9.

The ceiling at all times of day, the light, depth and meaning in an array of shades, seasons. The wooden window frame painted with the brand of white paint used for finish carpentry, peeling in spots, the curved iron window handle held in place by a solitary nail, a hole yawning where the other nail used to be—all this when the right-handed head nurse, Ružica, and Buddy change my clothes, and when he and Silvija flip me over—the nightstand with the scented candle, an open St. Anthony two-page booklet that fits in your billfold, and between the pages a colorful plastic sheet depicting the saint holding a bald infant who looks both like a baby and an old man. To its right, on a crocheted doily, stands a little radio that never plays, a plush reindeer with a red-green scarf, and Zagreb salve in a stick. As for clothing, I have two pairs of Benetton sweatpants, I know this because Mama made a point of telling me when she’d bought them, dark blue plush and gray cotton, she held them up for me to see and rubbed them with her thumb and forefinger; only then did she bite through the plastic tie attached to the label. “I’ll bring them back once I’ve washed them in our machine at home.” They put them on me so seldom, really only when they wheel me out into the yard, and this is only when we hit a day when the nurses are in a good mood so they’re willing to take the trouble to push my long stiff legs through the limp pant legs. Two bathrobes that I’m guessing are knee-length; living people have height, while the dead have length. One of them is snow-white with embossed designs, and the other a gray-pink plaid in flannel. A coarse terry-cloth glove by my head on the pillow—used by whoever comes by to wipe away the saliva that starts dripping from the corner of my mouth if my head is slightly tipped—it is yellow with pink edging. Several baby doll nighties of indefinite shape, gray on gray. One hairbrush and a matching mirror the size of a tablet, framed in white plastic, stowed in the drawer of the nightstand. My worldly possessions. All the material items I own. All that sets me apart, the patient in room No. 17 on the second floor, from the other voiceless creatures in human form living in this shared home of ours. My possessions used to include the floral clogs, but now their soles are being worn thin up and down the corridors. Ružica with the meaty hands is in charge at the hospital of people and property as she finds them. So be it. Of my already sparse belongings, few were in any way remarkable, and, of these, fewer were the ones I’d chosen myself. The ceiling, the window frame on which I know every wormhole, the salve, the terry cloth glove, for instance, could hardly be counted among them, almost all of us had those. Most of the patients, in their conscious or unconscious gaze, retain an image of their ceiling, their window frame or the edge of their nightstand. In all the wards, the hands of those near us slather, with merciful strokes, layers and layers of Zagreb salves onto dry, impersonal lips which damp tongues can no longer moisten, but the reindeer, the plush toy Mama brought, now that is something that used to stand on the shelf in only one childhood bedroom. He is unique in the entire hospital and whenever I spot him, as they turn me toward him while rubbing my bottom with gauze, I know I am still me. I see my reflection in his brown plastic eyes and remember how I loved to lick him, how we threw him at each other on my birthday and he fell into the mayonnaise, and how I lathered him up in secret in the bathroom sink and dried him with the hairdryer. How I shoved him into my panties and danced to “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin while my girlfriends from school clapped, how I wedged him between my desk and the wall so the desk wouldn’t wobble and scrape the wall paint. How I abandoned him to spiderwebs, grew up, changed, buried Daddy, stop speaking with my brother, moved out, told everyone to fuck off, sat in a car, and, what do you know, here we are again, he and I. The St. Anthony booklet belonged to Granny. When I went to pass my driver’s test she tucked it into my hand and, while standing with me at the door, said: “Cross yourself each time you get into a car, the instant you turn the key in the ignition you’re one foot in the grave.” He came with me that night when they brought me here all smashed up from the car wreck, he was in the billfold my mother dug through and she placed him near my head. There isn’t much that sets us apart here, in this way of life, personality is fragile, in much greater jeopardy than life itself, exposed to all the sepses, embolisms, blood clots that crawl like vulturous worms toward the lungs. There is no longer any material evidence here of our lived lives, the things that make us special find no reflection in anything but the horror in the eyes of others, those who do not visit us every day yet go on living through all sorts of belongings and clearly defined roles.

Martina heard. She heard that I’m conscious, and then everyone else heard, too. They all heard. She ran into Mama, they stood, holding each other by the sleeves of their coats for a few minutes, patting each other tenderly but not too intimately, while they shook their heads, have you heard, I’ve been meaning to let you know, it would be good, said the doctors, good if you came for a visit, if you can. Martina was not my best friend—she was a friend. We met when we were students, she had all the print-outs, the reading lists, markers in all the colors, she wrote group emails, saved me a seat at the seminar while I cruised through on my way elsewhere, slightly above ground, happier to hang out with Lada who, out in front of Café Limbo during the lecture, recited Bukowski and told me how she’d had an abortion during her senior year of high school because of her philosophy teacher. Between two sips of Badel brandy, she told me how her dad threw her out of their apartment and she spent the first night in a park, how he kicked her in the back. We laughed like crazy women, while the early dark of winter was falling and life hadn’t yet begun to happen, we left them all behind. Lada disappeared at some point in our second or third year, sooner or later all the Ladas disappear; the Martinas stick around. They organize birthday parties, email groups, dream up an exchange of holiday lingerie as gifts among girlfriends, spend Friday nights attending pub quizzes, concerts of poorly known indie singers, in their spare time they read Lacan, the books on their shelves are organized by genre and alphabet, once a year they see their gynecologist, one dentist visit, they discreetly blur their profile on social media, they click and share Pride, they straighten their hair with a light balayage, and whenever you’re really a wreck, wearing an especially worried smile under which seethes a geyser of happiness, they ask, “So, how are you doing?”

