Olympia

by Dennis Bock

  When we turned the bend in the river we saw the time clock wedged against a tall oak. The construction-paper numbers were washed away now. The red arrow indicated nothing, like a finger pointing in the dark. When we reached the oak we joined hands and pulled ourselves up onto the clock. It would offer some support, I thought. But once we’d partly dragged ourselves up onto the plywood, the clock came free from the oak and we began moving with the river again, swirling in small, gentle circles. Up on the embankment, houses drifted past like remote, unreachable islands. After the bend where Rebecca Street ran parallel to the river, the water grew calmer still, the floodplain broadened. Street signs looked down through the maples into the valley. At this rate we’d be at the harbour in a few minutes. I knew that we weren’t going to drown. But I was worried about Ruby. I imagined my mother when she found out about this, fearful that this flood would send her daughter back to another series of spinal taps and intensive chemo.

  On a Tuesday morning we buried my grandfather in a Kingston cemetery. For a time, his health had seemed to improve. But the sudden second build-up of fluids in his lungs came and he died before anyone could help him. Now, except for us, my father was alone. All his people were gone.

  We buried him beside my grandmother. My aunt was there that day, up from California, awkward on her crutches as she stood above the grave. The pastor spoke and then we each followed behind my father and dipped a silver spoon into a small bucket and sprinkled my grandfather’s coffin with earth. After my turn I stood beside my father.

  Marian took Ruby by the arm and pulled a strand of hair away from her face. My mother took Ruby by the shoulder, steadying her. She let the earth slip and fall into the hole. I lowered my head. The hair on the back of my neck pricked up as the falling earth spilled over the belly of the coffin like a slowly filling hourglass. I heard the clicking of my aunt’s leg braces as she turned from the hole and started across the lawn.

  Endings

  Ruby returned to school that fall, and in October she was back at the gym. I was working at my father’s shop now, saving money for the following year, when I would be leaving for Chicago. It was a quiet winter after my grandfather’s passing. But by December Ruby was back on a modest training program. She was talking about Moscow again. Our family began to breathe freely. There was no reason she couldn’t go. She had more than two years before they’d be choosing the next Olympic team. Boris talked to my parents about it, and to the doctors at Sick Kids. He wanted to know how hard he could push her. My mother bit her lip and frowned; the doctors assured her that it was best for a recovering patient to get back into the routine of his or her normal life. Physical exercise would just help the process along. Her red blood cell count was normal; there was little or no fear of anaemic reactions.

  There were small gym meets that winter. Ruby watched from the bleachers. She still wasn’t a hundred per cent. Her friends spun through the air over her head, twisting. She wasn’t jealous. It made her work harder. Before she could take to the uneven bars, she remapped her routines over and over in her mind, flew higher than she’d ever flown before. “I’m refuelling,” she’d say. Clouds raced through her head.

  Her spirit soared in anticipation of her body. In June she took to the air again after almost two years of treatment and recovery. My parents and I sat at the picnic table before supper and watched her perform a tentative flip or a handstand, then lower herself into the splits, beaming up at us as if she was performing these moves for the very first time.

  “Careful,” my mother would say, more out of habit than fear.

  “Look, Boobs,” I said when she finally sat down at the picnic table. “Do either of us have any excuse now?”

  “Nyet,” she said, leaning into my father’s chest. We were back on track after some minor evolutionary setbacks. Our mother began making clothes again after a year and a half of blankets. There hadn’t been any problems with my father’s sailboats since the disappearance off St. Lucia more than two years before. Our summer hummed with the sound of a Laser cutting through perfect wind and water, the jib finely tuned to the world.

  That summer she competed for the first time in two and a half years. In the Ontario championships, Ruby took gold in floor and vault and pulled in the bronze for total points. We were all there to watch. Even my mother started thinking about a trip to Moscow. The doctors at Sick Kids predicted a complete remission. I’d be leaving for the University of Chicago in a month.

  In July, a week after the meet, Ruby developed a sore throat. For two days we watched the cough. They took her to Toronto for her weekly tests. I saw them off that morning, then got into my bathing suit and dove into the pool. After a hundred laps I stopped in the middle of the deep end, filled my lungs and relaxed my arms. I looked down through the water. I thought about what it would be like to be dead, maybe something like this, floating just above and below the surface of things. Being in more than one place at a time. I watched my feet hanging below me, motionless as waterlogged sticks, as if they were no longer a part of me. I hadn’t broken the record, but I’d raised over three thousand dollars. I wiggled a toe and saw it move. The thinking man’s game, I thought. Floating between life and death.

