Marshlands (3 page)

In that peaceful attitude, he drifted off to sleep.

3

He awoke alone in the room. The lights had been dimmed, and there was a heavy packing blanket on his legs. He was still wearing the gown, although he'd torn it in his sleep.

He went to the sink and splashed his face with warm water again and again, then drank with a cupped hand. He reached for his clothes, but they were gone. He didn't blame the nurse for getting rid of them. They belonged in an incinerator.

New clothes had been laid out for him: a janitor's uniform and a pair of briefs still sealed in their retail package. He recognized the name on the label, a fancy downtown haberdashery. The price on the tag was shocking. He hadn't spent much more on his first set of dress whites.

He dressed, leaning heavily against the examining table. The thin blue pants, tied at the waist with a ribbon, reminded him of surgical scrubs, the uniform of his youth. He wondered what surgeons wore these days, whether there was even such a thing as surgery anymore.

The nurse brought him a disposable shaving kit. Before handing it over, he contemplated the safety razor with raised eyebrows, as if to stress that by passing a razor he was breaking an important rule.

He soaked a washcloth in hot water and pressed it to his face. Then he shaved twice, bearing down on the razor the second time, scraping everything away.

When he was done, he realized that he'd gotten blood on the washcloth. He didn't know what to do with it, so he left it in the sink. Other people had cleaned up for him his entire life, in locker rooms and officers' clubs—even in prison. The blood-flecked cloth looked wrong there, but he didn't dare throw it away.

His rescuer had returned and was arguing with the nurse behind the closed door. They were talking too heatedly for mere colleagues. She was telling him it would just be for a night or two. He was saying it was impossible. More than impossible. There was the safety of his family to consider.

She reacted strongly to the word “family.” She said she'd done plenty of things for him that his wife hadn't. At that, he lowered his voice and asked her to lower hers. Instead, she issued an ultimatum. The nurse was silent. After a long pause, she said, “I guess that's that.”

When she flung open the door to the examining room, he shielded his eyes, fearing she'd recognize him. There'd been a very famous photograph of his eyes on the cover of a magazine. They were duller now, but otherwise unchanged.

She looked him up and down, nodding with approval, and said, “Much better.”

She asked if he was ready to go but didn't wait for an answer before taking his elbow. On the way out, he stopped to thank the nurse. After all, the man had seen to his wounds and clipped his grotesque nails, all to earn the rebuke of this hardheaded woman. He tipped an invisible hat, holding it by its imaginary brim.

It was a gesture from another time. He hardly expected the nurse to understand it, but he did. The nurse tipped his own pretend hat.

It brought tears to his eyes.

The nurse's silent farewell followed him down the long echoing halls and out onto the museum's shallow steps.

She helped him down the steps, but when they reached the sidewalk, she didn't relinquish his arm. She guided him to a vendor and bought him a hot chocolate, most likely to spare any back-and-forth over whether he took sugar and cream with coffee. She handed it to him wrapped in a napkin, warning that it was likely to be very hot. He took it gingerly, blowing on it like a child, just to please her.

They waited for a bus. The bus stop was crowded with irritated workers, their manners holding them in check, but just barely. She surveyed the restless crowd and said under her breath that they'd never get home this way. She used her shoulder to make a passageway, leading him to open sidewalk.

They crossed one of the great avenues, eight lanes wide. The janitor's uniform offered little protection from the evening breeze. She saw that he was chilled and stopped to wrap her shawl around his shoulders, right there in the middle of the street. She explained that the streets had been cordoned off for a parade, but just as she said that, a police car raced by and activated its claxon. The sound convulsed his heart like the bare wires they used to touch him with in prison.

“No, you're right,” she said, “this can wait until we're on the other side.”

She led him through a memorial park. The park was as good a place as any to resume his time alone. He slowed as they passed a familiar steam grate. He might be able to snatch an hour or two of sleep before the police moved him along. Of course, there was a downside to steam. It made one sweat. To be rousted sweating on a cold night was to invite hypothermia.

