Tropic of Night (7 page)

Luz goes without a backward glance, as she has from the first day. Utter security, is it, or does she not even care, like a cat? Olo children are like that, I recall, after they have made the sefuné bond with their foster parents, so I suppose it’s all right. Or I’m crazy, which is always around eight-to-five probable these days.

I drive back to U.S. 1 and up to I-95, which I take to the East-West freeway and then off at Twelfth Avenue. It’s my only luxury, this driving to work. Parking and running the car cost nearly as much as my rent, but I don’t like the metrorail, the only American equivalent of African bus travel. Now that I have a child to raise, I don’t know if I can continue, although so far she’s cost little more to keep than a small dog. Perhaps I can find another source of income. It can’t have any sex in it, or drums, or smiling (cross out the ads that want personable, good with people) or snappy dressing. Computers? I know how to use one, and perhaps I could learn a programming language. On the other hand, so few women in that field, I wouldn’t want to stand out, no. Maybe I could tell fortunes, ha-ha.

Jackson Memorial Hospital, unlovely and vast, the great public pesthouse of Miami, lifts its many mansions in Overtown, hard by the freeway, convenient for both the walking poor and their driving healers. I park in my unguarded surface lot and leave the windows open. It is cheaper than the enclosed parking palaces and I don’t think anyone will bother to steal my car. I must walk two streets to the entrance to my building, however, and on the corner of Tenth is a convenience store where the homeboys hang. Hip-hop is playing loud enough to feel through my feet, but the beat is so utterly banal that it is more like the pounding of some dumb machine and it does not engage me. I try for invisibility as I go by. There are only a few boys and it’s hot and no one bothers me. I have been mugged three times, which is why I carry my cash and my ID and keys in a pouch hung around my neck, a trick of travelers in the third world. My purse is plastic, yellow, $6.99 at Kmart, in case anyone wants it.

When I say “invisible” I mean American urban invisibility, not faila’olo, the invisibility of the sorcerers, which I have not learned how to do. I rather suspect my husband is well up on it, though.

We work underground, in the basement of building 201, next door to the emergency room. Medical records don’t require the cheering rays of the sun. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the cries of those in emergency care, but it must be only the ambulance sirens. Still, it contributes to the impression of being confined in a dungeon at hard labor. I pass through the swinging doors and into the reception area, where the files are dropped off and picked up by the ward messengers. I nod to the clerk behind his counter, which is barely acknowledged, and pass through to the file room where I work. It is long and low-ceilinged and brightly lit by tubes behind rectangles of frosted plastic. Two rows of desks march down the center, and on either side are the banks of motorized filing cabinets, with corridors between them. As I enter, one of the messengers shoves off with a cart loaded full with brightly tabbed hanging files. “Yo, Dolores,” he says, waving. I always get a nice greeting from Oswaldo, as he is mentally retarded.

Several of the messengers are similarly afflicted. We file clerks are thus the elite of the medical records section. We are required to have total mastery of alphabetical order. Some of us, like me, work on retrieval, while others work on putting the files back in their proper places in the cabinets, or, to use our technical term, “filing” them. Lives are at stake here and well do we know it. If we forget, Mrs. Waley is there to remind us. Mrs. Waley is our supervisor, and I see her now staring out at us from her little glassed-in office, as if she were a tourist in an aquarium and we were the fishes.

Mrs. Waley is a yellowish, freckled woman with hair like black plastic, shiny and sculpted around her circular face. She must weigh well over 250 pounds, and I am afraid that some of the younger staff call her the Whale. I don’t. I have the greatest respect for Mrs. Waley. She’s been at Jackson for nearly twenty years and claims never to have missed a day of work. She began before computers, as she often remarks, and I believe she thinks they are something of a fad. She dresses in very bright colors, purple, scarlet, primrose yellow, and today she wears a pantsuit the color of the green stripe in the flag of Mali. She wears a purplish lipstick and artificial nails, also brightly colored, and more than an inch long, like those of a mandarin. I suppose she is a mandarin, of sorts. She is careful never to do any physical work.

