Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (17 page)

C
LOWNS SASHAY INTO THE UNIT
on Tuesdays and Fridays, and every day there are volunteers to wheel the child into the activity room so she can look at other children. Other children look at her. They find comfort in her placid refusal to make noise, in her willingness to share toys—that is, to have a toy snatched from her tray and replaced by a different toy. One thing is as good as the next to this little girl who has never grabbed; who has never sucked; who will never—thinks the fashion-minded nursing student with sudden envy—feel envy; who will never—the exhausted resident may be forced to conclude—discriminate between Tess and non-Tess.

Today’s volunteer, understanding Tess’s limitations, is nonetheless hopeful that the soft fingers curling around her own extended forefinger, with the chipped peach polish on its nail, can be induced to grasp a plaything, a hollow plastic chicken drumstick from the Let’s Make Dinner set. It lies now on the tray of the special stroller. Tess, seated in the stroller under the scepter hung with bags, has accepted the substitution of drumstick for forefinger. She is slumping. The volunteer wonders if the supports are properly placed, but her heart sinks at the thought of lifting and readjusting child and tubing. Instead she edges the drumstick along the tray, Tess’s four fingers still surrounding it (her thumb does not oppose, or at least not yet). The drumstick, a ghastly yellow, at last reaches the charming mouth with a little assist upward from the volunteer’s chipped nails. Tess’s lips part at the drumstick’s kiss.

Want
, the volunteer silently begs.
Want
.

Along comes a nursing assistant who bends down and blows at Tess’s hair as if it were a candle, and Tess smiles in the warm breeze

… Next week, the volunteer promises herself; next week we’ll work on the thumb.

In fact, even without the aid of her thumb, Tess’s limp fingers, encountering her feeding tube, sometimes weakly tug on it. The primary nurse and the fashion-minded nursing student comment on this later, when they are readying Tess for a nap. They confer bleakly about the possibility, in a month or two, that Tess’s aimless pull will be just strong enough to cause discomfort and even to do damage. For now, though, clothing snapped around the tube deflects the incompetent hand.

Sometimes she has trouble going to sleep. She whimpers, cries a little: a soft wail that she herself cannot hear. The nursing student would like to stay with Tess—would like to pick her up and cuddle her, an intervention that is performed many times during the day, not just for Tess but for all the little patients, the fussy and the bored and the hot and the insomniac, by volunteers and nursing students and nursing assistants and nurses and once in a while by residents when they are too tired to do anything else, and even by attendings. The infectious-disease attending, his glasses two gold circles and his mustache one black rectangle, has sometimes been found in a chair rocking a feverish baby, as if this effort and not the IV febrifuge would bring the temperature down.

The nursing student, raising her eyebrows at the primary, reaches toward Tess. The primary shakes her head, and covers Tess with a light blanket. “Princess will comfort herself.” The two women leave the room.

When the cleaning person enters, pushing his mop and bucket and trundling his supply cart, he finds Tess still awake, though no longer whimpering.

I
WENT INTO THE HOSPITAL
. Those crazy fish, flipping around in the tank all day. I took the elevator upstairs. Then I sat down. When she was born I couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with her, though the doctor knew, right away. “I have some concerns, Loretta,” was what he said. They rushed her down the hall. They were going to operate then and there but they decided to send her here in the chopper.

T
ESS IS LYING
partly on her side (a rolled baby blanket props her back). From this position she can see a mirror hung on the slats of her crib, a mirror which reflects her visage. It is claimed that babies as young as three days recognize the presence of eyes. Tess’s mentation is far above that of a three-day-old infant—the staff would rear like warriors were anyone to suggest otherwise. And indeed an expression of soulfulness passes over her face whenever she sees it mirrored—an expression of further soulfulness, that is, for her eyes and mouth always suggest soul, to the staff’s relief. The lashes, however, sometimes make her caretakers uneasy. There is not a woman connected with the unit, from the surgeon to the volunteer, who has failed to wonder at the assignment of these eyelashes to this young lady: an example of the profligacy or carelessness of Whoever’s In Charge. And yet every woman, and every man too, has also at some time privately praised the assignment, for although the staff would be attentive to an ugly child—they are already attentive to ugly children, to children whose features have been flung any which way onto their faces, as if by a raging Hand—still, comeliness inspires a tender leap of the heart, a frisson of identification, softening the shackles of Tess’s imprisonment, easing her warders’ vigil.

I
SAW THE CHOPPER FROM MY BED
. I had signed the permissions. By the time I got to the city, two days later, in Billie’s car, with Billie in her baseball cap driving, my child was hooked up to about a hundred machines. “Is it a baby?” Billie asked. “Or is it a sprouting onion?” You’d think that would have made me mad, but it didn’t, it made me feel better. Billie always has a handle on things.

After a few months there were only two tubes, the feeding one down below and the one that stuck right into her heart. The medicines from all the bags went through an aqua thing that looked like a clothespin and then into the heart tube.

So I could sit and hold her. One day I held her too tight and something tugged and I found out ten minutes later that the tube into her heart had gotten loose from the clothes-pin and instead of liquids going in, blood was coming out, slowly though, there were just a few splotches on my skirt, but the nurses said they had to flush the line. One did it and the other watched.

T
HE CLEANING PERSON
dutifully scrubs the rarely used bathroom. He mops the floor of the room. He empties the wastebasket into his rolling cart. And then, just before leaving, he pauses.

Tess is still gazing into her own eyes.

