Streams of Babel (7 page)

"A determined little prick," I finished for him as the elevator delivered us into the basement.

"Crusade rider, that's for sure. I'd imagine her over in Beirut, either siding with the extremists or picking them up by the throat and hurling them into the Wailing Wall. It's hard to say what she did over there, because I think she was a morph addict already when she came home five years ago. All Natalie Holman ever said was 'She's home, she's injured, and it's sad.'"

We turned the corner of a long hallway. The morgue is buried deep, down near the back entrance.

He went on. "Johnny looked at her arm, the old injury, just for curiosity's sake. He dug in with a scalpel just below the shoulder and stopped ... said if he went even halfway around her flesh, the whole limb would have landed on the floor with a splat. Hell of an injury. The muscle and cartilage were 90 percent severed, hanging mostly by veins and scar tissue. It's a wonder she didn't get gangrene."

"Wonder how she got hurt in the first place," I muttered, remembering Cora Holman's claims not to know herself.

"Johnny said the only time he'd seen an injury like that, right at the joint, was in a guy who'd had his shoulder run over by a truck. Only in her case, none of the bones had been broken. Looked to him like somebody just tried to wrench her arm off—just kept twisting and twisting, back and forth until—" He stopped himself with a cough and a sour face. Even I was struggling with that mental picture. "At any rate, gangrene might have been a blessing. An amputation and an artificial limb would have been a better deal, though it's neither here nor there now."

"So, did Johnny examine her brain?"

"He was just getting out the buzz saw when a guy from your night squad bumped into me in the men's room, said they'd brought in your mother about an hour back. I shot up here. I ought to call Rain—make sure she's not out cruising—"

"Rain's at our house," I told him casually. "She dropped in to see Owen after swimming and fell asleep on the couch. She woke up when the squad came in to pick up Mom, but she's with Owen."

"She was sleeping before midnight?" He slowed again, watching me. "Is she all right? She has a cold ... thinks I don't know. I'd hoped it wasn't caught from your house."

I didn't feel it was my job to bust Rain yet, though I watched him sympathetically. "Alan. Don't freak. Your kid does not have an emerging infectious disease."

The door ahead opened, and Johnny Gallagher appeared in fresh scrubs. I wondered if he was just taking a needed break. I knew doctors don't like to work on potential AIDS autopsies for long periods without a break. The theory goes that they can lose their concentration and get careless with the scalpel. He rubbed Mr. Steckerman's shoulder as we came up. "I don't think you want to go back up there. She, um, looks a bit strange."

Strange...
that was an unusual term for our normally precise coroner. "What, you still got her face down under her chin? Sew her back together so Alan won't puke, and let us on the deck. What's the story?"

"She's sewn up. She, uh ... bled out into her skull," he said. "Brain aneurysm. I'm certain the lab results will show she was loaded up on morphine, but aneurysm is the cause of death."

Nothing contagious. Nothing I hadn't seen before. "What do you mean, she looks strange? She looked fine when I picked her up. For a corpse."

"Her features are ... let's say ... without their usual dimension." He spoke more to Alan than to me. "The problem is that aneurysm usually just bleeds out into the skull. It doesn't penetrate the sinus cavity and exit the facial orifices. Passages to the ear, nose, and throat are not easily compromised, but some of her tissue samples were like cooked noodles, and her sinuses were like Jell-O. They had started to crystallize before I even opened them. I sewed her back up as fast as I could, but I needed the samples and had to follow protocol. Personally, I've
never seen tissue compromise quite like that before. I could have written my name in her sinuses with a blunt pencil."

I suddenly wished Alan and I had not just been heaped in conversations about the CDC. Sometimes there's a thin line between thinking of the worst that can happen and letting your imagination run wild, especially when your work involves the more colorful aspects of public service.

