Fragile (16 page)

An angled hallway leads off to one side. They slow for a moment, then bump open a door. Each room in the hospital seems to have its own inhabitants, who comfortably occupy their niche within the larger environment. This place echoes with the cool, antiseptic flavor of a large tiled bathroom, clean and cheerful, with a staff of technicians apparently awaiting her arrival. Their task completed, the lead orderly, the one she thinks of as her driver, scribbles a note on a clipboard and leaves her in the hands of her next set of caretakers. She hasn't had this much attention lavished on her since the days of her pending graduation from high school, when the family feared she would not graduate, would do instead something drastic like drop out and run away from home with her boyfriend or get arrested for smoking dope on the school grounds. Now a trim woman in yellow scrubs smiles at Holly and tells her they are going to perform what she calls a short “procedure.”

“All you have to do is lay on your back and remain perfectly still.” She says this in a way that makes it sound as if it will be harder to accomplish than it should. And then Holly sees why. After tugging the IV needle out of her arm and patching the hole with a gauze bandage, the technician helps Holly sidle onto a plastic ledge covered with a band of paper. This ledge juts out from the circular opening of an imposing machine that looks
like an oversized dryer in a laundromat with glowing blue lights inside it.

“Lie back and get comfortable. We're going to take a look and see what's going on.” Holly allows her head to sink into an overstuffed pillow while the technician pulls a thin sheet over her waist. Then the technician puts her hands on either side of Holly's head and maneuvers it the way Holly would tilt the head of one of her own customers during a cut. “We need you to look straight up and hold perfectly still for just a minute or two while the scan takes place. It may seem like a long time, but it's really only a few seconds. The bed will move you into the device automatically, and the X-ray sensors will move across your head, taking thin cross-section pictures.” She places a kind of collar over Holly's neck; the collar tips Holly's chin up and holds it in place. “Then the computer will put these slices together to give us a very detailed picture of the whole.”

Holly imagines the computer arranging delicate slices of her brain, its structures and synapses marred by her many indiscretions over the years. In her drug-induced bewilderment, she wonders whether they can make a mistake, putting the slices together in the wrong order somehow, converting her into a completely different person. Of course they can. Hospitals, or rather the people who work in them, make mistakes all the time, administering the wrong medications, switching the wristbands on newborn infants, sending them home to the wrong parents and wildly disparate future lives. This idea takes hold and evolves into a wish for something very much like this to happen; a mistake that would wipe all the mistakes of the past away.

“Now hold still. Take a deep breath and relax.” The technician adjusts the position of her head one last time, fluffing the pillow up around her. “Just re-
lax
.”

The hard platform her body rests on begins moving, slowly, almost imperceptibly slow. “Most people like to close their eyes during the procedure. A lot of people doze off and take a short nap.” Holly finds this suggestion incredible. This rigid pallet she is lying on is more uncomfortable than the floor. She can feel the individual bumps of her spine pressing against it, like knobs on the trunk of a tree. And now that it is time to hold still, she is overwhelmed by an urge to twist her head to one side, rebelling against the impervious grasp of the collar tucked under her chin. It has always been this way—whenever someone tells her to do something, she has a powerful impulse to disobey and do the exact opposite.

But she keeps her head still, heeding the words of the technician if only to avoid what she guesses must be the result of any movement: an image of her brain that is scrambled or distorted in some manner. A few inches above her head, the lip of the circular opening to the machine approaches and passes slowly by, absorbing her into it, accompanied by a deep, nearly inaudible humming. Slowly, ever more slowly, her entire head and neck are consumed by the machine. Though her legs and torso extend freely into the open air of the examination room, as her shoulders approach the opening of the machine, the ledge shudders and she has the sensation of being entirely swallowed up by this humming metal box. Now a circular band within the tube begins to spin at an incredible speed, causing
the hum that surrounds her to go up in pitch as it carves out a tiny cross section, a picture more finespun and meticulous than any ever taken of her. She closes her eyes to block this image and a vision of Tom sweeps over her, Tom hovering by the hospital bed, his round face etched with a look of concern; Tom holding the door for her on a date, bringing her elaborate gifts she can never live up to, enclosing her within his suffocating attentions, incorporating her into his pleasant but conventional life. Marriage to Tom would be like this, like sealing herself in a box.

For a few moments she allows her eyes to remain closed. Perhaps she does indeed sleep, as the technician recommended. How much time has passed? Two minutes, ten? She does not know. Without a known impulse from her, her eyes are open again, confronted by the harsh white roof of the cylinder, a few inches from her face. A thought comes to mind, prickling between her ears as if it has been transmitted by the high-pitched buzzing of the machine:
They will never be satisfied.

The words linger, twisting around on themselves, coiling into a ball. She wonders whether the machine can register any of her thoughts; at the moment she is thinking this, the machine is taking another slice of her head, transcribing the exact structure and contents of the brain. She has convinced herself there is a great deal of truth to this statement: They will never be satisfied, the lawyers like Tom, the doctors and nurses. Her mother. The ones who are always probing and measuring her. The old woman who watched the girls last night and gave her that moment a that
momentary look of disdain. They see everything; they know.

