Critical Injuries
Authors: Joan Barfoot
Critical Injuries
Joan Barfoot
Copyright © 2013
Joan Barfoot
This edition copyright © 2013 Cormorant Books Inc.
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Contents
An Unfamiliar Disobedience
“Hop in,” Lyle says, and in Isla hops. He does a little number on her thighs: “tickling the ivory,” he calls this. It still delights her to climb into his old dented green pick-up, so large and high, sturdy and workmanlike. Not like the toy sports car he uses for work, or even like her own practical compact, but a serious vehicle designed for serious pursuits.
Although they haven't always been serious in it. Once, they made love in the bed of the truck on a well-used old mattress Lyle was about to take to the dump. “One last time,” he said then, from his own Lyle-ish combination of immediate lust and permanent sentiment. That was a couple of years ago.
This journey is for some other purpose, celebratory and impulsive. Something to do with ice cream? At the far, far end of it, that much trickles back, but there's a problem: a profound interruption after that hopping-in moment; something like an electrical outage.
Isla perceives an absence of memory, and right on its heels an urgent longing for memory, along with a powerful, simultaneous desire not to remember. How odd. She's pretty sure she doesn't ordinarily give much thought to memory, that it doesn't usually loom so consciously large. She notices then the concept of consciousness: that something, anything, might or might not loom large in it. Also that she has, having lost it, regained it. Which has to do with memory, the desirability of it, or the importance.
This distress, this disorientation, is annoying; like something itchy she should be able to scratch. Petty, when there's something large that ought to concern her.
Something itches and it seems she can't scratch. That could get maddening fast. She fidgets, and mysteriously feels herself failing to fidget. “What the hell,” she thinks, meaning to speak but hearing her words fail to arrive in the air.
This is peculiar, very troubling, but perhaps the cause will come clear if she's patient and waits. That usually works, although sometimes things take their own sweet time about coming clear, and sometimes they do so in ways she would not have chosen.
Well, if she knows that much, she must have memory; and suddenly so she does, a great swoosh of scenes, voices, words, sensations, events, years and years worth roaring back into her head like a train in the night, brightly lit windows, faces pressed against glass, tearing through darkness full-tilt.
Banging into the hard wall of Lyle saying, “Hop in.”
Where is Lyle, and where, for that matter, is she? In this darkness she can't make anything or anyone out, and has no sense that there's another soul in the room. At least it seems like a room, an enclosed, stable, solid feeling to the air. She must be lying down â how else could she achieve this quality of stillness? â but she isn't absolutely certain of even that much.
She is certain, though, that there must be other things she ought to be doing besides lying around in, presumably, a room for, presumably, some reason. What should she be doing? Depends what day it is, and what time.
Oh. She hadn't realized she doesn't know what day it is, or what time.
It's possible she's in a dream. That happens: layers of dream peeling away, resistant to waking, so that there's a dreaming awareness of dreaming a dream. That kind of dream is especially hard to rise out of. So this may only be an excursion into the unconscious that's unusually hard to rise out of.
Usually she dreams in colour, and in motion, and in some activity, however senseless and strange. This, if it's a dream, is a most silent, dark one.
She can remember quite a lot now; just about everything, she thinks, she could remember before.
Before what?
There's the missing memory: whatever that elusive
what
is, that leaves her without a clue where she is, or what day it is, or what time, or what she ought to be doing. Her days are filled, her schedule packed, and this, whatever it is, sure wasn't marked on it.
If she understood exactly how she might be lying down, she could likely figure out exactly how to get up, and get going. As it is, an unfamiliar disobedience seems to be occurring. Her brain orders, “Move,” and nothing, apparently, happens.
This is ridiculous.
But say it's a dream: the trick in that case is to fall back into its full embrace, let whatever it is dream itself through, so that when she returns to the surface, the dream whole and completed, her real world will be there in all its colours and capacities, just as it always is when she's been sleeping and wakes. It's satisfying to find a sensible solution to a quandary, a puzzle, a dilemma. This is among the skills she's learned, sometimes in hard ways, in which she takes, therefore, some pride.
Although this time, it does not work that way.
This time, with return of consciousness there's light, thank God, a relief that she hasn't gone inexplicably blind, and there are also nearby but out-of-view voices. “What's happening here?” she tries to say. Not to mention, where, exactly, is here? Once again, words don't emerge. Instead of dead silence, though, there's garbled sound that is chilling. She sounds like an idiot. Seriously. Or like somebody fresh from a terrible stroke. Someone whose eyes roll, and whose tongue lolls, that's what she sounds like, someone damaged either by implosive or explosive, internal or external forces.
Still, she knows those words:
implosive, explosive
. She can't have turned into an idiot, and how likely is it she can even have had some brain-damaging event like a stroke if she still knows words like that, even if she can't say them?
She recognizes Lyle's voice, although not the other man's and not, quite, the words, a sort of tumble-rumble in her ears, not unlike her own sounds. Which they must have heard; which perhaps even meant something to them because here they suddenly are, one youngish stranger, one Lyle, looking down at her, and it's good, reassuring, to see that she can see them. Senses, some of them, functioning.
Lyle is wearing the gardening shirt he had on as he sat in the truck saying, “Hop in”: an old, soft, blue and black checkered thing, gone at the elbows, worn at the neck, cuffs rolled up his ropy forearms, whose tendons she is excessively fond of, enjoying the play of them working when he's doing something muscular, or just stretching, like reaching up to change a ceiling light bulb. But passion is not her mood at the moment, nor, it seems, his. His narrow features are drawn down and frowning, the tendons of his arms flexing with what looks like tension of a kind that is distant from pleasure.
