Vacation (11 page)

Now he seemed to be stretched out. He was buttoned-down, encased. He was being pushed on the floor through an entrance. There were noises that usually accompany chaos, but he stayed quiet in his straightwrap.

Frankly he was seriously grateful that someone was taking over the taking care of him. Whatever was going on, they’d have to handle him from here. He’d handled himself all these days, and it had been one mean week. He lay in his bracket. Bits of plaster dropped on his face. Someone nearby was saying something about units—people or blood. He had a thought rolling around: wasn’t he supposed to meet Gray somewhere?

Somehow now Myers had been put into a wheelchair and left outside. He seemed to be in a parking lot or on some other paved space. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten here. Good God, what was this heat? His briefcase was there, seated on his lap. He had his sightseer equipment inside—his food kit, his hand sanitizer, his emergency shoelaces. His arm was fixed to a board. He sat and he watched the tourists hobbling around. He could see them, obviously foreigners with their pale hair and glasses. They were picking their ways around the wheelchairs, leaning over the cots to offer snacks and drink.

No, not tourists. He didn’t know what they were.

What are you doing here? someone said, someone speaking English, standing over him.

Who, me? Myers started. Why? What happened?

It was a woman with a clipboard, a belt fashioned with hanging utensils.

Earthquake, she said.

Oh.

Is it just the arm and the ribs? she said.

He looked at himself. I guess so.

Any other injuries I should know about?

Not that I know of.

Any special conditions? Prior hospitalizations?

No, not since childhood.

And what was that?

Kid accident. You know, kids. Hit the head. He squinted up at her.

I see.

For two years after Gray left New York, he’d changed diapers, then soiled underwear, then green-kneed pants. He changed nothing else.

He’d spent the remaining six hundred and seventy-four hours of each month in automatic Laundromats, or in a blue, manual-transmission vehicle, or in front of a freshman college classroom where he solemnly recited grammar instruction four times a day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, or in a parking lot removing boxed imperishables from a shiny wheeled cage and lowering them into his trunk.

Most people live this way. They really do.

What kind of M dots you go in for? she said.

Excuse me?

Malaria. Which kind are you taking?

(Somebody walked by in a spacesuit, or what looked like a spacesuit.)

Oh. None.

No malaria pills? She made a mark on her clipboard.

Do I need them?

Do you want to get incredibly sick every year for the rest of your life and die off slowly?

Myers considered. Not particularly.

Earthquake, yes, it was coming back to him now. There had been Christians, a church. An Internet café.

Do you think I could check my email? he said.

No.

It was spectacular the way those tourists were coming around. Figures appeared on the horizon with clothing tied around waists or looped over necks like capes. They carried implements, handfuls of bags or bottles, something to set out on the ground, chairs, sticks, shovels, axes. Here, a whole extended family, a grandmother and a grandfather in front, a little dog running to the side. There, one standing on top of a truck in a swimsuit, hand crooked to the sun.

Who are all these people? Myers said.

These are the volunteers.

Of course, he thought, volunteers, had to be. He could see that now.

And what are you? he said.

Another volunteer, she said. She was having a look at the ropy contraption around his arm. She worked at the knot.

Hey, what are you doing with that? he said. Leave that.

Here, this might hurt.

The pain came in a wave, dashed him into a faint, then staggered him awake.

I’d like to lie down. It’s time to lie down.

Not enough stretchers, she said. Sorry.

Nearby, the volunteers pulled up their trousers, fastened on their shoes. They marched into the rubble of a building across the street. They waded to their waists. A very small volunteer ran up and down with a blue toy bucket. Two nuns raked rocks, or they may have been maids. Their black dresses billowed. Seagulls dotted the rocks. Somebody kept lifting a pup and tossing him away from the wreckage.

Do you think I could get some water? said Myers.

Someone will come around with it soon. Let me get this arm wrapped first. Then we’ll do the ribs.

The arm on the board screamed for a long moment, then fell to a whimper.

I could use some water.

Soon. What did you say you were doing here?

Vacation.

Alone?

My wife joins in a few days, Myers said dryly.

Did you get your Typhim at least?

My what?

Bad. You can pick up typhoid anywhere. You can get typhoid just opening your mouth. You could have typhoid already. Hang on.

I believe my tetanus is up to date, for what it’s worth, Myers gasped.

LOCAL NUN

This was a nothing earthquake, nothing. This was an earthquake I’ll forget in a day. A few fallen tourists, a few hooked limbs. The last earthquake, now that was something. All the area families piled under the earth. We had to go out and get new ones.

Did you get your hep A, your Havrix?

No, I didn’t get any of that.

Yellow fever?

No.

You better get on the stick, she said. How long do you think you’re going to last here?

I’m not staying long.

Every day you last is a gift.

I’ve got nine more days to go.

This isn’t Hannukah.

She was fumbling around down there. She was unknotting and turning. Dismantling. That hurt? she said.

A little. Myers thought that wasn’t right but that may have been what he said. He didn’t know what he said through the roar.

