Tarot Sour (5 page)

“If that's what you really want, Margot, then I'll go.”

Against all the force of gravity, I nod.

“Okay, then.” He takes my soft face in his weather-hewn hands and kisses my forehead. I keep my eyes focused on his chin. My world is his chin. The cleft becomes mountains, the sweat is oceans. The short stubble is the vegetation off of which I could thrive for ages. The small mole he keeps tucked under the sharp ridge of his jawbone is the source of life itself. I have descended to the surface of this planet, and slowly, inhumanly, I find myself ascending further from it once again until it is a distant speck floating amongst the slowly sifting dust and then, it falls into the black hole of a doorway and is gone, lost to another plane of existence I no longer have any contact with.

I pick myself up and fall slowly into the sockets and tunnels of my work clothes. It is a metamorphic regression, a butterfly shying defeatedly back into its chrysalis. I check my watch. I need to leave in fifteen minutes if I'm to get to work as scheduled. I go upstairs and into our bedroom. I shake off the crumpled down comforter of our bed and lay it flat down over the mattress. I plump the pillows and take Frank's to the bathroom where I dust off another night's worth of lost hair. At least he is suffering some consequence of his own actions. It gives me a haughty lift of spirits. I begin picking up the clothes that are lying around the floor; I pour Frank's into his hamper and mine into mine.

Falling out of the back pocket of one of his suit pants is a loose slip of ruffled pink fabric. I pluck it out. Another one of
hers
. That great wet bubble of disgust rises up inside of me again. I want to throw it but it won't shatter anything, so I just tuck it back into the pocket and drop the pants into the hamper. I remember the first time I find her scent hovering around our house. It is two years after Ingot is born. I've grown soft and fat with mothering her and haven't quite motivated myself yet to return to work at the hospital. A stronger woman, a weaker woman, than I would leave him immediately on finding the little slip of paper fallen out of his address book, the one with her phone number on it and a lewd little message of ingratiation. Since then I have thoroughly documented the affair with a disinterested panache, keeping a mental catalogue of his inconsistencies, his overt lies, the little novelties and mementos he leaves behind in his absentmindedness. There are times when I wonder if he can really be so stupid or if he is trying to flaunt the affair to me. I understand for just a second how it can be so plausible, so feasible, for a woman to slip and catch her hand on a mug. If I didn't need my hands for work I would tile my kitchen with banana peels.

Goddammit, I think, I am running late. I stand up from the bed where I have been staring at the hamper, at the little flash of pink thread showing through the wicker mesh. I hurry down and outside, it is only as an afterthought that I wonder if I've locked the door or not, but it all seems irrelevant. Nevertheless, I will have to call Mr. Henrik next door to check for me once I get to the hospital. I've never actually seen the man, other than from great distances in public, or through curtained windows, he tends to stay shut in. But he is an old, retired pervert who spends his days trying to find new ways to peer into our house. More than once I've caught him staring out of his window into our master bedroom or bathroom. I never tell Frank, partly because it thrills me, makes me feel younger to be the object of such distant attraction, and partly because it seems like another soft stab in his fat hairy back. As long as he keeps away from my Ingot, I don't mind if, considering the door might be unlocked, he helps himself to a pair or two of my underpants. Just because we all know who has taken the Hesse children doesn't mean it hasn't shaken us all about the safety of our own. Even Sheriff Barilla, with his adopted little girl from Vietnam, is overly anxious about the fact that two children have simply disappeared.

* * *

This town is as desolate and sterile as the hospital in which I work. The only real difference is a matter of hue. The streets are coated with the desert dust and sand blown in on the sea breeze. The walls are tiled thick with it. At one point this place was clean-swept and colorful. Now you can't tell the aluminum siding from the brick, you can't tell the yellows from the reds from the blues. The edge of the forest is dead from the dry heat, as though someone has asked for a buffer between us and the rich wet vegetation that leads the way to the coast. Even the people seem to wear clothes blander than they used to, likely because shortly after moving here one gains an innate understanding that anything elegant worn outside the house will soon have its every gap and synapse, every space between every thread stuffed with the thick granules of the wandering desert.

