“You’re in the hospital.”
His eyelids were clear of the crust now, and he opened them a bit; the eyes behind looked pale, unfocused. “What happened?”
“You fell,” she said, fighting to control her voice.
“Fighting?”
She smiled. He had always hated the fighting, using his fists to solve problems: it wasn’t the way he was brought up, he’d say, and besides, if someone like him had to resort to violence, it meant he must be pretty dumb. “No.”
He nodded. “Good,” he said, then took a deep breath. She reached into the mug, her hand numb with cold, fed him another handful of ice. He sucked at the ice for a moment then swallowed. “Tired.”
“Okay,” she said. “You go to sleep.”
“Yeah.” For a moment that old twinkle she remembered was there, and the corners of his mouth curled into a smile. “You take care, now.”
She woke with a start. Her chair had been pushed away from the bed, and here were people all around, reaching over her husband. The room was oddly quiet, and for a moment she wondered if she were still sleeping, dreaming. Then she realized just what sound was missing. The heart monitor was silent.
“What’s happening?” she said, rising unsteadily. She didn’t know who of these people, if any, was the doctor, who was in charge. Nobody seemed to be doing anything.
“He’s coding,” one of them said—a young red-haired woman in green scrubs. “I mean, his heart’s stopped.”
“Can’t you do something?”
“He’s DNR.”
Still fighting to awaken fully, she tried to pull those letters out of the alphabet soup in her memory. Then she remembered, the paper, the box . . . It was what he had wanted. She had thought it was what she had wanted. “I don’t care. I’m the one who signed it. Do something!”
The nurses, or whatever they all were, looked around at one another uncomfortably. Even as she spoke, she knew why: order or no order, there was nothing they could do. Paddles would hardly shock a heart that had withstood lightning bolts, and as for chest compressions—who was strong enough for that? One of his own people, if there were any left in the universe.
“It’s all right,” she said, calling up the voice she’d used all those years ago to convince her editor—and convince him—that she wasn’t afraid to cover the hurricane, or get the interview with the terrorist leader. That she wasn’t afraid. “You’ve done all you—”
Before she could finish the heart monitor started beeping again, haltingly at first and then with a regular rhythm. Even under the fluorescent lights she could see the colour returning to his cheeks.
“I’ll call Dr. Weller,” the red-haired nurse said, then turned to her. “It could be pretty noisy around here for a while—would you like to sleep in the lounge?”
She shook her head, realized with a start she was still wearing her reading glasses. “I’ll wait here,” she said, fumbling around to find the other pair in her lap.
It happened once more before the doctor came, his heart stopping and restarting itself. A motherly nurse in pink scrubs trailed Dr. Weller as he came into the room—sleepy-eyed himself—filling him in on what had happened.
“Are the results from the stool and urine samples back yet?” Weller asked, not yet acknowledging her presence.
“I’ll go see, doctor,” the nurse said, went back out into the dimly lit hallway.
Finally the doctor seemed to notice her. “You should sleep,” he said.
“What’s wrong with him? Why is this happening?”
He shrugged wearily. “We still don’t know. It could be—” The nurse reappeared at the door, handed him a clipboard; he looked it over, nodded to himself. “Well. Liver, kidneys. . . . It looks like, basically, his organs are shutting down.”
“So he’s dying,” she said. She bit the tip of her tongue. “How many more times will this happen? Before he—”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “The thing is, the organs—we think they’re healing themselves. I’ve been tracking what functions we can from what he . . . lets out . . . and it looks like whatever organ’s failed one day has healed itself by the next one.”
“You mean he’ll get better? Will he—”
He shook his head. “No. He’s too far gone. He can’t heal fully, and it—it looks like he can’t fully die, either.”
She looked down at her husband. He was resting, now, the heart monitor beeping a reassuring rhythm. Pale as he was, it was hard to believe he would never rise from this bed. Even in the darkest times, she had never really feared for him; he had always been strong, so strong. “So. There’s nothing—nothing you can do for him.”
“No. We’ll keep him comfortable, keep monitoring him . . . I could still be wrong. But . . .” He scratched at the side of his head. “In light of this, I think you need to consider your own health now. Being here is a lot of stress on you, at your age. . . .”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll think about it. Thank you, doctor.”
“Can I get the nurses to bring you anything?”
“No. Thank you. Switch the light out when you go.”
“Sure.”
She sat for a while, in the dark, not moving: watching him, watching his chest rise and fall, listening to the monitor’s soft song. “What am I going to do with you?” she asked.
To her surprise he stirred, his body stiffening like a still photo of a seizure. “I could see them,” he murmured.
His eyes were closed; there was no way to tell if he knew where he was. “Who?”
“Like in the dream.” He had told her, a few nights before she left for the conference, about a dream he’d had: finally seeing the place he had come from, all its lost people. “They . . . they’re waiting for me.” His breathing quickened, then returned to its sleeping rhythm, and his muscles relaxed.
There was no use trying to sleep. She turned the light on, tilting the shade away so he was left in darkness, and picked up her book.
Dr. Weller was pleased when, the next day, she decided to take his advice. “No sense making yourself sick,” he had said. “Keep your cell phone on you. We’ll let you know if—if anything changes.”
