Whatever the Impulse

by Tina Amiri

  “I can always have the stupid window fixed, but it’s not so easy when it’s a broken life.”

  Night couldn’t stop shaking, even under two blankets. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so sick, and the thought did cross his mind that maybe he was dying. His father, on the other hand, hardly seemed concerned.

  “Did I mention…your slut friend came by the restaurant yesterday?”

  Night’s eyelids parted to the sight of Andrew’s face turning sharply toward the window—right before he too heard the car enter the clearing.

  His father tramped to the front door and Night heard it fly open. The light from outside beamed down the corridor and stayed until long after the rumbling noise had faded. After the thud of the door closing, Night also heard three muffled words…

  “No fucking way.”

  ****

  Andrew feigned delight when Lila paid him another surprise visit, the next morning.

  “You don’t look well, Andrew.”

  “And I’m the healthy one here,” he replied, instigating the discussion that he intended to wrap up forthwith.

  “I certainly hope you’ve apologized to your son for yesterday?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Lila grinned. “I kind of like the rarely seen disheveled Andrew, but I guess this was a bad time for me to just drop in.”

  “It’s never a bad time, Lila. Rightfully, you should be living here with me.”

  “Hm. How’s Night feeling? Could I say hello?”

  “I don’t think he would appreciate company right now.”

  “Andrew, I’m not company, remember? Rightfully I should be living here with you.” She strode past him and he followed her, up the stairs, and into Night’s room.

  The half-open window drew the sickness from the room and replaced it with fresh salty air. Lila approached Night’s bedside and waited for him to open his eyes.

  Andrew lingered inside the doorway and crossed his arms.

  “Night…?” She touched his face like a mother and her eyes widened. “My God, Andrew. You hardly need a fire downstairs to heat this place up.”

  “Yes, come now, Lila. He’ll be just fine.”

  Lila ignored him and proficiently slipped another pillow under Night’s head. “His lungs sound full. That might help a bit.” She felt his pulse at his throat and appeared to be assessing the rate of his breaths. “If he’s got pneumonia, he may need more than bed rest, Andrew.”

  “I know, and I’ve already been to the doctor,” Andrew informed. “It’s just a cold.”

  “A cold?” She gawked his way in disbelief.

  “Whatever it is, he’ll be just fine in a few days. His doctor gave me this.” He pulled a piece of paper from his breast pocket. “If you really want to help, you can go into town and pick this up for me.”

  ****

  Two hours later, Lila returned with the antibiotics that Andrew had prescribed using a page from his own doctor’s prescription pad. He’d filched it some time ago for situations like this, but he’d never had to use it.

  Lila showed him how to dissolve the contents of these capsules in water to get them into his patient. “You want to make sure that he doesn’t get too dehydrated,” she lectured. “People don’t always respect how serious that can be.”

  “Thank you, Nurse Lila, but he isn’t going to die. It’s just what we get sometimes for dealing with the public.”

  Lila smirked. “You’re so sympathetic, Andrew. You’d fit right in with the nurses on my floor.”

  “I trust you work with a brilliant staff?”

  Their persistent bantering engaged Night on some level, but his words kept evaporating on his lips. Lila dropped an ear closer to his mouth. “What’s he saying? ‘It’s like’ what’?”

  “He’s dreaming, Lila. Come now.”

  He hastened her through the doorway, remaining tight at her heels. Before the door closed behind him, Andrew managed to decode Night’s uncoordinated, yet defiant effort:

  “It’s a lie.”

  After Lila had left the house to catch some sleep before her next shift, Andrew called the restaurant to report that he wouldn’t be in for a few days. He stayed with Night in a similar state of dysfunction, resting his head on the blanket at the level of Night’s hand. It slowly began to register that he could be reaping the upshot of some unlicensed doctoring. Lila’s words taunted him as well. Night would no longer swallow any water, therefore no medication, and after the initial two days of incoherent rambling, he just fell silent.

  The tedious accounts of modern people becoming deathly ill from some bug had never impressed Andrew before, but here he was, essentially being confronted with the influenza of the dark ages.

  ****

  Lila reached for the hospital elevator’s Hold Door button when Doctor Gardner came strutting around the corner from the adjacent hallway.

  “Thanks, Lila,” he said, turning to face the front, before he dropped his chin.

  She thought he always acted a little coy when he came into contact with her. He was a true South County General relic, having practiced at this hospital since its doors opened in the late 1950’s. He’d blushed in her presence the first time she introduced herself as a new nurse, sixteen years ago, at age twenty-five, but beyond his mannerisms, he’d always remained professional.

  “How are you tonight?” Lila continued, working her way up to the real question. She peeped at him sideways, opened her mouth, reset her posture, and then repeated this whole sequence.

  “Can’t complain, but what about you, Lila? It looks like there’s something on your mind.”

  The modest hopefulness in his tone encouraged Lila to go for it. “Doctor…can you recall a case from 1965-66, involving a local woman who died here…last name Shannien?”

  He gave her question some genuine thought. “Shannien… That’s a name from around that time, but I believe the situation involved a young, unwed mother…”

  “No, no,” Lila asserted. “The woman I’m referring to was definitely a mature, sophisticated woman.”