The halls of the hospital are just as lifeless, though white rather than the mahogany brown of the city. There is not much business to be had here anymore, not even in the wards where the destitute and the malaise used to gather in droves. In the silence, the hum of the fluorescent tubes becomes a voice of accompaniment. It is rebuttal to the thoughts of helplessness, it is concordance to the rambling queries of pleasantry, it is a sounding board for hypotheses. When I enter, as I do every morning, the receptionist, a cute young girl from the high school who always has half a dozen textbooks spread out on the desk around her, welcomes me in. I acknowledge her, though in my mind it is that clean white light that has addressed me, and it is the hum to which I have returned the greeting.

I work at that desk when I am in high school and my mother works on the second floor in Advanced Diagnostics and Radiology. There is a time when I manage to pull myself away from the siren's comfort of home. Though, far from anyone I know and uninterested in anything I find myself studying, I revert to nursing, and four years later find myself graduated to working in the same hospital, in the first floor clinic. It seems, particularly after marrying Frank, who at the time is a rather charming though unswervingly flirtatious accountant, that all of the noteworthy events of my life will take place in that building. I am birthed on the third floor, as are both Ingot and Emery. I spend my youth and now my rapidly vanishing middle age here on the ground floor. I am destined to spend my old age on the second floor in radiology where I am a legacy, making silent bets with the fluorescent lights as to which of the desiccates I will outlive and which will outlive me. And in the end, I will be shuffled away into some drawer in the basement and forgotten like so many buttons and pins.

I take my clipboard from Missy, the teenaged receptionist with an unfair bosom Emery has most likely already had the pleasure of acquainting himself with, and head for Mrs. Engel's room. I step aside as a swarm of faceless doctors and nurses like flitting moths pass by as the last night shift comes to its end. I can hardly imagine that so many people still live in this town, stuffed into what low-rise apartment buildings and homes have been left un-condemned as time continues whittling itself away into something purportedly more useful.

They pass, are picked up by a gust of dry wind as the front doors open and they float off to some other cloud for the time being. My clipboard tells me the same thing it tells me every morning: charged with seven hours of clinic duty, split through its thorax with a complimentary lunch half-hour in the cafeteria, and keep special attention on Mrs. Engel, the lonely old widow who is still keeping herself alive somehow, none of us can quite discern how. I decide to stop in to see her first. The night shift tends to be careless. No telling how many mornings I show up here with vials of siphoned blood sitting, curdling, uncapped, on carts themselves left to sit in the halls, lab reports left unfilled or, worse yet, half-filled so that nobody can quite tell which medications have been administered and which still need to be, patients left unfed, unbathed, uncleaned.

I stand in the doorway for a moment to assess the situation. There she is, a wrinkled little prune of a woman with her hands folded below her pulled-taffy breasts, half lost in the shadow of the machines that stand between her and the window that faces the sunrise. The
whisk-hush
of the ventilator as it provides her with oxygen. The steady drip of the IV's that pump her with liquefied food and nutrient minerals. The whir of the electricity of the machine that monitors her vitals and its accompanying metronome beep. There is hardly a shape between the stiff thermal sheet and the mattress as her hollow bones continue to shrink in on themselves. I swear, witch doctors have worn necklaces thicker with bone than this woman, a scarecrow gone and lost its hay.

I go in and stand at the foot of the bed and then I pick up her chart, flip through the pages. Nothing has changed since yesterday. It is as though despite the world, Mrs. Reya Engel refuses to change herself. The sharp contact between the chart and the steel bed frame as I place it back is as loud as the tolling of the village hall bell tower. I suck in my breath but she seems not to have heard it. It is only when I turn to leave that I hear the familiar rustle of human movement. I remember the first time I notice such a sound, that of human movement—only three years earlier when I come home early, sick with what will become pneumonia contracted from a little girl in the clinic, and hear it like a background frequency underlying all of the unique clicks and moans of Frank and his mistress as they tousle in our bed; I stand there for a moment thinking to myself, how can
anyone
ever get sleep with that horrible sound like a wind tunnel formed around them? And then I go sit in the park until the school buses are on their way home again so that he doesn't know that
I
know.

“Good morning, Nurse Fasch,” pipes a mouse. I turn and smile at the sad old woman who is smiling like a waning cuticle moon back up at me.

“Good morning, Mrs. Engel. How was your night?”

