Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
16
As we come in,” Mull says, half in his seat, facing the platoon, gripping the seat back for support, “I’d like to tell you what happened the first time we came out here.”
Rough winds. Heavy clouds outside the small oval windows. If not for the heat, it might feel like they were flying through packed snow.
“This is before the first platoon was deployed,” Mull begins. “A foundations check, as we call it, to map the logistics before sending soldiers in. Planning stages for a mission.” He has to speak up; the airplane walls continue to creak. “We didn’t hope to find what was making the sound. Rather, we were looking for locals, anybody who might know more about it than we did.”
Mull has taken this flight before. Same plane, he says. Made the mistake of listening to the sound, airborne, causing the small crew to get sick, a severe illness they couldn’t shake for the duration of the flight. They threw up in the barf bags and when the barf bags were full they threw up in the hoods of their unpacked sweatshirts, into the feet of their socks, into their sleeves. There was a very scary moment when the pilot appeared too vertiginous to continue. When they landed, they had to postpone their directive for two days; two days they spent camped close to the plane, hoping the sound wouldn’t arrive, live, in person, as they tried to get better. To protect themselves, they slept with headphones, the silencer type, the kind the men wore on the tarmac to save their ears from the perpetual roar of engines. But no sound came. Not the bad one. And on the third day they felt stable enough to proceed. Mull says there was some concern when they set out; nobody could say for certain that they’d “come back” from the illness. He explained this to mean it was difficult to determine whether or not the sickness had fully left them, or if they were all perhaps a little changed by the experience and would never again know the former, good way they felt.
“You gentlemen have heard of LSD,” Mull says. The Danes have. They’ve all tried it. Larry was pulled over on Woodward Avenue for driving only seven miles an hour. “We were concerned with a similar residual effect. Taking a trip without proof of returning.”
Philip sees something foggy pass over Mull’s eyes. Memory.
Mull and the radio crew bivouacked beneath the wings, then left camp. Intelligence had already located a settlement, three huts made of cow dung, eleven miles east of the Atlantic Ocean. The crew wore sand masks and carried sparse gear: a tape recorder, flashlights, extra pairs of boots, handguns, and a change of clothes for the night. They weren’t planning on staying long. The group’s translator, Doran, a native Namibian, expressed concern as to whether or not he would understand the exact language used there.
“I sensed fear in him,” Mull says. “Which of course frightened me in turn.” Mull himself spotted the huts first. Two were in bad shape, their roofs half caved in. But the third appeared lived in. American shoes lay outside the hut’s front door. The smell of the settlement caused more vomiting.
“His name was Nadoul. By our way of thinking, he was the poorest human being I’ve ever encountered. And what I mean by that is, the man had never heard of money. Not in the way we know it. He was the son of a larger family, the former occupants of the other huts, and the cattle they raised were their currency. But by the time we met him, there were no cows, and Nadoul trekked five miles every day to a natural spring, where he gathered fresh water and the edible plants that grew there. He’d had a wife once. They’d taken turns making the trek; Nadoul would go in the mornings, Ka in the afternoons. They were worried, Nadoul told us, about leaving their hut unwatched. When we asked him why he’d be worried about other people in a landscape where nobody lived for dozens of miles, Nadoul told us that he and Ka were never alone. That’s how he put it, though Doran said it was more of a colloquial phrase that meant, nobody is ever truly alone.”
Philip hears movement behind him and he turns to see that Lovejoy’s eyes are open. He’s staring at Philip without expression. Arms crossed. Armband clearly visible. Philip turns away and looks out the window. Absently he fingers the ivory F key hanging around his neck. Through the glass he sees clouds as thick as the pillows on his parents’ bed that he’d crawl into after a particularly bad dream.
“We asked Nadoul about the sound and he nodded like he’d expected as much, like he knew somebody was bound to come asking about the sound. Later, Markus, one of the radio operators, commented on Nadoul’s change in pallor when we brought it up. Like he’d blanched, causing his dark skin to lighten a shade. ‘Can’t you hear it now?’ he asked us. We were justifiably surprised by his question. Markus and the others hurriedly readied their gear. We recorded, we listened, but we heard nothing.”
