Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (12 page)

Afterwards, Rosita was gently persuaded by a nurse that the hospital would provide Sydney’s meals according to the in-house nutritionist’s recommendations. Pique flickered across Rosita’s face, but only those of us who knew her saw it. It was Sydney’s kindness to her that he refused to allow the nurses to help him with his food and drink, and it was Rosita who from then on fed him. She quarrelled, naturally, about what she saw as scandalous ineptitude on the part of the hospital’s cook. “This hospital don’t have a cook. Whoever make this food is no cook. This food tasteless for so. How they expect people to get better eating so?” she muttered. I humoured her, saying that it was probably meant to encourage patients to get well so that they could get out of there fast.

Sydney was happy with the attention and company. Between him and me there existed a new closeness. He had bared himself to me the previous day, but I held no power over him. Although he was the one who had done the talking, his divulgences had the effect of making me equally vulnerable before him.

Sydney was a novelty at the hospital. Nurses, including ones who were not assigned to his care, came into the room.
They gawked at him. And I saw them watching me too. From their awkwardness and uneasy half-smiles, I imagined they were curious about my relationship to this Indian-Trinidadian man who had once been a woman. Questions, however, were not directly put forward, except when one nurse asked, “You know him good, eh?” I offered that nurse no other explanation than my own half-smile. More than once I heard a snicker from a nurse or a doctor in the corridor outside Sydney’s room, or the tail end of laughter, and worried that it was at Sydney’s expense. But when I thought about going out and confronting the situation I realized that I wasn’t one hundred percent certain the laughter was directed at Sydney. I had never cried “prejudice” before and certainly didn’t have evidence or the vocabulary to make a convincing case for the accusation. I considered simply stepping into the corridor outside the room, standing there with my arms crossed and a stern face, but I decided that I might alienate those who could have an effect on Sydney’s health and life. Still, I cannot deny that I felt some shame and confusion about what he—or should that be
she
—had done to his—or
her
—body, despite all that he had so recently told me. In time, the jeering ceased. Or perhaps I simply stopped listening to it.

The first morning at the hospital, after Rosita returned to the house, I was touched when Sydney, still weak but able to sit up a few minutes at a time, asked if I would shave him. I had not touched his face since I was a child. In fact, I had never before touched “his” face. I set a small basin of
cool water on a trolley, alongside a towel and a thin lavender washcloth, a can of shaving cream, a disposable Bic and a small bottle of bayleaf-scented aftershave lotion, all brought to the room, on request, by a nurse—and I began. I cupped his face in my hand and thought of Zain. I held him by his jaw to turn his head. How Zain must have loved Sid. She might not have called it “love,” but she must have felt it. How could she not? The scent of the fried cumin and the onions from breakfast that had mixed with the usual hospital smells were obliterated by the astringently sterile, yet oddly reassuring fragrance of shaving cream. I lathered Sydney’s face, perhaps more than was necessary, with the tips of my fingers, stealing all the time—from the past, the present and the future—that the sense of touch, burdened with such a task, might grant, and perhaps it was only my wishful imagination, but I believe I felt the old familiar bones beneath his skin. I felt the weight of what he had shared with me the day before, and the weight of his life. As I pulled the Bic up his neck—here he raised his head, exposing it for me—I felt a purer love for this man than I had known before. Throughout the time I shaved him, no less than four nurses stopped by to watch. And now, months later, it is the coolness of his skin, the contouring of his face, the sudden, not-too-late, somatic intimacy that stays with me.

That day, Sydney asked me if I would be so good as to make sure that there was food in the house so that Rosita could cook proper meals for those of us there. My job was simply to check with Rosita, and I was to give Sankar
money—he told me where I would find it—for whatever was needed and to send him to fetch it. On two occasions over the next day and a half, when Rosita, Lancelot and Sankar came to the hospital, Sydney asked me to pass him his bag, took out a few dollar bills and requested I go to the hospital’s cafeteria to purchase Solo soft drinks and a package of Teatime tea biscuits for them. I was moved, realizing that he was in sickness as he had always been in health.

