Geese

Grace Glass

Mornings, Adam struggles up from his dreams to a blinding, ochre-tinged pain that sizzles up his damaged spine, seizes his neck, etches spiteful hieroglyphics into the base of his skull. He can’t help groaning but he does it quietly, because Rosie works third shift and needs her sleep. Before he hurt his back, he didn’t understand that pain is another person who travels with you, a bright-eyed parasite that demands nourishment, lunges forward in its own secret teleology. It’s a story, but not his. He’s only the bitter, aging stepmother frowning into a cracked mirror, the hare exhausting itself as the tortoise inches towards victory.

He sits up, pinches his too large belly, thinks about the body’s betrayals. He used to play soccer, basketball, or run to the park, pound over a rickety bridge and pause, blood rushing hot and vivid through his veins, to laugh at the funny-faced catfish that slipped in and out of sunlight beneath rippling waters. Now even trudging through the narrow rooms of their rented house is a protracted war on many fronts. But I’m still a lucky man, he reminds himself, brushing a lemony curl from Rosie’s cheek, wondering if she loves him the same in her dreams and if she’d admit it if she didn’t. She is real and so is the baby inside her, sprouting tiny, perfect fingers and toes, seashell ears, round, glistening eyes. They’re going to name her Eva or Gwendolyn or Carrie. Rosie will decide once she sees the crumpled face, hears the first piercing cry.

As coffee gurgles and toast browns, he swallows ten pills. It used to be four, then six, but every day ups the ante as though he’s trapped in an eternal poker game, squinting at hard-faced opponents, knowing his nine-high straight can’t go the distance. The Oxy slithers through him, warm, familiar, crafting a happy emptiness that whispers of forever but will really only last about three hours. He tucks the rattling bottle in his bag and drives to work, listening to talk radio on a station Rosie programmed. The host fills his hour with insults—trans people, feminists, the poor. He could change the station but she’d only change it back. She’s like that sometimes, he’s noticed, lapping up small cruelties like a cat with a saucer of milk. But motherhood will transform that. No doubt the baby will transform both of them, caterpillars into butterflies, bursting tight cocoons, floating free on intricate, iridescent wings.

***

Adam injured his back a year ago, lifting an eighty-two-year-old leukemia patient from a urine-soaked bed. He didn’t think to be careful because he’d done it a hundred times before. Besides, the man was wasted to almost nothing, a trivial bundle of fragile bones and papery skin. He bleated like a lost goat, his eyes wild, so Adam said, “Shhh, it’s okay; it won’t take long. Want to hear a joke? You’re not Catholic, are you?”

“Hold up, amigo,” said Ethan, another nurse who was squeezing the IV bag, tapping notes onto an iPad. “I’m Catholic.”

Adam chuckled and hoisted the man’s legs, readying a tale of a priest lost in a desert, a gaggle of nubile nuns, the devil’s clever punchline. Then there was a small mutiny, a dense, spreading patch of weakness, a burning that birthed itself from a pinpoint but unfurled, like some exotic plant in a distant rainforest, roots traveling impossible distances in the damp, devouring soil.

“Hold on,” Adam said, and “I’m so sorry,” as the man slipped from his hands and then Adam was on the cold tile floor with no idea how he’d gotten there. He was inside hurt. There was nothing but hurt. He was banished from the ordinary, catapulted into a terrifying forever.

Ethan knelt beside him and said, “What the hell man, are you okay?” Adam could produce only a jagged moan in response. Ethan left and came back with three other nurses. They gave him a shot of morphine. Before that day he’d never understood morphine. Why would you want something that turned you stupid, mumbling, vague? But the shot was just like old-time river baptisms he’d seen in movies. A strong hand shoving a sinner into dark waters, then yanking him out cleansed, infinite, free.

***

The next day, drowning in more morphine, he went to see Dr. Edwards, who said, “Well, let’s wait and see, these things often resolve on their own.” Four more appointments followed. Then Dr. Edwards said, “Well, there’s surgery, but I wouldn’t recommend it in your case. It’s only successful 50 percent of the time, and may cause more damage.”

He referred Adam to a pain management clinic, a chunk of a dingy strip mall with a flickery red sign and a doctor who wore too much CK One perfume. She didn’t talk of things resolving. She gave him laminated cards with yellow faces, some neutral, some smiling, some grimacing in simulated agony. He was never able to choose anything but the one with the eyes squeezed closed and the rippling, infuriated mouth. The doctor told him 32 percent of Americans live with chronic pain. She used words like manage and mitigate. She scribbled prescriptions, and he stuffed them in his pockets and tried to make himself understand that this was the rest of his life.

