by Mark Leidner
The ex-nun staggers out of the nunnery, defrocked, destitute, hair freed from the habit, and broken-hearted. With all her beautiful long dark hair freely blowing in the summer wind, she even questions God, since what kind of God could allow a consummate soldier noble in the ways of love to be hit by a bus like that, let alone allow the war that slaughtered so many people in such gruesome events she’d heard about second-hand. Numbed by loss, hair amazing, she walks over to her would-have-been lover’s corpse and forces herself to behold it in all its manglement. The crispness of his uniform contrasts sharply with how twisted and dead-looking he is in it. Then, her eyes shining with a Hollywood-esque, half-baked epiphany, the ex-nun seizes the soldier’s sidearm and wrests it from its holster. “Let’s see how merciful you really are,” she mutters Godward, and then with a shaking hand she points the barrel at her own chest and pulls the trigger. The blast spins her around twice and she falls crossways over the soldier, gushing blood all over his body from the hole on her heart. The impact of her fall, however, startles the soldier out of his grisly coma. He sees the nun’s beneficent face tilted just above his. Her eyes widen, glimmering with the recognition that he’s still alive—while simultaneously dimming with the reckoning of her own impending demise. He tries to mouth something, but he can’t because she’s crushing his lungs. She tries to roll off of him, but she’s lost so much blood that she’s too weak to roll more than a few inches. The wound on her heart is now bathing his face, and he’s blinking and choking on her blood while trying to show the same heroic resolve in the face of tragedy for which he was known in the trenches.
“We should have just broken up,” the soldier says ruefully, coughing and spitting between gulps of blood. “Before the war.”
“I know,” the ex-nun agrees.
There’s a terrible silence as both imagine the lives they might have lived had they not tried to stay together during the war.
“You know what?” she mutters weakly. “Let’s break up now.”
“What? Why? We’re about to die.”
“I know, but it’ll be more meaningful if we break up on our own terms and not have Death do our dirty work for us.”
The man is silent.
“Don’t you see how dying’s a cop out?” she asks, annoyed at his silence.
“Who cares!” he says. “We’re dying!”
She can’t believe that he can’t understand why they shouldn’t break up before they die to assert their agency in the face of imminent mortality, and he can’t see why they shouldn’t forget about that and meet death together, perhaps in discord about what it might mean, but at least defiantly allied. They go back and forth several more times, hashing out their various arguments, but they slip simultaneously into separate unconsciousnesses before their tiff is resolved.
19
THE IDIOTS WHOSE ANTI-BREAKUP RESULTED in a child are now in their fifties, and they tell the child, who is now an adult, that they’re finally considering breaking up because of irreconcilable differences, but first they’d like input from him because he knows them better than anyone.
Their son doesn’t understand why, given how long they’ve been together, their differences are suddenly so irreconcilable. His parents then awkwardly reveal the circumstances of his conception. It takes them several hours to describe their fears, why the pregnancy pact seemed like a smart move at the time, and how they’ve been unhappy ever since. The son is confused for a long time, but once he possesses a full understanding of the situation, he explodes in anger. “You should’ve just broken up!”
“But then you wouldn’t have been born,” they say.
“I wouldn’t know that,” the son says. “There wouldn’t even be a problem.”
The parents look down at the ground, then at each other, imagining the lives they could’ve lived if they’d broken up earlier. The son looks from one to the other. They say they see the wisdom in what he has said. Then, with great regret for their original decision not to, they finally break up right there in front of him, only it’s much harder than it would have been earlier, because now they’ve been together for thirty more years and their adult child is standing there. Watching the breakup play out in almost surreal slow-motion, the son clings to the hope that knowing what he now knows about his bizarre, almost preposterous origin will somehow invigorate rather than incapacitate his own ability to capably navigate his own romantic dilemmas.
