View From a Kite (2 page)

I try to write at least one page a day. Writing in code takes time and patience so I've had to cut down on the rambling angst. Two weeks ago I woke up to find a student nurse flipping through my papers. Normally I'm very polite (meek and mealy-mouthed), that's why I couldn't close the door on the Sally Ann Band, but that day I had a screaming hissy. Told her to get the hell out, if she was so bored she had nothing better to do than go through other people's private possessions she should go scrub out the toilets, a job well-suited to her brains and talent. Called her a stupid fucking bitch, or words to that effect. I don't think I actually said “fucking bitch” out loud, but I certainly thought it. Then I cried for ten minutes. Then I felt guilty for saying such nasty things, but a little pleased at how articulate I managed to be in the midst of my rage, and on such short notice, too. I'm not sure which is worse, being so paranoid about my writing or being a slave to unnecessary guilt. I heard later from Mary, who is the Einstein of eavesdropping, that the student nurse got reamed for “upsetting a patient.”

“Rest and relaxation are as important as the drugs you take.” They say it over and over again. “Worry interferes with the healing process. Our job is to look after you, and your job is to eat, rest, and remain calm.”

Mr. Conrad, whose wife is in Kentville about to lose half a lung and whose kids are farmed out in two different boarding houses while he lies on his back upstairs, is so calm he heaved a jug of ice water at The Witch after she preached that little sermon at him one day when he was shredding his sheets and hyperventilating. I wonder if anyone lectured her on “upsetting the patients.”

Anyway, now I write in code. The discipline's good, and it's easier than shredding everything. I might want to use some of this stuff someday.

CHAPTER 2

I am temporarily in residence at the Cape Breton County Sanatorium. Two and a half months ago, before they stuck me in this place, I lived with my Aunt Edith on what remains of our half of the family farm on the Bras d'Or Lakes. Most of the farm was sold off to cottagers, who all wanted bits that touch the lake and were willing to pay through the nose for them. Edith has the original house on five acres on the lake and about sixty acres of woodlot running in back of all the cottages. Next door to her are Cousin George and Cousin Elizabeth, who live on and sort-of work the other half of the family farm. Would-be cottagers harass them constantly, mostly Europeans waving big cheques in their faces. George and Elizabeth look after Aunt Edith, who is sixty-seven and slowly losing her marbles. They are all of my family, except for a handful of second and third cousins who live in trailers, mostly on the mainland, and reproduce in a scandalously casual fashion. Before the farm, I lived in a house in Sydney that my maternal great-grandfather built with his father in 1884. Eventually it was left to my mother, and now it's been bought by a lawyer who's put his offices in the high-ceilinged downstairs rooms. Upstairs has been turned into an apartment that the lawyer rents out. To his mistress, according to rumour. I've driven by it on the way to see my mother, but after the first curious pass I stopped looking at it. I know it's there; I don't need to see it.

This place wasn't originally built to be a tuberculosis sanatorium. Sanatoriums were mostly all built back in the twenties and thirties, up in the mountains or by an ocean somewhere, not buried in the backwoods. This place is too new, for one thing—new being a relative term. It's not what you'd call a state-of-the-art facility, it's falling apart around us, held together by paint as near as I can tell. World War Two vintage, thrown together in a hurry when the casualties started coming back, some of them in baskets, some of them wearing masks. The sight of them was too upsetting for the general public so they hid them here, in this barracks of a hospital, on a point of land jutting into Sydney Harbour. Trees on three sides and nothing around but PMQs for the army medical team and their families. Now the TB staff live in the PMQs; it's cheap—an extra perk for the fact that they work in dangerous surroundings. That's us. The In-valid. The Infectious. Hazardous Material.

They started moving in the overflow from the Princess Alexandra Sanatorium sometime around the late forties. There were no more new vets coming in, but a little upsurge in TB almost filled the place. Now it's three-quarters empty, and those of us who end up here these days are a temporary and annoying glitch in the medical world's triumphant march against the disease—at least in this privileged corner of the world. Elsewhere, it's a different story. But here they've battled it into a corner with streptomycin, PAS, and the wonder drug, Ionizaid. They figure to close this place in three years—I'll be long gone by then.

