Please (6 page)

I looked out the back window. There was a huge yard but no grass. It was all mud. And there was a large hole that looked as if it might have been made for a pool that had never been put in, or had been put in and taken away.

I found some stairs leading to the second floor and carried Mia up them. All the rooms up here were empty too. I took her into a bedroom bigger than my entire apartment and locked the door behind us.

I lowered Mia to the floor and then lay down beside her. I thought about my stolen Tom Waits tickets again. When Mia started to moan and shiver, I took off her wet sweatshirt. The alternating light from the street lamp made everything look like snapshots. I could see her bra had little kissing Mickey and Minnie Mouse figures all over it. I thought about taking it off as well, but then she sighed and rolled into me, slipped her hand around my waist.

I looked at her a moment longer, then took off my jacket, the inside of which was still more or less dry, and wrapped it around her. I could feel her breath against my chest. I laid my head back on the polished hardwood floor and closed my eyes.

I DREAMED ABOUT my wife, Rachel, there. Only it was more a memory than a dream. We were in another rainstorm, years earlier. We were swimming in this luxury condo's outdoor pool. We'd just been driving by when we saw it. No one was in it. We parked the car and climbed over the fence, took off our clothes. It was sometime past midnight. Sheets of lightning fell from the sky. Rachel stood on the diving board, naked, her arms held up to the sky like she was calling it down. And then an old woman came out onto a balcony above us and shouted, "Get out of here! You don't belong here!"

"Yes, we do," Rachel shouted back. "This is all ours!"

"I've called the police," the old woman said.

"This is where we live," Rachel said. And then she dove in and came to me under the water, pulling me down to her.

I WOKE TO the sounds of glass breaking in the distance and an engine starting up. For a moment I thought my car was being stolen. Then I heard something louder, something collapsing. I got up and went to the window.

Outside, the rain had finally stopped, and the early morning air had become a thin mist. My car was still there, its windows unbroken.

The neighbouring houses were nothing but dim, looming shapes. I couldn't see where the sound was coming from, but it kept up. It sounded like tanks were somewhere out there in the mist, roaming the streets, smashing into the houses.

I carried Mia down to the car, my jacket still wrapped around her, and got behind the wheel. My stomach started to growl as the first rays of the sun began to burn holes through the grey. I started the car and drove slowly down the street.

I drove for about a minute or so before I came across the source of the noise. It was a bulldozer, tearing down one of the houses. I stopped the car to watch. It drove into the front wall of the house, smashing its blade through a large picture window. Then it lowered the blade and tore apart the wall underneath the window. The bulldozer reversed across the muddy yard, then drove into another part of the wall a few feet over.

A flatbed truck and a couple of pickups were parked on the street. Men with white hard hats were drinking coffee from thermoses and watching the bulldozer work. I drove on when they all turned to look at me and Mia.

I kept on driving, past more half-built houses - or half-destroyed, I wasn't sure now - and then a long field bordered by a rusted chain-link fence and filled with bags of garbage. On the other side of the field were more houses, but there were cars in the driveways, and people walked up and down the streets.

I drove until I found a McDonald's. There was a car stalled in the drive-through line, so I parked in the lot and went inside. I ordered an Egg McMuffin and a coffee. When I came back out, Mia was awake and sitting up.

"Where are we?" she asked, looking around as I got into the car again.

"I don't know," I said. I cradled the coffee between my legs and started on the Egg McMuffin. The first bite burned my throat all the way down, but I didn't mind.

"Are you a friend of King's?" Mia asked. When I didn't say anything she began to scrape the dried mud from her face with her fingernails, then paused to look down at herself. "Where's my shirt?" she asked.

"It's a long story," I said.

"Did you do something to me while I was passed out?" She sounded more curious than upset. "You could have at least waited for me to wake up."

"I wouldn't touch you," I said.

"Yeah, right." She slid her arms into the sleeves of my jacket, did up the zipper.

"Not when you're in love with that dead guy," I went on.

