The Whole World Over (18 page)

SHE OFTEN WENT OVER THE AWAKENING
, the first memories she had
that came after the accident itself. It began with sounds, few and faint,
like the sounds of a fish tank. She'd never had an aquarium, but her dentist
did; looking at it was supposed to calm you down while you had
your teeth cleaned and drilled, your cavities filled. So there in the dark,
automatically, she'd thought of her dentist's office, of the brilliant fish,
some blue, some striped black and yellow like waterborne bees. The
burblings, watery whispers, and sighs of the machinery and tubing. But
she'd known she was not at the dentist.

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, the air about her settled to a tabby
gray, lit only by a glow outlining a sharp-edged form that quickly volunteered
it was a door.

She was in bed, and her throat hurt, and her head hurt even more. She
tried to lift it but couldn't. From her hips up, she lay on an incline (oh: a
hospital bed; a
hospital
), so she was glad, at least, to be able to make out
all of her body in her limited view. Something—a deeply physical reluctance
. . . a drug?—kept her from testing her body, from checking its
responses to her brain.

Her brain. Was it her brain that hurt, or was it her skull? Could you
tell the difference? Could your skull even hurt?

"Hello?" she tried to call out, but her throat felt swollen, inflamed,
and all that emerged was a rasp, like a wooden chair creaking under the
weight of a very large man. The effort paved a searing pathway across
the back of her head, pain like the rolling out of a brightly colored carpet.
Fear rose through her, vertically, sap through a tree.

A tree . . . something about a tree. Something awful. Very bad news.

Now she saw another source of light: a window, to one side. If she
tipped her head just a little to the left—this she could do if she did it
slowly—she could look almost straight out the window.

And there was the moon. A warm and visible greeting, a beacon of
relief. Full, unshrouded, its edges crisp. It looked like an airy wafer—
what were those crackers that came in the big green tin? She stared at
the moon and thought about the fact that she was breathing. Fact of
breathing, fact of life. This she could control: slow down and speed up
her breathing, despite the pain in her throat. She'd never really looked at
the moon, never really seen how intricate the etchings on its yellowy
silver surface. Bowl of a spoon in candlelight. When she'd looked a long
time—
I see the moon, and the moon sees me
—a glimmering ring like a
rainbow materialized at the rim. In the memory she still retained, as
clear as a framed snapshot, a portrait worn in a locket, Saga stared at
the moon that way for hours, and it kept her company, it kept her sane,
it kept her in one piece, it kept her alive. It was proof, fact, patience,
faith.

But no, she was told by a doctor sometime later, that wouldn't have
been possible, because nurses checked her room frequently, at least
every twenty minutes because her condition had been so severe; surely
not much time had passed before the nurse found her conscious and
fretful, gave her water and more of the medications designed to lighten
her mind, not just her pain.

Over the week that followed the accident, even while she had been in
the ICU, she had been conscious several times. This is what her mother
told her the next day. But she did not remember those earlier wakings.

What she did remember, as her days in the hospital stretched into
weeks, as she discovered that she would have to learn how to use her
right arm and leg all over again, was the accident itself. It had been raining
hard—
a whopper of a storm,
her mother's words—and Saga had
been walking alone to her apartment. She carried her black umbrella,
she remembered that, the big one with the wooden handle that had
belonged to her dad. She watched the ground for puddles because she
wasn't wearing proper boots. The rain was so noisy, the thunder frequent,
and one of the cracks she heard must have been not the thunder
but the bough that fell, that she could swear she remembered seeing as
she dipped the umbrella aside and looked up. She was transfixed, the
way you always are by something that looms unexpectedly, that seems
to be aiming right for you. More sharply than the sight of that bough,
she remembered the
sound
of it inside her skull, as if her consciousness
were the occupant of a very small house and the bough had crashed
down on its roof: a universally resounding hollow crack, a muffled gunshot.
And she remembered one instant thought:
If I die, Mom will be
crushed.
Because her father had died of cancer the month before.