She slid an arm around him and told him they didn't have far to go. She was very strong underneath all those sensible clothes. When they got to the edge of a busy street, her arm tightened around his ribs, which were still sore from being kicked a few nights before. He hadn't seen his attackers. He'd learned to curl into a ball and howl like a dog the moment he felt the first blow.

He let himself be led under her protective wing. She held him with one arm and signaled the oncoming traffic with the other, waving two fingers up and down in a tight arc.

A cab detached itself from the blur of vehicles and came to a stop in front of them. She helped him in, then climbed in next to him and shut the door.

The driver didn't want to go where she told him to, but she ignored his objections. She said she was within her rights to be taken where she wanted.

When the cab leaped forward and swerved into traffic, her body pressed against his. He liked how solid she was, even if it squeezed the air from his lungs. Her thigh alongside his was warm and smelled of perfume.

Despite the violent ride, she managed to locate the mating pieces of his seat belt and strap him in. It bothered him to be the more protected one. He reached over to help with her belt, but she patted his hand, then planted it firmly on his lap. The message was clear: it wasn't for him to strap her in.

He closed his eyes, but the car's suspension was loose, and he began to feel a little sick. He could tell from the ripping sound of the tires that they were crossing a long bridge.

He hadn't been to the other side of the river since high school, on a dare. Only factory workers and domestics lived across the river. One didn't cross over unless it was to do some unpleasant business. At least, that was what they'd said back in the day.

Wealth had changed things. They drove past pristine row houses with neatly painted trim. Antique streetlights had been retrofitted with artificial flames.

The streets were freshly cobbled. Corner drugstores had been converted into tony restaurants, their vintage neon signs advertising patent drugs that hadn't been sold for decades.

The sidewalks were crowded with smart young couples pushing strollers. The number of dark faces in the strollers surprised him: babies adopted from the marshes. The homeland birthrate had fallen off while he was in prison. It didn't take an epidemiologist to see that, merely a few weeks drifting through empty playgrounds.

Eventually they reached the edge of the gentrification. The road changed from cobbles to ordinary asphalt. The streetlights were ordinary, too, fitted with harsh sodium bulbs. There were no flowering trees, just buckled sidewalks littered with broken glass. Most of the row houses were boarded up. The driver kept using the word “mudmen”: how they lived like rats, how they turned everything into a fucking sewer.

As they drove under an old railroad bridge, rocks rained down on them. The driver cursed, accelerated into a U-turn, and then, at the first opportunity, skidded to a stop and ordered his passengers out.

She argued that it was illegal for him to discharge them this way, but the driver was having none of it. He answered by applying a fat knuckle to the cracked windshield.

She handed him a large bill and asked for change, but he rolled up his window and rocketed away.

Then they were alone on the street. Their path took them back under the railroad bridge. He was an easy target for bad boys. He was frightened, but she kept up a lighthearted chatter about her work at the museum. The clack of her shoes on the sidewalk was steady as a metronome.

Once or twice he caught her looking at him with a sudden intensity, as if to catch him in the act of hearing or not hearing. He tried to pay more attention to what she was saying, but her words battered his ears like moths. There was no capturing them.

She led him to the armored door of a factory building and surprised him by unlocking it with an ordinary key. She explained that the building was a warehouse that had been converted into apartments. She didn't use the word “apartments.” She used a new word. He didn't want to sound outdated, so he acted as if he'd heard of such things.

The elevator was cavernous. As its hidden cables roared to life, she seemed suddenly aware of the fact that she was leading a stranger to her door. A certain space opened up between them. He didn't really know how to reassure her. Perhaps he owed it to her, but he didn't bother trying. The new distance came as a relief.

Her hallway was full of cooking smells: seared goat, boiling rice, something floral, perhaps saffron. Marsh cooking. This was a source of great wonder to him. Apparently citizens of the capital now made their homes side by side with marshmen.

