A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,39

credit for making this place run. They’ll take everything from you, even the respect of an orphan girl with too many questions in her mouth.”

“Why is the hospital run by women? What happened to all the men?”

“They ran away.”

“But they’re the brave ones.”

“No, they’re the ones that break your heart and leave you for a younger woman.”

“So you’re saying that sometimes women are braver than men. And better doctors.”

“I’m saying that if you want to keep a man, you better hide his shoes every night so he can’t walk out on you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Deshi shook her head. Her romantic advice was worth a foreigner’s ransom, and here she was, giving it freely to a girl who couldn’t appreciate the hard-earned wisdom. “Just stay away from oncologists, okay?” she said, and led the girl to the waiting room. “If you just remember that, you’ll spare yourself the worst of it. Now, why don’t you get your notebook out and draw something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Where would you most want to be right now?”

“My home,” she said. She thought the word meant only the four walls and roof that held her, but it spread out, filled in, Akhmed, the village, her parents, the forest, everything that wasn’t here. “A week ago.”

“And I’d rather be right here forty years ago, when they first offered me the job. I’d wag my finger right in the head nurse’s face and say, no, no, you won’t trick me, and I’d walk right out those doors.”

“It’s stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.”

“Why don’t you draw that map?”

“Only if you let me play on the fourth floor.”

“Child, if there was such a map, there would still be a fourth floor. Start drawing.”

The sharp, chemical-curtained corridor swallowed Deshi’s footsteps and Havaa was alone again. The notebook tilting on her legs, she thought of her father. She didn’t hate him. Thinking that, realizing it, feeling it crackle through her arm bones, her finger bones, feeling her arms wrapping around her chest, her fingers clasping her shoulders, this trembling inside her that was only the beat of her heart. Each night he would tell her tales about an alien green-bodied race whose faces consisted of a singular orifice through which they saw, ate, smelled, heard, thought, and spoke. Each night he told her a new chapter, and so many nights had gone by, so many chapters had been told, that they referred to it as chapters rather than story, because stories had endings and theirs had none. According to her father, the green-bodied aliens had destroyed their planet in an interstellar civil war and had migrated to the Moon to begin again. Each night, as civilization collapsed around them, he told her of a new one being built on the lunar surface. She hoped her father was there, among them, up on the Moon.

Sonja strode through the door, reeking of cigarette smoke, her eyelids puffy and her fingers jittering. “You’re here,” Sonja said, surprised.

“Yes,” Havaa agreed. “I’m here. This is the waiting room.”

Sonja glanced down to the floor, to the chairs, puzzling over this and then nodding. “You’re right. This is the waiting room,” she said, and sat in the folding chair beside Havaa.

“How was your day?” Havaa asked.

Sonja shrugged, sparked her cigarette lighter, and stared vacantly toward the wall. “It was an okay day. You?”

“It was okay.”

Sonja sighed, closed her eyes, and sparked her lighter in a slow, senseless rhythm.

“Are the Feds going to take me, too?” To ask the question was to acknowledge that it could happen, and in Havaa’s experience, any horror that could happen eventually did. Better to armor yourself with the unreal. Better to turn inward, hide in the dark waters among the sea anemones, down deep where the sharks can’t see you.

Sonja’s hand found hers between the chairs.

“Will the Feds take me to my father?” she asked, while knowing the question had no answer she wanted to hear. Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.

“Let’s go to bed,” Sonja said. Still holding Havaa’s hand, she stood. “We close our eyes and there they are, right where we left them, in their