Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

“She is an ugly prostitute.”

“What is this talk of prostitutes, eh?” Again, he laughed heartily. “I have just taken you home. Now if you hurry, you will go inside before your husband returns. He will never know that you have left.”

Ifi reached into her pocket and thrust the letter at Emeka. He read slowly. At first he looked confused. Then he laughed suddenly, so hard and long that tears started in the corners of his eyes. Spittle filled the corners of his mouth, and he wiped at his face with his dry, crackling palms. “This is nonsense! A crackerpot. The American Job married for papers many years ago.”

“Papers?”

Emeka nodded slowly. “You see, in America it is easy to marry quick-quick and then irreconcilable differences .” After a pause, he explained. “Divorce. The American way.” He patted Ifi’s shoulder. “You people forget you are in America, oh.” After a moment, he gazed at her carefully and soberly added, “Your husband has not paid his full debt. But I am his friend, and so I go and meet her, so she will leave him.”

“Eh?”

Emeka nodded. “Now, it is not wise for you to tell him about this. He is a man. He will be ashamed to see another man paying his debt, even his brother.”

What he said made sense. Men and women married for papers. It was true. Had it not been for such an arrangement, Ifi’s only course to come to America would have been the lottery. In her lifetime, Ifi had only heard of one person who had received papers that way.

Suddenly, Ifi couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead, she gazed down at her belly. With nothing to do with her hands, she rubbed, willing the baby to remind her with a kick that she wasn’t alone, that he had seen it all. What a fool I have been. She laughed to herself. She would never make such a mistake again. Of course Emeka had gone to meet the woman in the early hours of the morning. Of course they had exchanged the money quietly. Of course her insecurities had taken the place of common wisdom. Hadn’t Aunty called her jealous and ungrateful as a child? Well, perhaps Aunty had always been right. How would they ever pay such a debt back to Emeka? Job would need to take more patients. Work more hours.

“And the old lady?” Emeka asked.

“Mrs. Janik. Our neighbor.”

“Hmm. She must not speak.”

“Don’t mind her.” A pause. “And how is Gladys?”

For a moment, his expression clouded. Then, like a sun breaking through clouds, his grin resurfaced. “My dear, Gladys is a champion.”

“And what of the boy?”

“Marry, bury, and retire in your native land.” He smiled. “His burial is set for two weeks from today. We will go and return in three weeks’ time.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Don’t worry yourself,” Emeka said softly. “We have talked. Gladys is strong. In fact,” he gazed at Ifi almost tenderly, “she has decided that it’s time. We have six children. That is enough. Healthy children, all beautiful, all intelligent. What of if they are all girls? We have been blessed enough, and Gladys is not so young anymore, like you.” He smiled at her. “I have spoken to her, and she has agreed to dash you the boy’s crib.” He grinned triumphantly.

“What?”

“I will drop it before we leave for Nigeria.”

Ifi didn’t know how to respond. “That is kind of you.”

“Don’t say anything to your husband. Just accept the gift. I know him. He will appreciate it once he sees it, not before. And it will be good for my wife if it is gone. She will be reminded that our family is already complete.”

Outside, whiteness spread across the clouds. Ifi tried to remember her first night in America. Was this the first sign of a heavy snowfall, like cool, dusty Harmattan winds in Nigeria? Was this the sign of an ending and a new beginning? “Do you believe Gladys? Is she finally done?”

Emeka’s face shined. He looked away out the window, up at the clouds. “We will move forward. The sun will rise tomorrow as it rose today.”

“And how are you?”

His laugh was thick, from a place in the back of his throat. “I will tell you this, little mama: you must always look around you, because your enemies are watching.”

What must he mean? Ifi started to ask, but Emeka stopped her with a gaze up to the apartment window. “How are you enjoying your television?”

When Job returned to Captain’s room for the last time during morning rounds, the old man was so knotted together under his sheets that Job panicked and believed he was dead and rigor mortis had set in. Many times he had seen it before: the blinkless, lifeless eyes of the dead, the turning of the flesh. At age seven, Job had seen those eyes on his brother when he peered down into his face in the open casket and lifted away the buttons that had been placed over each eye. To look and to be looked at by such eyes. At the time, Job had believed that Samuel died from fright, not the bullet. He had been a coward. His arrogance had been a cover.

Before he reached Captain’s bed, the smell told a different story. Today it was only a thick paste that made it as far as the fitted sheet. Job’s jaw tightened. Right at the end of my shift. If I don’t clean him, the morning shift will accuse me of leaving him filthy on purpose. Job would be written up and reprimanded in front of everyone by the charge nurse, a woman ugly and mean enough to be a boy’s uncle. She had done it before.

Shivers rose on Captain’s scrawny, hairy legs as Job, with a wipe, followed the path of the feces along Captain’s leg. He pretended the old man felt as ashamed as he did. He pretended he was the doctor and Captain was the patient, and that he was examining him, and that he could hear the slow drum of the old man’s heartbeat through his stethoscope. Like Ifi. Ifi’s stomach had been a steel drum, and the baby’s foot had felt like the flutter of a heartbeat. As he worked quietly, Job didn’t tell Captain about what he felt when his boy kicked through Ifi’s stomach. Instead, he told Captain about his television.

He spoke quietly. “It has the latest digital technologies.” When Captain didn’t reply, Job continued, describing the detail of its make, its size, the color saturation, the reception — all that he had learned from reading the manual during his meal break.

As he spoke, Job unwound the soiled sheets and pulled them loose from their corners. He wrapped a new sheet over the edge and did the same for the other end, smoothing and flattening it out with the back of his gloved hand. He gagged as he dumped the soiled sheets into the laundry basket. All the while, Job recounted the television in detail. Captain was so silent and still that Job no longer listened to his own voice. True, he had spent the night debating if he should return the television or keep it, tell Ifi something was wrong with the color tube, something as simple as that. He had wondered if instead he should pay for it with his father’s money. It was money he couldn’t afford on his own. But finally he had settled it, reminding himself that if he paid the minimum every month for the next eighteen months, he would finish the payments. Ifi’s next letter to Aunty will describe the television, he thought to himself, and for once it will be truth.

Job parked his car one block away from St. Ignatius Rehabilitation Hospital. In the dark, he peeled off the scrubs and their stink. Gagging, he balled the clothes up and placed them in the plastic grocery bag he tucked underneath his driver’s seat every morning on his return home, a secret place Ifi would surely never find. Even without the clothes on, he thought to himself, I smell of nshi. Captain’s shit. Its stink would never leave his body. Rocking back and forth, naked except for his underwear, he shivered. Then, before he knew it, he was sobbing.