Tiny Dancer (15 page)

She couldn’t really tell why the same sorts of actions might strike her as pleasant one time and make her skin crawl at another. It was as if she had two separate sets of nerve endings, which the world randomly selected every time any part of it touched her. Sometimes, when her skin felt crawly inside, she could jump and shout and run around until she burned enough nervous energy to smooth herself back out. But other times, her changeable nerves reacted to the world by overloading, burying her under more sensation and information than she could bear to take in. Then it didn’t matter to her if it was coming from her hosts in her language or from the Others in American words. It meant nothing to her. It was like listening to people gargling a mouthful of gravel.

When that happened, she liked to crawl under the kitchen table and curl up into a ball. She tried to pretend that she was in a little hole in a bank of cool sand and that she could pull the sand over her and disappear, safe from any further disturbance from the world and its sensations.

Sometimes that sent the people around her into various states of upset, which was good, since it allowed her to feel her willpower reaching out into the world and having some measure of effect, even though she generally felt invisible and unheard. At other times, she could hear adults talking about teaching her a lesson and not giving in to her manipulations. That was good too, because then they left her alone and safely curled up under the heavy table, in a state that was sort of like peace.

Other times, though, the adults seemed to need to provoke her. It felt as if they only existed to push her first one direction and then the next, with no clear reason to any of it. It was all just a series of instructions, explanation, orders. Doctors and nurses poked at her during her check-ups at the hospital, the host parents poked at her while they checked her dressings, and through it all the carefully translated words made it abundantly clear that these things were all for Zubaida’s benefit. She was beginning to lose track of what her “benefit” was even supposed to mean.

She understood as far as any ten year-old understands the idea of immediate sacrifice for a long term gain. But on deeper and more primal levels she shared the trait with most other humans of hating the feeling of being poked and prodded. The infuriating messages of helplessness that went along with every push and pull and poke and jab were far worse than whatever physical discomfort might be involved.

Sometimes when the adults were so sure that what they were doing was for her own good that they seemed to her as if they didn’t even realize she was a living thing. Then she had to stop them in their tracks—wake them up—make them see her. Make them listen to her. More than once, when their continual orders seemed specifically intended to drive her insane, she exploded and grabbed a kitchen knife, swearing that she would cut herself or anyone who came near her. It took that much to make them snap out of their adult trances and to actually see her as she was, standing in front of them. The pause never lasted for more than a few moments, but it was good to make them see her.

And as time went by and the host family tended to forget, she kept having to make them see her again.

* * *

The charitable Non-Government Organization that handled Zubaida’s case from Afghanistan to California was like any other NGO, in the sense that its interest in her remained strong even after arrangements for the trip and the surgery were completed. Throughout the month of October, however, the ordinary interest morphed into real concern. Peter and Rebecca began getting calls and emails from the NGO representatives with news of behavioral episodes involving Zubaida with her host family. The parents had grown worried about the unknown depth of Zubaida’s levels of emotional disturbance. Now their questions took on a real sense of immediate alarm.

How extreme might her behavior become? Were their own two children in danger?

The hosts wanted reassurance, but who could give them such a thing with confidence? Could the NGO who sponsored her, the hosts now wanted to know, offer any guarantee of Zubaida’s mental stability?

When that question came in, the NGO reps contacted Peter at the hospital and asked him what they should tell the family. Were the hosts in any danger? Could Peter and the NGO offer any guarantee at all that anyone was safe in this girl’s presence?

And it wasn’t her overt emotional scenes and melodramatic threats that upset them most; they could see through those manipulative sorts of behavior. Their greatest concern was over the increasing inability to get any cooperation out of her at all. It was as if Zubaida had somehow dismissed their credibility and was now detaching herself from them and from their authority, across the board.

When they challenged her solo foot trips, she explained that back in her village of Farah, she made it a habit to work off her considerable nervous energy with long walks through the ancient city walls. Even the strict local customs allowed such petty freedoms to a little girl. Now here in Los Angeles, Zubaida was firmly insisting that since there were no Taliban around to enforce their code of driving all girls inside the home after their tenth birthday, she intended to keep up her very Zubaida-ish habits of long walks filled with flights of imagination. The big problem was that she tended to disappear for these “long walks” at odd hours forgetting to leave any indication where she was going or when she would return.

However, the hosts knew her customs well enough to understand that such disrespect for household rules would never be tolerated inside of her own home, thus the implied message of contempt was difficult to miss. They complained of their utter inability to gain any cooperation from her about it at all. In fact, once Zubaida saw how much this sort of thing rattled them, she appeared to step up the behavior.

What were they supposed to do?

Peter was baffled by the situation and wondered how he was supposed to be able to solve their dilemma. Most of Zubaida’s time with him was on a medical patient basis; these other issues just never came up at the hospital. There Zubaida seemed to clearly understand that maximum cooperation was her most reliable route to a comfortable process and the best possible outcome. Even though the nursing staff maintained a family atmosphere among the patients on the ward, and despite the fact that Zubaida fondly referred to Helen San Marco, one of the older nurses, as “Grandma,” there were really no family-type confrontations there. Sometimes Zubaida would try to negotiate for a little more recovery time before her next procedure, but other than that—and her tendency to wiggle and dance whether or not she needed to be still and let her stitches heal—she had never presented him with such irrational behavior.

Still the calls and emails continued. Her behavior, according to the host family, was eroding so rapidly that they no longer felt safe in the house with her. They wanted to be replaced—they demanded to be replaced—and they wanted Zubaida out of their home as quickly as possible.

