She was bald, and she sat straight up in bed as though she’d been expecting a visitor. Her hands were busily rubbing her kneecaps beneath the purple hospital blanket. Behind her, the orange glow of a streetlamp slipped through the blinds covering the window.
I’m not scared anymore, the girl said.
Isabel wondered if, when you are dying, do people stop asking you questions like How do you feel? or Are you scared? The answers are short-lived. She said nothing but walked up to the bed and offered her hand. As the girl took it, she blinked, and Isabel saw again the golden eye.
You startled me when you came in, the girl said. I thought you were one of the night nurses. They come barging in like it’s the daytime, like we’re not trying to sleep in here.
I’m sorry, Isabel said. I didn’t mean to scare you.
The girl, still holding on to Isabel’s hand, lay down and closed her eyes. I thought someone had come to my room because I had died, she said. I thought I was watching myself from above.
An hour later, her heart monitor began to chirp. Where is her family? Isabel wondered. The girl’s breath stopped. Another minute and the monitor’s alarm gave out, some fault in the wiring, and even the baseline hum of the girl’s pulselessness was gone. The sun came up, and the room yellowed. The ceiling fan stopped turning. It took a long time for the nursing staff to arrive, and when they did, they entered the room with tired, dipping chins but also bright, shifty eyes. Isabel realized they were grateful the girl had passed; she understood they had been waiting a long time for this.
After the body was taken away, Isabel went and asked a nurse at the desk where the girl’s parents were.
They died the year before in a car accident on a highway, said the nurse. An aunt adopted the girl, but she’s unmarried and works long hours. She came every night at 6:10 and watched TV with her niece, but the girl was most often by herself.
The nurse was called away, leaving Isabel alone at the desk.
Isabel then did something she shouldn’t have: she went behind the nurses’ station and peeked into the girl’s chart. In the myriad handwritten doctors’ notes, she saw the patient’s date of birth, the record of her diminishing weight, her fluctuating body temperatures, and the progress of the cancer. She read the shaky, partial prognostications of chemotherapists, of the resident oncologist, of the surgeon who’d cut a growth from the girl’s leg. She saw the girl’s name: Daphne Bergmann. Tucking the chart under her arm, Isabel retreated down the cold corridor.
Back in the room, Isabel noticed for the first time how empty it had been all along, how devoid of toys or books or even a child’s teddy bear. As if all evidence of the world had been consciously removed, possessions somehow a distraction in the final hour. Isabel spent an hour tidying Room Three. She changed the linens on the bed, emptied the trash cans, and dusted the room’s surfaces most often overlooked by the cleaning staff: the top of the window frame, the blinds, the space between the headboard and the wall, the inside of the nightstand drawer, and the protruding back of the mounted TV set, which was something like a bulbous gray tumor.
When Isabel was finished, she went to the hospital chapel, a small room in the eastern wing decorated with only a white cross on the northern wall, a vase overflowing with daffodils, and six rows of gray folding chairs. Isabel was surprised to see no specifically Catholic ornaments. In the front row and with Daphne Bergmann’s chart at her side, Isabel sat down to pray for the girl and her deceased parents. She said her prayers aloud, because the nuns had taught her to always recite with conviction; there was no shame in asking if what you asked for could be asked aloud.
Because Daphne Bergmann had been young and motherless, Isabel spoke directly to the Holy Mother. She began at first with a Hail Mary but soon realized she didn’t have a rosary on hand. Isabel considered a lengthy incantation to God’s inscrutability; but the girl had died instead of being resurrected, so Isabel chose against the Sorrowful Mysteries, which gave meaning to death by pulling death itself from the void.
Instead, Isabel settled on a private novena for Daphne Bergmann, one that would last nine hours instead of nine days. She glanced around the quiet room. A novena demanded replication from a printed text. At St. Brendan’s, there had often been a Bible passage or a chosen hymnal printed on a pamphlet from which the congregation would read. When one of the teachers had died, they’d used hand-size, blood-red leaflets. But the chapel was empty.
