A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,123
circled in red ink:
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
The breaking sky could release no more striking a pronouncement. She repeated it to the unmade bed, to Havaa’s still-packed suitcase, to the desk of the former geriatrics director. Not once had she ever marked a dictionary, but here this was, encircled by the same red pen she’d kept on her nightstand. She stumbled into the corridor, reached out but couldn’t find a wall. Her legs felt as stiff as they had been on the day she had tried to make her own trousers, but when she lost her balance, when she fell forward, Natasha wasn’t there to catch her.
When she woke on the floor, the insides of her cheeks felt like the insides of lemon rinds. She rubbed her temples and checked the unlit overhead lights, but, thankfully, the ceiling was still. In the storage room she pulled a pack of Marlboros from the fresh carton. The crinkle of plastic wrap followed her down the corridor. At the door the one-armed guard declined her offer of a cigarette. Shards gleamed in his ashtray. His name was Mohmad. He didn’t particularly enjoy this job, but he knew enough to know that any man was fortunate to have work these days, particularly amputees. In Ingushetia he had an eleven-year-old daughter he didn’t know about, who was waiting for him to call. In two and a half years he would hear her voice for the first time.
She smoked three cigarettes before Akhmed appeared behind her, warming his hands around a mug of steaming water. “Marlboro?” she offered. He lit the cigarette from her ember.
“You look much better,” he said. The corners of his lips inched toward a grin.
“Shut up.”
“Nothing like a little beauty rest.”
“I’ll light your scrubs on fire if you say another word.”
The incipient smile sagged into an expression of surrender. “They came back for him,” he said. “Whoever dropped him off.”
“Bringing a dead man to a hospital. Do they think we’re magicians?”
“Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see.”
He had her on that one. “You’re a believer,” she said. That explained his incompetence as well as anything.
“I believe in some things.”
“In God.”
He shook his head.
“But I’ve seen you pray at noon.”
“That’s like asking if I believe in gravity,” he said. “It doesn’t require belief.”
“I’ve always thought Marx’s view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.”
“If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”
Westminster Abbey was the only steeple she’d ever stood beneath, a tourist guidebook, rather than a prayer book, in hand. God, like everything kind and good, lived in London. She dropped her gaze to her hands and picked at the white calluses that scalloped her palm.
“My goodness. These belong to a lumberjack,” he said, lifting her hands, examining them with a mixture of awe and pity. “Woodsman hands.”
“I hate my hands.” Aloud it sounded as small and petty as it had in her head, but they were horrid things, these hands, a crime for which she felt the immediate relief of confession. “How could such things grow from a woman’s wrist?”
“You’ve chosen the wrong profession. If not a lumberjack, you would have made a marvelous strangler.” With the unexpected sensitivity of a surgeon, his fingers drifted up her forearm.
“I keep thinking in Latin,” she said. He paused on her ulna. “The names of bones.”
“Latin is a problem with which I have no experience.” He squeezed her bicep. “You should think about anatomy like I do. This is your arm. It’s only your arm. This is your shoulder, nothing less than your shoulder. Your neck is only your neck.” His finger rose to a chin that was simply her chin, cheeks that were her cheeks, a nose that belonged to no one else. “And lips,” he said, leaning to her. “Our lips.”
A moment and she pulled away, frowning back at the hospital and smoothing out her scrubs. Of the varying shapes of love, grief, anger, and terror that had inhabited these scrubs, optimistic anticipation was a new one. She looked to his big, stupid face, blushed, and turned away. What would Deshi say if she saw her like this? The shock might very well make her act on her ten-year-long threat to retire.
“I’m going to the fourth floor,” she said, finally. “You could meet me there in a half hour.”