"You don't know anything about it," she said.

"Oh, I know."

She lifted the Egg McMuffin from my hand, took a bite. "I saw this show on television the other day," she said. "This woman was in a car accident when she was pregnant. The dashboard was pushed into her stomach. The doctors couldn't hear a heartbeat. They told her the baby was dead and said they'd have to abort it."

I tried to take the Egg McMuffin back, but she held it away from me.

"Please," I said.

"But she wouldn't let them take it. She carried it through full-term, even though she thought it was dead. But when it came out, it was alive. She'd brought it back to life, just like that."

"Please," I said again.

"Now that's love."

"Please."

WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR BABY? By Peter Darbyshire

THIS IS THE STORY of how I met Rachel.

I was working at one of the hospitals downtown at the time. They needed extras for training and disaster drills and the like. My job was to be a victim.

On my first day, a nurse made me get into a gown and lie on a bed in the hall - all the rooms were full, she said - and then the doctor in charge of the exercise came to see me. He was drinking coffee from a Starbucks mug.

"When the interns come, I want you to hold yourself here," he said, pointing to a spot on my stomach. "Make a lot of noise whenever anyone touches it."

"What's wrong with me?" I asked.

"Oh, it could be any number of things," he said.

"How about cancer?" I said. "Everybody gets cancer."

"If you like."

"What exactly are the symptoms?" I asked.

"It doesn't really matter," he said, watching a passing nurse and sipping from his mug.

"But how are they supposed to know what I'm dying from if I don't even know the symptoms?" I asked.

"This isn't that kind of exercise," he said. "You can't actually tell what's wrong with someone just by feeling their stomach."

"Then why are we doing this?" I asked.

"We're not testing them to see if they know what's wrong with you," he said, looking at his watch. "We're testing them to find out if they know the procedure."

I WORKED AT THE HOSPITAL once or twice a week. I was always suffering from some sort of deadly condition - brain tumors, strokes, heart attacks, that kind of thing. I researched them all in the library downtown so I could perform the symptoms properly. It was like I actually was dying. I could have been.

I usually worked the same shifts as Rachel. She specialized in acting out mental disorders. She told me one day that I was one of the best patients she'd ever seen. We were lying in beds across from each other in a room on the children's ward, which was the only floor they had space on that day. "If they gave away Oscars for this business," she said, "you'd have my vote." She was chewing on something that made her mouth froth, and foam was running down her chin. She'd told me earlier that it had something to do with the condition she was supposed to have, but I thought it made her look rabid.

When the doctor brought the interns in, Rachel started to shake and shudder in her bed. She spat more foam out of her mouth and down onto her breasts, rolled her eyes back so I couldn't see anything but white.

The doctor stepped aside and waved in one of the interns, a young man with glasses and a goatee. He bent down beside Rachel and slipped his finger into her mouth. "Her airway seems to be clear," he said to the doctor, but that was all he managed because then he was swearing as Rachel bit his finger.

"That's why it's best to use pens to check airways," the doctor said as the intern clutched his hand to his chest. "Not the plastic ones, though. They can bite them in half, and then you get ink everywhere."

The next intern took a step toward the bed but then stopped as Rachel threw back her head and let out a long scream. It was so loud I actually had to cover my ears with my hands. The interns all looked at each other, but none of them stepped any closer. Then Rachel curled up into the fetal position and began to shake. She did that for a few seconds, then unrolled her eyes and winked at me.

How could I not fall in love with her?

SOMETIMES I DID my research at the hospital. I went around the wards and watched patients in their rooms or in the hallways, wherever I could find someone who had a condition I wanted to learn about. I was in there at all hours of the day, but the nurses didn't seem to mind. It was like I was a real patient. Some of them even commented on my acting.

"You're not dragging your legs enough," one of them told me when I was practicing my MS walk with some crutches I'd borrowed from a supply closet.

