The Dead Are More Visible (24 page)

A numb, plunging sensation in your womb.
I have to go, Jayla. Call you later
.

You’d already guessed, but had chosen not to know. Jayla, you saw now, had been dropping sadistic little clues. It had been happening since soon after you’d told Charles he was going to be a dad. Apparently that title had scared him enough that he decided to substitute another: adulterer. On a hunch now you called Charles’s just-for-you-or-emergencies cellphone—tied up—then Jayla’s—the same. An hour later you made an appointment and that same day walked to the clinic with a hurricane inside your head and you faked composure and lied about how thoroughly you’d reflected and you signed the forms with a steady hand, had the ultrasound, embarked on the procedure—it was no miscarriage, except maybe in some metaphorical way—and minutes later you were sobbing unstoppably, spasm by spasm feeling your lover and your best friend purged out of you along with the baby-to-be. Best
friend?
In
the stirrups you admitted not only that you’d been the sidekick, the loyal turnspit (you already knew that, of course), but that Jayla had always flirted aggressively with your boyfriends, needing to prove to herself, and maybe to you, that deep down they found her more attractive (how could they not?) and she could win them away from you at any time; they remained yours only out of her immense benevolence. As your body hemorrhaged Charles and your briefer history, you realized with self-disgust how terribly you’d duped yourself about him—how you’d shrugged off erotic dissatisfactions and your recurrent scorn at his pomposities as if these were just puny blips you could work around. In fact, in that hour of emphatic wakefulness, you saw that for months now you’d been sedating your awareness, somnambulating through relationships you were not so much trying to will as to
dream
into lasting rightness.

You returned, gutted, and collapsed in your bachelorette. Sent Charles a last email:
Baby gone. Say nothing to anyone. Say nothing more to me. “Vehemently,” R
.

A vile, acrid paste spreads across your palate and your throat, starting to seal it like a diphtheria membrane. When you half wake, the flavour in your mouth is a milder version of that taste. Processional geometric dreams, like dreams in high fever. A dream of triangles, V-shaped torsos, deltas of androgynous pubic hair, pup tents of old canvas with humid, mildewy interiors. A cut-out creature with wedge-shaped body leglessly
running in space. The stress horse? Sad seahorse, flushed by a tide of tears from the womb of its one chance.
I am sorry
. Your cot is teetered so your head is down, feet near the ceiling. Your bunkmate has augured a hole through the upper mattress. The hole is smooth and clean as if the mattress is solid pine. An eye peering. Your “paranoid” intuition is right, your bunkmate is a
man
. Of course. Enrol as a woman in a sedative trial and “sleep” in a dorm full of potential victims. Just pretend to swallow the pills.… You have to get out. You try to rise but you lie rigid, teeth gritted, a coffined cadaver. Try to call out a warning but your larynx has been excised by Dr. Wall. Your mouth gapes. The springs of the upper bunk scream.

You wake in shudders, staring up. By the light of Henry’s Moon you see the upper bunk is unsagging, vacant. And someone is afoot in the room, moving softly.

“Stop!” you call out. Why has your voice shrunk to zero? You’re still paralyzed—can’t even open your eyes.

A firm hand on your shoulder.

“No!”

“Dear? Miss Kanakis? Are you all right?”

It’s Nurse Nkwele, her brow-lamp lasering down, a mother ship returning.

“I thought you were the man above me,” you blurt. “From the bunk above me.”

“Man?” She sounds so weary, so unsurprised. “You have been having a dream.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone, they took her downtown. Earlier in the night. She never should have been permitted to enrol.” Nurse Nkwele sits beside you. “She was ill, that woman. I should not be telling you this.”

“Thank God. I mean—thank God he … What did she have?”

“Judging by how she presented, a malarial condition. She has been doing volunteer work in Central America, on and off. I suppose she needed to make some quick money here. If I were to diagnose, she was having a mild relapse at the time she arrived, and the drugs, reducing her resistance, triggered a worse one.”

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you? Not a nurse.”

“I am a nurse. But you are correct.”

Correct
—that word people use when they want to confirm that you’re right but keep their distance.

