The Extinction Club (3 page)

The snow is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply …

“Oh Christ, don’t start that again,” I advised myself. Turning sounds and shapes into other sounds and shapes, into aural and visual mirages. A throwback, I’ve been told, to the bicameral mind of prehistoric times.

The van wouldn’t start so I put it in neutral, got out and pushed against the door frame. On a slight decline, it rolled a dozen feet. I clicked on the highs, lighting up silvery pinwheels of flakes and pellets, and in the distance, faintly, my neighbour’s front stoop. I’d need a miner’s helmet and pick to get to it. Feet sliding, arms flailing, I followed the paling bands of light.

On both the front and back doors were staple-and-hasp affairs with brass padlocks, so I snatched a cedar log from a cord of firewood on the porch and began bashing at the front windowpane, repeatedly, in overkill mode, insanity mode. The sounds, like the cursing and crash in the kitchen, thundered inside my skull. I dislodged shards of glass with my bare hands, then fumbled my way through the frame. I felt a tug of resistance on my arm and back, heard the sound of snagged fabric ripping. In pitch-darkness, the bits of glass crackled under my shoes as I groped along the wall for a light switch. Click. Power on! But the only phone I could find was a black rotary in the kitchen, whose cord had been ripped out of the wall.

What now? Send a pigeon? While staring at the torn strands of wire, I smelled something repellent, the scent of Javex, reminding me of a tight white coat I was once forced to wear.

I yanked open drawers and cupboards—all, strangely, filled to the bursting point. Cans of everything imaginable stacked up as if the owner was expecting a siege: soup, corn, peas, carrots, stew, salmon, tuna, condensed milk, maple syrup, hot chocolate … At least twenty pounds of rice. Box after box of pasta, crackers, powdered milk, oatmeal, pancake mix, baking soda, canning salt … But no coffee beans, only jars of instant dust, and no alcohol.

In a bathroom drawer, of all places, was a set of clamps, but large orange plastic ones, much too big for this job. There was also an under-the-sink disaster kit with bandages, witch hazel, gauze, rubber gloves, adhesive tape, steri-strips, butterfly tape, gauze pads, tweezers, Betadine ointment, baby shampoo …
Baby shampoo?
In the mirror above the sink I saw that my arm and back had been slashed, and that
my face and hands were laced with tiny cuts. I plucked out bits of glass then splashed freezing, rust-coloured water onto my face.

With two green garbage bags I made a makeshift seal of the smashed window. Then stuffed as many food and medical supplies as I could into a third bag. I was heading out the door when I realized I’d forgotten something. A TAG Heuer watch with a blue face I’d spotted on the bed table. Break and enter, destruction of property and grand theft would now be added to my burgeoning file.

Into my iron cauldron, whose water was on the boil, I dumped a wad of unused J Cloths. And then a pair of scissors. I lowered the flame and put a lid on the pot. With steaming water from the tea kettle I rinsed out a glass pitcher and filled it with tap water. Tossed in three spoonfuls of my neighbour’s canning salt and one of baking soda. Now to stir it … I opened the cutlery drawer and took out a bread knife.
Stir with a knife, bring on strife:
my mother’s words. I set the knife down. Took out a plastic salad fork.
Stir with a fork, bring on the stork
. I set the fork down. Took out a salad spoon, rinsed it with boiling water, and stirred. The cauldron lid began to rattle.

With the same spoon I fished out the hotel-kit. The thread was soft and creamy, disintegrating. In drawer after drawer, cupboard after cupboard, I searched for something to replace it. Nothing.

In the rafters I spied something promising, something trailing from a beam … I stood on a kitchen chair and pulled at it: a tangle of waxed whipping twine. Already knotted on one end was a needle, a sail needle. But the twine was too thick and the needle too large. So what now? Forget the stitches. I’d use electrician’s tape. Or Krazy Glue.

I glanced at my blue-faced watch, then scoured a metal cookie sheet with steel wool and Ajax for exactly three minutes. Rinsed it in the bathtub with hot water, then returned to the kitchen for the kettle and my neighbour’s rubber gloves. Poured the scalding water over the metal sheet, then the rubber gloves.

From the boiling cauldron I spooned out the pliers, tweezers, scissors and J Cloths and set them on the cookie sheet. I cut the cloths into small squares. Then folded a dishtowel in half and placed it over my mouth and nose like a bank robber. I tried to tie it at the back but it was too short, so I secured it with an elastic band. Put my reading glasses on over top.
If she opens her eyes she’ll die laughing.

I pulled on the rubber gloves and set the metal sheet down on a kitchen chair, along with the saline solution and Betadine ointment, and carried it over to the bed. I knelt down, holding my rubber hands up, prayerfully.

With the pliers I dunked a half-dozen cloth squares in the saline solution until they were soaked through. After mopping out both wounds, I placed a square on either side.

Biting my tongue, I pulled the edges of the higher cut together and placed a butterfly bandage across it. I squeezed out globs of Betadine over the adhesive strip, and for good measure secured everything with overlapping wraps of roller gauze.

