“How did you get out?”
“Down the hall . . . the other outlaw.” Her eyes droop shut. I shake her.
“Tell me! How?”
She tries to keep her eyes open, blinking furiously, staring. She gasps out a few words.
“Had it worked out . . . she got the guard back over to the nurse’s station for coffee. Those guys talk while I take the stairs down to the lobby. On my own, then.”
“How come they didn’t see you?”
Agnes’s eyes shut, her mouth drops open, and she’s out again, snoring. I go into the bathroom, get the washcloth wet, bring it out, and wipe her face, her throat, wrists, arms. I shake her.
“Uh-oh.” She grins slightly, rousing herself. “I had on this paira extra-large blue scrubs, lab coat. Actually, actually . . . oh, uh, I made it out the side doors to a Dumpster. Alla way down there. I was sposed to pretend to have a smoke, then this frienda mine, watching, she’d get me.”
“How? Who?”
I shake Agnes harder, desperately, but she’s gone again.
“How did you contact your friend?” I ask her sleeping face, over and over, but I can’t rouse her this time. I sit on my bed watching her sleep. It’s funny, watching someone sleep—how it tells you things about them you’d never know when they were awake. Agnes looks so sad in her sleep, for instance, not angry at all. Her sorrow is so naked. It is like the sorrow of the Virgin Mary, her knowingness, her foresight. And I’m helpless to change things. All I can do is untie her restraints. I do that, and then I watch over her, knowing I’m no protection.
One hour later, two nurses enter the room and draw the curtains around Agnes.
“Wake up,” I cry. I swing my legs over the sides of my bed and struggle through the curtains. “What are you doing with her!”
“Just prepping her,” says one of the rosy, chubby nurses, a woman Agnes calls the Cheesehead. Her voice is sweet, cheerful, even kindly. “Don’t worry. It’s a happy day, Cedar, it’s time for Agnes to have her baby!”
“You’ll see your friend in a couple, three hours,” says the other, a skinny black-eyed brunette with long yellow teeth, as they pull aside the curtains. But just as they are getting ready to wheel her out, Agnes comes to. She wakes in absolute silence, no warning, and flips out of the bed. One minute she’s totally limp, faking, and the next she’s got a fist and a foot out and she’s ripped the IV out of her hand. She springs up, uses the light aluminum IV stand like a kung fu fighting pole. She slams rosy Cheesehead on the side of the skull and cracks the skinny nurse across the throat so that suddenly they are both bent over, gagging.
“Help me!”
A thin orderly in blue scrubs darts in and seizes Agnes from behind. He crashes down, his nose spouting blood, when she cracks him with a back head-butt of her skull. I run over and sit down on him—oddly, he stays still. He could throw me off, but he doesn’t. He whispers, “Keep sitting on me.” Either he’s a pervert, I think, or he’s on our side and wants to stay out of the way, giving Agnes a chance. So I keep sitting on the man, who struggles beneath me in a halfhearted way. Agnes whirls, grinning at me, her white ass glowing through the wings of the hospital gown. Then she flies out the door, down the hall. I jump up and get to the door in time to see her bowl right over a chubby, short male doctor, who sprawls, groping for his glasses. I run out after her, into the hall, and see that with incredible quickness she’s got to the emergency stairway. I take two steps. The last I see of Agnes is the black vigor of her bleached hair roots and the abrupt yellow of the ends as her hair flags out, flying through the staircase door.
The OB doctor bumbles to his feet and yells for help, but it’s too late.
After that, I ask every nurse who comes in where Agnes went, if she got out, if she’s all right. Every one of them gives me a pleasant smile, a little laugh, a cheery wink.
“Oh, Agnes? She’s fine. She went home.”
