Vital Signs (2 page)

“What was that?” I asked. She shook her head and we sat down to a silent dinner. I thought she was angry with me, but when I asked her she smiled to reassure me.

Anna and I have always been comfortable with silence. The first time I acknowledged it to myself was one long afternoon, nearly thirty years ago, in my Clinton Street apartment. We had exhausted ourselves with each other, drinking one another’s breath, my hands and tongue probing the curves and crevices of her olive skin, my own body a starved, chalky spade digging, digging to be nearer to her until we lay still. On rising, we spent the rest of the day contentedly washing, reading, cooking—all without speaking.

When Sasha left home two years ago, we greeted the return of our solitude and its silences with some relief. It wasn’t unusual for us not to speak for long periods, and it was no different that day when Anna first uttered her involuntary riddles. She had gone to bed before me, slept soundly and risen silently to make breakfast for us both. But the dusk on the toaster, the fissures on the hummingbirds, and the poor magpies could not go unexamined.

“How are you feeling today, Anna?” Dr. Mead asked her on our first visit. The same question had been asked by our family doctor a few days earlier. Upon hearing Anna’s answer, he had made an emergency call to Toronto Western’s neurology unit.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, the tortoises have lain and are crawling slowly and singing the song for six trees that run through the garden, and we could have dinner on the lawn, but Mike has brought the car and if the teeth are cleaned then we all …” she paused, looking, I believe, at the astonishment on Dr. Mead’s face, and then turned towards me.
Everything went quiet. Dr. Mead reached for his ophthalmoscope; I looked into my lap, guiltily. Anna held her breath as though to cut off oxygen to the nonsense.

Or rather, I thought it was nonsense at the time. More and more every day I find myself drawn into the puzzle of her speech, determined to unravel meaning in each sentence, because now I’m sure it’s there, if I only listen to her in a way I have failed to listen for thirty years.

According to Dr. Mead, what Anna has been doing, and continues to do with increasing intensity, is to compress all of her life moments into one when she speaks. Confabulation, he has told me, stems from a problem of self-definition in time. When she’s with me or the children she seems less scattered about the decades, but what I hear when she’s with Dr. Mead is language scrambled in a time machine. “What’s your name?” Dr. Mead asked her on our first visit. “Me? I’m Anna Tractor, of course,” and then she looked at me, wanting me to confirm that she hadn’t ever taken my name—she was not that kind of woman—and that she was indeed Anna who went by her maiden name. But that name is not Tractor.

Anna’s first name is really Aygül. Aygül—the rose of the moon, in Turkish. It became Anna somewhere along the journey as a baby from Istanbul to Toronto in the 1950s. She grew up as Anna Yilmaz in a row house in the west end of the city, near High Park, and was raised like many immigrant children to be obedient, grateful, humble. Anna told me when we first met that Yilmaz means “never give up.” This moon rose is nothing if not
unyielding. She is a vibrant, eccentric and intelligent woman. She has nothing in common with a tractor. Undoubtedly the light of my life, she is, of course, the curse of it as well, because there have been many days over the last three decades when I believed that without her and the drone of married life and fatherhood I might have lived something magical. I know all the clichés of my “coulda been a contender” regret, but most days I sense that she was my last brilliant choice. Since then I have made choices that have diminished who I was meant to be and what I was meant to have.

Now I must count on Dr. Mead to perform magic: mend the tear in her brain and give my wife back to me, whole, linear, complete. But he is a theory man, not a surgeon, and confabulation is a tricky foe. From a Stayner library book called
Brain Fiction
, I know that confabulators have problems with context. While they appear to have a grasp on their autobiography, it’s a slippery one, like a driver’s control of a car on a snowy highway. Memories drift, swerve, and can skid into a pileup.

When Charlotte was fifteen and we let her go out to a movie with that boy who had teeth too big for his lips, “No!” I said to the teeth and the boy. “Gentle,” you said to the fifteen-year-old in me who had not known how to treat a girl. When she came home I hugged her, and asked if she’d enjoyed the movie. You—you arranged her nightclothes on her bed in an order that was like a sign I could not decipher, a configuration that said, from now on, she would sleep differently
.