Doctors came and went. Sydney was wheeled away for X-rays and an ultrasound, and after each interminable time he was wheeled back to his room, where I waited. Nurses came and went too, and I believe that over time they warmed to us. One doctor, a small black man with tortoiseshell glasses, called me into the hallway outside the room and asked what my relationship to Sydney was. I fumbled before telling the white lie that Sydney had been like a father to me from the day I was born. In the fraction of a second that he considered my answer, I prepared myself for what might come: curiosity, argument, lectures, opinions and judgements. I was ready now to fight. But when the doctor spoke, it was to inform me that there was pneumonia in Sydney’s lungs, that this was the main problem, the priority. He reassured me that Sydney was strong, Sydney was stubborn, and it was only a matter of time before the tablets worked.

I was as momentarily relieved at this news as I was gradually disheartened. I wanted to believe the doctor, but couldn’t shake the idea that I knew better. How was it that I, but not the doctors, could see that there was little chance
he would recover? I had heard somewhere—perhaps I’d read it in novels, or seen it in movies, or had heard from friends who knew first-hand—that when an older person or sickly person contracted pneumonia it was usually that, and not the primary illness, that did them in. Looking back, I feel a gnawing guilt: had I, on hearing that it was pneumonia, become so afraid that I weakened both our wills?

During the hospital’s visiting hours that evening, two men, one with heavily kohl-lined eyes, the other wearing a loose, light scarf around his neck, his right-hand pinkie fingernail long and painted the colour of a wet cherry lozenge, visited Sydney. As ill as he was, Sydney was pleased to see them. I had not met any of his friends before and was moved by the graciousness the three men exhibited towards one another. Beyond his greeting, Sydney said no more than a word or two. The strain of doing even this was evident. The two men tried not to expose to him how ill they saw him to be. They chatted as if they were paying him a visit on his veranda in Scenery Hills, including Sydney in their conversation by looking at him as they spoke, one making comments and posing questions, as if directly to Sydney, the other answering as if for Sydney, the two sounding as if they were three. The one with the kohl-lined eyes went to Sydney, pulled a little black plastic comb from a bag draped on his shoulder and arranged Sydney’s thinned hair. The man rested the tips of his fingers under Sydney’s chin, lifting Sydney’s face a
fraction to take a good look. He licked the tip of one of his ring fingers and ran it across Sydney’s eyebrows. He appraised Sydney again. He said, “You’re as handsome as ever, my dear man. Nothing can take that away from you—isn’t that so?” The other answered in the affirmative. Who could not have been pleased at Sydney’s smile, weak as it was, at this show of attentiveness? When I saw that they were ready to leave—the painted-pinkie one had kissed Sydney softly on his lips—I exited the room to allow the three some minutes alone. In the corridor I asked, doing my best not to impart too impolite a curiosity, how they knew Sydney. The one with the kohl-lined eyes replied that they had all attended the same health clinic. I reflected on how Rosita had taken it upon herself more than once to telephone Sydney’s sister to inform her of Sydney’s turn, but was told each time by the housekeeper that Gita was unavailable. These two men, then, were Sydney’s only visitors.

Their visit had a decidedly buoying effect on Sydney. For some hours I entertained a false hope of his recovery, and when with a strong voice he started to speak again of the day he had walked to the Irene Samuel, I anxiously listened as if it were the first I had ever heard of this walk. I listened, too, for signs that he was mentally competent, that he was regaining his health on all fronts.

But once this bout of storytelling was over, the end was all too swift. Time seemed to stand still and race at once. It was unbearable, by nighttime, to watch the man who had regaled me with his stories sunken against the bed,
vulnerable under the pale blue cotton sheets, unable now to whisper without pain. He uttered single words,
water
,
breathe
,
chest
,
light
,
nurse
, and he said my name, not always to alert me to his wishes, for sometimes when I answered, he looked for a few seconds into my eyes and then shut his. Eventually I reclined, as best as I could, in an armchair that was kindly brought by an orderly for me, and, to my surprise and shame, more exhausted than I realized, I slept through the night.

The following morning, when I pressed the doctor to explain why there was no improvement, but rather, why there was an obvious decline—for Sydney now had countless tubes and monitors attached to him, and his breathing was aided with oxygen—he urged me to have patience. The pneumonia was not recent. It had set in for some time now. The medications, the antibiotics, required time. The oxygen, he assured me, was being administered only as a precaution. The doctor insisted again that Sydney was a stubborn fellow, that Sydney wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. Never before had I experienced such a sobering apprehension of my own impotence.

