Luck (12 page)

Our real work.
They would come home not only improved and more purposeful human beings but bound and twisted together as thoroughly as ancient tree roots.

So romantic. Young love’s young dream. Although they were no longer quite so young.

Sophie had to shade some facts and tell a few outright lies to get through the aid agency’s interviews, tests and training sessions, since doing good was evidently considered the most dangerously unstable motivation, with fomenting revolution or even storing up economic and political ammunition for future crusades scarcely more highly regarded. Sophie said, “I have experience with refugees because of my parents’ work, so I would not be surprised. It will be an adventure, and a
kind of experiment, and a test of myself, and a learning experience.” Evidently that was the right sort of responsible goal for a practical, low-demand, energetic, good-willed but not crazy young person.

When she and Nick got their assignment, it came with pages and pages of background, advice, photographs, accounts by their predecessors and a video, all of it thrilling, unreal, unimaginable. They were going to a refugee camp in a central African country at the time much in the news due to massive brutalities. “We’ll get you out if things take a turn for the worse,” agency managers told them. “Conditions are bad enough now, but if you can hack it, we need all the hands we can get on the ground.”

Even at the time Sophie wondered if
hack
wasn’t an unfortunate slip of the tongue; much less
hands on the ground.

Now
her parents took notice of how far virtuous impulses—compulsions—may travel,
now
they were worried. “We wish you wouldn’t,” they said. “We really do wish you’d think it over.”

“I have thought it over.” And over and over. “We’ll be fine.” More than fine. Fiery, passionately burning-eyed Nick, clear-eyed, hard-working, brave, adventurous Sophie, two years far away, sacrificing wonderfully to good purposes—what, in every possible way, could be better?

Three weeks before they were to leave, Nick once again put his hands on her shoulders and cast his eyes upwards. “I’m sorry, Soph, but it turns out I can’t go after all.”

What?

He was taking instead ill-paid but highly principled work—who knew he was looking for work?—with a relatively radical environmental organization. He would be involved in saving trees, lakes, oceans, the air people breathed; although,
having left her gasping, he didn’t seem to care much about the air Sophie might be breathing. “When you think about it,” he said, “the environment’s at the root of every kind of exploitation there is, people using other people to get the most for themselves and ruining it all while they’re at it.”

Speaking of ruining, “What about us?”

“I see it as a pincer movement.” How happy he looked, how enthusiastic and far worse, relieved. “We’ll be tackling the issues from two directions instead of just one. Like a battle. A revolution. Which it is.”

Oh. Okay.

She could have backed out, of course she could have, but then what? If she did, would she not spend the rest of her life smelling blood on her hands? So off she went, clueless, and by the time she came home she barely remembered Nick and exactly how he’d been so compelling, and certainly did not care if he’d spent those two years underwater testing the purity of the oceans or perched in a tree fending off greedy loggers. Just the thought of buttocks, penis, that clever tongue, those fierce eyes—his or anyone’s—made her skin feel shot through with needles.

Men and their bits and pieces, their occasional grave allures, their evidently permanent vanishings—what an expert she ought to be, and therefore detached and accepting. Instead, here she is, following an undertaker through a funeral home on her way to view the body of her ex-employer, ex-lover, her diploma in bad behaviour arduously achieved.

Autopsy:
another sort of comparative luxury, really. Look at it that way.

There will be the difference today, too, between a singular man and torn humans en masse. The acres of boggy tents when Sophie rolled by truck into the camp, that was—well,
it was a
vista
to start with. Almost scenic. The orientation officer back in the capital city, hours and miles distant, had advised, “You’ll probably feel overwhelmed at first sight. Take care not to get swamped.” He meant that these were people blown out of their homes by rampaging militias, thugs and mobs see-sawing through their lives until they gave up, or were forced out, and fled. They were starved, they were wounded, they were the lucky survivors. Some were guilty. “There’s relatively few able-bodied men, but there can be problems.” Getting aid past them, he meant.

There was other corruption as well. Heartlessness; he did not mention heartlessness.

