The Malleable Morning Bruises
Installment Four
by Robin Hemley
The forecast is for snow, which is odd for Liberia. But there have been a lot of odd things happening lately. Delia steps past the doctor crouching on her lawn chair in her cleaning closet.
“Excuse me, Dr. Swift,” she says, “but they’ve been paging you for days now. No disrespect intended, but you’re getting in my way.”
This Dr. Swift. He’s on some bad medicine. But it seems like this whole country is on bad medicine. Her, too. She’s been having dreams of eyes in peepholes and that’s just been concerning her gravely because usually Delia doesn’t dream at all. Especially not peepholes with eyes and bouncing on beds. There’s something almost shameful about it. If she believed in the Devil, she’d say it was Devil’s work, but she doesn’t believe in God or the Devil. She believes in her mop. It supports her. She supports it. Doesn’t change direction without her knowing it. Isn’t useless like some doctor in the cleaning closet on her lawn chair. Makes her want every time she sees him to just kick that mop bucket because maybe if she kicked him, she’d get fired. Never know with these doctors. Might be some kind of test. Maybe they’ve been waiting for her to kick a doctor so they can fire her. Stranger things have happened. Snow for instance, though it hasn’t snowed yet. Just the forecast. Monrovia and elsewhere, general over Liberia.
She mops her way to the Blotto Boy’s room, checks his chart like a doctor. Says to her mop, “Patient’s name, Kwame Wilson, age 17. Gangrene infection got him. Prognosis: Snow. Start an IV drip of yams and chocolate. Five parts yam, one part chocolate.”
Everyone has a watcher except for this boy who is losing parts of himself every day. This boy’s parents showed up once. Once! Long enough for Dr. Swift to tell them (before he took refuge in her closet) that Kwame’s leg had to come off, and maybe more.
The father looked ashamed, as though his son had lost his leg shooting pool or playing cards. The mother cried. The father said, “He wanted to learn how to read,” and she wanted to bash the father with her mop. Since when you learn to read with your legs?
Dr. Swift didn’t say anything. Just nodded his head like he understood. Next thing you know he’s turned off his pager and has taken up residence inside the broom closet.
After that, no one has visited the boy. Most patients have at least one watcher. When an important man is sick, half a village might try to crowd into the room. Even in hallways, even in the grass outside, patients lie with their watchers. But not the Blotto Boy. He has no one except for Delia.
Dr. Leopold stands beside her. “Doctor Leo,” she says. “You shouldn’t sneak up like that. You’ll put me in one of these beds.”
“Delia,” says the doctor in a voice like he’s talking from inside a statue of himself, “if this is what you wanted all along, you should have said so long ago. I’m yours.”
She gives him a sidelongs glance and swats the air the way the women at the market swat the air with money, to multiply it. But she’s got hold of nothing, just jokes. No money. No promises. Just Dr. Swift on her lawn chair.
The window of the room is open. The boy’s leg is bandaged with a bloody gauze, an IV bag almost depleted, on the wall an unframed picture of Mary walking in the clouds beside a water stain that looks like the crest of a dune. The horns of traffic mingle with moans from the hall, the dying patients and the cars and busses having an argument. “No, we’re not taking you away. You’re dying. We’re moving. You’re standing still.” A loudspeaker chants the name of the President as though he’s a futbol team. A sour smell comes from the bed. In the tree outside the window, a parrot shifts on a branch, peering in it seems as though the boy’s appointed guardian.
“What’s so interesting about this boy, Delia?” Dr. Leo asks, moving to the window. “Just another dying boy. He’s smelling up the place with his leg. We’re going to take off a little more of him tomorrow, and then some more the next day and once nothing’s left we’re going to find another nothing to put in the bed and then another and another until all the nothings have died and then we have the election and re-elect our President and then everything is going to get better, you’ll see. No more dying nothings. Just joy and happiness in 4 West.”
The boy has hardly spoken a word since he entered the hospital. Except in delirium when he screamed, “I’m not letting you go until you give them to me. Give me the narcotics!” Another night he screamed her name, “Delia,” and this is what made her so curious. That was when the dreams started too.
“By the way, Delia. You seen Dr. Swift? No one’s seen him around. Think he’s joined the rebels?” He laughs like he invented laughter.
This a trick question? she wants to ask. That’s the problem with such a question. There’s no simple answer. You can’t say, “He’s in my cleaning closet perched on my lawn chair like that parrot outside.” Not without other questions being asked. Like, “Why did you kick your mop bucket? Were you really thinking of kicking a doctor? What you been dreaming about? What have you been peeping at? Do you have any friends?”
“Dr. Swift doesn’t tell me his appointed rounds,” she says finally. These doctors think they walk in the clouds. Think they can say all nonesuch and invade your broom closet like you’re some tickle in their throat, some pus-weeping nothing in a bed. “Maybe he went home because of the snow. What do you think snow feels like anyway?”
- Click here to read “The Malleable Morning Bruises: Installement One” by Philip Graham
- Click here to read “The Malleable Morning Bruises: Installment Two” by Nance Van Winckel
- Click here to read “The Malleable Morning Bruises: Installment Three” by Larry Sutin
- Click here to read about the Exquisite Corpse Project
- Click here to read more fiction