  The doctor chuckled. “I don’t think so, but the more I think about it, it was her infant son who was admitted. Shannien…yes. That was the case.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lila became more obstinate as the blood drained from her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. I’m talking about my partner’s deceased wife and she wasn’t an unwed teenager.”

  It appeared that her charm had limits as Gardner bristled against her contention. He shuffled his whole body in a quarter turn to face her, even as the elevator doors reopened. “Lila, come by my office tomorrow evening. By then I should have what I need from Medical Records and I’ll prove to you that my memory is not failing me yet.”

  ****

  Almost a week of decline brought Andrew to a long forgotten threshold. He’d nixed the hospital as an option so he had only one hope. He knelt beside Night’s bed and resorted to an act that he had refused to perform in almost two decades. At the edge of the bed, he placed his head between his elbows and he prayed. When he felt he’d lectured the Fates enough, he left the room and simply closed the door.

  ****

  Night awoke into a stale blackness of midnight and wondered if he hadn’t woken up, if this was another form of nightmare, already in progress. He couldn’t convince his body or even his lips to move when panic should have ignited all systems. But this experience, like every bad dream, could not endure the light of sunrise.

  ****

  Andrew kept his relief hidden behind a mantle of guilt. It wasn’t until he came to see Night’s recovery as a personal win—something to throw back at Lila—that he noticed a clear aberration. Lila hadn’t called him or visited him in days.

  ****

  True to form, Andrew made Night feel sorry that he had lived for whatever he did in his virtual coma. Apparently, some sort of doom was upon them both and it was all his fault. Sniffing and surveying the waves from the new living room window, still p
ristine and curtainless, Night watched as though the chaos and destruction would come by sea, and somehow, he didn’t really care.

  Chapter Seven

  The world looked a lot brighter to Night through the windshield of Daphne’s car. While she kept their destination a secret, she didn’t hold back about the number of times she’d tried to visit him but had to turn around, as per his instructions. Night tipped his head into his hand against the window, regretting that he’d done this to himself and to Daphne under the counsel of someone who was clearly the enemy.

  They arrived at an old cottage where a large group of young people sat around a blazing bonfire, drinking beer. It didn’t take long for a bottle to end up in each of their hands and Night tipped his back incessantly. He didn’t mean for the sun to disappear before mustering the nerve to tell Daphne the truth about everything, but he couldn’t chance her getting angry.

  “You look so damn serious and we’re here to relax,” Daphne chided playfully in the flickering light.

  The air had turned cool, and perched on one of his thighs, she wrapped herself around him like a backward scarf. Another couple in their circle started kissing, inspiring Night to show Daphne that he remembered everything from their last visit.

  He would tell her the truth very soon, in a moment, or later—or in the morning when they woke up together in her room. He only knew he wasn’t going back to his house.

  The music picked up—again that peculiar and brilliant sound. A young man with a mustache bounded from the house clutching a cigarette in one hand and a long wooden pole in the other, just ahead of his friend who carried a set of long brackets with many rungs. In two minutes, they had the pole suspended horizontally in mid-air, the soft rock music swapped for something seductively energetic, and the occasion labeled for the one clueless freak among them as someone jumped up and howled, “Limbo contest!”

  Daphne lifted her mouth to his ear. “I’ll bet you could do that.”

  Everyone stood up to watch as the first fellow leaned back and bounced his way out from under the pole; the two females that followed turned out to be equally skilled. Night could not only hear the music, he could feel it reinventing the rhythm of his heart and overhauling his whole concept of living.

  Daphne shoved him toward the lineup. He glanced back several times out of habitual unease, but he was exactly where he wanted to be. He copied what the others had demonstrated and also emerged cleanly from under the pole. People cheered at the limber newcomer, especially when he cleared it for the third time. It both surprised and encouraged him, but even his newfound confidence didn’t help him when the bar was dropped to the second last rung.

  By that time, Daphne looked more than eager to have him back. She finished taking a drag on the strange, tiny cigarette between her thumb and forefinger and passed it to her neighbor before he could take a seat. She helped herself to a swig of his beer before she grabbed his fingers and led him into the darkness of a nearby path.

  The light of the ancient moon followed them like a magic lantern. Its glow blossomed over the old bridge where they stopped and admired the diamond carpet that rolled out across the black water. Earth’s aura lifted between them in scents of mushroom and evergreen.

  Night turned from the railing and locked his sight on Daphne. She dropped her heavy knitted cardigan and he hungrily pulled her near. The bridge became a surreal place, with no rules, no right or wrong, nobody to declare his every move and desire a perilous violation.

  Daphne stepped back and, in less than three heartbeats, he caught onto her game. She turned her smile away when the zipper on his quilted vest got caught on a thread, but it fell soon enough, leaving him still covered by a tight, thin sweater.

  “That’s cheating,” she teased in a sultry purr. Showing him her back, she unbuttoned her slip-dress and waited to be helped with the rest. Instinct took over and he placed his hands on her small shoulders and traced them down, taking with them the straps of her dress. Then she twirled to face him.