I wiped my forehead with one forearm, then the other, before turning my attention to the other gash, the one on the thigh. This one would be trickier. It was deeper, for starters—I could see layers of subcutaneous tissue along the sides. A bandage would be harder to keep in place, would loosen if my patient moved, and do little if edema kicked in. Stitches, I’d have to use stitches …

I closed my eyes in concentration. I have a needle but no thread. What would serve instead? Strands of her hair?
Think
. My neighbour. He must have something. Should I go back, take a closer look? I looked at the wound, which was releasing blood in regular gouts.
You’re running out of time …

Yes
. I can see it now, in his medicine chest! Coiled in a white plastic box. I ran—masked, coatless, bootless—to get it.

Using tweezers and pliers, I threaded the needle with the Johnson & Johnson dental floss. Then paused to think.
There are three kinds of stitches: lock-stitch, interrupted stitch, and … what’s the third? Continuous? Doesn’t matter, because I remember only the second
. At the midpoint I made a stitch and drew the edges of the wound closely together. I knotted the waxed floss with a square knot and cut it. The sewing was easier than I thought it would be. The needle pierced the skin, the line pulled through, my patient didn’t budge. It reminded me of skewering a Christmas turkey.

Five stitches, spaced a quarter-inch apart. The knotting was the difficult part: I had to make sure the floss would pull the edges of the wound together without cutting into the flesh, the way it cuts into gums and makes them bleed.

I sat on the floor to rest, my arms afire with tension, my eyes watering. I inhaled deeply, held my breath, watched. Blood rose to the surface, filled the cloth squares. But gradually, without gushing. I mopped the blood and pressed out a line of Betadine along the laceration. Not sure if this was necessary, but did it anyway. Then opened a packet of adhesive gauze and, careful not to touch the portion that would touch the wound, stretched it over the skin.

Although both repairs looked shoddy, amateurish, like a child’s repair of a stuffed animal, I thought they’d do the
job. Not that it would make much difference. My patient’s condition was unchanged: somewhere between intensive care and the crematorium.

In the living room, my back against the window, I stared at an end table on which the previous tenant had set up a chess problem I couldn’t solve (“# in 3,” said a finger in dust). With a sweep of the hand I sent the pieces scattering across the room. I then turned toward the window, not registering a thing, anaesthetized against time and distance, feeling everything grow faraway and dim.

   II   

U
nder closed lids, lurid images assaulted me on a short loop of memory. From my makeshift bed of twisted sheets I couldn’t blot out a single scene from the night before; the horror of it reached through me and made me shake. I saw every instant, every stitch, with merciless clarity, as though magnified a thousand power under a microscope. Over and over I tried to get up that hill, to the hospital—a mere eight kilometres away!—but my tires spun on pavement that wasn’t pavement but an oozing tide of black-brown blood that was rising fast, that would engulf the van, sweep us away like a child’s plastic boat …

And that sound, that
thwack
of the body being dropped, woke me again and again, knocking inside my brain with the intervals of a church bell. An absurd association, but it reminded me of the thwack of the
Star-Ledger
on the stoop, a newspaper I delivered as a child.

In milky 6:00 a.m. light I arose from the sofa to inspect my guest, my princess of the bogs and rushes. Saint Lazarus’s younger sister. Still breathing by luck or miracle. I began to wash. Everything. The rooms, myself, her. As the sun bladed through the front window I wiped the shower curtain with a medicated cloth, shifting her body gently, painstakingly. I washed her from sole to crown, going back for hot water, then towelling down her nylon sleeping bag. For the first time I wondered why neither slash went deeper, why neither went for a major organ. A slow death seemed to be the intent—a bloodletting. Why?

Her matted hair was pasted with dried blood and gooey muck, to which there clung the faint tang of urine, so I wedged a cushion beneath her shoulders and eased her head into a basin of water. With my neighbour’s baby shampoo I washed her hair. It was tar black and cut to shoulder length, straight across the bottom, like Joan of Arc’s.

As I was drying it I began to cough, unstoppably. I fell to my knees, burrowing my head into the floor, trying to return to yesterday through the squares in the carpet. Years of food and filth had been walked into the weave and I retched on it like a dog. I stumbled to my feet, braced myself against the window. Pulled the thick brown curtain to one side, trying not to gag from the dust unleashed, and peered out. The van looked iced, like a confection, and its headlights were jaundiced, near-dead, no brighter than Christmas tree bulbs.

Over the next several hours I checked for signs of infection: inflammation, heat, pus. If I found any of these, I’d have to remove the sutures and drain the infected site. I didn’t. Things seemed to be progressing. Still, every time I saw her on the bed with her eyes closed I wondered if she were asleep or dead.

At my neighbour’s house, in a locked closet whose key was hanging on the wall beside it, I found a microwave still in its box, with a happy-face Walmart tag. I lugged it back to the cabin and cooked up a storm in dingy Tupperware: beef consommé, tomato soup, cream of mushroom, cream of vegetable, hot apple sauce, hot chocolate. I avoided all solids, guessing she’d only choke on them.

My patient didn’t touch any of this. She lay there, asleep, her arm dangling over the edge of the bed. Once she sighed, and once appeared to open her eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. On her throat was a bruise, an expanding map of blue and grey and purple lines.