October 5
They replace her with a young Asian woman who radiates intensity. She’s both demure and severe. Intimidating. She has either stopped speaking or speaks no English, and she might be insane. She stares into space, humming off-key monotonous tunes. She plucks at the weave of her blanket, removing long strings which she begins to wind into a ball, tiny the first day, much bigger the next. She has apparently unraveled her blanket all night. She hides the ball when the nurse comes in. The blanket is halfway gone. The woman reminds me of a perfect industrious spider, so quiet, fingers moving, moving, moving. She gets on my nerves and the food tastes horrible now. Lunch is a tan piece of seared flesh-substance, with canned beans and a quarter of a rotted tomato, a plastic bowl of cold, white pudding. I can’t believe I ate this food and liked it—that drug was awesome. The room is drab, the paint stained and peeling, and the photographs are tattered and saccharine. One is a big daisy with nineteen petals and three out-of-focus leaves. Another is a picture of a cozy Cape Cod with light flooding out the windows onto a bank of ratty snow. I hear the other women’s voices, whining or furious, and smell rank smells—shit, fear, chemical exhalations, isopropyl alcohol, and the food, always the spoiling food. Oh, the drugs have worn off, for sure, with a vengeance. It is very difficult to flush the next morning’s vitamin. I want my happy hospital back again. I want to sit here and contemplate how big you’re getting, how healthy, your little lungs continuing to strengthen. Your brain building configurations in rapid waves. Thoughts occurring, perhaps. I want to marvel at even the sharpest of your kicks and punches. So active! But I’m sick knowing what happened to Agnes. I think they killed her during her C-section. I think they have cremated her. I think there are full-time full-capacity crematoriums going night and day in the exurbs. And I also cannot stop my mind from weaving scenarios of dread and terror about my parents, both sets, about Little Mary, and especially about Phil.
My heart squeezes and pumps with an uncontainable energy, a useless urge to rush to him and comfort him and have him save us, too, by the way.
My roommate’s blanket is completely unraveled and she has a couple of huge balls of yarn hidden in the undercarriage of her bed. The nurse brings her another blanket, then leaves two more when—with a delicate sneeze and a sweet smile, a mimed shiver —my roommate indicates that she is cold. For a moment, I think she’s in her right mind, but then as soon as we are alone again she works obsessively to pick apart a beginning point on one of the new blankets. Soon she begins unraveling it exactly like the first.
I’m going to have to plot my way out. I wish Agnes had left the name of what must have been a helpful nurse, the other outlaw, she said. I don’t know how to find the nurse except to talk to all of the nurses. Get to know them. Engage them personally, make friends with them if I can. So on the fourth day after Agnes either escapes or dies, I rouse myself and begin to walk the corridors; it’s exercise anyway, and rocks you to sleep. You’re very active now, twisting, bumping me hard. I need to walk in order to calm these frequent attacks of fear and adrenaline that overwhelm me when I think of what will happen to you, or think of what has already happened to Phil.
I keep imagining him walking into the house and not finding me there. I imagine his rough cries. I know exactly how his face would look, registering disbelief, then growing knowledge, then a kind of unsettled anger, at first frantic and then resolute. He’s going to find me, I think that he already knows where I am. There will be a sign. I must stay ready for the sign, remain alert, prepare myself, stay strong. So I drink the powdered OJ and eat the rancid eggs, the strange bread, the curdled milk, and the coffee-type beverage so acidic it brings tears to my eyes. I eat the bean paste and slimy orange slices, the wads of wet Kleenex that are supposed to be mashed potatoes, and I walk up and down the one corridor, observing the routine, looking for a hole in the day.
October 8
I continue to make light chat with the nurses—and I ask the one nurse who has stayed clear of me, stayed behind the desk, in fact, if she knows where Agnes Starr went. I have already nickn
amed this nurse the Dweeb. She’s a pale, skinny, chinless, thick-eyeglass-wearing nerdy type of woman. She is unnoticeable, really, as manila as her stacks of folders. But when I ask her my question, “Where did Agnes Starr go?” she blinks at me, draws closer, looks at me carefully, waits for another nurse to leave the desk, then tells me the truth.
“They cornered her in the lobby, took her down. Knocked her out, solid. Agnes never made it off the delivery table.”
I stand there looking at the nerd-nurse, the Dweeb, who calmly regards me, her washed-out eyes now steady behind her thick, round, Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses.
“You’re the one who tried to help her.”
“I’m Jessica, they call me Jessie.”
“The other outlaw.”
“Whatever. You can’t talk to me again, you’ll blow things.”
“But I need your help, please. I’ve got to get out.”
“Yes,” says the mousy, bland, limp-haired, and cave-chested woman, her voice brightening to a false luster as another nurse approaches, “I’m working on that. Believe me, I really am.”
I turn away.
“You’re all alike,” I say to the other nurse. “She wouldn’t let me use the phone.”