She shrugs. Her shoulders are two bony little knobs like the fish skulls they keep insulated behind glass at the museum where Emery used to obsess over them until we pull him by the shirt cuff along. I am almost certain that, should I pull that blanket back, Reya Engel's body will be nothing but a fish spine lying curled with a scaled tail flapping slowly where her feet should be.

“Couldn't say,” she answers. “Slept right through it.”

“Well, that's good to hear. I see they've jacked up your dosage again. Has the pain been worse?”

“Nothing to worry about.” She closes her eyes and turns them up toward the ceiling. I can't tell whether she has fallen back asleep, but before I can turn to leave again, she withdraws a shriveled stick of an arm out from beneath the blanket, with obviously great difficulty, and beckons me over with a claw. “Did I ever tell you about the time I met my husband?”

“No, Mrs. Engel, you never did.” Her husband dies several years earlier, a quiet and humble owner of a hardware store who spends his entire life in town except for three weeks spent abroad overseas where he meets Reya and from whence he brings her back to live with him for the sixty-seven years that will precede his dignified painless death in the middle of the night.

“Do you have time?”

I check my watch, something I seem to do more and more these days despite the fact that I have less and less things to do and places to go. I am due in the clinic, but I can't quite bring myself to deny her. “For you, Mrs. Engel, I would make all the time in history if necessary.” I pull one of the steel frame chairs screeching across the linoleum to the side of her bed, take her cold hand in mine. I have to check to make sure it is actually cupped in there, it is so light it makes no impact on my relatively meaty palms.

“I was engaged at the time, but as far as I was concerned, it was already over. I was twenty-three, I thought I was too young to settle down but it turned out I was just settling down with the wrong man. His name was Julian. My fiancé. There was nothing wrong with him, but, when I kissed him, there was no fire. There was nothing that made me want to spend the rest of my life just trying to die so that I could be with him for eternity. Do you know the feeling? The fire?”

I say that I do, and I mean it. And I think of Benjamin.

“So I just up and left one night. I took everything I needed, or thought that I needed, to survive, and I took all the money I'd saved up from my part time job at the library, and I boarded a plane to Tokyo, and from there I chartered a small fishing boat to take me to Ie, an unknown fishing village all alone to itself on a small sheet of land floating alone among the Ryukyu Islands, the Japanese Archipelago. You can't imagine a more solitary place than that island. The entire piece of land barely had a population of a hundred. It was a green place with little trees and high rolling hills, the lower coasts, especially the coast around the town, were built up with high stone walls to protect from the tall ocean waves that would sweep upon us in the night like the specters of titans. There were about three dozen huts built from mud and from brick they forged themselves from the red clay of the sheer northern cliff. The rest of the island was rolling hills dotted with wild sheep and low wire fences that kept the sheep from wandering onto the half of the island jagged with rocks and cliffs. The fishing boat dropped me off at the edge of twilight, and I fell in love with the world all over again as I watched the bruise-purple sky swallow the setting sun, as wide as I'd ever seen it. You could see the strings of fire it spit up off of its surface and sucked back in again.

“I lived with an old woman whose husband had died recently of exhaustion from a lifetime of herding and shearing sheep. I had wanted to leave the world, and there on Ie, it seemed the only place left where someone could still do so. I spent my days helping the women make minor repairs to the huts, tend to the gardens, and pull the bone, gristle, and veins from the sheep carcasses the men brought back at the end of the previous day. Mrs. Han-Yoon, her name was, had spent her entire life on that island. After her husband died, the neighbors took pity on her and took turns preparing meals of fish and mutton to bring to her every night. I could not speak their language, and some of the villagers seemed never to have heard of America. But they welcomed me and began to feed me as well. I stayed for three months, occasionally distraught over the way I had simply walked away from my family, from Julian. I would cry late at night wondering if any of them were still looking for me. If they thought I was dead. If anyone had known how truly unhappy I had been with him. I felt I couldn't let anyone know where I'd gone, or that I had even gone. My parents were as smitten with Julian as
he
was with
me
. And in fact, they had always wanted a son. It had been about as close to an arranged marriage as you can get in Western civilization. Because they'd wanted a son, they had passively neglected me for years, and then I finally brought home a man who came from good stock, a handsome man with money and success and a personality brimming with charisma and good cheer. I couldn't go back to them. They would have sent me right back into his arms.