18
THE CHILD OF THE IDIOTS is a surgeon trying to save the lives of the soldier and ex-nun who are both lying comatose on adjacent operating tables and who have just been helicoptered in… while also breaking up with the only other person in the O.R., a nurse with whom the surgeon has been having a secret affair because the hospital prohibits employees from dating. The double surgery lasts 79 hours and has to be done simultaneously because too much of the nun’s blood is still mixed with the soldier’s, which requires a bunch of other little surgeries to be done to stabilize him before it can be pumped out, and the son of the idiots is the only person believed capable of pulling this surgery off. In fact, he is considered by many in the surgical community to be the preeminent surgeon of the age.
While moving back and forth between the two near-corpses, trying to repair their wounds in reverse order—her blood loss, his drowning in her blood, her gunshot to the chest, his bus accident trauma—the nurse he has been dating is unable to focus on passing him the clamps because the surgeon is also saying things like, “I think we should see other people,” in between things like, “Clamps!” The nurse’s hands are wet from tears, and the nurse keeps dropping the instruments on the floor and having to rewash them. The surgeon orders the nurse to go home because there is too much at stake for the nurse to be so emotional. The nurse calls the surgeon cold-blooded and asks why the surgeon chose now to break up. The surgeon shouts that he has to concentrate and he can’t when he’s living a lie by having an unsanctioned workplace relationship. If it were up to him he’d break up at one of their houses or at a restaurant and have a real conversation about it, but these two people’s lives are at stake, and he knows that if he can just break up with the nurse right now, they will probably be saved. The nurse shouts that that is unfair! Just then the machines both patients are hooked up to start beeping like crazy, and the surgeon roars toward the nurse, “Out of my O.R.!” then dives back into the soldier’s chest cavity with three different types of medical instruments in each hand. The nurse steps backward through the flappy doors. Then the surgeon looks up at the nurse with burgeoning remorse. He promises they’ll continue the discussion later. “And,” the surgeon adds, “I’ll listen to everything you have to say, and think about it, too.” The nurse nods, faintly hopeful, as the doors flap shut between them.
While changing from scrubs to street clothes in the locker room, the nurse reflects that by postponing their conversation, some change in circumstance could intervene in the surgeon’s life—i.e., the surgeon might get sad—and that might keep the door open for the nurse and him to be together. At this thought, he smiles while tying his shoes, then goes down to the lobby. Through the sliding doors at the entrance to the hospital, the nurse sees it’s pouring rain. The nurse checks his bag for an umbrella, but realizes that in his haste to prepare for the double surgery earlier that day, he’d forgotten to check the weather. As he steps out into the rain with his coat thrown over his head—the sound of the rain on it like a hundred tiny drums as he runs to his car—he realizes that what just transpired was probably the last conversation he and the surgeon will ever actually have about the relationship. His shoes and socks get soaked as he runs, speculating that if he ever tries to reinitiate the uncomfortable discussion, the surgeon will probably repropose postponement, endlessly insisting on the urgency of some emergency that conveniently renders every conceivable difficult discussion temporarily unhaveable. The nurse reaches his car, drenched, squishy, and cold, and falls into the driver’s seat and slams the door and starts the car and sits there with r
ain dripping down his face into his lap.
17
THE NURSE DRIVES HOME IN the downpour, veering wildly around other cars, enraged one second, bereft the next, disgusted with himself for being such a pushover, furious with the surgeon for prioritizing professional excellence over personal relationships, then veering into admiration for the surgeon for being so good at saving so many hard-to-save lives, then being upset at himself for admiring that quality more than he admires his own self-worth, then being furious with himself for carrying on an unsanctioned workplace relationship. Dating a coworker is so fucking stupid, he thinks. What the fuck are you doing with yourself? Why can’t you just get it together? Just be happy and find someone who’s also happy and who you make happy and who makes you happy and just be happy with them, fuck!
