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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... cc&d magazine (v215) (the December 2010 Issue) |
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Coronary
Margaret Karmazin
It was the damn heartburn again - that ulcer must be back. Then suddenly, surprisingly, he vomited. As he sank to the floor, he realized he was dripping with sweat. He saw Paula’s legs by his head before blacking out. He came to in the hospital, hooked up to monitors, an IV taped to his arm and numerous people hovering.
Paula said to someone, “Maybe it came on from last night’s dinner.”
“What do you mean?” said a young male voice, some intern Marshall supposed.
She sighed. “Our son and daughter-in-law were over for dinner. They got in a fight, like always.”
“Who, your son and his wife?”
“No, Marshall and Darren. They disagree on just about everything. Marshall is religious and...” she hesitated...“conservative, while Jerry and his wife are...you know, the other way around. Marshall gets so worked up. I tell him not to discuss politics, but he won’t listen and look at him now. I knew this would happen eventually!”
“Mr. Wright, we’re going to check your blood now. This might pinch.”
Holy shit, did it pinch. Pinch wasn’t the word. What was the idiot doing, trying to dig a hole in his arm?
Suddenly, he was moving, ceiling tiles and lights flashing above him. He was dizzy even though lying down.
A young man was in his face. “Mr. Wright, your enzymes are high. It appears that you’ve had a heart attack. We’re going to do a cath, gotta see what’s going on in there.”
Everything was a blur and where was Paula? Why the hell was she leaving him to this all by himself? They shot him up with something and were poking him in the leg. Time seemed to slow, then race.
“Four blockages, Mr. Wright,” someone said. “We’re going to need to do a bypass. We’ve got you scheduled for tomorrow morning.”
“You’ve got no choice,” Paula said from somewhere far off. He didn’t give a damn. What did he have to live for anyway with a son like that, an effete, pseudo-intellectual. How had he, Marshall, from a long line of men proud to be men, who’d risked their lives defending their country, ended up with offspring like that? It was Paula’s genes, that’s how. Wasn’t her brother mental? A “sensitive,” pencil necked geek who studied butterflies, for crap sake? Hadn’t her father supported Kennedy?
If he had to do it all over, would he even have married Paula? She’d been a good wife, he supposed, but namby-pamby like her son. Just remembering last night’s dinner make him feel he might choke.
“Mr. Wright, your face is turning red,” said a nurse. “Are you holding your breath? I think you need to give him something more to calm him down, Doctor.”
The subject had been gays in the military, to start with. From there, it evolved into the stupid gay marriage issue, abortion and illegal aliens, then back to the Iraq war and eventually to those ridiculous conspiracy theories about 9/11 being an inside job. What would Darren who’d never even been near a military recruiting office know how it would feel to have some queer watching you undress on a daily basis? In there in the shower while you’re washing your private parts? And did Darren want us to just lie back and take more and more Muslim terrorists coming over here pissing on our way of lie? If Marshall had his way, he’d nuke the whole mess over there, turn the whole damned place into a parking lot! And “women’s right to choose,” don’t get him started...
“Doctor? Maybe Mr. Wright needs that bypass sooner than tomorrow!”
Suddenly another team surrounded him and Paula fluttered somewhere ineffectively. The next thing Marshall knew, he was being scooted down hallways again. Was he going to die? Was this it? A great blob of despair welled up inside him, threatening to burst from his mouth in a never ending flow.
Everything appeared to move in a mist that cleared now and then. Why did he feel nothing but irritation with Paula? Shouldn’t he be teary with love for her when indeed he could be dying? He suspected her of being on Darren’s side, that was it. Of sympathizing with what the boy had been saying, with his revolting ideas, ideas that if put into motion would ruin the very country he so took for granted. These soft, spoiled, marshmallow young people who’ve always had mommy and daddy to serve their needs, who’ve never had to defend their lives, never understood the world is full of danger and meanness, pure evil constantly waiting to wrest from you your very life.
“Mr. Wright,” said one of the nurses, “Dr. Sajadi has come in and assembled a team. We’re going to do the bypass tonight. It’s for the best.”
