Nervous System, page 6
Her nervous system kept the memory failed twisted useless of an injury and went on reliving it—that was one explanation. But if my nervous system has a memory, Ella thinks, too slow—thinking in the present and maybe also in other times—if my body can remember, then it must also be able to forget.
explosion
✷ months earlier ✷
On leave for a few days. Forbidden to get up or engage with anything that might upset him. Ella had reminded him the night before but El ventured to open the door a crack, to bend over and reach out with his arm: his hand clenching the rolled-up newspaper bound with a rubber band. The newspaper he shouldn’t read during these days of recovery. The newspaper he would hide from Ella.
El closed the door gently so as not to wake Ella, and he stood still for a moment, waiting. Stock-still. Feeling like something had been trapped in the air, out there, somewhere in the building. A whisper. An echo that had to be an auditory hallucination. His anvil and stirrup pounding senselessly in one of his ears. He knew that those crackling sounds existed only inside him. He couldn’t trust his eardrum yet, but he sensed that now he was hearing a sound that came from outside his body. The neighbors’ rustling Sunday. Ella’s snores. The coffee maker burbling in the kitchen. It wasn’t any of that, wasn’t the rain, the coffee, an obstructed nose. It was a vibrating living vital sound. And again El’s face peered out, marked by burns, his ear bandaged, and again he heard a trembling e in the hallway, a long eeeee that ended in consonants. A covert, continuous heeeeelp. A voice crying out?
Ella would berate him later for having crossed the threshold in a t-shirt and undershorts, for having gone in search of a possibly imagined voice heard through walls ears uneven scabs. For going down the stairs alone when he was on bed rest, and round-trip along another corridor, and then back up again to the apartment where that drawn-out word seemed to originate.
✷ ✷ ✷
Description of an ashy head defeated by old age. It barely moves at the sound of running steps approaching.
✷ ✷ ✷
This is an old-folks’ home, Ella said bitterly when El woke her up to tell her about the collapsed old man bleeding from his nose. About the arm stretched out over the tiles, still holding the newspaper like a torch. Who knows how long he’d been there, laid out in the drafty hallway? El said, trying to keep her from judging him for going out alone in that state. Good thing you saved him, Ella murmured with a grimace, narrowing her eyes, oozing indignation.
But El deflected her silent reproach, still disturbed by the image of the old man he’d rescued from the floor and lowered into a chair and served a glass of water. He couldn’t forget how when he’d offered to call an ambulance, the old man had adamantly refused. Please leave, the man had begged. And El had left the old man inside.
El hadn’t even thought to ask his name, or hadn’t dared. The nameless could always disappear.
✷ ✷ ✷
A muscle or a tensed nerve, a twitch between the eye and the cheek was what Ella saw in El’s face when his boss asked him to cut his leave short, to return and take over the on-site investigation, well aware that he shouldn’t get close to an excavation site that had sent him headfirst into the hospital and all the others to the cemetery. The psychiatrist had prescribed distance from that mass grave and all others, for a time. But the director couldn’t do the job and El was her number two.
I have to be away for a few days on strictly personal matters. That’s how the director’s memo to the team began. Only with El had she set euphemisms aside to confide how just that morning, she’d awakened to find her husband staring at her with imploring eyes, open too wide. Neither asleep nor awake.
Are you going to take over? Ella asked him, raising her voice. What would you do? El asked, shrugging his shoulders and slamming the door, again.
✷ ✷ ✷
They realized the old man from the fifth floor had died when they saw, posted in the building’s entryway, the for-sale notice. The real estate agent opened the door for them with veiny hands; the skin sagged around her neckline but not on her newly stretched face, which shone with lotion and fair loan prices. She wanted to hide what they already knew, but she confessed, with a note of resignation, that some people went to hospices to wait sitting fallen fainted panting for their turn to come, and others preferred to end their lives attended by strangers in hospitals. But not that old man, who’d decided to die alone in his own apartment. To that end, he’d bought the forty-five square meters the agent was now showing them. The same woman with starched and wrinkled skin had sold it to the deceased man just a few months before, and she could offer them a discount. Would they by chance be interested?