Those of us who loved Sydney were no longer in a temporal eddy. It had become clear to Rosita, Lancelot and me, even if the doctors would not say so, that time was running out. Rosita and Lancelot joined me and kept watch. I stood at Sydney’s side, afraid now to turn away for even a second. I wiped his forehead with the thin washcloth, not because it needed wiping, but because that was all there was to do.

Towards the end, as he breathed shallowly into the oxygen mask, he seemed like a stranger to me, neither Sid nor Sydney. But still there were moments when it was as if curtains parted and revealed my beloved Sid in the bed, aged, but as she would have been had she never taken those hormones. Then the curtains would shut again and the face would become not Sid’s, not Sydney’s, but that of a stranger.

There is nothing more difficult than standing in a room doing nothing. We were simply
there
. That is all. Rosita, Lancelot and I. We were there, an arm’s length away from Sydney, a touch away, and we could do nothing. I was not even “waiting.” I was just present, and for some time I marvelled at the horror of our human powerlessness to effect change. I had always taken it for granted that being present was the same as being at the ready, as having agency. But, there I was, present yet impotent.

A memory eventually came to me, a gift really, for it lifted me out of the miasma of the present. A smile broke on my face, and I saw how closely related are smiling and crying. When I was a child, Sid used to say to me, “Yes, Jonathan, but how do
we
feel about it?” The use of the plural came about after Sid was chided by my mother—
we the English
, she’d said,
do not admire indulgences
—and I was corralled into a conspiracy of good-humoured mockery. When India was not in her study writing, she watched and listened to Sid and me with narrowed eyes and pouted lips. Sid would stretch out the
ee
in the word
feel
, and I would laugh at the way she did this. “How do
we fee-eel
?” I was old enough to
detect some play in the use of the “we” even if I didn’t fully understand what was being played at, but I was too young to incorporate it into my own answer, so I used the singular “I.” I would concentrate at length, aware that I was being asked not only to have a feeling but to express it in words. Because it was Sid who was asking this of me, I wanted to be as honest and as clear and as creative as possible. I took the task very seriously. Sid sat for as long as it took, staring into my eyes. I looked back into hers, and saw her expectation and pleasure. I pondered how I felt, and found words and phrases and accurate explanations that surprised Sid and delighted me. I knew I had to begin my answer with
I feel
, and so, imitating and elaborating on Sid’s imaginative excesses, I once said,
I feel as if there is a big blue sky in my heart, and in the sky in my heart, even though it is daytime, there is a meteorite shower, and the shower is shaped like a bouquet of flowers, and it’s exploding in every colour that exists in the world
. Sid went scrambling for a pen and a piece of paper. She wrote down what I’d said and pinned it with a magnet to the fridge door. To this day I clearly remember that particular image I had concocted to describe my happiness. Later, I overheard India say, “What are you trying to do to Jonathan, Sid? You’re too indulgent with the child. He should learn that to yield too readily is not something we do or admire.” Now, so many years later, it occurs to me that my mother might not have been the disciplining parent I thought her to be then; perhaps she was nervous about, or simply jealous of, the closeness and playfulness between Sid and me.

At the end, Sydney had the presence of mind to ask that his oxygen mask be moved aside. His breaths came shallow and quick. I was holding his hand when he half opened his eyes and looked at me. He whispered, one slow word at a time, that when I was a child my hair was as yellow as corn. Some minutes passed before he spoke again. “It’s so dark now,” he said, and I assumed he meant that the room had become dark, which I knew was the sort of thing that people are said to experience when the end is near. But he followed that with, “It’s like your mother’s. Dark like hers.” This was, finally, all that I had ever wanted from him. I felt small, self-centred, upset that it had come so late and deeply grateful all at once. He shut his eyes again, and what seemed like several minutes passed before he looked at me and uttered, “You look just like India.” He squeezed my hand and said, “You didn’t take after me one bit, did you, Jonathan?” It wasn’t a question. There was a sort-of smile on his face. I heard myself plead that I did. He sighed and closed his eyes. He seemed to sleep then.