain’s periodic rumble flowing in and out of the hiss of wind that had come up and whisked now through the tufts of tundra grass and through the bored holes in the rock. A shrill, warbling whistle that moved with him as he made his way up the slope.

  He wanted a last look at the mountain, at the bulk of it on the horizon with the birth of the world underway. The ash cloud was breaking up. Out over the valley only scattered bits were left, pixely tufts dissipating like static over the little clusters of hiddenfolk moving toward him. He knew what they were without being told, as if he’d always lived among them. Their eyes blinked through the haze, their pale, streaked skin—which normally blended with the landscape—nearly translucent against the backdrop of the ash cloud. They moved quickly, and it wasn’t long before they surrounded him in numbers, pushing and jeering.

  He thought he saw Blin in the throng, standing a head taller and smiling her guileless smile as they herded him toward the cliff edge. The water here, he knew, would be colder than the Blackfoot, colder even than the Clark Fork. Near ice, a degree or two above freezing. How long would he last? Minutes probably.

  They sang and chanted: We are here, we are here, all of us are here. He could smell their breath, close to the smell
of the ash plume—smoke and the aftermath of fire, melting earth. One jumped on his shoulder, bit his ear. He felt blood start down his jaw. A blade sliced across his Achilles tendon. He lurched forward, half walking and half falling.

  “So you’re going,” Tower said. “In the middle of this.”

  “There’s nothing more I can do.”

  He was picturing the unreal landscape of Iceland, savoring its remoteness and strangeness. He could lose himself there, he thought. Anyway, he already had his ticket and had paid the guide. “It’s just a week.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll be in touch. I’ll check in with the staff.”

  “Sure,” Tower said. “Life goes on.” He was looking past Pete, out the window toward the hospital chapel and the rehab center. He looked older, but then they were all subject to that.

  Cicely smiled, as she always did, her smile free of everything but love.

  “Bring back some fat pictures,” she said. Their joke.

  Out in the hallway, a nun shuffled past, gave a little bow.

  “Where is he?” Pete demanded. “That asshole god of yours?” To get a reaction, he guessed, to shake up the smug black-and-white stoicism and crack the beatific smile. He wanted to tear her habit off and make her face things naked like the rest of them.

  “He works with love, doctor. Whatever you may say.”

  He passed a room where Rick Dobson was talking to a patient in the calm, smooth tones of a hypnotist. Impeccable bedside manner; a blessing, the nuns all said. If only Pete could do that, go back to Cicely’s room, pull the chair close to her bed and talk to her like that. Tell her everything he knew, not just about fishing and rivers, but everything. The truth. How hard could it be?

  The air circulating through the ward was cold and sterile. It would be like that in Iceland, everything scrubbed clean by wind. Nothing hidden, no traps or surprises, because there was nowhere to hide. He could see it: a beautiful emptiness going on and on. Just a few sheep here and there, and every so often a river.