Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Meeting with Jem was a thing he couldn’t bring himself to hope for or feel that he deserved. The sight of her was enough to slow his heart to a near stop. He had watched her, settling himself among the leaves and mossy earth by the house, more often than she would ever guess. The single time that they had made love was already unreal, eluding him like a half-forgotten dream. Once again Ricky was alone in the fields, watching.

  There was a strange scent in the air—tart, almost spicy—and it took him a moment to recognize it as smoke. He turned suddenly, facing the highway, and saw a black streak rising, billowing out in charcoal plumes, from the direction of Dolores’s trailer. Probably just burning garbage, he told himself, but a terrible, familiar sensation started in his gut, and he was walking, then running toward the trailer. Probably nothing at all.

  BRIGHT MONDAY MORNING, at the first gesture of her shadow in the glass doors at the hospital, Melvina knew Dolores was gone. She did not waste time checking the patient log or calling admissions. She went directly to the room: there was a teenager with a broken hip where Dolores had been. They’d released Dolores an hour and a half before Melvina’s shift, the attending physician overriding Melvina’s own order to keep her in-house.

  Anger wicked up her spine and her hands burned on the patient logbook. She dropped the heavy book with a crash and everyone in the corridor looked up. For a moment, Melvina seemed to hold anger palpably in her arms. She did some deep-breathing exercises then picked up the logbook, dusted it off, and went to her office. She sat at her vast mahogany desk and looked at the two plaques she’d bought for herself on her ninth birthday, Right and Wrong. She picked each of them up, weighing them.

  Her phone was ringing then, the crisis line for the fire/police department, and for a moment she couldn’t bear to answer, to hear the death confirmed. If Melvina had learned one valuable lesson in nursing, it was that a thing was less powerful if she looked at it directly, but this time she said to herself, “Later.” Without picking up, she routed the call to Emergency.

  ON HER OFF-HOURS, when she needed to be alone to think, Melvina sometimes went to the old wing of the hospital, to the beds where they had once treated typhus patients. She sat on the mattresses and she could feel the ancient fever still there in the beds, its heat rising through her.

  “Prolonged hectic fever, malaise, skin rash,” she recited, stroking the mattresses. “Bradycardia, delirium, leukopenia. Intestinal hemorrhages and frank perforation, late complications.”

  Evenings in the abandoned ward, when she could hear nothing but the call of the crickets, she felt there was nowhere at all for her to go. She would stand at the window and feel the warmth of some maternal spirit in the air, the mother in the moon with her bare shoulders and grieving face. Then Melvie would chide herself and tear the cap from her hair, knowing that she had failed before she had ever begun, that her first memory was of powerlessness before death, that she had betrayed her mother even in her failure to remember her. She watched the moon become a cold rock, watched her reflection in the window say that people were deluded, betrayed into loving life. She would call herself a “marked nurse,” and know that she was offering penance with each patient’s care. Dolores was merely the most recent in a long line—the ones she had failed to save.

  At these times she would touch the windowpane, raise her face to the moon, and say, “How can I forgive you for leaving me?”

  IT WAS AROUND five o’clock the next afternoon, a Tuesday rich with August sunlight. Nurses off first shift left the hospital and stood outside, blinking, uniforms shining like glass, the heat rising in bands over the blacktop. They crossed the street through the glare until they were over by the cafés and bars, cubbyholes dank as autumn. There they could press their palms against beer glasses and wait for thought to return.

  Today Jocelyn was on the warpath, the silver tag of her uniform zipper swinging between her breasts, her big white shoes mashing a layer of peanut shells and popcorn on the floor. Some of the nurses at their table—even nurses throughout the bar—caught the feeling; it rippled through and made them anxious. For others, it was early and hot enough outside that they still felt stunned by the air, not yet ready to give up their drugged silence.

  “I’m gonna tell you right now,” Jocelyn said, squeezing a half-full can of beer so Jem saw it dent in her hand. “We’re suckers, all of us! I don’t know a single nurse who doesn’t want to be something else. They drop dead. Nurses do! We slave like jungle natives all our lives, then bam! Stone cold dead, push the body under a rock and con somebody else to take the next shift.”