***

Now he doesn’t walk the halls or lift patients. He sits behind a desk collecting insurance cards, typing names into appointment blocks, getting fatter. He drinks coffee with too much sugar and tucks a Shakespeare anthology behind his monitor because he mostly slept through English class in high school and he doesn’t want his daughter to have a stupid father. He toils through Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Coriolanus. The complicated couplets seem to fight him, but he’s charmed by the fierce, wounded men who always end up prone, bleeding, seeing the truth too late to make a difference.

He shares the desk with a receptionist named Evelyn whose freckles remind him of ants converging on a pile of crumbs. At twelve thirty, she fetches grease-spotted bags of burgers, and Adam decides he’ll start his diet the next day. His favorite patient, an eight-year-old named Bess with lymphoma, brings him crayoned pictures that he fastens on the gray cubicle walls. There is her house, red with white shutters, under flapping birds and a confident sun. Her dog, Stanley, looking rueful or possibly ashamed. A cluster of Canadian geese with sharp bills and murderous eyes. Bess confides that the geese chased her at the park. She was so scared that she ran faster than she’d ever run before and even, for a few seconds, felt like she was flying. Her eyes, immense in an emaciated face, glitter with remembered terror and triumph.

Her mother shushes her and writes a check for their copay. Caesar dies denouncing treachery, alone except for his incandescent anger. Defeated, Coriolanus huddles in a cage of despair but Volumnia rants about selfishness until he resolves to become consul, to live for Rome. Sometimes Adam looks up from the tortured monologues to the geese with their mosaic wings and thin orange legs, and wonders why God made something so elegant so bloodthirsty.

***

Wednesdays at ten, Philip Anderson sees one of the oncologists. Philip is dying of testicular cancer. He’s a garrulous skeleton with manic eyes and a pink mouth that drops open when someone else speaks. Evelyn always asks Philip how he’s doing, but Adam never does because he understands how the question fractures some essential but fragile patina. Instead he says, “Mr. Anderson, it’s always nice to see you.” One morning Philip’s insurance doesn’t clear.

“I’m sorry,” says Adam, “there seems to be a problem with your insurance.”

“Not surprised,” Philip says. “I quit my job on Friday.”

“You—”

“Well, think about it. Would you want to spend your very last six months typing formulas into spreadsheets and trying to convince the IRS your clients aren’t lying to them even though they are? I mean, what is a day for?”

“I see your point,” says Adam. “But we require financial responsibility at the time of service. I’ll have to charge you the entire consultation fee.”

“Which is?”

“$462.50.”

“Christ Almighty. Fuck that. What do I need to see him for anyway? He can go on and on about my levels and scans to the empty room, for all I care. How many ways can you say, ‘You’re screwed, Philip? You’ve lost the game. Exit stage left.’”

“Well, Mr. Anderson—”

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not worm food yet. I’m alive this fucking second, aren’t I? I’m going home. Pour myself a bourbon and watch Wheel of Fortune reruns.” He shakes his head. “We think if we were dying, we’d do all these once-in-a-lifetime things. Hike the Grand Canyon. Visit Venezuela. Make amends with the addict son, the mother who hit without leaving marks. But when it actually happens, you’re so tired; you want small things. A Xanax, a hamburger. Did you know Pat Sajak and Vanna White never had an affair?”

“I didn’t know that,” Adam says.

“Never considered it apparently. All the episodes with her in those tight mermaid dresses, and him imperious, like the king of some small, wealthy country. Maybe it was just like food you’ve smelled for so many hours that you can’t imagine eating it.”

“Maybe so,” Adam says.

“What’s that picture of?” Philip asks. “Seagulls?” He points to Bess’s drawing.

“I think it’s Canadian geese.”

“Those birds can be real bastards. Anyway, I’ll see you later, Adam.”

“Take care, Mr. Anderson.”

For a second, Philip’s skinny limbs divide a patch of morning sunlight. Then he’s gone, and Evelyn says, “Want a Big Mac or a Whopper today?”

Adam says, “Either’s fine.” He turns a page, studies a chunk of text, but the letters wiggle and blur. There is an edgy heat in his back, so he takes five more pills.

The morning stretches into a bland, hazy afternoon. He drives to the clinic and sits in the dusty waiting room reading an old issue of National Geographic. In a photo, a tanned, grinning man poses on the prow of a ship. He’s just finished circumnavigating the globe. In the article, he’s asked what lessons he’s learned from the journey. “Lessons,” he repeats, “well, I learned to use sunblock and eat oranges. I learned to fish at twilight and vomit into currents moving away, not toward.”