"Try taking off your clothes," another one said when I was sitting in the waiting room, working on my Alzheimer's look. "They like to take off their clothes when there are nurses around."

Even some of the patients gave me advice. A man who'd lost his legs in some sort of industrial press accident taught me how to use a wheelchair like I'd been in it for years. We spent the entire night racing up and down one of the halls, until I crushed the air hose of a woman on oxygen who'd come out of her room to complain about the noise. The nurses wouldn't let me back onto that floor for a week, and when I came back, the man in the wheelchair was gone.

Once, the nurses left a dead man on a bed in the intensive care hallway because they were too busy to take him down to the morgue. Someone was having a heart attack or something like that in the room at the end of the hall, so they were all in there. I lay down on an empty bed across from the dead man and studied him for a while, then tried to make myself look like him. He'd been left with his eyes open, so I stared at the ceiling for as long as I could without blinking, tried not to move at all. I only breathed when I absolutely had to. I could actually feel my heartbeat slow down. I wondered if this was what meditation was like.

One of the nurses came out of the room at the end of the hall and rolled the dead man and his bed into the elevator. I stayed where I was, not moving. A few minutes later, another nurse came out of the room and started pushing my bed toward the elevator. She screamed and jumped away from the bed when I sat up.

"Did I have you fooled?" I asked.

"I thought you were that dead guy," she said.

"Thank you," I said.

SOMETIMES, WHEN RACHEL and I were waiting for our shift to start, we'd get coffees from the cafeteria and wander around the hospital. We liked to make up stories about what was wrong with the people in the rooms we passed.

"Flesh-eating disease," I said of a man whose entire body was covered in bandages. "The nurses are afraid to touch him."

"Cancer," Rachel said when we went past a room with a woman on a lung machine. "But she never smoked a cigarette in her life."

"Attempted suicide," I said of a young woman who sat in a wheelchair by a window, drooling. "She took all the pills in her apartment when her boyfriend left."

"Self-inflicted gunshot," Rachel said of the same woman. "There was no boyfriend."

Rachel liked the intensive care ward the best. This is where they kept all the critically injured people, and we were only allowed in there during visiting hours. Most of the people in here were young, and many of them were dying from wounds they'd sustained in accidents and that sort of thing. They had a whole other wing for people who were dying of old age or disease.

"Imagine," Rachel said as we walked through here one day, "the lives of all these people are still going on."

I looked into a room at a man who appeared to be in a coma. He'd been asleep for as long as I'd worked at the hospital, and there were tubes going into both his arms. "I don't know about that," I said.

"I don't mean in here," Rachel said. "I mean outside. All these people have lives waiting for them out there. They have family, jobs, houses, cars, money, everything you can think of, just waiting for these people to get better and come back."

"But some of them aren't going to get better," I pointed out.

"Imagine if you could take their place," she said. "Just step into their lives and take over from them."

"I think there are laws against that sort of thing," I said.

"You could be anybody you wanted to be."

ON ONE OF OUR WALKS, Rachel and I found ourselves in the part of the hospital where they keep the babies. There was a room full of them on the other side of a glass wall, each one in its little incubator. Nurses wandered around the room, making sure they were all right. The babies closest to the glass waved their arms and feet at us.

"It's like we're their parents or something," Rachel said.

"But we're not," I pointed out.

"If it wasn't for the nurses, we could just probably take them and go, and they'd never know the difference."

"There are easier ways of getting children," I said.

"Are there?"

We watched as a nurse lifted one of the babies from its incubator and took it into a back room. There was a woman in a bathrobe sitting in a wheelchair back there, and before the door closed, we saw her hold out her arms for the baby.

"What do you think we'd be like if we were the parents of some of these kids?" Rachel asked.

"What do you mean?" I said.

She pointed at the nearest baby, a dark-haired thing with a face that looked as if it had been pushed down with sandpaper. "Who would we be if we were this kid's parents?"

I looked at the baby for a moment. "I'd be a lawyer," I finally said. "Corporate. You'd be ..."