“My Nigerian credentials are not sufficient here. This night shift pays decently. In a few years, I’ll go back to school here. Another two or three years of school.” She straightens and stiffens. “I will have that blood now.”

“May I ask a question?” It seems easy here in the night dorm, Nkwele’s face anonymized under her blinding lamp and you essentially stoned.

“So long as your question is less personal. I have said more than is professional.”

“It is personal,” you say, “but it’s not about you. Ouch,” you add.

“Ask.”

“Can love just happen, or do we always choose?”

Nurse Nkwele sighs. “Example, please.”

“Your lover and your best friend, say. Love just happens to them, they can’t choose not to be in love, so they are in love. And they do act.”

She chuckles softly. “Such a North American idea, that. No. I would say that in such a case, there is always malice. Malice, not love. Malice in masquerade as love. Or a desire for power, in masquerade. So many things pretend to be love, do they not? The trick is not to believe the outer symptoms.”

“That’s more or less what I think,” you say. “What I’ve decided. Thank you.”

“Are you all right, girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“Here,” she says, “let me tape you. You try to sleep now. Many of you seem to be having bad dreams.”

Under the doctor’s blue eyes the skin is bruised and pouchy, but the eyes themselves have a morning freshness. As you enter, he grins, almost shyly—a boy working up his nerve to ask a girl to the prom. It’s creepy, yet touching. Even if his interest in you is clinical and close to morbid, it’s touching.

“Hey, Roddy! You look better this morning. How do you feel?”

“Like I’m half asleep and just dreaming I’m here.”

“Great. Just roll up your sleeve. Should we try first for a true reading?”

“Well, it might be harder for me to raise the pressure today,” you say—and it’s true, you do feel somewhat calmer, clearer, as if a fever has broken in the night.

He pumps, releases, eyes fixed to the gauge.

“You’re not thinking about him now, to raise the numbers?”

“Not really.”

“Because we’re still low, but we’re approaching low-normal.” He reaches for his clipboard, looking shy again. “How would you feel about me, uh … doing a little follow-up on you, after this trial is done? I’m thinking of trying to write a small paper.”

Now you place it, that faint, skunky smell: pot.

“What went wrong in that other sedative trial?” you ask.

“It’s confidential, I’m afraid.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

He says eagerly, “A depressed male in dormitory B overdosed on a benzodiazepine variative we were retesting. Apparently that was his plan. He’d been suicidal on and off for a year and no longer had access to sleeping pills. He managed to bribe one of the other males to save his pills, every second one—just pretend to take them. Meanwhile he was doing the same. We noticed irregularities in the various blood tests, but the drug was new and we weren’t sure what was happening. And this was before Vivienne. Nurse Nkwele. She’s unfoolable. So after the last blood draw on the
fourth night—sedative trials were five days then—he swallowed all the pills he’d stored up.”

“He died?”

“But these things have a much lower toxicity than the old barbiturates. We figure he took at least fifteen. As expected, he just slept for a long time.”

You gaze expectantly at Dr. Wall. He’s enjoying himself.

“Eighty-two hours, to be exact!”

“A coma,” you say.

“Ah, but the research indicates that drug-induced stupors are not the same as comas caused by accidents, say, or blunt trauma! It’s something else I’d love to be researching, if I had the time. Last I heard, our Rumpelstiltskin was functioning again and hadn’t repeated his attempt. Maybe we could all use a good eighty-hour sleep, huh?”

“Rip van Winkle,” you say.

“Sorry?”

Something comes to you now, a poem you read in high school about kids climbing birch saplings until the young trees bend under their weight and deposit them back on the ground, and the poet brings it around to a wish that he might leave the earth for a while—take a little time off—then return and start over.

You wake at noon to a dormitory that no longer feels like an opium den. Less than twenty-four hours left. The atmosphere: like a classroom on the second-last
day of school, mid-June, the air tender, teachers lenient, bullies lazy. A smell of coffee. The cafeteria brew, dispensed in polystyrene cups, tastes like instant decaf, but now the smell is palatable, even appealing.

Wen is sitting on her bunk, chatting with Sunetra across the room. Han is on her cellphone talking to her boyfriend—that’s plain. Her voice is inaudible but her face is a billet-doux. Eleanor is helping Hong again and now even Ruth the cranky paralegal is involved.

