The Story

This story was published in The Massachusetts Review

Betty: the size of football stadium and running the way I imagined an old-fashioned waffle iron waffle iron would run. We followed, Judith and I. Our pink smocks whisking like tissue and our white shoes squeaky on the bright floor.

Betty was talking to herself. Asia and monkeys and birds. Confinement, containment, isolation. Big words. She was covered in blood, too. Breathing like an animal. A big African animal. A hippo. A rhinoceros.

Judith whispered something to me. I didn’t hear. She started laughing. Our shoes kept squeaking and I was tired of running. I wasn’t all that small either.

My body was short and thick, as if made of mortar and stone. My face was glassy, bubbled, and my hair, which I adored, was mongrel red. Dried rose, split by threads of white.

My name was Annie. I was born on the Olympic Pacific rim, in the tiny port town of Blueback.

My parents died in a fire at the cannery and that was when I met Brad. He stared at me across the line of caskets, at the high school, as marching trombones played low and rainy. His face was thin and his body was thin. He had very blue eyes and a mouth, I remembered, that had something locked inside, an expression from a long ago place that wanted to know me again.

We treated each other like race cars. Stripped-down nights of drugs and fucking outside beneath the drizzly limbs of pines. A constant pulling at our bodies, so that our skins became welted and tear-shaped.

By the time we turned seventeen I was addicted to gasoline and walked in a rhythmic twitch, pulsing with sleeplessness, pounds of me shuddering away.

Instead of wedding rings, Brad bought a small blue truck for three hundred bucks. We packed the rusted bed with two changes of clothes and pictures of our parents and headed east along the fist of the peninsula. We followed the flat of the ocean and I watched the wind break small white waves far out into the water. Then the ocean turned into a river and the Cascades rose above us, the sun setting on the ice and glaciers like red sawdust and salt. Brad reached for me, digging into my hair, palming my skull. He looked up at the mountains and told me the red ice, that big beautiful light, wasn’t any prettier than me.

We got lucky. Ira and Brad fell into the kind of degenerate friendship usually reserved for teenage boys, leaving Judith and I plenty of time for ourselves.

They spent every Saturday, all day Saturday (even in the rain), drinking beer and gambling horseshoes in the parking lot of our apartment complex, as Judith and I wasted the long afternoons on the roof of my building, sharing a bottle of gin and a pack of our favorite cigarettes, the kind that tasted of mint and clover and opened our throats like arteries.

We told stories and stared off onto the grey orb of the Sound in the west, throbbing under a grey blanket of sky. We drank our limed gin and remembered all the drugs we huffed or snorted or shot; the popular synthetics we were both too scared to touch, but remembered friends who had: slumped on toilets, asleep in bathtubs, trembling in the kitchens of parties. The fires that sometimes started and the nights we sometimes spent in jail and the countries we dreamt of living in, starring in lives that were not our lives but a French movie of life where we lived in beautiful cities with rivers instead of streets.

Judith loved movies. She had a film projector set up in her living room and during the wettest part of the winter we’d watch old black and whites on her grainy screen, eating strips of raw salmon and drinking white wine. She told me all about the actors and actresses, their great and tragic love affairs, their addictions, their habits, and their moments of pure brilliance where the fictions of themselves gave her heart the weight of magic. Movies, she said, made her love the way she loved, for often she told me the best came in the end, when Ira took her and placed her face between his shoulder and chest, deep in the smell of him. There she was, lost. Every nerve and piece of skin so alive and noisy moments before became still, quiet. All she could feel was the pinning of her flesh and the sound of Ira’s blood flowing under his skin, around the tissue of his muscles and ridges of bone. It was her most sacred place. Her favorite plot. The film from which she was cut and spliced into the frames of his life.

I thought about the machines I would use. The holes I’d fill. The organs I’d hold and squeeze and pump and push. The clamps and sheets and itchy beat of the pulse.

I was sweating and my back hurt and Judith was breathing hard. I could feel all my cigarettes in the channels of my lungs and I thought about cancer. Then Trauma 4.

The room was covered in blood. All over the double doors, shattering the floor, red wormy globs, black lumps of tarry flesh. All over the machines and monitors, all over the blue emergency smock of the attending doctor.

Gushing from the middle, stretched on a table, was a woman. I saw her right away, her black eye staring back at me, her long hair pressed to the side of her face, the rest crushed under the flow of her insides. She was alive.

I rushed, my hands diving. The doctor shouted. Judith worked her hands in, next to mine. We tore at her body. Then it was over and I was looking down at our feet, our white shoes wet with blood.

Later, as we huddled in the cafeteria while Dr. Poolbelly briefed us on what he was calling “Incident Priority,” I kept thinking of that color. The freckles that spattered my chest, my back, and the parched red grass of my hair.

