Fragile (13 page)

“I'm going to shine this light in your eyes. It may be a little bright.”

The doctor has the haggard look of someone who spends most of his life bathed in the fluorescent pallor of hospital rooms such as this. His hand comes close to Holly's face, flicking a beam of intense light into her eye.

“Try not to blink.” He leans closer to her. She can see individual hairs tufting over the top of his earlobe, but otherwise she has been rendered blind by this light. She forces herself to obey his command, holding the eyelids open. His breath smells of garlic.

“Good.” The light shifts to her right eye now, subjecting it to the same blinding brilliance. She cannot help but blink. But she resolves to keep the eyes open, and soon he retracts the light and tucks it away in the pocket of his corduroy pants. Beneath the veneer of his white lab jacket, the doctor is dressed more casually than Tom; beat up brown loafers, a golf shirt that has seen better days.

“Now,” he says, standing up straight, “I want you to take your finger, your pointer finger, hold it out here like this, and touch it to the tip of your nose.”

Holly sits up and feels her head swim. She holds her hand out in the distance like he showed her, and it seems very far away, an object disconnected from herself, almost beyond her
control. She brings the hand back towards her face and to her great surprise finds that she misses the mark, touching just off to one side and grazing the wing of her nostril. In a way, this is funny. It reminds her of the time she was out with a guy named Ali about two years ago, maybe three, and they were coming back from some party near Eagle Crest Lake and the cops pulled him over and made him take a sobriety test. Sitting there with the blue and red lights of the cop car flaring against the dashboard, watching Ali stagger a few steps forward and then huff into the little tube they held up for him, she couldn't help but laugh at him. And now, here she is, failing a test of her own, one more in a long sequence of examinations she has not passed. She has never been good at complying with the requirements of life's institutions: school, church, marriage, things that require her to do things correctly. Things that require a certain amount of belief. Now the people in this hospital are checking to see what's wrong with her and are finding her deficient.

“Look straight ahead.” The doctor moves his finger out to a place beyond her left ear. “Can you see this?”

“Yes.”

“What about this?” The hand and finger have gone farther back, to a point where she thinks she can still see them, but maybe she is just imagining it.

“Yes. I think so.”

“Good.”

The nurse that came in before has returned, hovering at the end of the bed, waiting for the doctor to finish. Tom wants to
say something, to exert his benevolent presence. “What are you finding, doc?”

The doctor ignores him. He takes Holly's hand firmly into his. “Now, I'm going to give your arm a little tug.”

This seems strange—why would he do this? She holds her arm out directly in front of her, and he pulls on it. The arm feels loose and limp under his control, like a long damp towel being wrung out. She wants to pull her hand away from him, but he doesn't let go. Instead, he grabs her now by the elbow and tugs again. Her hand and wrist flop in response. More to the nurse than anyone else, he says, “We'll do a head CT. Maybe keep her overnight.”

With this pronouncement, the doctor wheels about and hustles out of the room. Tom's question has remained unanswered. The nurse pokes the screen of a laptop computer several times with a plastic stylus, then trudges out as well, tugged along by the tidal weight of the doctor's last comment. Alone with Tom again, the translucent pain of Holly's headache shifts from one part of her skull to another, like one of those vivid jellyfish that bob and slither through the sea. She has been enveloped in the unfathomable workings of the hospital, in its mesh of strange people and procedures where time is beyond her control. The immediate future spreads out before her as a broad slippery mudflat, gray and wet, a place where minutes and hours blend together in a timeless mesh of faces floating above her, the faces of the doctor and Tom and the nurse interchangeable with others that have no features, dim ovals of blurred flesh. Oddly, Tom's voice seems to emerge from one of these blurred ovals.
“The doctor, before he came in here. He was asking me some questions.”

There are always questions in a place like this. The object is always to try and pin people down, organize them into convenient sets of characteristics, points of data. “He thinks you may have a fractured skull.” An image of the broken fragment of porcelain crowds into view, her own blood staining it. “He asked me what happened, whether it was an accident. As if I might have had something to do with it.” There is a touch of indignance in this last phrase. “I said maybe it was from the fall, after you were cut. But I don't like making stories up.”

