Fellow Breathers of the Only Air
by B.J. Atwood-Fukuda
by B.J. Atwood-Fukuda
She passed whole families walking home from temple, the husbands averting their eyes as she ran by in her sleeveless top and bike shorts. The wives, pushing two-seater strollers and carrying their fifth or sixth kids in pod-shaped slings across their chests, shambled alongside the men, or sometimes behind them, covered in long sleeves, long skirts and opaque hair-nets designed, it seemed, to avoid flattering even the loveliest face.
If not, indeed, especially this.
What were those hair-nets called?
Snoods.
So she recalled, if she wasn’t completely mistaken.
Such a strange word. Offspring of a snout and a hood?
If not suggestive, somehow, of both a snare and a brood.
Though to her ear, at least, more evocative of something a plumber might use to unclog a drain. Or a piece of pipe that attached to the thing that did that.
A plumber’s acquaintance, if not precisely his friend.
Something like this.
Or so she imagined.
Even as it also called to mind the name of some exotic or primordial form of life—a rare and storied species. If not an appendage protruding from the head or the body of such a form, a part once highly specialized, inexorably gone vestigial. Upstaged by the vicissitudes of natural selection, perhaps.
The creature of which that part was once so prominent a feature, itself become endangered long since. If not in fact extinct, its substance retrievable only in bits blown eons apart by some nameless cataclysm, its form discernible only through the meticulous recovery of those pieces, the glacial process of fitting them together to form some kind of whole—stray shards of shell or bone embedded in the landscape or the ocean floor, a few unearthed every decade or so.
Snood Snagged off Grand Banks Found to Belong to Proto-Echinosaur—?
So she pictured the headline blazing from some front page in the wake of one such dramatic discovery.
Though perhaps in a place way far from the sea, far from the glacial morain underlying the roads she ran on, a place of vast swaths of sand and red rock stretching to the nether reaches of the continent… itself, once buried under fathoms of ocean.
A giant sea-urchin? Once proud possessor of a pliant, prehensile tail?
Something like that.
The star of the show looming all the larger in its absense.
Her inner voice beginning to satirize itself as it took on, quite in spite of her, the portentous tones of one of those science documentaries on public TV.
However slow she was to realize this. Only as the line began to slither away… beyond her grasp, in moments. Out of range forever, never to return.
Horrors.
Though perhaps ‘good riddance’ was the more appropriate response.
She wondered, even as she passed them, if the women wearing those deflated balloons on their heads ever riffed on the word in, say, the privacy of their own homes.
As in: Honey, could you pass me my snood?
If she could be forgiven for attempting to picture this, let alone hear it.
Not that she dared expect their husbands to.
Forgive her, that is.
Forget picturing it themselves.
The women eyed her wearily, smiling back at her with a look of pleased surprise when she smiled at them. The men looked away, stonefaced.
If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.
Isn’t that how it goes?
Something like this.
She recalled an article she’d read about a website where people who had had one or more of their limbs amputated, for no known medical reason, shared stories about the experience before and after.
The occasion for such a drastic change in these people’s configuration being, they said, the offense incurred by the presence of the given arm or leg in their life. By which she supposed they meant its attachment to their body.
As if one’s arm or leg were not a piece of working hardware, if she could put it so crudely, so much as, itself, a vestige—an obsolete appendage destined to drop off in some later generation, a remnant already on the way out. A curio, fated to fall by the wayside when it grew too withered to bear its own weight.
Never to be seen again.
Unless, perhaps, by a child wandering the Badlands, or some such place.
The toe of her shoe snagging on it, her body sprawling.
The child herself, descendant of a crew of Martians who had chanced upon the planet centuries before her time, in a time when Earth could no longer support, if you will, human life.
If so, why stop there?
Removing an eye being marginally less outrageous as a cure for the perceived sin, perhaps, than pelting the offending sight with stones until she stopped breathing.
Or so she hoped some lawyer might argue in her behalf, if it ever came down to this.
Vaguely analogous to the position that smokers had a perfect right to pollute their own lungs, but not those of their fellow breathers of the only air.
Although by then it would already be too late.
Not to say she believed for one minute that the wan-faced fathers of the families she passed on these winding streets had anything like this in mind. Placid and preoccupied as they appeared.
