Iris
Page 5
button. After she handed me my change I asked her if she'd had it done before or after March 27. "Before," she said. "What does it mean?" I asked. "That people have been making up weird shit for a long time and we're still fucking here." In Pakistan, the United Nations uncovered a mass grave of girls killed because they were pregnant—to protect the honour of their families. When I was a kid in Catholic school, my favourite saint was Saint Joseph because I wanted to love someone as much as he must have loved Mary to believe her story about a virgin birth.
On July 1, we subduably celebrated Canada Day. On July 4, my wife shook me awake at six in the morning because she was having back spasms and her stomach hurt. She got out of bed, wavered and fell and hit her head on the edge of a shelf, opening up a nasty gash. I helped her to the bathroom sink, where we washed the wound and applied a band-aid. She tried throwing up in the toilet but couldn't. The sounds of her empty retching made me cold. The cramps got worse. I picked her up and carried her out of the apartment—Pillow whined as I closed the door—and down to the underground garage, where I helped her into the back seat of our car. Pulling out into the street, I was surprised by the amount of traffic. It was still dark out but cars were already barrelling by. On Lake Shore, the traffic was even worse. I turned on the radio and the host was in the middle of a discussion about livestock, so I turned the radio off. Farther in the city foot traffic joined car traffic and the lights couldn't have changed more slowly. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw women collapsing on the sidewalks, clutching their stomachs. I kept my eyes ahead. At a red light, a black woman kept banging on the passenger's side door until I rolled down the window. She asked if she could get a ride. I asked to where. "To the hospital, where else?" she said in sing-song Jamaican. I let her in and at the green light stepped as heavily on the gas as I could. In the back seat, my wife's eyes were barely open. The Jamaican woman was in better shape. Noticing my concern, she said, "Don't worry yourself none. I was like that this morning, too, but I'm better now. It comes and then it goes." I was still worried. The streets around the hospital were packed with parked cars, but I found a spot by turning the wrong way up a one way street. The wheel hit the curb. I got out. The Jamaican woman helped me with my wife, and the three of us covered the distance from the car to the hospital in minutes. Ambulance sirens wailed close by. I heard the repetitive thump of helicopter blades. I glanced at my watch. 7:24. In the hospital, the hallways and waiting room were packed. There was standing room only. I left my wife leaning against a sliver of wall and ran to the reception desk. The Jamaican woman had disappeared. When I opened my mouth to speak, the receptionist cut me off: "Just take a seat, Mister, same as everybody else. Stay alert, stay calm. If you need water you can get it down the hall. We're trying to get as many doctors down here as we can as quickly as we can, but the roads are jammed and there's more than one hospital. That's all I've been told." I relayed the information to my wife word for word, once I found her—the waiting room was becoming encrusted with layers of incoming people—and then they shut the hospital doors—and my wife nodded, looking at me with eyes that wanted to close. I kept her lids open with my thumbs. My watch read 7:36. I wanted to tell her I loved her but was stupidly embarrassed by the presence of so many people who might laugh. I didn't want to be cheesy. "It comes and it goes," I said, "so just keep your eyes open for me until it goes, please." She smiled, and I touched my lips to hers without kissing them. Her lips were dry. Around me shouts were erupting. There was a television in the corner of the waiting room, showing scenes of crowded hospitals in Sydney and Paris, and violence in Rio de Janeiro, where families huddled together in the streets while men, young and old, flung rocks, bricks and flaming bottles at a cordon of black-clad BOPE behind which politicians and their families were running from shiny cars to state-run clinics. My wife's weak voice brought me back to the present. "What do you think happened to Monsieur Charles?" she asked. "I don't know, but I'd guess he's probably just getting ready for work now," I said. She smiled and the pressure on my thumbs increased. Her eyes started to roll back into her head. "Don't go away," I said. "Don't leave me." I felt her eyes sizzle and shake like frying spheres of bacon. I couldn't hold them open anymore. I didn't know what to do. The shouting in the hospital had devolved into chaos. "Do you know why they call it pasta?" I said. I didn't expect her to answer. I didn't expect any reaction, but, "Because I already ate it," she said, smiling—and it was the last thing she ever said, her last smile I ever saw, because in that moment there was a horrible whine that made me press my fists against my ears and in the same instant every woman in the hospital exploded.