“You know there’s no phone service,” says the nurse in a melting, soothing, frightful voice. “Let’s go back to your room, shall we, and see if we can put a movie in for you.”
I follow her back to my room and don’t watch one of the movies from the little library—The Bells of St. Mary’s. The nurse puts it in, but I keep my eyes on my hands. The movie is cover, allowing me to think. For the next few hours I sit picking apart my waffle-weave blanket, reducing it the way my roommate is doing, to an angry ball of yarn. As I wind the string, I begin to talk and then just keep talking, why not? I’m sure my roommate doesn’t understand me, but I’ve got to hear somebody talking, a voice, some form of understanding, even if it’s only myself.
“You and me could be related,” I say to her. “Have you ever heard of the Bering Strait? The land bridge theory?”
My roommate just keeps picking at her blanket and smiles gently at me. She feigns listening politely, and I somehow appreciate that. I notice that she uses a square knot when she pieces together stretches of yarn. On my walks, I take dirty blankets from the hampers in the hallway, bundle them under my robe, next to you. If she’s up to something, I want to be working with her. So now I’m picking my own blanket apart just the way she does. Talking to her.
“We possibly share the major DNA haplotype B marker found in most American Indians as well as people in Ulaanbaatar,” I tell my roommate. She gives a tiny, polite, oh-you-don’t-say smile. “Not that all Native views coincide here, mind you, there are plenty of people who believe that their particular tribal origin spot—hill, lake, cave, mountain—is the real place they emerged from. As much as I’d like to believe the same, I was raised with a reductionist worldview and think at least some of our people came across the land bridge in a steady migration, a trickle really, for tens of thousands of years. Then there were the people who navigated the sea to South America. And the ones who dropped from the stars. Over a hundred million of us until de Soto’s pigs got loose, Pizarro coughed, Captain John Smith sneezed. All that. Diseases killed ninety-nine percent of us. Of course, your and my families lost touch over time.”
She makes a pleasant humming sound of assent.
“But I feel comforted to renew the acquaintance now,” I say, and nod at her. We smile a bit idiotically at each other until we hear a nurse approaching. We quickly hide our handiwork. My roommate pretends to sleep and I paste a dreamy drug-addled smile on my face. The nurse who is working with former Dweeb nurse, now Jessie, brings us a couple of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, with a side of army-green boiled peas. My roommate pretends to wake up. She nods and twinkles her eyes at the nurse, who says to me, “Isn’t she adorable?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Has she said a word?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, I’ll leave you two to enjoy your lunch.”
“Thanks. This looks sooooo good!”
“Bye-bye,” she says to my roommate. “You little China doll.”
As the nurse turns away my roommate watches her, unblinking, from under her eyebrows. She tips her head to the side, smiles. Deadly.
“Wow, I hope you never look at me that way,” I say, impressed.
She opens her mouth, as if she might speak. But shakes her head and goes all demure again.
“Oh all right! You’re so fucking mysterious! What the hell? Why don’t you say something?”
Her hands come out. She begins making signs. I took American Sign in high school, at Southwest. So I just laugh.
“You fake,” I say, furious. “I don’t know what the fuck your game is.”
But she won’t say a word, so I eat my lunch. I really am grateful for the peanut butter sandwich. It’s less disgusting than most of our lunches, although the bread is stale and dry. I choke down the spoiled peas for your sake. There’s a glass of powdered milk. I stir the lumps out with a fork and drink it in a gulp. Then the two of us go back to work. Now, just to bug her, I keep talking to my roommate about various pre-Columbian civilizations, touch on crackpot theories, mull over the Kennewick Man, mention skull size and race and anthropology. She nods and hums and keeps winding her ball of yarn. We’ve now taken apart four blankets and have a substantial number of rolled balls hidden in the bottoms of our beds and the ledges underneath and beside the heating duct covers, which I’ve unscrewed and pried away from the walls. Most important, I still keep this notebook, your letter, securely hidden. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t write to you. I don’t think I could stay mentally alive. This is my only drug. The books in my bag were confiscated, and my envelope with the pages of Zeal’s next issue. They have not been given back although I’ve asked for them every day. When I can’t write, or wind yarn any longer, I say the rosary. At least I’ve got that. It’s soothing, the mindless repetition, the smooth beads, the Mother of Infinite Mercy whose cool hands and blue robe I imagine while I am saying the prayers. Only I have to wonder: Is her mouth duct-taped shut? Is she going to answer? Will Kateri? Is anyone listening?