Though she’d been flensed, if that was the word, on the streets of certain international capitals, by the stares of men who’d glared at her with a hostility that stopped her breath, paunchy men in pants like a cheap hotel (no ballroom) and tapered shirts opened to the waist, their chests bristling with hair and decked with collars of chunky gold—men whose wives drifted like ghosts in their wake, the women’s eyes peeking from behind slits the size of a CD drive or a slot in a segregation-cell door, their bodies invisible beneath clouds of hot black polyester fabric while their small sons tore around in shorts and t-shirts, their daughters all but quiescent in full-length pink satin veils that framed their tiny features as they listed in the lee of mothers who, for all their billowing folds, reminded her of sails, or of tents propelled, like the flying carpet, by magic.
However slowly.
The silence and grace of their perambulation hiding, or revealing, some vast realm of something she knew nothing about, though she couldn’t begin to tell what.
Which, she supposed, was the idea.
Though perhaps it wasn’t all that mysterious.
She wondered if the women knew they’d stepped into a theme-park of cliché simply by virtue of being who they were. Walking alongside those men. Wearing what they wore, thinking what they thought.
Whatever that might be, in this post-911 world.
Though perhaps it was she who had put them there.
Complicit as she feared she had become, albeit involuntarily, in an act of insidious global proportions.
Forget about the men.
Their daughters’ days of face already numbered, though the girls could not have been old enough to be informed of this in so many words. If ever they were.
Or so she surmised, she herself having endured the scrutiny of many a daughter’s father over the years.
In many a shrine, if you will, of global capitalism.
One view holding the eye of the beholder to the fire for what it beheld, the other bent upon rubbing out the thing seen.
A penance far more extreme than an eye for an eye, it seemed to her.
An eye for a woman being a matter, surely, of some big daddy’s foot on the scale, resting there like a lead pig in the pit of a tiny boat.
If she could be forgiven for putting it that way.
Ballast for a notion the wind would surely bear away, without it.
A concept that, unlike the boat, held no water.
Not that she would ask forgiveness, if it came down to that.
So she thought as she swung down the short but steep rise from the street to the front door of her building…
…having forgotten to head for the side entrance instead—the one she had exited through not two hours earlier—on account of the lobby renovations.
Which had been in progress for at least a week.
Inside, she met a neighbor she hadn’t seen in months—a fellow who lived on the eighth floor too, across the hall from her. A guy who had once headed up the co-op board, but who’d quit that thankless job to take care of his wife.
Or so he’d announced at a meeting some years ago.
It being generally appreciated, even by those who disliked him, that his wife had just had brain surgery.
Appreciated? Perhaps barely understood.
If not merely rumored.
Her neighbor across the hall being a man who seemed to arouse strong negative feelings in certain people.
Strange as she had found this at the time, gentle as he’d always seemed to her. His face wearing always a sad, distracted look. Though perhaps it was more the long face of exhaustion than of sadness: a deep weariness, no doubt exacerbated by the steady decline in his wife’s condition over the years.
Tall and stooped, he had been labeled a wimp by the faction of the co-op board who hated him.
While the faction who didn’t had applauded him for standing up to them.
The co-op board having been split into factions ever since she could remember, no matter who, it seemed, she and her fellow residents elected to it. The understanding being, if never precisely mentioned, that only certain kinds of people would run for election to the board.
Only to find themselves, once elected, thrown inadvertently behind the lines in a turf war they had failed to discern on the horizon…
…if indeed they hadn’t run for office precisely in order to take part in such a war, if not to help craft it.
She tried to remember what was allegedly wrong with her neighbor’s wife. Not that she hadn’t been told, in some detail, by the woman herself. Not just once, but on numerous occasions.
Albeit none of them recent.
Each retelling unique, something new added to the story each time. Even as nothing ever seemed to become superseded.
Nothing, that is, resolved. Only amplified. A complication every few months, or weeks.
Not that she hadn’t listened each time with concern, if not outright fascination, to these updates. So many anomalies seemed to be afflicting her neighbor’s wife that she’d marveled at the woman’s ability to laugh it all off, however sardonically, over and over again.
If, that is, she hadn’t completely misconstrued the matter.
It being a sort of miracle, perhaps, that the woman was functioning today.
Not to mention still alive.
Unless, of course, she was lying.
No, confabulating.
If so, wouldn’t such a tendency—or compulsion—be the inevitable fallout of all those brain operations?
A sufficient condition, if not necessarily a necessary one.
However difficult she herself was beginning to find the task of remembering the details of other people’s lives, including her neighbor’s wife’s, at least where they concerned bad news.