The attending emergency doctor was a mess. His name, I remembered, was Pennymaker. He had been in the Ward less than a week. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. As Dr. Poolbelly talked, Pennymaker cracked his knuckles and checked the lapels of his white coat as if something was missing. I could tell his fingers wanted to grab onto something important and tear it away. He was trying to explain.

He couldn’t explain.

Dr. Poolbelly was a good doctor, the best I ever knew, but a calm man he was not. Everything was serious, dead serious, to the point of being irrational, as if he never got used to the fact that people die and often without reason.

He asked, one last time, slowly: “Can you describe for me, just for me, Doctor, what you think might’ve happened.”

Pennymaker shrugged his shoulders quickly. Nodded quickly. “Yes,” he said quickly. Then he touched the corner of his mouth where a little of the woman’s blood remained, and rubbing the mark of blood between his fingers, he stood. Gently removing his white coat and resting a hand on Dr. Poolbelly’s shoulder, he walked across the cafeteria to the fire exit and broke the lock. He pushed the door open, cold wet air rushing in, sounding the alarm.

Betty and Judith looked at each other and then Dr. Poolbelly.

I looked over at the door and the rain pouring in, the wet leaves brushing across the cafeteria floor. I was thinking it should mean something. The door and leaves. The floor and all the red in me.

We called it a bloom. The way a flower blooms, or a bomb.

We called it a rocket & surge, like a star flickering and then imploding.

The isolative lockdown was in its second week. The main wings of the hospital had been closed, patients transferred, and the Ward was quarantined as women continued to pour in. We gave them beds, fed them, changed the sheets, waited for the rocket, watched them bloom.

In the mornings, we stared at the mourners from the bay windows of the coffee room, stirring packets of sandy sugar and powdered cream into our coffees. The mourners believed they were there to remind us that a world outside existed and that we were still part of it and help would come. We hated them. Their signs, their banners, the We Love You and God Bless, the names of mothers and wives and sisters and daughters––Bianca, Sara, Diana, Jennifer. Sometimes one of them threw something and the police would appear and disperse the crowd. We liked it when this happened. Quiet. We liked quiet.

It was raining. Betty finished her coffee and left, closing the door behind her. Donna immediately opened the door, peaked her head inside, looked over the room.

“Annie?”

I turned, raising my eyes.

“Should I tell him you’re with a patient?” 

I looked at Judith. Judith shook her head.

Out in the hall, the smell of blood and bleach, I closed the phone booth and locked it.

Brad was coughing. Drunk. His voice snapping like firewood.

He wanted me coming home. “Tonight.”

“We’ve been over this, Brad.”

“Fuck what we’ve been over. I want you home, Annie.”

“The Ward is packed. We’re quarter staffed. You seriously expect me just to leave?”

He hit the phone against something hard, then back on the line apologizing. Didn’t I understand how difficult this was on him? “Two weeks,” he reminded me. How did I expect him just to accept this?

I never told him we were under orders. I was afraid he’d do something stupid and I wanted him safe. But he believed he’d done something, said something, hurt me in some way, and he apologized over and over until he became angry in his apologies and demanded me home.

I told him to get some sleep. Rest, eat something. Soon, I promised him. “Don’t be angry.” And please, I begged him: “If you love me, let me do my job.”

I missed the sounds. The way Brad gargled and groaned like something warm and spongy was filling his throat. Like he was trying to fit every part of me into him, as if I was difficult in the keys of my skin––every fat, quivering chord of me. And humming, Brad shoved me further in, playing me from the inside out, until something deep within us pitched a down-throttling tone, a deep crawling boom.

The morning I told Brad I was leaving, I boiled a pot of water because it felt like the right thing to do.

“What’s up,” he said, sitting at our kitchen table, rubbing the grey clay of his face. He was pushing eighty hours a week in a boot factory. We were saving for a home and because of it he always smelled of rubbery leather and bootlaces.

“Boiling water,” I said.

He opened a bottle of beer.

“Something I have to tell you,” I said.

“Something about that water,” he answered, smiling, settling into his beer.

I turned from the stove and took his hand and told him about the star. The rocket and surge and how something like this was probably inside me too, biding its time. I raised my eyes to our bed that was in the middle of our living room, our rumple of pillows and sheets.

I’d be gone for a spell, I said. The general wings of the hospital were closing and the women coming in would be housed in the Ward. I was one of the few who’d committed to stay.

Brad was quiet. I felt him imagining me––what might be growing inside, giving it color, sound, a shape and a body that was my body.

The state had just quarantined the city. There were demonstrations. Police and arrests.