He understood without her saying it that it was possible he might die. Surely, he should feeling nostalgia for his life, possibly sorrow for his sins? He did not. Instead, he was impotently enraged and infinitely sad. What he was sad about, he could not definitely say. It was a kind of universal sadness he had never felt before.
“Mr. Wright, we’re giving you something to help you relax.” Someone turned him and a needle jabbed into his butt.
Paula’s face appeared over his own. “Honey,” she said, “relax now. I’ll be praying. Everyone is praying for you. I love you. We all love you.”
But he knew, as the drug washed over him, that that was not true. Maybe Paula loved him, but other people did not. Because Marshall stood for what he knew was right, his own son did not love him. Did he love Darren? He didn’t know anymore. By now though, in spite of this knowledge, he was feeling quite good - a synthetic druggy good. If they killed, him, so what?
They wheeled him into the operating room, which was freezing and attached the IV. He counted down and was out by eighty-eight.
There followed, though the state he was in, he couldn’t determine if anything followed anything, a faint beeping, a feeling of being swaddled, the sensation of something in his nose and someone speaking with an Hispanic accent - that particular tilt to the voice, a woman’s voice. Someone not far. Where was he?
As if in answer, he heard a similar, not exactly the same female pleading. He saw a doorway covered in chipped mint green paint, the small chubby hand of a child as it disappeared around the jamb, then high pitched wailing. The wailing abruptly stopped and a woman walked into view, holding the child whose lower lip still trembled. The woman, stocky with large black eyes and honey smooth skin was looking at him with a mixture of rage and love.
“You go,” she spat, “and you won’t come back! I know you, I know how it goes! Don’t tell me your lies even if you think you mean them now, don’t insult me, Lujano.”
“Nidia, please,” he was saying, “I must go. It is either that or our lives will be wasted. You want to end up like everyone else on this street, living in these rat holes, do you? Do you?”
He was speaking Spanish; he understood it perfectly. This was a dream then? He wasn’t certain. How did he know Spanish?
“Don’t you understand, Lujano? If you are dead, that is no help to us whatsoever. Better to be poor as dirt, better to worry every day where the food and rent will come from, but to be alive! Think what will happen to us if you are dead!”
“I am thinking of Elena. I am thinking of Jaciento. You know we have produced a genius; the teachers have told us. So what will happen to him, Nidia? You want our genius to end up running drugs and die, murdered in his twenties? Because that is how he will end up, if I do not do this, if I do not get us money.”
Nidia is sobbing, which sets off the child again. “Don’t cry, Elena,” he says, leaning to kiss the damp little face.
“How many die, crossing the desert, Lujano? Thousands, that’s how many. Remember Fernando, Elias, Duke, you remember them? Your own friends, lost now, probably with their eyes picked out by vultures. Useless to their wives, their children. How helpful was what they did?”
He hardens inside. “I am going. There will be no more argument. I am going to cross and I am going to make money and I am going to return alive and well. You will see, Nidia, you will see.”
In his heart, he is afraid. The stories are terrifying, the men suffocating in boiling, airless vans; the stories of mistreatment and hiding in terror once there, of being hated, spit at, vilified with nothing and no one to protect you should you be injured, maimed or sick. But there is nothing for him here. A father can not sit by and watch his family degenerate. A father has to do it.
His chest tightens, his gut clenches and for a moment, he thinks he might disappear into the panic.
Marshall again heard a woman’s voice with the Hispanic accent, not Nidia, that same someone else, but now she seemed to move further away and disappeared into a fog of faint noise.
“Mr. Wright, are we waking up?”
Who was this now? A man’s voice, but not quite a man. A homosexual voice - it reminded him of his neighbor’s son, that over dramatic disappointment to his entire family. How did that kid get in here? What was that beeping?
How is it he suddenly finds himself in San Francisco, for that is where he apparently is, sitting in some seafood joint close enough to the sea that he can smell it. He glances down at his hands and they’re dark skinned! What the-?
