Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2014, Издательство: Sarabande Books, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Elegy on Kinderklavier: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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"The stories in
travel around the world and to the moon, and along the way they tell you everything they know. Arna Hemenway writes a fiction whose satisfactions are not merely narrative but musical, and it is a pleasure to listen to his stories as they rise into song."
— Kevin Brockmeier
Barnes & Noble Summer 2014 Discover Great New Writers Selection The stories in
explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar.
is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.
Arna Bontemps Hemenway
The Missouri Review, A Public Space
Seattle Review
Ecotone

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When Charlie entered the room that time after her return, I watched her stop short a step inside the door. She didn’t look at me, and didn’t say anything. Instead, she gathered herself and went to Haim slowly. In his fitful sleep he had kicked off his blanket, and she started with his leg, the fat beneath bulging out in rolls. She put her hand out as if to gently touch his body, allowing her fingers instead to hover carefully a few millimeters above. It was like she was, piece by piece, retaking his body from the distortion of his sickness, reaffixing the original in the system of vision she seemed to understand would now be required of her. First was the leg, then the sides with the violent stretch marks, then the arm.

It reminded me of the way she used to do more or less the same thing when he was a newborn, the way she spent hours gently feeling and moving his tiny legs and arms, which had seemed to be almost all fat and no bone then, the way he let her, looking in confusion at her hands. Now, when she got to his face, she stopped.

If I am to be brutally honest, I admit to taking some pleasure in her difficulty, her struggle in that moment. I wanted him to be foreign to her in the wake of her desertion, unrecognizable. For Charlie, for lack of better words, to understand that he was now more mine than hers.

I also wanted her to see what was the cruelest bodily insult of all, which was that instead of the wan, ravaged, rail-thin body of the child with cancer nearing death, we had been given the opposite: a robust, bloated, outsized child, an embarrassment of flesh. I wanted her to get that we would not even have the small mercy of watching our own kid live and fade; that, instead, we would only have the queer neutrality of watching this Other, this boy whom some persons else had allowed to grow so fat, to become so lost in his own body. Of not even being able to recognize him, really.

Because, of course it’s true that you can’t see him within that body. I had to admit that, even then, watching Charlie staring down into his changed face. You can’t see him as he once was, you can’t see and love the passage of the years, not really, if you’re being plainly honest. You see only what’s before you. The foreign body, the sickness. It’s impossible to see what you’ve already lost.

She stood beside his hospital bed, stooped over him for a long time. Eventually she closed her eyes and put her hand lightly over his face, touching it like a blind person. I understood then that things would not go back to their erratic-but-more-manageable normal with her. That her holiday was not the single act of brinksmanship she needed to enact with herself in order to bring herself back to us. Haim had entered the hospital as one boy, with one body, and she had left that child, not this one. To her, he was simply not there to return to.

Haim had to have been awake by then, had to have felt her hand there on his face, but he refused to open his eyes until a long time after she was gone.

Nighttime here, especially on Sundays, has its own kind of timelessness. It’s winter now, so the light goes quickly, and by seven o’clock it is so dark through the windows you can’t even see the outlines of the mast tips at Cadogan Pier needling the sky. Eventually it is so dark that the windows reverse themselves and only show the long corridors they face, giving the shapeless dark beyond them the false depth of the hallway’s lights. It’s late now. Sundays are the hardest nights to get through.

The day has been quiet — they try to schedule all the kids’ therapies so that they feel like they have a real weekend, can recover a little bit — and the only thing Haim has had to do today is suffer a dressing change for the stretch marks. These re-dressings used to be so traumatic that they couldn’t do them without sedation, but Haim eventually chose to refuse the anesthetic. This amount of pain seems to be interesting to him, even if he is sick from it afterward. Today he watched as he usually does, looking down at where the “wound team” worked: curious, wincing, not really breathing. They’ve had to switch the dressings to non-adhesive foam pads because of “skin breakdown,” meaning they had to stop pulling off the gauzes that were taped to the skin because the skin would come off with them. Nobody says anything, but there is a finality to all this. The nurses with their hyper-focus on Haim’s wound care. Three failed “avenues of therapy” for the pontine glioma and we’re left slathering onto his body something called MediHoney. Two different Phase II clinical cancer trials (one that was supposed to recognize and block the chemical signals that lead to the generation of new blood vessels in the tumor, and one that was supposed to damage DNA at certain guanine locations so as to trigger death of the tumor cells) and months of targeted radiation/chemotherapy later, we are using honey — actual honey — that bees make from a certain tree in New Zealand to hopefully give us a few more weeks.

I come back to the room from a coffee run in the deserted cafeteria and Haim is gone. I find him a floor down, in the pediatric intensive care unit. The lone nurse at the duty station gives me a sad little smile as I pass, as if to say she’s sorry.

Haim has been back and forth between here and the pediatric oncology ward so often that everyone knows us. The only real regulars in the PICU are from our ward upstairs; most everyone else on the PICU floor is already close to the end of their story, happy or sad, and, one way or the other, doesn’t return.

Haim met Ava on his first return from the PICU, when they’d both gotten C. diff after starting chemo. They were each in contact isolation rooms which were situated next to each other at the end of the ward. The bathrooms, which they both occupied a lot, had extremely thin walls, and at some point they realized they could hear each other. Dozing beside Haim’s bed I would hear their tiny voices talking for hours as they each waited out the diarrhea, the tinny laughter echoing strangely, always sounding so surprised. Each time the IV team came to access their ports, the nurses moving back and forth in the lock between the two rooms, Haim and Ava craned their necks, trying to catch a glimpse of one another when the doors opened, and sometimes waved. Ava got cleared to leave contact isolation first and Haim moved into her room. She’d spent a lot of time writing random phrases and words in dry-board marker on the large windows that looked outside. Her handwriting was rounded and girlish and after she was gone, Haim changed her letters into numbers, solving the complicated equations idly against the furrowed clouds.

Ava, who has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, is not doing very well. Haim asks for updates about her every week and I usually tell him whatever the nurses tell me when I pause at their station. He has his own information-gathering services, I guess, because lately I’ve just told him I’m not sure. He’s not really allowed down in the PICU, but he knows this and usually goes at night, when the nurses are too tired or defeated to stop him from wheeling his chair along to Ava’s room. I nod to Ava’s mother as I pass her in the lounge, but she is sitting forward, perfectly still, elbows on her knees and face completely covered with her hands.

I don’t disturb Haim. I lean against the wall in the hallway and watch through the doorframe. The only light on is a long, tubular fluorescent one above Ava’s bed. She is lying flat on her back, beset by the Lilliputian tubes, wires, and monitors. Her mouth is taken up by the breathing tube, but she is looking up into Haim’s face with her sharp, clear blue eyes, her small brow rising, steepled in what seems like fear. I don’t know if she recognizes him. It probably won’t be long now.

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