Philip watches Mull’s lips move, remembering the moment in the control room, the words he didn’t think he spoke, the words Mull heard anyway.
Did you say you hear a chord, Private Tonka? Did everybody hear the same?
“Nadoul looked at the tape recorder and shook his head, laughing at us. We couldn’t be sure he even knew what a tape recorder was, but the spinning reels must have reminded him of something, because he understood it well enough to mock it. He spat a word in the direction of the recorder and Doran told us he thought it meant slippery. But more like . . . a fictional creature or idea that a man can’t hold. Can’t cage. I took it to mean Nadoul was saying the sound was uncatchable. Some of the others thought he was simply scared of the device and was asking for it to be removed from his home.”
Outside the window, the clouds have doubled, tripled, and to Philip it looks like they’re traveling, impossibly, through solid alabaster.
“We asked him where his wife Ka was, what happened to Ka. She’d either died or left him, and either way, we were talking to a man with no possessions who probably felt a loneliness we couldn’t possibly imagine. But he was surprisingly spry as he began telling us her story, as much as he knew, as if the subject of his former wife was more pleasant to talk about than the sound he claimed was still playing, then, as we stood before him. Ka, he told us, started complaining about a bad back. She told Nadoul that her walks to the spring were becoming more trying, more difficult. She called it her ‘burden’ and told Nadoul it was causing her ‘great pain.’ Neither Nadoul nor Ka thought it was a matter of sore muscles or aging. As wild as it sounds to us, they immediately assumed Ka had someone unseen attached to her back, someone who’d been watching them and had finally decided to close in. I assumed he meant a spirit of some kind. Surely Nadoul didn’t see a physical man sitting on his wife’s back. Through Doran, we told him that the sound made us feel sick, and maybe Ka had been experiencing a similar sickness, but Nadoul shook his head no and told us Ka found the sound pleasant, sometimes even sang along with it. We asked him if he’d seen any military in the area, anybody who might have built something to make such a sound. He laughed again. Briefly. Clipped. But he didn’t answer that question directly, just went on to talk about the increasing difficulty of Ka’s daily treks to the spring and how finally, one day, Nadoul decided he would have to make the treks himself. Ka would have to rest until the thing . . . left her back.”
A pocket of rough turbulence and Mull grips the seat back harder; for a moment he loses his professional visage and instead looks like a frightened civilian. A shrill howl erupts outside the plane and for two heartbeats Philip thinks it’s the sound.
He reaches absently for a drink that isn’t there.
“Nadoul was afraid to leave Ka alone but more afraid of what would become of her if she didn’t get proper nourishment. At one point she’d told him the sound was playing inside her ear. She asked him to look for it. By now, Ka’s feelings for the sound had changed. It was no longer a thing to sing along to. She believed it was the voice of the thing attached to her. She thought it possible the thing had left her, but its voice remained, lodged in her ear. Nadoul found nothing, of course. But Ka insisted. It’s in there, she told him. And it’s not coming out. By this point, Ka wasn’t looking good. Nadoul had to act quick. He decided she needed more tha
n what was available by their daily treks. Rather, he’d visit the nearest settlement, though it was a day and a half away. There he might speak to a medicine man, return with a cure. So with only his baboon-hide canteen, he bid her farewell and left her alone in the hut.”
Outside, the clouds part, only for the duration of a single intake of breath, and Philip thinks he sees beige, blue . . . the colors of a desert beside an ocean.
Then the sky swallows his view once more.
“The Himba medicine man offered Nadoul nothing. He actually advised him to move. Told him it was the fault of the sound and that it made men sick, made them see things. Nadoul, stubborn, left the settlement empty-handed.”
“And when he got back?” Larry asks suddenly. “She was dead?”
Mull breathes deep. Smiles sadly.
“We don’t know,” he says. “Only her ears remained. Cut off, there on her pillow.”
