On Such a Full Sea (23 page)

The fellow—stitched into the breast pocket of his scrubs was
V. UPENDRA, M.D
.—seemed put out at first for having to make this outcall, and then by who the patients turned out to be, his chin stiffening at the strangeness of the large, open bunk room. But once he began examining Five, who could now hardly raise her chest to inhale, he camped beside her on both knees, his eyes narrowing as he took her pulse and temperature and listened to her heart. He asked what exactly they’d ingested and when. He processed the information with full attention and gravity. Then he asked Mala to have the owner of the house come up right away, and she went down to fetch Miss Cathy.

While they waited, he looked about the room, Fan getting some water for the sickened girls. The five other girls—two of whom were older than he was—had retreated to one arc of the circular sofa, bunching together. They had not encountered any outsiders since Three’s appendicitis, and perhaps no one else for years before that, and so they were thoroughly unsettled by the presence of this man, who was unshaven and looking like he was at the end of a double shift in his wrinkled scrubs, though still certainly handsome. In fact, they could hardly look at him, keeping their gazes lowered, all except for Six, who snuck long looks at him.

Fan couldn’t help but think he was similar to Reg, at least in frame, bony-shouldered and bony-elbowed, though, of course, he had commanded the room when he had first come in, merely by the ease and authority of his posture, something Reg—or most any other B-Mor—couldn’t do if he tried. Or perhaps it was simply a Charter thing.

What’s that? he asked Fan. He was looking at the wall.

Fan told him it was what the others were doing, not sure now how else to describe it.

Not you?

Fan said she was only helping a little. He walked to the wall and surveyed it, instinctively beginning at the corner and following its progression around to the second wall. The Girls nervously tittered as he viewed it, for they suddenly realized that a stranger was perusing their innermost thoughts and dreams. Two covered her face entirely and then all the others did the same. The young doctor was not paying any attention to them, however, despite the fact that he could have easily matched a scene to a girl. He was clearly fascinated by the wall, its many shapes and colors, and when he reached the panels in which Fan first appeared, he seemed to pause, checking back for her in the previous images. He stood for a while before the largest scene of her being pushed upward.

What’s your name? he asked Fan, and she told him.

You’re not one of them, are you?

Our Fan offered neither expression nor word.

I figured, he said, regarding her intently. Did she feel a thrum in her chest when confronted so? Was it his light brown skin? His blue eyes, almost like Reg’s, as deep as a sparkling island sky? His lips full but defined, the head of densely dark wavy hair? Yet there was something about him, not at all superficial, that spoke to her of Reg. Perhaps it was a core of sanguine innocence beneath all the Charter self-assurance, a node of vulnerability that had not been trained away, dissolved.

You don’t move like the others, he said, glancing over at the Girls. They were peeking now at him again. They go around like they’re following something. Little heeding steps. You’re not a Charter, though. That’s obvious. But then you’re no counties person, either. You’re from a facility, aren’t you? Which one?

But before she could answer, or not answer, Mala and Miss Cathy appeared. The Girls instantly rose and schooled about Miss Cathy, and for some reason they began to cry, shaken perhaps by the sudden and unprecedented fullness of the gathering. Miss Cathy, who didn’t appear put out or perturbed at all, spanned them with her arms, her manner that of an all-loving school headmistress, patting each girl on the head to try to calm her. Once done, she broke from their ranks and in her willowy dressing gown fluttered to the beds of Four and Five, practically ignoring the young doctor until the moment she spoke to him.

So why can’t you help my girls? she said.

They can’t be treated here, he replied, clearly annoyed by her tone. But this didn’t deter him from explaining the situation to her fully; their lack of fever was a clue, and that while only lab tests at the medical center could confirm it, he suspected it was botulism, which was something that occurred rarely, and then only out in the counties. They were breathing poorly as well, and if it was indeed botulism, they might eventually require a ventilator.

A ventilator? Miss Cathy said.

Yes, the doctor told her. They could lose the ability to breathe. They could die.

Miss Cathy nodded. Then she asked him to arrange to have ventilators delivered, and have the testing done here, as she didn’t want the Girls to be separated. But he said that was not possible.

Then please ask your superior.

I’m the superior, he told her. Apparently he was the ER chief, and had only come because the outcalls resident had suddenly taken ill. It was a simple choice; she could have them transported, or they would remain here.

Miss Cathy said, It’s my decision, yes?

Assuming you’re their keeper.

