Читать книгу The Radiant City - Lauren B. Davis - Страница 5

He wakes up in a hospital. There is pain, a lot of it, but it is over there, in the corner somewhere. It crouches and readies itself to spring into his gut. Someone is moaning. Ah, yes. He is moaning. A nurse’s face appears, her skin like dusty paper, and then a warm liquid spreading, full of happy little massaging fingers. Good drugs, he thinks as he slips away from the crouching pain. Missed me, he thinks. But there is something to be remembered. Something worse even than this pain. But he can remember later. There will be all the time in the world for remembering.

Oblivion cannot last. Refuses to last. The doctors insist the morphine be tapered off. Matthew hates these doctors. And it is good to hate them, for it gives him something to hate other than himself.

His spleen is gone, the doctors tell him. He is a lucky man, they tell him. Another inch or so and the spine might have been severed.

Yes. Lucky. Lucky, Matthew.

The man in the square was not lucky. His daughter was not lucky.

Josh was not lucky.

More drugs please. Heads shake. So he begins screaming, and keeps on screaming, until they give him something and the black curtain tumbles over his eyes.

There are some people. Asking questions. Taking notes. There is a camera. A bright light. More questions. Then nurses are shooing people out. Raised voices. He wonders what he said. He screamed Josh’s name. He knows that much.

Kate is here. Kate with her dark hair, and her vanilla and sandalwood scent, her long-fingered hands, her steel-and-sapphire eyes. Kate at the foot of his hospital bed, her white-knuckled fingers clutching the footboard.

“Hello,” he says.

“I thought you were dead,” she says and it is clear she has done much crying.

“I don’t think so. I’m trying . . .”

She moves to the bedside to kiss him. Her lips feel chapped on his. Her hands are cold on his face. How can anyone be cold in this country?

“How long have you been here?” Time is an impenetrable grey cloud.

“Couple of days. It took a day for them to notify me. Planes, travel, you know.”

“Such a long way to come.”

Kate looks puzzled. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” He fumbles with the sheet. Turns it back, pulls at it.

Looking at her is painful. Being seen by her is worse.

“They say you’re going to have to stay in hospital for a few weeks, anyway. Maybe longer. Three bullets, apparently. They did a bit of a dance around inside you.” She wipes something off his face. “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.”

Oh, God, he thinks. I’m crying.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head. Language is helpless and helplessness destroys. A kid with his foot caught in a railway tie screams. The kid screams and tries to get out and the watcher knows he is not going to get out and the train whistle blows and it doesn’t mean anything because that kid’s as good as dead. The question is, In that equation, which am I? Watcher? The kid caught in the track? “I think I’m the train,” he says.

“We’ll get you back home soon,” Kate murmurs as he cries. “I promise. Into a hospital in the U.S. and then home as soon as possible.”

He cannot smell her scent, only disinfectant, bleach. Her hands feel like silken ice. He shivers. Sleeps. Dreams of Hebron. Bullets. Josh. Father and child. Sand between his teeth, coating his tongue.

Every time he wakes, she is there. Sitting in a grey plastic chair against the pale yellow wall, which makes her skin look like mustard. Talking with the nurses. Drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Petting him. Sometimes she clasps her hands under her chin and he thinks she might be praying. They do not talk about what happened. He’s grateful for that. Talking is exhausting. Breathing is exhausting, but try as he might, he cannot get himself to stop. He cannot keep track of such things as days and nights. Everything is measured out in nightmares.

The phone rings. Far too often. People want to talk to him, interview him.

“Vivisectionists!” he yells.

They take the phone out of his room. There is some sort of a ruckus in the hall. Men with cameras. A security guard is posted at the door for a while. A big fellow who wears a skullcap. When he looks in on Matthew, he sneers as though he needs to spit.

From time to time, the older nurse, the one with the broken blood vessels in her cheeks, brings a plug-in phone into his room. Colleagues ask how he is. They say they are sorry, but it is clear they want to get off the phone. Events like these make everyone uncomfortable. He pictures the way they take a deep breath before they call him. The way they gird themselves with concern. They are afraid of him. He can hear it in their voices. Then one evening the nurse comes in with the phone and says, “This is your father calling.”