“Hold on a second,” Duane says. “Are you telling us she was murdered?”
“Murdered?” Mull asks. “Not according to Nadoul. He believed she’d cut them off herself.”
The door to the cockpit opens and one of the young pilots informs Mull that they’ve begun their descent. The secretary thanks him and turns to face the platoon.
“We’re landing,” he says, then secures his seat belt.
Each of the Danes, the photographer Stein, and Private Greer stare out the small windows as the clouds part, leaving a trace, the fog, barely obscuring the shore below. Even from this height, the ridged sand appears endless, too big to harbor success, and Philip searches for a hut.
“We’re coming in hard,” Larry says, a tremor in his voice.
Is it turbulence? Is it fear?
Philip closes his eyes and pictures one hundred thousand dollars; imagines what he’s going to do with it when he gets back to Detroit.
The equipment the Danes will buy. The nights out they’ll have.
Again his fingers travel to the piano key around his neck.
When he opens his eyes he sees the desert in greater detail.
Even now, anxious, uncertain, impatient, Philip is able to comprehend that what he sees is like nothing else on earth.
The Namib Desert looks as primal as Mull’s papers described it.
And beyond the boundaries of an impenetrable band of fog, below the surface of the crystal water, he sees shipwrecks, too.
Dozens.
“Jesus Christ.”
Philip thinks maybe he’ll buy just a single drink with all that money. Just one. Sitting on a stool at Doug’s Den, shooting news with Misty.
Yeah, Philip thinks, as the plane lowers, as the sand rises to meet it and the waves roll like unsteady earth, a one-hundred-thousand-dollar drink sounds good right now, if only because it would mean he was back home, where he belongs.
17
In her apartment on Bettman Street, Ellen usually finds some degree of solace, a break from the sadness, injuries, and death of Macy Mercy. Nursing is not an easy job, and often she fantasizes about leaving the hospital altogether. Though jobs are hard to come by, and she knows she should be grateful for what she has, there isn’t a store she enters, a diner she eats at, where she doesn’t imagine herself working instead.
There are loftier scenarios, too. Getting in her green New Yorker and driving west to California is one.
It’s Jean, she thinks, tonight, removing her coat and tossing it on one end of the brown couch she sometimes sleeps on, as the static of the television plays like the equivalent of the recordings of ocean waves her friend Lucille uses to help her sleep.
Jean is the name of her daughter, who died at only three years old.
It’s Jean, and it’s always been Jean. You’re trying to make up for it, Ellen. And good luck with that.
Ellen understands how potentially detrimental it is to her own mental health, constantly playing catch-up, rewind, attempting to heal someone, anybody, to fill the frighteningly limitless void left by Jean.
And yet, there’s Philip.
“Stop it,” she says out loud, as she crosses the small carpeted living room and enters the half kitchen with a mind to fix dinner for herself. She flattens the front of her beige slacks out of habit, the way she flattens the front of her nurse’s uniform all afternoon and evening at the hospital. It bothers her, the way she can’t leave work at work.
Philip.
If she’s honest with herself, she’s got to admit that nursing Philip, both during the silent six months and now that he’s awake, is the first time she’s felt differently about that void. As if, through Philip, she’s heard the first reverberation in there, the first echo, suggesting there’s a bottom to that pit after all.
She takes a pan from the hanging rack (it saves room in this tiny apartment, hanging pans and lids, utensils, and mugs with handles, too) and places it on the stove. She lights the next burner, brings the temperature to medium, and places the pan upon it. Actions like these are supposed to do some good for her. The motions of a simple, everyday life. But when she drops some butter onto the pan and it begins to sizzle, she immediately thinks of the sound of the reel machine in the main office rolling, as Dr. Szands sat listening, taking notes that reflected a particular conversation, a private moment, she’d had with Philip.
Philip was scared when she told him there was a piano in the unit. For Christ’s sake, he asked for a mirror to see the thing before he asked to see himself. And he absolutely asked her what color it was.
Unless he was listening in, how could Szands have known?
She realizes the butter is browning.