A woman sits across from him talking. She looks Italian and kind of tough, like one of those athletic girls he remembers from school. He hears her speak in a low, almost threatening tone, though he feels no actual threat issuing from her. Whoever she’s directing the anger to is not present. Though she’s seated, he somehow knows she is of medium height and compact and muscular for a woman though not anything like those female weight lifters, nothing like that. She has a tribal tattoo around one bare arm and on the other a USMC emblem. She keeps shaking her head.
“My whole life up to now down the tubes. What am I going to do, Richie? What? Soon as I was out of school, I became a Marine. I was a Marine morning, noon and night. I thought, ate, pissed, shit and fucked Marine.”
“Well, that was your trouble, girl,” says Richie. “If you’d just been able to put a zip on it!” Marshall wonders at the voice, the precise articulation, the exaggeration. “Don’t think I’m not on your side though, honey. I still think you should get a civilian lawyer and fight it. Take it to the news, 60 Minutes, whatever. Don’t mess around, go to the top!”
She shakes her head. “Useless. Look at the women who get raped in there. What do they do about it? Nothing. I personally know six raped females, two by officers. You think the higher ups care? One got some action because her father is a Captain. They threw the book at the piece of shit, but the rest? Nothing. Like it doesn’t matter a whit if some prick spikes your drink, then he and his buddies do a job on you. Even when your own rank is higher. That’s how it is for women, gay or straight.”
“Well, Lisha,” says Richie, “that’s not the issue now. The issue is you.”
She stabs a shrimp, looks at it and sets the fork down. “I read that 12,500 service members have been discharged since that don’t ask-don’t tell shit started. They’re so fucking stupid they throw away good people who risk their lives for this country! Look what I did myself, and I’m just one of many. Like when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb on our convoy while I was delivering a generator. I shielded the medic who was treating the wounded while we were fired at from a mosque. I’m not bragging here, Richie, but if I hadn’t been there, that medic and those soldiers might be dead now. Yet, they kick me out, like none of that mattered. And why? Because I kissed a woman? I didn’t even have sex with her, I kissed her. Now tell me this world isn’t a fucked up mess.”
Richie shrugs. “Anyone with intelligence knows it’s a fucked up mess. That leaves quite a few people. Hey, it’s their loss. Bunch of pea-brained, muscle head morons running that show, too dimwitted to know gold when they see it. How about me? My best friend in all the world is laying there in some Wisconsin long term care home and I can’t hold his hand. We weren’t even lovers, but his rod-up-the-ass parents and that holier-than-thou sister of his won’t let me near him! Like somehow I contaminated him, gave him cancer! My best friend for twenty years and I can’t see him! Bastards!” He spits.
Lisha shakes her head. “I don’t know, Richie. What can I say? Jay Sweeney’s family did the same thing to Jay’s partner when he was dying from the accident, you remember? It was even mentioned in an article in that magazine, what was it?”
“Rolling Stone,” says Richie.
“I have my application in to five police departments,” she says, “but with that kind of discharge, I’m probably screwed. I’ll be flipping burgers the rest of my life? All my training and experience gone just like that (she snaps her fingers) because of one kiss, because I was born gay and don’t tell me I wasn’t, I know what I was! I didn’t choose to be that way, like those churchy hypocrites think.”
The veins in her neck stand out. He hates to see her so worked up.
Richie says, “I was putting on my mom’s makeup at three. We all know the score, Lisha. It’s all the morons out there who don’t.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but it’s the morons who run things, isn’t it? It’s them who ruin the rest of our lives!”
The male nurse, if that’s who that was, must have left. Marshall couldn’t seem to work up the energy to open his eyes, though he could discern light and dark, know when someone leaned over him, when they were gone.
Some distance to his left, he thought he heard a young woman. Who was she talking to? She sounded slightly hysterical.
“Oh God, don’t die on me. Justin, please. I’m pregnant, I was just going to tell you and then you had to go buy that stupid bike, oh why did you do it, Justin, why? Don’t leave me alone with this kid, don’t you dare. I won’t, I won’t-”
She didn’t finish.
There were other people in in this room then? Besides that nurse? He seemed to sense their presence. What was that infernal beeping?