There was Daphne Bergmann’s chart, however. It lay closed on her lap. With careful fingers, Isabel opened it and began to read: Name, Daphne Bergmann, Date of Birth, August 17, 1973, Height, 5 feet, 1 inch, Weight, 95 pounds, Address, 3486 Copper River Road…red and irritated eyes, early signs of glaucoma, deteriorating vision across long distances, increased squinting…pain in the left leg surrounding the femur, trouble walking, limps slightly according to the aunt…osteosarcoma as a result of metastasized retinoblastoma…chemotherapy dependent upon patient’s postoperative condition…hospitalization and monitoring…cisplatin, doxorubicin, high-dose methotrexate…ineffective drug therapy, referral to Boston Children’s…
Reading the chart both illuminated and muddled Isabel’s vision of Daphne. The records were meticulous, and something told Isabel that children’s records were more deliberately maintained than adults’, that their smaller faces inspired in doctors greater diligence. It noted coolly all the weaknesses of the girl’s ailing body: how the cancer had spread but also how it had strengthened and divided, how it had sought fresh parts of Daphne Bergmann to consume. But it said nothing of Daphne’s background, noting only that her parents were deceased. The chart’s main figure was the aunt, who came across as an observant caretaker, offering surgeons and oncologists an active portrait of her dying niece: she limps and complains of not being able to see the TV, at night her bad eye disturbs her in the wrong light; she cries when I touch her thigh; she’s just weak more often than she’s strong.
After an hour of reading aloud, Isabel detected a shift in the woman’s tone as she tracked her niece’s deterioration. Through the scrupulous notes, Isabel could sense the aunt’s palpable fear, but as Daphne’s illness progressed, the girl was eventually transformed into a foreign body. For all the time the aunt spent watching and caring for the niece, she seemed, in the end, incapable of knowing Daphne beyond her skin. She feels better if she drinks three glasses of water at 7 each night; she needs a pillow under her left leg in the mornings from 8 to 10:30. The aunt’s precise observations implied a mechanical distance and a sad truth; Daphne, at some point, had become her illness, was no more than her body and its failings. Isabel cried at this, though she kept reading, and her tears wet the doctors’ dictations and the stiff X-ray sheets, black and now leaking thick, inky carbon onto Isabel’s fingers.
By the fourth hour of recitation, Isabel’s lips were dry and her throat was sore. She had to whisper to keep going, which was actually a blessing, because the sound of her own voice had given her a headache. A severe pain had lodged itself behind her eyeballs, producing bright flashes of blue light if she spoke too loudly. The softer she spoke, the more bearable the prayers became, and eventually she spoke only on the exhale, only when air needed absolutely to leave her lungs. She was beginning to memorize parts of the girl’s chart, and she could, by the fifth hour, anticipate the single instance in the chronology of Daphne Bergmann when the cancerous cells seemed to be moving into remission, a lone, optimistic mark by the sloppy hand of a doctor looking for hope: recent therapy showing somewhat positive shifts in disease management. But that was the only deviation in a long decline, and eventually Isabel felt herself going the way of the aunt, losing the brief, though startling, image of Daphne in her mind she’d only just recently acquired: the cat’s eye. The orange glare was fading, and Isabel felt the young child dissolve first into a body, second into a vaporous plague, a malicious biology, and finally into nothing but noise.
By the seventh hour Daphne was little more than a name, a sound Isabel could
barely utter.
Yet the girl had been Isabel’s first patient, the first dying person she’d sought out and spent the night with, or, at least, some moments, escorting her across the darkness. Isabel felt she’d at last begun to enact her revelation at Opal’s Lake, but right then she could barely recall Daphne’s face. And now, after the fact, following the transcendent moment, she felt no different. There was no blush in her neck, no heat rising in her chest.
Isabel recalled Daphne’s throaty voice. You startled me, the girl had said. And she had looked to be in a trance just before she died, fixated on something Isabel couldn’t quite see.
She was shaken loose by my voice, Isabel realized. She was awoken.
Had she been late? Was Daphne already on her way when Isabel pulled her back? Maybe returning to the world is more frightening than moving into the next, Isabel thought. Maybe I shouldn’t have made a sound.
In the ninth hour Isabel did something she’d never done before: she spoke directly to God as though he were a man at her side. She closed her eyes and asked, Where did that girl go? Did I take her somewhere, or did you take her through me? Why doesn’t this feel like that afternoon with the boy on the frozen pond? Why does my skull ache?