He comes closer.

“Tell me what happened. Who was it? I'll slap a restraining order on him.”

Holly can see now, in the dark crescent of space within the cuff of Tom's sleeve, a patch of black hairs that comes up and around the outside of his wrist. The hairs are coarse and dark, almost like pubic hairs, distinct from the pale down that covers the rest of his arm. Tom's upper lip juts out as he forms the words he is saying. “Did someone hurt you, or did you hurt yourself?” Then, as if there has been a skip in a phonograph record, another sentence comes out. “Listen Holly, I want to marry you.” The sounds his mouth makes are separate from him, from his tongue and teeth and pink gums. The words hang there frozen between them, punctuated by the blip of the machine that tracks the involuntary squeezing of her heart. In a moment of clarity, Holly sees that this is one of Tom's tactics, a kind of negotiating ploy. He must do the same type of thing in
his job. The statement is so absurd in this context that it cannot be taken seriously. And yet, it is out there. A position that has been staked out in the far distance, an objective he might someday achieve.

Holly has a sudden vision of the series of meetings she and her former husband had to endure with the bland sorrowful minister who was going to marry them, in which he instructed them on the church's view of the mission they were about to undertake. She and Jake had been living together quite happily at the time, a fact that was known by the minister but never mentioned. These sessions were supposed to set up a framework of support and holy justification for the marriage, sanctifying the bond that already existed between them.

“Tell him it's none of his business.” She can only ignore what Tom said about marriage. She must push him away. Lying there in the bed, she feels tired and small. Her eyes want to close. “If he asks you again, tell him to go fuck himself.”

Before Tom can respond to this, the nurse is back in the room once more, unannounced. Time in this place is carved into frail uneven segments drawn out by waiting. The nurse looks older now than when Holly first saw her. Her skin has the tough leathery gloss of a smoker. She sidles up to Holly and holds out a metal prong sheathed in plastic. “Open.” The command is flat and direct, no explanation required. Holly has been given commands like this before. Opening her jaws this wide pulls the ache from the base of her head along the stretched muscles that run from her chin to the back of her skull. The nurse slides the prong in under her tongue, and Holly
instinctively closes her lips on it, cold and hard. “Okay honey. Give me your arm.”

Holly extends the arm that has been wounded, the one with the rusty bandage shielding her wrist. Gently, the nurse wraps Holly's biceps in a black plastic sheath, the velcro patches on either end catching and holding tight. The nurse steers a rolling tree of equipment with a digital readout connected to both the metal prong in Holly's mouth and the sheath on Holly's arm. She presses a button on the readout and the sheath springs to life, puffing up with air. Holly feels her arm locked in, compressed. The tips of her fingers tingle from lack of blood. Her mouth filled with the hard metal probe, her arm tethered to the box in the nurse's hands, she is fully under control. Tom's eyes are on her too, watching, waiting, narrowed and clasping her hand, he leads her from the table to the ballroom floor, blending in with the others, together with the rest of them, flowing with the notes, the crisp notes of the horns threading their way among bare arms, drawing them onward, outward, apart and away, pulling together, pushing, twisting, unfurling apart again. The sinuous pitch of the clarinet sweeps up their spines, rotating slow, slow, grasping each other towards arching shoulders, backs supple and tense, but not really our music, this was left over from our parents and war days. Maybe they thought it would be more elegant, more in keeping with the final days of this place for tonight, but ours was new music never heard before, not this slow and subtle. Ours driven by loud drums and guitars, not this way of slowly building, quiet, hushed, then rising,
lifting the couples paired one with another, each man with a woman, each woman with a hand locked in hand approaching cheek pressed to cheek. Hands on backs and shoulders, hands held together wide and steering, pushing together your things and my things, his things and her things. She wants to show him that all the erroneous, agglomerated stuff he has acquired over the years can be easily carved up and divided, sold for cold hard cash in an effort to make the impending move much easier. Her plan is to get rid of all the old possessions they have accumulated and move back east with as little as possible. Throw it all out. Declutter. The money they save on the move will then be used to buy new things, new furniture and clothes and housewares, once they settle in to the new house. New glasses and plates and silverware. New bedspreads and sheets. New everything, an experiment of hers, this new hard woman who lives with him; she wants to show him that it all amounts to nothing, all the detritus of the marriage that has built up over the years.

