Extraordinary

“He said, ‘It’s too early to tell.’

“I said, ‘Is that the best news you have for me?’

“Dr. Ortoya seemed to understand what I was thinking, because he said to me, ‘We get used to situations.’

“‘Not this situation.’

“He said, ‘Do nothing rash. Wait.’

“I said to him, ‘Is there anything to wait for?’

“‘Are you religious?’

“When I heard that, I thought, Boy oh boy, am I ever going to kill myself! Suddenly, there was a real urgency to do it—to do it quickly, before anybody could read my mind and stop me. But that’s the problem with being crippled: You can’t kill yourself. The best you can do is fall out of your bed and bang your head on the floor. But that’s not going to kill you.

“And you can’t ask a friend to roll you to the edge of a cliff and look away for a second. Because even then, you can’t get out of your fucking chair. You have to have someone tip you. And, you know, finding someone to tip you over the side of a cliff, that’s a tall order. Those kinds of friends are hard to come by.

“One night, as I lay in my hospital bed in Mexico City, I watched a romance start up in the building across the street between a man with a mop and a bucket—he must have been new on the job—and a woman in a blue apron who was going from office to office emptying the wastepaper baskets. It was the middle of the night, just their floor was illuminated, and you could see them working their way toward each other. The one thing that nothing, not even gravity, can stop: people finding their way to each other even in a dark building. It went for a week like this, the two of them meeting in the brightly lit office and talking. And then one night I saw the man get up and go over and turn off the lights. Just for a half-hour or so. And I wondered if, in my condition, I would ever be part of that world again. Would I––” Here she paused, as if the instant in which the original thought had first occurred to her reopened like a seed in her memory. “Would I ever be attractive to the opposite sex again?

“Sometimes, when I opened my eyes, I expected to discover myself back in Toronto. As if Mexico and Freddie Steigman and my patio looking at the mountains and the party and the limes on the cutting board and the knock at the door and the carpet and the voices going silent were the kind of unhealthy fog you drift around in when you have slept too long. A progression into staleness.

“But then I’d glance around my room, I’d hear Spanish voices in the hallway, and I’d think, This can’t possibly have happened to me. You go to a party, you cross the room, you trip on the carpet. Do you know how many coincidences have to happen for you to arrive there? But there is no reward in figuring out the statistics, is there? Because it all returns you to here and now.

“I woke up once after midnight. My legs were on fire. Some terrible, insistent pain, like an animal staring at me from the doorway. I lay there listening to the soft swish of white shoes outside my room, back and forth, back and forth. I thought, I’m going to lie here very still and this thing will go away; it’ll get bored and go away. But it didn’t. It just sort of flopped itself across the doorway with a grunt and waited. Pain, I’m telling you—pain and the things that come with pain—it’s such a horribly private business. I’m sure for some people that the actual act of dying is a relief. If only to extinguish those monotonous, incommunicable, repetitive cartoons.

“I pushed a button on a cord and an angel appeared at the side of my bed. She gave me a fat pink pill. It left a bitter taste at the back of my throat, even with a glass of water, but I suspected that good things would come with that taste. And they did. I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake, but I could actually watch my thoughts take on a physical shape, even colour, like people in a novel who suddenly forget they’re characters and start moving around on their own. Pursuing their own concerns.

“I buzzed the nurse. I asked her to raise up my bed as high as it would go, to prop me up on pillows so that the whole of Mexico City lay below me. It must have been a Saturday night. The town was lit up like a pulsing Christmas tree, and I felt like something very good was just about to happen to me. Somebody was playing the piano. How perfect, and yet how odd—a piano on a hospital ward in the middle of the night.

“I thought about Dr. Ortoya in his crisp linen jacket, about the angel in the whispering shoes, about all the life in Mexico City. In the bars, in the streets, in the cantinas, in the houses—all this glittering, energized life. I thought of Chloe, smiling in her sleep. And I thought, This is a good deal, being alive. Life is a good deal.

“But the next day, things didn’t seem so cheerful. And even in that clear sunlight, the banality of the world seemed like the dominant chord.” Here, Sally paused for a moment. “Or perhaps because of the sunlight,” she added privately. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it was my third day in the hospital. A grey day outside my window. The city flat, lifeless. All night long, a man across the hall with a bullet wound in his thigh had been groaning. I didn’t hear him come in. I was dreaming about lying on a dock at the edge of a country lake. You were there. So was your older brother, Jake. We were all tanned. Tanned and skinny. I could hear the wind passing through the pine trees on the shore. You know that sound it makes, that swish, the pine needles rubbing their hands together.

“I was lying face down; I could smell the sun-bleached wood; I could hear the water lapping under the dock. Little by little, the groaning of the man in the hospital bed across the hall began to mingle with the sounds I could hear on the dock: a boat crossing the bay, the water lapping under the boards, the wind in the pine trees, a man groaning with a bullet in his thigh.

“I woke up. Rain splattered on the hospital windows—fat, dull-witted drops. Splat, splat, splat, not like regular rain, but like transparent jelly thrown at the glass. Splat, splat, splat. The pill had worn off, leaving behind a sort of flatness like a winter field that stretches all the way to the horizon. And I thought that this is what life is like without my pill, this field that you walk across forever. Yes, I’m going to use all my intelligence, all my creativity, to put an end to this. I was, at that very second, wondering how to get more pills out of my angel when a girl as thin as a pencil appeared in the doorway. It was my daughter, Chloe.

“‘How are you feeling, Mama?’ she said, and the sound of her voice, with its tiny, uncertain wobble, broke my heart. It just cut me in half, and within seconds I realized that all my plans, my schemes, my scenarios for killing myself, were suddenly in the back seat, suddenly in the past tense. Inconceivable. Like a drunken fantasy from whose grips you awake thinking, What in Heaven’s name was all that about?

“If grown-ups can get used to new and dreadful circumstances fast, children do it with a speed that’s breathtaking. They really are built for survival. It was like watching an eyeball come into focus, the way Chloe accepted the new version of me—the neck brace, crabbed hands, the motionless legs.

“There she was, perched like a bird on the side of my bed, talking about a red-haired girl at the American school she attended in San Miguel, about why so many boys liked her. What is it about some girls that boys like? she wondered. And I could see that she was completely absorbed by the red-haired girl. The sun came back out and transformed the city into a dazzling foreign port.”

Three

Eighteen floors down from Sally’s apartment, a car alarm went off in the parking lot. Honk, honk, honk, honk. We both listened to it involuntarily. Then it suddenly stopped and the room again filled with silence, a more profound silence, it seemed, both of us privately aware of where we were and why we were there. In only a few hours, we had grown so enthralled with each other’s company that the third person in the room had disappeared.

“I wrote the note,” she said.

“What’s it say?”

“Just to call the police before coming into the apartment.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want to make any troubles for you,” she said.

“Okay.”