In fact it had made her sick to leave her husband there, alone, but what she needed lay outside the hospital’s walls. It would not be easy to find, but she was unworried. She had always had a nose for trouble.
The house looked like every other one in the suburban Minneapolis neighbourhood: a half-bungalow, aluminium siding in one of three tasteful shades of grey. A haphazardly shovelled trail led through the snow up to the door, and an uncollected newspaper sat on the porch. Smacking her lips—Chapstick, not lipstick; her days of vanity were gone, and besides, it was so dry here—she rang the doorbell, heard slippered feet shuffling within.
She had to stop herself from laughing when she saw him. It was still the face she knew from a dozen kidnappings, a hundred hostage-takings: the owlish eyebrows, the fiercely intelligent eyes were still there—but he was wearing a crocheted cap in a rainbow of yarn. “I’m sorry,” she said when she saw his eyes flashing with anger. “You never seemed to care about being bald before.”
“It’s for warmth, not vanity,” he said, scowling. “What do you want?”
“Can I come in?”
He fixed her a long stare, shrugged, turned to go inside. “I had hair,” he said. “You know that stuff the yuppies use to fill in their bald spots? I invented it.”
She closed the door behind her, tapped the toes of her boots against the floor to knock the snow off. “So what happened?”
“Well, I used the good stuff—what the doctors can prescribe is just a taste, to hook people on the real thing. That’s where the money is. Anyway, I had the healthiest head of red hair you’ve ever seen.”
“And then?”
He tapped the crocheted cap. “Cancer. Chemo.”
&nbs
p; “I’m sorry.” She summoned an expression of concern. “How’s it going?”
“Ehh.” He went on into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee. “I’m alive. You want?”
She shook her head. “No, thanks. Is that why they let you out of jail, the cancer?”
“Nah, I’m a parolee. It was always attempted whatever, thanks to him, and I never really did anything that bad—never even tried to kill anyone but him, and they couldn’t even charge me with attempted murder without admitting the existence of you-know-what on public record.” The bald man took a sip of his coffee, frowned, put down the cup. “So, you’ve tracked me down, and it wasn’t just to catch up on old times. What do you want?”
“You know what.”
He tilted his head curiously. “I don’t, really.”
She took a breath. “What you called it. You-know-what.”
“Ah,” he said, understanding dawning on his face. “Trouble in paradise?”
Her face flushed with anger. “None of your business,” she said.
His eyebrows rose in amusement. “Too bad. You know I’m always at your service . . . all you have to do is ask.”
“He’s—he’s very sick,” she said, swallowing bile. “And his body, it—He’s too strong. It won’t let him die.”
He gave a barking laugh, broke into a cough. “Why . . . even if I had some—which I don’t—why should I give it to you?” He picked up his coffee, took a long sip and swallowed. “I spent half my life trying to make him miserable. Why should I put him out of his misery now?”
“I can pay you,” she said, her knuckles whitening as she gripped her purse strap. She took a step closer to him, reached in for her wallet.
“Pay me? Anyway, I told you, I don’t have any.”
She smiled inwardly. An old interviewing trick, move the conversation along the path of least resistance: not whether he would but whether he could. “I don’t believe it. You’d never go without at least one piece, just in case.”
He shrugged, smiling broadly. “Sorry. It’s a condition of my parole—no owning any radioactive materials of any kind.”
“Uh huh.” She took a step closer, nodded sadly, and reached for the lump in his right pocket. His hand shot out, quicker than she had expected, grabbed her wrist; she grabbed his other arm and they froze, each unwilling to back down but neither able to risk a struggle and the fall that might follow. She locked eyes with him, felt a blast of pure hate. She fought to hold his gaze, forcing herself to remember everything he had ever done to her, to him.
After a long moment his eyes dimmed; deflated, he looked away, released her arm and reached into his right pocket. There it was, in a nest of tissues and rubber bands: a rough crystal, about an inch around.
“If you want this,” he said, “You have to do something for me.”
She nodded; there would be a price, of course. There had to be. “What do you want?”
His shoulders slumped, his body curling protectively around the glowing stone. “It should have been me,” he said. “Not just . . . time. When it—happens—” She felt a moment’s absurd pity for him: he had, she realized, been as bound to her husband as she was. “Tell them it was me.”
He snuffled loudly, turned away, wiped his nose with his sleeve.
“Tell them I won . . .”
When she returned to the hospital she was told her husband had moved to a different room, in the isolation wing; the woman at the desk couldn’t tell her why. An orderly stopped her as she got off the elevator, directed her to a room where white quarantine suits hung in a row from hooks on the wall. A sign opposite said SUIT UP BEFORE ENTERING! She looked around, went back out into the hall and to the nurse’s station.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
The nurse, an Asian woman she hadn’t seen before, shrugged. “Which patient are you here to see?” She told her, and the nurse flipped through a pile of charts. “Your husband’s in quarantine. You can visit, but you need to put on one of those suits and follow procedure.”
“I know that,” she said, her voice raspy from the cold dry air she’d been breathing. “Why is he in quarantine?”