  Night had never seen ice-pink underwear like this before, and it did for him everything it was meant to. Daphne stole his turn and pulled up his sweater. When she could no longer reach, he completed the job. His focus returned to her lacy bra, which she reached back to unclasp herself. It tumbled to the wood, but Night didn’t notice it land.

  Holding his gaze, she backed away and stroked her long flame-red hair while the moonlight presented her skin in milky porcelain-white, the contrast breathtaking.

  He remained transfixed and desire rushed his neutral eyes. At once he understood that a flawless veneer, stylish clothes, and flashy accessories couldn’t hold a candle to the sublimity of this girl’s bare skin, the wind through her already careless hair—mystery, expectation and pure admiration for nothing more than what nature ordained. This was the essence of eroticism though he didn’t know it by name.

  “Don’t worry,” she breathed as they came together, which he assumed implied that nobody would know.

  Their arms fused around one another and their lips collided with more force at every contact. It helped that on high-heeled sandals, Daphne stood several inches taller. He had learned a lot from their past kisses, and it didn’t take him long to master any art. Daphne would just have to wonder how he’d suddenly become the aggressor.

  She brought him to the wood planks and pushed him back before he could think of coming forward on her. She kissed him shortly before slinking halfway down his body.

  He blushed at the stars as he listened to murmurings of how ‘hot’ he was while she kissed him all the way from below his navel to his chest where she teased his taut nipples with small shudders of breath, tiny licks and delightfully distressing pinches between her teeth. His fingers coursed through her river of hair while she lifted her head, but his hands went limp when she opened his jeans. He helped her slide them past his knees, from where her hands ran up as she kissed her way up his thighs. There, she began tracing his hips with her nails while she tugged at the damp front of his underpants with her lips. He already welcomed the arrival of the most magnificent feeling of his life and he reclaimed his grip on her scattered mane.

  Night appreciated all the tactics she used to drive him to this treacherous brink. He forgot to exhale as Daphne’s warm breath continued to circle his private parts… This term, which he’d only heard from his father, thanks to his childhood curiosity, breezed through his frenetically blissful mind, and stirred up a grievance. More than any other body part—more than an elbow, knee or a nose—this one deserved to have a specific name.

  Daphne’s fingers slipped inside his underpants to free this special part and his breathing reignited with a gasp. Her mouth sank down and he could hardly stand the few last seconds to touchdown, and then her body collapsed over him to the sound of her shoe sole skidding off the edge of the bridge. A faint splash followed as her shoe met the inkwell below.

  Daphne scrambled onto her knees and twisted to peer over the side and Night’s intentions split in two. His state had not been abated, but Daphne’s attention appeared to have left him, so he stood up and pulled up his jeans.

  He left them open, and once he’d climbed down the embankment, he finished the job himself. It didn’t take long; then he staggered through the icy thigh-high water until he spotted the pale shoe scarcely hanging onto one of the boulders beneath the surface.

  By the time he returned, Daphne looked as cold as the current he’d just waded through, in spite of his gallant deed. He set the shoe down in front of her where she sat crouched against a splintery post, huddled in her wooly cardigan with her arms crossed unyieldingly across her chest, but then she grinned.

  “It’s all right,” she said as she rose and pulled the straps over her heels. “You’re soaked and you’re freezing. Let’s just go.”

  With chattering teeth, Night scooped up his things and followed her to the car. He frequently disappointed his father and so, he concluded, he probably had the same propensity with everybody else. He
exhaled as he sat down in the passenger seat. How could he tell her the truth now?

  She drove him back to his house in complete silence. In the driveway, she flicked the light on above them. “I had a good time. You probably could have won the contest but you tend to freeze up.” She winked and then draped her pink bra over Night’s arm.

  He didn’t know if she’d just handed him a final consolation prize or a pledge of commitment, but either way, it was his cue to get out.

  The car’s headlights helped him to the front steps. He hated being back, but he felt he could survive on this evening for a while. Even if something trumped it, he would never forget this one experience. He waited until he could no longer see the car’s taillights through the trees, then he blissfully swung around and sauntered up the stairs, closing his eyes indulgently, and it was in that moment that the lanterns beside the doorframe came to life.

  His father had informed him that he wouldn’t be home until the next morning, but the lanterns suggested otherwise. The silent door in front of him now seemed alive and breathing and he feared disturbing it. He hesitated with his hand on the door handle, but he had little choice, now that Daphne had left.

  He crept through the foyer, drawn forward by the demure lamplight in the living room that spilled a human shadow toward him. Night peered in the direction of the empty driveway, only to receive full confirmation of his father’s presence through a blazing sweep that landed across his face.

  “Yes, the car is out there,” Andrew barked as he studied Night up and down, wincing at the beacon of pink lingerie hanging over his arm. The malevolent glow in his eyes faded as he turned around and made his way, despondently now, to his armchair.

  Night pressed himself against the wall in the living room, now that his legs had lost most of their strength.

  Andrew’s head slumped over his knees and he rubbed his heated temples. “How could you?”

  Night assumed this was all about his rendezvous with Daphne. “She just—”

  “Lila’s gone,” his father’s voice rolled like dark, heavy storm clouds.