“Shit.”
She flattens the front of her slacks again, then carries the pan to the sink. She dumps the burnt butter and begins the process again. For a place that’s supposed to be a safe haven from the perilous moods of work, home has never been good to her.
But tonight it’s especially taunting.
She’d planned on frying leftover rice, vegetables, and lemon, but this time, once the butter is melted, she simply cracks an egg. One egg will do. Ellen can’t seem to focus beyond that.
“Why?”
She’s talking to herself at home. Not for the first time. The one-word, one-syllable question comes as if attached to the single egg, but Ellen knows better. She can’t crack the question away. And she can’t help but go on.
“Why is he healing so fast?”
Today Philip didn’t only move his head, he was gesturing with it and his shoulders, as he spoke to her.
As the translucent white of the egg turns opaque, she places both hands on the oven handle and closes her eyes. She sees him again, dented and deformed, discolored and fearful, flat upon the same cot that’s held him for over half a year.
Shouldn’t Ellen be glad that he’s healing? Isn’t that the ideal scenario? And for crying out loud, why does she care as much as she does? Why does she feel like she has to be the one to point this out?
Ellen opens her eyes.
She sees the egg is brown, burnt. She grips the pan handle hard and tosses it, egg and all, into the sink. She jams the burner knob to off and flees the kitchen.
It’s one thing to say she took the job to fill the impossible void left by not having been home when Jean died, but it’s another to think she should feel responsible for a patient’s welfare to the point of suspecting the hospital of misconduct.
Is she? Is she suspecting the hospital?
She breathes deeply. An old standby, still the best way to calm herself down. She thinks of how that battered body once played music.
And yet, he was scared of the piano.
When Philip first came to Macy Mercy he was in worse shape than any patient she’d ever seen. The limited information Dr. Szands had given the staff didn’t do much to shed any light on the person Philip was beneath the bruises. It took Carl, the doughy-faced manchild orderly, to tell her Philip used to play in a rock ’n’ roll band.
The Danes.
Ellen looks at her rec
ord player, situated on a flat brown table by the living room’s one window. She’s had the 1954 Admiral AM Radio/Record Player for three years now, and it is her prized possession. If she can’t distract herself with dinner, she’s going to have to do it with 45s.
The records are in a neat carrier she also bought three years ago. Not much taller than the discs themselves, the aqua-and-white box holds forty-five 45s. Ellen hasn’t quite filled it, but she’s more than two-thirds of the way there. As she gets to her knees beside the couch, pulls the box from under the table, and starts thumbing through the records, she compares the percentage of the box that’s filled with Philip’s recovery.
Is he also two-thirds of the way to being back to normal?
In only a few days after waking?
As she riffles through the various paper sleeves, she clears her throat, like she’s telling someone else in the room to stop bringing up Philip Tonka, the obviously (and justifiably) troubled patient at Macy Mercy who really plays no bigger part in her life than any other patient in there does. No, for Christ’s sake, he’s not two-thirds healed. Just because the guy can move his head and wiggle his finger doesn’t mean he’s about to drive a car, run a race, win a boxing match. And if she’s really going to harp on it, Ellen must factor in the six months, inert or not, as being half a year the man has had for getting better.
“Aha,” she says, stopping at a record. “Here you are.”
Like a lot of music lovers, Ellen doesn’t really know the names of all the songs she likes or the musicians who made them. There’s the well-known ones like Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard, and they’re on the radio all the time. But Ellen likes the deeper stuff, the music you hear in the car late at night, driving home from a diner. The music you hear playing in a bar. A lot of the time, the names of these artists don’t stick. Don’t stay with a person. Don’t stay with Ellen. It’s the music that moves her, after all, not the names.
But there’s more: some of these deeper cuts are packaged in a more creative way. Without the major record label money determining which song makes it to the radio, the smaller ones need to be smart. Some of them, like the one she’s chosen, use “cover art” for the front of the sleeve. A fancy way of writing the song title. Bright colors for the name of the band. Ellen understands that it’s marketing, that there’s something carnival-barker to it, maybe even cheap, but she likes it, too. And though she’s not looking at it now, she’s also a fan of the photo of the band on the back of the sleeve. Four guys standing in front of the orange bricks of a city drugstore.
