The Dead Are More Visible (23 page)

A faint pneumatic sigh as the sleeve releases.

“Yup, you’re still reading low. I’m wondering if this might be an unusual rebound effect of the presumed pregnancy.”

You stare at him.

“Your blood tests suggest you were recently pregnant. The low BP coinciding with it might be a complete ‘coincidence,’ sure, but I find the correlation pretty suggestive. You
were
recently pregnant?”

“I miscarried. It was early on.”

“And
did
you have a history of low blood pressure before?”

Suddenly you’re too depleted to respond. You look down, bite your lower lip to steady it. Too late.

After some moments Dr. Wall, now stiffly sheepish, says, “Sorry about the miscarriage.”

“Okay.”

“They’re real common, more common than people think,” he adds, and he proffers what he has—data and stats—as consolation: “Up to 45 percent, in fact, according to one school of thought. And some feel the incidence is rising, possibly as an effect of, and this is fascinating, a general weakening of the gene pool due to the way the usage of antibiotics has, uh, prevented the natural triage among weak and strong offspring over the last forty or fifty …”

It was a shock, the pregnancy. A real stress horse. Within days it altered you, like a potion or a serious illness. For one thing, it made you fall in love with Charles, who until then you’d been unsure of. (You see now that you were also tickled at the thought of presenting your parents with a tiny blond Anglo bastard.) After five days, sure of your feelings, you gave Charles the news. Nervously you feigned neutrality, so as to draw a candid response, but he must have sensed your excitement. “That’s
amazing!
” he exclaimed, though with the look of a man congratulating a rival on winning a huge fellowship. He pounced, embraced you, hid his face behind your ear.

“What’s wrong?”

“NOTHING!” he said, rending your eardrum. “But … are you sure we want to do this?”

“Others,” Dr. Wall says, “blame environmental
toxins, especially those with long half-lives in the body.”

“But I don’t understand, Charles. A few days ago you were talking
marriage
.”

“But I know it’s hard. My ex-wife miscarried when we were not much older than you. We came here from the States after college, in ’68. The war. I went to med school here. Really I wanted to be a researcher.”

“A father is just not how I feel right now, Rod.”

You’re touched that Dr. Wall is making an effort this way. He is so wooden, it’s obvious he hasn’t had much practice. Or is he just afraid of losing his star patient?

You go on thinking about Charles while Dr. Wall does a second reading.

“Well,” he announces, “it worked again!”

Day two passes like a day in a tropical fever ward. Even when the first cycle of pills wears off, around three p.m., everyone is flattened. The women doze, go out to the washroom or for a short walk—nobody feels like walking for long—or to purchase a pretty much futile coffee. Sunetra wandered off to the TV/computer room after the last blood draw and has not been seen since. The baritone in the bed above you is still asleep, turned to the wall, the collar of a grey fleece tracksuit visible where the blanket ends. A beige near-afro of curls like wood shavings. Huge black sneakers on the locker. Eleanor, still in her hairnet, is propped on her bed with Harry Potter on the lectern of her knees. Every fifteen minutes or so she turns a page. On the
upper bunk, Hong slumps against the wall with her laptop open on her thighs, greasy hair tied back, lips moving while she reads. She improves her English by studying Scripture, she says; she has the full text of the King James Bible on her hard drive. Han, prone on her mattress, is browsing
Cosmo
. Maybe she’s given up on trying to study while here.

“Listen to this—champagne contains traces of lithium. So it’s a natural mood-booster.”

Wen takes out an earbud and says, “Could losing all this blood hurt us? I mean, in combo with the drugs?”

“That’s what they’re trying to find out, dear,” Eleanor says without looking up. “If the drugs are dangerous.”

“What means ‘graven’?” Hong asks Eleanor, who’s helping with her English.

“It means ‘carved,’ I believe—isn’t that correct?” Eleanor squints over at you.

“What’s the sentence?” you ask.

“They’re really not taking much blood,” Han says. “Oh, and it’s a myth about the bubbles making you drunk faster.”

“
Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands
. Isaiah 49:16.”

“I guess it would mean more like ‘cut,’ ” you say. “Like with a razor or piece of glass.”

Hong nods firmly, as if mechanically locking the definition in place. Eleanor beams at you and says, “I can always tell the bright ones. I ought to have taught school!”

You know this is a cue of some kind but you’re too weary to respond.

“Wouldn’t mind a drink about now,” Wen says. “Not champagne. A shooter and a pint. And a
smoke
. That’s the only time I still want one.”

