In the Mean Time

by Tremblay, Paul

  All of which means this will most certainly happen again. Your own rolling wheel of guilt and emptiness and the need to fill it.

  I didn’t press her further on the party. I was all talk and just as comfortable saying nothing, adding to our nothing. How could we both be so empty of things to say?

  “What are you and your brother going to do on Friday?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on what time he gets here.” She laughed through her nose and folded her arms across her chest. Doing that made her look younger, and small. “Not sure if I’m ready to take Phil out on the town. I’d have to work up to that.”

  The next time it had happened my doctor said there is no cure for Pica. Sometimes giving nutritional supplements help. He said sometimes again, and then wrote a prescription and encouraged me to eat appropriate, healthy, nutritional foods. That list didn’t include my recent à-la-carte items: cardboard, newspaper, or kitty litter.

  I said, “I can’t wait to meet Phil. I’m going to bombard him with questions about his growing up with the one-time young . . .”

  “Hey! I’m still young,” she said, and gave me the first real smile of the night, maybe of the week.

  “. . . and uncorrupted Cassandra Evans.”

  “You won’t get anything out of him.”

  The next time it had happened my doctor said typical Pica patients are people who are poor or have nutrition and vitamin deficiency or a family history of Pica, or even people with ethnic customs who live in cultures where it is practiced. Oh, and as a throwaway, he added that Pica is very common among pregnant women. I had resisted the urge to thank Doctor Obvious.

  Cassie sat next to me at our little kitchen table. Another of our antiques. This one we’d stripped and lacquered ourselves on a breezy fall Sunday. The wind had kept sticking leaves on the table while we’d worked. If you were looking for it, you could see three different leaf-outlines in the table’s finish. My teacup was resting on one. This table was my favourite piece of furniture in the house.

  She said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Please do.”

  “How does it happen? I mean, what are you thinking when it happens?”

  The next time it happened my doctor said that even in America the eating of clay is common and sold as edible in some states. He said some people believe that eating clay will help with morning sickness. He said pregnant Nigerian women will eat calcium-rich clay because there are no calcium-rich foods in their usual diet.

  Cassie had taken out books and talked to my doctor, but this was the first time she’d asked me about it. This was a good thing. Although I had no idea what to say, because I really didn’t know the answer.

  The next time it had happened my doctor said Pica in pregnant women tended to go away after childbirth but sometimes it occurs post partum. Again, he said sometimes.

  I decided to try this:

  “I never sense when an episode is coming on. Usually, I fake myself out. I’ll be reading or teaching or watching TV, and then I’ll start thinking about the disease and worry about what it could do to me and the baby, almost convincing myself that an episode is going to happen. But then it doesn’t.

  “When it happens for real, I don’t really notice there’s anything wrong, but at the same time I do. I don’t know if that makes any sense. But I guess there is a sense of something about to happen, I can remember that, but I’m calm and there’s no worry or panic, like my body knows there won’t be any thinking or worrying getting in the way of what it wants. I don’t know, I guess the best way to describe it is that it takes over, without any real struggle on my part. Like being hypnotized, or anaesthetized. Any memory of the actual eating is fuzzy at best, like remembering a scene from a long-ago-watched movie or TV show.”

  Cassie grabbed my hand and said, “You can stop now.”

  It was too much for her. She got up, tried to offer me a smile, but it was broken, and she walked out of the kitchen, walking like there was a somewhere else for her to go. I heard our bedroom door close, and I closed my eyes and got this sudden vision of unused honey at the bottom of my teacup, and somehow that seemed like the saddest thing in the world.

  After it had happened earlier that day, my doctor said that there is talk about Pica possibly being more psychological than physical, the ingesting of toxic or harmful non-food items as a form of self-abuse.

  Self-abuse. We were good at that.

