Ivan Vladislavić: The Restless Supermarket

The girl put her hand on my arm. Her voice was sweetly scented, candy-striped in flavours of green, it came close to my ear. ‘Are you okay, Phil?’

Jesus Theodosius Christ. I drew her attention to the shape of my head.

‘Lie down. They won’t mind.’ A confirming glance at the ambulance men, solicitous phantoms in a miasma of Old Spice and congealed regulations.

She pushed me back, and soft and melting as I was, I keeled over on my side. The canvas stretcher was red, and so was the rubber sheet, and the blanket. Sensible choice. My feet got left behind on the floor, and she picked them up like a pair of shoes, very professionally, I thought, and put them on the end of the stretcher. Long practice, probably, with a drunken father. Harvey Wallbanger, everyone’s pal.

Floyd was trying to speak, but they had clamped an oxygen mask over his jaw. Blood welled in his crizzy hair, and one of the ambulance men swabbed it with the tea cosy. Blood was dripping out of the aluminium foil too, around the waist, and splashing the leg of the girl’s jeans. I tried to raise my arm to point it out, but it was glued to the stretcher.

Lava lamps. Never had the temerity to buy one. I used to see them in the display window of the Okay Bazaars in Eloff Street, on the way home from Posts and Telecommunications. What was that substance? It always seemed to be red. Was it magma? Magma come louder. Magda. Merle. Mazda. Bogey. Bonsma. Organs suspended in … that other substance the lava was floating in … Amniotic fluid? Glycerine? Oil. Muddy Waters. Meltdown in my overheated brainpan, my head full of words, my prolix crackpate, my derivations running into one another. The sump. The sumptuous. The crankcase. I am not the crankcase, I am the crank itself. I have been moulded into a shape that was once useful, but is useful no more. I saw the crank. It looked like an S fallen flat on its face. A proofreader’s mark: transpose. Cause to change places. Change the natural or the existing order or position of. The crank was made of hardened steel, and it was lying in a crankcase made of oak and lined with velvet. The velvet was blue, midnight blue. And the crank was me, that rigidly mortised form, that stiff. I was lying in my casket the way I prefer to lie in my bed, on my side, with my knees drawn up and my hands clasped between them. I was lying like that now; the rubber sheet that cleaved to my cheek smelt of methylated spirits. My stomach heaved.

I opened my eyes. The girl was shaking my shoulder.

‘Wake up, we’re there.’ And then, with a morbid laugh, ‘I thought you were dead.’

*

The ambulance men lifted the stretcher down onto its unfolding wheels and rushed Floyd away, and the girl hurried after him through the automatic doors, down the neon-scalded corridor to the accident unit.

Bodies under blankets. And the barely breathing, leaking fluids onto the floors. And the walking wounded, bound up and splinted, stilting along in their rods and slings. Everyone was staring. Was I an oddity in this infernal place? Had the Johannesburg General gone so solidly black in a matter of months that a white man was already a novelty? I should have come with the dirk sticking out of my chest. That would have given them something to gawk at. But then they were used to bodies stuck with blades and spikes, prickly as voodoo dolls. At Baragwanath Hospital, patients strolled in off the streets with axes lodged in their skulls.

I decided to take a turn in the grounds to clear my head. But I had not gone far when I tripped over something in the darkness. A signboard jutting out of the lawn. De Wet Irrigation. My stomach said: enough is enough. Heave-ho! Lights were shining through the trees in the valley below. Probably a squatter camp. Or was it Harold Oppenheimer’s place? Living without a care in the world, either way. And poor old Tearle, fallen to earth again, on all fours in a herbaceous border.

*

I traced the girl to a desk in the reception area. The clerk seated opposite smirked when she saw me coming. It was time to take charge.

The girl gave me her seat. I reached for the admission form with one hand and a pencil with the other, forgetfully, and found nothing but splinters and ground graphite in my pocket. The clerk resisted. She put her fist down on the form like a rubber stamp and raised a plastic pen like a club. I brought my upside-down reading skills into play. Once you’ve tackled some Tagalog against the grain, a bit of plain English is a piece of cake — even standing on its head. The form was blank except for the word ‘Floid’ on the first line.

‘That’s a “y”,’ I said, ‘F-L-O-Y-D.’

She took up the Liquid Paper, and I oversaw the lavish whiting out, the painstaking correction.

‘We’ll put you down as the next of kin. What’s your name?’

‘Shirlaine,’ the girl said.

‘Can you spell it for me.’

‘S-H-I-R-L-A-I-N-E.’

It was like something you would find attached to a block of flats. Mount Shirlaine. I repeated the spelling for the clerk.

‘Do you have surnames?’

Floyd was a Madonsela. Shirlaine was a Brown. True enough.

The clerk got half of it wrong. I made her do it over. No medical aid, of course, no fixed address. Allergies? Work, I should say. Previous conditions? Drunk and disorderly. Legal guardian? Impulsively, I put my own name in that box. Black humour.

Then Shirlaine went to find out what had become of Floyd, and I sat down in the waiting room on a plastic seat bolted to a metal frame, and tried to gather my thoughts. The seat was one of many, and I was surrounded on all sides by the wounded and bereft, all facing the same way in rows like passengers on a bus, all bathed in neon as corrosive as acid, all gazing forlornly at the Coca-Cola machines ranged against the wall.

*

i. For ‘information’. Why didn’t they use a capital? That minuscule ‘i’ suggested that the information was not very important. Information was what the doctor ordered. Surely they didn’t think people would confuse a capital ‘I’ with the Roman numeral? I knew what that dot was, of course: a tittle. But what was it doing there? The question had never presented itself to me in exactly this form. Why should ‘i’, of all letters, have that detached fragment floating above it? I went through the alphabet in my head. Just ‘i’ and its neighbour ‘j’. All the others were solid citizens. In that inhospitable waiting room, reeking of blood, it seemed ominous. What hope was there that prescriptions would be filled correctly, that the right tissues would be readied for dissection, that the appropriate procedures would be followed and diagnoses struck, that proper disinfectants would be swilled in the scrub-ups, that the diseased limbs would be amputated rather than their healthy counterparts?

These apprehensions proved diuretic. I sought out the cloakrooms. Dames and Here.

And so I saw myself in a mirror, lit up, fluorescently frank, covered in boot polish. How could it have slipped my mind? Tearle in blackface. Denigrated. A creature of nightmare. An aged printer’s devil, on the wrong side of pensioning-off, not going out in a blaze of glory like that lucky McCaffery, but dropping dead in the traces like Aldus Manutius’s slave. Black. No wonder people were staring. I fetched some toilet paper and cleaned away what I could, which was not very much. Was it indelible?

All along Hospital Street, as they called the main corridor, I looked for a nurse. No one familiar was on duty in the wards near the dispensary. I recalled that the gentler natures were sometimes posted to Paediatrics, on the sixth floor, and so I made my way up there. By a happy quirk of architecture, the sixth floor was just one above the ground. Nothing but glum faces. They were none too pleased to be on duty, but they cheered up no end when they saw me. Laughed like drains. I let them enjoy the joke. Then I persuaded one — a Xhosa, to judge by the cluck-clucks of sympathy — to lend me a hand. She poured methylated spirits into a kidney dish and scraped at me with wads of cotton wool until my skin hurt.