At home the nurse calms down by scrolling the internet. One of his friends from school has just posted a music video by his favorite band, which has just released a new album. The fact that he hadn’t even known that his favorite band had come out with a new album strikes him as particularly significant. He watches the video several times. It’s epic. It does everything that that band has always done well… times ten. It makes him weep. He pours a glass of wine and replays the video. He turns it up. He finds the song on his phone and puts in his earbuds and walks, invigorated, through the now-just-misty rain, down the street to his favorite bar, blasting the song. It’s the sort of bar the surgeon wouldn’t be caught dead in, but where the nurse likes to watch sports sometimes and relax. As he walks into the bar, his mood is more than high, it’s bordering on dangerously manic. God it feels good to step out of the rain into somewhere familiar! Besides that, there’s an awesome song from the nineties that’s just started on the jukebox. Not one by his favorite band, but still a great song. He pulls out his earbuds and basks in it like entrance music. This is who he is. This. This moment. This place. Right now. This is love. This is life. This song. He’s not some over-devoted neurotic second-fiddle to some stuck-up workaholic Christ-complex-having mother-fucker. He’s an everyman. He’s normal. He’s a decent human being doing the best he can, and right now he’s in tune with the music of the universe. As soon as he thinks this, he orders a shot and sees a cute man at a nearby table who looks woefully lonesome. The nurse walks right up to him, and they instantly click because the nurse is in possession of that perfect balance of recklessness and confidence that only comes in the wake of one’s life being upended, and the other guy is self-deprecating and ironic and deadpan about his own recent romantic mishaps. The nurse asks what the other guy does, and the other guy says, “Hopefully… you later.” Then he turns red and covers his face and says he’s a freelance blogger and editor for a bunch of terrible websites, and he’s literally never been that forward.
“Awesome,” the nurse says. “I fucking love the internet.”
“Really?”
“Love-hate.”
“Me too.”
“Obviously.”
They look at each other. Fast forward an hour and they’re practically attacking each other back at the freelance blogger’s surprisingly well-appointed apartment. The love-making is as epic as his favorite band’s recently released music video. It’s also serendipitous and lasts as long as both want it to. In its throes, the nurse feels like all his blood has been replaced by the notes in that brand new song. But when they’re done, the nurse is surprised to find his mind flooded with longing for the surgeon again, and he succumbs to a post-climax vortex of futile nostalgia that stirs in his soul a sadness tracing all the way back to the emotional errors of adolescence. The blogger is not blind. He reluctantly asks the nurse what’s on his mind. The nurse, trembling, overwhelmed to a level he hadn’t even felt on his harrowing drive from the hospital, chronicles through tears his breakup with the surgeon. The blogger isn’t overjoyed to be used in this way, but the experience helps the blogger realize how much he might actually like the nurse. That he’s willing to listen to the nurse talk about someone else strikes the blogger as an indicator of chemistry for which it might be worth sacrificing a small amount of emotional labor. The blogger realizes what just happened between him and the nurse wasn’t mere meaningless fun. As long as it didn’t get out of hand, he might actually develop enduring feelings for this person. Suppressing the fears that he’s just a rebound, the blogger allows the nurse to curl up in his lap, at which point the nurse starts sobbing like a child. When the nurse is all cried out, a deadness different than any he’s ever felt creeps through his emotions like tentacles touching the farthest reaches of his being, and he stands. He tells the blogger he feels much better, and also much worse. The blogger asks what this means. The nurse says he’s sorry, but he needs to leave. The blogger asks when the nurse might want to hang out again. The nurse says nothing. The blogger starts to cry and says, “I guess I understand what you’re going through.” Then the blogger adds, “Not that you’ve asked one question about how I’m dealing with my own heartache.” The nurse’s feelings return, and he sits back down and asks the blogger to tell him about his situation. The blogger shakes his head and tells the nurse that it’s obvious he wants to leave, and so he should. The nurse is paralyzed with indecision, torn between his pity for the blogger and his genuine desire to be alone with his own pain. He finally stands and leaves. He walks home in a cold fog that has replaced the mist.