  So you-the-machine walk out of the cupboard, ploughing through the sunbeam. You-the-machine doesn’t notice. Then across the kitchen to the back door and out that door onto the three-season porch. You-the-machine doesn’t see how clean it is, how Cassie must’ve dusted and washed everything: mini-blinds, walls, wicker table and chairs, everything, because today is Friday, the day of plans. You-the-machine notes the change in temperature on the porch, but only in an instinctual, gooseflesh way. You-the-machine does not notice your frosty breath, your exhaust, nor do you look out the windows to see the still-going-strong snow cover. You-the-machine walks to the porch corner that is adjacent to the garage entry. Resting on the floor and tucked into the corner like a poorly kept secret, are a bag of potting soil and a box of powder laundry detergent. You-the-machine doesn’t care that the soil was a house-warming gift that has sat in the same spot for the two years you’ve lived at the house. You-the-machine doesn’t care that the detergent has been there as long as the soil, something you bought before learning Cassie only used liquid detergent.

  One robot-hand goes inside the soil bag, satisfied with the cold and crumbling clod it snatches, and the other into the detergent box and its white chemical sand.

  After, there will be no going-on-leave math department party and you won’t meet Cassie’s brother Phil. The Friday, and all the days after, you planned, will not exist, as if it ever did.

  After, and this after will only be if Cassie comes home and finds you in time, you’ll be in an ambulance that shouts all the way to the hospital and you’ll only faintly remember the rest: mouth opening, a foggy notion of taste, of enriched mineral and earth filling your mouth and mixing with the tang and burn of chemical, and before the pain is the initial opiate-like rush and relief of a full stomach, of filling the empty, of feeding the machine.

  Figure 5

  (co-written with M. Thomas)

  1

  Anderbine has watched her for seventy-two days. Each morning, as the sun spills around the spires of the Ministry of Bone, Midria pauses on the eighty-seventh step of the Grand Hundred stairs and throws back her tattered hood. Plague victims who pass her on the stairs never show their faces. The city sprawls below her on precarious ridges carved from bloodless limestone and greywacke cliffs. The guards on the eastern edge of the Grand Hundred stairs do not pass the plague barrier, but some throw ugly slurs her way, which she ignores.

  Anderbine’s Figure 1 is a triptych on wood. Only minute manifestations of the plague are visible on the first panel: cold sores and rashes around the eyes and mouth, along the cheeks, jaw, forehead, and into the hair. Such manifestations are the only evidence necessary for quarantine. In panel two, the lesions suppurate and the pus congeals into a tough, honey-coloured scab too painful to remove. It sloughs off eventually along with hair and eyelashes, as is evident in the third panel, leaving behind the nacreous sheen of the new flesh called the Caul. The Caul will be lost too, eventually. The ears draw closer to the head as the lesion seams heal tightly, leaving the cartilage of the ear flap to stick out in ridges along the jaw. In the beginning, change was the only constant, fluid in its speed, and he sketched madly for hours. Now her metamorphosis has slowed, if not stopped.

  Anderbine sits in his studio, holding a pencil and sketchpad, and looking out his high window. He tries to catch sight of her hands, which will accept her daily allotment of water from the plague well: the well once reserved, in better times, for penitents a
nd holy days. Midria has not changed since the preceding night. She keeps her hands hidden in her sleeves.

  In Figure 2, a full-length portrait, Anderbine has paid special attention to the milky sheen of her Caul, the strange bulges and bumps of the new bone growth underneath or rather, the rearrangement of the chin, cheeks, eyebrow ridges, and jaw, which narrow and elongate. The Grand Hundred stairs are littered with teeth that fall out during this stage and they crack like shale underfoot of the plague victims.

  Figure 3 is a simple line drawing, no shading, only lines to show the sharp new edges of her and the new eyes, three of them along her forehead. They pressed and bulged against the Caul until they burst through, doe-ish and dry.

  In Figure 4, chalk on gray pulp-print, the Caul is completely worn away and hangs from her in strips. Days ago, he doesn’t remember how many, she scratched at and pulled off the Caul. Its thin swaths dropped onto the stairs among the teeth. Underneath the Caul was a smooth, white carapace, which reddened, then browned in the sun, looking like a finely polished wooden mask.