As we come in,” Mull says, half in his seat, facing the platoon, gripping the seat back for support, “I’d like to tell you what happened the first time we came out here.”
Rough winds. Heavy clouds outside the small oval windows. If not for the heat, it might feel like they were flying through packed snow.
“This is before the first platoon was deployed,” Mull begins. “A foundations check, as we call it, to map the logistics before sending soldiers in. Planning stages for a mission.” He has to speak up; the airplane walls continue to creak. “We didn’t hope to find what was making the sound. Rather, we were looking for locals, anybody who might know more about it than we did.”
Mull has taken this flight before. Same plane, he says. Made the mistake of listening to the sound, airborne, causing the small crew to get sick, a severe illness they couldn’t shake for the duration of the flight. They threw up in the barf bags and when the barf bags were full they threw up in the hoods of their unpacked sweatshirts, into the feet of their socks, into their sleeves. There was a very scary moment when the pilot appeared too vertiginous to continue. When they landed, they had to postpone their directive for two days; two days they spent camped close to the plane, hoping the sound wouldn’t arrive, live, in person, as they tried to get better. To protect themselves, they slept with headphones, the silencer type, the kind the men wore on the tarmac to save their ears from the perpetual roar of engines. But no sound came. Not the bad one. And on the third day they felt stable enough to proceed. Mull says there was some concern when they set out; nobody could say for certain that they’d “come back” from the illness. He explained this to mean it was difficult to determine whether or not the sickness had fully left them, or if they were all perhaps a little changed by the experience and would never again know the former, good way they felt.
“You gentlemen have heard of LSD,” Mull says. The Danes have. They’ve all tried it. Larry was pulled over on Woodward Avenue for driving only seven miles an hour. “We were concerned with a similar residual effect. Taking a trip without proof of returning.”
Philip sees something foggy pass over Mull’s eyes. Memory.
Mull and the radio crew bivouacked beneath the wings, then left camp. Intelligence had already located a settlement, three huts made of cow dung, eleven miles east of the Atlantic Ocean. The crew wore sand masks and carried sparse gear: a tape recorder, flashlights, extra pairs of boots, handguns, and a change of clothes for the night. They weren’t planning on staying long. The group’s translator, Doran, a native Namibian, expressed concern as to whether or not he would understand the exact language used there.
“I sensed fear in him,” Mull says. “Which of course frightened me in turn.” Mull himself spotted the huts first. Two were in bad shape, their roofs half caved in. But the third appeared lived in. American shoes lay outside the hut’s front door. The smell of the settlement caused more vomiting.
“His name was Nadoul. By our way of thinking, he was the poorest human being I’ve ever encountered. And what I mean by that is, the man had never heard of money. Not in the way we know it. He was the son of a larger family, the former occupants of the other huts, and the cattle they raised were their currency. But by the time we met him, there were no cows, and Nadoul trekked five miles every day to a natural spring, where he gathered fresh water and the edible plants that grew there. He’d had a wife once. They’d taken turns making the trek; Nadoul would go in the mornings, Ka in the afternoons. They were worried, Nadoul told us, about leaving their hut unwatched. When we asked him why he’d be worried about other people in a landscape where nobody lived for dozens of miles, Nadoul told us that he and Ka were never alone. That’s how he put it, though Doran said it was more of a colloquial phrase that meant, nobody is ever truly alone.”
Philip hears movement behind him and he turns to see that Lovejoy’s eyes are open. He’s staring at Philip without expression. Arms crossed. Armband clearly visible. Philip turns away and looks out the window. Absently he fingers the ivory F key hanging around his neck. Through the glass he sees clouds as thick as the pillows on his parents’ bed that he’d crawl into after a particularly bad dream.