Hong, a terrible newsprint colour but still diligent, reads out another verse, something about violence no longer being heard in the land, nor wasting nor destruction within the borders. She says, “I understand not this wasting. Not like the garbage? Or spendthrift?”

“Hmm,” says Eleanor. “That’s a toughie. I think maybe it means no more good things will be wasted. What do you think, Ruth?”

“I love you tons, Rick,” Han whispers under the ambient bustle. “Tons.” She looks as though she might weep—and this doesn’t destroy you.

Ruth is talking now, talking like someone who has been trapped solo in a mineshaft for a month and is spilling out her tale. Today’s the first day she has felt able to talk, she says. The cravings are easing off—for a smoke. The work, she says, is high pressure and it never backs off. “Never felt I could work without a cigarette. I figured if I came out here and quit cold turkey and slept for three days, through the worst of the craving …”

“And now you’re through it, aren’t you?” Eleanor says.

“Getting there. Plus, I knew it would be hard to get smokes here.”

“You could’ve bummed off me,” Wen says, entering the conversation late and missing the point. “I was going outside for one now and then.”

“I know, I could smell it on you. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you.”

“I quit smoking once,” you announce. “It was the second hardest week of my life.”

“What was the hardest?” Wen asks.

“Tough question,” you say.

“Anyway,” Ruth says, “I can see my way clear.” Her hands are folded tightly in her lap. Han whispering,
Don’t worry, I don’t think I’ll go back this summer
. Her accent revives some, though it doesn’t seem conscious.
One summer of London was enough
.

“
My
hardest was last week,” says Wen. “My boyfriends found out about each other. I’m kind of like … hiding out now. What about you, Sun?”

Sunetra’s cheeks and ears darken. “Oh, it’s too much like asking what’s my favourite kind of wart. Are you scared they’ll come after you?”

“They should cool off after a couple of days.”

“It was when my father died,” says Eleanor. “It was recently.”

“I thought you said you were taking care of him,” says Ruth.

“Oh, did I?”

In the silence, Hong shakes her head—not Job-like but with a bemused air—and says, “Too many hardest to pick one.”

“I was,” Eleanor says. “I’m sorry. It’s such a thing when somebody dies under your care! I mean, when you have convinced yourself you can keep him alive. I always thought I should have been a nurse, not a secretary. Now I’m neither. I’m no longer a daughter, either. It’s something you’ll notice about aging. One by one, your … your … what is the word now, Roddy? Your
attributes
, they are withdrawn. Finally, I guess, you’re nothing but yourself.”

“Then not even that,” Ruth says.

And you think: to be stripped down that way, at least for a brief period, might not be all bad. You say simply, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and the others nod and murmur concurrence and you feel that in this moment—shortly before going your separate roads—the seven of you have become a group.

You wander out into the hallway, hungry at last. Is the bitter taste going, or are you just getting used to it? The
moussaka
is out of the question but you might try the special. Hot turkey sandwich with baked potato and peas. You pass the lone window and it hits you—swallows eat insects and migrate to warm, brighter places for the winter. The bird you saw before must have been a figment caused by the drug, a waking dream … You order and go to the payphone and dial
your uncle at the restaurant. You don’t think you can face waitressing for him again, but you know he pays his cooks decently and you’re going to have to start saving. Nurse Nkwele, though she appears old to you—forty, at least—seems undaunted by the prospect of going back to school for another two or three years, or more. And this shames you a little, shakes you up.

“Roddy!” Uncle Lambros cries with heartbreaking joy. “It’s you!”

[ NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ]

Some of the stories in this collection have been previously published in magazines and anthologies. The author is very grateful to the editors.

“Those Who Would Be More” appeared, as “Dialogues of Departure,” in the United States in
Tin House
and in Canada in
The New Quarterly
.

“A Right Like Yours” appeared in the United States in
The Black Boot
and in Canada in
Maisonneuve
and was anthologized in
The Exile Book of Canadian Sports Stories
(Exile Editions, ed. Priscila Uppal). It appeared also in Douglas Glover’s online magazine,
Numéro Cinq
.