He found the surgeon scrubbing his hands at a basin in one corner, the shadows falling slantwise across him. He was holding his hands up and his skin looked very white and the water ran down his forearms in brown rivulets as he shook them dry.
You shouldn't be in here, the surgeon said. What are you doing here?
I'm looking for a, the old man began. Then he fell silent.
Two of the nurses had moved away and he could see now on the operating table a figure laid out half-naked and exposed, her stomach swabbed darkly with iodine. A nurse was carefully unwrapping the stump of her left arm.
Do you know her?
He nodded.
The surgeon looked wearied. Nurse, he called. And then to the old man: We'll do what we can. She's hemorrhaging bad. You can wait through there.
A nurse led him back through to the closetlike entry and left him. It was quiet there. A small metal folding table, two chairs by the entrance. He watched her disappear back into the operating theatre and the plastic strips over the door clattered and cut softly and fell still.
He stood a moment listening. Picked up a clock on the metal table to wind it and propped it back in place. Upon a white cloth unfolded there lay various weird implements hooked and toothed like articles of dentistry or the refined instruments of some torturer's bag. He could hear the surgeon murmuring in the room beyond. The click of scalpels. A high whine and sluck of some fluid sucked clear. He sat and leaned back and crossed his ankles to wait. Pinched his eyes shut.
Sometime later he rolled one eye groggily open. He looked at the clock to see how long he had slept. He rose and looked in the basin and saw silver forceps soaking in the clear water but otherwise all was as it was before. His own watery reflection stared out at him.
He crossed to the door and looked out. The heat was baking up out of the earth and the old man squinted and ran a hand along the inside of his collar. The tarps were lifting and shimmering but there was no wind and he felt uneasy seeing it. Something had awoken him and he thought perhaps he had heard the tobacconist cry out in pain and then he thought perhaps the surgeon had come in and stood over him while he slept but neither seemed likely and there was a scent of the sea in his nostrils and then he rubbed his eyes for he recalled his dream.
In the dream he had been standing on a sandy log and a tide was going out and out but it was no tide he had known. In a yellow inflatable raft his wife and grandfather were being carried farther out and they were laughing. He heard out of the grey sky the bellow of a ship. Dark ropes of kelp and shining rocks and rippled banks of mud sat exposed to the air and still the tide went out and the old man began to wade out across it. He wore gumboots in the dream and the going was hard in that mud.
The sky above the tarps looked blue and pure to his eye and the sun was still sinking at that hour and on another day this would have passed for great beauty. Standing there in that sunlit doorway he thought the world of man ineffable and fiery and blessed. And he saw the boy pulling a rifle from a corpse and then his dead wife holding a black umbrella at a curb and he saw a sliver of light in a blackened hall. He saw the tobacconist lifting a glass of water to her lips and drinking in the white stillness of her shop and her slender eyes were upon him and he saw the black woman with the bandaged hand laid out in the cot. A yellow rope was tied to the low brass ring of a tarp sheet and he watched its canvas billow and roll and it seemed to him that he stood at a window staring in upon the world, so removed was he from it.
Then a nurse was standing beside him and she pressed a hand against his shoulder. She told him the tobacconist had died. She told him she had not regained consciousness and she did not suffer in the end. Her voice was soft and tired.
The old man stood breathing. Is that it? he said at last. Is that all of it?
I'm sorry.
The old man looked down at the nurse's clean white hands and up at her face and he nodded and turned and left that place. Under the dying red sun his heart felt cerulean and cold.
She said I played the victim. I expect there's truth in that. She said there
was no space in our marriage for her anger. That she couldn't be justifiably
angry ever. Well. She'd smash dishes, throw crockery. She was difficult
and sensitive and there wasn't any right move to make with her.