Smells hit first, wiping out
vista.
Newspapers, TV, training films, websites, orientation sessions, none of those carried the reek of thousands of human bodies and open waste trenches and dampened cooking fires and a kind of rotting she couldn’t identify. Sophie took a first deep breath and threw up.

She has always had a delicate stomach.

It will be important not to get sick around Hendrik Anderson.

She is unsurprised that after they pass through a solid, dignified door to the left at the end of the entrance hallway, they enter surroundings that are entirely different. Now they are indeed in unpublic space, although by no means private space. They are descending a wide bare staircase, between walls that are drywalled and painted pale green, not panelled and wallpapered. Light bears down clear and bright from the ceiling, not from muted, soft-coloured, up-tilted lamps. And there is a smell. Not a bad one, but slightly acrid and sharp. She would say
medicinal
if this weren’t a place where it’s far too late for medicines.

There is a corridor in the basement with two wide blank
metal doors leading off it, and at the first one he says, “I’ll step ahead for a moment. If you’ll wait, please.” She obeys, because down here there is something different about Hendrik Anderson, too; something scalpeled or chemicaled or otherwise scientific, expert and remote.

He slips through the door, closing it quickly behind him. Rather than yield to a fresh temptation to bolt, she stares at her hands. They are real and calming, if also alive enough to be trembling.

Not as she can expect Phil’s to be.

Hendrik Anderson reappears looking reluctant again as if his doubts, too, have resurrected. “I really don’t know about this.”

“It’s fine,” and she puts a hand once more on his arm, looks sincerely again down into his eyes. “Truly. I’m fine. Believe me.”

“Well then,” he says, and steps back.

Isn’t it amazing, that he would do this?

Once through this last door, she finds the real chill of the place. “This isn’t where we do our work,” he says, close behind her. Embalming and make-up and so forth, he must mean, and it’s obvious this can’t be where anyone could do any work, their fingers would freeze, they’d be clumsy and make garish mistakes. No, this is a meat locker of sorts: a small, steely, preservative anteroom. No hooks, no dangling corpses, but a single metal gurney bearing a long lump that is Phil, mostly covered by plastic.

Most of that plastic is covered in turn by a black and green plaid blanket; the sort of blanket that might be packed up for a picnic, or to shelter a pair of lovers on a porch, on a beach, in the woods. On a wicker sofa, on a patch of lawn behind a workshop. Here in this spartan space is a blanket so incongruous and discordant Sophie feels tears rising up, clogging her throat, blurring her vision. Because the blanket is so
homey, domestic, warm. Sexual. Because this man Hendrik Anderson has thought it might camouflage mortality and also comfort her. A sweet, heartbreaking, erroneous notion.

“Thank you. You’re very good.” And then, “Could I be alone now?”

Here come his doubts again, showing up in a quick, distressed frown. She imagines him imagining her falling into hysteria, howling, screaming, tearing her hair. Or weirder, that she has in mind chopping off some of Phil’s hair, or scraping skin, or cutting fingernails, gathering ingredients for a nasty witches’ brew, or a huge, disastrous curse. Not that he would believe in that, but he might believe Sophie does. Or he might be leery of more luridly personal acts: initials carved on Phil’s dead chest; Phil’s deceased penis sliced away.

He must at least assume she has something to hide.

As she does.

It’s also possible that he basically thinks, if Phil’s own loved ones don’t care what happens to him, why should a mere mortician? “For a few minutes, then,” he says. “But if you need me, I’ll be right outside the door. Just call out if you start feeling upset or queasy.” She hadn’t thought of that: that part of his concern might be for her well-being, not his own. In that case, what a nice man.

“I’m all right. Don’t worry. No harm will come. But thank you. I won’t be long.”

She’ll be as long as she wants. When he has gone, she turns her full attention to the gurney, the blanket, to Phil. “So here we are,” she says aloud. “Alone at last.” Kind of a joke; Phil might have smiled. It’s stupid, though, and embarrassing to hear her own lonely voice in this metallic, echoing room.

All that’s visible above solid plastic and dense plaid blanket is Phil’s rigid, untroubled face. His pores are large. His
forehead is unlined. He needs shaving. She reaches out to his cheek with the back of her hand. What does she expect? Something less like cold porridge than this.