“Tell him I’m not here.” He turns to the wall and pokes at a patch of peeling paint.

The nurse puts the phone on the bed and rests the handset on his ear. Matthew shrugs it off.

“Matthew! Goddamn it! Matthew Bowles!” His father was always loud.

Even at thirty-nine, his father’s voice still makes him feel like a defenceless boy. Matthew lets him yell for a few more seconds. Then sighs and picks up the phone. “Hello, Dad.”

“That you?”

“Yes.”

“I heard,” the old man says.

“Oh? How?”

“You kidding? You’re all over the news.”

Matthew’s gut churns, as though another bullet slices through him.

“Sure, you’re on CNN, CBC, ATV, even seeing you up here in Truro.

People in town are all talking about it.”

“I see.”

“I had a hell of a time tracking you down. You’re a big fucking hero, eh?”

“Hero?”

“‘Journalist tries to save father and child.’” His father snorts.

“I have to go, Dad.”

“Yeah, well. This call’s costing me a fucking fortune anyway. You should have called me. Just wanted to see if you were all right.”

“Sure. I’m just great. Thanks for the call.” Matthew hangs up the phone.

“You want me to see if we can get a television in here, so you can see?” says the nurse.

“Hell, no!” He wonders if he can manage to swallow his pillowcase and choke to death before anyone gets to him.

Bandages are changed. Drainage tubes are adjusted. Urine and fecal output is monitored. Pain medication is still administered, but they are stingy, and so pain, of all kinds, in unimaginable doses, reappears. It takes root. It grows.

An army man visits. He is a slight, stiff man, younger than Matthew, maybe thirty, but very full of his authority; razor creases on trouser legs and sleeves. Matthew tries to keep track of things like name and rank, but gives up. It takes too much energy. The army is angry with him, this much he gleans. He is responsible for events. As if he didn’t know that. As if he didn’t know his own damnation. They understand, says the army man, that he has had some sort of a breakdown. They sympathise. Of course, even so, even so, even in his damaged mental state, he must see that the Israeli army is in no way culpable. Does he see that? He does. Certainly. Whatever. No. Not whatever. It must be crystal clear. Fine. Crystal clear. They also feel it would be best if he did not stay in Israel longer than is necessary.

“He’ll be leaving as soon as he can. And don’t worry. He won’t be coming back.” Kate’s voice, and her conclusions, surprise him.

The army man leaves. Matthew regards Kate. He will not be working as a journalist any time in the near future, at least not as he has been. Not in the conflict zones. That requires being trustworthy. It is a job best done at least in pairs. You go somewhere ‘hot’. You find someone you know, or arrange it in advance. Someone you trust. You stick together. Better that way. Unless, of course, you cannot be trusted. Then no one will work with you. Too dangerous. I would not work with me, he thinks.

Kate seems to read his mind. “You’ll come home with me. We’ll have a life,” she says. “No more war zones. No more of this. You have had enough, haven’t you? Because I sure as hell have. I can’t take anymore, Matthew.”

Part of him wishes he could say what she wants him to. She is beautiful, loyal and she is a tough woman. A defence lawyer—she has to be. She believes in Matthew and things like the future and children and all that. He’s supposed to want a woman like that.

“No. You shouldn’t have to,” he says.

“So you’re done then?”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t what? You can’t what, Matthew?” Her head twitches. Her neck is full of tendons.

Washington. Life in that sun-drenched apartment. Kids and carpools and friends round for drinks and a nice steady job somewhere. A kitchen with a big steel fridge and an ice-maker in the door. Scented candles. Fluffy duvet on the bed. Everywhere softness, cleanliness, calm. He would go crazy from the smell of disinfectant. He would go crazy in the quiet order, with nothing to listen to except the sound of his memories scraping along the imported Italian tiles like a broom made out of bones.