I hadn’t thought of her even once until I heard from the corridor, at the threshold to the other world, a greeting sung out as only Martina could. “Hey there!” The “heeeey” stretches out, and then shifts to a higher register, lighter, more melodic, and so synthetic that there’s nothing left in it of a greeting meant especially for me. She comes cautiously over to the bed, horror gleams at the highest level, but she channels it so smoothly and colors it over with her markers, her face is perfectly calm as if we’d only parted ways a month ago after she’d told me all about taking part in a knitting workshop. “How aaaaare you?” She knows I can’t speak, and she doesn’t expect me to. Like a hipster-version of Mother Teresa, she pats me on the head, pretending this is how we’ve spent our lives, she in her designer leather jacket and her made-to-order handbag, which because of its chain strap keeps slipping off her shoulder and slapping against me when she leans over, and me there like a mummy. She keeps jerking the strap back with a nervous twitch, she’s afraid that if she sets the handbag down somewhere in the room she’ll be leaving a piece of herself, but the chain has a mind of its own, it keeps slipping and rubs against my gray nightgown with the Varaždin General Hospital seal. How cool is this, to have friends like me in this discrimination-free world. I clearly see in her eyes how devastated she is by my condition and appearance, I only saw myself once, a month or two ago, and I no longer care to, it took me days to forget the mush where my face used to be and the several clumps of bristles on the back of my head. I think she’s pulling back from the smell, too. Despite this she pretends that absolutely nothing has happened, her reaction is the result of her decision to behave precisely this way while she was chatting with Sandra over coffee about how she was coming to see me, they broached the topic only minutes before they were about to part. Then they came up with a few of the remaining knee-jerk clichés: “I tell myself, I’m going to see her once a month.” Then she took out her almond oil hand cream, squeezed a pea-sized droplet on her upper arm and massaged it carefully in. Now here she was. After she patted me, at a distance, on the shoulder, she stepped back and found some space where she could reclaim her fragile sense of self at a safe distance. As she’d predicted, we couldn’t pass the time with conversation like we used to, and she also predicted her own discomfort, so she’d come up with something truly exceptional to brighten the encounter for both of us. She looked around for a chair, in three steps she reached the corner of the room and drew it up from there to the bed. She sat down and began rummaging through her handbag, took something out, and then then with a bright chirp held two books up in my range of vision. I was supposed to choose. “Blink which one you’d like me to read to you.” She waited, confused, for something to happen while in front of my eyes loomed the books of poetry. Danijel Dragojević and Sylvia Plath. Blinking doesn’t afford the option of selection, clearly this was something she hadn’t thought of, though if I’d been able to, I would have been happier choosing a dagger to my heart than to have her read me verses in an exalted tone that had nothing to do with me and even less to do with her, except as hollow bricks for erecting her self-image. I closed my eyes. She probably thought I was tired, she certainly hadn’t expected such pitiful, essentially non-existent communication. In movies about the paralyzed this isn’t how it looks. They blink and blink and everybody understands. I tried to defend myself with my eyelids as best as I could, but my ears I couldn’t close, no, they let in the fractured verses that split me in half. No horror could have hurt me more, I barely exist as it is, my body has been ground up, my soul displaced, and at a certain level I have become used to having other people dress me, wipe up my shit, handle me roughly. However the beauty of the poetry, the words linked with such extremely polished insight, wounded me deeply. I didn’t look at her anymore. While she was reading about apples in a foreign city, about August, about a moment of round and shining freedom, I was erasing all my memories of her, all I remembered, preserving only one, the time I told her about you, that memory should stay. She was the first person I confided in, this was poor judgment on my part, I’d been drawn in by her inauthentic breadth of spirit—an artificially created illusion that she was capable of understanding complexity and life’s depth—that brought me that sunny afternoon to her apartment. She listened to me open-mouthed, very pleased, she said this had never happened to her before, but she understood how everything is possible, what mattered most was that I am happy and who cares what other people think. Then, in the end, after we’d finished off the last drops of the pelinkovac, after I’d left my armor at the door, after so longing for a friend I’d finally felt something breaking free inside me, she asked, giggling, “But hey, aren’t you going to miss cock?”

Maybe I really did drop off to sleep, I don’t know how much time passed, but when I opened my eyes, she was gone, the books were gone, the dark had begun creeping into the room and the ceiling was in its twilit variation. My worldly possession.