Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

“Call Janik,” Ifi said again, through gritted teeth.

He grabbed the phone and dialed some numbers, but even from her place on the floor, Ifi could hear the ringing.

Jamal hung up. He dialed another series of numbers. He said Ifi’s address into the phone. He told the voice to hurry, but nothing more.

“You called hospital?” Ifi asked.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, grimly. “Now let’s get ready.” He helped her to her feet and wrapped the blanket around her. Her boots were thankfully still on her feet.

They stood at the top of the landing, Ifi leaning against Jamal’s broad, skinny shoulders, and it looked impossible. He sighed and then half lifted her against his body. One step at a time, they made their way down the three flights of stairs. Twice Ifi thought they’d stumble and fall the whole way, so she clung to him more tightly. At one point, she felt his skin break underneath her fingernails, but she couldn’t let go. Even the tiniest release would surely send the baby spilling out of her insides and onto the steps.

On the bottom stair, Jamal leaned her sideways against the wall. He stood in the doorway, peering out into the street.

After Ifi had begun to lose hope that the ambulance would arrive, Jamal suddenly thrust the door open. A cool shock of air breathed on Ifi’s face. It felt good. Somehow it calmed the pulsing in her back to a mere ripple. Jamal grasped Ifi and lifted her, gasping in sharp, jagged breaths from the effort. They plunged out into the whiteness of the snow to a yellow cab.

“Where is the ambulance?” Ifi asked in confusion.

“We’ll get there,” he said.

He hefted her across the snowy walkway, and again Ifi was forced to half submit as they made their way to the cab.

The driver, an ashen-faced man, gazed at them in bewilderment. “I don’t want no mess on my seat,” he protested. “I don’t want no trouble.”

Jamal offered the driver a steely expression, the one Ifi imagined that he had shared with Job the day he and his gang had attacked her husband. He started to open the door, but the cabdriver hit the gas. Back door flapping like a bird’s broken wing, the car careened down the street and around the corner.

Both Ifi and Jamal stood in the abandoned street, their mouths open in a stupor until the cold overtook Ifi’s body in shivers, and the waves in her back buckled her knees.

“Shit, damn motherfucker,” Jamal said. The sharp edges of his teeth bore through his clenched jaw. He led Ifi back into the building.

“Please, Jamal,” she said, using his name aloud for the first time.

Without a word, he loped up the stairs. A moment later, he returned with a grave expression on his face. He had another glass of water in his hands, but before he handed it to Ifi, he started talking quickly. “I can’t stay with you. I gotta go. I told them you’re here, the address and everything, so they’ll find you. I can get the crazy lady to wait here with you until they come. Just don’t say nothing about me. I can’t go to jail. I promised my daddy.”

When his words began to make sense to Ifi, she was surprised by her tears. “You are not leaving me, oh,” she wailed. “I won’t tell. He won’t tell,” she said of Job. “He has not. I will promise you.”

A pained expression crossed Jamal’s face. He hesitated, then collapsed on the floor next to her with his face in his hands, his back turned to Ifi. She ventured to reach for him, but he knocked her hand away. Sirens wailed as the ambulance and police arrived. His body flexed and tensed like a cat ready to pounce. Jamal burst out the door, leaving it swinging behind him. Just moments later, flustered attendants propped Ifi onto a gurney and carried her out to the ambulance. Her last backwards glance reached Mrs. Janik, cup of tea in hand, peering out of the window of her apartment.

The angry and puckered face staring back at Job belonged to his son. His first son, because there will be many more, he decided. Tall, sturdy-backed boys whose nameplates will be followed by MD, JD, PhD. Before setting the boy back in the incubator with his own swollen, trembling hands, Job stared into the wrinkled face for one long moment.

When he had received the telephone call, he was on the line at the meatpacking factory, white gloves to his elbows, drenched in the blood and fluids of an animal. In his white jacket, white gloves, facemask, and hat, Job felt, in a peculiar way, like a surgeon. Instead of an electric knife that buzzed and whirred as it sliced through frozen flesh, bone, and fluids, he wielded a scalpel, neatly slicing through the layers of fat and cartilage of a patient.

Strange how quickly he had taken to the work when his supervisor first introduced him to the line. But Job had a secret system that he hadn’t shared with anyone. It was simple: he told himself that he was a machine. Nothing but bits of iron held together each of his joints, and the muscles and tendons were really hardened bits of twisted wire. This is what he told himself, and he moved like it, staring at the broken cow in front of him, sawing, breaking apart each bit with a sudden swift turn of his wrists, thinking of his life in America, thinking that finally he would raise the money for a better home, a place where a doctor and his wife could live.

Supervisors circulated among the rows of identical lines, shouting for the workers to keep things moving, to pick up the pace. Each time they stopped at Job, they nodded with approval. Once, a tall, willowy Somali woman, complained that she needed to urinate, but the supervisor yelled obscenities into her face until she whimpered back to her place on the line. Secretly, Job sided with the supervisor. She had no business here among men if she couldn’t handle the work. When a portly Mexican man, angered by the woman’s treatment, had spoken up on her behalf, he had been fired on the spot. A surprise it was that the man had spoken on her behalf anyway. It was the Mexicans who complained that the Somalis used their prayers as an excuse to break the line. And the Somalis complained that the Mexicans used their cigarettes as an excuse to break the line. Job had sided with the Mexicans on that one.

During his interview, as his tie-and-jacketed supervisor had questioned him, Job had to clarify that he was Nigerian, and from the south, and so he wouldn’t be wasting the factory owners’ money on prayer breaks throughout the day. After the Mexican man was fired, he returned three days later, begging for his place on the line back, the position to which Job had promptly been promoted, the fastest line with the highest pay. While the man descended to Job’s former position at the bottom of the line, Job switched stations and resumed work, his fingers cutting and flashing with efficiency. Wet floors, the noise of whirring knives, the cold of the room meant nothing to him. He simply moved, keeping up with the line, cutting and sorting the pieces of flesh as he had been instructed in the orientation video, blindly imagining the life he would live in the palace Ifi had described to her aunty.

Only when he reached home each night did he stare down at his large, swollen digits. In the shower, he would turn his palms up to his face and let the warm water run down them, rinsing them clean, thawing his talons until they became human and he could hold a fork again.

Because they would never understand, because they would consider the work beneath him, Job couldn’t explain to anyone, least of all Ifi or Emeka, the strange pride he took in his work, cutting and scoring cow parts that would be distributed to restaurants and grocery stores all over the nation. Each time he took a bite of seasoned beef in pepper soup, he was secretly reminded that once he had held those precious pieces in his hands.