We are killing time in a hotel bar. We are mutilating an hour, waiting for Anna’s appointment with the cerebrovascular neurosurgeon who Dr. Mead has arranged for us to see at St. Michael’s Hospital. Why time must always be so brutally disposed of in such circumstances, I do not know.

“Would you like vodka?” I ask Anna. She scans the drinks menu, but I know she will have one of two things: wine or vodka. Occasionally a gin and tonic, but it isn’t warm enough for gin today. It isn’t warm enough for anything today, even though we have passed the solstice and summer has been officially declared. I crave the return of my childhood summers: the consistent, reliable intensity
of heat and sun that made living in this country bearable. Summers as a kid were longer than winters, only because so much happened in them; now they pass like a racing pack of wild things. Anna thrives in the heat, and I am getting too old for the cold that I was born into.

When you lay in the sweat-trough place we find every time, and you put your face in the pit of my arm and smelled me, I was ashamed and outdone by the quality in you that digs deeper than my desire will allow. “How do you feel?” you asked me. I was mute, shut down. And afraid that any answer would imprison me
.

Anna chooses lemonade again and I’m surprised, but I shouldn’t be. She is a woman who understands her body, and would not want alcohol to reduce her already diminished control. As for me, it’s beer again. I gulp it down. It chills me more, and I rub my hands together to murder another minute.

“How do you feel, Anna?” Dr. Gottlieb asks when we finally get in to see him. It’s the same, every appointment. I despise this trick question.

“I’m fine.” Anna says nothing more.

I’m proud of her for throwing the trick back at him.

Dr. Gottlieb stares suspiciously, not understanding my wife the way I do—not knowing how powerful she is. Don’t you see, doctor? She is the one in control. I find myself missing the insolent Dr. Mead, who, when Anna claimed her farm machinery identity, accepted her tease
with a smile, as though he knew what game they would now be playing. Confabulators are not limited to, or inhibited by, their own awareness. Their brain has been set adrift in a galaxy of suppressed alternatives to their own consciousness. It’s possible that the distinction between Anna’s external and internal worlds is becoming vague. In our careful conversations at home yesterday, as we waited to confirm this appointment with Gottlieb, she said only one sentence, “Asparagus electrocuted the ravens,” that caused me any alarm. I became convinced then that Anna is indeed playing with us, and is in complete control.

“The spies came out of the oven and were blue by the time I got to them, and when finally they opened their heads, the pyjamas were torn and all the furniture was wet,” Anna says, unable to hold back any longer. Gottlieb’s eyebrows slide up. My heart silently splinters.

He slowly checks charts and reports, the accumulation of the past weeks of testing. We wait for a pronouncement, but what I really want to do is pick up and leave, I want to take Anna home, and I don’t mean to our house south of Stayner, where the corn has already begun to climb towards my waist from all this rain. I mean to take her to Istanbul, where we will both be warm and where the sun will order her words, as bud to blossom to fruit, in the natural order of spring to summer, not this mad weather, this mad language. As I shift in my chair, I can feel the edge of the sketch pad in my jacket pocket, and the point of the Staedtler liner protruding from it.

“There is an operation,” Dr. Gottlieb offers, as though giving into something he hadn’t really wanted to admit. Anna’s eyes narrow.

“Doctor, please let us know everything,” I say, but what I want to do is punch his nose flat into his face.

“It’s complicated. It involves opening up the skull and fixing a clip on the artery. It’s unlikely the flow will stop on its own, and more likely, if we don’t do anything, the aneurysm will burst. Which would be fatal,” he says, and looks out the window. “We can’t take a chance. It’s not like a leaky tap you can let drip.”

I want to tell him he’s the dripping faucet—this dripping bloody medical profession and all they think they know. I want to tell him to leave my wife alone and let her deal with it, because that’s what she’s always done, always managed—managed both of us, really.

“But the risk is high, you see,” he continues, and again: all that we never know is coming. “There’s a very high risk of brain damage, or even complete disability. And as with any operation, there is the risk of fatality …” He does that doctor thing and looks down at the chart as he says this.

Fatal is what life is in any case, I want to holler back at him.