  Midria pauses to search the high houses on the eastern side of the stairs, and her gaze lingers on familiar places: the Salons, the rock gardens, the terrace restaurants, the libraries. Then she is gone again, her hood replaced. She rejoins the anonymous crowd of hoods and slumped shoulders climbing up from the bottom of the Grand Hundred to their water, to prolong their death sentence with the barest of comforts.

  Anderbine leaves his window and considers his final canvas. It is Figure 5 he cannot complete. Midria has remained unchanged, or unfinished, locked in the Figure 4 stage for a week now. There have been no reports of plague victims surviving for long after the shedding of the Caul.

  “Gravis,” Anderbine calls, and his aged and stooped servant appears immediately. “A fish for dinner, I think. And some apples, if you can get them.”

  Gravis, the only member of his staff to stay after she left, says, “Yes, sir.” They still address each other formally, though stubborn adherence to social mores is meaningless with no one present to observe it. Gravis disappears from the room, thrifty and economical in all his ways. Anderbine doesn’t blame the others for leaving.

  Anderbine walks the dark and cobwebbed hallways to the dining room. The house is too much for Gravis, but there are few left to hire. Those who come try to hide the rashes with makeup and scarves, increasingly bizarre wigs, strange jewellery pressed through open sores to seem like ornaments. In the dining room, candles are lit beside a single place setting at the head of the long table. Ministry portraits, arranged chronologically, hang on the walls, safe in their shadow. Anderbine sits and wipes the silverware with his napkin, then traces scratches and gouges in the wooden table with a tine of his fork, following them as if on a path, or solving a maze. But he is thinking only of his Figure 5 and whether Midria will live long enough for him to paint it.

  2

  Summoned by messenger that afternoon, Anderbine takes a curtained rickshaw to the locks, away from the Grand Hundred stairs. He waits patiently in his private boat until it is raised to the Ministry landing. Once inside the Ministry, he ensconces himself in a sanitized balcony encased in glass, a thin, white baton in his left hand.

  Ten feet below is the operating room and its lone table. On the table is the nude body of a Figure 2 plague victim, a young male, whose Caul is misshapen and protruding concave bony plates. Three Figure 1 plague victims stand around the table, having already been trained and initiated into Anderbine’s surgical strategies, trading their plague zone detention for the relative comfort of spending the rest of their lives cloistered within the walls of the Ministry. Anderbine doesn’t fool himself into believing that it is a fair trade, but his work must be done. It is important work, work worth their lives. They stare up at him, their eyes and mouths rumours within the lesions that will take over their faces. They are ready to begin.

  Anderbine lifts the baton and his conscripted surgical assistants take scalpels, clamps, and bone saws into their hands. Flesh and bone are rent, limbs and organs removed, everything catalogued according to the precise and fluid motion of his baton. Anderbine scribbles notes onto personal copies of his four complete Figures, replicas of which hang from the balcony and operating room walls, slide off instrument trays, lie under the feet of his surgical assistants, and are covered in old notes and fresh blood and gore.

  Anderbine halts his baton, allowing the assistants a short reprieve. One of the assistants, a male with black ringlet hair that will fall out in clumps soon enough, leaves his position at the operating table and surveys the walls and its wallpaper of Figures. He gently places his hands on the replica drawings, obscuring her many faces with a bloody palm print. It’s as if the young plague victim cannot bear to see his future, and the desperation of this act fills Anderbine with sadness, albeit distant. The work must go on.

  He taps on the balcony glass and flicks his wand harshly, demanding the autopsy begin anew. The other two assistants scurry and fill their hands with instruments and flesh. But the first assistant chooses a Figure from the floor instead of a scalpel. He turns, holds up the Figure 4 replica toward the surgeon’s balcony, and points.