October 9
Maybe they were listening. An astounding thing happens. It is really more than I can stand and the strangeness of it electrifies me. I get mail. I am making my usual corridor stroll up the one thousand and six alternating blue and tan linoleum tiles set in one hundred and sixty-seven rows of six with leftover spaces filled by strips that come out to, I figure, about four tiles in all as they are very thin strips. I am walking down my side of the twenty-two-bedroom ward, past the ten rooms, on each side, then the central nursing station and elevator/lobby/door-to-stairs, and then on past the other rooms, which are always closed and so just numbers to me. Midway back in my walk, the twenty-ninth pass of my morning, I pause at the desk to chat up one of the younger nurses. The elevator opens behind me. Someone brushes my flimsy robe. I look to my left and there stands Hiro, holding the mail out at arm’s length. He puts a rubber-banded stack of envelopes into the hands of the nurse and then turns away without looking at or acknowledging me.
I wait until I am back in my room before I put my hand into the pocket of my robe and in amazement draw forth a letter. A letter. My roommate sees the tip of the envelope. She looks down at her yarn ball quickly, but I catch the glint of one eye. I walk into the bathroom and run water while I open the letter, which at first I am positive is from Phil, and I read.
The letter does not say: I love you more than life—my life or any life—and I am coming to get you. Stay strong.
It does not say: Go to the stairs at 4 a.m. and I will be waiting with a group of people I trust to break you out of that place and take you with me.
What it does say is this: Phil turned you in. Be careful and watch for me. I love you, my darling girl.
The note is written in my Songmaker m
om’s handwriting.
Later on, I tear the note into a thousand bits and flush the pieces down the toilet, all except for the line I love you, my darling girl. I crawl into bed, breathing hard, my heart dead, my breath skipping, burning my lungs. Phil was the one who betrayed us. Angel Phil. I press the little piece of paper to my cheek and shut my eyes. I don’t cry. Crying’s for the little things, I guess. For all the night and the next day I stay catatonic, then on the second day I sit up, weak and dizzy, and eat my rotting breakfast and swallow my vitamin. That day, I blur out, winding yarn. On the third day, with a vast effort of will, and with deep regret, I flush my happy pill. And I think to myself that maybe Sera’s wrong. Maybe she doesn’t know as much as she thinks she knows. Without the first part of the note to look at, I begin to wonder if I even read those words at all. Phil’s fake ring stays on my finger, and I try to forget.
October 12
It happens today, same as before. I stand at the counter, making agonizingly pleasant bullshit small talk with the roundest, most obnoxiously cheerful nurse of them all, Orielee, when behind me the elevator swishes to our floor and stops. The doors open. I know Hiro’s tread and I feel him brush by me. This time I clap an arm down on the pocket of my robe and turn away, shuffle the opposite direction from my room. I make two more corridor walks before going into the bathroom and huddling over my message.
Page 1019
Cured by the Apocalypse?
It is apparent to everyone around me that I am taking perverse pleasure in the contemplation of this massive biological reversal. During the first week that this great symmetricism was revealed, I laughed my head off every night in front of the television. It was not just derision or amusement or outright glee at the reactions of the Know Nothingism nothing Knower creationists, Methodological Naturalists, Anti-Common Descentists, Wedge Strategists, and Macroevolution naysayers who persisted in denying the fundamental elegance and truth of evolution. True, that was very satisfying. It was more. It was awe. In spite of the hardship that a rending of the social fabric might cause for my beloved family, not to mention great unknowns in the area of reverse evolution that will probably result in mass starvation, I was and remain exhilarated. I have started reading Exodus in order to witness the working of the design: 1:18, 2:4, 3:8, 3:18, 3:32, 4:1, 7:18, 7:28, 9:9, 10:6, 13:7, 13:14, 14:11, and 14:19. The opportunity to witness the working of the design unraveling. The sheer thrill of the plan coming to light in each detail. Who says any complexity is irreducible? IT IS BEING REDUCED ALL AROUND US RIGHT NOW. I have the chance each day to marvel at the vast dismantling, and do not want to kill myself so that I can see more of the world’s inner workings.