“Promise you’ll get back to me,” he said finally.

I knelt over him, kissed his face and though I felt him not wanting to, he pulled me down into his lap anyway, nibbling on the ends of my hair like a horse.

“How big you think this star is?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Bigger than you and me?”

“Nothing’s bigger than that.”

“Swallowed me inside you.”

“Nothing can swallow you.”

“Why’s it happening?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Just that it’s happening.” 

“Yes. Just that.”

My hair fell from his mouth and his hands slid off my body. I leaned back and looked at him, at his thin neck and white lips. I could smell bootlaces and leather. The kettle on the stove came to a boil, but we just sat there, looking at each other, as the water went on screaming.

I’d sit with the women for a few minutes, my hands resting on their bed sheets, telling them about Brad and the way he hummed during love. I wanted to give them something personal. Raw, full of smells and tastes. Something they could remember with their bodies.

I never knew if they could hear me. Flesh sunken to the bones of their faces, deep in the cartilage of their necks, veins stretched red and lightening blue on the surface of their skin, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling as if breathing took a great deal of concentration.

When I finished, I reached over and touched them, drawing my hand up their arm, over their shoulder, under their jaw, delicately around the often agape mouth, past the eyes to the hair where I would pull away, whisper goodbye, and move into the next room.

There had been changes outside. The police were a constant presence. The mourners growing aggressive. Always the thudding of helicopters. We kept looking for media––news cameras or any attention from a larger, outside world––but there remained none. The television continued in its ways (foreign news, sitcoms, game shows, advertisements) without any evidence of our existence or suffering.

The halls were silent. Except during an actual bloom, everything was very silent, which was different from quiet, in that silence was endless and the blood tunneling through my ears was like an oncoming train.

I was checking the empty rooms because it was late afternoon and everything was silent and I had nothing to do but listen to the blood in my head. Then I found Bibiana. She was sitting in one of the empty rooms, on the edge of a bed, near the window, small hiccups twitching up from her body like a clock.

The bed was covered with paper, thick and rough like a grocery bag, and it crunched underneath the huge shape of my back. Bibiana looked at me. “Annie,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Bibiana was shy in a way that some mistook for distance, full of a clear-eyed somberness that broke my heart. All she wanted, she often told me, was a baby. With baby hands and baby feet and a little mouth cooing bubbles and jeweled spit. Her husband had been arrested for inciting demonstrations and she had come to live in the Ward before “Incident Priority.” Her husband was a minister, a social reformist, and I remembered the way he walked––so straight and upright that twin two-by-fours must’ve been stitched into the length of his black cloak. He talked with a slow meandering gentleness, especially when galvanizing a crowd, but I could tell beneath lay a storm, a disaster of rage and very hard rain. It was his eyes. The sharp black across the soft brown and his mouth razored to an otherwise smooth face.

I took Bibiana’s hand. I told her about Montana. I’d seen pictures of it in an old nature magazine and I thought it was a place people should see before they die. I saw yellow fields. How the sky was blue and pink and a little grey at its white edges. Houses stood far away from each other and often there was water, streams or small rivers over rocks, and the sun was a soft thing that gave green light to all the trees. The cities, I said, were small and the beer was very good, made of only local hops without fertilizer or pesticides. Everything tasted like cracked wheat and spring water. And the snow, when it snowed, was not icy, but fine like mist, like the ground was shaven from bricks of white soap.

We’d not be left to die. That’s what Dr. Poolbelly said.

“We’re walking out alive.”

“Like a prison break,” Donna said.

“This isn’t a prison, Donna,” Dr. Poolbelly said. “It’s my goddamn hospital.”

Judith raised her hand. She asked if guns were to be involved.

“Guns?” Betty asked, looking aghast.

“No, Judith,” Dr. Poolbelly said, taking Betty’s hand. “No guns.”

“Then how?” Bibiana wondered, but fell silent.

“Tomorrow,” Dr. Poolbelly said. “This is what we’ll do.”

I took a walk. I was tired and the last thing I wanted to think about was tomorrow.

There had been six blooms that day. Judith and I volunteered for incineration. We folded the tatter of their gowns and sponged clean the remains of their bodies. I knelt against each of them, my hair untied and draping. As I worked, I thought of my life in their lives, opened in the hole of their stomachs, birthed with blood. I felt something move inside me, needles fingering my abdomen, a hot clamp in the low of my back. Judith turned on the fire and when she opened the door of the incinerator, I paused in pain and she looked at me and I knew I was dying.