I
LAY MYSELF
down in the garden, the garden will keep me whole. I lay myself down in the garden, the garden will keep me sanctified and whole. And Enrique, God bless him if he ever thought to wake up on a Sunday morning and roust his family to church, might look out from the back kitchen window and see me lying here in this mouldering damp plot of earth and wonder what the crazy old gringo lady has gone and done now. But he never does get them up and out to church, though the bells of St Monica's are loud enough when they call the early mass to make the sashes rattle. He sleeps right through it, up past midnight, up when I got home last night with his three fat children watching television too loud, and even the bells of the second mass only wake him up and get him to the porch in his t-shirt and baggy sweatpants reading the paper with his hair standing on end. So Enrique will not see me, nor anyone else even if they happen to look out from the second-story windows of the houses on either side. They will see now that I have crouched down bearing my weight on the butt of my hands in
the dirt and lain myself, my heavy decrepit body, down in the dirt, still damp, wet with dew.

There is no one left to see me, for I am covered up now in the flowers of my garden, in the tender tall fronds of the snapdragons and cone flowers, tall stalks of their stems lifting all around me, a forest from the red dusk globes of the cone flowers draping over me, a canopy of loose amethyst umbrellas. The snaps on their gabbling stalks, luminous, lavender and bronze, they cover me up, they genuflect and shield me, tired and still empty where I was ever hollow from lack, like a seed, like a grain of wheat falling into the damp earth, fallow, slow. Slow in the weight of me, all encompassed now in this great ungainly husk, still sanctified and whole, the entirety of my burden still sanctified and whole.

Was there ever one moment when I could have let go of my penitence, my impudent idea of showing, always showing him that—no—that is not what I was, that is not what I did. I am instead this: An emblem of forsaken need. When he said to me,
well, if you're not going to get a man, you have to get a job,
dry and hollow I became out of spite of him, of them, of you, Tris, yes you. I said, no, I will show you I never was what you thought of me. I never did that, and sure enough here I am with no one left to witness it but the canopy of leaves dumbly filtering the light, only this, Elmer's garden now mine as well and the great pinoak still here, still observant now as it once was of the girl I was before, when I was still light enough and free and not defined by a lack, by the weight of a lack drawn upon me. And blanketing like a hollow in my chest, I went about my business, my job,
my chores, my meals, my life sideslipping the hollow every day and night, circumscribing the lack. Yet I did have things, I had many things in life to reprise me, to satisfy and drag through justifying days. They never left me, this great husk the body is a plenitude of pleasure, so who's to say that one is more preferred above another? Whole afternoons I ate and ate, I soaked in television, and these things are probably superior because they are pleasures of one's own, they are only unto me contained within that hollow, and did he not say that any one who loves his life will lose it, and anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal?

I had no regard for my life here on earth. He said it and yes, Karl would agree. He who hates his life in this world preserves his life forever and ever. I only did what ever it was that proved convenient. I circumscribed my self, my daily coming and going, ever smaller, folding in upon my self. Karl would agree, he would see it now as sanctified and whole. When he came here from Philadelphia with Dennis, he pried my life open gently, like petals of snaps, and let me have companionship, in his authority it was not wrong.

Those years with him and with Dennis were enough to let me know that even a lack is something too, even this hollow is enough to keep my self vigilant to sacrifice, to maltreat, to proficiently maintain the lack and hollow is enough to pinion a semblance of living, to promise myself what he promised me too, which is another chance at longing, another evidence of his love, his beauty, his sin. In the cast of pewter light filtering through the August sky cloudspun and dulled, Elmer, your garden
is still lovely. You would be happy to know it. Even the colors filtered through the Sunday pewter morning light. He was praying in a certain place. He said to them, when you pray his last sermon, and the light filtered through St Monica's windows, lavender and bronze, his last sermon and mine here.

Will they call her about the hair? They should. I have not left much, and neither have I asked for much. They should call her, and she should do it, in case. It is one last vanity, but it is not much. They should do it in case you Tris—in case one last time. But the porcelain vase is broken, the beautiful vase I threw, it flew, I did it myself against the wall, and shattered. It flew into a bright star of fragments, the fundament, the firmament, the first and the last and the moment is broken, never one whole together again. Ever here and ever smaller, folding myself in the wainscoting a crack and the fragments scattered in porcelain dust on the floor. Darkness and shadow creep from the leaves, interweaving the pewter Sunday sky.

All is alike, all is invisible, invincible, it creeps among me, a joy secure or neverlasting, on through the world the brilliant bright gong of the second mass bells sounding, sounding, they will ever let them weep. By God's decree, by the firmament, the fundament, the fragments of light and space filtered through lavender and bronze. He let go of me, he let go of us all, he let us fall until he was praying in a certain place, he said to them lavender and bronze, sanctified and whole segments of time have been compressed into moments such as this, moments in which the hastening procession of evenings and mornings and
afternoons one beyond another and the events they contain have been distilled into a finely grained, telescopic awareness of truth: This is the way things always have been and ever must be. He turns away from his work beneath the sink and glances over his shoulder at Laura in her terrycloth robe as she sets his plate of eggs on the table next to the paper and juice. From his position crouching on all fours, Laura with her back to him and towering above is captured in an essential pose of wifely endeavor, placing the meal she has just cooked for him on the table. The slight curve of her less than ample backside exaggerated by leaning over tugs at him with a distant resonance of the night before. He carefully returns his head to the crowded cavern of space beneath the sink where the line to the faucet has been leaking. Raw chemical smell of various liquid soaps and cleansers undercoats the sour tang from a can of rancid cooking grease she saves here. At the joint where the line attaches to the faucet hardware, a reflective sheen of liquid emerges and gathers into a solemn tear-shaped drop that eventually generates enough mass to detach itself and land with a light and merry plink in the metal mixing bowl he has placed on the floor of the cabinet to catch it. The entire process takes about seven seconds. Not a great deal of water, but enough to do damage over time.