“We asked Nadoul about the sound and he nodded like he’d expected as much, like he knew somebody was bound to come asking about the sound. Later, Markus, one of the radio operators, commented on Nadoul’s change in pallor when we brought it up. Like he’d blanched, causing his dark skin to lighten a shade. ‘Can’t you hear it now?’ he asked us. We were justifiably surprised by his question. Markus and the others hurriedly readied their gear. We recorded, we listened, but we heard nothing.”
Philip watches Mull’s lips move, remembering the moment in the control room, the words he didn’t think he spoke, the words Mull heard anyway.
Did you say you hear a chord, Private Tonka? Did everybody hear the same?
“Nadoul looked at the tape recorder and shook his head, laughing at us. We couldn’t be sure he even knew what a tape recorder was, but the spinning reels must have reminded him of something, because he understood it well enough to mock it. He spat a word in the direction of the recorder and Doran told us he thought it meant slippery. But more like . . . a fictional creature or idea that a man can’t hold. Can’t cage. I took it to mean Nadoul was saying the sound was uncatchable. Some of the others thought he was simply scared of the device and was asking for it to be removed from his home.”
Outside the window, the clouds have doubled, tripled, and to Philip it looks like they’re traveling, impossibly, through solid alabaster.
“We asked him where his wife Ka was, what happened to Ka. She’d either died or left him, and either way, we were talking to a man with no possessions who probably felt a loneliness we couldn’t possibly imagine. But he was surprisingly spry as he began telling us her story, as much as he knew, as if the subject of his former wife was more pleasant to talk about than the sound he claimed was still playing, then, as we stood before him. Ka, he told us, started complaining about a bad back. She told Nadoul that her walks to the spring were becoming more trying, more difficult. She called it her ‘burden’ and told Nadoul it was causing her ‘great pain.’ Neither Nadoul nor Ka thought it was a matter of sore muscles or aging. As wild as it sounds to us, they immediately assumed Ka had someone unseen attached to her back, someone who’d been watching them and had finally decided to close in. I assumed he meant a spirit of some kind. Surely Nadoul didn’t see a physical man sitting on his wife’s back. Through Doran, we told him that the sound made us feel sick, and maybe Ka had been experiencing a similar sickness, but Nadoul shook his head no and told us Ka found the sound pleasant, sometimes even sang along with it. We asked him if he’d seen any military in the area, anybody who might have built something to make such a sound. He laughed again. Briefly. Clipped. But he didn’t answer that question directly, just went on to talk about the increasing difficulty of Ka’s daily treks to the spring and how finally, one day, Nadoul decided he would have to make the treks himself. Ka would have to rest until the thing . . . left her back.”
A pocket of rough turbulence and Mull grips the seat back harder; for a moment he loses his professional visage and instead looks like a frightened civilian. A shrill howl erupts outside the plane and for two heartbeats Philip thinks it’s the sound.
He reaches absently for a drink that isn’t there.
“Nadoul was afraid to leave Ka alone but more afraid of what would become of her if she didn’t get proper nourishment. At one point she’d told him the sound was playing inside her ear. She asked him to look for it. By now, Ka’s feelings for the sound had changed. It was no longer a thing to sing along to. She believed it was the voice of the thing attached to her. She thought it possible the thing had left her, but its voice remained, lodged in her ear. Nadoul found nothing, of course. But Ka insisted. It’s in there, she told him. And it’s not coming out. By this point, Ka wasn’t looking good. Nadoul had to act quick. He decided she needed more tha
Outside, the clouds part, only for the duration of a single intake of breath, and Philip thinks he sees beige, blue . . . the colors of a desert beside an ocean.
Then the sky swallows his view once more.
“The Himba medicine man offered Nadoul nothing. He actually advised him to move. Told him it was the fault of the sound and that it made men sick, made them see things. Nadoul, stubborn, left the settlement empty-handed.”
“And when he got back?” Larry asks suddenly. “She was dead?”
Mull breathes deep. Smiles sadly.
“We don’t know,” he says. “Only her ears remained. Cut off, there on her pillow.”