Not to mention the details of her own.
Who had been diagnosed with what. Who was on what: how strong a dose, how many times a day.
Who had had something removed, either wholly or in part. Which part of what body part. Which organ.
Who was in rehab, who in remission.
How poignant to discover that the person in question seemed to go on being whoever he or she had ever been, more or less, no matter what.
Well, almost.
Whatever that was.
All but heroic.
Notwithstanding whatever was missing. However much had atrophied, or been excised.
Though she had to confess, with some shame, that this wasn’t always so easy to discern.
The stories of the accidents being far more compelling, to her, than the details of any consequent medical intervention.
The more so, perhaps, for her having to fabricate many of them herself.
A process which seemed to kick in on its own, however involuntarily.
Indeed, quite shamelessly beyond her control.
Stories whose tellers invariably left out something of crucial importance, or so it seemed to her. Though perhaps it was merely a matter of something she needed to believe.
Or preferred not to.
Something that just wasn’t there.
Though what that might be, she could not have said.
It having become ever harder, as time sashayed on, for her to be sure.
Of this or of just about anything else regarding the dance of daily existence, for that matter. When to point, when to flex—or deflect; when to take a flying leap. In what direction? How far?
Her neighbor’s wife, on the other hand, seemed to have razor-sharp recall, notwithstanding whatever it was they’d removed from her brain.
At least, as concerned the details of her various operations—not just what they had robbed her of, but what they had left her with, in what condition.
Not to say that this wasn’t self-evident.
At least, in part.
If only some of the time.
That day being the first time she herself had seen either one of the couple since she’d moved back into the building. Since she’d returned to this city, this country.
In what was left of the lobby.
The wife now in a wheelchair, her hair gone sparse and wispy, her head a funny shape. Abnormally flat from behind, or so it seemed to her.
The woman peered up at her with a watery look, her pupils silver dots in the pale skies of her eyes.
I can’t walk, she said. They operated on my brain and they blew it. Now I can’t walk.
The husband, pushing his wife’s wheelchair, talked about the weather. Such a beautiful day, he said, we had to take a walk.
He asked her how long she was staying in this country.
She interjected that surely the two of them went out with some frequency. At least on good days like this.
Suspecting, even as she said it, that it wasn’t true.
The wife’s eyes widened as if she were about to offer a reply.
No, he answered, hardly ever. It’s too hard on my wife. She gets so tired.
Whereupon the wife lowered her eyes.
What about you, he said. Planning on moving overseas again one of these days? Or are you back for the duration?
She flinched.
I can’t walk, said the wife. They botched it, and now I can’t walk.
The husband remarked on the lobby renovations, as everyone else who lived in the building seemed to whenever they crossed paths. About how, now that you had to walk outdoors across the roof of the underground garage and enter the building through a side door, instead of taking the usual route down the front steps and through the front door, you had to be careful what you said out loud.
Given that you passed under everyone’s windows on the south side of the building, to say nothing of their balconies.
Which, for some reason she’d never understood, people here called ‘terraces’.
The garage roof, itself indeed a terrace, being otherwise off limits to any kind of traffic. Historically so.
Stretching, as it did, along the ground just below the apartments facing south.
Why, people up on the 16th floor could hear a paper-clip drop out here, her neighbor said.
I can’t walk, shouted his wife. They screwed it up and now I can’t walk.
Nice to see you again, her neighbor said.
He stroked his wife’s head, his fingers playing with her hair. We’d better get upstairs.
His wife felt for his hand, touching it.
A hand large and powerful enough to affect the shape of anything it might choose to adjust, or so it appeared to her.
She found herself wondering, in spite of herself, what had afflicted her neighbor’s wife at the outset. What, if anything, might have warranted mandatory intervention.
Which she assumed they had called it.
Something like this.
Way back before they started doing the surgeries.
Just how her neighbor had convinced his wife that she needed the first of these—procedures, as he no doubt called them.
He being no different from the rest of her neighbors in that regard.
Before they started earmarking certain parts for adjustment, if not for actual removal.
Each intervention that followed being, like the first one, a matter of ‘informed consent’, or so she surmised.
Simple, and ever simpler with each episode.
Though perhaps ‘incision’ was the more judicious term.
Consent being granted, in every subsequent instance, by a person who’d been rendered less and less able to give any sort of permission for anything.
Or so she imagined.