  The problem was a recently admitted patient. In his mid-forties, he was an advertising executive, scheduled for an appendectomy. He refused the hospital food and had his secretary run in sushi, chocolate truffles, wedges of Camembert, ruby grapes, and Italian wines from the import stores downtown. When Jocelyn had attempted to confiscate the wine, he’d deliberately leaned over and drooled on her arm.

  “A long string of slobber!” she held out her hands to demonstrate. “Like the cows used to do on my grand-daddy’s farm. And then he smiles at me. He smiles through the slobber. In his yellow L. L. Bean p.j.’s or whatever they were. And he says, ‘Now clean it up.’”

  Some of the nurses stared through sun-blinded eyes, a bored look saying, get used to it, that’s the job. But Harriet said, “What total bullshit,” and another said, “How’s his b.p. medication these days?” Some of the women glanced at Melvina—Sheriff. It was the law of the Old Nursing West: if they wanted, they could have punished or killed; it was called creative medication.

  Melvina sighed, crossed her arms, and ruefully considered that there was a time not so long ago when she might have gone another way. It would have involved becoming a renegade of some sort, like the Vietnam vets she sometimes treated, the ones who refused to go near the V. A. hospital. They drove each other up to the emergency room on Harley Davidsons, roaring like Zeus, in black leather, chains, and a web of tattoos.

  Melvina, despite her appreciation of law and order, couldn’t help a sneaking admiration of bikers. She had a sense that with a twitch of fate, it might have been her on a Harley, perhaps glued to the back of some disposable man as she’d seen many of the women; hair fluttering under their helmets, molding their bodies to the momentum, closer than a marriage vow. What was more interesting to her, though, was the thought of mounting her own engine, tearing a hole through the layers that weighed on her, house, community, family, the need to make well and whole. She’d have punched through it all and left the tattered edges behind, rising white-uniformed on the highway.

  She reflected on killing the advertising executive, just one small human sacrifice, nothing spectacular, no stakes, bonfires, or necktie hangings. Just something discreet, a gradual, invisible, accidental misapplication of medicine, and the sliding into some choice coma, irreversible brain damage. Nothing to it. And he’d earned it, hadn’t he? He’d spat on a nurse! That hardest working, hardest suffering, most unthanked, unseen, unknown of the race of visionaries and saints. He’d earned it.

  “The sooner we get our patient well,” Melvina said finally, looking, in turn, each and every one of her compatriots in the eye, “the sooner he will leave us.”

  MELVINA HAD TAKEN psychology courses as a part of her nurse’s training; she knew all about what she called the “myths” of id, ego, and superego. Personally, she was much more attracted to Shintoism, whose faithful collected little god statues, spirits all around them, who kept everything in line. That seemed to her to be the way things worked. Inside the Arab-Syracuse world she was surrounded by relatives and other interested parties, the dead and the living, each with his or her own opinion and influence.

  “I’m fed up with egos, ids, whatever,” she liked to say. “If they want to speak to me, let them come and speak. Otherwise, I don’t have time for it.”

  She’d duke it out with any id that’d care to put up a fight. She believed that in her own case these so-called h
idden desires and violences all rode up in the front seat, everyone carrying on at the same time, like a carload of Arabs. Then there were the occasions when she would surprise herself and do something she hadn’t known she was going to do. So it happened that around seven, after the Won Ton à Go-Go, she found herself turning left instead of right at the Euclid blinking red light, away from home and toward the Key West Bar.

  As usual, the place was silent and lit up like a cathedral, windowless walls glowing as if holding racks of red candles and tapestries. Melvie had come to see the owner, a man with skin like marble, hair like plaster, eyes of stained glass. The saintly light in his hair and skin made him look as if the star of Bethlehem was at his brow, cherubim at his fingers. She walked up to the bar and felt an eerie impulse to kneel.