I don't know. I think this city stifled something in her, the drab buildings
and miserable parties and the silence in the streets after dusk. Maybe
it was me. It didn't help that we didn't have any kind of friend except
a Polish mechanic who lived across the alley. He'd stay up late smoking
cigars and getting drunk on a brandy he brought over with him. Then
he'd close his eyes and get to muttering in Polish and Callie would just
give me a look and go to bed. I wouldn't say we were lonely. Not that.
But tying on an apron and cooking and cleaning was never the fate for
Callie. I can remember one night she hurled a casserole dish out the
kitchen window into the driveway. The raccoons got into it, the metal
pan clattering and scraping over the gravel while we tried to sleep. I was
a little frightened of her. I think sometimes I argued with her out of
shame. She had strong hands and when she hit me it hurt. But she was
also kind, and generous, and she tried not to let her unhappiness infect
anyone around her. So what do you do with that? It's been more than
thirty years and I don't pretend she was something she wasn't. She made
me sick with anger sometimes. But I learned more from her than from
anyone. And I include my grandfather in that. It's a hard thing living
with a debt that can't be repaid. I guess that's what guilt is. I've felt it a
long time now. I don't know that I'd take back any of the fights if I could.
They were a part of what we were. I suppose Callie'd say otherwise. I do
wish we'd been gentler with each other. I do wish that. I could've been a
better person. I know it.
Well. If somebody could invent a machine that told you happiness
when you were in it, I guess they wouldn't have to eat potatoes ever again.
I guess not.
Is there no coffee? he grimaced. Tilting the steel canister.
A table of nurses glanced up from their trays.
Hang on, the counterman said. Ladling up grey scoops of potato. Scraping the mess towards him and banging the spoon on the dish and wiping his fists in his stained apron. Coffee?
The old man nodded.
Can't sleep, eh?
A flurry of muttering from the nurses' table. Sad frowns his way.
I'm not much for it myself. Some people just want to roll over and go to sleep when something like this hits. The rest of us just can't. The counterman swung the shining canister down and lifted a second from near his shoes. Flicked a red switch along one side.
You a doctor then?
No.
Well. You got that look.
Surgeonlike himself in his apron, sleeves rolled high past his elbows. Doffing his white cap. A tall and stove-chested stranger in a pair of yellow galoshes, rumpled clothes, two dirty adhesive bandages set crosswise low at his throat and puckering outward as he dropped his chin.
The old man watched him at his work. Scraping and stacking an empty silver tray, wiping down the server's counter. Hefting a pail of watery soup into place by its handles. A brown fluid slid down the walls of the pail, hissing. He watched it, thinking of Aza with Callie long years ago, the soft sepia light in the parlour windows where they sat laughing softly, dark-tressed heads bent together, and then Callie's wide angry mouth lifting towards him as he came foolishly in and saw too late that they were not laughing but crying. He glanced around.
What?
I said, are you hungry.
The old man blinked, a cup of coffee in each hand. Some pink meat sore-looking and inflamed in its dish of thick grease. Pale noodles slick with mucus. Platters of fried eggs sweating under heat lamps, beans leached and grey.
He took a step back. I guess not, he said.
Well, said the counterman. If you are.
Thanks.
He set down one cup and pocketed a handful of creams and packets of sugar. An old cook coughed in the kitchen beyond, his shadow in the door's light. Ropy black loops of electrician's wire overhung the crossbars of that dining tent and the caged fluorescent lights were buzzing softly overhead by whatever miracle illumined their lives. He slid between the rickety tables and out into the warm night.
He made his way along the dirt path, ascended the grassy slope. The coffee hot through the paper cups, the deep smell of it rich and fine. He could just make out the gardener's truck, the tailgate standing down where the woman sat with her legs swinging slightly.
Arthur? she called softly. Is that you?
He came up to her in the darkness.
Mason's sleeping, she said. How are you holding up?
He sat next to her, held out a cup. White dust rising in the rubble below, men standing about tiny and shadowy against the halogen lamps.
Regret giving up your bed yet? he asked.
No.
How's the arm?
She said nothing, blew on her steaming coffee. Then she frowned. You want the truth?
