A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,21

she would do if she found glass shards tracked into the hospital. He watched Akhmed pry out fourteen shards and deposit them in an ashtray.

Akhmed sighed, crestfallen. His first day as a hospital doctor wasn’t beginning well. “Tell me,” he asked, nodding to the guard’s missing arm. “Do they pay you half rate?”

The guard, thirty-one years old, had never received a paycheck, and wouldn’t have known what to do with one if he had; in three years, when the hospital issued paychecks again, beginning with a whopping nine years of back pay, the guard would frame his in glass and hang it on his wall without ever depositing it. For the rest of his life, he wouldn’t trust the numbers people put on paper. “They should pay me more than they pay you,” the guard said, smiling. “Even I know better than to give an unresponsive patient a questionnaire.”

Akhmed’s flush hadn’t faded when he pushed open the double doors. The cannonball of Havaa’s head crashed into his stomach.

“You came back!” she exclaimed, breathless from her sprint across the room. He raked his fingers through her almond-brown hair, a shade shared by the back of his hand. He had been so concerned with Latin nomenclature he’d forgotten about her, and as her arms formed a tourniquet around his waist, the tight press slowed his breaths. She hadn’t forgotten him for a moment.

“Of course I came back. Where else would I go?”

“Has he—” she began, and he squeezed her shoulder as consolingly as he was able.

“We’ll both be here a little longer, okay?”

“I guess,” she said. She loosened her embrace and stepped back as the enthusiasm of the prior moment drained from her face. Her blue suitcase stood by the folding chair where she had been sitting.

“Planning on going somewhere?”

“In case we were going home,” she said. Again Akhmed squeezed her shoulder, but the gesture was small and futile, and reasserted the helplessness she seemed to foist upon him.

“How was your night?” he asked, hoping to cheer her up. “Did Sonja turn into a bat after the sun went down?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Havaa said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “She just became boring. She wouldn’t stop talking about her ice machine. And she called me a solipsist.”

Akhmed followed her across the waiting room to the perimeter of paint-chipped folding chairs and sat down beside her. She lifted the blue suitcase to her lap and wrapped her arms around it. “Do you want me to carry that back to your room?” he offered. She gave a slow, dejected shake of her head, raised the suitcase on its side, and hugged it. “You know what you should do,” he said, turning to her. “You should teach the guard downstairs to juggle.”

“But he only has one arm.”

“But he really wants to learn. He’s embarrassed by his arm so he’ll refuse at first. But you need to be persistent.”

“I can be persistent,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“My father says persistence is a polite way of being annoying.”

“You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

With a slight smile, she acknowledged her considerable expertise. But the smile he had worked for wilted when the trauma doors swung open and Sonja walked in. Each step produced a rattle from her bleached-white scrubs. Pink veins cobwebbed her eyes. “You’re late,” Sonja snapped, completely oblivious to the important work happening there, on the waiting-room chairs, between them.

He raised his eyebrows to Havaa and then followed Sonja into a corridor cloaked in curtains of pungent ammonia. She turned into the staff canteen, where, in the corner, the notorious ice machine brooded. Sheets and towels draped from clotheslines and silver instruments shifted in pots of boiling water. Duct tape covered the windowpanes and the overhead emergency lights cast a dull blue glow across the walls. Even in war conditions he had expected Hospital No. 6 to be more glamorous than this.

“Was everything all right with Havaa last night?” he asked.

Sonja didn’t turn to him. “Let’s say she’s an inexperienced house-guest,” she said, and felt the hanging sheets for moisture. She handed him scrub tops from the farthest clothesline. Still damp.

“What about the ones I wore yesterday?” he asked. “I left them in a cupboard down the corridor.”

“No, they need to be clean. And just as important, they need to be white.”

“Why white?”

She leaned against the wall and slid her hands into the cavernous pockets of her scrub bottoms. He concentrated on her face as if preparing to draw her portrait—the angles, ratios and proportions