The Air We Breathe (20 page)

As Eudora pulled her fingers guiltily from Leo's, she saw that Naomi was wearing a dress she'd made herself: a dark red cotton print, with a white piqué collar, cuffs, and square patch pockets, surprisingly stylish except for a puckered shoulder seam, where the sleeve hadn't set correctly. Perhaps she imagined that; the light from the hooded lamps was dim. But certainly she didn't imagine the look on Naomi's face, or her choked voice saying, “What are you doing here? Why aren't you with Irene?” Rising, Naomi caught her hem with one foot and nearly tipped over.

“I took a night off,” Eudora said, while her friend righted herself. “I didn't think I needed your permission.”

At home, putting on her second-best dress, she'd ascribed the jumpiness in her stomach to curiosity. Not only about what Leo would do, but what she'd do herself when they saw each other away from their normal routines. That, and perhaps also a sense that she was doing something underhanded. She'd wanted to believe she wasn't doing anything wrong, but it was more, she realized now, that she hadn't expected to be caught. Her own sense of betraying Naomi made her sound harsher than she'd intended. “What,” she said, “are
you
doing here?”

By now those of us close enough to hear were eavesdropping with what, if we're completely honest, we'd have to call a kind of malicious pleasure. The short films had been only sporadically interesting, whereas this…

“But you
know,
” Naomi said. Her voice rose, bewildered. “You know how I feel, you've known all along.”

Eudora looked beyond her to Leo, wondering how she might ease the situation.

“You
told
him!” Naomi said, catching the glance Eudora and Leo exchanged.

She ran from the room, the bag dangling at her side. For a moment, as she threw open the door, her slight figure was outlined against the white rectangle of light. “Shut it!” someone called, and she banged it behind her. Myra's sudden hemorrhage had caused the usual speculations, but this—bad behavior without the excuse of illness—we found simply entertaining, something we could gossip about without feeling too cruel.

Have we said how bored we often were? How hungry for something to happen? Perhaps we didn't say enough, earlier, about the feuds and quarrels that used to be common here. The way we found scapegoats, broke into factions and groups, turned like jackals on those who tried to hold themselves apart or guard their privacy. It wasn't that we hoped for the worst or didn't like a happy ending, but we wanted to be included in the process.

The door closed. Leo sat, Eudora sat; the next reel offered aerial shots of two airplanes fighting. “This is terrible,” Eudora whispered to Leo. “I have to go after her. Or maybe you should.”

“I can't do anything without her misinterpreting it,” Leo groaned. “She's so convinced…”

Eudora nodded and rose. “You're right,” she said. “It's better if I go.”

Again Leo watched the rectangle of light open up on the wall, this time silhouetting Eudora for an instant before the door shut again. Several of us saw her leave, although no one was with her as she stood looking right and left down the bright corridor, trying to imagine where Naomi might have headed.

A girl had been embarrassed, we thought, as we focused once more on the screen. It was nothing more than had happened to many of us, and she'd get over it. She was well, she was free to go wherever she wanted; what did she have, really, to complain about? Some of us looked with pity, others with amusement, at Leo, who now had his head in his hands. In the corridor Eudora turned right—she should have turned left—toward the walkway leading to the men's annex and Leo's room, where she thought that Naomi, trying to comfort herself by going where she was most forbidden, might have headed.

IN THE REEL
we were watching by then, the dogfights happened as if they'd been scripted, so far away that they were tiny, almost toylike. When a plume of smoke went up it seemed no bigger than what might rise from a match, while a wing torn off and falling looked like the wing of a moth. We knew there were men inside those machines but we couldn't see them. We rustled in our seats, flirted with our neighbors, kissed our cousins if they would have us. We tuned out the Tchaikovsky Kathleen was playing, talking to anyone within range and feeling, although we wouldn't have admitted it, slightly bored, now that the drama between Leo and Naomi had played itself out.

Perhaps because of that, those of us in the back row, including Leo, turned toward the piano as soon as Kathleen started coughing. We were on our feet when, as the coughing grew more violent, her playing stuttered and stopped. Surely we couldn't have a repeat of Myra, not twice on the same evening? Four of us rose, took a few steps toward her, and in an instant, as something noxious filled our nostrils and mouths, began to cough along with Kathleen. Kathleen kicked over her bench and fell to the ground, a searing pain in her throat and lungs and then in ours; someone shrieked and someone else turned on the lights; those of us toward the rear of the room saw the thick yellowish brown smoke pouring out of the ducts along the back wall, while those toward the front saw, if not the smoke itself, the rest of us clutching our throats, bending double, falling down.

How fast does chaos arrive? Faster than we can say it. We heard a hissing sound, which seemed to come from beneath us, and then more smoke mushroomed through the ducts. The lights were still on but the room was dark; some of us squeezed toward the three doors opening into the corridor, pushing so hard that we might have killed each other if Otto, Albert, Ian, and Frank—they deserve much credit—hadn't seized chairs and hurled them through the windows running the length of the room. Through those jagged holes we poured, shredding our hands and faces and backs. Someone heaved Kathleen, already unconscious, out one opening; her arm broke when she landed. Dr. Richards and Dr. Petrie, handkerchiefs tied over their faces, crawled along the floor beneath the clouds, working toward the back and searching for those who'd already fallen, dragging them toward the windows and doors. The night watchman, walking the grounds, saw the smoke and rang the fire alarm, which sent Eudora, who by then was standing in Leo's empty room and wondering where next to search for Naomi, down the stairs at the end of the wing and outside. The moon was full and across the wide lawn she saw the crowd tumbled in the flower beds in front of the dining hall and the lobby, the figures stretched out on the circular driveway, a resident doctor herding those of us who could walk or be dragged into the raised garden that filled the center of the circle. We knelt and clutched our chests and choked, vomited and gasped and began to turn blue. Eudora ran in our direction, trying to grasp what was happening.