Isabel opened her eyes. She stared at the floor. Then, to her right in the folding chair nearest the wall, she saw a pair of brown shoes and a pair of legs in dusty blue pants and a pair of thighs making a lap upon which rested a pair of hands folded one atop the other.
Startled, her whole body tensed. Her scared hands bent Daphne Bergmann’s file at the edges, and her knuckles blanched. Her breath, which had been steady, was suddenly lost, as if she were drowning.
Too frightened to cry out, Isabel waited for the body to move or for an unseen mouth to talk. Eventually, she noticed the hands, which were stunning and beautiful, the fingers long and the nails pink, the cuticles clean and trimmed, the knuckles hairless, and the backs clear and brown. The thumbs seemed especially prominent, capable of circling the palms entirely, and all the digits together reminded Isabel of tarantulas, of spiders crawling in many directions. She knew then that the man was a surgeon, and she found herself envisioning his practitioner’s hands slipping, ghostly, into the abdominal cavity of an anesthetized patient.
I’m insane, she said, and her own voice was like a needle in her heart, an electric shock to the base of her skull. This is a delusion.
Another pang at her temple. She closed and opened her eyes, but still the hands and legs were there, still his pants cuffs were dingy with gray dust, as if he’d walked through a field of ash. For the first time in her short life, she doubted herself. She thought, The man is a surgeon because I’ve made him that way. I chose to witness a young girl die, and nothing happened. The nurses came and cleared the room. I washed the television set. I washed the windowsills. Nothing has happened except for this headache. I am seeing a false god to make up for these things. He’s a surgeon because surgeons heal the sick. I want to believe God is a surgeon, that he took Daphne somewhere else to cut the cancer from her body.
Isabel remembered the afternoon on the pond and the eyes of the dying boy, the layer of ice she thought was freezing over his pupils. She remembered the blue tips of his fingers, and eventually she recalled things that she had forgotten: her own purple fingertips, the way her cold, dry lips had stuck together, the sensation that her body might give out, the heated blood in her veins popping through her capillaries and arteries. Why was there no counterpart here and now? Where was the confirmation of her work? Why did her veins shrink into themselves? Why were her arms cold, and why did her own voice send waves of guilt and pain down her spine?
Because she could not help herself, she asked the man, Do you normally make the work so mysterious?
Isabel tabulated a handful of God’s mouthpieces: Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Sarah, Aaron, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Esther…and not one of them had moved along a straight path; even the first two had been a complicated mess of indecision, the father told to kill the son, who then becomes another prophet.
Isabel asked a better question: Can you tell me why my voice is poison?
And because she asked this question in earnest, Isabel couldn’t help but look up. She was ready to see the man’s face. But, looking, she found the face hidden beneath a surgeon’s mask, and the man also wore a surgeon’s cap on his head hung so low that Isabel could not make out his eyes. What she gained was a view of two beautiful arms emerging from a surgeon’s pale green scrub shirt, both appendages long and coffee-colored. The face stared back at Isabel, and she saw the mask pucker and flatten. For a moment she thought it was the surgeon’s breathing, but then she decided his lips were moving beneath the sterilized cloth. He was speaking something to her or, at least, mouthing some words.
Isabel felt her voice gurgling up in her throat, but she clamped her jaw shut. She slid toward the stranger. Her white hospital shoes, dragging across the carpet, did not make a sound. Isabel listened for the air ducts, then for her own breathing, but heard nothing.
The world has gone away, she thought. Or I’ve gone deaf.
Isabel saw the man’s feet shift, and she faced him, looking to see if his lips still moved. The surgeon’s mask fluttered like the wing of a moth, and Isabel felt an ache in her ears, a reaction to the silence, a craving for sound. She leaned toward the stranger and put her ear next to his mouth. She held her breath. Her cheek was nearly pressed to the man’s chin, and though she could not describe, either then or afterward, the quiet she experienced next to his mouth—overwhelming, drowning, submerging, swallowing—she would remember always how cold the skin of her face became. There was a slim pocket of air between her body and his, but the air didn’t seem to move, was as frozen as water in space, and it cooled her cheek to the point of pain.
