The Small Backs of Children (5 page)

Why is everything in hospitals the color of mud or mold?
The playwright stops typing for a second and stares at his hands on his laptop. He can’t believe he’s already writing this. Already twisting it into art.
Cannibal.
He feels a pang of guilt.
You’re in a hospital. Your poor sister is dying.
But even as his heart is beating him up in his chest, he can’t not do it. He can’t. He looks up at the strange and sporadic rivulet of people coming by to see his sister: former students, acquaintances, colleagues, fans of her books. It’s a pitch-perfect humanity parade. If he doesn’t get it down right now, it will blur and hum away like a train.

She’d be on his side. Wouldn’t she?

Then again, she’s dying. That’s what they’re all so somber about. When they spot him in that Naugahyde chair, hunched over a laptop, they must think he’s odd. But there is a profound sibling secret, like a spider’s thread, from his body to hers: No one knows more about the death in life and life in death than he
and his sister. Their family a war zone. He breathes the artificial air.
God, this place smells like someone shit antiseptic.

When they were children, he used to make his sister play Romeo and Juliet with him. Love scenes and death scenes from the play, which he’d been assigned in school. Though she was only six at the time, and he fifteen, he reconfigured his sister into a Romeo. Green leotard tights and a black down ski vest. He even cut her hair in what he considered an Elizabethan style, much to his mother’s dismay, and talked her into a small codpiece he’d made from a sock. He taught her many of Romeo’s lines to Juliet—
let lips do what hands do—wherefore art thou
—kid sisters were like chimps, you could get them to mimic anything. Her adoration knew no bounds. He’d stand at the top of the stairs, his sister at the bottom, all her longing in words and body reaching upward to him.

She was good.

Although no one, in any production he’d seen since—in Central Park, London, L.A., Venice—had been a finer, more beautiful, bath-towel-for-hair-hanging-past-his-ass Juliet than he’d been, in his mother’s silk robe.

But during one of their private performances, when he was sixteen and she was seven, his sister did the unthinkable: she improvised a line.
Pity the small backs of children,
he heard her saying.
They carry death for us the second they are born.
They gazed at each other with a heavy stillness, then, his Juliet at the top of the carpeted stairs, her Romeo holding his hand out and up toward her, like faith.

“That’s not your line,” he said.

“But it is,” she’d said. “My line.” And she’d grabbed at her codpiece and thrown it to the shag carpet. It was their last performance together. Something was shifting, he remembers thinking. She was acting more like Hamlet than Romeo.

He can see her clearly now, in his mind’s eye. Was she a writer even then, his sister? At six, seven years old? Some strange prodigy primate taking form underneath him?

Sometimes it feels as if he can’t exit the family drama he left when he was sixteen. Or
thought
he left.

His skin itches. Doesn’t it? He scratches his own wrists three times. Six. Nine. He knows exactly what the itching is. He feels all wrong, away from the calm and the cedar-soap smell of his lover’s skin, the ground wire of his voice. He can feel his own internal organs lurching, especially his lungs and heart and possibly his prostate. Can one feel one’s prostate? He takes a deep breath. Holds it for three seconds. Blows it back out, pacing his breathing. He does it three times. He hears his lover’s voice:
You need to self-soothe. Self-soothe! Self-soothe.

He closes his eyes. He sees his lover’s body in the dark of their penthouse bedroom. New York City night light—the moon, the windowed eyes of adjacent buildings, neon signs and street traffic glow—illuminates the terrain of his lover’s body: the top of a shoulder, the hill of a hip, his hair like a forest of wood shavings. He can smell the skin of his lover. He breathes him.
Cedar-scented soap cedar-scented soap cedar-scented soap.

The only calm he has ever known has come from this: a man loving a man in the face of this city, in a room lit by night and
skin. Why can’t he always feel like this? He grinds his teeth exactly three times. Every other moment of his life, his ordinary life, ordinary days and hours and weeks and the ever-excruciating ticking and grating of time and tasks and human pretenses, feels to him like a series of chops. Like a carrot cut quickly on a wooden block. He hears the
chop chop chop
in threes. He doesn’t want to leave this room. He doesn’t want to feel anything outside this room. He wills the chopping sound to stop by breathing in cedar and skin. The chopping sound melds with someone’s heels on linoleum.

