Fever (11 page)

“I brought you a radio,” Rudy said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.” She recognized the small black radio that was kept on a shelf above the stove in the kitchen. He set it down on her night table and bent to plug it in.

“Thanks,” she said, knowing she would never even turn it on. He straightened and looked down at her.

“Are you still bleeding?” He asked her this without any embarrassment and she was not embarrassed by his question. When he had asked her to describe her symptoms, she had told him all of them. Rudy had that effect on her. Or perhaps it was the illness itself which sapped her energy so that she found it impossible to muster the strength for subtlety. She lifted her hand and gave a small, noncommittal wave, dismissing his question.

“I don’t know why you won’t go to the doctor,” he said. “It must be ten days now.”

Joan had once had a friend who, when her husband was caught stealing from the till at work, had started to bleed and didn’t stop for six weeks. Finally the friend had gone to an emergency ward and the doctor there had told her, “There’s nothing wrong with you that I can see, and you can bleed just as well at home as here,” and had sent her away.

“It’ll stop,” Joan said, not looking at him. “I just have to lie here till it decides to stop.”

Rudy continued to stand close to her bed looking down on her.

He was a man, she thought, who sought simple solutions. She could see he was baffled by her refusal to take action.

“Call the doctor today,” he said. “You can’t go on like this forever. Do you still faint when you stand up?”

“I don’t faint,” she corrected him. “I almost faint. I’ve never fainted in my entire life.” He looked down at her for a few seconds longer, smiling a puzzled smile, then went slowly out of the room. Joan could imagine the contingency plans involving ambulances and emergency wards, going through his head.

None of the women who lived in the house came into her room. They were all younger than she was and none of them had been married yet. They rushed in and out, disappeared for days at a time, called into her from the doorway as they passed by, as if her disease were catching and they were afraid of getting too close. Joan didn’t blame them. She felt humble in their presence, believing herself in their certainty that they would never screw things up as badly as Joan had, and understanding that they were afraid to get too close to her for fear her failure would rub off on them.

“Still living,” she would reply gaily to their quick inquiries called in through the open door. “I’m getting up tomorrow.”

Most nights she had nightmares that woke her and that frightened her so badly she would turn on the overhead light, the bedside lamp was not bright enough to erase the dream, and would lie the rest of the night with it glaring down on her. In her dreams over and over again she was in a white hospital bed and Steven, who in real life had never laid a finger on her, had never even threatened to, was banging on her door, coming in to kill her, and the dream was such that his breaking it down and her death at his hands were inevitable, and only seconds away. Every time, just before the door burst open she would wake, find herself sitting up in bed, her nightgown wet, gasping for air as if
she were drowning, her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it prevented her from swallowing.

Then she would stagger out of bed, fumble in the dark for the wall switch and flood the room with light. Blinded and beginning to faint again, she would fall back on her damp bed before the swirling, dark water that was always there sucking at the edges of her consciousness, dragged her under.

Every afternoon in the silence of the big house, when everyone was gone and a few stunted rays of afternoon sun shone through her high basement window, Joan got up, washed, dressed, and walked around the house. Sometimes she went outside and sat on the steps or walked a few feet down the sidewalk and back again. Once she felt so well that she walked all the way to a nearby shopping mall, going slowly, enjoying the sunshine and rejoicing in the feeling that her weakness and fainting had gone away for good. But by the time she arrived at the mall it had returned and she had been lucky to find a taxi waiting at the entrance to the grocery store, its driver only too glad to find a customer not laden with groceries he would have to help carry. It whisked her back to the big house in minutes, and she stumbled down the stairs and fell onto her bed just before the water closed over her head.

Then she wondered if she would ever go back to her job, ever see Simon again, ever do any of the ordinary, simple things that people did. Every day she imagined herself going to the nearest emergency ward, as in Rudy’s plans, and saying, “I’m done for, I can’t go on anymore, please take care of me,” but her humiliation at what she had come to was too great even to phone a doctor.

Yvan said to her, “You can’t keep on bleeding forever, you know. You should go to the hospital.” Joan thought it interesting how her steady bleeding worried the men of the house so much. “How long are you planning to go on in this way?” he
asked, sitting on the side of her bed, holding her hand and stroking it gently.

“It’ll stop,” she said, bored with the repeated question.

“Do you need anything?” She shook her head. “I brought you a glass of water.” She glanced at it standing on her bedside table next to her bottle of tranquilizers and her bottle of sleeping pills that she had gotten prescriptions for before Steven left, when things had been so bad.

“Thanks.”

“Let me get you some aspirins,” he said, standing up. She shook her head, made an effort to speak to him feeling his kindness and sympathy made her owe him an explanation.

“It isn’t … real, you know.” She was looking at the ceiling when she said this and not at him. He said nothing, but his silences were so full of acceptance of what she might say that she felt free to try to put into words the vague ideas that were floating around in her brain. “It’s like this thing that’s happening to me, the bleeding, like it isn’t …” She hesitated, searching for the word she meant. “Real,” she repeated lamely.

Yvan cleared his throat gently.

“What do you mean?” he asked tentatively, softly inviting her to try again. Tears had begun to run out of her eyes and to slide down the sides of her face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Lying here sometimes I start to get a different feeling. It’s like …” She lifted her hand aimlessly, then wiped one side of her face. “I get to feeling so light. It’s like I don’t really have a body anymore. And then I can sort of see that … this isn’t real blood.” The last came out plaintively and she put her hand over her eyes, then took it away again.

Yvan was looking downward at the rug. He had his hands in the pockets of his jacket and she saw for the first time the lines in his forehead showing that he had suffered too and making him
look much older than she knew he was. She found herself wanting to tell him about the black ocean that threatened her, but looking closely at him, she thought she saw a hint of it lurking in his eyes. After a pause he drew in an audible breath, then slowly turned and went out of the room without looking at her again.

