A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,38

in it, and Akhmed hooting as she chased them. It had taken her all afternoon to learn to juggle one. The next day they had moved indoors. Juggling is more in your mind than your hands, Akhmed had told her; in the still air she had learned in minutes. “Juggling is more in your mind than your hand,” she told the one-armed guard.

“I died in my sleep, didn’t I? This is Hell, isn’t it?”

“You begin by throwing a handkerchief up in the air,” she said, and demonstrated in an exaggerated flourish.

The one-armed guard began praying. “Deliver me, Allah, from this cesspool of wickedness.”

“You want to make sure you cross the handkerchief, like you’re pinning it to the shoulder of an invisible partner. Like a phantom partner; that should be familiar to you!”

“Jesus Christ, hear my plea,” the one-armed guard chanted, in case the infidel god was more receptive.

“Then you repeat the same movement with your other hand.”

“She thinks I have another hand.”

“See how well I can do it?” she said, all three handkerchiefs aloft.

“My phantom hand is slapping you in the face.”

“I can’t feel it,” she said, proudly.

“Neither can I,” he said, glumly.

“You seem a little grumpy. Maybe you should take another nap.”

As she left the one-armed guard she hated Akhmed even more; if she couldn’t tell him, it was as if she hadn’t taught the one-armed guard to juggle at all. He had left her, just like her father had, and her mother, and she bandaged that wound with all the stubborn sullenness she could muster, so it would be hidden, well insulated, and so no one could see how in just three hours she had learned to miss him with the same incredible longing she reserved for her parents. She should have known Akhmed would forget her as quickly as he had her mother.

She didn’t hate Sonja, not as much as Akhmed. Sure, Sonja was curt and short-tempered, a humorlessist incapable of finding in an hour the fun Akhmed could conjure in a minute. But that was okay because Sonja was different. Sonja was the boss of this place, ordering everyone around, and even Akhmed went pale when she spoke. Not only was Sonja a doctor, she was the head of the entire hospital. Women weren’t supposed to be doctors; they weren’t capable of the work, the schooling, the time and commitment, not when they had houses to clean, and children to care for, and dinners to prepare, and husbands to please. But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She didn’t have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She was capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja’s life. Havaa liked that.

And so she wandered along the corridor, wondering what she might be like if she lived like Sonja. Maybe she could be an arborist, like her father. She hadn’t thought that women were allowed to be scientists, but if Sonja could be a surgeon and hospital head, why couldn’t she be an arborist? Or a sea anemonist? She slowed to peek into the room where the legless man slept. Blood dried darkly on his bandages. His stump poked from the edge of the white bedsheet like a rotten log through snow cover. He slept. Somewhere in that hazy, heroin-induced slumber, he was already designing in dreams the monument to war dead he would, in twenty-three years, make of steel and concrete. He was the only person in the hospital right now she didn’t hate.

“I thought I told her to find something to do,” Deshi said, entering the room with her customary frown.

“I was.”

“ ‘I was,’ she says. Was what?”

“Thinking,” Havaa shot out, like a pebble cast toward the nurse’s flat face.

“Find something more useful to do,” Deshi said. She knitted as she leaned against the wall. The yarn ball slowly rolled in her pocket.

“Does Sonja order you around like this?”

“Why would she say that?”

“Because Sonja runs the hospital.”

“Unbelievable,” Deshi said with a sigh. “I’ve been working here since before Sonja was a kick in her mother’s stomach, was already retired when I hired her, and she gets the