The Waters & the Wild

precarious tottering, but the way back was a plummet, a headlong drop. Something had caught up to me, seized and hauled me back to my campsite, as though to say: “You cannot leave, you can never leave.” But what was it that had ensnared me? The fact both simple and impossible that Miriam had killed herself, had killed herself and her child, our child. Here. Yes, that was the implacable fact that had tracked me down and seized me, saying, On n’est nulle part, et toi, tu n’étais jamais là. This is nowhere and you were never here. You were never here, but you can never leave. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I could never leave. I had said to the girl, If you need me, you can find me, as though I had appointed myself her physician on call. But I wasn’t on call. I was in a kind of custody, held not by professional obligation but by whatever it was—the desert, the wilderness—I knew I could never escape. I had found myself in a kind of limitless detention, a version of what French law calls garde-à-vue, the state of being kept in sight, without refuge.

That night in my tent, I could make myself drink only enough to keep off the shakes. Did I think if I lay very still and waited in the darkness, the fact would pass me by? Did I think that by some inscrutable mercy I would be released, uncoupled from it? But suddenly there was a voice calling out in the campground. Then the voice was nearby. Someone was beating on the tent fly with his hand and shouting, Docteur! Docteur! Vous êtes là? Putain, il est où, le foutu médecin, le médecin américain?

Yes, the fucking American doctor was here if he would shine that fucking flashlight somewhere else.

The beam flashed up before he flicked it off, illuminating the gaunt face of the man who had expelled me from the squatters’ basement—though now he seemed a mere boy, gangly and rawboned. Panic cracked in his voice as he spoke. “Viens, Docteur, tout de suite! The girl, you must come, she is in trouble—”

“She is in labor,” I said.

“She is dying,” cracked the voice.

“Then get her to a hospital, like you should have before.” I turned.

“Pas d’hôpital! No time.” He clasped my arm and jerked me around. “She is dying. You come. Ma moto.” And then we were flying, my hands gripping his bony waist, the motorbike wailing over the bridge and up past the Porte de Paris, ricocheting through the twisted streets and then out through the housing projects, bumping over a curb into the unbuilt development, through the flung-open plywood door, and down the ramp, brakes shuddering, skidding to a stop in the abandoned basement.

“She is dying. You see how she is dying,” he said, lifting the kerosene lantern over her body.

“She is in labor,” I said. But the cast of her skin in the lantern’s glare looked livid and greased. Naked, she lay on her side, a lake of dark fluid pooled beneath her hip. A groan surfaced from the depths of her body. When I turned her onto her back, her head lolled to the side. Respiration labored, eyes half-open, carotid pulse weak and thready. The young man had been speaking. They’d thought her pains were just withdrawal cramps, so he’d gone out to cop. That had taken a couple of hours. When he came back, she was worse. She had shat or pissed or something all over the bed, and she was screaming. He hadn’t wanted to shoot her up, but she’d made him. She had stopped screaming then, maybe because of the hit, but she wasn’t better, she was worse. She’d turned a color. He’d had no idea what to do; maybe he shot her up again…But she was saying something, something about getting the doctor, the American doctor. Was she dying? She wasn’t going to die, was she?

“She will surely die if you don’t get her to a hospital.”

“But you can do something, no?”

During his explanation, I had knelt and examined her. Though the cervix was effaced and fully dilated, her labor appeared to have ceased, with the baby’s head canted at a bad angle in the birth canal. I stood up.

“You see she is not dying,” the young man repeated, shifting from foot to foot like a child needing to urinate.

“No,” I said. “She is not dying. They are both dying, together, she and your baby. If you do not leave now, if you do not get an ambulance here now, they will die. Do you understand? Toutes les deux. Both of them.”

Then, as though shot from a sling, he was gone, the echo of shrieking tires vibrating from the walls. An odor of scorched rubber and exhaust lingered, mingled with the odor of effluvia, ferric and excremental, pooled on the cardboard beneath her hips. I could neither look at the girl nor look away. The lantern hissed. Beside it in an ashtray, balanced across the bowl of a spoon, a loaded syringe rested, the needle-tip beaded with a clear droplet. The lantern light glowed scarlet in the needle’s chamber, suffused through the mixture of heroin and blood. The young man must have stopped or been stopped after he had found the vein.

Another groan, weaker this time, rose from the girl. I had examined her at first without compunction, but now the thought of touching her appalled me. Standing there above her, I held my hands up, palms inward, as though I had just pushed my way through scrub-room doors into an operating room. My hands, however, were ungloved, and dark not with Betadine but with blood.

What—I tried to make myself think—what what what were the likely complications? What was most urgent and what could be ignored? What could wait until the ambulance arrived? The heroin must have retarded or interrupted labor. It would have if he had given her enough. But something else could have