Marshlands

by Matthew Olshan

  They laid him on an upholstered bench under the disapproving eye of an elderly guard. The bench sighed, its leather exhaling an odor of wealth. For the first time, he had a good look at the woman who’d intervened on his behalf. She was middle-aged, with dark, tightly curled hair, shot through with white. Her eyes were deep brown and soulful, but diminished by octagonal glasses, bits of burnished gold and plastic that should have lightened her face, but instead gave it a kind of severity.

  She wore a gray suit that was well made but old-fashioned, like something she’d found in her grandmother’s closet and mockingly tried on, only to discover that it fit quite well—well enough, anyway, to save the expense of buying something new.

  She didn’t wear makeup. In fact, she looked like someone who thought makeup was silly, but was nevertheless vulnerable to the attention of glamorous department store saleswomen. He wanted to tell her she was right not to wear it, that no one should hide such beautiful tawny skin.

  It had been a long time since he’d studied a woman’s face so closely. He was surprised to be drawing conclusions from it. That was a skill from his old life, when subtleties mattered, before all he needed to know was whether or not a person meant him harm.

  She dismissed the last young man who’d carried him in. The others had already disappeared through the massive revolving door.

  She asked if he was comfortable, then offered him an oat bar, rummaging for it in her purse.

  He wished she had something else. He avoided food that made him thirsty. This was a city of pay toilets. A homeless man was forced to do his business out in the open, in precisely the way that invited beatings and even arrest.

  “Here,” she said. “I know it’s not great.”

  He was in no position to refuse it, but he told her that oat bars didn’t agree with him, all the while hinting that the problem lay in his teeth. Actually, he had strategies for eating anything, even beef jerky. He knew how to keep food in his cheek until it softened. If that didn’t work, there were other ways to break it down.

  She slid the bar back into her purse and said she didn’t really like them, either, which was why she carried one for emergencies. She wasn’t likely to eat an oat bar unless she was truly desperate.

  The guard came over and whispered something that made her angry. She walked back to his station, dealing with him sharply along the way, and returned with a guest badge. She made a show of pinning the badge to his chest, then helped him to his feet and led him to an unmarked door, which she opened with a swipe of a security card.

  They walked long hallways lined with specimen cases. When he paused to rest in front of one of the cases, a bird with iridescent feathers caught his eye. A male marsh coot. He knew it well. The taxidermist had captured the coot’s enigmatic smile, but the eyes were the wrong color; he remembered them as red, not purple.

  She explained, as if he were a visiting colleague, that museums were in a time of transition. Merely displaying the wonders of nature was no longer enough. What curators emphasized now was not so much this or that specimen, but rather the story of the scientist or explorer who collected it.

  He didn’t really understand what she meant but nodded sagely to keep her talking. The businesslike tone of her voice made him feel safe.

  Then she told him they were headed to the infirmary, which surprised him. He wondered why there should be an infirmary in a museum.

  “There’ve been accidents,” she said. “That’s what we’re calling them, anyway. Some quite serious.” She went on to say that the museum had added extra security, and that its insurer had insisted on a medical station until the new exhibit was finished and all the fuss about it died down. Everyone called it the “infirmary” because the phrase “medical station” seemed awfully heavy. Didn’t he agree?

  He nodded, but once again, she was talking beyond him. “Medical station” seemed perfectly normal. Had words truly become light or heavy while he was away?

  “Here we are,” she said, stopping at the open door of an office suite. A male nurse rose from a swivel chair to greet them. He’d been interrupted while reading. He set aside his book and let his reading glasses dangle from a cord around his neck. He was a compact, balding man whose large ears and rosy cheeks nevertheless gave an impression of youth.

  She greeted him with a familiarity that aspired to a kiss but didn’t quite reach it. There was an uncomfortable spark between them—or perhaps that was just his overactive imagination. Then again, why shouldn’t they be a couple? She was lonely. He didn’t need all of his wits to see that. Of course there was always the possibility that the nurse was a homosexual, that antique stereotype.

  Homosexuality was in vogue in the capital. He’d noticed a surprising amount of public affection between men at rallies on the Mall. The hand-holding might have been tactical, a mirror image of the battle lines of the police, who linked arms when facing a crowd. But he’d seen men holding hands when there were no threatening police to be found.

  It didn’t really faze him. He’d always envied the easy camaraderie that marshmen shared, which wasn’t entirely chaste. A marshman never knew when he might be called to defend his fellow tribesman in a blood feud. He might hold that very tribesman, bleeding to death, in his arms. A precedent of intimacy might prove helpful, even if it was years in the past and forbidden to remember, much less invoke, in those ultimate moments.

  The employee lounge had been converted into an examination room. It was strange to undress in front of a vending machine, to warm his bare legs by the coils of a miniature refrigerator. The nurse helped him change into a gown of dimpled crepe, carefully folding his filthy rags and setting them on a side chair, but not before lining the upholstery with table paper.

  There had been advances in medical supplies. The gown’s soft fabric was one of them, as were the tools the nurse used during his examination, which were sculptural, the steel curving and glistening as if it were still liquid. These were finer tools than he’d ever had in the field. He marveled that a temporary infirmary should be so well stocked.