Is Marshall a she, how can that be? And why is it suddenly so damn cold? The wind outside his (her?) window is howling, snow flying past almost horizontally, the window itself streaked, a blue sun catcher dangling from a nail inside it. On the sill sits a wilted plant.
She is curled up sideways on a bed, a cell phone in one hand, a wad of kleenex in the other. She’s been sobbing so hard, her sinuses are aching. Her face feels burny hot, her eyes are swollen. Her life is down the tubes, utterly. Once again, she pushes in Danny’s number, once again it rings and rings. He always answers unless he is fucking. So...either he’s fucking someone or he’s not answering because he sees it is she who is calling.
She should have known he would leave. Hadn’t he left Karen, his first wife? Not for her, no, she hadn’t known him then. But she should have taken note of the fact that he’d left Karen alone with a toddler to raise. Why would she imagine he would never do the same to her, that somehow she was special? Big mistake thinking you’re special.
She’s been religious about using her diaphragm, religious. Always, no matter how spur of the moment their passion, she has always excused herself to insert it. So, what kind of hideous kismet is it for her to get pregnant again? With two in school and Danny having left? How did it happen?
Here’s how: from all the damn stress, she’s lost twenty pounds. No one, including the doctor, had thought to tell her that when you get skinnier, your insides down there get larger. Less fat, a wider hole and you need a new diaphragm fitted. Who would even think of it?
So here she is with a seven and nine year old, Danny having run off to be with his second cousin Tiffany (“they’d really always been in love”), she already holding down two jobs to make ends meet and Danny notorious for “forgetting” his child support payments to the ex. So what could she herself expect on that score? And now she’s pregnant on top of it all.
She sits up in the bed, looks around blinking and feels another rush of tears. How did that unfold, her getting knocked up? Danny came over to get more of this stuff, all that electronic crap, and asked for a beer and then she had one herself. She helped him lug the stuff down and then they were hungry and she offered to make sandwiches. The kids were at school and Thursday was her one day off; she worked the other six, mixing two jobs, one as a paralegal and the other as a bartender.
Why on earth did she have sex with him? She still loved him, that’s why. He was, after all, her husband. Was it guile that had her mix up that pitcher of Long Island Iced Tea? But what is the difference between guile and doing her best to win back what is hers in the first place? He screwed her all right, then got up and left, leaving her to feel like scum. And then to see that her diaphragm was half out and when she went to the doctor, he explained about the losing weight. She cried then, just like now, for hours.
Sometimes she has to leave the kids home alone; Mrs. Dooley could only watch them three days a week. The paralegal job nets her $2,000 a month and bartending about $650. If she wants to keep the house, she’ll have to buy Danny out, but with what? The mortgage is $1,367, food $400, utilities $145, gas $150, health insurance now that her job doesn’t cover one hundred percent $440 for all of them and we’re up to $2062 not yet counting clothing, car insurance. doctor visits, school supplies and other stuff. Now she’s in the negative. And toss in a new baby? How the hell is she going to do that? She has no relatives to help.
Well, she knows what she has to do, and she’ll have to come up with the money for that too. She snorts a bitter laugh. All those “pro-life” fanatics, where are they after you keep the kid with no way to take care of it? And how is she supposed to carry it to term and take time off to have it even if she gives it up? Any of those fanatics lining up to help her out, watch the other kids, clean the house, keep things running while she does it? Talk her boss out of firing her? Where are all the big mouths then?
Beep, beep, Marshall is back to himself. At least he thinks so because he recognizes Paula’s voice. “Honey?” she says, in that quiet, persistent way that usually annoys him, but now maybe not. Maybe not. He opens his eyes.
“Marshall, do you know where you are? Oh, what am I doing? You can’t answer anyway on the ventilator.”
He thought he had spoken, but apparently not. Maybe she’d know what was confusing him so.
“They think you’re hallucinating. It’s the drugs. It’ll wear off...”
Why did she lie to him?
“Marshall...” she paused and didn’t finish.
He seemed to float in space, hearing someone speaking in another foreign accent, some man talking with a woman. “Dr. Sajadi, have you heard from your brother?”
