Right of Thirst
Authors: Frank Huyler
A Novel
From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life.
â
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
America
She let me lie down beside her. But she didn'tâ¦
Our home is an old two-story clapboard farmhouse twenty milesâ¦
When I was just starting out as a cardiologist, Iâ¦
I'd met Rachel three weeks after I'd left home forâ¦
I'd seen the announcement in the local paper. The lectureâ¦
It was the most expensive restaurant in town, along theâ¦
The Valley
The days were blinding and bright and deep. Silent, also,â¦
Sanjit Rai, our liaison officer, was a few inches tallerâ¦
Early the next morning the men appeared. Eight or nineâ¦
I asked Captain Rai to direct me to the palletâ¦
“What's wrong?” she asked, and I was in the presentâ¦
Elise had gone to bed. We were sipping rum andâ¦
The next morning the sky was a low steely gray,â¦
All night the snow fell, whispering against the sides ofâ¦
So we were back in the dining tent again. Raiâ¦
The next morning the storm was over, and it wasâ¦
Rai was right. A few days later they asked forâ¦
Perhaps I should have done it that afternoon. But Iâ¦
Early the next morning, after a few hours of fitfulâ¦
Rachel came up the walk from the mailbox with theâ¦
General Said's gift was a tiny mountain lake at theâ¦
She could feel her leg sometimes. It came and went,â¦
I thought it was thunder. A distant rumble, very farâ¦
Later that night, when there was nothing else to doâ¦
The next morning it was gone, but in the afternoonâ¦
Homa sat alone on her cot in the medical tent.
The City
They came that night. I must have been very deeplyâ¦
Early the next morning, in the dining tent, I finallyâ¦
The soldiers were out on the field. A swarm ofâ¦
Late that afternoon, shortly before the sun fell behind theâ¦
“Can I stay with you again?” Elise asked, later, asâ¦
The next morning we woke early, just after sunrise, andâ¦
The river was growing larger as we descended, joined byâ¦
Rai, to his credit, took a very long time. Itâ¦
Early that afternoon, after we'd dozed fitfully for a fewâ¦
I imagined a long waitâa day, or even more. Iâ¦
That night I lay on clean sheets, on the fifteenthâ¦
The phone rang loudly the next morning. I was alreadyâ¦
At one end of the lobby, just past the bankâ¦
When the time came to meet Rai in the lobby,â¦
They sent a small gray Asian sedan with tinted windows.
That evening, the bellman flagged a taxi down for usâ¦
Later, when Elise had been prevailed upon to help putâ¦
“Will he give Homa the money?” Elise asked me, asâ¦
The next day, at the airport, I was determined notâ¦
A window, near the back. The seats were brown andâ¦
AMERICA
She let me lie down beside her. But she didn't want me to touch her, and she didn't want to talk. I suppose we'd talked enough by then.
She looked up at the ceiling, and blinked. The shades on the bedroom window were open, and it was early in the day. The morning nurse was gone, and it would be hours until the evening nurse arrived.
“How long will it take?” she asked.
I fumbled out of my clothes before getting into bed. For an instant I considered remaining dressed.
“Not long. A few minutes.”
“Please, Charles,” she said, glancing at me, then away. By then I think even her fear had been taken from her. She was calm, and asking for calm.
Her eyes were gray, her hair black where it had grown in again. Despite the hollows of her temples, and the spikes of her cheekbones, it was still her face.
She'd drawn up the bedclothes to her chinâa plain blue quilt, white flannel sheetsâas if it were cold outside. Even then she wouldn't reveal her body, and I had not seen it uncovered for weeks. As I eased in beside her the plastic crackled beneath us, and I felt the cold point of her hip against mine.
I tried to put my arms around her. I tried to hold her close, and whisper. But she shook her head.
So I lay on my side and faced her, and took her hand, and held it against my chest. I tried to stroke her hair, also, short and brittle and dry, but she shook her head again. I brought her hand up to my cheek, and held it there, which she allowed. The room was full of fresh air, but underneath the sheets there was the faint smell of urine, as her kidneys continued on, in ignorance. That was the line she had drawn. When I can't get up to the bathroom, she'd said, that's when.
I don't know if I can, I'd replied.
Then her last flash of intensity, turning toward me, sitting upâplease help me, Charles. Don't make me do this alone.
Her hand lay easily in mine. It revealed nothing at all, and I held itâneither warm nor cold. Her breathing was steady, and she blinked up at the ceiling. I could smell the apple juice on her breath. If she lay thinking, if she lay gathering herself, I couldn't see it. For the first few minutes, each time I forgot myself, and started to whisper something, she shook her head. And so I did my best, as I had promised her I would. But I was weak anyway, far weaker than she. I shook and trembled, and she lay as still as a sunbather.