I’m their keeper, she answered.

We know, of course, that Miss Cathy deemed the two would remain in place, to which the rest of the girls, shaken as they’d never been before with real confusion and fright, could only assent. It was happier for all of them, especially Miss Cathy, to believe that the sickness would pass. Even Four and Five tried to agree, waving from their beds. It had been most difficult, Miss Cathy now recalled for them, when Three developed an infection from the burst appendix and had to stay at the medical center for a week. With one of them missing, they couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t eat. Even the wall work went badly. Nothing was right.

Mala asked Miss Cathy to reconsider, but the woman literally blocked her ears, no doubt startled to hear such questioning from her helper. It may have been the very first such instance. Mala pleaded some more and Miss Cathy finally shouted, Enough! Mala shrank. Miss Cathy now mentioned to the Girls that she had been planning to bathe and wondered if they wished to be with her afterward, to do their hair and nails. They cooed in happy panic; it was a rare treat to be invited for a beauty session in her suite. Before leaving, they all kissed the sickened girls, Miss Cathy telling Fan to stay and watch over them and call the doctor if necessary.

Upendra, who had been gathering his things, reiterated that it would only be an ambulance returning to transport them to the medical center, as there was nothing more here for any doctor to do. Miss Cathy didn’t respond, though her tight huddling with the Girls reminded one and all that they were in one another’s care, just as they always had been, just as they always would be. They disappeared into her suite. Mala had to go downstairs, so she would let Upendra out. But before he left the Girls’ room, the young doctor took Fan aside, handling her by the elbow, kindly but with grip enough that she could distinctly feel each pad of his fingers pressing on the joint and bone.

You don’t have to stay here if you aren’t hers to keep. You know that, right?

She nodded.

He waited for her say something, perhaps to ask him for help, but she remained silent.

Okay, then, he said, seemingly unsettled by the moment. He was going to say something else but then he simply left. The Girls’ room door was locked shut. Fan must have known, if anyone would, that she wasn’t Miss Cathy’s to “keep.” She wasn’t anyone’s to keep, perhaps not even Reg’s, which is in part why we admired her so. Yet there are times when one must simply endure, as was the case now, with Fan alone watching the two sick dear girls, their color already going to slate.

There is an old B-Mor saying that one hears a lot these days. Or so it would seem. It came over with the originals, surely, and like many of their sayings, notions, traditions, it has remained in currency. It goes like this:

Behold a fire from the opposite shore.

For the originals, it was advice to be taken literally, for back where they came from there were indeed real fires raging (whether by accident or design or negligence), plus constant plumes of lethal smoke from the primitive industrial processes, not to mention the attendant spews of fouled waters, and countless megakilos of buried waste products that eventually poisoned the entire subdistrict. You had best stay back, suggested the sage. Or flee.

Proverbially, of course, it means to indicate that one can rightly look after one’s own, that you are not obligated to address the plight of others. This may strike us as inconsistent with what we think of as the primary ethos of our community, namely, that it is a community, right down to our slippers, in which we shall labor and prosper together, or else tread at our lonely peril.

Sayings are employed for a purpose, reflecting what we want of them and the larger world, as well as the very time of that wanting. Everyone knows a truth can be a falsehood (or vice versa) depending on the context. So, too, with the recent frequency of this “fire.” Are we afraid of what seems to be happening, and so are justifying a retreat into ourselves? Or is it being spread by people secretly working for the directorate, for the same reason? Either way, we have begun to feel the rends in our finely spun society with each outbreak of vandalism and impromptu public protest and then the rash of the newest graffiti, spray- or hand-painted with what must be a widely distributed stencil.

FREE REG

No matter if we agree. And we do agree, as does everyone else we know. Is even the directorate in opposition? But it’s the fact that the sentiment is being duplicated, in most every hue, with both the faint smudge of haste and the meticulous intricacy of design, which unnerves. It’s gone wide. One example that we saw the other day clearly looked as if a small child was barely able to hold up the stencil before messily overspraying it, the part outline of his or her stout little hand floating faintly above the drippy letters. It was practically heartbreaking—and disturbing—to think of that innocent young person wholly caught up in this broad surge of feeling.

But it is a genuine surge, and like all surges that rise up and tide and maybe threaten the bulwarks, it will eventually recede. What it shows of us when it does is difficult to say. We are not accustomed to thinking too far ahead, no doubt because of our longtime security and prosperity. We are engaged in the regular business of our living, as always passing the hours mostly hived in our households, though these days, despite the cooler weather, you see more and more of us outside, just as we would be on especially hot summer nights.

