Temporary shelters have been set up in the park next to the JR Hospital, dome tents made of inflated PVC tarpaulin. They look like igloos, and the rain crackles against them, a sound like deep-frying meat. This is the safest place the city council could think of, high ground.
They’re ready for us. Medical staff and emergency volunteers direct bedraggled evacuees and hand out blue fleece blankets, makeshift bedding. “No space in the hospital,” one of them says, so Bryan carries me into the closest igloo, cradling me. Pain in my abdomen, a wrenching of bone. No good. I leave a red imprint of myself against his body for the second time. A hazy numbness creeping into my limbs, like I’m disconnecting, detaching, drifting away.
Goodbye, fingers. Goodbye, toes.
Bryan is scared, I can tell by his thudding heartbeat. He feels responsible, he found me. Not just here, now, but on Bunkers Hill months ago. He found me. I don’t know how, except the right people always find you, don’t they? That’s what makes them the right people. At the cement works, that first time: wasn’t sure if you were going to make it, you know how it is, pleased you did…
I’m on a cot in a tent, waiting for doctors. Mom is beside me and Aunt Irene too. They fold and unfold their arms in unison, mirrors of grief and worry. The floor is soaked and there’s chaos around us. The pale maniac faces of other children as orderlies restrain them. They want to get out. The storm is calling them. I can feel it too, a surging of adrenaline. Bryan’s eyes are panicked.
Someone tries to pull him away but he won’t leave my side. He settles down beside me, elbows springing into the mattress of the cot. Shielding me.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him.
“Shut up,” he says. “You bloody fool. Just stop it, will you? You can’t die on me!”
“I know.” He doesn’t understand, can’t. This is not me dying. Not dying. Not me.
“Broken femur for sure,” someone is saying. “The right—a compound fracture. Several ribs too.” A nurse? He’s ashy with fatigue, hair close-shaven. “Her BP…she’s lost a lot of blood.” I can’t see who he’s talking to, chanting, incanting. “Let’s assume injuries, likely a liver lac, maybe—splenic rupture?”
Bryan is holding my hand but I can’t feel it. The nurse speaks in a soft voice as if he is talking to a small child. “We’re taking her into surgery.” He sounds like Dad in the living room, telling us goodbye. “There are bound to be complications. In her state, with her condition.” Telling us he loves us, but not enough. Not enough to come with us. “There’s so many of them,” the nurse says, voice breaking with frustration. “I don’t know how we’re going to cope.”
I feel like a telephone line cradling thousands and thousands of crows. Claws hooked into me, the bustle of their wings, voices. A thick residue running through me, a noiseless vibration. New signals filling me up, if I can tune myself to them. Tune in, tune out. Easier to hear them now. As if I was listening through muffling cloth before, through water.
Struggling to speak to Bryan, to tell him: “I understand it now. What Kira said. How she wanted to go even if—oh—” It’s lovely. So bright. “It’s okay, Bryan. You don’t have to be afraid.”
I’m hollow on the inside. You could put your ear to me and hear the ocean, hear roaring. This world is imprinted upon me. Everything nestled inside everything else, everything falling open.
I’m half flesh, half ether. I’m made up of insubstantial things: air, lightness, thought, memory. A different kind of memory, the memory of cells, the memory of bone. My hand in Bryan’s, him gripping me. Sparks cross, little zigzags of lightning. We’re sharing molecules, spreading energy between us. I have caught him inside of me.
I can see him clearly now, him but not just him. He is hollow too, hiding his own secret world. His cells are storerooms, miniature temples. All these pieces of him, his father, his mother, his grandmother.
I travel back, ages and ages, from one cell to another. It’s like turning a page, reading what has been written into him, heartbreak and joy, trauma, recovery. A village called Dowde with roofs of yellow-grey thatch, mud, and furze. A thick peaty smell in the air. The fine ash of a bonfire. I see how the survivors moved in grief and a slow stupor, talking to each other about what they had seen. The dead climbing out of the earth, angels with the faces of their kin. This memory, a seed. A remarkable thing was noticed…everyone born had two fewer teeth than people had had before…He knows, some part of him knows. Some part of it has been imprinted inside his body.
This has happened before…
Further, I could go, eons into the past. Would I see the same thing? A way of surviving, hiding, travelling, starting over, passed on from generation to generation.
Bryan is wrenched away from me, the contact broken. They’re taking me somewhere, through a long tunnel. Mom grips me, running alongside the gurney. Her skin is soft, transparent. It breaks open like an egg. I can sense the silky course of her blood, the yolk of each cell. Those cells and mine, singing to one another. Gifts passed between them. Her, calling out to her sister, to her daughters, both of us.
I remember this. I remember Kira going to the same place, through this hallway. The strange look on her face, the absence of fear. My fingers twitch. “Stay with me!” Mom pleads.
Too late for that. My cells have opened, the doors have been flung wide. I am rushing forward, laughing, to greet whatever lies inside. And then I’m moving beyond them, not forward but upward, into the open air where the rain is moving, lovely, lovely, dissolving me like sugar on the tongue. And all around me, the sound of birds, their wings carving up the night, endless birds. Birds like wind, birds like weather. A swarm of them, glossy in the moonlight, radiant eyes, radiant throats, the music pouring out of them and into me, all of it, everything. I’m pouring out of my body and into the darkness, spread so thin, thin as electrons spinning and spinning, shifting, becoming this: the hidden world, it is me, it is all of us.