15
A hospital room.
Two beds, a sleeping figure. For a moment I assume I am with her, feigning illness, hoping for intercession. Then it is London, and darkness, the piercing rays of the sun. But no—the form moves, a sharp nose pokes beneath bedcovers, a bird whistles, recognition dawns. John Paul shifts in his sleep, his face twitching slightly, his body in motion even in repose. He snorts, flips onto his side, and resumes a measured droning that sounds oddly of the Qur’an’s opening sura. I place my pillow over my head, the odor of my own hair and skin in my face. For the first time in my life, I am ready to die.
Lights flip on mechanically, or perhaps by an unseen hand. John Paul rises in a rush. His feet pad the floor. His breath is musky as he leans in toward me.
“Hey, wake up! It’s rise and shine. Did you sleep okay? Did you dream?”
“I am okay,” I say from the pillow.
“Good morning, gentlemen. Time to wake up.” A tenor voice enters—southern, effeminate. Hands grasp the pillow and remove it from my head, leaving me staring into the face of a reed-faced man, his head and neck dotted with the pits of once-ravaging acne.
“I’m Lawrence. You must be Mr. Conn.”
He extends an orange hand. I shake it without thinking.
“Come on. We have breakfast, we have medicine, we have lots of fun in store. If you want to use the bathroom or take a shower, you have time.”
I rub my face. “Is there tea?”
He glances at a chart, smiles. “There is. Once we get to breakfast. For now, we need to get moving.”
Movement strains sore muscles. My head knocks and throbs. I grope my way to the bathroom, to the open shower, strip off my clothes, and turn on water that becomes only slightly warm. Others enter—the black man they call Puff, the stringy-haired Leo. They turn on other nozzles, standing bashfully to one side as the water heats up. I avoid looking at them, at their sagging rumps and distended organs, but both of them stare at me as if I have sprouted a new neck. I turn off my nozzle, exit past turned heads and wordless stares, dry myself as best I can with the thin towel Lawrence distributes, climb back into my clothing. I glance at myself in the mirror, noting the slackness, the eyes that look aged and different. I decline Lawrence’s offer of a disposable razor. My face is numb.
Breakfast is a replay of dinner, complete with eggs and sausage, toast, and weak coffee. There is no tea. I have gained a certain familiarity with the other patients, or at least I think so—I recognize people, we nod greetings, some hold out hands and say, “What’s your name?” or “Who’s this?” Many appear drugged, or severely ill, gripping their plates in hunched-over fashion, glancing neither left nor right. I sit at a table with John Paul and another man, a scowling giant with red-rimmed eyes and a forelock of blond hair that falls into his face. John Paul introduces him as Sydney.
The meal is, as expected, accompanied by a John Paul monologue. Sydney says nothing. I tug at my eggs, the wooliness from before back upon me, my mind stumbling in different directions. The dream, Carol, Violet. Death. I remember the closed wing of the hospital in London, the psych wing, the howls and sobbing that wafted from behind large wooden doors. The man—an escapee?—who appeared periodically and came up to each patient to ask, “What time is the lorry? Where’s the lorry?” before others arrived to hustle him away. I had no idea then what this meant, but others taught me. It became almost the first English I learned. I rarely saw other patients from behind the big doors, never knew what criteria caused one to be placed there. A rumor abounded that those in the head-injury ward who never improved would go in. As such I gave myself headaches trying to bring forth scraps of memory. But then I was moved to my room, I met Carol. The threat of confinement eased. If I think hard enough I can still hear the wails, though, still summon the same anxiousness.
Something clatters, interrupting John Paul. Heads turn to take in the dropped tray and the source of its fumbling, then turn back. I take advantage of the momentary lull, the silent instant before John Paul resumes speaking.
“Tell me, John Paul—what are you researching?”
He looks puzzled, like an actor thrown off his script.
“Did you not tell me you were working on your degree?”
“Yes, yes, yes. I’m studying the mechanics of instructional design in several disciplines, how different management structures affect capabilities . . .”