Years and years later when she had come to a time in her life when she fully expected another period and one didn’t come, never came again, she would look back on this terrible time, remembering it almost fondly. And she would remember how she had not been frightened because the blood, which eventually stopped as she had known it would, had been so thin and pale and had seeped out of her slowly, as blood seeps out of a wound.

That night she dreamed she was murdering Steven, hitting and hitting him with a rock until he turned into a huge crab-like creature and scuttled away from her. She woke frightened and filled with self-loathing and horror that she might, even if only in her dreams, be a murderer.

Yvan stopped in each morning and every evening.

One night she said to him, “I’m afraid it may be real blood after all.” It was evening and the small piece of sky she could see through her window was a soft, dusky blue. She could hear children’s voices on the sidewalk in front of the house and upstairs in the living room above her head two of the women were dancing together to a song she had often danced to in the nightclubs. They shouted and banged into furniture and stamped their feet.

Yvan sat in the chair next to her bed and watched her with his brown eyes. Under his gaze she felt thinner and paler and the black water drew closer. She was afraid that the sea of blackness lapping at her would engulf her if she let go for only an instant. Already she felt it sucking at her limbs, kept turning her face away from it to breathe better. She closed her eyes, then opened them in time to see Yvan disappearing out her door. She closed
her eyes again and for some reason, a picture of her first serious boyfriend from almost ten years before popped up behind her eyelids.

He had been everything she had ever hoped to find in a man. He was very handsome with curly black hair and green eyes and wide shoulders of an athlete, and he was well-educated and filled with ambition too. He asked her out, she went with him, and the first time she kissed him she knew she was in love with him. She knew too, from the first moment he kissed her, that he would leave her. She never wavered in this surprising conviction, she never expected the outcome to change, she even asked him on their second or third date if he would tell her when he was finished with her so that she wouldn’t go through the agony of waiting week after week for him to call.

One night, after about a year of dating, he came to her and told her that he had accepted a job in another city, that he would be leaving soon, and that he would not be taking her with him. Sadly, she accepted this, neither arguing nor complaining. After he had said good-bye to her, she went home and didn’t even cry.

About ten o’clock Joan was lying in her bed in the darkness, the light from the hall reaching only halfway into the room, falling short of the foot of her bed, when Yvan returned. He was carrying something bulky in his arms. He threw it on the floor a few feet away from her bed and she realized it was a sleeping bag. He took off his shirt and pulled off his jeans. Then he crossed the room in his underwear and socks and shut the door, blocking out the light. She heard him pad softly back to his sleeping bag and get into it.

The rest of the house had grown silent, its inhabitants either out somewhere, or sleeping, or too far away for their voices to be heard in this basement room. For a long time now Joan had been
able to smell everything. Odours came to her like the blossoming of a flower, with a distinct shape, the petals of scent thinning out if they were further away. If she had chosen, she knew, she could follow scents like a dog. She heard Yvan strike a match on his sleeping bag’s zipper and smelled the sulphur and then the smoke. She could smell Yvan’s distinct scent too, beyond the odour of cigarettes, she could even smell a hint of pine coming from his sleeping bag.

After a while she heard him fumbling for an ashtray, then crushing out his cigarette in it. He settled back into his sleeping bag.

“Good-night,” he said softly to her. “Good-night.”

The room was very dark, there was no light at all coming from the window and someone must have turned off the hall light for the yellow spears around her door had disappeared, leaving only a smooth wall of black. She forgot about Yvan’s presence in the room, or rather, his presence grew large, an amorphous blackness that swelled and blended with the blackness of the room.

After a while she saw a shape forming in front of her eyes, appearing so bright against the black that its outline seemed to sizzle. The image was vivid pink, it was her bottle of sleeping pills enlarged and hovering in the air before her. She stared at it, noticing the disordered way the capsules fell, this way and that, inside the bottle. Then a purple line, perfectly straight and horizontal, appeared across the full bottle, two-thirds of the way down. In an instant the image vanished, leaving an after-image which melted slowly away.

This was not the first vision Joan had ever had. She had never told anyone about the others and in fact, was never sure herself that ‘vision’ was the right word to describe them, but there were
moments when she saw things that weren’t there, clearly, before her, things that told her in one precise picture, something she hadn’t known before. “Yvan?” she said.

“Yes?” he answered at once so she knew he hadn’t been asleep. She told him what had just happened.

“Yes,” he said again, more slowly this time, with a hesitant air, but no surprise.

“I’m not going to take them,” she said.

“Good,” he said, and she knew then that his presence this night was not a whim of his, and never an accident, that he had indeed come to be with her, knowing she needed him.

Now she wondered if it was true that we choose our own lives, that we ourselves make them what they are. She wondered why it was that she had been so inarguably convinced from the moment she kissed her first boyfriend that he would leave her. She wondered too, if she had expected instead that she would have him forever, if that is what would have happened. Then she would never have married Steven, who had left her and nearly killed her. Or was it that the various things that happened in her life in what seemed a helter skelter, random way, were really part of a plan, designed to bring her to the breaking point? But what the ultimate reason for this might be, the changing of her, Joan, into a different person than the one she had started out as, she couldn’t fathom.

One night, she was never able to remember if it had been the same night or a night or even two nights later, she woke and recalled that she had just had an ordinary dream, a dream about nothing in particular, a silly dream. She thought idly, as she prepared to throw back the covers, last night I had an ordinary dream. I must be getting better. The thought arrested any movement. What? she thought. What was that? I had an ordinary
dream, I must be getting better. And she had laughed a startled laugh and, carried on it, got out of bed. The next day she went back to work.