She hopes he's not still wearing the heavy old boots and the worn blue jeans, as well as the shirt, in which he usually kicks around in the garden. They'd be muddy. She could swear she is straining to raise up her head, turn it to look, but the view doesn't change. Something hard and serious seems to have clamped itself to her head.
“What?” she inquires again, and the word sounds clearer this time, although she wouldn't know that from Lyle's face, which looks more scared than anything else. She would like to smile at him, just so he'd feel better. For all she knows, she is smiling. Perhaps in some scary fashion. The thought may be the deed, she can't tell, but she also can't see a reason she'd be better at smiling than at turning her head. This is all puzzling, and surely no dream.
Whatever it is, Lyle will fix it, she can rest easier with him at hand since he's a reliable fixer of practically everything, from Jamie's drug charge to the toilet when it wouldn't stop running. She's never seen him look quite this way before, though; as if he has no idea where to begin, and moreover is afraid of the task. From this angle, too, she can see how crumpled and worn his throat's skin has become: tissuey, fragile.
She is forty-nine, he is fifty-two; not old, either of them, but also by no means young. Saggy events have been occurring with her flesh as well, although in her case it's been more a matter of rippling than crumpling. “What is it?” she attempts, one more time.
She sees his lips move, hears him say “Isla,” and then also for some reason hears “ice cream,” and “You run in, I'll keep the truck running,” although his mouth doesn't move beyond “Isla.”
How ridiculous the two of them sound: Lyle and Isla, Isla and Lyle. There's no way to gracefully put those two names together. They're a tongue twister, lyrics to a gibberish song. They didn't actually notice this, or at least she didn't, until his older-by-five-minutes twin son William was toasting the newlyweds at their wedding six years ago and sounded so silly doing it, slightly pissed, that the whole room burst out laughing. Including Lyle and Isla, Isla and Lyle.
Why, when she can perfectly well see his hand reaching down to what must be her arm, or some real part of her, anyway, can she not feel his touch? Why won't he touch her? Why would he leave his hand hovering over her skin? That's almost cruel, in a way. It's not like him to hold himself back.
Oh. They were celebrating, that's what the ice cream is about. Another piece of information fallen in place: that Lyle's arteries were not after all about to explode or his heart to clench closed, because in just over ten months he'd ratcheted his cholesterol down from seven-point-something to five-point-something, and was in a mood to throw caution briefly aside.
Naturally at their ages they're aware of the possibility, moreover the likelihood, of encroachments from the inside: indiscernible nibblings by stray cells going exploring at the edges of organs, testing conditions for their own omnivorous, destroying survival. Lyle, especially, knows about this. Both of them would be horrified but not startled, exactly, by cancer or heart attack or kidney collapse, anything invisibly internal like that. Although they also know about the possibilities of accidental, external doom, these seem so random as to be faint and not worth considering, but never mind anything that came before â in just the eight years Lyle and Isla have been together, including the six married years, they've been to a number of funerals involving natural causes, as these things are termed. Friends. Colleagues. They rule out mere acquaintances. “I don't think it's something we want to do recreationally,” Isla told Lyle. “Going to just anyone's funeral is a hobby we might want to hold off on for a few years.”
Maybe she's dead. That would account for Lyle looking so unhappily down at her. Although it would hardly account for her looking back up.
They'd taken his spiked and unwholesome cholesterol count seriously. “I don't want to lose you,” she'd said, tenderly because it was true, he has been something of a miracle, not to say revelation.
She imagined his arteries like the mysterious events that regularly occur on expressways: you're booting along nicely just over the speed limit, happily singing to the radio or a favourite CD, looking forward to an agreeable destination, and all of a sudden there's a whole line of brake lights ahead, a blockage, a jam that slows everything to a crawl, ages and ages spent creeping until finally there's a couple of cars twisted together in the left lane, or construction narrowing the right lane, and sometimes there's no visible reason at all and the traffic just clears and you're back to booting along nicely, humming along. She'd imagined, when he came home reporting those high cholesterol levels, his arteries just like that, flowing smoothly and then suddenly clogging up, moving sluggishly, moving, fatally, not at all.
They ate salads, low-fat cheeses, egg substitutes, lentils â dear lord, they now have a whole stack of recipes for various lentil manifestations. Naturally when he came home from the doctor's, happy as a kid with a good report card, with his five-decimal-something cholesterol count, he wanted a treat. “Ice cream,” he said. “The real thing. Just once, I promise, but I want a big Rocky Road. Or double chocolate, with thousands and thousands of chips.”
She saw traffic parting in front of them, the driving clear and easy, returning to cruise control, only more watchful now, more alert.
They are responsible, she and Lyle, to each other's lives. That's what marriage now means; to her, anyway. She hopes, if she is not managing to smile as she would like to, that her eyes send this warm message to him. He looks so unhappy! She can't see beyond the unhappiness, although his face usually has a capacity for layers and layers of expression, if she watches closely enough. She can on occasion, for instance, perceive anger behind gentle concern, or vice versa, and often enough there's some kind of laughter, and some variation of affection in the lines of his face, the set of his lips, the tenor and shape of his eyes.
If he laughed right now, she would feel a whole lot better. If he even just smiled, she would be reassured.
He was laughing when they left home for the ice cream, laughing at her because he'd swept her into his light-hearted whim without giving her time to change from her work clothes, which happened to be the midnight-blue linen suit with the snug, fitted skirt that's tricky when it comes to manoeuvring into the truck. It rucked up around her thighs, and he helped her pull it down, although not right away.
What comes next?
Driving out the lane, she supposes. Down the road. Into town. But that's not a particular vision, it's not something she sees but something she's done so many times her head can re-create each dip and turn, every culvert, roadside rock, fence and crop.