The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  “It’s junk,” he announces like a connoisseur. “It’s worth nothing at all.”

  “And yet you’re the asshole who palmed it off on me!” protests Rover.

  “Well, I was fucking with you. Go fuck yourself!”

  Everything here loses its urgency. We’ve all become impassive, like statues unaware of the relentless accumulation of the dust of days. Instead of stretching, my notion of space hardens, contracts. Very quickly I get used to the idea that from now on we will be alone, trapped in a gigantic spider’s web that thickens around our heads. In this insignificant part of the universe we are happy to move about with pointless gestures, with patchwork dreams, with conversations often had only for the pleasure of hearing our own voices. Our bodies no longer have a mission to fulfill, except to inhale the maximum amount of oxygen for our sick lungs, to accustom our clogged ears to unimportant or absurd noises, like the fart or burp of a relaxed roommate, blissfully happy as a dog, and our eyes to see only the things that bother entering our line of sight. Boredom atrophies the imagination. I’m overcome ad nauseam by the banality of my thoughts. Thankfully, spasms grab hold of me. I’m like a wild horse imprisoned in a serene body where life beats despite the fear, despite the threat of one day being diluted like a common solution in the murderous hospital air.

  i sink into the bed as if it were a viscous trough. My body, trapped between two slopes, doesn’t move. I can’t turn onto either side or the pains will return. In an effort to amuse myself, while I wait for sleep, I often localize each ache and assign an individual color to it. The shooting pain gnawing at my right side is a deep crimson; the one on my left, turquoise blue; the twinges budding in the hollows of my armpits are alternately yellow, pale green, Indian red, ocher, purple, and indigo; the areas that endure multiple syringe injections each morning are monochromatic landscapes, one single color in infinitely varying tones. Over time, I transform into an immeasurable palate unabsorbed by the night. I glow bright as a star, I rise above the room to a place where I can barely hear my companions’ breathing or snoring, I gently flatten myself against the cold ceiling, turn around so that I can look down upon the beds; the void that grows between the ground and my body is so frightening that I return to my immobility in the trough. I sink into my memories in search of my youthful corpse. All I need for the past to shed its shroud, to slip on the rags of my six-year-old self, is a whiff of Brazilian coffee, a tune from a music box, or a fine drizzle falling in bright sunlight like at a jackal’s wedding. But there are no scents anywhere, no scents of childhood, no scents of once abundant fruits (mulberries, carob pods, pomegranates, black nightshade berries), of wild flowers, of the sacred plants from our stories (thyme, basil, henna, laurel). Where can I find, even in my dreams, a field of poppies and ripe cornstalks gently shaken by an autumn wind? Rover emerges from a silent thunderstorm. He laughs and slaps his thighs: “You want to know if the ocean is nearby? Nothing could be easier! You follow this path of cacti until you reach palm trees, you turn left and you start down a dusty trail, which leads to the head doctor’s residence. It’s a large windowless villa surrounded by fir trees. If by extraordinary chance his guard dog doesn’t rip off your leg or ass cheek, then that can only mean one thing: there’s no longer a head doctor at this hospital. You keep tearing down the hill, and you’ll arrive at the edge of a fifty-foot cliff. Then you can, if you insist, go for a nice little dip!” Guzzler appears in his turn, shoving Rover, who crumbles like dried clay: “You think that people like us can afford the luxury of memories, a past with clean diapers, notebooks, a pencil case, and a backpack? I was barely out of my mother’s vagina when my childhood went up in smoke. My old man broke so many rods over my skull that it was impossible for me to get through primary school; I became an apprentice tailor, an assistant repairman of every machine ever created, I even secretly married a widow so I could have cigarettes and pocket money like a proper daddy’s boy. Then, after an eternity of unemployment and begging, I started the back-and-forth hospital cycle . . . So what do you call childhood or adolescence? A fancy Sunday suit, that’s what!” Meanwhile, Rover has pulled himself back together, piece by piece. He coughs, vomits blood, laughs, and wipes his eyes. Guzzler hands him a Marlboro, and suggests, “Try and get yourself some good hash!” He turns to me: “Do you want Rover dead?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t ever stop him from lying! Lies have become second nature to him. Did he already tell you the story about the old fool who chopped up everyone in his bathhouse? You haven’t heard anything yet. Go ahead, Rover, how does it go again, the one about the guy who buys Al-Buraq at the Medina flea market? Not a two-bit engraving, mind you, but the real thing, the Prophet’s steed, go on, tell him.”

