Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 22

Limits

The dead man.

Every now and again, I see him.

And the wildlife refuge where I worked then,

the shallow ponds of Leslie Salt Company

patchworking the San Francisco Bay edges

and spreading below the hills like broken tiles,

each pond a different color — from blue to green

to yellow until finally the burnished red

of terra-cotta, as the water grew denser

and denser with salt. Dunlins blew upward

like paper scraps torn from a single sheet,

clouds of birds purling in sunlight, harboring

the secret of escaped collision. And

that other mystery: how these weightless tufts

could make it halfway to Tierra del Fuego

and back before spring’s first good day.

On those good days, a group from the charity ward

named after the state’s last concession to saints

would trudge up the hill to the visitor center,

where I’d show them California shorebirds

— a stuffed egret, western sandpiper, and avocet —

whose feathers were matted and worn to shafts

from years of being stroked like puppies.

As I guided their hands over the pelts

questions stood on my tongue — mostly

about what led them to this peculiar life,

its days parceled into field trips

and visits to the library for picture books

with nurses whose enthusiasms were always greater

than their own. Their own had stalled out

before reaching the moist surface of their eyes,

some of the patients fitting pigeonholes built

in my head, like Down syndrome and hydrocephalus.

But others were not marked in any way,

and their defects cut closer to the bones

under my burnt-sienna ranger uniform.

Maybe I was foolish to believe in escape

from the future carried in their uncreased palms:

our lives overseen by the strict, big-breasted nurse

who is our health or our debts or even

our children, the her who is always putting crayons

and lumps of clay in our hands, insisting

we make our lives into some crude but useful thing.

And one day a man, a patient who must have been

supervised by his strict heart, fell down

suddenly and hard, on his way up the hill.

Two nurses prodded him on toward the building,

where he went down again like a duffel bag full of earth

in front of the reception desk where I was sitting.

I watched the one male nurse turn pale as ash

when he knelt to certify the heartbeat

of this man whose lips were blue and wet.

The other nurse took the group to the auditorium,

saying James isn’t feeling very well right now.

James is sick. Get away from him. Then I heard

the dopey music of the automated slide show

behind those doors from which she never reappeared.

The male nurse was too young to leave stranded

with a man down on the smooth wood floor:

his cheek still velvet, his dark fingers

worrying the valleys of the man’s white wrist.

He’s okay, he’s breathing, as the man’s skin

turned gray, his mouth open, a cherry sore

at either edge. I don’t remember what I did at first,

I must have puttered off to perform some

stupid task that would seem useful —

gathering premoistened towelettes

or picking up the phone while the nurse repeated

He’s okay, he’s breathing. But the colors

got worse until nothing could spare me

from having to walk my hand in the crease

of the man’s blue throat, where his carotid

should have pulsed. Nothing.

I said You breathe for him and I’ll compress,

and for a while we worked together like a clumsy

railroad handcar, me humping at arm’s length

over the ribs, the nurse sealing his lips around

the man’s scabbed mouth, while yellow mucus

drained from James’s eyes and nose and throat.

Each time the nurse pressed his mouth to the man’s

like a reluctant lover, the stink of cud

was on his lips when he lifted up. Sometimes

he had to hold his face out to the side,

to catch a few breaths of good salt air.

Until he was no longer able to choke back his gut

and asked whether I would trade places with him.

For a moment I studied the man’s staved chest,

which even my small knuckles had banged to jelly,

then the yellow pulp that flecked the nurse’s lips,

that sour, raw smell from their mix of spit.

And I said: No. I don’t think I could...

It’s strange what we do with the dead

— burning them or burying them in earth —

when the body always tries to revert to water.

Later, a doctor called to say the man’s heart

had exploded like a paper sack: death hooked him

before he even hit the floor. So everything we did

was useless — we might as well have banged a drum

and blown into a horn. And notice how I just said “we” —

as though the nurse and I had somehow married

spirits in a pact of gambled blood, when in truth

the nurse, like the man, rode off in an ambulance,

the man for a pointless go-round in the ER, the nurse

for a shot of gamma globulin, while I stood

in the parking lot, picking lint off my shirt.

End of story. Except that since then James

has followed me, showing up sometimes at the house

to read my gas meter, sometimes behind the counter

where I ask him what I owe. No surprise then

that I’ve made my life with another James,

who swears my biggest defect is still the limits

on what I’ll bring myself to do for someone else.

I know there are people who’ll cut out their kidney

to replace a friend’s cankered one, people

who’ll rush into burning buildings to save the lives

of strangers. But every time I ponder selflessness

I hear the beats of my heart, that common loon,

most primitive of birds. Then my life seems most

like a naked, frail thing that must be protected,

and I have suddenly become its mother, paddling

with my own life saddled on my back.

There’s one last thing I didn’t mention —

when I refused to breathe for the dying James

what happened next was that I began to laugh:

a thin laugh, nervous laugh… but loud enough

to drift outside, where it stood on the hill

and creaked its wings a minute before lifting—

over the levees, across those shallowest of waters.