His sister. He keeps his eyes closed. Sister. Simultaneous lifeline, loveline, and yet stone to the bottom of everything.

An alarm goes off in the distance. Some other hallway.
Code blue
. Some shuffle of scrubs. “Death is a body everywhere,” he types onto his laptop. Then deletes it. Then retypes it. Deletes. Until it’s just the word
death
staring at him.

Being on the West Coast makes him feel homicidal. That’s just true. Part of him thinks, Well then, go ahead and die already, my sister, my imperfect other, it’s astonishing we made it this far. You deserve it. Rest. Some other part of him bitch-slaps the first.
Vulgar. Insensitive. Asshole.
What kind of brother thinks a thing like that?

He retunes his ears to the scene around him. His fingers then flurry. He can’t stop typing. Typing everything the visitors, orderlies, doctors, nurses around him in the hospital-hell hallway are saying to each other. He just can’t not do it.

He sighs. He hates hospitals. Well, everyone does, but his hatred has a locus, an image arrested from the past.

His sister, as a girl of eight, on her stomach in a hospital bed. Her blood blooming up red from below, staining the white of the sheets, staining the word
daughter
with
father
and
family
. Blooming from her injuries. A paternal rape gone so badly wrong they had to keep her on her stomach.

He looks over toward his sister’s room, then back across the waiting room at the performance artist. The only other permanent member of the tribe. His suspicions tug at him. He narrows his eyes at her. She chews her fingernail to the quick. One side of her hair is neon blue, the other bruise blue. How old is she, even?

Where’s the filmmakerhusbandbrotherinlaw?

He stands up. He passes the performance artist in silence, walks to his sister’s door. He steps in, out, in, out, and then in. He crosses the linoleum floor, avoiding tiny fissures. He reaches out, across the antiseptic air and beeping monitor, and holds her hand. The hand of a writer and the hand of a playwright and the silence between them.

She’s a caterpillar in a cocoon
. His mind goes slack and gentle. Her body is emaciated. Studying the blue veins in her eyelids and wrists, he recalls the primal scene which separated them—his boyman self on the cusp confronting his father with the truth of his assault—how he’d brought a knife, he’d meant to stick it into his father’s gut as hard as he could, but his father had quickly overpowered him—his father the brute, his father the big-bodied masculine animal—his father then knifing his mouth wider, the blood shooting up and then pooling around his teeth and tongue.

His mother a useless blur in the hallway. His sister under the bed, eyes pleading.

Later, he had his mouth repaired, in the same hospital where his sister had lingered between life and death, after the push and cut of father. And yet, the next day, even knowing what it meant to his sister, he—
the words slow down in his head
—

Left.

Her.

There.

It was the last time he saw her.

It’s a terrible love he carries. His guilt keeping the distance between them, East Coast and West. His guilt driving him to be the New York playwright, the star, the success. The bad brother. The toast of the town. The great gay playwright and the penthouse that he built. The abandoning one. The one who left her to the wolves.

He opens his mouth and whisper-speaks to his sister between the pulses of the heart monitor. “Where are you?” He stares at their hands. Everything they are now is in their hands. He puts his head down. He kisses her hand once, twice, three times. The magic of fairy tales and children. She doesn’t stir. People don’t know anything about love. It’s nothing, they told us.
Fate moves over the small backs of children. They carry death for us the second they are born.

He returns to the hallway, pacing in and out and in and out and in and out of the doorway. He sits back down. Back to his laptop, he registers the performance artist’s Where-the-hell-have-you-been looks, but ignores them.

What is she doing here, anyway? Perched with her knees up, scowling at everyone who comes by? Pieces of words now like glimpses float in the hospital corridor: “I wonder if I can donate blood while we are here” and “I’d die for a vanilla latte but all they have here is sludge water” and “Yeah, five-thirty
A.M.
, isn’t that the crack of shit? I hate getting up early but we have rehearsals in the basement of a free clinic and we can only use it before they open or after they close . . .”

But then, suddenly, everyone around him stops their ambient babble.