✷ ✷ ✷
El dreamed he opened the old man up, using both hands to tear his hide like a rag, before cracking open his breastbone and finding himself inside, singed. Other times he found only brushes needles traction devices inside the old man. A telephone full of copper. An ear. A bloody scalpel. Sometimes the old man was wearing the same uniform as the dead workers. Sometimes El was one of the workers himself, or his bones were among those found in the mass grave before the explosion splintered them.
Sometimes El howled in his sleep, or muttered words in a language Ella could not decipher. She shook him. He woke up sweating with a sharp pain in his chest, sure he was having a heart attack.
The heart was a muscle that could give out.
El accused Ella of having filled his head with surgical nightmares. You and your family, body addicts, she heard him say as he threw off the sheets and punched the wall so hard it shook her. As if you didn’t work with worse bodies, muzzled broken dissolved in acid explodable. She didn’t need to remind him about the mined cadavers of the most recent dig. The splinters of those bones encrusted in his face, his ear cut, eardrum busted, face spattered with the blood of the workers who’d acted as a shield. It’s a miracle you’re alive, Ella raged. Ella, who dedicated her life to inoffensive dead stars.
✷ ✷ ✷
He had always been irascible, but the explosion had made him even more bitter.
✷ ✷ ✷
The Father issued contemptuous judgments of this profession that didn’t diagnose or cure or make any attempt to do so. He was of the opinion that this man of forensics intervened only once it was too late, and even then it was just to establish dates of death using carbon 14. Instead of calling him by his name, her Father asked about that man or the historian, the bone guy. Only when El was taken to the emergency room did he become worthy of paternal respect. The Father asked about each of El’s contusions and was surprised there wasn’t a single broken bone; he was likely thinking how that same accident would have pulverized his Firstborn.
Ella, who had admired the luminous projection of El’s skeleton in the hospital, could confirm that he was excessively radiated but in one piece.
✷ ✷ ✷
El’s only sister had been dying, like everyone, since childhood, and she went on having birthdays, as so many do, every April.
She called him every day while he was home on leave. His single sister’s name flashing on the screen, the ringing phone piercing the silence, but since El rarely heard it, Ella was the one who answered. Then El would bellow a greeting designed to travel across the wide country that separated them. He spoke so loudly Ella could hear the expanding waves of the conversation even with the door closed.
How could they ever understand each other, Ella wondered, when instead of alternating sentences, their words overlapped and the decibel level climbed?
I’m going to go deaf, Ella scolded him, her open computer under her arm.
Bad idea to mention deafness. He was the one who’d lost his hearing.
✷ ✷ ✷
The radiator building up steam and hissing softly in the living room, and the distant whistle of the trains crossing the nocturnal horizon of the present. And the ambulances, the honking horns, the thrum of nearby motors. El woke up knowing exactly what time it was, and if he was wrong it was only by a few minutes.
He slept so little. You can’t go on like this, Ella said. She, ever since she was little, would lie down on the balcony to count stars when she couldn’t fall asleep. Take something, she told El.
He didn’t take anything, because even that decision required effort.
✷ ✷ ✷
Are you going to take over that dig? Ella asked. You’d do it, too, El said, picking at a scab until he pulled it off, depositing it in her outstretched hand.
✷ ✷ ✷
The explosion is still inside his eardrum.
Inside, El still has those workers fallen with their chisels, picks, scrapers, dustpans, stopped watches on their wrists. He’s seeing them crouched down in the pit where there is only dust, rocks, torn bee wings, bits of flesh scattered in the smoke: an airborne bonfire. And fleeting sparks falling onto him, burning his hair, spattering his skin, wounding his clothes. An infernal sound and urine and blood mixing with dirt. People are running so fast around him and the fog is wafting so slowly, in such silence, that El thinks he is dead or paralyzed or abandoned to his fate and he closes his eyes, until he smells an acrid sweat and deduces that he’s being carried out among several people who load him into a taxi that will whisk him away.