“I meant lessons about life,” says the interviewer, and the man laughs and says, “My journey’s no different from any other. You start at the beginning, end at the end.”

Adam closes the magazine and stares out the window. What did you expect, whispers something sly, secretive, in the pit of his stomach. Nothing, he answers, as a lime green Jeep swings out of its space, almost hits a hurrying woman lugging grocery bags. It occurs to him that there must be thousands a day, these tiny near-catastrophes. Quivering with violent potential. Vanishing unremembered.

In the examination room it’s cold, and his thighs rip the paper covering the plastic seat. The doctor breezes in and smiles. Today she’s wearing mauve lipstick and a black blouse scattered with aggressively large roses. Those roses don’t have thorns, Adam thinks, and wonders why that makes him angry or maybe just afraid.

“How’s everything going, Adam?” she asks.

“Okay,” he says.

“Breakthrough pain?”

“Yes, I mean, if that means I have pain throughout the day. When the pills wear off.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have to suffer. What I’ll do is write you a script for a fentanyl patch. It’ll release tiny amounts of the drug throughout the day. It will take a bit to build up in your system but you’ll stop having to take so many of the OxyContin, I think. But by all means take them if you need them.”

“Okay, I will.”

She pats him on the shoulder and leaves.

He drives to CVS and fills the prescription. The pharmacist, tall with greasy, black hair, frowns and starts to say something, but apparently thinks better of it. Adam is given a paper bag of waxy packets that remind him of Band-Aids. In the bathroom at home, he pastes one on his upper arm. He sprawls on the couch, tries to read but Coriolanus has disintegrated into fragments that refuse to paint pictures in his mind. Where is the hero, where is the sacrifice? he wonders, but his thoughts have subsided into a slow, trickling stream, one partially frozen by a bitter winter. His back’s frantic muttering quiets itself. He flips on the television, and as a chef rubs a chicken with butter and parsley, the Oxy and the fentanyl swirl through his blood, a dark deliverance from pain, and he falls into a thick, dreamless sleep.

***

Fifteen miles north, Rosie is two hours into her shift. She’s a security guard at a Curves gym, a job with little actual danger, because nobody tries to rob Curves, but as the manager explained to her at her interview, the women who work out there need to feel secure. So Rosie at work is more symbol than person. She stands in the lobby wearing a blue uniform with a missing button, greets customers, watches cars weave through the parking lot as the sky goes from pink to fuchsia to deep, star-speckled black. A short woman smelling of sweat and hairspray, holding a child’s hand, bustles into the lobby.

“Oh,” she says, breathing heavily. “Good, glad I saw you there. Marie, wait with this nice lady while I get the car. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all,” says Rosie. Her mother always said white lies were different, but Rosie notices they gnaw at her the same as selfish ones. This one chuckles and schemes behind her thoughts as the child slips a damp hand into Rosie’s. She wears a salmon-colored dress edged with dirty lace, old-fashioned saddle shoes. The part in her hair is crooked. Rosie’s skin itches where the child touches it. The girl tips her face up and asks Rosie how old she is.

“Twenty-eight,” Rosie tells her. “How old are you?”

“Seven and a half. When I’m eight I’ll be allowed to ride my bike to the store and get sodas. How much do you think a soda costs?”

“I don’t know. A dollar fifty, maybe?”

The girl sighs. “That’s a lot. I can’t get three.”

“Why would you need three?”

“Because I get thirsty, dummy. What’s your favorite movie? Mine’s the first Harry Potter.”

“I don’t think I have a favorite,” Rosie tells her.

The girl narrows her grass-colored eyes. “That’s stupid,” she says. “You should have a favorite everything. Do you have kids at home?”

“No, but I’m going to have a baby in March.”

“My mom had a baby but he died,” says the girl. “He died before he got born. Why aren’t you fat?”

“I’ll get fat eventually. But right now the baby is small.”

“Or,” says the child, “maybe the baby died already.”

“No,” says Rosie, “no, she didn’t.” The sides of her throat seem to puff and tenderize, as if she has mumps or strep. Her breakfast boils uneasily in her gut. The child’s hand gets heavier, warmer, greasier, and her piggish, knowing eyes don’t leave Rosie’s face. Rosie begins to feel like the damaged husk of something that like all living things thought it would never die.