Thanks to each new incursion.
Though she could have been way out of bounds on this.
She wondered, now, if the instincts of those who had massed against her neighbor in his capacity as president of the co-op board had been, in some sense, correct.
If correctness was a quality that one might attribute to instincts.
Her own instincts about such matters having become so unreliable—anymore.
That last, a term few people in these parts would have felt the need to append to such a snippet of thought, she startled herself to realize.
However idly, however slowly.
‘Anymore’ harking back, no doubt, to some interlude in her past, some sojourn no longer retrievable, perhaps, in any detail. Someplace in the midwest or the south where she’d once lived. In the care of someone who had minded her like a mother. Who had clasped her to her breast.
As such a person might have put it.
Had she existed anymore.
If ever.
The feeling of remembrance, of loss, being all but visceral.
She wondered sometimes, when she heard a certain kind of cry outside her window late at night, if it wasn’t all in her imagination.
Not unlike so many of her memories.
How to know? Such a fine line.
All of lived life a mere marring of the boundary between memory and imagination, however momentary in geologic time. A smudge shot through with flashes of light.
Roars of thunder?
The sound invariably coming from the roof of the underground garage.
Though when she peered out the window and gazed down across its sprawl of concrete slab—an empty platform slated, every now and then, for flower-beds and strolling paths—she never saw a thing.
The voice being unlike that of any animal that might have been expected to turn up in the lee of her building, or of any other, at a time so late in its natural history.
That era all but suspended in a sigh of protracted fadeout. Or, more precisely perhaps, a state of siege.
Maybe ‘segue’ was what she really meant.
A seamless segue into the saga of Homo sapiens—hoardes of erect bipeds alternately covering and raping the earth.
A song of humankind triumphant.
In the chamber of whose echoes, nonetheless, some creature let loose a long wail as it stretched its limbs, unseen, beneath a sky of few stars.
How congenial it must have found the new moon, the vaguely metallic smell of the river just beyond the tracks; the whine of the third rail announcing the approach of a train. A silvery, keening sound curving like a sickle around the bend. Followed by a series of rhythmic cracks like a monster breaking bricks. Cracks so loud they shook the whole building.
The cry she heard nonetheless a strangled scream, rendered at half volume.
Albeit full pain.
A sound quite beyond the range of any dog or cat.
However open any living throat would have to be to produce a sound like that: however free.
Notwithstanding the paradox of this.
However great the anguish in her own throat when she heard it.
Enough to render her mute.
If not, indeed, especially this.
What were those hair-nets called?
Snoods.
So she recalled, if she wasn’t completely mistaken.
Such a strange word. Offspring of a snout and a hood?
If not suggestive, somehow, of both a snare and a brood.
Though to her ear, at least, more evocative of something a plumber might use to unclog a drain. Or a piece of pipe that attached to the thing that did that.
A plumber’s acquaintance, if not precisely his friend.
Something like this.
Or so she imagined.
Even as it also called to mind the name of some exotic or primordial form of life—a rare and storied species. If not an appendage protruding from the head or the body of such a form, a part once highly specialized, inexorably gone vestigial. Upstaged by the vicissitudes of natural selection, perhaps.
The creature of which that part was once so prominent a feature, itself become endangered long since. If not in fact extinct, its substance retrievable only in bits blown eons apart by some nameless cataclysm, its form discernible only through the meticulous recovery of those pieces, the glacial process of fitting them together to form some kind of whole—stray shards of shell or bone embedded in the landscape or the ocean floor, a few unearthed every decade or so.
Snood Snagged off Grand Banks Found to Belong to Proto-Echinosaur—?
So she pictured the headline blazing from some front page in the wake of one such dramatic discovery.
Though perhaps in a place way far from the sea, far from the glacial morain underlying the roads she ran on, a place of vast swaths of sand and red rock stretching to the nether reaches of the continent… itself, once buried under fathoms of ocean.
A giant sea-urchin? Once proud possessor of a pliant, prehensile tail?
Something like that.
The star of the show looming all the larger in its absense.
Her inner voice beginning to satirize itself as it took on, quite in spite of her, the portentous tones of one of those science documentaries on public TV.
However slow she was to realize this. Only as the line began to slither away… beyond her grasp, in moments. Out of range forever, never to return.
Horrors.
Though perhaps ‘good riddance’ was the more appropriate response.
She wondered, even as she passed them, if the women wearing those deflated balloons on their heads ever riffed on the word in, say, the privacy of their own homes.