  Two hours later I heard the car pull into the driveway. I was warming down now doing slow lengths of the pool. Ruby came around back and kicked off her sneakers and sat on the grass. She was singing a Bee Gees song. Then she went upstairs to get into her bathing suit.

  My mother and father came out into the backyard and sat down on the deck. My father leaned over and touched the water with his finger. “Warm,” he said, considering something. “Peter. She’s out of remission.”

  “But they said they got all the blasts.”

  “There’s been a relapse. They said it takes only a few leukemic cells to take over the whole body again. Her red cell count’s taken a nosedive. She’s having an anaemic reaction. That explains the cough. Dr. Lee says there’s an operation she has to have if they can get her into remission again. It’s a transplant. It’s the last option. He needs to take something out of your hip and give it to Ruby.”

  I rested my chin in my hands on the wooden deck, the noon sun warming my shoulders. I’d read a dozen books on leukemia by now. I knew what was going to be asked of me. I kicked my feet behind me and raised my body parallel to the surface.

  “That’s where the blood’s made,” my mother said. “It’s called bone marrow.” She touched my arm. “They kill all of the bone marrow cells in Ruby, and give her some of your healthy cells. Not just the leukemic ones. They destroy everything. It’s best if it’s from a brother or a sister. That’s the best chance she’s got. Then she starts producing her own. But they have to test your blood to see if you’re compatible. If you are, you could do it.”

  The screen door slid open then and Ruby walked onto the patio in her bathing suit. She didn’t look sick to me. She looked tanned and healthy. She still didn’t know about the relapse. I climbed out of the pool.

  “Ruby, it’s back,” my mother said when she came up to the three of us. She understood, just from that, and sat down at the edge of the pool, her feet hanging motionless in the water, and cried.

  The next morning she was back at the hospital and on chemo again, hooked up to the IV, her head sideways on the pillow, turned towards the sky on the other side of the window. There was another spinal tap that night. When they pulled out the big butterfly needle, a nurse called me into the next room for my blood sample.

  Within a week they determined we had nearly identical HLA antigens. There was a match.

  Then, the radiotherapy. We watched her on the video monitor, her head strapped down to the flat surface to prevent any movement. Beside us in the booth, the technician gave Ruby some last-minute instructions over the microphone. “Remember, honey. Absolutely still, okay?” The hum of heavy, slow-moving machines. On the lead-covered door a sign read CAUTION—HIGH
RADIATION AREA. The woman looked at me and mouthed, All right.

  I brought my face close to the microphone and began to read.

  “‘One day in 1802, a college student named Pliny Moody, while plowing his father’s field in South Hadley, Massachusetts, turned up a sandstone slab bearing the imprint of a large three-toed foot. It looked like the footprint of a giant turkey or raven.’” I looked up at the screen and said, “You copy? Over.” I waited.

  Over the speaker we heard her thin, metallic voice. “I copy.”

  “‘Those who saw this wonder decided, in a moment of pious fancy, that the print must have been made by the raven that Noah had released from the arc to search for dry land.’”

  “Only a few minutes, honey,” my father said, his face pressed against mine. They’d said there was no pain involved. She was laced to the earth like a helpless Gulliver. When the hum of the machines died, the technician went into the chamber and turned Ruby over. She came back out and started the radiation again.

  “‘Other tracks of Noah’s raven were found over the years, always in the Triassic sandstone that would become the source of the “brownstone” favoured in the construction of Manhattan townhouses.’”

  “Would you like to see that someday, Ruby?” my mother asked into the microphone. “Go to America to see dinosaur fossils in the houses there?”

  “I want it to stop,” she said weakly. “Over.”

  Three weeks of this, roped to the hard board in the radiation room. She lost weight rapidly. Her hair fell out again. She was back to where she started. Every day, radiotherapy. I wondered if she carried around the poison rays once they’d turned off the machine. A fire cooking inside her body.

  “All this is going somewhere,” I told her. “Archaeopteryx didn’t know he was turning into a bird when it was happening.” There were dark circles under her eyes. Her head looked too big for her body. I didn’t know if she understood what I wanted her to understand.

  “What a funny thing I’ll turn out to be,” she said. “This mix, you and me.”

  Already into September, a week before the transplant was set to go, I called the dean of sciences at the University of Chicago to explain what was happening to my family. In the letter she returned to me a week later granting a deferral, she said the university would be pleased to have a student as dedicated to family as I seemed to be. She enclosed a Scientific American article that touted miraculous advances in leukemia research and treatment. She ended the letter, Godspeed.

  Before the operation, I dreamt Ruby and I flew. She carried me on her back. Bathed in sunlight, Lake Ontario opened before us. We broke the surface and went under. As we went deeper and deeper I blew oxygen into my sister’s mouth. We found a treasure chest at the edge of an underwater mountain full of syringes and leukemic blasts. We loaded the needles and squeezed their milky substance into the pale water and watched the thinned cancerous blood dissipate through streaked sunlight descended from the surface.