I stopped walking. I lay on the dull floor. I closed my eyes. My fever had come suddenly. A great flow of blood in my ears and though my skin was very cold, everything inside me was twisted with heat. There was my liver, my lungs. I could count parts of my blood. One, two. I saw Brad: sitting alone at our kitchen table, boiling water in the kettle, remembering me. His pants were down around his ankles, his fingers fumbling across his penis, trying to make something inside him work. Crying, jerking himself, moving loose skin.

Flags. A row of flags, all the same color.

The man wore a suit and drummed his fingers on the podium. Microphones. Spotlights glowed on his face and he was sweating, bloated and blinking. He balled his tongue in the left pocket of his old mouth, his image flickering. He spoke apologies and responsibilities but said nothing. He excused himself. Took a glass of milk from a small table next to the podium and drank. A line of army (black armor, black goggles strapped to black steel helmets) marched in behind him. They dropped their guns down in unison, waiting at polar attention as he finished drinking. The army saluted. He burped into the microphones, excusing himself a second time.

He raised his empty glass and God blessed everyone.

Betty turned off the television.

“We have a plan,” she said.

“Where is he?” Donna asked.

Betty looked at the clock on the wall. “Probably in his office. Or on the phone.”

Judith turned and looked at me but I looked instead to the window and the rain, the mourners gathering in the weather, wrapping their signs in plastic, while the police stood uneasy, drinking from thermoses, mouthing into receivers. In the dim reflection of the window, I watched Betty fold her hands to her lips. Bibiana stood next to me. The pain stomped in my stomach, hands clapping fire across my lungs. The phone rang. I felt pregnant with blood.

Her husband stood outside in his black cloak. He held a large rifle and the men behind him had rifles and the army had other things and stood in front of them, all in the mud of the lawn. It was raining.

Judith blocked the door.

Bibiana was pinned to the floor by Betty’s thick knees. She was screaming her husband’s name. His name was Jonah.

“Was this the plan?” Donna asked, looking out the window. “Because this plan sucks.”

“Can’t we give her something,” Judith said.

“Right shelf,” Betty shouted.

“Where is he, Betty?” Donna asked, turning from the window.

“I don’t know, Donna!”

Judith drew Bibiana a shot of morphine. Bibiana turned glassy. We laid her on the coffee room table, checking her pulse with our fingers as Jonah stood outside in his black cloak, holding a large rifle.

Once, we kissed.

It was cold, I remembered. Saturday and drizzly. Judith and I wrapped in blankets, the sky looking like a block of cement. She was talking. I was a little drunk and thinking how nice the ice melted between my teeth, especially when hinted with lime, and when I came back around Judith was looking at me, smiling like she knew I hadn’t been listening. I smiled, shrugging my shoulders, and then we were kissing, pressed together suddenly, the heat of her deep inside me, everything warming. We stopped. Our lips close, waiting. We knew we could have this anytime we wanted. There was no need to rush. Waiting felt good.

Holding my jaw, smelling of gin and lime and our favorite cigarettes, Judith told me all her life was a movie. She just watched it draw out and unfold. People appeared, disappeared. Cities were cities. The screen was black and white, everywhere grey. She was in love with a man named Ira. She had a best friend named Annie. And when the lights finally came on, she’d carry us both out, into the real world, where we would blink because of the light.

Dark fell.

Her husband lit torches. There were loud voices and soft voices and chanting. Bibiana rocked against the wall and looked at the back of her hands, tracing the veins with her fingernails.

We walked into the halls and opened the rooms and wheeled the beds from the rooms. We had decided to centralize in the cafeteria and wait for Dr. Poolbelly. Betty knocked on his office door but there was no answer. When we heard the ripping of artillery, we pushed the beds together and waited some more.

I watched myself weave between the beds, dribbling water across their lips, touching as many as I could. I watched myself, sick and feverish. I could hear the sound of traffic. I could see the black, felt-tip scribblings of someone on a truck stop mirror. Cracked, peeling. Breaking me broken past the dried spots of hand-soap and puss and touches of blood. Toilet paper fell like scripts of white leaves and there was a clock, rusted dripping. The red locks of my hair tied behind my ears, aching.

An explosion on the lawn rocked the building. The windows of the cafeteria shook. I watched us stagger against the rails of the bed and the water on my fingers felt hot and milky. Everywhere I looked, I was falling. I remembered that Blueback was slang for a purple ocean fish and that often Brad compared me to light and every time he did I would win. Even against the Cascades, his hand in my hair, palming my skull, red sawdust and salt. I watched hands pull at my body, welted and tear-shaped. Watched Judith call my name as I came out the middle of myself, blinding me: no more fat, human me. And Brad, my dear audience, I saw him too. Lit up in so much shine, big and beautiful like new boots, a cup of red between his knees, fingers sifting cold white seeds, and me nothing but the dust of projected light.