As in: Honey, could you pass me my snood?
If she could be forgiven for attempting to picture this, let alone hear it.
Not that she dared expect their husbands to.
Forgive her, that is.
Forget picturing it themselves.
The women eyed her wearily, smiling back at her with a look of pleased surprise when she smiled at them. The men looked away, stonefaced.
If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.
Isn’t that how it goes?
Something like this.
She recalled an article she’d read about a website where people who had had one or more of their limbs amputated, for no known medical reason, shared stories about the experience before and after.
The occasion for such a drastic change in these people’s configuration being, they said, the offense incurred by the presence of the given arm or leg in their life. By which she supposed they meant its attachment to their body.
As if one’s arm or leg were not a piece of working hardware, if she could put it so crudely, so much as, itself, a vestige—an obsolete appendage destined to drop off in some later generation, a remnant already on the way out. A curio, fated to fall by the wayside when it grew too withered to bear its own weight.
Never to be seen again.
Unless, perhaps, by a child wandering the Badlands, or some such place.
The toe of her shoe snagging on it, her body sprawling.
The child herself, descendant of a crew of Martians who had chanced upon the planet centuries before her time, in a time when Earth could no longer support, if you will, human life.
If so, why stop there?
Removing an eye being marginally less outrageous as a cure for the perceived sin, perhaps, than pelting the offending sight with stones until she stopped breathing.
Or so she hoped some lawyer might argue in her behalf, if it ever came down to this.
Vaguely analogous to the position that smokers had a perfect right to pollute their own lungs, but not those of their fellow breathers of the only air.
Although by then it would already be too late.
Not to say she believed for one minute that the wan-faced fathers of the families she passed on these winding streets had anything like this in mind. Placid and preoccupied as they appeared.
Though she’d been flensed, if that was the word, on the streets of certain international capitals, by the stares of men who’d glared at her with a hostility that stopped her breath, paunchy men in pants like a cheap hotel (no ballroom) and tapered shirts opened to the waist, their chests bristling with hair and decked with collars of chunky gold—men whose wives drifted like ghosts in their wake, the women’s eyes peeking from behind slits the size of a CD drive or a slot in a segregation-cell door, their bodies invisible beneath clouds of hot black polyester fabric while their small sons tore around in shorts and t-shirts, their daughters all but quiescent in full-length pink satin veils that framed their tiny features as they listed in the lee of mothers who, for all their billowing folds, reminded her of sails, or of tents propelled, like the flying carpet, by magic.
However slowly.
The silence and grace of their perambulation hiding, or revealing, some vast realm of something she knew nothing about, though she couldn’t begin to tell what.
Which, she supposed, was the idea.
Though perhaps it wasn’t all that mysterious.
She wondered if the women knew they’d stepped into a theme-park of cliché simply by virtue of being who they were. Walking alongside those men. Wearing what they wore, thinking what they thought.
Whatever that might be, in this post-911 world.
Though perhaps it was she who had put them there.
Complicit as she feared she had become, albeit involuntarily, in an act of insidious global proportions.
Forget about the men.
Their daughters’ days of face already numbered, though the girls could not have been old enough to be informed of this in so many words. If ever they were.
Or so she surmised, she herself having endured the scrutiny of many a daughter’s father over the years.
In many a shrine, if you will, of global capitalism.
One view holding the eye of the beholder to the fire for what it beheld, the other bent upon rubbing out the thing seen.
A penance far more extreme than an eye for an eye, it seemed to her.
An eye for a woman being a matter, surely, of some big daddy’s foot on the scale, resting there like a lead pig in the pit of a tiny boat.
If she could be forgiven for putting it that way.
Ballast for a notion the wind would surely bear away, without it.
A concept that, unlike the boat, held no water.
Not that she would ask forgiveness, if it came down to that.
So she thought as she swung down the short but steep rise from the street to the front door of her building…
…having forgotten to head for the side entrance instead—the one she had exited through not two hours earlier—on account of the lobby renovations.
Which had been in progress for at least a week.
Inside, she met a neighbor she hadn’t seen in months—a fellow who lived on the eighth floor too, across the hall from her. A guy who had once headed up the co-op board, but who’d quit that thankless job to take care of his wife.
Or so he’d announced at a meeting some years ago.
It being generally appreciated, even by those who disliked him, that his wife had just had brain surgery.