“You’ll have to ask Dr. Weller.”
“Where is he?”
“I’ll page him for you.”
She pretended to read a magazine for twenty minutes before the doctor arrived. “What’s the matter?” he asked the nurse.
“Your patient’s wife is here,” the nurse said, pointing her out.
“Ah. How are you?” Dr. Weller asked, stepping over to her.
“What’s going on? Why is he isolated?”
“It’s his immune system. We had some outbreaks on the floor he was on—we think bacteria in his system may have been mutating for a long time. Adapting to match him—they evolve so much more quickly than we do. So long as he was healthy his immune system would have kept them from getting out into the population, but . . .”
“I thought you were going to call me if anything changed.”
“Ah. Well.” He looked away. “Nothing has changed. My prognosis is still the same.”
“So he’s still . . .”
“Yes.”
She nodded to herself. “Can I see him?”
“Sure. Just put a suit on—there’s instructions—”
“I saw them.”
“Okay. You might need a little help getting into the suit.”
She had thought, when she saw them on the wall, that they looked like spacesuits, but they were actually very thin. She stepped into the legs, glad to be wearing pants rather than a skirt, and Dr. Weller helped her with the arms and hood. He led her to the room; the first door led into a little antechamber, with a garbage can and a sign over it saying DISPOSE OF SUITS HERE BEFORE LEAVING. The first door closed behind her and she shouldered the next open, went into the room.
The room was dark and nearly empty, with even the few comforts of a regular hospital room gone: no bedside table, no chairs. Just the bed where he lay, breathing shallowly, and the heart monitor. Round adhesive ghosts on his forehead showed he’d had an EEG put on and then removed. She could see why: he was twitching in his sleep, tiny seizures passing over him every few seconds. Loose restraints over his chest and legs kept him from floating more than a few inches from the bed.
“It’s okay,” she said, stroking his forehead with gloved fingers. “I’m here.”
Another twitch went through him, then he seemed to calm. His eyelids fluttered.
She felt her resolve weakening. “I’m sorry I had to leave you. I won’t go again.”
His lips, dry and cracked, opened slightly; she held her breath. “Luh . . .” He spoke just over a whisper, so quiet she wondered if she had really heard him. His head pitched to the side, as though fighting a nightmare. “Let me go.”
“I can’t,” she said, her voice breaking. “I still need you here.”
Another tremor went through him, and his hands clawed convulsively.
“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . “ she said. He said nothing.
This wasn’t fair. Why should she be the one to have to do this?
Because she could. Because she would.
Opening her left hand she took out the tissue she had palmed while putting on the suit, unwrapped it. She looked quickly over her shoulder, through the windows of the two doors: no-one was paying attention, as usual. The rock in her hand felt heavier now that she could see it. She waited for one of his spasmed hands to open, fitted the rock into his palm. Its glow peered through his fingers, cast shadows across the room that quivered as the seizures took him.
She sat with him for a long time, until he was still.
THE LAST ISLANDER
Saufatu stood neck-deep in the water, watching the dawn arrive over the great empty ocean to the east. He raised the coconut shard in his right hand to his mouth and nibbled on the flesh
, enjoying the mixture of sweet and salty flavours, then quickly glanced over his shoulder at the shore. He knew before looking that there would be no-one there: even Funafuti, the biggest of the Eight Islands, was nearly always empty except on Independence Day. Here on Niulakiti, the first of the islands to sink, he had never seen another soul.
He turned back to the sea, took another bite of his coconut and frowned. Something was out there. He squinted, trying to make out the dark smudge perhaps a half kilometre out towards the horizon. It looked like someone swimming, or rather thrashing at the surface; suddenly he remembered what he had put out there, realized what was happening, and pushed himself out into the waves.
It had been a long time since he had been swimming, but a childhood spent in the sea had inscribed his muscles with the necessary motions. He inhaled and exhaled salt spray with each stroke, getting nearer and nearer to the man—for he could now see that it was a man, dark-haired and tanned but unmistakably White—a tourist, who was struggling for his life. The snout and fin of the grey reef shark, rising and falling from the water as it fought to draw the man down, completed the picture.
“Bop it on the snout!” Saufatu called as he got closer, hoping the man spoke English.
The man, who to this point had not yet noticed him, looked his way and tilted his head.
“Bop it on the snout!” Saufatu shouted again. He slowed to tread water for a moment, raised his left hand out of the water and smacked it against his nose twice.
The man turned back to the shark, which was working to fasten its jaws on his leg, and tapped it gingerly. A moment later he smacked it harder, and the shark turned its head away; another hit and it thrashed its head from side to side, snapped its jaws on empty air and dove under the surface.
Saufatu reached the man a few minutes later, closing his mouth to avoid inhaling the bloody water. The man looked pale, but surprisingly composed given what he had just been through. He put his right arm around Saufatu’s shoulder and kicked his legs weakly.
“Not that way,” Saufatu said, shaking his head. “Past here it’s all algorithmic. Just let me pull you.”
The man nodded and then coughed, spitting out seawater. “Thanks,” he said.
Irregular Verbs Page 34