Peter’s heart sank the moment that he heard that. This was the nightmare scenario that he hoped to sneak past, because he already knew that the charitable NGO had never followed through on securing a back-up family—their own stockpile of obligations siphoned away enough of their work time that nobody ever got around to it.

He urged everyone to find some sort of compromise. The surgical process with Zubaida was nowhere near completion. Her original treatment plan already compacted three years’ worth of surgery into a single year, so there was just no acceptable way to speed that timeline up any more. It would only deny her fragile body the already limited recovery time that she was getting now.

He made sure that everybody involved in the decision-making process understood that if Zubaida had to return to her village at this stage, much of her current progress would eventually be lost while her body continued to grow and the unresolved scars pulled harder and harder against the rest of her. Both her appearance and her mobility would be heavily affected if essential work on her chest and torso was left undone.

But no matter who he dealt with at the NGO, the same answer came back—they had already done everything that they could to secure housing and care for her. How could they ask another host family, even if they found an acceptable one, to take on a child that the original host family was afraid of? Aside from the moral issues, who could begin to unravel the legal implications of such a thing, if indeed a second home was established but the situation there turned out even worse? What if it involved violent harm?

Who would answer for it, among all of them: the soldiers who first encountered her, the medics and doctors who cared for her, the State Department, the NGO, the Sherman Oaks Hospital, the Grossman Burn Center, or even Peter Grossman, himself—the doctor who first insisted that the Burn Center take this case on in spite of its many risks—who would answer for such a disaster, if it happened?

Who would have the power to fix that one?

* * *

The ancient and instinctive animal drive to avoid torment is imprinted on the very cells of the bones and the blood. Nothing that lives and moves will tolerate poking and prodding, especially on an unrelenting basis, without, at the very least, moving out of the way. Or, if sufficiently provoked to anger, it will strike out like a deadly predator. Civilizations teach various methods of learning to delay that response within human company, and of tolerating a certain amount of poking and prodding as an inevitable consequence of life in the community. But the veneer of civility is known to be thin. Poke anybody a few too many times, and even the most bland personality will erupt in anger. Further provoked, they will rise to the level of rage where violence not only becomes possible but is likely, even guaranteed.

For any human being, the best thing about freedom is the power that it bestows to be able to walk away from something that is poking you, so that you don’t have to wait until it causes you to explode and beat it to death.

Then you get to live in peace.

Zubaida knew that her lack of freedom was only the product of the massive efforts to help her recover from the damage left by the teeth of the orange monster, but understanding her lack of freedom didn’t help her tolerate the inability to get away from the poking and prodding. It went much farther than medical examinations; she was continually poked and prodded from the inside by invisible hands holding unseen needles, and the needles jabbed her over and over.

Her culture is built upon the life of the extended family and one’s place in it. In this country, she felt strangely naked a lot of the time. The pangs of separation prodded beneath her stomach and her feelings of guilt poked her with reminders of how much she had cost her family by carelessly dancing into the teeth of the orange monster.

In this country, the constant strangeness of the language jabbed at her ears, whether it was the flat-sounding American English or the accented
Dari
spoken by her hosts. In both cases, the odd sounds of the words scraped over her sense of hearing like dull blades. Everything about America was impossibly foreign, and even though she had spent most of her time indoors, the weekend trips with the Grossmans helped impress upon her that nothing about this place resembled her homeland or her people’s way of living. Here she was amidst abundance such as she could never imagine, while her family remained behind in Farah in circumstances more destitute than before she fell into the fire. And of course they were also less able to keep up their home life because of the lack of Zubaida’s constant help with the unending chores of group family living.

The harsh realities of all that made for too much poking and prodding to endure. She felt like she had been enveloped by a cloud of invisible bees. The needling stings came at her from every direction, intent upon revenge. They didn’t just come at her from outer sources, with the constant orders, orders, orders from strangers—the needling jabs tormented her inside with hot stabs of guilt.

She needed to release little bits of that pressure by exploding in frustration and rage, and that need was becoming just as compelling as the need to scream away the pain of the burns had once been. She knew all about the civilized reactions that were expected from one who receives help and hospitality, but the need to either flee or to strike out was stronger, stamped into the cells of her bones and her blood. And since there was nowhere to run, somebody close by was sure to encounter a girl who was being driven half mad by swarms of unseen bees.

That wasn’t the way Peter Grossman heard it, when he got the doomsday call from the NGO. What he heard was that the experiment was over; it had failed.

Zubaida was going back to Afghanistan.

The host family was now demanding that Zubaida be immediately removed from their home. They were no longer listening to entreaties.

“What?” he barked into the phone. “She’s not finished! You’re telling me about what her hosts want, but what about the patient? Are we just going to throw her away?”

Maybe, they gamely tried to assure him, she can eventually make her way up to Turkey with her father. Some of the hospitals there were known to be pretty good. Maybe the Turks would offer up the facilities, the expertise, the desire to show deep charity to a foreign patient who cannot pay.

Oh yeah,
Peter thought.
And maybe she’ll find a magic lamp and wish it all away.

It is helpful at this point to get a clearer picture of who was receiving that news. Peter was born in 1963, just a year before his father finished his surgical training. He was still only a year and a half old when the family moved to Los Angeles. His father, Richard Grossman, went to work for a Beverly Hills medical firm for a few years, then opened the first incarnation of the Grossman Burn Center. Peter’s parents were divorced when he was thirteen, and he lived from age 14 through age 16 with his father, whom he idolized.