  “Come on, Guzzler, another time. Can’t you see that our friend is already asleep? Leave him be.”

  would it surprise you if I said that one day I transformed myself into a spider, a weeping willow, and a cyclamen flower? Would you help me unravel my tangle of memories? Not likely. One doesn’t enter a sleeping man’s brain with impunity, not unless you’re a brave head louse or a moonbeam. I can no longer remember the weeping willow or the cyclamen. For that matter, I doubt I ever really had branches that hung out over the sacred waters of the Ganges or the Nile, or the bloody waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. To avoid being caught red-handed, I may as well admit that I don’t know much about botany, and so I will just barely tolerate being compared to a prisoner condemned to invent his paradise behind four walls. I dreamed up my cyclamen without any preexisting knowledge: the flower therefore reflects both my ignorance and my stubborn memories that refuse to be put back together, no doubt imagined memories of something close to an ivy or poppy or maybe also a rhododendron. On the whole, we’re talking about a stolen life, its weight in gold issued in counterfeit money, written in clotted blood and urine. But I had to get rid of the spider. Its toxic memory was poisoning my nights, splitting my brain with extraordinary violence. Was it my dream? Was it the spider’s dream? It doesn’t matter. The dream — I should say the nightmare because it haunted me for a very long time — would follow me like a curse and yet, each time it came to life, I experienced it with every fiber of my soul; quite often, at the end, I would feel distraught, vulnerable — and I wasn’t ashamed to cry. How long did this last? Time during childhood is so uncertain. Later I learned that time was an adult invention, used to delineate the traps in which we struggle like small insects, or giants broken between heaven and earth. At twilight, at the exact moment when the swallows stopped fighting in the final rays of the setting sun, the house with the slatted shutters where my parents moved after my birth suddenly became a temple of exaggerated proportions; shadow-filled depths revealed mammoth caves, the staircase assaulted a sky that came down to rest on the veranda — clouds sparkling with dew and stars burning like embers — offering me an exceptional playground in which I would conceive of my small companions, sickly, underfed creatures, bald or with a single tuft of hair atop their heads, torn jackets, shoes too big for their feet. I don’t know what became of those creatures. One night I found myself alone. All around me I felt the frenzy of my young body, the tingling at the roots of my hair, the beating of my bleeding heart, swollen with bitterness and sorrow, flashes of heat, fire, between my legs. Whenever it suddenly rained down ice water on the deserted street, whose residents quickly forgot about the frozen beggars sheltered under makeshift tarps or tattered pieces of burlap, I would observe these dirty and mute landscapes through the windowpanes. My eyes would follow the wildly streaming rivulets laden with paper, mud, and dead rats, and I got the feeling — or the conviction — that the world was dead, that spring was dead, that my tales, my marvelous legends, my countrysides as golden as warm pieces of cornbread were dead. Fat flies flattened themselves against the windowpanes, chased by the torrents of rain. Armed with a needle, I took malicious pleasure in skewering them one by one, their diaphanous wings buzzing in my cruel silence. T
hey would continue to writhe and contort their thin, hairy legs as I shut them away in a matchbox. This game, which I admit I enjoyed, came to an end when my grandmother took me away one morning, of which I retain only the partial memory of another veranda, in a nearby neighborhood, where an ageless old man was holding court, surrounded by basil and sunflowers. Other children, crouched attentively, listened to him. In a serenely calm voice, he spoke of a taciturn end to the world: “On that day, all the stars in the universe will roll into infinity like rags or balls of yarn.” He added: “Heaven and hell are separated by a thread so fine that it’s invisible to the naked eye!” My sojourn in this camphor-infused mythology came to an end when the old man from another century died. That’s when the dream of the spider began. No doubt it was a revolt on my part — a mild revolt without noise or fury — during which I doggedly began to weave my webs almost everywhere in the house with the slatted shutters. Neither of my parents seemed to notice anything unusual. For them, I was the sickly boy, the baby born two months premature in the bleak cold. I diligently took medications that made me want to vomit. I treated myself for some unknown illness. Admittedly, I had trouble breathing: I carefully avoided sleeping with my head buried under the blanket in the same way I avoided washing my face in the sink. I felt more comfortable in the spider’s skin, freer in my movements. I was happy. I lived in the corners, like a Quranic schoolteacher, distracting myself while bombs, massacres, executions, and famines were plaguing the outside world. I slept a lot. Even if a careless gnat were to shake the fibers of my web, I rarely troubled myself. Dipterans are so stupid that they’d get themselves tangled in my gummy trap, rendering all movement or escape impossible. I lived like this for a long time, on the margins of a strange childhood, my monstrosity protecting me with its extraordinary warmth. I hated the tick-tock of the alarm clock, the morning cries of the street peddlers and knife sharpeners, I hated dawn when the town shook off its last dreams like a lazy donkey getting back on its feet to begin another hellish cycle of forced labor. The calls of the muezzins would stab like daggers at the edge of my insomnia, marking the rupture of my gentle arachnid dreams. The return to my human form transpired painfully. I would cling to the slatted shutters, trembling, feverish, gasping for air like a fish out of water. I was reborn, quite despite myself, in a worn down universe, amid a vanquished, humiliated humanity, resigned to an absurd destiny of flowering graves that led to an uncertain future in intolerable paradises. I was heading toward a mythology of survival, leaving behind in my rotting limbs a prehistory of one thousand and four hundred years of hate, vainglory, and putrid nostalgia, under the clear sky of a false Andalusia where our murder has been in the making since our birth. Many years later . . . the sun had gone out, unless it was just an ordinary light bulb emitting a pallid glow, without warmth, in an icy room where a monotonous voice said: “Listen to me, listen up — and stop coughing! — your body needs a specific treatment, your kneecaps are as empty as neatly cleaned seashells, they’re having a hard time supporting your weight even though you’re as light as a measly feather. That’s why — don’t cough, I said! — you’re at the mercy of any gust of wind. More than one reckless soul like yours has been carried away during a quiet storm! That’s why you’re here now. You’ll never know if you’re dreaming or not. Either way, your reality doesn’t matter, it’s just like an autumn leaf, the slightest breeze and it will crumple in on itself and get dragged along the ground until it’s completely disintegrated. Your new life isn’t as bad as all that. Get used to it. Don’t cough in my presence! Keep your dirty bacteria to yourself. There’s one thing you need to understand, even if I have to drive it into your medieval skull with a club: you know nothing about contagion, which is normal since you don’t even know that a simple device like the microscope exists. From now on you will be isolated, in another time, which will suit you wonderfully since you come from a people without schedules, who never invented so much as a butter knife!” The voice faded or continued elsewhere in a different darkness. The sun, returning, burned my retinas. It was morning, an ordinary morning, dripping like a mop, when I rediscovered with near joy the squalid backdrop of the hospital, its inhabitants, Rover and Guzzler, who were whispering on the threshold of my insomnia. “Come on, Guzzler, another time. Can’t you see that our friend is already asleep, leave him be! He’s in a dream that doesn’t belong to us!”