But I changed my mind about seeing this corpse and backed away slowly toward the elevator. Alan didn't try to stop me, but we locked eyes as I pushed the elevator button. The eerie chat-room blather he'd mentioned was stuck all over my head:
Waters will run red in Colony One ... Waters will run red three hours from Home Base in December ... They will drink in December and die like mangy dogs in April.
I tried telling myself all sorts of reality, like that of all the places on the globe to be terrorized, it just doesn't happen to your hometown, and also that the water towers had come up pristine when they had been tested.

But I kept seeing the image of Mom sticking her worn-out Evian bottle up to the tap several times a night. And the sicker she got, the more she'd try to flush it by drinking the water.

I didn't want to make myself nuts. I just felt like I ought to go see her again and make sure she was okay.

CORA HOLMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2002
4:59
A.M.

I WOKE AGAIN toward dawn to actually find myself in Oma's room, pulling boxes off her closet shelf. The line between sleeping and waking had been that thin for many hours, so I was not exactly stunned.

But I couldn't remember what I had been rooting for, until boxes lay strewn around me and I had the item in my grip, pulled from a box of my fourth-grade Girl Scout projects.

Baba.

"Cora, how can you put that crusty lamb under your face? Give it to me. I'm gonna wash it—"

"Oma, you can't put Baba in the washer! He'll drown!"

"Just so you know..." Oma waves her cigarette toward Baba, so I cover Baba's nose. "...that lamb is full of five years of kid drool. And the terry cloth might as well have gone through chemo. Oh, what the hell. God bless America, where kid germs are sweet as honey."

I sniffed Baba warily. And as if I had smelled the sweet aroma of comfort and security only yesterday, I squashed him into my neck like I used to and stumbled back down the hall.

As I waited for sleep in the dark, I noticed my mother's notebook on the nightstand. I couldn't remember bringing it into my bedroom. Had I walked in my sleep earlier? It seemed to me I woke up one other time to find myself at the window—staring out at Shore Road as if I were waiting for some car. But I couldn't remember bringing that journal in here, and now it had a strange hue, as if the pages in the binding were glowing neon.

The room had turned from black to an ashen gray. Outside, the blackbirds were already calling.
Sunrise is causing that glow.
But I had no intention of reading Aleese's blather—not when I felt so weak and chilled after my trip down the hall.

"
Jack fell down ... broke his crown ... Jill ... gets gangbanged
by a
—"

I cleared my throat just to wipe out the crude echoes of Aleese's humor. It made me cough, which made me realize my left eye had been throbbing for some time. It seemed hard to pick out one particular ache when I ached all over, but now it was strong enough that I couldn't control where my mind went.

"...by a goddamn bunch of rabid, fucking goons."

My mother sounded like some bizarre combination of
Alice in Wonderland
and
Boyz N the Hood.
Oma's words returned, about Jack and Jill and kings and queens and countries losing wars.

Was Aleese "Jill" and my father "Jack"? Was this Jeremy Brandruff Ireland "Jack," and some sort of a great leader?
Was my father royalty?
Had he led Aleese to take pictures of a battle?
I enjoyed a number of possibilities until echoes of Aleese's moaning filled my head again. "
Oh ... Mogadishu!
"

I remembered something ... A bunch of guys from school had seen a movie,
Black Hawk Down,
and they came into physics one Monday talking in disgust about the Somali people in the city of Mogadishu, either ... eating American soldiers alive ... or dragging them alive through the streets until they died ... I hadn't been paying enough attention.

Obviously, Aleese had been in Mogadishu at some point, though that information, like most concerning her adult life, had died with her. I knew she had not been in the military and could not have been involved in the
Black Hawk Down
violence, which had occurred in the midnineties. Putting anyone I knew at the events that sparked a movie seemed almost impossible—and with my mother, it seemed almost laughable.

"It wouldn't kill you to pick up after yourself once in a while. I'm not your nursemaid, Aleese."

I'm just back from singing in the choir's holiday show. I'm picking up socks, beer cans, used tissues that have been thrown at the television screen, at yet another depressing documentary. I realize I've kept my posture very straight while picking things up, squatting with my legs turned sideways instead of stooping or bending. It's part of me lately, this perfect posture, along with reaching for perfect, proper English. It sets me at odds with Aleese, assuring me that I don't have to end up like her.