LOCAL NUN

It’s not the biggest thing that happens in your life, an earthquake. You try to walk and you can’t. You see people and you can’t reach them. You try to scream and you can’t hear your own voice. Then it stops. You dig the people out, you set them back on their feet—lift by the shoulders, not the neck
.

Late that night Myers would wake, hear a sound, think he heard a sound. Gray? he would say in the dark, the word coming out of his mouth. Gray? He switched on the lamp. No, he didn’t. His arm gave a groan and he held still. There was no lamp beside him anyway because he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t in the first hotel, or the second hotel, because he was in the hospital, and when he opened his eyes, which turned out to be shut, it was dim, not dark.

Late that night the sound wasn’t Gray but it wasn’t anything else either. There were sounds but they had nothing to do with him. The contents of the room—cots, people, pathways—spread out in regular intervals. He lay, the barrenness within him and the clutter without. A thought was pulling at him. It was just under the surface. He was forgetting something. It would come, he needed to wait. Out the window, the trees or whatever those were, bushes, the stack of housing, the ash and the human hum. Nearby were bodies taped to metal and given a wheel to steer. The utterly empty bottle of his soul. He waited for day.

Gray had ridden the bus to the city on the day of a cold February parade. He stayed for four and a half months, during which time his thoughts moved with the sluggishness of words being formed with alphabet blocks, one letter at a time, a small fat boy lining them up gracelessly. People move through that city with awe and expectation, but Gray felt nothing but oppression and pain, his interior arrangement a clogged river. He could see no future for himself. But he could not stay where he was. The despair wasn’t over the marriage but the child. She was just over a year at the time he left, a little squiggle in a diaper.

How could you love something so small and for no other reason than that it belongs to you? He didn’t know. He walked all over that city and each day he came back to the fact of her at one end of the state and him at the other. The news that came from the top half of the state was grim. Threats of only two supervised visits a year due to unfitness, mental abuse, his wobbling around with temp jobs.

His lawyer sighed on the phone. It’s a woman’s world, he said.

When at last Gray’s thoughts organized into a simple sentence, it read: I can’t lose that little girl.

So the day he got on the bus and left was not a day of defeat but of triumph. Without alerting anyone and without being told to, without a person on earth as witness (or so he believed), one afternoon instead of trolling around in circles and squares, he walked to the bus station and left, went back to fight for his daughter.

A man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were wrapped in air and light.

Chapter Eleven

MARIA

He turned up and checked in and that is it. He was already dying when he arrived. It wasn’t what I did. He arrived late one day and hasn’t left. At first he walked all over, went around town. I don’t know where he went. Maybe he started dying after that. He doesn’t speak any Spanish. Who knows what he’s doing here. After a while he stopped walking and he got into bed and barely gets up. So I come in and turn on the light in the morning so he knows it’s now day and it’s time to keep his eyes open, and then I come in at night and switch it off so he knows it’s bedtime and now he should sleep. That’s my main job. My other job is to holler at my son to bring the poor man something to eat. If he found himself dying, wouldn’t he at least want someone to come around with a sandwich now and then, or a cup of juice? Shame on him that I have to remind him.

I have no idea who he is or if he has anybody anywhere. The man is obviously just about dead. I called the doctor and the doctor hauled him over to the hospital. They put him in a cot and they said no doubt the man was dying, the good Lord knows he should be dead by now. What do you want to do with him? they said.

And I said, He’s not mine. What do
you
want to do with him?

We aren’t really in the business of caring for people in this dying way, they said.

We cure people, they said.

Apparently you don’t, I said and pointed at him.

He’s barely moving now. He gets his lunch, his snack, and in the evening I go out to the plaza. I find my son playing kick-stick and I say, Somewhere your father may be lying there like that at this very hour and you better hope someone’s better than you are at bringing him a bowl of soup. Or I say, Let this be a lesson, son, about the cold heart, that a man could be left behind like this. Or I say, This is what becomes of a man who walks out on his family.

And my son says, How do you know that man has a family?

Every man has a family, I say, and there’s only one reason a man leaves and that’s for another woman.

And he says, Then where’s the woman?

And I say, No woman stays with a man who left.

Chapter Twelve

Myers should leave her. That thought had formed in his mind. Her motives didn’t matter. If this was the wife he’d got, he should just go, let her follow that man off a cliff.

But then one day Gray got on a bus and left. That’s how the matter had ended.

Myers had watched it happen. Or, to be accurate, he watched her watch it happen, or watched her not be able to bring herself to watch it happen, watched her hide her face as the bus pulled away, actually roll her face to the wall, as if Gray was headed to war, as if Gray was the one who was her husband and was headed to a terrible war, a wrong war, one that we were losing, one that we could never hope to win, that a soldier could never hope to return from, every last man downed, grenaded or gassed, that’s what she looked like when Gray got on the bus and that’s what Myers, watching, wished was happening. What a tragedy. Oh woe.