  Larry’s hand was fluttering over his cash register, ringing up a drink. It stopped in midflight when he saw Melvie’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He smiled and pushed the drawer closed.

  Though she’d been stopping there almost daily, since mid-May, she was still surprised each time she did. She had little use for men as a general rule. There were a few male nurses on the floor, especially good for lifting and turning patients, but often the first to start feeling wounded dignity. Their identities were often a source of confusion; it was not uncommon for a patient to assume that a male nurse was a doctor, a female doctor “just” a nurse. Male nurses were always the first to return to the outside, what Melvie called the “unreal world,” where they were men again, privileged to spit and wear suits, swagger, and whistle at women.

  She’d never forgotten what their mother’s mother had said to her in phone conversations that had followed the death, when Melvie was still a child: “Never trust a man. Don’t let them touch you, I mean really touch you. They’ll only hurt you.” Her grandmother needed a scapegoat, someone to anchor her despair. Melvie knew those feelings got tied up in the threads of a person’s blood, the lattice of muscle and heart. Still, though Melvie had dismissed her grandmother as paranoid and a hypochondriac, she found some sense in her attitude to men in general.

  She looked at Larry, who was now polishing the same spot of bar over and over, eyes mostly lowered. He went on with one little movement of the rag in his hand, as if his brain were caught in a tic. He was all patience, waiting for Melvina to speak.

  The only other customer in the bar, Tenny Beevle, laid aside his paper and said around his cigarette, “Hear about the big blaze…” Then his voice faded, his eyes narrowing, as if trying to recall his thought.

  No, Melvie knew, men were something beyond hurt: perpetrators, trespassers, their presence as troublesome as poltergeists, their desires far less certain. Larry lifted his eyes, stopped rubbing the bar, and Melvie said, “Take a break.”

  MELVINA STEPPED INTO it, like a traveler on frostbitten plains, walking into a place where the earth mingled with ice; she lowered her head, averted her face, and pushed.

  She had no interest in why; that was self-evident. To her it was only, always how. How to get the drug, to tap so many cc’s into the hypodermic chamber, to test it for air bubbles, letting drops spritz free; how to tourniquet his arm for him, or his leg, to find the vein, the one standing strong and blue, the one with straight, unbroken walls, carrying its load to map out the body in blood seams, turning it into a country of snow.

  Larry ducked his head. He couldn’t stand to watch when she injected him. He was upset by his habit—introduced by way of muscle relaxants after an injury in ’Nam—and believed that it was another body, another Larry, that this young woman injected, graceful and deft upon the needle as another woman’s fingers might be upon piano keys. Melvina brought him the drug to keep him alive, in the same way she would feed a patient who couldn’t lift a spoon. She had suspected his addiction from the first moment that she’d seen his paper lips, his transparent skin. On the night of the church dance, after Melvie had slapped her aunt, Larry had come up, shuffling her through a side exit into the blue-and-gray twilight and into his car. He had pulled into an abandoned drive-in lot, weeds shagging against the car. He reached for her and Melvie pushed back his sleeves to see the track marks. He was ill, and for Melvie the decision to help him had been made long before she’d ever met him.

  He received his fix in the storage room under the Key West. It was the only place in the whole building with windows, thin casements near the ceiling that sparkled with dirt and sunlight. They sat on liquor boxes. When she withdrew the needle, Melvina would sit back to watch the transformation. She brought him metha-done; she called it the middle rung down the escape ladder.

  Larry became an angel, eyes burned to filament. He put out his hands to her, held himself to earth, and his veils would lift, one after another, like the layers of deaths she had seen in her life. The tiny deaths rose and he emerged, his face shining from the force of it. His words became powder and he sprinkled them over her. His eyes became stars and he saw the spirit inside Melvina, that glowed with something like his own burned-away beauty, “Melvina…my life…my joy…my beauty.” And then, “Welcome to the Room of the Absolute Present Tense.”

