Vital Signs (13 page)

Hamada walked to the front of the Jeep, opened the hood and examined the engine. He unhooked the hose which led from the engine to the tank, inspecting it before going to the back of the Jeep, where he dug out some rubber piping. Returning to the engine, he leapt onto the edge of the Jeep’s frame, inserted the pipe and devised a siphon, which, he explained, would let him extract the water that had been added to stretch the cheap black-market fuel.

“That is normal for Egypt,” he said as he brought the stiff pipe to his mouth and held it firmly between his lips. I felt my knee buckle ever so slightly as he sucked. Anna observed him without emotion, taking in the angle of the pipe in his mouth, presumably grateful that Hamada was saving us from a cruel death of scorching, starvation and blindness.

I stepped forward.

“Anything I can do to help?” I knew about cars, having grown up with auto parts strewn about the fields next to our farmhouse near Kleinburg. My father loved getting
under the hood of our Ford, always ready to communicate his deep pleasure in the way things connected: plugs and oil and carburetor and ignition.

Hamada said nothing, of course, and how foolish of me to have expected him to, with that thing in his mouth. Anna did not take her eyes off his lips.

“Do you remember, Anna?” I say, and I realize that she and I are alone in the hospital room now. I shove the blank paper and drawing in my hands into my jacket pockets. I have no idea where Charlotte and Sasha have gone. Probably off to torture the male nurse—all of them with this power to give such delightful pain.

Anna looks at me, as though she too has just remembered that I’m in the room.

“The desert night. The fox we heard around the tent,” I say.

She stares and seems to be searching her memory. Was I wrong? Had she not been referring to Hamada just now?

“Anna,” I say again. She moves her mouth as if to speak, but I see how she stops herself. She shakes her head.

She stares.

I wait.

“Anna, please!” I am beginning to lose control.

I look towards the door, dismayed by my own tone. How fortunate we are that my insurance has paid for this private room, where I can yell at my wife with impunity, minutes before she is to have her head sliced open. For God’s sake. My head falls into my hands.

“Everything okay in here?” a thin, delicate nurse says from the doorway. I look up and nod. Anna smiles at her and waves, and the woman retreats with relief.

“Anna, I’m so sorry,” I say.

She shakes her head, still refusing to speak, and I think it’s for fear that I will shout at her again.

I sit on the bed and begin to cry. Anna raises her hand towards my face, but I intercept it with my own hand. I put my other hand on her shoulder.

“I meant the night in Egypt. Remember how cold it was?”

She nods, but I don’t think she does remember. I can feel that cold right now as I stroke Anna’s hand. Her eyes close. Perhaps she is falling asleep. I keep stroking.

As the sun sank in the White Desert, the sky turned the colour of a cantaloupe. We drove a few more un-sputtering miles, the Jeep’s fuel now cleansed of the destructive water.
We searched for a suitable site to stop for the night, and eventually pulled up in the shelter of a bleached sandstone beetle. Hamada unpacked and began to set up camp. I looked on, helpless, knowing better than to offer assistance, but Anna didn’t suffer from the same inhibition. I watched as she took out our food supply and laid out the vegetables on the grand Bedouin rug that would be our dining room that evening. While Hamada tended the fire, slowly turning sticks to even out the flame, waiting for the wood to become ash and charcoal, and then repeating the cycle, Anna began to peel potatoes and then wash them in a basin with water from the plastic jug that Hamada had set down beside her. It was as though they had done this hundreds of time before, together.

“Here,” he said, after noticing she was struggling to make the knife work without a cutting board or hard surface. He took the knife from her, held a potato in his other hand, and with a movement that looked like the delicate polishing of a stone, the potato was diced, magically. I watched Anna’s face change like an old-fashioned animation cartridge—each minute gesture captured in successive frames: Anna curious, Anna bemused, Anna wary, Anna delighted and Anna radiant.

“Hamada,” she said, as though the sound of the syllables gave her pleasure.

He grilled chicken on the fire, as the potatoes boiled over the gas cylinder camp stove. To accompany the meal we had more of the red sorrel tea that I’d quickly grown to love. We ate in silence, I remember. It was my silence,
I realize now, but at the time I was certain that it was theirs. The sky grew dark, but above us the stars were like hundreds of small fires in call and response with our own.

Again at night the desert turned intensely cold. I couldn’t step away from the fire without thinking I might die from exposure in a place that just a few hours ago had made me swoon from heat. Hamada made a faint noise—and Anna stirred as though recognizing this as the signal to retire to our tent for the night. Hamada stood and put out the remaining flame in the firepit with his bare foot. I watched Anna turn back in time to catch the last dab of his toe on the log, which he flicked over into the sand, allowing the remaining embers to glow, their faint whisper rising to the stars. I saw her shudder.

I stood and followed her into the small nylon tent, my shoulders twitching with the unbelievable chill of the brittle night.

“God, it’s freezing,” I said, a statement so obvious that I instantly felt foolish in front of my own wife. I dared to take off my shoes so that I could slide into my sleeping bag, hoping the extra layer would quell my shivering. I looked up and caught Anna’s eye; her face gave away nothing.