But my mind is spinning off again, sailing its way back to her, to my shame and frustration at the way we had parted, my clumsiness and inadequacy at the Khan al-Wazir. I want to go back to her, rush to her, try once again; in America, anything is possible.
Anything.
But I recognize, on some level, the nature of my quest, the finality inherent in the path I have taken. I look back on life now, in America. Where all things are possible, but not guaranteed.
“Medicine!” Lawrence the orange-skinned HST pops into view. We are back in the dayroom, the other patients shifting, queuing up before a Dutch door-like window attached to a wall. There, a nurse consults charts and asks questions, dispenses water and hands out pills. I wait, watching her face as it rises and falls, rises and falls, as those in front of me extend hands and tilt necks. What are they saying? I have been placed here, held here. I have come here to die.
The nurse grasps my arm, examines the wristband I have no memory of receiving, glances from chart to band, lifts her face to expose an expanse of gapped teeth.
“What is your birth date?”
Again, to remember. “The year 1898.”
“Very good, Mr. Conn.” She hands me a small cup containing five pills, another small cup of water, then watches as I gulp them down.
“What happens if you don’t take your medicine?” I ask John Paul as I pass through the line.
He grimaces. “By law they can’t force you, unless you’re classified as violent or a danger to yourself. If that’s the case, they give you an altered form that dissolves on your tongue. Or, failing that, an injection. After one or two experiences with either, most people take the pills.”
I nod. My stomach rumbles. We stand for a while. The drugs slow my heartbeat, then lengthen my tongue. The lights of the room dim and yellow.
“Mr. Conn.” Lawrence, again. “May I call you Emmett?”
I make the slowest of movements.
“We have you set for treatment team at eleven. Right now, you get to go outside.” He pauses, consulting a chart before him. “Let’s see . . . you’re not a smoker, are you?”
The others are queuing again, like schoolchildren bound for recess. HSTs and nurses nudge them along, buzzing and clucking, and suddenly I am back, the association so clear I can almost see it, back on the hilltop overlooking the deportees, examining the sheep and the canines. I search from left to right and back again, across the plain in the direction of our journey, then to the rear, the way we had come. The same sense of disappointment follows, the same loss, before I find myself standing in line again like a tottering old tree, wiping my forehead against the south Georgia heat.
“Hey! Are you all right?” An HST peers back my way.
I nod my head. The line ahead shifts, the tail of a fish held at the mouth. I search for someone I recognize. Violet? Do I know anyone here? I am cantilevered, defined now by absence—Burak’s, Carol’s, Araxie’s, my own. But I am alive still. Breathing and spitting. Like a camel in sand.
The exercise area consists of a concrete pad perhaps one hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. A ten-foot brick wall, angled to create more room at the back, forms the perimeter of the area, with a volleyball net at its midsection and a basketball goal at one end. An overhang closest to the building shields a Ping-Pong table and metal picnic furniture. The patients hobbling before me break off into groups, some taking seats at the picnic tables, others standing together in the sun’s sharpened light. The women join us, HSTs dispense cigarettes, and one by one heads bend toward devices built into the wall that look like braziers, and return in puffs of smoke.
“See those black boxes?” John Paul points to a series of small rectangles at the top of the wall. “They’re motion detectors. The ground is sloped on the other side, so it’s only three or four feet from the top. If you were to climb over the top, they’d detect it.” He steps farther down the wall. “See this?” He points to a recessed light. “They put the plastic covering over so you can’t use it as a foothold.”
I glance up at the wall. “Have many tried to escape?”
“Not that I know of. One guy got up on top of the walkway running between our unit and the open unit and ran around for a while before they pulled him off.”
“The open unit?”
“It’s for more permanent residents. They have their own cafeteria where the food is made, not brought in, like it is here.”
We stand silent a few minutes. The day has begun to heat up; most in the sun edge into the shade.
“Mr. Conn!”
I turn.
“You have a visitor.”
I follow Lawrence back into the building, through the locked doors, into a glass-paneled cubicle off one side of a hall. I am confused again by this place. Am I dreaming? I have no visitors, no one here knows me. I am a foreigner. An
enemy
. But then a woman turns. Gray-haired, erect, she is familiar, so . . .