  She held her patient-lover’s hand as he rose and drifted, skin limpid in the creamy sun. The windows floated away. Though Melvina never touched any drugs herself, she dutifully took his hand and accompanied him. Whitening air filled the room, their small space; in the long hours they spent together, Melvie watched figures from her memory, from Euclid and Syracuse, wander in and out like figures in a fog. She saw her father and her sister, and though she might have reached toward them, they left her. No matter how she called after them and strained her eyes, they lost themselves in the turning current of the air, just like Dolores Otts and her mother and every other person she might have saved and had lost.

  When the sunset in the windows ripened and turned apricot, Larry recovered enough to look in on the bar. Sometimes that was when they parted ways, but on that night, the first week of August, Larry turned the bar over to Hilma Otts. He and Melvie drove up to the fish stands on Lake Ontario. They walked past the picnic tables and took fried, dripping sandwiches to the lakeside. The shore was broken into flat rocks where they could sit and watch the progress of the sunset. The lake was a baptismal font where the sun broke along steepening bands to a single, intense line that spread crimson against the water. The air was dotted with clouds of gnats. Larry leaned back against Melvina and said, “You know, babes, when I see days like this, I feel like, okay, now I can die.”

  Melvie stiffened. She wanted to dig her fingers into Larry’s shoulder, to say to him, never. She put her arms around Larry: she would keep him alive as long as she could.

  “Psychohealer,” Larry said, still staring out. “You and my ex-wife are a perfect balance. She was the Psychokiller and you are the Psychohealer.”

  “I beg to differ, Mr. Fasco,” Melvie said, annoyed. She straightened as if behind her big desk at work. “There is nothing psychotic in the pursuit of holistic health.”

  Larry chuckled faintly.

  “And why, pray tell,” Melvie said, “do you insist on calling your ex-wife by that horrendous name?”

  “Her meat loaf,” he said, with a faraway look. “Her meat loaf, and every now and then she chases Peachy Otts around with an ax. Of course, that’s a Euclid kind of thing to do anyway.”

  Melvie carefully wrapped their scraps in a page of newspaper. Folding it up, she noticed a small item smeared with grease, Dolores Mabel Otts, 29, Dead in Fire.

  Chapter 32

  WEDNESDAY MORNING PRESSED down on Jem. She felt the eternal recurrence of work that was continually undoing itself; she could hardly bear another day, losing her life hour by hour. The team leader had talked her into staying on until they could find her replacement. Two weeks notice turned into a summer, and perhaps longer: they hadn’t even advertised the opening yet. She went to work thinking, This is absolutely my last week.

  She walked down the corridor to the business wing, looking at her desk
, the wall before the desk, all flat and faceless. When the first phone call came, before she had her hand on the receiver, preparing the words, “Good morning, inpatient billing,” she was thinking, I’m dying.

  She thought about the passage of her life, about the fact that she would be thirty in a month, after years of summers, visiting aunts and uncles, listening to their warnings: A good girl does not leave her home. Does not go out in public, speak to a man, show her ankles, talk back to her parents, go to school, live alone.

  On her walk in from the parking lot that morning, everything had felt heavy, the thick raindrops, the sight of the gardeners settled between wicking branches. Her breath wavered with the thought of Ricky’s mouth. She looked into the cement-colored sky and knew she was getting older. She was determined to leave.

  Portia came to Jem’s desk that morning and asked her to stay on another week.

  “Just until we can get your replacement trained.” Portia was wearing a dress of tiny flowers that seemed to flow and ebb around her bulk, independent of the flesh beneath. Jem tried not to look at it; the flowers, white on a black field, would wink open then disappear. Jem’s eyes kept falling from the woman’s face to her dress. She felt herself tilting, falling into the universe of the flowered dress.

  Sweat was pinching out of her skin, at her temples and underarms. Portia was smiling at her, already pleased by Jem’s answer, by the way she knew things would go. Jem imagined a giant weaving in Portia’s office, in which she arranged the future, a fabric Portia could wear on her back like her dress of star-flowers. The smile on her face was inexorable. How could Jem presume to alter the course of Portia’s destiny?