I heard a noise outside, a kind of skittering that couldn’t possibly have been a human. But what then? A snake? A rat? I heard Hamada groan in the distance. His bed of rugs, woven saddlebags and camel blankets was in the open air, under the full canopy of stars, and somehow warm enough for him.

Anna dropped down to her knees. She pawed at the sleeping bag in which I had entombed myself.

“Wasn’t that an amazing day,” she said. The beam of the flashlight, which was perched on her cosmetics bag, illuminated the corner where the red nylon panels of the side and top met, making our tent look slanted—a lopsided cubist tent.

She pulled my sleeping bag down.

“What are you doing?” I pleaded, grabbing the edge of the bag and holding tight to stop the warmth from escaping. She didn’t look up, but I felt her smile. Her silhouette widened, her hand loosened my grip and, leaning her head towards my lap, she pulled the sleeping bag down to my knees.

“Anna,” I said, and I thought I heard the skittering outside again, louder this time and possibly human.

“Shhh,” she whispered, and touched my face ever-so briefly. She unclasped my belt and slid my fly down. I freed my leg from the sleeping bag and lost track of the skittering sound, then of sound altogether as I swelled at the smell of her hair in the tent, the lopsided angle of her head silhouetted against the nylon wall as she bent over and kissed my cock. And again, gently, one touch of her lips. I throbbed in response. Another kiss. And another.

She took me in her mouth and held on. She swirled her tongue over the small vein at the base of the head, where she knew it would have its greatest effect. And then, suddenly, I pictured Hamada’s face, the pipe that led to the gasoline tank, and I softened.

I pushed away the image and focused again on her lips. She took me in deeper than ever, it seemed, and then there was nothing in this world but her mouth.

I came quickly. She swallowed.

I sat up and looked toward her face, feeling the need to apologize, fearing she hated me then.

“Darling,” she said, and I felt her face widen again in a smile. “I think a fox has taken the chicken bones.”

“What?” I asked.

“You’re not cold now,” she said, feeling my fingers. She pulled the sleeping bag up around me.

And as my bald wife lies sleeping, in a brief moment of respite from the slow drip that is eroding her faculties, I see her face as first on the list of things that I have never truly trusted. Trust requires a faith, which I have never had, that life will treat me as it should. It requires me to trust death the way I trusted being born.

I am not half the man Hamada was: a man with three wives, he was required by the laws of his faith, to care for each equally, provide for each identically, and serve all of them wholly. I gave Christine much less than I have given Anna. I have resisted everything that says that service is freedom and that the small acts of forbearance between two people are … are what? They are more than I know.

I don’t know her.

She might be going to her death, and I have never known her. Why have I left everything so late?

“Anna,” I say, gently, trying to wake her, but not wanting to startle her. “Anna?” I touch the side of her face. Her eyes open and she looks at me as though I’ve slapped her.

“Melting,” she says.

“Can you hear me?”

“Thimbles.”

“Sweetheart.” I take the hand that she holds out to me. It is shaking.

“Miming—” Again she stops. At least she can stop herself now, I think. If she can control herself, perhaps it’s only her tongue that is not working. Her brain, I tell myself, is fine. Is really fine.

“Anna, we’re ready for you, dear,” says Rosie as she enters, followed by the delicate nurse from earlier.

“Wait!” I say. “Wait.” The second time more politely, as I turn to confront her.

Rosie shakes her head at me. “The doctors are ready; we have to go now.”

I stand in front of Anna, blocking the nurse’s access to the bed.

“We have to go now,” Rosie says.

“But the girls aren’t here,” I say, stalling.

“I’m sorry,” Rosie says, and puts her hand on my arm and gently moves me out of the way.

I take last night’s drawing from my pocket.

“Break knack picking stick,” Anna says. I step forward again and slide the drawing in my hand underneath the edge of her pillow.

“That’s right, dear,” the nurse says, and for a moment I believe she’s telling me I did the right thing, but I feel unravelled.

“Mom,” Charlotte says as she enters the room. Anna smiles at her, and then at Sasha, who follows behind.

“Mommy,” Sasha says, and we all notice this regression, but not even Charlotte, who is holding onto the shoulder of her mother’s hospital gown with a terrified grip, would dare comment now. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be right here. I can’t wait to see you when you wake up,” Sasha says, her voice as steady as one of her pirouettes.

Rosie pulls up the brakes on the bed. I lean in and kiss Anna on her lips, and she holds my head to hers. The nurses wait patiently as I release myself from the kiss and smile at my wife.

“Okay, then, we’re off,” says Rosie, and with a flourish Anna is wheeled out of the room. I catch her face just in time to recognize that she is terrified. I run along behind her towards the operating rooms and stop just as the
restricted area doors swing shut. I am suddenly a character in some TV melodrama that I used to mock my children for watching.

The hospital cafeteria smells like a combination of processed cheese and a wet animal. The stench is so appalling that it overwhelms my attempt to come up with a sign for a public eating place.