  “Don’t leave!” I cried. “Don’t leave me alone, I’m not dreaming anymore. I’m really here, with you. I’m tired of a past filled with unending rain. I no longer have the strength to find shelter there. It won’t do any good anyhow.” I stop talking. No one will hear me. I need to settle the score with my irreverent childhood once and for all. Forever rid myself of the divine corpse that taunts me across ten thousand layers of memory. I tell myself that once it’s been cracked, no deity, whatever form it may take, can be stitched up the way you stitch up a sock, otherwise it would become something grotesque soaked in banned alcohol and mint tea. At the hospital, as in prison, religious fervor is rivaled only by the fear of being suddenly taken away to meet your maker. “This is why, you bunch of assholes, we have to tend to our ablutions every day, you could be summoned to the seventh heaven at any moment! I’m not asking you to perfume yourselves like an old lady or a queer, but all the same, be presentable, make sure your asses aren’t covered in shit, make sure your armpits and feet don’t stink. Our angels are, as you know, very sensitive beings. The slightest fart could have the catastrophic consequences of a tear-gas grenade.” So says a patient, somewhere between a fig and a raisin, whose neck looks like a chicken that’s been skinned alive. “That’s Fartface,” Rover tells me. “A permanent resident of Wing A. It’s normal if you haven’t seen him before. No hospital wall can keep him from leaving or stop him from getting back into his bed.”