We listen to some more details, and Anna rubs her hands together. I watch her fingers curl slowly over her knuckles. It is here, now, I think, that my marriage to this woman truly begins. Until now it has mostly been the “better” part of the deal. Here we go, sliding into “worse.”

I cannot see any difference in her. Her skin is still beautiful, despite the age spots, those freckles of experience that dot her fawn-coloured complexion. She has only a few wrinkles beneath her dark eyes, and two lines that put her mouth in parentheses. Her lips have not lost any of their fullness, any of their moisture. She will be fifty-nine in September. This is a woman I have known since her late twenties, and this woman, I believe, right here, right now, in the shadowless sterility of Dr. Gottlieb’s office, I love more than I did three decades ago.

I had been thinking of green, of the greens that I had seen in Indonesia a few months before I met her.

The green of a banana palm is fearless—a green that says it will endure, despite what those who live alongside it will do, despite famine, war, and the swarming of insects. This green says, ha ha, I am serpentine, and light is in my blood. Anna’s shirt that night we met was the colour of those palms. She was nearly twenty-eight, doing a Master’s in Literature at the university. I had just started DesignAge with my partner, Harry, who knew how things worked, who knew how to get himself a BMW and women, and who knew that we didn’t have much time to make it; our time was now. Growing up I had believed that I would be a real artist, a painter, but necessity dictated something else, and I had become a prisoner to shapes and signs and the shared meaning they take on.

On a double date that Harry had arranged with his girlfriend Susan, the four of us sat at a long communal
table in a bar. I was beside Harry and across from Anna. A man in a white shirt sat next to me, angled towards his girlfriend, who looked to be having a miserable time.

“Mike, you’re not eating,” Harry said to me, noting how I’d drifted off, though he might not have guessed that my thoughts involved the colour green. I clipped a french fry between my fingers and bit into it. It was cold, but I picked up another quickly on its trail and nibbled at it distractedly. I couldn’t help wondering if Anna was a Muslim, as I’d learned on my holiday in Java that green had been Mohammed’s favourite colour. The fact was that Anna’s origins puzzled me. Her first name was ordinary, for a Canadian or a Brit or a Spaniard, a Columbian, a Czech. A small, ordinary name for a face so exceptional, and it threw me for the first hour of our dinner together. Harry had told me about Susan’s fellow student, Anna, but he hadn’t mentioned a surname, and it had felt impolite to ask upon meeting her. Her skin glistened like a mineral. As I watched her face it was as if different parts of the world rose up through it—the shiny, mottled variance of the earth. Look, there was south China or Malaysia, look again, the west coast of Africa, then Delhi, Persia, Lisbon, and suddenly somewhere Celtic.

“I can’t believe you ate that,” Anna said to me, smiling, revealing beautifully white teeth, slightly crowded in front at the bottom. The smile made the words a tease.

“Why not?” I asked, already powerless.

“They’re his,” she said, pointing to the bowl of french fries and then the stranger beside me.

I sat up straight, embarrassed, and she laughed.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said, “and you do the same for me some day.”

I would do anything she ever asked of me.

When I took her out the following week to the repertory cinema on Bloor, I was still too shy to quiz her about the continents in her face—the which, where-from and how of someone I thought was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. Her beauty was not traditional, and that made it all the more powerful. She had bold, not refined, features—and her eyes were the quickest I’d ever seen.

“Can I help?” she asked a man in the street outside the cinema as we stood in a line with others waiting to buy tickets. I was confused as to why she was approaching this stranger with her elbow out towards him. The man took her arm; I pinged with jealousy. A minute or so later I realized the man was blind and that Anna was helping him navigate the crowd, which was making his passage along the sidewalk difficult. Anna had noticed his effort before I’d seen a thing.

During the film she kept herself tight in her chair. I have no idea what we watched, and was oblivious to anything but her.

We would lie in bed too long, exhausted by the night of Fred’s wailing. We’d trace the rising stench to Fred’s full diaper, but would try to ignore it, try to clutch the arm of a dream, to stay clear of duty before the sun rose … then one of us would laugh and we’d be bound by the shared trap of our existence
.