On they wentâthe minutes, the long steady breaths, and we lay there together, and she let me hold her hand against my cheek. I began to wonder whether it had been enough. She continued, minute after minute, breath after breath. I held her hand and waited, my heart pounding, though I tried to empty myself as she didâI tried to follow her, if only for a little while. But I began to sweat beneath the heavy quilt. Soon there were rivulets on my chest and belly, and her hand grew damp in mine. I closed my eyes for a long time. I held her hand as though it could save me, and then I felt it loosen.
Her breathing changed and the gasping began. I had dreaded that gasping for so long, and there it was at lastâa steady hiss of inhalation, and then a long, mirror-clouding sigh, and then another, the spaces between growing longer, and then a cluster of breaths, and the beginnings of gray, as my fingers slid to the slow pulse in her wrist.
Six breaths, then four, then none. Her heart continued on, and her face began to change. A light blue, at first, in the lips, but then spreading, like water spilled on a table, darkening to the color of slate. Her heart was strong, but then it too began to go, and I knew exactly what was happening beneath my fingers, the skips and shudders, the pauses and returns, and then, as more minutes passed, nothing at all.
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The yellow soap shone on the dish, the grains of dust lit up on the blue tiles below it. I heard the sound of a tractor in the cornfield behind our house. From the corner of my eye I could see my body standing in the mirrors over the bathroom sinkânot young, with gray hair on its chest and thickening at the waistânot young, but healthy nonetheless. I tried to clear my head, I leaned my face briefly against the glass door of the shower stall, and then I opened it, and stepped inside, and turned on the water.
All the details that awaited me, the telephone calls, the paperwork, the crunch of tires on the gravel, the prepared explanationsâI was in the next room, I came and found herâand finally the bundle carried out, light as a girlâI let all of that dissolve in the steam, as it clouded the door, and encased me.
Only a few days earlier, when she was still able to sit in a chair by the window, she'd told me that she loved me. Her words had caught me by surprise, and as I stood in the shower I tried
to cling to them. I hadn't replied, but I'd put my hands on her shoulders from behind, then bent and kissed her cheek. She was trembling, but soon she stopped and looked out through the window and made a casual comment about the dry state of our trees. It was a warm day, and the industrial sprinklers in the fields were on again. At times, I'd look out at themâthe sunlight, the wide curtains of water and the millions of sheaves of green cornâand wonder how it had come for her there, through all of that.
The water fell.
We were on a trip to the Pacific Northwest. We were staying at an inn, high in the forest, a few months after our marriage. The hike was a loop through old-growth trees to an overlook. Round trip took about two hours, and the path was wide and easy, with mossy stones at the sides and split-log bridges over the streams.
It was spring, the off-season. I remember the enormous wooden lobby overlooking the snowcapped peaks in the distance, with its chandeliers of antlers and its crossed skis and snowshoes on the walls and the standing stuffed hides of grizzlies shot seventy or eighty years earlier. Leather furniture, cool in the height of summer. A large fireplace made of stones from a river. A hunting retreat, sold for a hotel when the heirs were gone.
The rest of the patrons seemed old to me then. Mostly retired couples, as I remember. The place was nearly empty.
We set off after breakfast. The hotel sat at the edge of a meadow on top of a hill, and the path descended across the grass into the trees below. The trees closest to the hotel had been logged, and so were close and thick above us, but a half mile into the forest we were in old-growth timber. The change was abrupt and clear, like stepping from a hallway into a large roomâthe
spruce, in their immensity, rising hundreds of feet above us, the long spaces between them full of shades and stillness and cool heavy air. The path wound along across the needles and decaying logs as soft as paper, where mushrooms of all kinds grewâoff white, deep yellow. There were patches of snow. We were alone on the path, and the forest absorbed our footsteps entirely.
It was just a snapshot, but I remembered it with such clarityâRachel, ahead of me, walking lightly across the forest floor through columns of sunlight from the high canopy, as I hurried to catch her. Just thatâher figure, twenty or thirty yards ahead, among the trees and the empty spaces between them, as I followed. There were so many other moments I might have remembered from that time, but that was the one that never washed awayâRachel, pushing on, without waiting, which was very like her. She was young, and she was not afraid, and we did not know each other quite so well, and we had the first of our many years to fill together.
“Please, Charles,” she'd said. That was all.