She ought to know better.

But touch, that’s the point: to incise into memory his magic tricks, the clever sleight of hand rendering her finally unhorrified by skin; causing her to wonder at the rabbits he could pluck from her with his dextrous fingers, the scarves he knew how to draw from her body’s sleeves, the several ways he could cut her in two.

Ah, was it really so good? Never mind, it’s what she’ll remember; intends to remember.

Warily—bravely—she raises plastic and blanket, and peering downwards sees a Y-shaped railroad track of bright careless stitching heading from naked, broken, newly hairless chest towards the darkness below, perhaps also now broken and newly hairless. Someone else might want to examine those parts. Nora maybe. Some evenings lately, Sophie has watched Nora across the table or across the living room, sitting with elbows propped under her chin, or legs curled beneath her, and thought,
Phil has travelled there, there and there, all over that woman, that Nora, and vice versa.
Sophie was more bemused by this than jealous. In a way it created connections between her and Nora, pulling and pushing ones, attractions and repulsions.

Hard to know if these connections counted if only one of them knew.

It’s surprising how unstiff Phil is. The time for rigidity has passed, Sophie knows this, but she is still startled, trying to draw his arm into view without dislodging too much the camouflaging plastic and blanket, to have it come free without resistance. It’s very heavy, though. The limbs of other
dead people Sophie has touched were often astoundingly light; like picking up baby birds.

She has helped carry dead bodies, she has wrapped them in plastic and cloth, she has helped bury them, without much time and with very few words, even less ceremony than with Phil, this body going up tomorrow in flames.

A purplish-grey fattiness has settled around his upper arms, his forearms, his wrists and, she sees, turning over his hand, on the fleshy part of his palm, and at the base of his fingers. The lines and creases there are filled out by this freshly risen doughy substance under the skin.

But the skin itself—here it is, her impulsive, vital, second-day purpose dreamed up in the night. This skin remains roughened, there are calluses at the tip and base of each finger, nicks and scars from old tool cuts and scrapes. She can stroke the palm and its thrilling abrasiveness.

Here is Phil’s heart line, sliding from the side of his palm to the space between middle finger and forefinger: not very long, or very deep. Here is his life line, slicing hard across his palm in a curve from the very base of his thumb to a point between forefinger and thumb. She should tell Beth, who has on idle evenings read all their palms, a typically frivolous entertainment picked up in long hours in hotel rooms and backstage, waiting for her interminable pageants and competitions to start—she should tell Beth it’s all nonsense. Otherwise Phil’s life line would have to come to a premature end.

Does this make the heart line false, too?

Tinier, intricate, criss-crossing lines speak of ambitions and aptitudes, skills and terms of desire. Phil worked with his hands, used dangerous tools with speed and great skill. His fingers smelled of wood; not like the outdoors kind of woods, not piney underfoot or arching and dark overhead, but of cut,
chiselled and carved wood that bled resin into his flesh. These lines, calluses, scars, rough now-discoloured pads at the base of each finger, pregnant with clean raw wood scent, they touched Sophie, caused her skin to rise up and fall back. “You understand,” Phil said, “I love Nora, but in a friendly, calm sort of way. Not like this,” as he wrapped this large hand under a breast and lifted it up, up to his mouth.

She moves around the gurney to the other hand, the one stroking her face, her round belly, her voluminous thighs. This hand is surprisingly different. Both its heart and life lines are deep and long and slightly meandering. There are smaller lines that do not appear on his other palm, and a few seem to be absent. The callused bumps at the base of each finger are more pronounced. So she has two hands to memorize: either a full depiction of Phil, or two separately incomplete ones.

Nora’s the artist, she’s the one who takes shapes and ideas and visions and does something with them. Sophie will be the engraver, etching each ridge, hollow and line of Phil’s hands, the length and breadth of each finger, each curve and bump, into memory. For what purpose? Maybe to bear in her mind like a keepsake; maybe only, after all, the way other people hold on to significant restaurant menus, birthday cards, movie stubs.