  The nurse proceeded methodically, examining the facial wound first of all, cleaning with disinfectant and probing with tweezers so fine they looked as though they terminated in two metal hairs. As he worked, he applied a balm that instantly made the area numb.

  With the numbness came guilt. He’d trained himself to ignore pain for as long as possible, and then, when it could no longer be ignored, to think of it as retribution, a reminder of the pain he’d inflicted on others.

  The nurse continued the examination downward, swabbing old wounds as he went, bandaging some, applying his wonderful balm. When the examination was over, and the street grime had been lifted away, the small trash can by the door overflowed with filthy cotton. The nurse then cut his toenails, which were gnarled and yellow, an old man’s claws.

  He hadn’t found a blade sharp enough to cut them, not even the broken penknife he’d tried to whet on a curb with unusually creamy concrete. He’d gouged one of his toes with its jagged steel tip. The wound had festered and was only just beginning to heal.

  The nurse made short work of the nails, then handed him an emery board, out of deference to his masculinity. But his fingers were too clumsy to hold the file at the proper angle, and his body was stiff from the fall, so in the end the nurse took back the emery board. It was a blow to his pride, but what blow hadn’t he weathered? He held himself still, closed his eyes, and listened to the wisp wisp of the file, the tiny pulses of another person attending to him.

  In that peaceful attitude, he drifted off to sleep.

  3

  He awoke alone in the room. The lights had been dimmed, and there was a heavy packing blanket on his legs. He was still wearing the gown, although he’d torn it in his sleep.

  He went to the sink and splashed his face with warm water again and again, then drank with a cupped hand. He reached for his clothes, but they were gone. He didn’t blame the nurse for getting rid of them. They belonged
in an incinerator.

  New clothes had been laid out for him: a janitor’s uniform and a pair of briefs still sealed in their retail package. He recognized the name on the label, a fancy downtown haberdashery. The price on the tag was shocking. He hadn’t spent much more on his first set of dress whites.

  He dressed, leaning heavily against the examining table. The thin blue pants, tied at the waist with a ribbon, reminded him of surgical scrubs, the uniform of his youth. He wondered what surgeons wore these days, whether there was even such a thing as surgery anymore.

  The nurse brought him a disposable shaving kit. Before handing it over, he contemplated the safety razor with raised eyebrows, as if to stress that by passing a razor he was breaking an important rule.

  He soaked a washcloth in hot water and pressed it to his face. Then he shaved twice, bearing down on the razor the second time, scraping everything away.

  When he was done, he realized that he’d gotten blood on the washcloth. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he left it in the sink. Other people had cleaned up for him his entire life, in locker rooms and officers’ clubs—even in prison. The blood-flecked cloth looked wrong there, but he didn’t dare throw it away.

  His rescuer had returned and was arguing with the nurse behind the closed door. They were talking too heatedly for mere colleagues. She was telling him it would just be for a night or two. He was saying it was impossible. More than impossible. There was the safety of his family to consider.

  She reacted strongly to the word “family.” She said she’d done plenty of things for him that his wife hadn’t. At that, he lowered his voice and asked her to lower hers. Instead, she issued an ultimatum. The nurse was silent. After a long pause, she said, “I guess that’s that.”

  When she flung open the door to the examining room, he shielded his eyes, fearing she’d recognize him. There’d been a very famous photograph of his eyes on the cover of a magazine. They were duller now, but otherwise unchanged.

  She looked him up and down, nodding with approval, and said, “Much better.”

  She asked if he was ready to go but didn’t wait for an answer before taking his elbow. On the way out, he stopped to thank the nurse. After all, the man had seen to his wounds and clipped his grotesque nails, all to earn the rebuke of this hardheaded woman. He tipped an invisible hat, holding it by its imaginary brim.

  It was a gesture from another time. He hardly expected the nurse to understand it, but he did. The nurse tipped his own pretend hat.

  It brought tears to his eyes.

  The nurse’s silent farewell followed him down the long echoing halls and out onto the museum’s shallow steps.

  She helped him down the steps, but when they reached the sidewalk, she didn’t relinquish his arm. She guided him to a vendor and bought him a hot chocolate, most likely to spare any back-and-forth over whether he took sugar and cream with coffee. She handed it to him wrapped in a napkin, warning that it was likely to be very hot. He took it gingerly, blowing on it like a child, just to please her.

  They waited for a bus. The bus stop was crowded with irritated workers, their manners holding them in check, but just barely. She surveyed the restless crowd and said under her breath that they’d never get home this way. She used her shoulder to make a passageway, leading him to open sidewalk.

  They crossed one of the great avenues, eight lanes wide. The janitor’s uniform offered little protection from the evening breeze. She saw that he was chilled and stopped to wrap her shawl around his shoulders, right there in the middle of the street. She explained that the streets had been cordoned off for a parade, but just as she said that, a police car raced by and activated its claxon. The sound convulsed his heart like the bare wires they used to touch him with in prison.

  “No, you’re right,” she said, “this can wait until we’re on the other side.”