Since
Blood, guts and bone shards blanketed the surfaces of the waiting room, making it look like the inside of an unwashed jar of strawberry jam. My wife was gone. Every woman in the room was gone. The space behind the reception desk stood eerily empty. The television in the corner was showing the splattered lens of a camera that a hand suddenly wiped clean—its burst of motion a shock to the prevailing stillness—to reveal the peaceful image of a Los Angeles street in which bloodied men and boys stood frozen, startled...
I was too numb to speak.
Someone unlocked the hospital doors but nobody entered.
The waiting room smelled like an abattoir.
My clothes smelled like an abattoir.
I walked toward the doors, opened them with my hip and continued into the morning sunlight. I half expected shit to rain down from the skies. If I had a razor blade in my pocket I would have slit my wrists, but all I had was my wallet, my car keys and my phone. Sliding my fingers over the keys reminded me how dull they were. I didn't want to drive. I didn't want anything, but if I had to do something I would walk. I stepped on the heel of one shoe with the toe of another and slid my shoe off. The other one I pulled off with my hand. I wasn't wearing socks. I hadn't had enough time to put them on. I threw the shoes away. I wanted to walk until my feet hurt so much that I couldn't walk anymore.
I put one foot in front of the other all the way back to my apartment building, waited for the elevator, and took it to my floor. In the hall, I passed a man wearing clean summer clothes. He didn't give my bloody ones a second glance. I nodded to him, he nodded back, and I unlocked the door to my apartment and walked in. My feet left footprints on the linoleum. A dark, drying stain in the small space between the fridge and the kitchen wall was all that was left of Pillow. She'd squeezed in and died alone. I took out a mop and rotely removed the stain. Then I took off my clothes, flung them on the bed, which was as unmade as when we left it, took a shower and laid down on the crumpled sheets beside the only pieces of my wife that I had left. My sleep smelled like an abattoir.
I awoke to a world without women.
I rolled off the bed into sore thighs and guilt, got up to emptiness that echoed the slightest noise, and left my wife's clothes on the sheets without thinking that eventually I'd have to pack them into a plastic bag and slide them down the garbage chute. I felt magnified and hollow. In the kitchen, I used the stove top as a table because the actual table had my wife's tablet on it, and spilled instant coffee. What I didn't spill I drank in a few gulps, the way I used to drink ice cold milk as a boy. I stood in front of the living room window for a while before realizing I was naked, then realizing that it didn't matter because men changed in front of each other at the pool and peed next to one another into urinals in public restrooms, and there weren't any women to hide from, no one to offend. The world, I told myself, was now a sprawling men's pisser, so I slammed the window open and pissed.
I wanted to call someone—to tell them that my wife was dead, because that's a duty owed by the living—but whom could I call: her sister, her parents? Her sister was dead. Her father had a dead wife and two dead daughters. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew. I called my wife's father anyway. Was he still my father-in-law now that I was a widower? He didn't accept the connection. Widower: a word loses all but historical meaning when there are no alterna
tives. If all animals were dogs, we'd purge one of those words from our vocabulary. We were all widowers. It was synonymous with man. I switched on the television and stared, crying, at a montage of photographs showing the bloody landscapes of cities, hospitals, retirement homes, schools and churches, all under the tasteless headline: "International Pop". Would we clean it up, these remnants of the people we loved? Could we even use the same buildings, knowing what had happened in them? The illusion of practical thinking pushed my feeling of emptiness away. I missed arms wrapping around me from behind while I stared through rain streaked windows. I missed barking and a wagging tail that hit my leg whenever I was standing too close. Happiness seemed impossible. I called Bakshi because I needed confirmation that I still had a voice. "They're the lucky ones," he said right after I'd introduced myself. "They're out. We're the fools still locked in, and now we're all alone."
For three weeks, I expected my wife to show up at the apartment door. I removed her clothes from the bed and stuffed them into a garbage bag, but kept the garbage bag in the