Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

SEVERAL TIMES THE private nurse buzzed at the gate and startled him awake on the chaise lounge he had dragged beside Jem’s bed. Their bed. These last few weeks Jem had become so sensitive to light and sound and touch she couldn’t bear to sleep beside him. She had always liked to hold his hand at movies and public events, would lightly rest a hand upon his ankle on a sunchair in the garden drinking morning coffee. As if needing reassurance of his presence. Now she flinched at every touch. The sheets are rough, she said. He replaced them with high thread-count brushed egyptian cotton. He replaced them himself because he’d dismissed all the help except the private nurse a week ago. He replaced them every day because she broke a fever every night.

He kept the room heat high because she said that she was always cold. She drank liter after liter of water and sweated constantly. Nauseated and no appetite. The bones emerging in her face and her color bad. She’d lost twentyeight pounds since the CAT scan and hadn’t had them to spare to begin with. Often she made noises that made Niko think that she was having nightmares and he’d lean across the bed to reassure her and she’d be awake. Had been awake for hours. Sensitive to everything. Water was freezing and tepid teas scalded. The room too bright and her bedclothes bunched and his footsteps loud on the deep pile carpet. Her world burning brighter even as it waned.

Niko kept his vigil by her bed and talked to her. She’d grown short of breath and did not talk much. Short tired sentences often trailing off as medications claimed them. He talked about their lives together and adventures they had had. Would have. The great good fortune of their lives, of being alive. News of the world, their friends, their industry. He tried to keep it light but every word felt like goodbye. He called her father and held the phone against her ear and she said a few words but mostly listened. Hank a brokenhearted bear who had been nothing but kind to Niko despite all that Niko’d put his daughter through. Tolerant and forgiving and firm and stern when need demanded. His wife dead of pancreatic cancer these eight years. The man made smaller in the years since then. Tentative. Aware that everything valuable can be broken. Will be broken.

She called friends and spoke to them through him. She’d been texting them but that had dwindled. Some came to visit though he discouraged this. The great unspoken in their eyes. She didn’t need to see that. When the reporters started calling he stopped answering his phone.

He helped her to the bathroom while she still felt good enough to walk and changed her bedpan after she did not. He changed IV bags and swabbed insertion sites and gave meds as the nurse had shown him. The litany of medications now well known to him and only palliative. A month ago it had been Tylenol for headaches and chronic fever and joint pain. The headaches became migraines which had led to Imitrex. The joint pain became general which led to Lyrica. Shortness of breath and chest pain led to asthma inhalers which did nothing. Reglan for nausea. Her skin began to hurt and sometimes even burn. She spiked fevers several times a day and soaked the sheets with night sweats. She became dehydrated and had no appetite. IV glucose and fluids, Vicodin and then Percoset for pain. Marinol briefly to horrible effect, hallucinations and panic. Now it was morphine and nowhere left to go.

He did everything he could to be with her and make her comfortable, and conducted his researches and arrangements while she slept. Phone calls and emails and websites and rare books. Fed Ex packages delivered through discreet third parties. Notes and diagrams and incantations. He became disturbed by how familiar all these preparations felt. Keys and summonings, abjurations and imprecations. Icons and dead languages. Things he’d never been exposed to in this life and could not have known. Yet know them he did. He did not learn so much as remember. As if the more he dug the more some tiered self surfaced like recovered strata of despoiled Troy.

He worked in the study and left the intercom on in case she called out and kept his cellphone near to hand in case she texted him. Sometimes that was easier for her than talking. Her voice the first thing he had loved about her. Wise beyond its years and freighted with the world no matter what it sang about. Now threadbare and so much diminished. As Jem herself was much diminished. She slept more than she was awake. It all got worse.

SOME NIGHTS IT weighed on him too much. The unforgivable nature of his complicity. The exquisite folly of what he was going to attempt. On those nights he’d simply play his Goya on the button-down leather couch in the study. He had a fine small studio across the courtyard but the thought of even going in there filled him with dread. Like desecrating a tomb. He’d play the guitar on the couch and let his sorrow rage despair and grief emerge as notes upon the quiet air to linger well beyond his fingers’ muting on the strings. The counterpoint of hope among them. All of it delivered from six tuned strings and a hollow lacquered wooden body far more easily than speech could ever convey. And throughout it all the sense of final things, of winding down. Of waiting for some tardy guest. Every gesture emblematic. Every note farewell.

For the first time in decades he heard the bottle’s siren song. The memory of whiskey trickling down his throat, the warm purr spreading in his veins. It would be so easy. In the next room was a cherrywood bar, Waterford decanters and matching highball glasses. Jem had thought he should get rid of the bar, toss out the booze or give it away, remodel the room into something very else. She needn’t have worried. Since the Deal he hadn’t touched a drop.

But one night he found himself sitting at the bar and turning a decanter in his hands, the caramel liquid disk seesawing as cut facets caught the light. The thick round stopper sideways on the glossy wood. He frowned. Had he? He took stock of himself. No. No. But still. He raised the decanter to his nose and breathed in and coughed. He thumped the decanter onto the bar and restoppered it and went back into his study and sat down again to play.

THE PHONE CHIME woke him. Jemma’s ring. He’d fallen asleep on the couch again. He sat up and picked up the phone and pressed it and it lighted. Whats it like outside. He looked around the study. Ancient leatherbounds and scattered notes. Trophies, portraits, ragdolls guarding books. The Goya leaning on a bookcase. He drew aside an opaque curtain and squinted out the window at the courtyard. Bright Los Angeles morning. Looks nice, he typed. He pressed send and got up and used the bathroom and splashed his face and stood looking at it dripping in the mirror until the phone chimed again. Can I see?

SHE WAS SITTING up and typing on her phone when he came in. Her color better but much else wrong. She turned the phone screen toward him. “Clear, sunny, seventyeight degrees, air quality index mild.” This the longest she had spoken in a week.

“Another shitty day in paradise.”

“Can we go outside?”

He looked at her. Gaunt and pale, dark circles around her eyes, breathing strained. She did not look as if she could make it as far as the bedroom door. “We can try,” he said.

The nurse was not due again until tomorrow. Niko pulled the sheets aside and Jem swung her legs over the side of the bed. He put her slippers on and started to make some Cinderella joke but stopped. He disconnected the IVAC monitor and gathered the clear IV tubes and picked up the metal pole and put his free arm around her and was startled at the hardness of her shoulderblades against him. He helped her off the bed. She could stand. She took a test step toward the door and stopped and nodded. He said Okay and stayed beside her and carried her IV pole, the plastic bag swinging from its loop as they moved slowly from the room. Her hipbone a hard knob against his thigh. He moved in unison with her and held the gathered tubes like someone operating a lifesized marionette. His ankle kept hitting the IV pole casters but it was easier to carry it than to pull it along. His framed past slowly sliding by them in the hallway.