When they came to her door, she told him there'd recently been a large levy for roof work, something to do with the high price of copper flashing, which was so very expensive on account of the pointless wars abroad.

Then she swung the door open and held it, inspecting him as he passed, like a teacher on the first day of school.

4

She unbuttoned her jacket in the front hall and dropped it on a rough wooden bench. It bothered him to see such a fine jacket treated that way, but he kept his mouth shut. Why should he care more for her clothes than she did?

She showed him the bathroom. He went in obediently and ran the water for a while, first warm and then hot, holding his hands under the flow, his whole body vibrating with pleasure.

Rather than wipe his hands on a towel, he dried them with toilet paper. He started squirreling some away for later, but it occurred to him that stealing toilet paper was no way to reward her hospitality. He tried to roll it back up, only to find that he'd ruined the sheets with his wet fingertips. He stuffed the ruined paper in the wicker trash basket, staring at it with regret.

He waited in the hallway, listening to the banging of pots, the rapid click of a gas igniter, until she called for him. Then he stood in the kitchen and watched her uncork a bottle of wine.

She filled two glasses, proposing a toast to better times, then set a plate of flatbread in front of him and encouraged him to eat. The bread was tough. He would have liked a bowl of warm milk to soften it, but she was very busy, so he dipped it in his wine instead. The flavors were bad together. When she saw the expression on his face, she laughed and took away the bread, saying there were better things to come.

He was still mourning the loss of the bread when she put out a plate of farmer's cheese and crackers. There was still cheese left after he gobbled all the crackers. He held back for a while, quivering like a faithful dog, but in the end, he ate it all. It took all of his willpower not to lick the plate clean.

The main course was roast chicken and rice. They didn't speak much during the meal. Every few minutes, she served him more rice. The rice was very salty; he washed it down with glass after glass of water. Drinking freely was as great a luxury as the rich food.

When she stood to pour him more wine, her napkin came untucked and fluttered to the floor. Dizziness overcame him as he reached down. His chair tilted forward. Someone seemed to dump him out of it.

He came to on the floor, his cheek resting on the napkin, which smelled of her lap. The scent of her body agitated and comforted him in equal measure.

He offered to do the dishes, but she helped him to the couch and covered him with a throw, saying there was plenty of time for that later.

Closing his eyes, he again thought of himself as a dog, peaceful in his soft-sided crate, his belly full, yet with a nagging sense that he ought to be throwing himself at his master's feet.

The quality of the light changed from time to time. His arms fell asleep, requiring him to roll to different positions. His neck developed a crick.

Then it was morning and she was padding through the room in a thick dressing gown. She turned on all the lights and went to work in the kitchen. The radio came on. A few minutes later, she made it louder.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Nighttime twisting had torn open his fly. It hadn't happened for a long time, but he'd woken with an erection. He waited for it to subside, but it was stubborn. When she came to tell him to get a move on, he covered himself with the throw.

She saw, but didn't turn away. Instead, blushing deeply, she looked him in the eye and held her gaze there. The crimson highlighted her lovely skin.

“Wait here,” she said, appearing a few minutes later in a long plaid skirt and a blouse that strained a bit at the buttons. She made her hair into a loose bun, pinned it with a pencil, then stepped out.

She returned with an armful of clothes, which she laid out on the coffee table. She said her only neighbor with any spare men's clothing was the widow of a marshman.

He ran his fingers across the handmade garments, which he recognized not only by region, but by tribe. He murmured the name of the tribe to himself and selected a finely woven tunic. It was a very beautiful example of the type. The matching leggings were unusually soft. He didn't recognize the wool.

She took his interest in the leggings as a kind of criticism. “Well,” she said, “it's the best I can do,” then left him to finish dressing.

It had been a long time since he'd worn marsh dress. He remembered watching elders wrap their leggings with little grunts of painful resignation. Now he grunted, too, as he wound the fragrant cloth.