The taxi driver keeps an eye on him in the rearview mirror and talks to him so he won’t fall asleep: that’s the mission he’s been handed, for which he’s been paid triple what it would cost to bring an uninjured man to the hospital. Unaware that El can’t hear him, the taxi driver decides to keep his attention by telling him about a time he made a distracted mistake that could have been fatal. I gave myself my insulin injection twice, because, listen here, don’t fall asleep on me, because this gets good, I gave myself an overdose that made me crazy, an electroshock of current in my head, and it was only by some miracle I didn’t die, listen here, he’s shouting now, and it’s a good thing I wasn’t driving, listen, listen, and he stops at a light and shakes his passenger with one hand because now El’s eyes are closing.
✷ ✷ ✷
The nurses who pulled him from the taxi gesticulated with fingers elbows flapping jaws, talked to him with delayed voices.
The strange voice that was Ella’s when she arrived in a flash at the hospital.
✷ ✷ ✷
Lit up by the otoscope, the perforated eardrum was a planet wounded by an asteroid.
✷ ✷ ✷
Futurist portrait in the intensive care unit. El was alert, aware, conscious but dazed. The explosion could have killed him but he’s alive, alive, dozing, his closed eyelids move in slow motion, or maybe those are his eyes moving like worms beneath them. Ella wants to press a single kiss on his eyebrow, because El’s face is all burns and winding bandages. A two-dimensional face. Her mouth hovers over the tip of a rough nose but there are many noses now. El is five bodies, eight ages, six swollen eyes, fifteen pairs of torn lips.
Ella tries to say something to pull him from the comatose buzz of his breathing. His eyes blink so slowly, so deliberately, as if they hurt. Positron, she calls him, whispering. Posi, she repeats, raising her voice. Positron, are you there? Give me a sign. She sees a tongue peek through the wound that is his mouth, she wets a finger with saliva and puts it to his lips so he’ll know she is there. And she comes closer and tells him anxiously that the pit exploded, that all the others are dead.
He was trying to decipher what she said but there was noise in his head, and of all Ella’s words he could discern only the end, because she switched to his language to say the phrase big bang.
✷ ✷ ✷
Ella goes back to their shared apartment without the living nearness of his body. The empty living room. Empty chairs. The barren refrigerator. Dirty dishes. The unmade bed. She flops onto the sheets and dials the number of the past so she can tell her Father, consult him. Dad? she says almost without saying it, dad, dad, because she can’t manage anything but incomplete words that disappear into her Father’s ear.
✷ ✷ ✷
Words falling off the cliff of his ear: the doctor didn’t warn him, or maybe he did, but El didn’t know that he might hear a whistling sound when his hearing began to come back. The daily noise would muffle that constant sonorous thread, but it would seem louder in the stillness of the night. The sound filled him with insomnia.
And there were people who lost their minds with that sound embedded in their heads. People who killed themselves just to get silence back.
✷ ✷ ✷
Now Ella was turning that ring on her finger that didn’t signify any kind of commitment. Turning over that conference where she’d seen him in profile and head-on and had imagined him graying wrinkled curled over a cane. She’d wanted to shrivel with him. To gradually wear out every one of her vertebrae with him. To have felt that now leaves a hole in her stomach.
✷ ✷ ✷
They’re running through an airport so they won’t miss the connection that will take them to the country of the past where they met. She’d been a student on vacation in her city, he was a forensic scientist invited to give a master class on identification of the bones that abound in the earth of countries like hers, disturbed by years of dictatorship. Ella’s Friend, who went to all those talks as if it were her duty or her form of mourning, had invited her to the conference in the newly inaugurated museum of memory, where El, with hair still very thick and black, all his teeth, arrogance in his smile and a badly tied tie, spoke of the time trapped in carbon 14, and how every bonologist should leave the laboratory and get his or her hands dirty on a dig. He moved his own hands as he spoke, and there was no ring on his finger.
That country of the past was sown with still-undiscovered graves.
The city of the present was now finding its own. Hundreds of clandestine graveyards full of anonymous cadavers, though everyone knew who they were.