  Anderbine turns and jabs the baton, twisting and arcing it into a new set of directions.

  The assistant wets his finger inside the cadaver’s chest and writes a message on the Figure:

  I know who she is.

  Anderbine pauses. The young man rewrites the message.

  Anderbine calls the guards and has the operating room cleared. He ties a black mask over his nose and mouth, and leaves the balcony. In the decontaminant vestibule, he covers the rest of his body in clear plastic, and then enters the operating room. The young man steps toward him, head tipped up. Anderbine is not prepared for the rich baritone that emerges from the ugly scab of a mouth.

  “There was a man came out healed from the Ministry. ‘Healed,’ they said. She took him as her lover, but he did not give her the plague that way. He gave it to her because she asked him to. It was a gift. And she gives it to us.”

  No one has been released from the Ministry healed. There are Ministry agents who spread lies within the plague zone, to keep the infected from rushing the border guards and checkpoints. Anderbine knows that most of what this man says is myth, but for every myth there’s a kernel of truth. Why did she seek a life so far removed from the one she had with him?

  Anderbine decides the distant view from his window is no longer sufficient. He says, “Do you know where she is?”

  “Yes. Everyone does.”

  3

  The Ministry rickshaw burrows into the plague zone. Following the canal and moving past the base of the Grand Hundred stairs, Anderbine looks out the window to the east, trying to find his house, trying to find her view of what was once their home.

  To justify this trip, Anderbine called on all his Ministry favours. He is dressed in layer upon layer of protective gear: gloves and hose and scarves and a ridiculous hat that covers his rapidly greying hair. Two members of his surgical team, the extensions of his hands, draw the rickshaw along the seaside base of the city, after lowering from the locks. The rickshaw windows are poor glass. Through them the plague zone appears watery, riddled with bubbles of air, stone turned the colour of thunderheads by the smoke of endless fires. The plague zone is too small for its inhabitants, and they camp crowded against the lanes in blanket tents, fouling the roofs of houses on the ledges below with their night-pots and oyster shells. The stench comes in through the cracks around the windows and through his protective scarf, a rotting flesh and vegetable smell.

  The rickshaw pulls up outside a shanty deep within the zone. It has a curious space around it; even the plagued masses give it a hole, a burrow of its own. The door is torn away, for firewood perhaps, and only a tatter of cloth covers the entrance. He draws it aside gently, and though he cannot feel the cloth through all the prot
ective layers, he is treated to a memory of a slim dress she wore once, the way it spilled into his hands when she shrugged it from her shoulders.

  There is a table in the center of the shack, and on it rotting fruit, bread, fish, an oil lamp burning. Outside the lamp’s light are thick nests of debris: seaweed and deep piles of shells, the barnacled slats of wrecked ship hulls, furniture, clothes, tree branches, and, he suspects, rotting pelts of dead animals. On top of it all are blue teacups, an alarm clock with rusty bells, a dulled letter opener with etched vines, and an empty suitcase, all of which came from his house. The debris is artfully arranged, rising and falling, mimicking tsunamis and a voluptuous horizon.

  Midria stirs, lounging in one of the piles, and the bare light of the lantern is not enough to discern where she begins, where the refuse ends.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he says, his voice swallowed by the miserly acoustics of filth against the walls.

  “No,” she replies. “You have been brought to me.”

  “You are very ill now,” he says.

  “I am well,” she says. “Changed, but not unhealthy.”

  It’s too dark. Though he hears her shift, he can’t see her. “You chose to live in the plague zone over living with me. You are alone.”

  “I am not the one who is alone.”

  He says, “I can still help you.”

  “You still assume I am diseased.” Her sudden stillness in the pile of refuse is profound. “It was the same with us when we were together and I yearned for you, and you were at your work and your art. You swore it was vapours, humours, my uninhabitable womb, my fondness for smoke, some spirit possession. It was always something. You wanted so badly to heal me, but always from inside your Ministry vestibule. Glass between us when we were not in bed.”