Breed

by Chase Novak

  It doesn’t bother him as much as he would have expected. He knows he is lucky to be alive. He is in a hospital. Never in his wildest imagination would he have thought that the sight of a hospital room would fill him with such relief, waves and waves of relief, one arriving after the other.

  At last Xavier dares to fully open his eyes. Pain, like a rain of flaming arrows, beginning in the part of his skull that Alex rammed into the light pole, penetrates him with such sudden vehemence that it makes him moan.

  “Xavier?” Someone has called his name, a familiar voice. Someone… safe. Someone good.

  He sees he is connected to a machine. And there are IV tubes going running into him beneath the covers.

  “Xavier. Xavier.”

  His sister is here. Rosalie. Rosalie. She seems to float before him, like a face reflected in a gigantic soap bubble. The sight of her makes him want to weep.

  “Don’t move, baby,” she is saying. “You’re okay. You’re alive, you’re hurt, they fucked you up something good, but you’re okay and you’re going to make it, baby. You’re going to be fine.”

  He has to think for a moment. Is she speaking English or Spanish?

  “Where’s my arm?”

  “They don’t know yet.”

  “How long have I been here?” His voice is barely a whisper. He has shredded it, screaming for all those hours.

  “Shhh, it’s okay, Xavier. You’ve been here just a little while. It’s okay.”

  He wants to say to her Stop reassuring me and just tell me what the hell is happening, but it’s too many words. Where have I been? What have they done to me? He tries to convey it all in a look—she knows him so well, she’d be able to read it in his eyes, but she has gotten up from her chair and is walking toward the squeaking wheels and the murmuring voices and the ding ding ding of some machine, which sounds like someone has put a stethoscope to the chest of a robot.

  “Nurse? Someone?” Rosalie is calling out. “My brother’s awake!”

  Xavier hears music and he painfully turns his head toward it. He sees now that the room he is in is not a room at all but a piece of hospital real estate in which some of the privacy of an actual room has been created by shelves of medical supplies and stacks of medical equipment on one side of him and a pleated white curtain on the other.

  The curtain is only partially drawn, and he sees in the open space the bare, swollen, faintly blue feet of someone in the next bed, someone who is apparently watching a television set that’s mounted near the ceiling on a long L-shaped bracket.

  Xavier has a clear view of the set. A newsreader, an Asian woman, her dark hair like a swimmer’s cap, is looking down at her script, frowning. She looks now at the camera, swallows, takes a deep breath. “Police continue to look for answers in the strange and shocking deaths on the Upper East Side of Manhattan this afternoon, and we’re joined now by News Twenty-Two’s Carter Davis, in Central Park.”

  The anchor’s face is replaced by that of a local reporter, a rather louche young man wearing a long scarf and a beret, and with a two-day growth of auburn whiskers. “Thank you, Becky. Well, people are still reeling from the events of this afternoon, and we now have positive identifications of both of the dead men in this apparent murder/suicide.”

  The image changes now to a close shot of the bloodstained tips of King Jagiello’s twin swords. City workers have erected a screen to block most of the statue from view, though even now, with the body gone and the initial excitement down from a roar to a hum, there remain two or three dozen people drawn by curiosity and some darker impulse to the sight of the killing, just as once upon a time people would gather at the spot where someone had had a vision or where a miracle had occurred.

  “New York City schoolteacher Michael Medoff…” the reporter is saying, and whatever comes after that is lost on Xavier, because a new image now fills the hanging television’s screen.

  That’s Michael’s driver’s license is Xavier’s first thought; his second cannot really be called a thought at all. He starts pulling the tubes out of himself and kicking the covers off. He knows only one thing now and that is he must get to that TV set and take Michael’s picture off it.

  “Shh. Shh. Xavier, please, tranquilo…” Rosalie is at his bedside and she has her warm, soft arms around him and—like home!—is wrestling him down. “Someone?” she calls out. “Help?” And then in a sharper voice, “Please turn that set off. You’re disturbing my brother.”