But he loves these things he has worked so hard to buy. He loves the king-sized bed she says is too cumbersome and heavy to move. He loves his collection of old suit jackets and ties, the clothes he wore to work each day, each tie gathering dust (for no one wears ties any more) still connected to a set of workday memories, places he went to, hotels and airports and three-cocktail business dinners spanning decades by now. Some of these ties go back to the Nixon administration. This gold one with bold blue diagonal stripes is a perfect salesman's tie though
it has to be thirty years old if it's a day. He could wear this tie to next week's meetings and no one would blink an eye—though no one wears ties any more. That's what she said: “No one wears ties any more.” So get rid of it. Throw it away. That is the assignment for the evening: Clear out his portion of the master bedroom closet. Sort through all the old clothes, the threadbare shirts and the dress shoes gathering dust, the athletic gear and the suitcases and the collection of photo albums stacked leaning against each other on the highest shelf. Go through all these things and decide what can be given away to the secondhand store or simply tossed in the trash to perish.

He cannot throw this tie away. He places it back on the rack and reaches for the portfolio where he keeps his work. Behind the network schematics for a food processing plant and the slick marketing brochures that tout the features of his company's products, the broad sheet of drawing paper has been waiting. He lays it on the lid of the plastic tub where the children's keepsakes are stored. There is not much light here: two fifty-watt bulbs, no windows, though the evening outside has faded into dusk and would not help much anyway.

The line he made is so faint, he has to squint to see it clearly. Though it does not reach the edges of the paper, it does divide the whiteness into two competing masses of empty space, the realm at the top of the page seeming to float on top of the smaller area below, the compressed field of blankness that already, with one stroke of his hand, seems to represent the earth. His hand grasps the pencil, touches it to the paper and draws it across, lightly, a thin scratching noise against the grain of the
paper. A dim echo of the first line, an arc parallel to it and slightly above: the roofline of the building. Now another line, quickly, and another.

He stops for a moment and examines what he has drawn. He remembers now the unique and unnatural challenge of reducing a seen object to mere lines on a page. With a few strokes of the pencil, the image concealed within his head has materialized before him. When he entered the building, he would fly through the doors, those big glass doors, shoving them aside, and look for her, even as his pupils dilated to capture the hazy light of the lobby. Sometimes with Elmer, sometimes Louise. Sometimes all four of them together. Innocents. They were still innocents then. They had not yet made all of life's many mistakes.

From the doorway behind his head he feels a presence. Two eyes, boring into the back of his head, watching him work. In one deft movement, he lifts the lid of the rubber tub and slides the paper underneath it. Then he turns and sees Laura staring at him, her brown eyes blank, her mouth set in a disappointed slot.

“What are you doing?” She's holding the telephone away from her mouth, directing the words at him instead of the receiver. The implication of the question is that he is not doing what he should be, what she expected him to do. She tilts the phone half an inch higher and speaks into it. “Here he is … Do you want to talk to the bastard?”

Laura bends over and reaches the phone to him, her eyes screwed to the lid of the rubber tub and what lies beneath it. He sees in the glance she gives him everything that he hates about
her: Her rigid focus on the list of tasks that is constantly circulating within her head, the relentless ticking of the clock inside her that urges her on, compelling her to nag him if a particular job she has decided he must do has not yet been completed; her unremitting concentration on the mundane details of daily life. Yet that had also been one of her chief attractions to him when they first met. He saw her as a challenge; he was always trying to show her how much he knew, impressing her with his knowledge and understanding of the world and its ways. She was so fixed on the brutal reality of each moment that he had to lift her above and away from it. He set out to prove to her that there was something more to life, entire oceans and continents far beyond her limited horizon, and in a few fleeting moments she did in fact acknowledge that there was something else out there.