A sigh. “Nothing. The last I heard, he was hoping to leave Kandahar. We’ve tried to call, but...nothing. Everyone is very worried.”
“I’m so sorry,” murmured the woman.
Marshall felt himself moving softly, then at great speed.
Again, a woman. Again, she is sobbing. Her name is Huma. Somehow he is Huma, but he does not fight it now. It doesn’t matter who he is anymore.
She wails in some style he is not accustomed to and rocks back and forth. Women and their crying, he thinks, but it is he who is doing the crying.
“Shaya, Shaya,” she cries, every so often, as if to punctuate her rocking.
He sees with her eyes, sees what she is mourning.
Shaya is the son who’s been mutilated by a mine, half a leg and two fingers blown off and the left side of his face raw meat. He, along with his sister Mahsa and Huma’s mother-in-law Badria are all that Huma has left. They killed her husband. That was two years ago, the last time she saw Fariad, his dear face smiling, that one missing tooth. How was she to know that he would be dead by noon, blown to bits by a roadside bomb? This man who treated her with respect and equality, something few women enjoyed in Afghanistan, this man among millions, this gem of her heart?
She doubles over in a gripping pain, unconscious of her surroundings. She doesn’t know which tears her apart more, the ruin of Shaya or life without Fariad. Though she is a devoted mother, she admits to herself that it is probably Fariad she most mourns. It is not something she would tell anyone else. Mothers are supposed to love their children most, but many of them have unkind husbands. Fariad was the whole and is now the end of her world. She can not explain this even to his own mother.
Badria walks in the door and sets down her jug of water. She is stooped, old and half toothless. Huma has seen American and European movie stars the same age as her mother-in-law, forty-eight years, who look like young, beautiful women. How is that possible? Badria looks like she is their mother.
Huma knows Fariad’s mother was once beautiful. She has seen photos. Those photos may no longer exist since the family had to pick up and move when the Americans dropped their bombs. The house they once occupied may be nothing but rubble.
“I could not find an onion anywhere,” says Badria, “but I did find some mung beans. We can use the rice that is left and then try to get more tomorrow.”
“That is the last of it,” says Huma, drying her eyes with her sleeve. She notices that the heel of her shoe is coming loose. It is the only pair she has.
“We will go see Shaya, if they will let us,” says Badria, “and then look for rice.”
“The market has not opened for two weeks,” says Huma, her eyes filling up again.
“If we must walk to Daman, then that is what we will do,” says Badria. “We will take Mahsa with us.”
“She is too small to walk that far.”
“We can’t leave her here alone,” Badria replies. She is right.
There is a long pause before Huma comments. “What hope is there for us, Mor? The Taliban reduces us to less than dogs, the Americans kill us? What is the use, I ask you?”
Badria shakes her head. “I know nothing,” she says. “I have lived decades, but everything that happens cancels everything I have learned.”
Huma allows herself one more comforting rock back and forth, before she drags herself up and prepares to follow Badria. She knows that whatever pleasures she once enjoyed - they are over. Her sole mission now is to save her children.
He opened his eyes. A male nurse appeared above him, smiling. “Mr. Wright, how good to see you awake!”
His voice was familiar, a chirpy, effeminate voice that was comforting. “You’re coming off the ventilator as soon as Dr. Sajadi arrives. You were on some pretty heavy drugs, but those are coming down now. Then you can tell me all your stories. I’m a very good listener.”
Marshall felt as if he were wrapped in a cocoon, numb and safe. Though he suspected that pain would be coming. He understood that the drugs held that off. He didn’t care about pain though; part of him was elated. He realized that he would love to tell stories to this nurse. Would the man like to hear about the dreams?
But Marshall was not sure those experiences were dreams.
“Dr. Sajadi,” said a woman. It was Paula, his Paula. “Are you taking out the vent now?”
“Let’s check him over first,” said the foreign voice.
Marshall wanted to ask the doctor about his missing brother. He actually wanted to know.
The vent was out, a rather painful procedure, and he was free. It took a few tries and his voice came out in a croak. “I love you,” he said to anyone listening. He realized it didn’t matter to whom he said it.