  Xavier has no strength for the struggle. He falls back onto the bed, pain shooting through him with total violence, the violence of nature, the violence of a volcano. The body—the mind!—cannot survive the onslaught of so much pain.…

  Though Rosalie tries to cover his eyes with her Lysol-sanitized hand, Xavier can still partially see the set, enough to identify the next picture that comes up. The photograph is of a handsome middle-aged man with a terrific haircut, a white shirt, a striped tie. There is nothing in the picture to remind Xavier of the beast who dragged him out of that taxi—when was that? When? When? His mind gropes for a sense of sequence as a man might flounder for a piece of wreckage to help him survive the explosion of the ship he once sailed. Human beings, he thinks, were not made to endure such pain. Weakly, he tries to remove Rosalie’s hand, but he cannot, and now she is joined by someone else.

  A nurse is here. Her lined, exhausted face. Her hands. The low hiss of the rayon of her uniform. Her candied breath.

  “Okay, Mr. Sardina, can you just relax for me? Please?”

  Rosalie removes her hand from his eyes and he stares up at the nurse. African, from the pure blackness of her. Her eyes are dark brown, her expression reserved but kind. The wrinkles on her fingers like little white rings.

  “Are you in pain now, Mr. Sardina?” the nurse asks in her up-and-down voice. “Can you put a number value to your pain, with ten being the worst?”

  Xavier looks again at his shoulder, and the sad droop of bandages, and the unbelievable emptiness that follows. He remembers: It’s where the beast started in. It’s where he took the first bite. Sorry, sorry, the man had said, staggering away, wiping his chin, breathing quickly, shallowly, like a rapist. Next time, I’ll get something to knock you out.

  “Monster!” Xavier screams. “Monster!”

  “I need some help here,” the nurse says in as calm a voice as she can manage. “Is Nurse Gauthier on the floor?”

  “No, Amelie had to leave early,” a distant voice answers. “She had some situation at home.”

  “I knew one day I would see you again. Sometimes I searched for you, just looking at the faces of people when I walked to work. I knew I would recognize you. Even though—and I don’t mean this in a bad way—you don’t look so much like you used to.” Amelie Gauthier is seated with Leslie in a cramped kitchen, the blue Formica kitchen table between them, and she does mean it in a bad way. Leslie’s skin is like ever-so-slightly-pink clay, her eyes are dark and deeply set and totally without happiness or hope. How can Amelie dislike a person so clearly faltering, so visibly failing to thrive? Yet she does.…

  There is something hospitable about sitting with someone in your kitchen, but Amelie has brought Leslie into this room because it is the only room in her apartment currently unoccupied. Which must mean the abandoned ones, the wild children of the park, have already cleaned her out, because the kitchen is usually their first stop. Leslie, dazed, limp, has allowed Amelie to lead her to a hard wooden chair. The kitchen reeks of soup and the yeasty redolence of vitamins; Leslie must breathe through her mouth to stop herself from retching. Her hands are folded. She is like a child at her desk in school. Her face is streaked with mascara and tears. She looks as if she has been living in one of the tunnels beneath Pennsylvania Station. Wildness and hopelessness rise off her skin like wet smoke. She squeezes her hands together to try to control her trembling, but the effort only makes everything worse.

  “You don’t have any idea who I am, do you,” Amelie says. She takes a deep breath,
folds her arms over her chest, and looks her visitor up and down.

  “I’m sorry,” Leslie says. She looks past Amelie and into the next room, where her twins have joined Rodolfo and the others. Alice is whispering rapidly, interrupted now and then by Adam, while the others listen, rapt.

  “Who are these children?” Leslie murmurs, as much to herself as to Amelie.

  “They have something in common with your own children,” Amelie says.