But this wasn't like any fire we'd known before; there were no flames shooting out the windows, no floors collapsing downward in the heat. Nothing that might, had the fire engines from the village been anywhere near us yet, have driven back the hoses. There was only the smoke, which, those of us less badly hurt were beginning to realize, was not so much smoke as a suffocating gas. Still it poured through the dining hall, which was empty by now, pushing through the corridors, the lobby, and the solarium, into the elevators and the stairwells of the administration building and then up, and up.

Jaroslav, who'd been sitting in the second row behind Dr. Petrie and Dr. Richards but who'd bolted before the bulk of the crowd, running into the lobby and throwing open the main entrance doors, was in better shape than many of us; he was the first to shout, “The infirmary!” and to remind us that seven people lay up there. In the center circle Nan and Polly were already counting, although they could barely breathe themselves. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty; was everyone here, was everyone out of the dining hall? We knew how many of us had been present, but weren't sure how many staff had joined us, and the confusion over that distracted attention from the infirmary patients.

We weren't cruel, we weren't stupid; we were nearly dead. We had broken wrists and legs and ribs, wounds small and large from the broken glass (Zalmen was struggling to get a tourniquet around Belle's thigh, which was jetting blood), while even those without a scratch were coughing so hard tears ran from our eyes.

Our heads swam, our vision dimmed. But some of us looked up not long after Jaroslav called out, and then we saw that two of the fourth-floor windows had been opened and were leaking trails of smoke. Framed in the windows were five faces: Mary, Vivian, Morris, Pinkie, George. Still there were no fire engines. The building had no fire escapes; the stairwells were fireproofed, lined with gypsum block and tile, and we'd been instructed to avoid the elevators in an emergency and use these sturdy passages instead, which could never burn. Indeed they were not burning now.

“They'll have to jump,” the night nurse, who'd rolled Myra out in a chair to the front lawn when the alarm sounded, said to Eudora.

“Onto what?” Eudora asked. Knowing the answer, refusing to think it, she continued to scan the crowd. By then she'd glimpsed Leo, Dr. Petrie, almost everyone she'd seen inside the dining hall. But where was Naomi?

The nurse looked down at Myra, whose eyes were closed and who was very pale. Then she turned her head at the sound of a motor and Eudora, following her gaze and hoping the sound signaled a fire engine approaching, instead glimpsed a Model T headed away from us, far down the hill but only just emerging from the curve that, for a long stretch, hid everyone approaching or leaving Tamarack State. Later, when Eudora could leave us for a moment (already she was bending over our bodies, encouraging one of us to breathe deeply, wiping another's foaming mouth, pressing a wadded shirt against a wound), she would check the parking lot for Mrs. Martin's car and feel relieved by its absence. But for now Eudora moved among us, trying to help everyone at once and realizing as she did so that she hadn't seen Irene. Irene hadn't been in the dining hall; perhaps she'd gone out for the evening, or perhaps she was still at work. Like the rest of us, she hadn't yet remembered what would seem obvious later: that Irene's domain was directly underneath the dining hall.

“Jump!” called one of the four orderlies who'd appeared beneath the infirmary windows, each holding one corner of a blanket. They moved together, like the legs of a horse, shifting the small scrap of safety right and left.

Instead of fading, the clouds pouring from the infirmary windows increased, and when the fire engines still didn't arrive (their ladders wouldn't have reached, but they had nets), all five patients did jump, one by one, onto that improvised device. Mary bounced off, hit the ground a glancing blow, and broke her collarbone, four ribs, and her shoulder. Vivian broke both legs. Pinkie was fine—except for his lungs he has always been lucky—while George broke only his wrist. Morris fell at an odd angle and died just a few minutes later; a rib had punctured his liver and one lung. And in the excitement everyone who was still conscious—not very many of us by then—forgot that not five but seven people had been up there, and that two were still in their beds, where they remained. Edith Weinstein, Denis Krajcovic: gone.

L
ATER, WHEN SUCH
things became possible, we placed these notices in our
Kill-Gloom Gazette:

WE DON'T HAVE
funerals here. When we die our bodies are taken away at night, to the village for an autopsy or directly to the undertaker's, returned either way in a plain pine box and buried quietly. The cemetery is a mile north of our central buildings, in a clearing on the other side of the hill, hidden by a border of white pines, never shown to visitors and not mentioned in our rule book. We learn where it is from each other. When, during an afternoon walk, one person shows another the clearing for the first time, it usually signals a new stage in the relationship. After that, we think differently about how long we've been here and what time we might have left.

Twice since the fire, all of us involved in the Wednesday gatherings have gone to the clearing as a group, to visit the three who, although they didn't join in those afternoons, were still tied to us. The hospital commission gives us modest grave markers rather than headstones, low oblongs twelve by four inches, set almost flush with the ground. Morris, Edith, and Denis lie at the western edge of an area about the size of a swimming pool, neatly paved.