I guess so.
It hurts.
The old man nodded, grunted at the crews far below. I see they're still at it.
I keep thinking it doesn't feel real.
He lit a cigarette, straightened, breathed out. I was just thinking the opposite. It's so real I don't know what to make of it.
Yes, she said with a nod. That too.
He knew that she was thinking of her daughter and after a moment he said, Mason was sure he'd find you. He never doubted it for a moment.
He's like that. He's always been like that.
He was so sure.
She scratched at her bandaged arm. But you weren't.
No.
She gave him a searching look and he saw this but said nothing and then she was picking at the frayed white threads in her jeans. Out of the floodlit ruins a caravan of trucks was passing. The old man shifted on the grooved metal tailgate and watched their windshields flare and vanish like halos in the false light.
Arthur? the woman said.
What.
I wanted to thank you.
He sat staring at his hands and they were trembling faintly. Then he twisted around to see through the dirty window where the boy slept with his face dark against the pale leather seats and he said, very softly: He was just a rumour down there. Both of you were. I could hear him singing to you.
Her dark fingers cradling her shattered elbow. The slouch of her shoulders in silhouette.
I'm sorry, he said. You wanted to know.
I do. I do want to know.
It was another man who did most of the work. Pike. He was digging all night. If you want to thank somebody you should thank him.
He thought I was dead. He left me in there.
So you do remember.
She shook her head, uncrossed her legs. Gazed unseeing at the broken taillight by her knee. I can't make any sense of it, she said softly. I don't think I'm the same as I was.
No.
It scares me.
There was something in her voice as she said this and he did not ask and she did not say.
He wet his lips, drew long on his cigarette. He was thinking of the tobacconist polishing the brass railing in her shop and the glint of silver in her mouth when she smiled. He winced in the darkness.
I wonder if we could have known this was coming, she said. If there were signs.
He sipped at his coffee. What do you mean. Like warning tremors?
Maybe.
Do you mean signs from God?
An inky black shine in her eyes as she smiled at him. I don't mean from God.
He held her gaze a moment. You're being so polite, he said.
I'm not being polite, she said. It wouldn't even occur to me. God doesn't even come into it for me. I can be rougher if you want.
Be rougher.
You believe in God?
The old man drew deeply again on the cigarette and lifted his chin and blew out the stars. The tobacconist in her shirtsleeves in the sunlight, peering up at him. Her leathery spotted hands. I don't think that's the sort of question anyone can answer, he said. Not honestly.
No?
You don't agree, he said. You think you can answer it.
She said nothing.
You think you can. But you can't. That's the trouble with it. I don't know how to make sense of what happened today. Was I given a chance at goodbye? Or did I just fail her twice?
You can't think like that, she said softly.
The cigarette burning between his grazed knuckles. The smell of that surgery tent and the sharp cloudy stink of the iodine. I'll tell you a story, he said. This happened in a small town in southern Alberta. Just east of the Rockies.
Is this a true story?
It really happened, if that's what you mean. He brushed at his trouser legs and then waved his hand large-knuckled and knotted and white at the darkness to dispel the smoke in the air. He tipped the ash from his cigarette into the dirt. He said, There was a teacher in the local high school, a good man. But not a lucky one. Some years earlier his wife had been killed in a car accident and in his grief he'd turned to drink, and then, drunk, he'd turned to God. I don't know how exactly. But in the end he was reborn, he was saved.
Saved, she said.
Yes.
Is this how you answer my question? Or how you avoid it?
He cleared his throat. I don't know, he said. Maybe both.
So this man, he went on, this teacher. He kept a faded pocket bible buttoned in his shirt flap and he consulted it often. He came to believe it the word of God given to men for safekeeping and that all things written in it were true. That all men are brothers in that they are sprung from Eve and that God in his goodness created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. This man's faith in such creation stories became his compass, and he guided his life by it. A good life, lived among his fellow men, and he didn't drink or walk in temptation.