  The nurses encouraged me to walk a few hours after I came out of the anaesthetic. Still in my pyjamas, I rode the elevator and limped down the hall to Ruby’s room. By the time I got there, she’d already received the first bag of marrow they’d taken from me. It hung on a rack beside the bed, like an IV, but the tube was hooked up directly below her collarbone. The doctor said everything looked good so far. She felt feverish; her head pounded. I felt nauseated. All the side effects we’d been warned about. But the pain in my bones began to subside. It felt like I was carrying gravel in my hips. They did tests before they hooked up a second, paler bag. We waited there with her for the two hours it took to complete the transplant, watching the bag’s yellow-pink contents move along the tube and disappear into Ruby’s chest, the afternoon sun streaming through the open window. She was kept in isolation to minimize the risk of infection.

  After a month, the rejection began. Her body turned red with blotches. It was the mixing of our blood, I thought. Her skin turned scaly. It had nothing to do with the HLA antigens. We’d evolved in different directions. What I’d given was killing her. Every day, after he finished work, my father drove me to Toronto. My mother was always there, waiting. Ruby would ask me to scratch her back when our parents went out to the hallway to consult with Doctor Lee. I’d slide my hand under her shoulder blades and lightly run my fingers up and down her spine. I felt the drying skin come off in my hand. “Softer,” she’d say, and me barely touching her. The tests confirmed it. They called it Graft Versus Host Disease. Her skin burned; the diarrhea threatened to drain all the liquids from her body. I was the graft. It was me doing this to her. It was my blood that was killing her.

  Skeletal now, her shoulder blades emerged from her body like great wings. Small like a bird, and bird-like, her mind jumped suddenly from post to wire. Her breaths were short. Yes, scratch there, she’d say. And then appearing on a branch. Cold like an icicle! Remember how I told you it was? And of a sudden, screeching, I want to go home. Over! The final attempts to rise. Booby, I’d say, taking the hand to my face.

  Helpless that last week, we watched as her thoughts soared. Perched on black-iron weathervanes, surveying, then breaking free in a desperate flutter of wing and feather. When open, her eyes glowed with an understanding gathered from dizzying heights. How sad, the end of the Triassic, clawing against air; her voice thin now as her wrists. Countdown to Moscow. For days, her body receding along a parade of nurses and doctors. Always my mother or father staying behind while I went home with the other to rest.

  “Sweetheart?” my father said that last morning, sinking to his knees. Her clawed hands scratched against air as they might have done her first day in hospital fourteen years before. Her small body writhed in its attempt to fly. A desperate fluttering, the straining effort to leave the world beneath her, one last time. Then the quiet stillness, Ruby somewhere distant as my mother, all month fighting tears, hoping for her child’s quick death. All of us. We knew what each was thinking. Eagerly now, we waited for the silence to come and wrap his dark glove over her heart. Without words my mother kneeled beside my father as my sister rose, her life spiralling upwards like windfall over dark water.

  V

  From the stands Rudolph watched the man dig the hole into the dirt track with the hand trowel to the correct size of his left shoe. He watched him as he measured the distance for the second hole along the length of his thigh. He marked a second spot in the dirt, verified its accuracy by placing his forward foot into the new hole and finding where his right foot fell comfortably. He ground his toe into the dirt, then trowelled out the hole into the shape of his right shoe. The runner righted himself and straightened his back. He put down the tool and crouched and set both feet into the holes, first the left, then the right. His knee came up against his chest when he sank into starting position. He bobbed, putting pressure on the balls of his feet, testing to see if the dirt would hold. He removed his feet and made adjustments. The other runners, three on his left, one on his right, were ready now. They were standing, shaking out their legs and slapping their thighs. Rudolph admired the man’s concentration. He would not be rushed. Finally he stood and tossed the trowel onto the grassy infield where a chubby man in a white suit scurried and bent to collect it. The tool disappeared into the pail he carried under his right arm. The runner shook out his legs and looked up at the sky.

  “Auf die Plätze,” the starter called. The five men took their mark and waited, thighs wet and blood-filled, feet tight in the dirt starting blocks. Rudolph readied his camera. Overhead, the shadow of the Hindenburg nosed out the sun. Its straining motors buzzed through the silence like insects. Its shadow fed along the contours of muscle.

  “Fertig.”

  The pistol shot rang out. Immediately followed by another. Rudolph lifted his finger from the button and exhaled. The airship passed overhead as the men walked back to their starting positions, averting their eyes from one another.
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