Ruth, on her back with her eyes closed, rolls dramatically toward the wall as if brusquely ending an argument with an invisible bedmate.

“God!” says Wen. “Aren’t we even allowed to talk during the
day?
”

“I have commandments!” Hong says, holding up a piece of paper that must be the contract you didn’t bother reading. “It says, to talk in the dorm in the day not forbidden.”

Charles is back. Charles who donates blood and always makes a show of not needing a rest afterward. He has a nice-looking face and a slim, waifish body—a combination highly appealing to girls who wear layered black and listen to Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen—but he hates his body and weight-lifts with punitive diligence. He’s one of those twenty-three-year-old guys who always seems to be shimmering with rage, and the rage comes because the world will not ratify and reward his brilliance. That he has yet to provide the world with firm evidence doesn’t occur to him. The world should just sniff it out on him. And where does it come from, you wonder, this deep, aggrieved conviction of one’s genius? What a luxury! Even in your last year of high school, when teachers were all telling you
you
were
brilliant, a talented writer with a great career ahead, university, grad school, anything you chose, you found it hard to have faith in yourself. Yet in every class there was a student—usually a boy, though not always—who, while getting far less encouragement than you, still stubbornly believed in his own radiant destiny.

After you gave blood together at a clinic, Charles said, “Hey, they say I have A+ blood!” He cocked an ironic eyebrow, yet you sensed he was secretly chuffed. All the same, you felt for him—more and more as you grew intimate with his better features, his idealism, his earnest curiosity. You knew he suffered. In a world where there isn’t enough importance to go around, men like him, who need a lot of it, will always be disappointed.

Another psychotropic doze and you decide to get some food, though your appetite is dead, stomach vacant but gassy, as Nurse Nkwele warned might happen. She’ll be back on shift before long, bearing the next dose. You slump up the hallway, stand at the window. The only sign of life in the industrial park is a bird—some kind of swift or swallow?—that keeps plunging straight out of the sky toward the mouth of the chimney of the building next door. At the last moment, over and over, this small diver peels away as if losing faith, then loops up again to try a fresh approach. Finally it triumphs—keeps its sickle wings tucked flat and zips straight down the shaft—and though you’ve been rooting for the bird until now, its
final success disturbs you. As if its vanishing was not voluntary; as if it has been sucked into the engine of a private jet.

Another marshy sandwich, salmon salad. It tastes wrong, the coating in your mouth scrambling the flavours. The only other diner is a short, bearded guy in a tank top, doubled over a table, pushing away his paper plate of food—laminated
moussaka
, oily fries and a “Greek salad” of iceberg lettuce with feta flakes. Now he grips his paunch and makes faint, crooning moans. You’re unsure if you’re meant to hear. Maybe he wants you to ask if he’s okay. Normally you would. You avert your gaze and a pair of dark eyes, banefully watching you from the pass-through counter, look away. The curse of the Inca mummy. You’re feeling a little paranoid. A symptom you should probably report at the next blood draw. Then again, ha ha, what if they should use it against you.

The washroom: your face in the mirror, in unchivalrous overhead light, lips rabid with toothpaste. You’re scrubbing hard, teeth and tongue and way back in your mouth, almost gagging yourself as you scrape away that caustic aftertaste. You look even thinner. Jayla has always told you she envies you your Mediterranean cheekbones. Women with cheekbones, she says, never age.

“Do you think I look
green?
” Wen asks loudly, her huge blow-dryer in hand. She’s grooming at the next sink, a towel wrapped around her from just above the
nipples to just below the crotch. She’s exhaustively waxed. She has swabbed off her metallic blue eyeshadow but still wears pink lipstick.

“I think it’s just the lighting,” you say.

“And I’m breaking out around the mouth. Han said it can be a symptom of like, poisoning? Like if someone spikes your drink in a club, you break out around the mouth the next day?”

“Wouldn’t that be the least of your worries the next day?”

“Hmm, right.” She nods vaguely. “Plus, I’m packing it on. All this lying around. Food’s better than I expected. You don’t seem to be having any problem.”

“Actually, I think you look great,” you tell her, hoping that’ll be the end of it, but in the mirror you see her face snap toward you, a sunrise of colour coming to her cheeks and throat as she smiles. A lovely smile. And you’re glad you said it. Her fingers bracelet your wrist, squeezing. She doesn’t realize the industrial blow-dryer in her other hand is now trained on you, point-blank. In the mirror you see your hair shooting back and your eyes squinting, as if you’re riding a Harley, free and easy, a hot Nevada wind in your face.