“Hold on a second,” Duane says. “Are you telling us she was murdered?”
“Murdered?” Mull asks. “Not according to Nadoul. He believed she’d cut them off herself.”
The door to the cockpit opens and one of the young pilots informs Mull that they’ve begun their descent. The secretary thanks him and turns to face the platoon.
“We’re landing,” he says, then secures his seat belt.
Each of the Danes, the photographer Stein, and Private Greer stare out the small windows as the clouds part, leaving a trace, the fog, barely obscuring the shore below. Even from this height, the ridged sand appears endless, too big to harbor success, and Philip searches for a hut.
“We’re coming in hard,” Larry says, a tremor in his voice.
Is it turbulence? Is it fear?
Philip closes his eyes and pictures one hundred thousand dollars; imagines what he’s going to do with it when he gets back to Detroit.
The equipment the Danes will buy. The nights out they’ll have.
Again his fingers travel to the piano key around his neck.
When he opens his eyes he sees the desert in greater detail.
Even now, anxious, uncertain, impatient, Philip is able to comprehend that what he sees is like nothing else on earth.
The Namib Desert looks as primal as Mull’s papers described it.
And beyond the boundaries of an impenetrable band of fog, below the surface of the crystal water, he sees shipwrecks, too.
Dozens.
“Jesus Christ.”
Philip thinks maybe he’ll buy just a single drink with all that money. Just one. Sitting on a stool at Doug’s Den, shooting news with Misty.
Yeah, Philip thinks, as the plane lowers, as the sand rises to meet it and the waves roll like unsteady earth, a one-hundred-thousand-dollar drink sounds good right now, if only because it would mean he was back home, where he belongs.
17
In her apartment on Bettman Street, Ellen usually finds some degree of solace, a break from the sadness, injuries, and death of Macy Mercy. Nursing is not an easy job, and often she fantasizes about leaving the hospital altogether. Though jobs are hard to come by, and she knows she should be grateful for what she has, there isn’t a store she enters, a diner she eats at, where she doesn’t imagine herself working instead.
There are loftier scenarios, too. Getting in her green New Yorker and driving west to California is one.
It’s Jean, she thinks, tonight, removing her coat and tossing it on one end of the brown couch she sometimes sleeps on, as the static of the television plays like the equivalent of the recordings of ocean waves her friend Lucille uses to help her sleep.
Jean is the name of her daughter, who died at only three years old.
It’s Jean, and it’s always been Jean. You’re trying to make up for it, Ellen. And good luck with that.
Ellen understands how potentially detrimental it is to her own mental health, constantly playing catch-up, rewind, attempting to heal someone, anybody, to fill the frighteningly limitless void left by Jean.
And yet, there’s Philip.
“Stop it,” she says out loud, as she crosses the small carpeted living room and enters the half kitchen with a mind to fix dinner for herself. She flattens the front of her beige slacks out of habit, the way she flattens the front of her nurse’s uniform all afternoon and evening at the hospital. It bothers her, the way she can’t leave work at work.
Philip.
If she’s honest with herself, she’s got to admit that nursing Philip, both during the silent six months and now that he’s awake, is the first time she’s felt differently about that void. As if, through Philip, she’s heard the first reverberation in there, the first echo, suggesting there’s a bottom to that pit after all.
She takes a pan from the hanging rack (it saves room in this tiny apartment, hanging pans and lids, utensils, and mugs with handles, too) and places it on the stove. She lights the next burner, brings the temperature to medium, and places the pan upon it. Actions like these are supposed to do some good for her. The motions of a simple, everyday life. But when she drops some butter onto the pan and it begins to sizzle, she immediately thinks of the sound of the reel machine in the main office rolling, as Dr. Szands sat listening, taking notes that reflected a particular conversation, a private moment, she’d had with Philip.
Philip was scared when she told him there was a piano in the unit. For Christ’s sake, he asked for a mirror to see the thing before he asked to see himself. And he absolutely asked her what color it was.
Unless he was listening in, how could Szands have known?
She realizes the butter is browning.
