Читать книгу Promiscuous Unbound - Bex Brian - Страница 6

My jaw is popping. Loudly, with each chew. Haven’t I enough bones out of whack? I had Sonia lay her ear against my cheek just before she abandoned me to see if it was audible to the world.

“That’s disgusting,” she said, curling her lip. “Your jaw, it is cracking.”

“Oh good,” I told her. “For a minute there I thought it was a ticking time bomb.”

She rolled her eyes and left. I can hear her now mooning around the nurses’ station. She doesn’t like to be in the room while I eat. I make too much of a mess, never managing to bring a grizzly, gravy-soaked piece of meat to my mouth without some spillage. The blue-haired woman who comes to collect my tray likes to make the tired joke that it would be better if I ate my meal rather than wore it. Today, finally, I told her to fuck off. She went away without bothering to clean me up. For the rest of the day I’ll have to suffer these oily splotches and the discomfort of bread crumbs, intrepid little fuckers, working their way, stealthily, down and across my bed.

Sonia is laughing like a hyena. She’s trying to make friends with Dr. Luc’s girlfriend, throw her off the scent so to speak. I think she is wasting her time. The woman’s jokes aren’t that funny. Sonia is more likely to rouse suspicion than anything else. I wish instead she would cross the corridor and try and get a peek at the new patient, the one who, if the night nurse’s information is good, was found wandering the streets in a state of acute panic. All week Sonia has been bringing me bits and pieces about her that she’s picked up in her rambles around the hospital. Yesterday’s morsel was that she is a refugee. My first thought? Potbellied children and glassy-eyed women with bundles on their heads trudging along sunbaked mud roads. But the night nurse, having hoisted me up to wash my backside, gave me a smart smack on the rump and sharply reminded me of Kosovo. No drought-baked nakedness. No sun-exposed skin withered to leather. This girl made her trek through the verdant green of a Balkan summer in stonewashed Levi’s, Nike sneakers, and a Boss T-shirt.

“Nowhere is somewhere,” my father told me once, years ago, in Africa when we were traveling south after a long stay at Kenya’s Lake Turkana. We were alone, a rarity—no film crew, no producer, no deadline. Only each other. Never easy. The fear that the next moment will bear no relation to the last. I chattered away, which didn’t help. The road before us was blocked by ragged bands of refugees from the north. Some, I could see as we honked and nosed our way through, had stopped, laid down their belongings, while others simply kept on moving, with no apparent end in sight. Really it could only have been an internal clock that made the one group decide that there, rather then two miles back where we saw the exact same muddy watering holes and blanched landscape, or two miles on, was the place to settle.

“But why there as opposed to . . . ?” I kept on asking, waving my hand out the window as if I could grab some meaning out of the stifling air. My father’s admonishment did nothing to lessen my confusion.

“Nowhere is somewhere.”

Later, much later, while following a band of Turkana nomads, those storied travelers, we decided we needed a break from their smoky fires and bleating goats. Together we climbed a mountain, our feet knocking loose the crumbly striated cliff face, all of geological history laid bare. I felt, as we scrambled over rock and thorn, as if we were kicking away time itself. At the top, resting against a termite mound, we could see far down below us for miles all around the worn routes traveled for millennia by the nomads, etched in the earth, like the Nazca Lines of Peru. “Nowhere isn’t somewhere,” I thought. Even those in a constant search for water and grazing never, ever veer off course.