  Amelie’s eyes follow Leslie’s gaze and sees how this dark and chaotic apartment must look, its unending dishevelment speaking definitively about the difficulties of Amelie’s circumstances and the impossibility of her schedule. Mingled with the profusion of medical supplies she needs to care for Bernard, there are piles of laundry that await folding, stacks of newspapers that await recycling, books that await reshelving, videos that await returning, dishes that await washing.

  Leslie blots her eyes with the heels of her hands, takes a deep breath.

  “Thank you for letting us into your home,” she says.

  It is not the first time Amelie has come home to a houseful of the untamable children. She keeps her door open to the kids who live in the park. They are Bernard’s friends, his only friends, and she is grateful to them, filthiness and all.

  “May I call you Leslie,” Amelie asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you remember where we met, Leslie?”

  Leslie shakes her head uncertainly.

  “Well, people like you don’t really notice people like me.”

  Leslie blinks in surprise. “I’m sorry. Do you want us to leave?”

  “No, I do not. I’m going to try to help you. But it would have been nice if you had remembered meeting me before. I was one of the nurses in the delivery room with you when you had your three children.”

  “How could I know? I was having a baby. I don’t remember anyone from that day. My mind isn’t what it once was.” She is surprised she has any tears left, but she does.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Leslie cocks her head, tilts her ear toward Amelie.

  “I said your three children.”

  “I thought mistake,” Leslie murmurs.

  “Not my mistake.”

  Leslie shakes her head. She is not able to process what is being said to her right now. Even under the best of circumstances, she would be confused by what Amelie is saying.…

  “You didn’t have twins,” Amelie says. Her voice softens, her shoulders relax.

  “Yes, I do. Did. Twins.” Leslie has noticed over the past few months that when she is tired or under stress, she makes even more mistakes in her speech, and she has never in her life been more tired and under more stress than she is right now. She thinks for a moment about simply closing her eyes, cushioning her head upon her arm, and letting herself plunge into a deep, obliterating sleep. Yet she does not dare: in the darkness float the excruciating memories of all she has seen today and yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. Darkness is a room where the image of Alex crushed and the image of the pierced body of the young teacher now squeeze themselves into a space that already contains more revulsion and more regret than she ever thought possible. If only she could never ever close her eyes again.

  “You delivered three babies, Leslie.”

  Leslie shakes her head.

  “Your doctor?”

  “Don’t remember. We saw many.”

  “Yes. From Turtle Bay Obstetrics. Yes?”

  “I think so.”

  “May I ask you how you got here?”

  “Here?” Leslie asks.

  “Yes, to my apartment.”

  “We walked across the park. No one was paying attention to us. We just walked. My children. And the other children.”

  “And they brought you here,” Amelie says.

  Leslie looks away. An arched entrance separates the kitchen from the shadowy chaos of Gauthier’s apartment; her children sit on a sofa with six of the park children. From this distance they just seem like children, hanging out, wasting time. Adam has a video-game controller in his hand, as does Rodolfo, and they are playing a game whose sound track seems to be an unending stream of automatic weapons firing and the wail of police sirens. How can they listen to those sirens and not be reliving what happened right before their eyes? Where do they put their experiences? How do they live?

  “Leslie?” Amelie reaches across the table and touches Leslie’s arm, causing Leslie to turn toward her with terrifying swiftness, her eyes keen, her lip curled. Amelie puts her hands up.

  “Would you like to see your son?” Amelie asks. “Your other son?”

  “No. No more. Please. I want everything to stop.”

  “I have to insist, Leslie.” Amelie has a sense of justice, and it must be satisfied. For years, she has tended to Bernard’s ever-expanding needs, suffered with him the humiliations of his disfigurement, endured with him the grinding pain of his days. In that time, she never doubted that she was right to have outwitted those who wanted him extinguished—she was willing to defy them all, the doctors, the other nurses, even nature itself. And she never wanted recompense, except for this one thing: she wanted the mother to look at what she had abandoned.