The playwright looks up from his typing. The hospital people aren’t saying anything. Why aren’t they saying anything? He closes his laptop, gets up. An orderly walks by him with a tray of hot towels. He grips his own biceps, too hard. He grabs the fabric of his own shirt. The performance artist is the only other person in the room who is directly involved. He clears his throat and asks her where the filmmaker is.

The performance artist looks up with the slowness of a neon Lorax. “He said he needed to walk around.”

“Listen,” the playwright says, rubbing the back of his neck in little three-circle massages. “Do
you
understand what happened? Because that story they told me on the phone is nonsense. Tell me any details you know. Tell me what the doctors are saying. She looks unbelievably pale. Her skin looks as thin as a communion wafer.”

The performance artist sits mute and still. She looks to him like fatigue dumped a load of human in a hallway, like refuse.
Can a person die of inside-hospital ennui?

“I bet you get a performance out of this,” he says.

“Yeah? And what the hell would that look like?”

In the urban dictionary next to the word
emo
is this girl. “Well,” he persists, “you know, there’s a Beckett play. It’s called
Happy Days
. There’s a woman in it named Winnie, who gets buried in mud. Up to her breasts.”

“You don’t say.” The performance artist eyes the elevator.

“Yes, but we never learn how she got buried.”

“Fascinating.” The performance artist gnaws at a new finger.

“Or trapped.”

She chews her fingernails.

“What’s he done? Becker? Anything on streaming?”

“Beckett.
Samuel.” Briefly he wants to slap her into womanhood.

Mercifully, the elevator makes a holy
ding
and the filmmaker enters stage left. The playwright walks—nearly hopping—twelve steps in sets of threes to meet him.

He touches the filmmaker’s arm—Jesus, this guy is big. I mean, nothing he didn’t know, but Jesus. He could do some damage with those cannons. He pulls the filmmaker aside, whispery, needy, as if they’re guy pals or comrades or anything but what they are: the brother who abandoned her and the husband who can’t cope with her descent. “Just give it to me straight, no chaser. What’s going on? Really.”

The filmmaker’s skin looks blue-gray and heavy mugged. “She’s . . . I don’t know how to answer that. None of this makes any sense.” His eyes are marbled in hues of hazel specked with brown.

“Well, what was the instigating event? All they’re telling me is that she suddenly went deaf and dumb, and went on some kind of Kafkaesque hunger strike.” He swallows, trying to lower his voice an octave.

“One morning she seemed a little distracted. Staring at the wall. That’s all. I said, ‘Baby, are you okay?’ She turned to me and smiled. We kissed. I went to work. So did she, I assume. I assume the day was like any other day—it rained, she taught her classes and I taught mine, neighborhood dogs barked, the mail came. I came home that night, she was on the floor. Unconscious.” The filmmaker draws a breath, sucking oxygen like a human vacuum.

“She just dropped? Just like that?”
Don’t say DEAD don’t say dropped DEAD don’t say DEAD.
The playwright’s sphincter twitches. His lover’s voice in his head:
Be aware of social codes be aware of social codes be aware.
But it’s not working, the hallway lights of the hospital are too bright, the filmmaker is so physical, he’s like walking physicality, and the playwright’s longing to write it all down is creeping up on him, like it always does, like black letters and words growing larger and larger until they’re walking around on the white floor before his eyes, big as people, the word DEAD bigger than any, with cartoon-muscled arms and shoulders.

“Yeah. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” The filmmaker closes his eyes and rubs at them with his thumbs.

“Okay, yeah. Of course. I’m going to see if I can find a doctor to talk to me.”

“You know what?” the filmmaker nearly shouts. “You do
that. You get a doctor to talk to you. I’m sure you New York people deal with this stuff all the time, right? Depression? Neuroses? Pathologies? You want to know what they’ll say? They’re gonna tell you the same story they told me. They’re going to tell you
there’s nothing wrong with her.
She’s a goddamn physical specimen. See how far that gets you.”

“Nothing wrong with her.” The playwright starts ticking the fingernails on his thumb and forefinger in sets of threes.

“Look, I’m sorry,” the filmmaker says. “I told you, it’s hard for me to talk about this right now. I haven’t slept much, and my kid is with my mother . . .” His hands knot themselves into fists. Dangling fists with nothing to do.