“Shit.”
She flattens the front of her slacks again, then carries the pan to the sink. She dumps the burnt butter and begins the process again. For a place that’s supposed to be a safe haven from the perilous moods of work, home has never been good to her.
But tonight it’s especially taunting.
She’d planned on frying leftover rice, vegetables, and lemon, but this time, once the butter is melted, she simply cracks an egg. One egg will do. Ellen can’t seem to focus beyond that.
“Why?”
She’s talking to herself at home. Not for the first time. The one-word, one-syllable question comes as if attached to the single egg, but Ellen knows better. She can’t crack the question away. And she can’t help but go on.
“Why is he healing so fast?”
Today Philip didn’t only move his head, he was gesturing with it and his shoulders, as he spoke to her.
As the translucent white of the egg turns opaque, she places both hands on the oven handle and closes her eyes. She sees him again, dented and deformed, discolored and fearful, flat upon the same cot that’s held him for over half a year.
Shouldn’t Ellen be glad that he’s healing? Isn’t that the ideal scenario? And for crying out loud, why does she care as much as she does? Why does she feel like she has to be the one to point this out?
Ellen opens her eyes.
She sees the egg is brown, burnt. She grips the pan handle hard and tosses it, egg and all, into the sink. She jams the burner knob to off and flees the kitchen.
It’s one thing to say she took the job to fill the impossible void left by not having been home when Jean died, but it’s another to think she should feel responsible for a patient’s welfare to the point of suspecting the hospital of misconduct.
Is she? Is she suspecting the hospital?
She breathes deeply. An old standby, still the best way to calm herself down. She thinks of how that battered body once played music.
And yet, he was scared of the piano.
When Philip first came to Macy Mercy he was in worse shape than any patient she’d ever seen. The limited information Dr. Szands had given the staff didn’t do much to shed any light on the person Philip was beneath the bruises. It took Carl, the doughy-faced manchild orderly, to tell her Philip used to play in a rock ’n’ roll band.
The Danes.
Ellen looks at her rec
The records are in a neat carrier she also bought three years ago. Not much taller than the discs themselves, the aqua-and-white box holds forty-five 45s. Ellen hasn’t quite filled it, but she’s more than two-thirds of the way there. As she gets to her knees beside the couch, pulls the box from under the table, and starts thumbing through the records, she compares the percentage of the box that’s filled with Philip’s recovery.
Is he also two-thirds of the way to being back to normal?
In only a few days after waking?
As she riffles through the various paper sleeves, she clears her throat, like she’s telling someone else in the room to stop bringing up Philip Tonka, the obviously (and justifiably) troubled patient at Macy Mercy who really plays no bigger part in her life than any other patient in there does. No, for Christ’s sake, he’s not two-thirds healed. Just because the guy can move his head and wiggle his finger doesn’t mean he’s about to drive a car, run a race, win a boxing match. And if she’s really going to harp on it, Ellen must factor in the six months, inert or not, as being half a year the man has had for getting better.
“Aha,” she says, stopping at a record. “Here you are.”
Like a lot of music lovers, Ellen doesn’t really know the names of all the songs she likes or the musicians who made them. There’s the well-known ones like Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard, and they’re on the radio all the time. But Ellen likes the deeper stuff, the music you hear in the car late at night, driving home from a diner. The music you hear playing in a bar. A lot of the time, the names of these artists don’t stick. Don’t stay with a person. Don’t stay with Ellen. It’s the music that moves her, after all, not the names.
But there’s more: some of these deeper cuts are packaged in a more creative way. Without the major record label money determining which song makes it to the radio, the smaller ones need to be smart. Some of them, like the one she’s chosen, use “cover art” for the front of the sleeve. A fancy way of writing the song title. Bright colors for the name of the band. Ellen understands that it’s marketing, that there’s something carnival-barker to it, maybe even cheap, but she likes it, too. And though she’s not looking at it now, she’s also a fan of the photo of the band on the back of the sleeve. Four guys standing in front of the orange bricks of a city drugstore.