John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

The man must’ve started starving before the others. The apocalyptic reek came worst from him, and Barb recalled something out of her schoolgirl reading about missionary work, something about how the glands broke down as the body lost fuel. She could feel the patient’s breaking down when she took his hand. The palm was moist but cool, and up at the elbows the skin bunched like the sleeves of a long john. His hospital shirt couldn’t hide the fence-lines of ribs and shoulder, and the bones of the face were prominent as well. He might’ve been handsome a week ago. Now his features had darkened like a gum-caked penny and, even as he took this morning riposo , his scooped cheeks stretched his lips to the point of exposing his teeth. And there was another pressure on his face too, a stranger business. Fist-sized packs of cotton had been taped against the corners of the striker’s eyes.

Barbara bent nurse-like. She cradled the hand, a lone sandal found rotting by some Congo roadside, and touched his eye-sockets’ padding.

“Mom, careful.” Chris stood at the foot of the bed. “That stuff, he needs that.”

Barbara put a finger on the dreaming face.

“You remember,” Chris said. “That cotton, that’s so he can see.”

Himself more than arm’s length from her, Chris was the only child to have ventured in. Beside him stood Maddalena, with her camera at her eye.

“Mom, don’t you remember? They explained it on the news.”

What Barb remembered came, again, out of her schoolgirl preparations for becoming a saint. The African’s cottony blinders were to help with double vision, one of the symptoms of starvation. But was this any way for a woman to visit such a needy place? Knowing next to nothing? Could that have been why she’d lunged so eagerly to this poor man’s side, that same half-baked Samaritan impulse?

Now a doctor approached, his white wrap suggesting a toga. He too had something to say about striker’s head. Signora, gli prego. . The formal third-person pronoun straightened Barbara up.

Five patients, men, occupied beds set in two rows. Also she spied a kind of fortified stretcher, with padding and straps, standing against the wide room’s second door. Not that this exit needed additional protection. The door was bolted and padlocked, and an armed guard sat beside it in a mammoth chair. A cop on a throne, he made three altogether in the ward. The other two were at the detector. Thanks to them, the NATO Vikings had seen no point crowding into the ward. They remained out beyond the archway, slouched against the cool tufa of the corridor, their helmets off and their semis at their feet. Closer to the mother roved a pair of medical staff, checking either the IV’s or a flat-screen monitor hooked to one wall. Barbara felt chagrined to see all the technology, nothing like a chapel full of ojetti and even less like a catacomb. But on the other hand there were the figures in the beds, flesh and blood and nearly naked. Smaller guys, like a lot undocumented immigrants, they could’ve worked as galley slaves or salt miners. Everyone had some icon around his neck, finger-polished and wafer-thin. Then too, while none of the other strikers were so far gone as Barbara’s, they all had that twitchy underfed quality she’d seen in a number of clandestini . Certainly it was neediness that linked these members of the Shell, not race. Only Barbara’s man and one other came from south of the Sahara, and one was something like Macedonian or Kosovar; he passed for white.

As she watched, the protesters kept breaking into smiles. Spooky smiles, really: their cheeks were already going slack. They grinned for Maddalena’s camera, of course, and out of the giddiness of malnutrition. Then too, they must’ve been enjoying the pick-me-up that their Red Cross inspectors had mentioned, the pleasure of the family’s company. That much the mother could understand, but there remained bewildering business everywhere, such as this IV at her elbow. What good would it do to give this man fluids? Also she couldn’t tell what sort of scars those were across the sleeper’s cheek. Could’ve been a ritual marking, the crescent moons of initiation.

If she could be sure of anything here, it was the effect on her children. They’d fallen in behind Chris, breathless and slack-faced between the rows of beds. John Junior had buttonholed one of the doctors, but Barb couldn’t hear him. His voice was as small as the creak of the cops’ leather.

Dora was the first to move closer. “Mama? Is he dead?”

Barb lost the girl in the mini-cam’s spotlight.

“That, that guy. Is he dead?”

“Honey,” the mother managed, “you all told me, dell’Ovo, you told the driver too. This place, it’s like — don’t you remember St. Anthony’s Rest? I warned you, don’t you remember? It’s like at St. Anthony’s.”

“Like at St. Anthony’s.” Sylvia tiptoed up behind her sister. “Some people are very sick.”

“You all said, all of you.” She focused on a point between the two girls. “You knew what was going on in here, but you all kept saying you wanted to.”

The girls didn’t quite nod.

“I can’t tell you everything,” Barb said, “about what’s going on.”

Chris joined his sisters, sidling past the camerawoman. “But like, come on, you know what’s going on here.” The boy had taken on a different voice, non-professorial. “Dora, Sylvia, you remember, like, the bad Italian laws? How hard it can be when people come to a new country?”

Barbara let the fifteen-year-old explain, figuring the one she had to worry about was Paul. The younger boy stood between two hospital beds, and after Barbara’s first look, for a shivery moment she thought she should turn everyone around and march them out. It was one thing to have the children visit the sick and aged. Barbara had been raised that way, talking about her schoolwork with a bedridden aunt, or taking the chair beside her father’s mother at the Sunday table, though the old woman couldn’t do more than blink and mutter over her plate. But the way Paul was looking just now, here on the second story of Castel dell’Ovo, that shook her. He’d lost his American-Kidness, his elbows tucked, his torso clenched. His clothing turned him into an undertaker. Like that, the mother started thinking of alternatives, get ‘em out, Torre del Greco. Except — she’d seen the boy that way so often, these days. Lately he’d shown his mother a look like that, what? Twenty times? Twenty-five? Her Mr. Paul had tensed up and zoned out even while he lay listening to fairytales. And what was Barbara doing here if she was going to get all timid and cross-wired again? Why had she gone visiting Cesare everyday and having revelations under his ceiling if it wasn’t to wangle precisely this detour and assert her new power?

With her free hand, she dug in her purse and fingered up her rosary. She kissed the big central bead and then bent once more over the raised bed beside her, the slow suicide. No sooner had she started, of course, than Maddalena closed in.

“Oh, you are so good,” said the younger woman, behind her camera. “La Mama Americana , so very good.”

Was she talking morals or mediagenics? Barbara huddled close enough to gag briefly on the smell, the dysfunctional sweat. She could see, too, that the man’s cotton headgear had gone snot-yellow where it touched his cheekbone. The doctors needed to change the dressing. Meanwhile Maddalena’s spotlight stayed with her; the newswoman found the best angle, on the opposite side of the bed. How was Barbara supposed to pray under these conditions? How could a rosary make things better, anyway? Again the dell’Ovo venture felt nutty or worse, even as she noticed the awe in her two youngest, visible out of the corner her eye. If Chris weren’t with them, Barb realized, Dora and Syl would be hanging on to Mama’s dress. They’d probably start praying along. Back in Bridgeport, they’d helped a couple of old-timers sing a round of Dona Nobis Pacem . And the twins weren’t the only ones moved, just now, by Barbara’s hesitant Hail Mary. Also the African’s papery lips began twitching. The mother realized this might be delirium, but she tried to make a connection, to restore the strength in her spirit muscle, bending even closer. Yet this only left her aware of her cleavage. Maddalena had the front of Barbara’s summer dress squarely in the middle of her frame. All around her, La Mama Americana confronted a perverse mirror image. She was the one who needed to pack her eyes in cotton.