The girl’s mother reappears outside, darting through starlight. Thank God, Rosie thinks, and it occurs to her that in just six months, there won’t be some other woman bringing peace. I thought I was supposed to, she thinks, everyone says, and what else was there? But maybe she’s stumbled. What if it isn’t a burst of tenderness she will feel for the baby but a coiling pit of quicksand, or one of those smug, carnivorous plants that devour insects and small animals?

The mother enters and thanks her. The child takes much too long to let go of Rosie’s hand.

Nausea heaves in Rosie’s stomach like a river after a storm. The mother and child disappear into a shiny SUV and Rosie crouches, takes deep breaths, reminds herself of Adam, waiting for her at home, his warm hands, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, his slow, sweet smile. At six thirty, as the sun creeps through remnants of night, she takes off her uniform, stuffs it in a locker, drives home listening to her favorite talk radio host expound on QAnon. She only half-believes things like that and only when she’s tired or sad, but something in her demands abstruse, impossible realities that spring from the darkness everyone harbors.

***

Inside the house, she calls for Adam but gets no answer. Still sleeping, she thinks, and opens the freezer. A bottle of Grey Goose rests on a middle shelf. If she poured herself a shot, just one, she could mix it with diet Sprite, orange juice. Sweet and cold going down, then that fuzzed, intimate warmth. She touches the bottle’s frigid surface and tells herself she can still imagine because imagination damages nothing. At some point, she remembers that she should eat so she makes toast, fries an egg, takes the plate to the living room.

Adam sleeps on the couch, a curved lump under an old blanket. She settles beside him, pokes the egg with a fork, watches bright yolk soak the toast. She chews a buttery corner, listening to the silence, then wonders why Adam isn’t snoring. She turns and sees there is something wrong with his face. It’s no longer burnished, flushed. It’s cemented into a sculpture of skin and bone instead of the things themselves. She touches his cheek, and it’s as cold as the vodka. For a terrible second, she thinks she’s done something, that it was her hand that brought the cold, and then what is happening, or what already has happened, starts to crash, grind, twist, like cars in a collision. Things speed up, scatter in pieces.

There is a ragged terrified voice that can’t be hers pleading with a 911 operator who makes promises she doesn’t keep. Men shouting outside the door, kneeling beside Adam, stabbing him with needles, compressing his chest with powerful arms. Someone says, “I’m so sorry, ma’am, who can we call for you?” and then her mother pats her elbow with a soft hand, and says, “Think of the baby, honey,” and Rosie says, “Why, I don’t even want it anymore,” and people in the room—there are too many but they won’t go away—say, “You don’t mean that, sweetheart.” They cover her with a scratchy blanket, and she’s alone with this wriggling, faceless thing that will feed on her from the inside out until there is nothing left.

***

Six months later, Rosie lies on a hard hospital bed swallowing a tepid mass that might be oatmeal but it’s hard to tell. Carrie sleeps in a bassinet under a dirty window. She has ten fingers, ten toes, blue-gray eyes that are far apart, deep set because that was the peculiar construction of Adam’s face although Rosie did not remember this until she held the baby in her arms. She has one night in the hospital because that’s all insurance allows. A nurse tells her that most new parents are afraid to leave with their babies because they don’t feel like parents. Rosie says she isn’t afraid. Something made a difference that morning when she sat on the couch next to Adam and understood because to understand was to be like stone battered ceaselessly by ocean, to dwindle to something hard and pure.

When she and Carrie get home, the house will be empty. Rosie will walk on leaden legs and sob in the afternoons. She has done this since Adam died. But she and the baby will toss bright spatters of paint onto a canvas until there is beauty there. To be sure, it will be chaotic, unintelligible, but altogether new. An imperfect copy of a messy stream of moments—evenings, midnights, dawns, the alternating rhythms of the baby’s cries and silent, contented sleep. And I will never sleep, Rosie thinks, because I won’t be able to stop watching her transform the life I thought I loved but never really understood.

But Rosie isn’t an angel or a ghost. She is a warm, breathing, damaged thing that can’t last forever. So she does sleep, sometimes for many hours. She dreams of the way some twilights hold sunlight and darkness simultaneously, as if the eternal transformation of night into day and back again can be halted, seen, and finally understood. Then she travels the short but infinite distance to the baby’s sleeping face, watching it as it whispers of Adam, the past, and the future. She touches the warm cheek, and when the babysitter arrives, Rosie goes to work because she has to live—there is no other path—and if there is a God, He chuckles and turns his gaze away.