The cleaning person, like the infectious-disease attending, is Asian; but whereas the doctor was born in the Subcontinent, the cleaner hails from the Pacific Rim. He has five children. They are all healthy, and they go to school every day—except perhaps for the oldest, who leaves the house at the proper time but with a secretive look in his eyes. Nonetheless, no bad reports have reached the father’s ears. The cleaning person is grateful for his children’s health, for his job, for the United States of America, a country which rescues its ill babies and repairs its malformed ones, sometimes (he has heard) before they come out of the womb—such meddling, he doesn’t understand it.

He has known Tess for the two years of her life, and he considers her beauty angelic. Angelic beings, he knows, need no justification for existence. (Unlike the infectious-disease attending, whose belief system does not include the heavenly Hierarchy, the cleaning person is a devout Christian.) But Tess is not an angel, despite her looks; she is a human, despite her flaws; and he has overheard (his English comprehension is good) that these flaws will be the death of her. In his country, if Tess had been born at home she would have been allowed to die. If she had been born in a hospital, she would have been helped to die.
Why you here?
he wonders. Pain and death and sorrow he understands as part of the design that God has created—but life like this?

The eyelashes lower. The cleaning person pulls off his thick yellow gloves and puts on a pair of thin rubber ones from the box on the wall and runs his protected finger down her plump cheek, once, twice, three times, recklessly, for such a gesture is against the rules and he would be reprimanded for making it. It is hard to know, though, who among Tess’s overworked court of doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, and volunteers; not to mention directors, Utilization Committee members, accountants, and the fellow who removes dangerous waste—who would bother to chastise him. Anyway, the cleaning person caresses her cheek unreproved, and tosses the rubber gloves into the wastebasket, and shuffles into the corridor.

I
STAYED IN THE CHAIR
near the elevator even after the Chinese man left my daughter.

I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was glad I hadn’t said anything to Billie, though. You can’t let the baseball cap she wears fool you. She takes everything hard.

T
ESS’S NEXT-TO-LAST VISITOR
is the counsel, so much taller than the cleaning person that his pale hair grazes a mobile. He has drafted the preliminary statement to the court, he silently informs the now sleeping child. He doesn’t touch her, and his stance is not reverential like the cleaning person’s, but reflective. His thoughts are not in the interrogative mood, but the mildly threatening conditional:
If we are to continue to save you, why, someone must be made responsible
. Responsible in a financial sense is of course what he means.

T
HE TALL GUY
pushed the elevator button over and over and it finally came.

I went into the room.

She looked okay, sleeping on her side, though when I lifted the blanket and undid a couple of snaps I saw that she still had the diaper rash. Her skin just burned itself off sometimes because she didn’t crawl or even roll, just lay there in her stuff. She might turn over someday, one of them said. She’d never eat and drink and she was deaf and she was impaired but really she knew me always.

I put the blanket back on. I watched her ear for a while. All those windings and curves. My little girl’s little ear.

I got the toy she liked best from the windowsill. The red floppy dog. They always forgot it. I put it in a corner of the crib. Then I unscrewed the end of the heart tube from the aqua clothespin and I slipped it under the blanket so the blood would pool quiet and invisible like a monthly until there would be no more left.

W
HEN OLD VICTOR CULLEN
, housebound, his sight dimming fast, filed a report from his bed with the invented dateline of Ataraku, Japan, his editor at
World Enough
, elderly himself but with mental and physical gears fully engaged, didn’t know what to do. So he did what he’d always done: edited the piece (never much work except for those damned ellipses), corrected the galleys, checked the blues. With the help of the art director—also Victor Cullen’s friend and colleague—he fooled around with photographs of Matsushima and Tsuwano and Aomori and came up with convincing composites. An impoverished young artist who happened to be Japanese was let in on the mischief. She did a fine wash drawing of an imaginary Shinto temple. The editor sent the proofs up to Godolphin, the town Victor and Nora Cullen had moved to twenty years ago, no, twenty-one; leaving New York, no, forsaking New York. Godolphin was just outside of Boston. Their daughter practiced medicine there.

Nora telephoned right away.

“Greg,” she said softly. “This Ataraku … it doesn’t—”

“I know,” he said, cutting her short; her voice still had the power to liquefy him. “It’s okay. Victor’s fans adore whatever he writes.”

That much was true—the magazine’s readers never tired of praising the keen eye and ear, the turns of phrase, the research. Every Victor Cullen contribution to
World Enough
inspired enthusiastic letters to the editor—letters in longhand, letters pecked on derelict typewriters, letters composed on word processors, and nowadays e-mail. “Ataraku: An Edgy Serenity” reaped the usual harvest.

It had been a prank, Greg figured: the prank of a furious old monarch, assisted by loyal retainers. King Victor. Maybe he’ll rest now.

Almost immediately came Stwyth, Wales, whose entire population was named Pugh.

After Stwyth came Mossfontein, South Africa: such extravagant gardens.

Greg, in his third-floor office, edited Stwyth and Mossfontein and gave them pride of place in consecutive issues. The publishers on the twentieth floor published them. Did anyone in that suite even read the rag?
World Enough
made money; that was all the conglomerate wanted to know.
World Enough
had always made money despite its refusal to take ads from hotels, airlines, cruise ships, and package tours. Instead, whisky distillers, cigar makers, purveyors of tweeds and cashmeres willingly bought space; also antique booksellers and rug dealers and, increasingly, retirement communities and facilities for assisted living.