Mrs. Waley does not like me overmuch. At first I thought it was because Dolores Tuoey had claimed on her phony résumé a college degree and a spell as a nun, but I heard from some of the other staff that she thought I was a management plant, a spy. Why else would someone with an education work here? I gave out that it was doctor’s orders; I couldn’t take any pressure. This seemed to satisfy her, and ever since she’s treated me as a potentially dangerous lunatic. I hoped at first that she might relent, and move me into the harmless lunatic category, for I’ve given two years and four months of good service, never once forgetting the order of the alphabet or foisting a McMillan in place of a desired McMillian, a common error among the retrievers. Latterly, I’ve decided that she does not like me because I am a white person, the only one in her domain.

My in-basket is full of record request forms that have accumulated during the night. I sort them by service and last name. This is something of an innovation, I’m afraid. Mrs. Waley instructed me during my orientation that I was to take the eldest, or bottom, request first, complete the task, and then go on to the next one. She showed me how to turn the pile of forms over so that the eldest form was (marvelously!) positioned on top. My breakthrough methodology means, however, that I can get my stack done in about a third of the time the other way requires, and so I do it, and hope that Mrs. Waley doesn’t catch me and make me stop. The time thus saved I devote to reading medical records, walking slowly through the narrow corridors, between the buff walls of softly shining steel. This is something so beyond the scope of Mrs. Waley’s imagination that she hasn’t thought to specifically forbid it, although it is, of course, a state and federal crime. Reading files is much like doing anthro research. It amuses me, and passes the time.

I notice that a tape on one of the records has come loose. I leave it alone. Once I forgot myself so far as to replace some tapes myself and inspired Mrs. Waley to wrath. College graduate and can’t even put on tapes right. I hadn’t realized the importance of the three-quarter-inch clearance between each tape strip. No one can say that I don’t learn from my mistakes. I finish a cart for the medical ward and go back to my desk to get more request forms. There is a note on my desk from Mrs. Waley on top of a box full of files. It says Take these files to Billing stat.

This is messenger’s work and I am not supposed to do it, but I suspect Mrs. Waley thinks I can be spared for this because of the efficiencies I generate. Mrs. Waley is in something of a bind, since if everyone worked as quickly as I do, she could run the place with half the people, and such diminution of her empire would never do. So she does not compliment me but sends me out on errands; it’s a creative solution.

I stuff the box under my arm and go off to Billing, which is on the ground floor. Other than menial visits, such as this one, an excursion to Billing, for a meeting, say, is a rare and valuable prize. The hearts of all medical records clerks yearn toward Billing, as the Christian’s toward heaven and the Olo’s toward Ifé the Golden, where the gods walked. For Billing is the heart of the hospital. Without Billing, how could the nurses care, the surgeons cut, the internists ponder, the psychiatrists push dope? They could not; people would die in the streets.

Billing is light and airy and has a carpet on the floor, unlike our green linoleum. The blessed who reside there tap on computers. Their desks are decorated with pictures of family and little furry toys and plaques with amusing sayings. We are not allowed these in medical records, since we must keep our desks clear to arrange the files. On the way back to my post, I take a small detour through the ER suite. I do this as often as I can. It adds interest to the day. Many of the people in the ER are there because of emergencies, but during the daytime the majority are there because the ER is where we have decided that poor people are to obtain medical help. They sit in colorful plastic chairs if they are older or race about if they are younger, sharing whatever viruses and bacteria they have with their socioeconomic compadres.

An elderly lady in black attracts my attention. She is prostrate and moaning softly, attended by two younger women. They are speaking to her in Spanish. I catch my breath and feel tightness in my belly. Dulfana is pouring out of her like smoke and I can smell it. Not smell it, exactly, but that is what it feels like, an insidious quasi-olfactory sensation. Someone has witched the old lady. I turn and quickly walk away. Early in my apprenticeship, Uluné made me eat a kadoul, or magical compound, a green paste that he said would enable me to sense when witches were at work. He was always feeding me stuff, or blowing stuff up my nose or rubbing it on my skin. Much of this applied biochemistry was to enable me to interpret the condition of the fana, the magical body. Everything alive has a fana . As physical bodies are to the m’fa, so is fana to the m’doli, the unseen world. I was sick for two days, which amused and encouraged Uluné, since by this he knew the compound was efficacious. Thereafter, to my immense surprise, I could actually pick up dulfana, which is the characteristic effect of sorcery upon the fana . Back then, I interpreted these sensations as the aftereffects of the compounds Uluné made me consume. I can no longer entertain this theory, as it’s been well over four years, and I sense dulfana often in the streets of Miami. It is nearly as common in certain quarters as the scent of Cuban coffee.