Appreciated? Perhaps barely understood.
If not merely rumored.
Her neighbor across the hall being a man who seemed to arouse strong negative feelings in certain people.
Strange as she had found this at the time, gentle as he’d always seemed to her. His face wearing always a sad, distracted look. Though perhaps it was more the long face of exhaustion than of sadness: a deep weariness, no doubt exacerbated by the steady decline in his wife’s condition over the years.
Tall and stooped, he had been labeled a wimp by the faction of the co-op board who hated him.
While the faction who didn’t had applauded him for standing up to them.
The co-op board having been split into factions ever since she could remember, no matter who, it seemed, she and her fellow residents elected to it. The understanding being, if never precisely mentioned, that only certain kinds of people would run for election to the board.
Only to find themselves, once elected, thrown inadvertently behind the lines in a turf war they had failed to discern on the horizon…
…if indeed they hadn’t run for office precisely in order to take part in such a war, if not to help craft it.
She tried to remember what was allegedly wrong with her neighbor’s wife. Not that she hadn’t been told, in some detail, by the woman herself. Not just once, but on numerous occasions.
Albeit none of them recent.
Each retelling unique, something new added to the story each time. Even as nothing ever seemed to become superseded.
Nothing, that is, resolved. Only amplified. A complication every few months, or weeks.
Not that she hadn’t listened each time with concern, if not outright fascination, to these updates. So many anomalies seemed to be afflicting her neighbor’s wife that she’d marveled at the woman’s ability to laugh it all off, however sardonically, over and over again.
If, that is, she hadn’t completely misconstrued the matter.
It being a sort of miracle, perhaps, that the woman was functioning today.
Not to mention still alive.
Unless, of course, she was lying.
No, confabulating.
If so, wouldn’t such a tendency—or compulsion—be the inevitable fallout of all those brain operations?
A sufficient condition, if not necessarily a necessary one.
However difficult she herself was beginning to find the task of remembering the details of other people’s lives, including her neighbor’s wife’s, at least where they concerned bad news.
Not to mention the details of her own.
Who had been diagnosed with what. Who was on what: how strong a dose, how many times a day.
Who had had something removed, either wholly or in part. Which part of what body part. Which organ.
Who was in rehab, who in remission.
How poignant to discover that the person in question seemed to go on being whoever he or she had ever been, more or less, no matter what.
Well, almost.
Whatever that was.
All but heroic.
Notwithstanding whatever was missing. However much had atrophied, or been excised.
Though she had to confess, with some shame, that this wasn’t always so easy to discern.
The stories of the accidents being far more compelling, to her, than the details of any consequent medical intervention.
The more so, perhaps, for her having to fabricate many of them herself.
A process which seemed to kick in on its own, however involuntarily.
Indeed, quite shamelessly beyond her control.
Stories whose tellers invariably left out something of crucial importance, or so it seemed to her. Though perhaps it was merely a matter of something she needed to believe.
Or preferred not to.
Something that just wasn’t there.
Though what that might be, she could not have said.
It having become ever harder, as time sashayed on, for her to be sure.
Of this or of just about anything else regarding the dance of daily existence, for that matter. When to point, when to flex—or deflect; when to take a flying leap. In what direction? How far?
Her neighbor’s wife, on the other hand, seemed to have razor-sharp recall, notwithstanding whatever it was they’d removed from her brain.
At least, as concerned the details of her various operations—not just what they had robbed her of, but what they had left her with, in what condition.
Not to say that this wasn’t self-evident.
At least, in part.
If only some of the time.
That day being the first time she herself had seen either one of the couple since she’d moved back into the building. Since she’d returned to this city, this country.
In what was left of the lobby.
The wife now in a wheelchair, her hair gone sparse and wispy, her head a funny shape. Abnormally flat from behind, or so it seemed to her.
The woman peered up at her with a watery look, her pupils silver dots in the pale skies of her eyes.
I can’t walk, she said. They operated on my brain and they blew it. Now I can’t walk.
The husband, pushing his wife’s wheelchair, talked about the weather. Such a beautiful day, he said, we had to take a walk.
He asked her how long she was staying in this country.
She interjected that surely the two of them went out with some frequency. At least on good days like this.
Suspecting, even as she said it, that it wasn’t true.
The wife’s eyes widened as if she were about to offer a reply.
No, he answered, hardly ever. It’s too hard on my wife. She gets so tired.