“Hello, dear.” Mrs. Fleming rises and offers a perfumed hug. I remain standing, despite my body’s lingering soreness. Dizziness fades her image, shifting her face in and out.
“Violet will be here in a little while. She’s getting her hair done this morning.”
Mrs. Fleming. Violet. I do not know of a relationship between them. She returns to her seat. The magnification of her glasses makes her eyes soft, like a cow’s.
“How are you doing?”
I slide into a seat near the door. I am imprisoned, time draining, while Violet has her hair done.
I look up. Mrs. Fleming’s hair is the scruff of a lioness. I say, “I am surprised you have come to see me.”
She gives a little snort, exposing capped teeth. “Just because you’re in here? I’ve come here before.” She pauses, shifts in her chair. “My Cecil was here once.”
She looks as if she might cry, then crosses her legs, the flap of fabric parted, returned. “I told them I was your sister.” She smiles. She nods her head. “You don’t know what to think of me, do you?”
“I am unsure of most things.” The wall behind her is changing, now speckled, now swathed in black stripes.
“Part of what I do is visit people, when they’re sick, when they’re in the hospital. I know what it’s like there. I’ve had cancer twice, been written off for dead at least once. There’s power in grouping. Some people think it gives me a rush, and maybe it does, but it’s more than that. My mother always says that indifference is the greatest cruelty. I try not to be indifferent.”
I nod again, my mind fluttering to brief images of what Mrs. Fleming’s ancient mother might look like before returning, slack, to its languor. Warm tears come, unbidden and unexpected, leaking as if from an old faucet, the seals dry and worn. What brings this now—compassion? My own pity? The tears slide into crevices, through wrinkled skin, pooling, dripping. They are
water
, I tell myself, but what of water? My life spent providing it, diverting it. The stream where, at my offer, she first bent to drink. The water I bartered for, rationed. The goatskin I provided when her body expelled everything. The fountain I bathed in as I tried to stay near her. Indifference? I wipe my face and my nose.
“Emmett.”
I jump.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I have been left behind. “I am sorry. What did you say?”
“I was asking about you. I don’t know that much about you.”
I tell her, or at least I try to. I am from Turkey. I fought in the war. I was injured, then rescued. An immigrant. A father. I cannot tell her, though, of before, of what I know now, of what I remember. That I was a gendarme, a . . . murderer. That this is my shame.
My voice trails away. She is saying something, asking something else. She likes that I still want to live. Others my age want to die. She says something about the future.
But there is no future. I am ninety-two years old. I have a tumor.
I am a monster.
Our eyes lock. No one knows of this past. I hang on a precipice, reaching out for a rope, Mrs. Fleming laughing as if she now holds it. Did I tell her? This must remain covered. Her head bends back in a new baring of teeth.
“What?” I ask.
“Peter Melville, Violet’s cousin. He was awarded that grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Five million dollars—can you believe it?”
I struggle. Peter. Brains. The ostrich farm, sound-wave pest control. Five million dollars? But I am weighted, deadened. Money is of no use to me now.
A knock sounds at the glass door. Hinges swivel. Dr. Mellon enters, his big frame filling the room and changing the atmosphere, the colors. I glance at the wall behind Mrs. Fleming, returned now to its institutional white.
“It’s time for Mr. Conn’s treatment team,” he says, his voice measured and deep.
Mrs. Fleming rises and picks up her purse. “I need to go.” She pauses at the door and looks back. “Take care,” she says. Her glasses flash. She is strong, her back arched like a dancer’s. “You’ll be okay. Violet will come see you soon.”
The door swings shut. Dr. Mellon helps me to my feet, the smell of cologne on his hands. I am shaky and slow. I follow him from the room like a dim-witted child, a thin, older woman behind us. We enter another cubicle, stand awkwardly, take seats around a similar table.
“How do you feel?” Dr. Mellon folds his large hands. The thin woman produces a tape recorder and notepad, arranges them like homework before her. She leans forward, exposing dark rings that make her eyes seem much larger.