I feel a vague shame and suppress it. I could have helped that woman, who surely won’t receive what she needs from the exhausted intern who will shortly examine her, but countersorcery generates something like a tornado in the m’doli, and the narrow end of that tornado would point directly at me. Sex strengthens the fana, as does happiness and contentment, and joy and anger, which is why I’m careful not to indulge in those things now. There is the child, and my love for her, of course, which must be generating a hot little blip in the old m’doli, if anyone’s looking, but I can’t do anything about that. Everyone’s fana is slightly different, like everyone’s smell. I never learned to distinguish at a grain that fine, but Uluné could, and I expect that nowadays my husband can too. Is he actively looking for me? My constant thought. I know he’d like to find me. He wanted us to be together, or so he said, the night before I sailed away. He wants me to watch him do his stuff.

I make my escape, find I’m trembling, and pause at the elevator to lean my forehead against the cool stainless steel of its door. Oh, the physical body, full of meat and juice, in this place regarded as merely a soup, requiring only a balancing of the ingredients and the stoppage of leaks to restore it to good order. The m’fon, as the Olo call this body, is the only one officially recognized by Jackson Memorial and the Western World, of which it is an atom. I want to believe in that pleasant notion: it’s just a soup of proteins and water and metallic compounds, and each of these is merely a soup of electrons and other subatomics, and those in turn, merely a soup of quarks. Oh, merely ! How I wish, wish, wish, I could get back to merely ! The Olo have no word for merely. They never learned the trick of dividing the world into the significant and the insignificant, which is one reason why there are only about twelve hundred of them left in the world and what they know will shortly vanish from the memory of mankind.

So nobody will ever go up to the intern who is perhaps now puzzling over that old Cuban lady’s symptoms and tell him his EKGs, and EEGs, and chem-sevens, and cancer panels, and sphygmomanometer readings, and tox screens are mere objectivity. In fact, the m’fon of the Cuban lady is more or less fine, except where it is destroying itself at the subtle urgings of her fana, which is not at all well.

I have to stop at the ladies’ room because of the Cuban woman. I have a sensitive digestion nowadays, another thing that keeps me cadaverous. When I was a kid, I ate like a wolverine; it was my sister who was the delicate eater. She used to pass me stuff she didn’t like at the dinner table, and sometimes we would switch plates when the parents weren’t watching, and I would get to eat her dinner too. I believe Mary was an anorexic in fact, rather than in fancy, as I am. A willowy beauty, often so described, often by my mother, also thin, who I believe was disappointed in me. I was more like my father, inheriting the long heavy bones, broad shoulders, and big hands and feet of the Doe family, a reversion to the original doughty fisherfolk stock. I had at one time photos of the two of us on our boat, dressed in slickers, grinning like fools as green water comes over the gunwales. Aside from our relative sizes, it’s hard to tell me from him. I guess my brother must have snapped them; he took all the family photographs, which is why there are almost no photographs of him. Yes, it would have been Josey, because I don’t recall my mom ever going out in weather, or Mary. That damn boat, Mom called it, although it was Kite, officially.

Mary took after our mother in a number of other ways, as well. The red-gold hair. The heart-shaped face. The thins. When I was small and just learning go fish, I thought the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards was a portrait of my mother. I had a photograph of Mary, she must have been nineteen or so, when she was being a model in New York, a candid shot, not professional, and in it she has a look on her face that I don’t imagine has ever been on mine, a look that says Oh, I’m so fucking terrific, don’t you wish you were me and doesn’t it just kill you that you’re not? The eyes are void of any inner life at all. She was calling herself Mariah Do then and was extremely hot. When I was in Paris, I once saw her picture on the cover of French Vogue. I told no one at the museum. There was no danger of anyone commenting that I resembled her.