Whereupon the wife lowered her eyes.
What about you, he said. Planning on moving overseas again one of these days? Or are you back for the duration?
She flinched.
I can’t walk, said the wife. They botched it, and now I can’t walk.
The husband remarked on the lobby renovations, as everyone else who lived in the building seemed to whenever they crossed paths. About how, now that you had to walk outdoors across the roof of the underground garage and enter the building through a side door, instead of taking the usual route down the front steps and through the front door, you had to be careful what you said out loud.
Given that you passed under everyone’s windows on the south side of the building, to say nothing of their balconies.
Which, for some reason she’d never understood, people here called ‘terraces’.
The garage roof, itself indeed a terrace, being otherwise off limits to any kind of traffic. Historically so.
Stretching, as it did, along the ground just below the apartments facing south.
Why, people up on the 16th floor could hear a paper-clip drop out here, her neighbor said.
I can’t walk, shouted his wife. They screwed it up and now I can’t walk.
Nice to see you again, her neighbor said.
He stroked his wife’s head, his fingers playing with her hair. We’d better get upstairs.
His wife felt for his hand, touching it.
A hand large and powerful enough to affect the shape of anything it might choose to adjust, or so it appeared to her.
She found herself wondering, in spite of herself, what had afflicted her neighbor’s wife at the outset. What, if anything, might have warranted mandatory intervention.
Which she assumed they had called it.
Something like this.
Way back before they started doing the surgeries.
Just how her neighbor had convinced his wife that she needed the first of these—procedures, as he no doubt called them.
He being no different from the rest of her neighbors in that regard.
Before they started earmarking certain parts for adjustment, if not for actual removal.
Each intervention that followed being, like the first one, a matter of ‘informed consent’, or so she surmised.
Simple, and ever simpler with each episode.
Though perhaps ‘incision’ was the more judicious term.
Consent being granted, in every subsequent instance, by a person who’d been rendered less and less able to give any sort of permission for anything.
Or so she imagined.
Thanks to each new incursion.
Though she could have been way out of bounds on this.
She wondered, now, if the instincts of those who had massed against her neighbor in his capacity as president of the co-op board had been, in some sense, correct.
If correctness was a quality that one might attribute to instincts.
Her own instincts about such matters having become so unreliable—anymore.
That last, a term few people in these parts would have felt the need to append to such a snippet of thought, she startled herself to realize.
However idly, however slowly.
‘Anymore’ harking back, no doubt, to some interlude in her past, some sojourn no longer retrievable, perhaps, in any detail. Someplace in the midwest or the south where she’d once lived. In the care of someone who had minded her like a mother. Who had clasped her to her breast.
As such a person might have put it.
Had she existed anymore.
If ever.
The feeling of remembrance, of loss, being all but visceral.
She wondered sometimes, when she heard a certain kind of cry outside her window late at night, if it wasn’t all in her imagination.
Not unlike so many of her memories.
How to know? Such a fine line.
All of lived life a mere marring of the boundary between memory and imagination, however momentary in geologic time. A smudge shot through with flashes of light.
Roars of thunder?
The sound invariably coming from the roof of the underground garage.
Though when she peered out the window and gazed down across its sprawl of concrete slab—an empty platform slated, every now and then, for flower-beds and strolling paths—she never saw a thing.
The voice being unlike that of any animal that might have been expected to turn up in the lee of her building, or of any other, at a time so late in its natural history.
That era all but suspended in a sigh of protracted fadeout. Or, more precisely perhaps, a state of siege.
Maybe ‘segue’ was what she really meant.
A seamless segue into the saga of Homo sapiens—hoardes of erect bipeds alternately covering and raping the earth.
A song of humankind triumphant.
In the chamber of whose echoes, nonetheless, some creature let loose a long wail as it stretched its limbs, unseen, beneath a sky of few stars.
How congenial it must have found the new moon, the vaguely metallic smell of the river just beyond the tracks; the whine of the third rail announcing the approach of a train. A silvery, keening sound curving like a sickle around the bend. Followed by a series of rhythmic cracks like a monster breaking bricks. Cracks so loud they shook the whole building.
The cry she heard nonetheless a strangled scream, rendered at half volume.
Albeit full pain.
A sound quite beyond the range of any dog or cat.
However open any living throat would have to be to produce a sound like that: however free.
Notwithstanding the paradox of this.
However great the anguish in her own throat when she heard it.
Enough to render her mute.