They refuse to tell me when I'm getting out. Six months? Eight months? A year? The doctors won't commit, they just shake their heads and tell me not to think about it, to rest. The nurses aren't allowed to guess, or at least they're not allowed to tell you what they're guessing. I just want them to give me a date, any date. Make one up. Lie. I need to be crossing off the days on my calendar; I need to be subtracting from a number—big or not, I don't care. I don't need to be adding: yesterday was day seventy-three, today is day seventy-four. Well, I'm a big girl, I can pick my own date. Say, six months. So: yesterday was day one hundred and thirteen, today is one hundred and twelve.

There are three wards, of the original six, still open at the San. C is the men's ward. A is for the kids—a dismal place with whiny toddlers and the smell of disinfectant and diapers. Ward B, Home Sweet Home, is a big long barn with half a dozen rooms and two open dorms planted around a wide central hall. The bathrooms are all jammed down at one end—next to the nurse's station so you can't pee without them knowing about it—and at the opposite end are the big double laundry doors where Mary and I have pizza delivered when OFN is on duty.

After the war the hospital administration picked up truck
-
loads of surplus army paint for next to free, so all the halls are painted army-puke-green and will be well into the twenty-third century. There's a room in the basement full of the stuff and, unfortunately, none of the staff is the least bit interested in pinching any of it. The single rooms are painted pastel mud: blue, yellow, something called “buff” that looks like “barf,” and occasionally the pink of obscure internal organs. All army surplus. The barf and blue and yellow, I suppose, could have been used in offices, but it is difficult to imagine the army painting anything pink. Perhaps they put it in the PMQs and forced distraught army wives to live there. You have to wonder about the suicide rate of those women.

There is a nun, Sister Mary Clare, in the last bedroom down the hall. She is allowed to keep her bedroom door closed. We're not.

“What is this paranoia about giving us a little privacy?” I asked Mary once.

“It's like this,” she said. “One: in the beginning they think you might croak on them; two: when you start to get better you might bolt on them; and three: when your boyfriend comes to visit you might drag him into your bed and bring the moral tone of the place crashing down. Don't eat the applesauce, it's full of saltpetre.”

“What? Why?”

“To kill your sex drive. I think they got a deal on that from the Army surplus, too.”

Sister—obviously trusted not to croak, bolt, or screw a boy
-
friend—is permitted to keep her door closed. She only comes out to babystep her way to the bathroom, clinging to a nurse. Her nightgowns come up to her ears and down to her toes and out to her fingertips. She wears a soft little white hat. She stares at the cracks in the tile floor.

“She's a bit depressed,” said OFN. “She was supposed to go to Africa to join a mission there, but she failed the medical. It was a terrible disappointment for her. Try to be friendly whenever you see her. She needs cheering up.”

Black-veiled Sisters, wearing grey wool skirts and cardigans, white blouses, and massive crucifixes hung round their necks, and priests in the usual black-on-black and Leonard Cohen haircuts come to comfort her. Occasionally you can hear low moans coming from her room. But she keeps her door closed, always, and never looks any of us in the face. Makes being friendly quite a challenge.

“Good morning, Sister,” we chirp when we see her, and she sometimes makes a muffled little bleat into her collar in return.

Across from Sister was Louise, until last week. She was thirteen and she was from a reserve on the mainland. She didn't look sick; she was plump and—until you heard the brutal, bladed cough she dragged up from the basement of her chest—you'd have thought she'd been misdiagnosed. Mary extracted most of her life story the first day she was here. Took her about ten minutes and most of my chocolate nut clusters.

“She says she's only staying for a couple of months, until the weather warms up some. Then her parents are taking her to some island off the coast where she'll be magically cured.

She says it only works for natives; it's some special deal with the Virgin Mary. She says lots of her relatives have been cured there.”

“So why won't it work for us?”

“Power of faith, baby. You got to believe.”

“I believe she'll be back here next year hacking out the rest of her lungs.”