Back at home, he opens his laptop without thinking, and the song that inspired him to go out blasts into his house. He mutes it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He looks up the blogger’s work online. He finds a piece the blogger wrote about how we’re all living in a materialist dystopia, and the only cure for loneliness might be to give up our belongings and serve the poor, the sick, and the dying. Into this thesis the blogger interweaves references to societies of pre-sapiens humans who lived in present-day Guinea, the changing conception of the atom in the physical sciences, the growing problem of income inequality, and the disappearance of the honey bee. It’s a remarkable piece of general-interest advocacy, not to mention a monumental and adroit exercise in unexpected synthesis, and it has over seventy-five thousand shares, and although the nurse can see that it’s the most objectively beautifully written piece of long-form journalism he’s ever read, it makes him feel nothing.
These eight lines by Christina Rossetti, spoken from the perspective of someone who is dead, vividly evoke, to me, the consciousness of the nurse at this moment:
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
16
WITHOUT THE NURSE IN HIS O.R., the surgeon works through the night and is able to save the ex-nun from her gunshot wound, and even the soldier from drowning in her blood, but he fails to save the soldier from the trauma he suffered when struck by the bus. The surgeon feels so guilty for not having saved the woman’s lover that he stays by her bedside during her recovery, refusing even to perform any other surgeries. When his coworkers suggest he go into counseling because he’s clearly just transposing some other emotional wound onto this woman and her loss, he snarls, “None of you will ever understand the pressure of being the world’s greatest surgeon!” His coworkers back slowly out of the room. After missing several surgeries in a row, however, during which every patient dies because he isn’t there to work what are, effectively, his surgical miracles, he is fired from the staff at the hospital, but they let him stay in the ex-nun’s room out of respect for his record. He practically lives there, growing a huge gross beard, refusing food, and even stealing pills from the hospital pharmacy and drugging himself into nightly stupors to pass the time until she wakes or until he dies, whichever comes first.
When she does wake, his heart soars, and he brushes to the floor the crushed pills he was about to snor
t and rushes to her side. The ex-nun blinks dreamily at his haggard countenance. He clutches her hand and welcomes her enthusiastically back. Feeble but able to speak, she tells him that she could sense his presence while in her coma. He looks surprised. She knew he was her doctor, she explains, and then her guardian angel, and in her dreams the two of them became lovers. In fact, she says, to her, she and he have already spent a lifetime together, a blissful one. They lived in a shack on a remote beach, and every morning he cooked her breakfast from eggs he foraged from wild pheasants who nested in the dunes, and every evening she cooked him a fish that she caught from the sea with her hands.
She says that once she’s physically recovered, nothing would shorten what is sure to be her long psychological recovery more than to run away with him and find that shack on that beach they shared in her mind and make it their own in the world. The surgeon is so moved by her innocence, and still so wracked with guilt over having not saved the soldier, that he can’t bear to inform her that she’s not really his type and that he stayed by her side not out of amorousness but self-reproach.
They go on a road trip to find the beach they lived in in her anesthetized delirium, and although they don’t find it, they find one similar and inexpensive enough to rent, several hours up the coast. It’s still summer, too, so they’re able to enjoy walking the sand and trying out their new-to-him but old-to-her relationship. The surgeon keeps his lack of attraction to her a secret, and finds other people to be with when he wants to, and the deception is easy because the ex-nun is neither suspicious nor jealous. She might even be okay with it if I told her, the surgeon thinks. Maybe he will tell her. He realizes he might even actually be close to being happy. Since he knows he doesn’t want to be with her, ironically, being with her as a sham is actually kind of easy. He gets all the benefits of platonic companionship without ever having to confront any real emotions—except for living a lie, of course, but living a lie isn’t really an emotion, it’s a skill, and it’s in matters of skill that the surgeon excels. He even makes enough money working as a surgeon in the local hospital—mostly patching up the minor injuries of fishers and vacationers—to finance their upper-middle class lifestyle. After a couple months in their beach house, however, it’s the ex-nun, not the surgeon, who realizes that they’re ill-fit, and the reality of living with him doesn’t live up to the fantasy she experienced during her recovery, so she breaks up with him one crying morning over some pancakes he’s made her.