Migrants crossing borders or trying to, abandoned along the way, dying frozen or gagged or suffocated inside trucks, wrapped in newspapers whose pages confirmed their date of death, women hacked to pieces and children lost in arid lands that halted their disintegration and the passage of time. El had exhumed those cadavers on the outskirts of the present.
El had gone into bone identification in order to put an end to violence. That’s what he told her when they met. Ella found the effort heroic.
✷ ✷ ✷
Now Ella is bringing El back to the past, this time without a tie, to introduce him to her family. She tugs on his arm, hurries him along, we’re going to miss our connection, but El falls behind, and when Ella turns to be sure he’s following her, he has disappeared. The plane is ready to take off, the last stewardess is about to board, they’re the only ones left. And that woman dressed in red, a little red hat and red heels clicking on the floor, is raising her hand to wave at Ella. Ella doesn’t know what to say, how to excuse El’s delay. There is no one but her on the terminal’s white tile floor, until finally a pallid El appears. I don’t feel so good, I’m a little queasy, he stammers, after emerging from the bathroom he’s been locked inside for the past seven minutes. Ella howls at him, they’re going to leave us behind. And El drags his moccasins and his heavy legs and holds out his blue passport and disappears down the walkway, followed by the annoyed stewardess. No sooner do they sit down and buckle their seat belts than she realizes that El is racked by fever and cold. She throws her blanket over him, hers and that of the passenger beside her, plus two or three more brought by another red-clad stewardess. The hours and the years stretch out as if instead of heading toward the past, they were all on their way to Mars. And if El is still trembling it’s not because the six blankets aren’t working but because he is dehydrated. He can’t take even a sip of water without it coming back up. He regurgitates everything he’s eaten that day, but he’s trying to stifle the retching noise that aggravates the nearby passengers, who have already started to eat.
Just a little gastric unrest, he murmurs, disturbed by the vomiting.
Her Father would think of dengue yellow fever malaria chikungunya, or he’d think of something much worse. Ella doesn’t know what to think.
✷ ✷ ✷
El was convinced that the cold weather brought on stomach cramps and he blamed the city’s winter, its endless snows, the slippery ice camouflaged on the sidewalks. Ella knew the cold didn’t cause his indigestion, just as it didn’t cause colds or urinary tract infections.
He’d always had a problem with onions, and he stopped eating them, just like he’d quit chili pepper cauliflower fungus. And beans. Sardines. Cucumbers. Some packaged cookies sent him running to the bathroom and he had to stop buying them. But during those long days down in the mass graves, he ate whatever poison they put in front of him. God forbid he be labeled snooty by the excavation workers, who devoured salami and raw onion on bread and smacked their lips. Ella loved the garlic that made El ill.
Sick all the time. Swollen belly, all the time. As he vomited on the plane one might have said his stomach hurt right down to the pylorus. Her girlfriends used to say that in school and double over laughing; Ella would smile, wondering if they knew, those classmates of hers, where that pain was really to be found.
✷ ✷ ✷
El started to follow the dog’s diet: nothing, until he was better. But her Father had tried that diet, and the acid had eaten him away inside until he was hollow. There was no way to convince El that his thinness was growing dangerous. He said he’d lost his appetite. She ate for both of them, fighting her own disappearance.
To lose kilos of fat muscle nerves caffeine, to lose the desire to get out of bed. To lose his laughter, the echo of his former cheer. To lose the desire to be with Ella, to laugh with her, ever since he almost lost his life in that fiery mass grave.
✷ ✷ ✷
He’ll have to stay on investigating that pit, which has become an unprecedented political scandal. Until his boss comes back. At his office, El sends her a text he’s just dictated into his old phone. She’s not going to come back so soon, now she says she’s going to spend 34 days at a conference. Ella reads it in consternation and writes, What do you mean 34?! What kind of conference lasts 34 days?! but right away another text comes from El, no comma I said 3 to 4 exclamation point it’s 4 days comma the go down shoe. And another one comes immediately: my goddamn shrew of a boss period this phone is deaf exclamation point it doesn’t know how to interpret what I say exclamation point exclamation joint.