"You don't know what dirt is, brat. You have never seen dirt."

"I've seen you, and I would say that is plenty."

"Yeah ... I guess I'm pretty scurvy anymore. Sorry about that."

It sounds almost sincere. She can sound very sincere for a mo
ment or two. I wait for her to explode into some deplorable punch line, but she doesn't this time.

"Why don't you get some help, Aleese? Why don't you go to a rehab clinic?"

"
Because." She picks up her jelly arm and lets it flop down again like she sometimes does to amuse herself. "Did you know that even if I came up with the money for an amputation, this would still hurt? Did you know it would hurt all the way down to here?" She makes a swiping motion at her hip.

I feel a stab of pity and continue around, picking up whatever she had dropped, thrown, or left around that week. She's manipulative. Oma had always whispered that. I had to be careful not to get sucked in to her pity parties.

"There's got to be something you can do so that you're not always—" I stop. I was going to say, "so horrid. You're like a person possessed by the devil."

She sits up, and at this point I do get scared, because her dark eyes blacken, like they can when she decides to fly at me. She's always stopped short of hitting somehow, but she gets me in death grips—by the arm, the neck. She can be amazingly strong, even with one bad limb.

"So that I'm not always what? What, Cora! So I'm not always bothering
you?
You have no idea how good you have it! You were raised so goddamn spoiled, you need to visit a few other countries. And do you know how easily I could have had an abortion?"

I smooshed Baba tighter under my chin and wished for sleep, but my mind refused to shut down. Jeremy Brandruff Ireland. September 1, 1957–. I reached for the notebook again, to stare at this name, to see if the air still spun when I thought,
"
My father.
" My eyes glazed over, unable to focus enough to read, though I was pretty certain that if the name Jeremy Ireland had passed by my eyes, I would have noticed. But one half-interesting fact came clear: You could tell when Aleese was needing her drugs, because her pretty, rounded handwriting would turn squarish and jagged, and her sentences became twisted and full of embittered words.

I'd heard enough of that in five years, so my eyes sought a passage that was rounded and pretty. Very few at the end were, but toward the beginning, they were about half and half. I stared at one dated just a few days before the first one I'd read ... it looked like she was also on an airplane. My eyes zeroed in, maybe because it was melodious, almost rocking me and Baba...

It's as if this airplane is soaring upward, upward, upward, through the reaches of space, presenting the grand overview of our troubled planet as the sun sets behind it. I think of the wars and the rumors of wars, and I see little pinpricks of orange blink and bulge on the Dark Continent, as the blazes of war snuff out dozens more lives before returning to black.

Then Asia flickers—first Palestine, then Iran, then Jordan, then Iraq, then back downward to the Nile again, and over Africa. I can hear a million voices—victims on tenor, terrorists on bass, soldiers on baritone, civilians on alto, children on soprano. As we used to say in school choir,
"God, somebody's off!"

We are, all of us, conjoined in sad song, committed to our marriage of bad harmonies. We're linked as closely to those whom we hate as those whom we love. Film and photo
and e-mail and planes—they pull our faces together as tightly as beads on a string. A hand waves in North Africa; a wind ripples in America. A gun designed in Virginia, with metal purchased from China, sends its bullet through the guts of a foot soldier in Somalia. The hateful collide with the loving; the wise collide with the foolish; the loving are sometimes hateful; and the simplest of people often seem to be most wise. And as I've already proposed, the dead collide with the living, and if I'm not proof of that, then nothing is.

I'm returning to America, because I want to die there, because for me, there is nothing left. Nothing except some memories, and One Nation under God, which, in spite of all its little hypocrisies and ill-bred boorishness, still appears to have Providence on its side. It's the one place where, from up here, I don't see the orange flickers of civil unrest, political upheaval, or invasion. America has managed to keep its dignity. Even though I have not, I want to be part of it again. I want to die in my own backyard, where dignity persists, like the wildflowers that bloom regardless of what men can do...