  “I have spent ten years taking care of what you were meant to take care of,” she says. “And now you are here, in more trouble than you could ever imagine, and you are hiding from—from who? The police? Everyone in the world? Yourself? And you are asking my help. If you want that help, Leslie, you need to take a look at your son.”

  Amelie pushes her chair back, stands, and gestures commandingly for Leslie to follow her. They walk through the room where the children are parked in front of the TV screen. They all look down, remain silent, which makes the video game sound all the louder.

  “Bernard?” Amelie says, rapping a knuckle against his bedroom door. She looks over her shoulder at Leslie. “He may be a bit groggy.”

  “I have to think,” Leslie says. She rubs her forehead.

  “If you want to stay here, you need to do what I ask you. It’s as simple as that.” She raps again on Bernard’s door, this time not waiting for an answer before opening it up.

  The boy was able to awaken himself enough to call his mother at the hospital, but, still clutching his phone in his two-fingered hand, he has fallen deeply into a vast narcotic sleep. Even from a distance, and even through the darkness of this room, Leslie sees enough of Bernard to make her let out an “oh” of dismay.

  “How dare you,” snarls Amelie. She goes to Bernard’s bedside, takes the phone from him, and holds out his hand for Leslie to see. “You see that?” With her fingertip, she traces the path of Bernard’s reddish birthmark, a serpentine squiggle just like the marks on the hands of Leslie’s other children.

  Leslie does not speak. It is all she can do to nod her head. Calamities collide within her until she cannot tell exactly where one has ended and the next one begun.

  Suddenly, she feels something touch her on the back. With a shiver and start, she turns around and sees Alice looking up at her.

  “Mom?” she asks. “Are we going to go home?”

  Leslie and Amelie are in Fairway Market on Broadway and Seventy-Fourth Street, filling their shopping cart with food for the children. Between Amelie’s apartment and the store, they passed two cops conversing in their squad car, a mounted police officer, and two women on foot patrol, and none of them paid Leslie the slightest mind. Maybe it never happened, Leslie thinks. Yet memory reacts quickly and decisively to the effrontery of fantasy, and as soon as she imagines that Alex and the teacher are out there, alive, the images of their deaths rush forth to shred her illusions. Now, with everything else, she has a new enemy: the memories that stalk her every step of the way. Her own mind has become a forbidden zone.

  Amelie pushes the cart decisively through the thronged aisles, full of people on their way home from work. She fills the cart with plums and apples, orange juice, almonds, rice crackers
.…

  “These kids don’t eat anything decent most of the time,” Amelie says over her shoulder. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “What about some meat?” Leslie says, in not much more than a whisper.

  Amelie stops her cart, turns, and holds Leslie in her gaze for a couple of long moments. “That’s the last thing in the world they need.”

  “Protein,” Leslie says, with a shrug.

  “Look, Leslie, I know what you’ve been going through. I know how hard it’s been, and it gets harder every year.”

  “It was just a suggestion.”

  “I know what to feed these kids. Meat is full of hormones. You know how you feel at night? The temptations? The cravings? Well, that’s how some of them start to feel when the hormones really kick in. Right now, they’re still basically just kids. But some of them, you have to keep an eye out.”

  “I have to take care of my kids,” Leslie says.

  “I know, I know. I’ve got stuff I can give you back at the apartment. Pills that will take the edge off, pretty much.”

  “I don’t like pills.”

  “They’re not going to turn night into day, but if you take them they might help, for a little while.”

  “Why just for a little while?”

  “You’ll get used to them. You’ll burn through them, they’ll stop making a difference. They might not even make a difference at all. But don’t worry. As long as you’re with me, I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  “And after that?”

  “I’m a nurse,” Amelie says. “Mainly nurses just try to alleviate suffering.”

  A couple of shoppers—a dapper older man and a heavyset younger guy—are listening to Leslie and Amelie with unmitigated curiosity.

  “May I help you?” Amelie says to them, her voice as blunt as a kick in the shins.