But who could believe such a thing? I myself cannot. And yet I swear to you, the three of us, together, sank into a dreamless, obliterating slumber. When I woke, everything was different. The surroundings had not changed. Every object was exactly as it had been, only a total clarity had descended, purifying the airless space, sharpening the edges of the lamplight. The mother’s breathing was regular and steady. The night, I knew, was far gone. I knew that no one would come to help us: no gendarmes, no police, no paramedics jogging down the ramp with trauma kits and stretcher boards. The young man had spurred his bike and fled. Our solitude, though shared, was absolute.
—
Had you been there, Father, had you stood, say, at the top of the ramp, what would you have seen, looking down? The baby, sleeping, had fallen from the girl’s breast, the breast blue-veined, hard and pale in the hard glare of the lantern. Behind them both, the doctor: his eyes open now. The scene would seem frozen, fixed, a tableau, until you remarked the trembling of the doctor’s hand on the mother’s naked hip. At first you understand this to be a natural response, a discharge of adrenal tension after his urgent exertions. But then you see how the hand is not in fact trembling, not any longer, but shaking, and you understand that it is not the hand that is moving but the hip beneath it. The hand jerks as the mother’s body jerks, and you see now that her mouth has filled with a bloody spume. Her eyes rolling, erratically at first but then back in the direction of the doctor beside her, but they do not meet his own. He does not move to clear her throat, or to turn her so that she does not aspirate her own vomit. He only holds his hand against her hip, as though the hand were an instrument whose sole purpose was to register each twitch, each throe, within his own person, recording each spasm heaving now through her in waves, each one closer on the heels of the last until they have fused into a single convulsion, driving her chest forward, her spine arched. You would think this compounding paroxysm had lasted for many minutes, realizing only afterward that mere seconds had passed before it released her, a faint tremor flickering through her extremities, followed by a hoarse, scraping exhalation. The doctor’s hand is immobile now, as incapable of movement as the mother’s body, now perfectly still. So absolute is that stillness that when at last the doctor rises, slowly, as though taking all pains not to wake them, you think he must have risen out of his own body. You think when he bends over the baby and wraps it in his shirt, he has lifted the baby from out of its body as well, so that even after he has departed with his tiny burden, the three of them—the doctor, the mother, the child—would remain forever in that darkness, as though carved on a tomb lid or frozen in the shadows of a near-black photograph.
FORTY-ONE
During my rounds at the hospital, I must have fallen asleep in the chair at a patient’s bedside, next to the IV tree. Did no nurse think to wake me? I try to rise, but exhaustion like a great weight presses me down. And where is the patient? I wonder, aware now that I am the only person in the room—the only person, and yet not alone. Certain thoughts wait for me to regain consciousness. One, barely audibly, suggests that the chair I am sleeping in is not in fact a chair. Another indicates that I’m not sitting but lying in a bed. A third whispers that I have not been making rounds, that I have not made rounds in many years, not since I was a medical student. Another says, Listen: the voices in the hallway speak a foreign language. But it is not foreign; it is French. You have awakened in France. You took a wrong turn somewhere in the hospital, got out on the wrong floor, and now you are in France.
Why was I there? How did I get there?
—
If I shifted, the IV rack shook as though startled. The bags hanging on the rack drained into a converging tube, and the tube to an in-line catheter, the catheter to a needle, and the needle in a vein in the back of a hand. These elements hung together like segments of a syllogism. The hospital bed was my bed, the drip stood at my bedside, the hand was my hand. Nevers. Somehow I knew I was in Nevers. The reason, like a visiting bedside relative, had gone away but would come back later.
—
There had been voices in the corridor, but the voices had disappeared. I thought: So this is what it feels like, the standard combination, Haldol and a benzodiazepine, lorazepam most likely. I’d ordered it often for my patients. The sedatives corralled my thoughts away from me, as though in a tank, submerged and distorted behind walls of heavy glass. They swam like huge fish, vanishing