After some thought, though, I reconsidered, and I tried— shamelessly—to cozy up to Louise to get a little more information. I was curious about this Lourdes of the Island, but she'd obviously run into too much skepticism because she clammed up on me. I'd ruined my chances with my narrow-minded attitude; a mistake, I've decided, I will not make the next time something like this comes along. There was quite a little scene when her grandparents walked in, packed up her stuff, and took her home. The doctor was furious, the nurses cluck-clucked and fussed. Seems Louise wasn't testing positive anymore so they couldn't send the cops to drag her back. Her local doctor had promised to see that she continued to take her pills.

“We've had this problem before,” a nurse's aide confided.

“Do they always end up back here?” I wanted to know.

“Well—not always.”

“So what, so they die?”

“Oh, no. Heavens, no!”

“Then sometimes they get cured, right?”

“Well, they were probably on the mend anyway. I don't really know. I'm not a Catholic.”

“Neither am I, but I think there's something here the medical profession should look into. Why should I spend another six or seven months of my life here when Louise is gone off to be cured? If what's-his-name of Navarre could convert to get his hands on Paris, I could surely do it for an early release.”

“We don't know she'll be cured.”

“Louise does. Her family does. You should be researching this. I'm willing to volunteer right now.”

No one took me seriously.

It was at that point that I started my research into cures for tuberculosis—other than the accepted-party-line cures, that is.

The guy who invented the saxophone, a Belgian by the name of—naturally—Sax, claimed that playing his invention strengthened the lungs and should be used to treat TB. His son, Sax Jr., wrote and published a booklet called “The Gymnastic of the Lungs, Instrumental Music Considered from The Hygienic Point of View” in 1865.

Where can I lay my hands on a saxophone? And do you have to have some innate musical ability? That could be a problem.

Next door, to my left, is cranky old Mrs. Cyr. She's deaf and it drives her crazy not to know everything that is going on; to make herself feel better, she tries to drive everybody else crazy, too. She lassoes passersby into her room with her bullwhip of a voice, she yells out questions and then can't hear the answers unless you yell back. She can't read so you can't even write things down for her.

“WHO'S THAT BIG UGLY WOMAN IN THE BLUE HAT JUST WENT
INTO SISTER'S ROOM?”

“I DON'T KNOW.”

“MY GOD, SHE'S SOME BIG,
AIN'T
SHE? NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE.
HAVE YOU?”

“NO.”

“GO ASK NURSE WHO SHE IS.”

“Okay” and bolt, glad to have escaped so easily this time.

“DON'T YOU MAKE THOSE GIRLS YELL,”
shouts the nurse.
“IT'S
NOT GOOD FOR THEIR LUNGS.”

“GOOD FOR THEIR LUNGS! I GUESS!
STRENTHEN
THEM UP SOME
GOOD!”

Her room is between me and the bathrooms so I try to time my trips to coincide with her naps, or I walk past her door (always
WIDE
open) reading a book and pretending I am far too absorbed to hear her.

“GIRLIE! GIRLIE!”
she screeches.

“Can't hear you,” I mutter, and turn a page.

No one comes to see her. She's ninety-seven, fifty years a widow, no children, friends long since dead.

Just once, I've been told, she had a visitor, a grand-nephew, a minister from Boston who dropped in during his summer holidays to say hello. She was so shocked by his madras Bermuda shorts that she lectured him quite rudely on the appropriate attire for a minister. He didn't come back. I suppose if she'd been pink and sweet and quavery-voiced and called him “Dear” he'd have made a few more duty calls before his vacation was over—but she was yellow and mean and cranky and one visit seems to have been plenty for him. Poor old bat. Somebody must have loved her once.

Mrs. Cyr is a bitchy old bird, but Mrs. Charmichael just makes me want to slap her. One door further along the hall, she's the fluttery, whiny sort, with a voice just on the dreary edge of tearful—the tears being all for guess who? She feels so thunderously sorry for herself that no one else feels obliged to join her. All she ever talks about, all day long, are her x-rays, needles, medication, bronchoscopes, bronchiograms, gastric washings, constipation, and enemas. We all like to obsess from time to time, but who wants a sixth hearing of how somebody else gags and retches every time a nurse sticks a tube in their nose, pushes it down to their stomach, and sucks up the contents? Three mornings a week, once a month, we all suffer through it. I just blank out my mind and concentrate on not puking. I certainly don't go on about it in public.