Though now, instead of the children playing their games of tag and hide-and-seek, and the adults arrayed on the stoops fanning themselves and drinking iced tea and smoking, we are milling about on the sidewalk or in the street. The children are actually aware of us, awaiting our next move. Most everyone is standing. Maybe there’s a food hawker, maybe there’s a reader of palms or cards, but even these are behaving with politeness and reserve, just as though they had set up outside a row house holding a viewing, to serve any craving mourners. They’re acting this way because we are murmuring to one another, and not of garish happenings on the evening programs, or of the unusually pronounced bitterness of the bitter melons at market. We are sharing a different kind of report: of ongoing shift reductions at the facilities; of ever-increasing class sizes at the schools; of a spate of postponed overseas retiree tours, with no further word of rescheduling. And along with these and other observations and gripes, which have all been made before (if privately), what’s arising are the exhortations people are giving to one another to bring about change. And whether or not that change is possible does not seem paramount, at least not yet. It’s the very practice of our talk that warms enough, how we face each other and speak.

Maybe Reg could hear us, too, wherever he was. Maybe he peered out the window of a building or vehicle and caught sight of some of the tags, repeated in their sundry, modest fashion, and felt the buoy of our call. Such that he thought about us as we had been compelled by events to think about him, as our being just one, as beset with joy and pain as any single person. Maybe that inspired him to keep on, to endure.

And in the unknowably connected way of things, this somehow bolstered, too, our dauntless Fan. For within an hour of when we left her last, she realized that poor Five could now no longer make a sound and in fact was barely sustaining herself with her breaths; the rises of her chest stalled halfway and then could not get shallow enough. Four appeared to be approaching the same condition. Fan had already banged on the door to Miss Cathy’s suite but there was no answer. She even swung a night table at it to smash the panes but they were thumb-thick unbreakable plastic and the flimsy piece of furniture instantly broke apart at its leg joint. In the small kitchen she searched for something she could use as a lever but all the knives were short, thin-bladed parers. She was wielding one anyway and ready to try when the half-opened hatch of the dumbwaiter caught her eye. No, even our Fan was too big to fit inside. But she had an instant vision: she tore up a cereal box and piled the pieces in a soup bowl, nesting some toilet paper on top for good measure. She found matches—the Girls loved scented candles—and when the flames leaped up, she sent it down, knowing that when it reached bottom it would sound a bell in the main kitchen. She pressed her ear to the metal door and heard the faint ping.

But nothing. Just smoke, sharper now, and noxious enough that she had to lean back.

Then a shouting from the other end of the well: Mala frantically calling for Tico. Was the woman on fire? Fan hollered down the well. But less than a minute later the door of the room opened and it was Mala, wholly fine. Once she saw the girls, however, her expression grew stern, now resolved in what she needed to do. She asked Fan to prepare a bag of things for the girls; she herself would go downstairs and call for an ambulance. She wasn’t going to ask Miss Cathy’s permission.

This is your chance, too, little one, she said. Pack a bag as well. This is not the place for you. I’m so sorry. So sorry for everything.

Fan said, You don’t need to apologize to me.

Yes, I do! Mala held her by the shoulders. You most of all! I could see you were different, but what did I do?

It doesn’t matter anymore.

Yes, you’re right, Mala said. You should just go, right away. Take any bus heading out the gate! Here’s my fare card. There’s enough on it to take you quite far. So go as far as you can!

Fan could easily see this was her best chance, too. It was a matter of simply walking out, though of course there were awful possibilities that she would be leaving behind. And yet there was not a mote of her that could have abandoned these girls now. If she didn’t love them as Mala did, or even Miss Cathy, whose feeling for them, if unnaturally skewed, was arguably the most intense of all, Fan at least loved them as if they were of her household, these dear cousins whom she ought to always nurture and safeguard.

I can’t leave yet, Fan said.

No one would blame you! Not even the Girls!

That’s exactly why I can’t, Fan said. Mala clasped her cheek and then ambled away, though not before propping the Girls’ door ajar with the broken night table leg, and Miss Cathy’s suite door with a chair—in case, Mala said, Fan changed her mind.