It had all been fine when he had come and gone. All been undemanding and sweet when he had landed like a tattered carrier pigeon for a short rest stop. But as a permanent solution? He never intended the relationship to be forever. I’m an asshole. Yes, well, that’s not news. He would last a year at most. Then he would break whatever promise she wanted him to make now. Break his word. Break her heart. Better to do it now. Get it over with.

In her eyes, he sees a tiny projection of what she thinks he is, this good heroic man. He cannot help himself. Wants to feel his hands squeezing the life out of his own false image.

In his head, there is the thing; that glinting something, like the after-glare from a flash bulb. The burn of horror. The ghost-flare of images. What he knows is that he cannot go back to any where, since there is no purpose to any thing.

How to explain?

How to explain he may not be alive a year from now?

He leaves out the last bit. He looks her straight in the eyes and then says, “I just don’t love you, Kate.”

“You’re lying,” she says.

He shakes his head.

“You’re just saying that because you’re sick. Because you’re depressed.”

He shakes his head.

It takes three days for her to believe him.

“If I go,” she says on the third, “this is it, Matthew. I’m not going to sit waiting for the phone to ring. I’ve done enough fucking waiting. Enough sitting around. Wasted enough time on you. You’re a real bastard, you know that?”

He does.

“Fine. You’re a fool. You have no idea what you’re turning down.”

But he does.

“My life’s been on hold, waiting for you. The number of times I’ve run to some fleabag dump in some godforsaken corner of the earth so we could have a couple of days together. The number of times I’ve believed your promises. Christ. What a fool I’ve been.” She picks up her purse. “Hope you heal up okay. In every way. Leave a message at my office with Sherri. Let me know where you want your stuff sent.”

She does not glance back. He does not blame her, of course. She is absolutely right. Kate, the only woman to whom he’s talked of his mother’s death; it was ruled not to be a suicide, but what else do you call starving yourself to death? Kate, who believes in lost causes like saving the rainforests or stopping the AIDS epidemic in Africa, has no choice. At last she stops believing in him.

The next two days he spends alternately staring at the wall and at the bland expanse of white sheet that covers him. Both act as excellent projectors. All his nightmares find daytime viewing space. He simply cannot get enough sleeping pills.

The nurse comes in with the phone again. “A very insistent man,” she says.

“Tell my father I died.”

“Funny. It isn’t your father.” She puts the phone down and leaves.

He considers not answering it, and then decides it might be a diversion from the horror film playing in his head.

“Yes?”

“Matthew Bowles?” A man’s voice. He does not recognize it. The line crackles. Long distance.

“Yes.”

“Oh. My name is Brent Cappilini. I’m a literary agent.” New York accent. He says ‘Brent’ as though there were no ‘t’ at the end.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Cappilini?”

“Call me Brent. And I’ll tell you what you can do. You can write a book.”

“What about?”

“About yourself. About what got you shot.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Are you kidding? You are a hot ticket, pal. Am I the first agent to contact you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, good for me, but I won’t be the last. Believe me.” He has a deep laugh. Deeper than his speaking voice. Matthew pictures a little man with a big cigar. “I can get you six figures, on spec.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Matthew hangs up the phone and stares at the wall some more. His funds are less than limited. A few thousand. He is an independent, with no newspaper empire behind him. No long-term disability. His medical insurance will eat this up. He will never get any more. Bad risk. Very shortly, he will be destitute. If I’m still alive. Like mother, like son?

Writing a book might at least buy time in which he can sort through things and come to a decision. The knowledge he now carries irrevocably, heavy as a sack of skulls, irrevocably changes the world. There is so little hope, and no purpose to anything. The world is exposed. It is horror, and all his belief in the power of observation proven to be folly. And if his mission fails, if it turns out there is nothing to understand, no answer, then he knows very well how to permanently stop the pain. Until then, he might as well write a book, maybe even explain a thing or two.

The agent calls again the next day. “I suppose we should talk,” Matthew says.

“Good man,” says Brent Cappilini.