They told her this was probably a dream she had much later, and for
a while she argued with them. Then she pretended to agree. Now she no
longer mentioned it to anyone, but it remained a marvel: this crystal-clear
memory, like a church bell rising over the din of an entire city, over
all the confusion and pain and humiliating inability to recover parts of
herself that she could almost recall, that she felt sometimes she was carrying
around in her pockets like lovely stones, things you can fondle but
never really
own.

"Think of your memory as very badly bruised," one of her therapists
had told her early on. "Some of it will recover fully, but some of it could
remain permanently numb."

That wasn't how Saga saw it. She now thought of her entire memory
as a distinct and separate being, with moods and feelings, as if she'd
been born into the perfect marriage and then, bingo, the marriage had
crumbled into an unpredictably bumpy relationship, but one that could
not be severed or traded in for another, no matter how discouraged she
became.

She looked at the material world around her and sometimes thought
she was making small discoveries. Riding on the train, she'd notice how
highway signs were precisely the same green and white as those woven
plastic lawn chairs (was that on purpose?), how she felt like a drop of
water sliding fast through a long glass tube, how railroad ties were no
longer made of dark motley wood but plain old concrete. But perhaps
she had known and felt all these things before. At such times, she saw
her brain as one of those pocket puzzles composed of numbered square
tiles in a grid; the tiles had merely been mixed up like crazy, and now her
work was to move them side to side, up and down, till she got them
back in order.

Oh but numbers: numbers were one thing that she seemed to have lost
almost completely. She knew what they were, she could count and tell
time, all that; but when she looked at actual numbers—at those figures,
whether on paper or on a street door or on one of those traveling headlines
on the stock market channel that Michael kept on the TV during
his visits—they were mostly meaningless. She knew them as words—
seven
or
two and a half
or
three thousand six hundred and seventy-four
—
but as symbols on bank statements and grocery receipts, they
were, except in rare eureka glimpses, little more than rows of tiny ballet
dancers. Uncle Marsden had bought her a wristwatch, large and sleek,
where all the numbers were represented by their names, and he made
her a card—of which he had dozens printed—bearing a chart that read:
0 zero 1 one 2 two and so on. When people gave
her phone numbers, she could rewrite them as words. Laborious, but it
worked.

Words, they were more unpredictable, more fickle. At times, she
could actually sense the voids, nearly palpable, where reservoirs of
words had deserted her mind. The three years of French she had taken,
though what she had learned was no doubt elementary, had mostly fled
as well. But then, like windows into the past, there would be periods
when all of Saga's non-numerical knowledge felt harmonious, when
words, at least in her own language, came easily without falling into
torrents, when events for days on end seemed as clear and orderly as pictures
in an album, when she could open the refrigerator without encountering
a box of cherry tomatoes or a jar of mustard she had bought the
day before and regarding its presence there as a baffling surprise.

SHE WAITED NEARLY TWO WEEKS
before she went into the city again.
She would meet Stan, she reminded herself as the train pulled into Grand
Central, and then she would stop by to see that Alan fellow, the one
who'd offered so kindly to pay for the vaccinations. (Stan, of course,
had seen the offer as suspicious.) She couldn't remember his face, but
she remembered his help and that he had given her a cup of tea. If it got
too late, she would spend the night in her secret place. It was warm
today, really warm for a change, and she had remembered to bring
her sleeping roll. She liked the open sky when it was nice out. That
night, the moon would be nearly full. She had checked the calendar.

Before leaving home, she always wrote her day's plans, step by step,
in the notebook she carried. There were things she'd forget anyway,
things she'd skip over, but later she'd know about it.

This time, as promised, Stan was where they'd agreed to meet, by the
arch in Washington Square.

"Here they are," he said, without any kind of hello. She didn't blame
him that he wasn't friendly. She no longer took it personally, since she'd
seen him with other people and this was simply how he was.

She looked at the flyers Stan had printed. "You did a nice job," she
said. "Color copies are expensive."

"Yeah, well, let's just say my butt is crapola if my division manager
checks the counter on that machine. So you know where to put
them up?"