  She led him through a memorial park. The park was as good a place as any to resume his time alone. He slowed as they passed a familiar steam grate. He might be able to snatch an hour or two of sleep before the police moved him along. Of course, there was a downside to steam. It made one sweat. To be rousted sweating on a cold night was to invite hypothermia.

  She slid an arm around him and told him they didn’t have far to go. She was very strong underneath all those sensible clothes. When they got to the edge of a busy street, her arm tightened around his ribs, which were still sore from being kicked a few nights before. He hadn’t seen his attackers. He’d learned to curl into a ball and howl like a dog the moment he felt the first blow.

  He let himself be led under her protective wing. She held him with one arm and signaled the oncoming traffic with the other, waving two fingers up and down in a tight arc.

  A cab detached itself from the blur of vehicles and came to a stop in front of them. She helped him in, then climbed in next to him and shut the door.

  The driver didn’t want to go where she told him to, but she ignored his objections. She said she was within her rights to be taken where she wanted.

  When the cab leaped forward and swerved into traffic, her body pressed against his. He liked how solid she was, even if it squeezed the air from his lungs. Her thigh alongside his was warm and smelled of perfume.

  Despite the violent ride, she managed to locate the mating pieces of his seat belt and strap him in. It bothered him to be the more protected one. He reached over to help with her belt, but she patted his hand, then planted it firmly on his lap. The message was clear: it wasn’t for him to strap her in.

  He closed his eyes, but the car’s suspension was loose, and he began to feel a little sick. He could tell from the ripping sound of the tires that they were crossing a long bridge.

  He hadn’t been to the other side of the river since high school, on a dare. Only factory workers and domestics lived across the river. One didn’t cross over unless it was to do some unpleasant business. At least, that was what they’d said back in the day.

  Wealth had changed things. They drove past pristine row houses with neatly painted trim. Antique streetlights had been retrofitted with artificial flames.

  The streets were freshly cobbled. Corner drugstores had been converted into tony restaurants, their vintage neon signs advertising patent drugs that hadn’t been sold for decades.

  The sidewalks were crowded with smart young couples pushing strollers. The number of dark faces in the strollers surprised him: babies adopted from the marshes. The homeland birthrate had fallen off while he was in prison. It didn’t take an epidemiologist to see that, merely a few weeks drifting through empty playgrounds.

  Eventually they reached the edge of the gentrification. The road changed from cobbles to ordinary asphalt. The streetlights were ordinary, too, fitted with harsh sodium bulbs. There were no flowering trees, just buckled sidewalks littered with broken glass. Most of the row houses were boarded up. The driver kept using the word “mudmen”: how they lived like rats, how they turned everything into a fucking sewer.

  As they drove under an old railroad bridge, rocks rained down on them. The driver cursed, accelerated into a U-turn, and then, at the first opportunity, skidded to a stop and ordered his passengers out.

  She argued that it was illegal for him to discharge them this way, but the driver was having none of it. He answered by applying a fat knuckle to the cracked windshield.

  She handed him a large bill and asked for change, but he rolled up his window and rocketed away.

  Then they were alone on the street. Their path took them back under the railroad bridge. He was an easy target for bad boys. He was frightened, but she kept up a lighthearted chatter about her work at the museum. The clack of her shoes on the sidewalk was steady as a metronome.

  Once or twice he caught her looking at him with a sudden intensity, as if to catch him in the act of hearing or not hearing. He tried to pay more attention to what she was saying, but her words battered his ears like moths. There was no capturing them.

  She led him to the a
rmored door of a factory building and surprised him by unlocking it with an ordinary key. She explained that the building was a warehouse that had been converted into apartments. She didn’t use the word “apartments.” She used a new word. He didn’t want to sound outdated, so he acted as if he’d heard of such things.

  The elevator was cavernous. As its hidden cables roared to life, she seemed suddenly aware of the fact that she was leading a stranger to her door. A certain space opened up between them. He didn’t really know how to reassure her. Perhaps he owed it to her, but he didn’t bother trying. The new distance came as a relief.

  Her hallway was full of cooking smells: seared goat, boiling rice, something floral, perhaps saffron. Marsh cooking. This was a source of great wonder to him. Apparently citizens of the capital now made their homes side by side with marshmen.

  When they came to her door, she told him there’d recently been a large levy for roof work, something to do with the high price of copper flashing, which was so very expensive on account of the pointless wars abroad.

  Then she swung the door open and held it, inspecting him as he passed, like a teacher on the first day of school.

  4

  She unbuttoned her jacket in the front hall and dropped it on a rough wooden bench. It bothered him to see such a fine jacket treated that way, but he kept his mouth shut. Why should he care more for her clothes than she did?

  She showed him the bathroom. He went in obediently and ran the water for a while, first warm and then hot, holding his hands under the flow, his whole body vibrating with pleasure.

  Rather than wipe his hands on a towel, he dried them with toilet paper. He started squirreling some away for later, but it occurred to him that stealing toilet paper was no way to reward her hospitality. He tried to roll it back up, only to find that he’d ruined the sheets with his wet fingertips. He stuffed the ruined paper in the wicker trash basket, staring at it with regret.