“You’re sweet,” Wen says megaphonically. “But you’re so quiet! Are you okay? You want to use my Conair on your hair? I mean, after you wash it a bit?”

“Thanks.”

The blow-dryer goes on sandblasting your face, searing the tear ducts. You’re strangely moved—a
combination of Wen’s unexpected humanity and that mirror flash of yourself as everything you no longer are.

Returning to the washroom just after five, after taking the first pill of the next cycle, you chuck your cellphone in the garbage bin and rearrange things over it. You’ve stopped checking to see if messages are amassing. A sound from the far stall and you recognize the large shoes, black Converse sneakers, that have sat on top of the locker for the last twenty-four hours. They’re facing the toilet. As you stare, something occurs to you. You flee and hurry back to the dorm. You lie on your bunk, hearing the other women talk and begin to slow, slur, go silent, as you wait for your bunkmate to return.

Ruth is mopping her face with a white T-shirt.

“Are you all right, Ruth?” asks Eleanor.

“Holding my own. Thanks.”

“Touch of flu?”

“I’m good,” she says, then adds conclusively: “Thanks.”

Hong asks Eleanor, “What this whole verse means?
For thy waste and thy desolate places … shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away
.”

“I think it has something to do with overcrowding, don’t you think, Roddy?”

Wen gives you a collegial leer. She’s changing into a T-shirt that says
TO SAVE TIME, LET’S JUST ASSUME I KNOW EVERYTHING
. Sunetra is snoring—soft, demure little snores.

You nod, still waiting; but you drift off before the eighth dorm-mate returns.

It’s the middle of the night and you’re packed with narcotics and suffering your first insomnia in weeks. When guardian vampire Nkwele slipped in an hour ago to wake you for the blood draw, you were globe-eyed in the darkness, staring at the bunk above you. Rebound insomnia, she explained—it occurs with almost all sedatives, although the manufacturers were hoping that it would not with this one. That way (she said in a whisper thick with distaste) patients would not have to take occasional hiatuses from them. They could sedate themselves nightly. Forever. And some physicians would happily facilitate such a course. She would not, however, if she were practising.

“Plus, I feel uneasy,” you told her, not wanting her to go. Wishing she would sit maternally on the side of the bunk, though half ashamed to explain your fear.

She said she would note down that symptom as well.
Uneasy
.

Now the big stranger above you is tossing. To your relief, Han and Wen are also awake, Han whispering softly, Wen loudly. Her hearing has been damaged; not everyone can be a rock star but now everyone can have rock-star hearing. She keeps saying
“What?”
so that Han has to raise her own volume.

“The realm of possibility’s a pretty big place, Wen.”

“So, you really don’t like doing that to Rick?”

“I’m okay with it. But I don’t really like when he does it to me.”

“Oh my God, are you serious? Is he, like, no good at it?”

“I get lonely. He seems so far away. You know?”

“I certainly do not!” Wen shrieks. “I feel like I’m being
worshipped
.”

After a silence Han says, “So maybe being worshipped is a lonely thing.”

“Not being worshipped is lonelier any day.”

Is the bunk above you moving steadily, vibrating?

“Be quiet, please!” Hong hisses. “There is a time to rest, and we’re on drugs.”

“So
go
to sleep,” Wen says. “We’re not stopping you.”

“Wen,” Han chides—and it hits you that her accent has all but vanished.

You roll toward the wall. Didn’t Sylvia Plath say, “How I would like to believe in tenderness”? Easier to believe from a safe remove. Think of your sweet uncle, for instance. Or Mega Sister. Don’t think of Charles.
Don’t, Charles
. Sharing a bed is no safe remove.
Please, don’t
. When he was about to come that way, he would hold your head down and in your last weeks together he had clamped it down as far as it would go, like a movie villain drowning somebody in a river. And you were drowning, you were choking. No more, you finally said. You called Jayla to talk about Charles and your various concerns and to tell her that you were
pregnant and weren’t sure what to do, given his obvious reluctance and his increasing roughness, but you didn’t get as far as the pregnancy. Because when you said, “I don’t even mind doing it like that—usually I
like
it,” she cut in, “You don’t
mind?
I love it!” She even loved having her head forced down in a death grip, she said. The thrilling insistence of it. The
vehemence
. And that word, “vehemence,” was simply not native to Jayla’s vocabulary. Not her style at all. “Vehemence” was Charles’s style.