"East from here over to Avenue B, come back through SoHo, then up
west. Okay?" She would take most of the flyers to the veterinary clinics
and the pet supply shops in those neighborhoods. Others she'd put up in
cafés and college buildings that let outsiders put things up on their bulletin
boards. She kept a map with every one of these places marked—
though she'd never have shown it to Stan. Saga knew that Stan wasn't
well liked, not personally, but people liked what he did. He didn't care
one way or the other—"Life ain't no popularity contest," he'd say—but
he knew it was best if other people did the footwork. He didn't have the
time, and he was prone to picking arguments with people who, as he put
it, deluded themselves into
thinking
they were animal lovers when an
animal, to them, was little more than a fashion statement, a bed warmer,
or a creature to boot around in this miserable world.

He handed her the list of vets, the places she had to go. "Think your
scrambled brains can handle this?"

She didn't answer that; she knew why he had to insult her. "Can I
come down and see them tonight?" she said instead.

Stan smirked. "Call around six. If I'm there, I'm there. No promises."

"I'll try you then," said Saga.

No better at good-byes than he was at hellos, Stan strode off across
the park, back to the subway, to his job at the phone company.

Saga stayed on the bench for a moment to feel the sun on her head
and shoulders. Sometimes she liked to imagine that if she could just sit
still long enough, the sun could heal her brain the way it made leaves
and flowers sprout, multiply, glow. She let herself reach up, just briefly,
to feel the long furrow that remained along the top of her head, entirely
hidden by her hair, which had quite indifferently grown out (speaking of
growth) to cover this anatomical crisis.

She pulled her hand down and made herself look at the picture Stan
had taken for the flyer. It was true; he had done a nice job. The puppies
were cozied up together on the big plaid cushion in Stan's kitchen, all of
them facing the camera. They looked playful and bright and would find
their new homes quickly.

The flyer gave Stan's number over and over on little rip-off tabs at the
bottom. When people wanted to adopt an animal, Stan took it to them,
so he could see where it would live. He never let them come to his place.
Saga supposed he knew how his way of living would appear to the outside
world, so sometimes she still wondered, a little shamefully, about
the way he'd so easily let her come over that very first time, about how
naïve she had been.

Stan lived in a skinny, sinister-looking house out in Brooklyn.
Though it had clearly come first, it looked as if it had been squeezed into
a crevice between the two large brick buildings on either side. Because
of this, it was almost constantly in shadow. But hey, as Stan had pointed
out when Saga remarked on the darkness, it was a
house.
A house in
New York Fucking
City.
He'd bought it at a foreclosure sale. Deal of the
fucking
century.

When she had first phoned him, last year, after getting his number
from that shelter worker in Connecticut, he had given her directions to
get to his place. Without worrying about her safety, or about who this
man really was, she had eagerly followed those directions, carrying a
small stray, a Norwich terrier, in her plumber's bag on the subway. She
had already put up a notice in the post office and the grocery store and
on telephone poles around Uncle Marsden's town and other towns
nearby—
IS THIS YOUR DOG? HE MISSES YOU!
—but no one had
called. When Stan agreed to take the dog, she'd told Uncle Marsden she
was going to a museum in the city.

Stan worked, so she'd had to wait until the evening to see him. To kill
time, she had taken the dog to Central Park, walking him past the back
of the Metropolitan Museum, so that what she had told Uncle Marsden
became almost the truth.

Setting foot inside Stan's house had been a shock. Saga was almost
obtusely brave (that was how Uncle Marsden put it once when he lost
his temper), but for a moment even she had second thoughts about her
safety. At a glance, the place was a nest of bedlam and grime, cats and
dogs everywhere, in frayed, chewed-up baskets, on tattered armchairs,
in open metal dog crates lined up against a wall where you'd expect to
find a sofa. And this guy Stan, in his buttoned-to-the-neck white shirt
(gray at the cuffs) and shiny black pants, had a kind of leering undertaker
quality. He had this long, thin, pale face (somewhat like the façade
of his house), spiky brown hair, and huge, intense blue eyes that looked
a little creepy when he smiled, because his smile was faintly mean. Or
maybe, to be fair, this effect was just because of his jumbled, slightly
pointy teeth. When he closed the door behind Saga, the look he gave her
was the look you might imagine on the face of the old woman in the forest
who takes in Hansel and Gretel: Now
here's
a tasty meal!