This, Isabel thought, cannot be the God of my making. I’d make him speak.
Isabel began to sob. As she wept, she heard footsteps outside the chapel in the hallway. She heard them approach and then pass the shut door. She heard a clicking in the air ducts, the sound of air moving again though the floor vents. A fluorescent bulb above her flickered and buzzed, and then went out. The room somehow grew brighter. Isabel blinked, and the surgeon was gone.
—
In the hallway Isabel once again encountered the world of sound. She covered her ears with her hands and retreated to the doorway of the chapel but stopped short of reentering the room. She heard the grating whine of gurney wheels somewhere in the next ward; she heard the scratching of pens on charts and the shushing of air from ventilators. She took a deep breath and crossed the hallway, slipping into a janitor’s closet.
There, among the bottles of bleach, dirty mop heads, and boxes of latex gloves, Isabel was able to take her hands from her head. On her chest lay the brass crucifix necklace; she found it with her quivering fingers and discovered that the metal was ice-cold. She breathed hot air onto it. When it didn’t warm, she took the chain from her neck and examined the face of Christ. She remembered the face, or lack of face, of the stranger in the chapel, and she shuddered. She hung the crucifix on a hook on the back of the door and rummaged around in the closet, eventually finding a box of matches.
Isabel lit a match and held the burning end to the brass face of the figurine. The flame burned down to the tips of her fingers, and then she lit another match, holding it also beneath the Christ’s chin. After the fourth stick she pressed her thumb into the metal; it was hot but solid. Isabel spent the remaining matches, hoping the brass would soften, and when the matchbook was empty, Isabel gripped the crucifix and slammed its face against the metal knob of the closet door. She struck the handle seven times until the icon’s nose was mangled and its eyes were shut, until its mouth was also gone. Standing, she drew the chain over her head, but the brass was still hot, and it seared her neck. The heat startled her, and she put her hand to the faceless icon and pressed it deeper into her skin.
Isabel opened the closet door, afraid again of the noise
that waited on the other side, but the sound of the world was tolerable again. She could hear her heartbeat echo against her eardrums, but it was not agonizing. Stepping into the hallway, she realized it was nighttime. The ceiling lights were turned down low, and only the lamps above the nurses’ station were fully lit. The nurses’ station was empty. The phone atop the counter blinked mutedly with incoming calls. This was the floor bodies were taken to if they survived the ICU. All the doors in the hallway, save one just beyond the station, were shut. The open door, Isabel could see, was that of a patient’s room. And though Isabel saw nothing besides a blue light escaping the suite, she knew there was a human being lying awake in a bed in that room. Shutting the door to the janitor’s closet, Isabel grasped her crucifix. The hallway was quiet and peaceful, if a little cold, and there was a person waiting, perhaps an old man who was himself quiet, who was starting to feel the particular space between life and death. She went to him.
—
Yet Isabel, for all her Providence, had not anticipated the brokenness of Uxbal’s mind and body. Her first weeks at the camp she’d sat by her father’s bed day and night, wanting to be near him because she barely recognized him—his voice had proven as foreign to her ears as her silence must have to his. Eventually, he told her of his rebellion during their time apart, but those stories were, in Isabel’s mind, passing political history. They did little to explain how Uxbal had come to such ruin. Instead, Isabel found herself scribbling desperate questions onto scraps of paper.
Why did you send Ulises a letter instead of me? she asked one night.
I didn’t know if you and your brother were together still, Uxbal said. I didn’t have a sense of what had become of you. His article came to me in the way I said it did, carried in the pocket of a tourist by stupid luck. I could write the magazine on his behalf, hoping the letter might reach you too. The censors would see the address and think, maybe, here is a man writing about Cuban cigars. If they opened it, they would read my nostalgia for a family I’d lost, and they’d let it go. They’d assume the magazine, should the letter make it that far, would pitch the letter aside as the workings of a senile father whose family had had the good sense to abandon him. Had I written you, I wouldn’t have been able to hold myself back. Who knows what I would have given away about this place and myself? Putting that on a sheet is like building a paper bomb, and you don’t know when it will go off.
The Mortifications Page 16