  Guzzler goes on: “He’s incurable. The doctors use him as a guinea pig, that’s why he can move about as he pleases.” Nobody knows Fartface’s true name or age. He’s the only one who wears a short-sleeved djellaba over his blue pajamas, also the only one to own a lute, which he wields every so often like a real troubadour. Sometimes he looks at his instrument the way you’d look at a sewing machine. Then he starts to sing. His repertoire consists of old songs from the 30s and 40s. His masters: Sheikh al-Anka, Houcine Slaoui, Raoul Journo. I was very quickly accepted into his entourage. He offered me a glass of tea and said: “We don’t have last names here or even first names. We’re all alike, scrawny corpses that wouldn’t satisfy even a maggot. But you’re not illiterate, so maybe one day you’ll write a book about us, about our testicles, about the beautiful shit that we’re drowning in. If it helps you overcome the passing time and daily monotony, write, for the fun of it, to piss off the world of neckties and hypocrisy, otherwise shove it down the toilet and flush three times, and when your scribblings disappear in the gurgling of the earth, say amen and go stuff yourself with suppositories until the dogs are dead!”

  this morning it’s raining dirty dishwater. The ground’s become a bog that we have to wade across to get from one wing to the next. Actually all connection to the outside world appears to be severed. The other patients are so distracted by the biting cold that they haven’t noticed that the nurse and his squeaking gurney are missing. The most alert among them must be thinking, “Oh, he’ll pass by another time!” The windows of the neighboring block — whose uniform facade rises over the high, thick hospital wall — are all closed, locked up. No life is visible inside. Normally I can see women hanging their laundry from clotheslines stretched between television antennas, and young girls hidden behind the shutters, watching the street scene below; often I hear their radios blaring music and news of a world that’s no longer my own. Now, the building looks like a stone face with lots of closed eyes, and the rain beats against it intermittently, as if to rattle its lethargy, to awaken a breath of life — but all in vain. A heavy melancholy reigns everywhere, in the traces of the ocean air. The silence of the birds
and the immobility of the oak trees in the neighborhoods near Wing C remind me of a petrified forest; shrubs, thickets, branches, frozen overnight, seep, drop by drop, to the rhythm of a deluge that batters the hospital’s isolated wings in slow motion. The cold is all the more intense now that we’re inert. Our stiff, aching limbs grow more and more numb. And the damn heater doesn’t work! Just a shitty electric hot plate hanging above the room’s entrance . . . but good God, why can’t they just replace it? Most of the patients are coughing even harder. Rover bursts into the room, using an unfurled newspaper as an umbrella. He sits on the edge of my bed.

  “It’s never worked,” he says.

  “What?”

  “The damn heater.”

  “What’s the point then?”

  “Here, this will warm you up.”

  He reveals, as if by magic, a paper cup of black coffee that’s still hot. I take it with both hands to warm my fingers, which are starting to turn blue. He takes a cigarette out of my pack, lights it, and announces out of nowhere that he’s leaving the hospital, tomorrow; then seeing the surprised expression on my face, he adds: “For a day.”

  “One day?”

  “Come on. You think they handed me a medical certificate with ‘permanently rehabilitated’ written out in bold, capital letters?”

  He smiles. A small, bitter smile.