Of which there was very little possibility now, as Fan made her way to Miss Cathy’s immense, many-chambered bathroom. She did not know what she would do or say to the woman, holding out zero hope of convincing her of anything. But she must have been caught up by a fury, for we can see how there was a new propulsion to Fan’s step, not a speeding up but rather a feeling that she could pass right through a solid if she wanted, that she would not be halted. And that’s one of the funny things about Fan, as we think about her now, which is that when it mattered most she was an essentially
physical
being, rather than some ornate bundle of notions, wishes, dreams. Perhaps that other sort is more often seen to be heroic these days but we B-Mors—and maybe now you, too—respond more deeply than the rest to someone’s determined gaze, or the way they move across a room, or simply stand there, as Fan did that day at young Joseph’s wake, with such solidity that you might think the world and everything in it was, for a flash, turning around them.

Though naturally not everyone can appreciate this. Miss Cathy, for instance, was surely thinking of the impudence of our Fan as she appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, rather than of her remarkable presence.

What are you doing here? Miss Cathy said, no doubt startled by the fact that Fan had somehow gotten out of the other room. The Girls were attending to one another with various implements and tonics and polishes, with Miss Cathy herself, hair turbaned in a towel, in the midst of curling Seven’s hair. It could have been a scene from one of the ancient oil paintings in Mister Leo’s gallery, an array of fleshy, radiant maidens in an opulent marbled bath, though of course in this tableau the maidens were petite and angular and variously aged and orbiting about this much larger, paler, older figure, this cold sun of a woman who seemed to pull every mote of warmth and color from the stone-tiled room.

I want to join, too, Fan said. May I?

Miss Cathy hardly seemed to have heard her words, gazing absently at the brush in her hand and then rolling the brush under to give the girl’s hair an inward lilt. But she said, Come in then. The others lightly murmured. They were beaming kind smiles but they were clearly uncertain as to why Fan would now leave their sisters, who were stricken in the other room. They must be doing better, was what they silently concurred with one another, though none of them dared ask her for confirmation.

Had they been different souls, Fan might have tried to rally them with some sign, had them ring their keeper and bind her up with the belts of their terry robes, ensuring that whatever Mala could arrange would go unimpeded. Perhaps someday they would thus act, but for now Fan could see that there was no chance for such an uprising. And so she did what she must have thought was best, which was to sit herself down among them and select a bottle of polish from one of the baskets and ask Two if she liked the color she’d chosen, a milky, opalescent silver, to which Two nodded, giddily flapping her extended feet.

Fan remained patient, despite the fact that with each breath of her own she surely felt the straining of Five’s chest in the other room. Yet what was she intending? What was she waiting for? If her aim was to ensure that Four and Five could be transported back to the medical center, she might have tried somehow to trap Miss Cathy inside, maybe dammed the bathroom threshold with the massive bed or stuffed armchairs while the others spirited them away. But no, she did this instead, placing herself into the heart of the group, the strong solvents sweetening the air enough to lodge them all in a heady register.

After Fan painted Two’s toes, Two naturally wanted to paint Fan’s. But to everyone’s surprise, Miss Cathy said she would do it, handing the hairbrush to Two. She would often brush hair and sometimes paint fingernails, but it was very rare that she would do one of the girls’ toes. In fact, it had been many years since she had. Yet now Miss Cathy had Fan soak her feet in a small tub of hot foamed water. Then she filed away the softened skin of her soles, afterward buffing the toes and the spaces in between with a soft brush and wiping the nails and cuticles clean with rubbing alcohol. She dabbed each one with a cotton puff like they were tender little wildflowers. All the while Fan was surely wondering why Mala had not yet returned with help; yet there was little else for her to do. Another sort of heroine might have summoned the darkest parts of herself, resolving, by either bestial fury or righteous mantle, to wield the scissors sparkling right there in the open drawer of the vanity, or else raise her wooden footstool high above this woman’s bent head, and transgress all.

Of course, she did not. We have to view Fan as recognizing, at that moment, not just Miss Cathy’s mania but how much the Girls meant to the woman. This might seem exactly wrong, given how apparently willing she was to leave poor Four and Five to the full run of their fates. For it was ultimately not a particular girl or girls who were most important but their totality, the way they could web her and cocoon her and settle her down each night and day so that there was no untoward pinch or ache or wrinkle, the temperature of their corpus always regulating and kind. It was all about her, yes, it was solely her storm or fine clime they were subject to, and in this regard the greatest potential disturbance was not their complement being diminished but the specter of sudden change. What the woman needed now was to put a scrim up against the sky.