It’s obvious that the hospital is deserted before I even kill the engine but I park up anyway and tell the woman I’ll be back with help. She speaks in frantic whispers, reaching out with her hands to cup some imagined face. When I step out of the car the heat of the late afternoon hits me and I think better of leaving her alone. I swaddle her in a blanket and scoop her into my arms.
Outside the sky is the colour of bruised skin – the sun setting slowly over a skyline now thick with smoke – and I feel a sudden urgency to my work, as if the falling darkness will swallow all that it touches.
I call out for help in corridors and waiting rooms but find no response. With each footstep I feel myself becoming the sound of my own voice. Desperate, frantic. Searching for something that cannot be found.
I walk through wards full of machinery and empty beds. The floors wet with leaking IV lines. The air saturated by the shrill calls of dialysis machines and heart monitors. They speak in a foreign dialect. The language of grief not universal at all, but individualistic, coded. Woven into the fabric of people in a way that makes it impossible to fully decipher.
‘I’m tired,’ she says, wrapping her arm round my neck and drawing herself into me in the way a child might.
She is impossibly light in my arms. I imagine that she could be Phineas, and when I close my eyes I see his crooked smile floating in the dark of my mind like some disembodied phantom.
I lay the woman down on a gurney. Her breathing shallow. Her head engorged. She takes my face in her hands.
‘My husband?’ she asks, and I shake my head. I don’t know where he is, or even what he is any more.
‘Is there anyone you’d like me to call?’ I ask, and the woman shakes her head.
‘What about Jennifer? You asked for her in the car?’
‘My sister,’ she says. ‘She’s gone.’
‘One of the disappeared?’
She shakes her head no. ‘We were young when it happened.’
I fetch her a glass of water and sit beside her in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs that seem to plague classrooms and hospitals. Across the ward, on a shelf by the window, is an antique anatomical bust of the male body. Some of the organs have been removed and arranged round the figurine like offerings.
I think back to my conversation with the therapist. To the belief that we parcel ourselves up and give parts of ourselves away. That the body is a house occupied by those whom we love and have loved. But the same was true for those we have hurt, those we have failed. We harbour their pain and we pass it on. We inflict it catastrophically and infinitesimally. Piecemeal and in perpetuity.
The silence between us grows lustful, wanting. The woman winces and adjusts herself on the gurney. ‘I saw her today, when it happened.’
‘What was it like?’ I ask.
She’s quiet for a long time. ‘It felt easy.’
I feel an imagined and distant rumbling, as if the earth is yawning, waiting playfully to swallow me whole. ‘There is someone I would desperately like to see again,’ I say, rubbing circles into my palms.
‘They won’t be the way you remember them, not exactly. They are changed. Imagine everyone you have ever met, even in passing. Lovers, guardians, mentors, strangers in the street. Imagine every word you have ever spoken to another living soul. Then imagine yourself as a composite of those remembrances.’
It feels as though a knot has been tied at the centre of my head. A thousand hands reach out of the darkness to pull it tight.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say.
‘We don’t fall in love with people, but rather versions of people. Manifestations. The act of love renders them incorporeal. We carry the idea of a person even as their reality ages and dies before us.’
The woman winces again, holding her stomach, sucking in breath.
‘We never truly stop falling in love because the act of living is itself a process of constant reincarnation, a perpetual reconciliation between what was once and what is now.’
‘But there is danger in it,’ I say. ‘The risk that reality diverges too harshly from expectation, from desire.’
‘You’re beginning to see,’ says the woman, and I notice that the room has filled with a cold yellow light. It bounces off the ceiling and pools on the floor, like sunlight on water. I’ve seen this before, I think to myself, and turn to see our therapist standing in the hallway.
‘It’s time for you to go,’ the woman says.
I stare at the therapist.
‘I can’t just leave you here,’ I say to the woman.
‘I’m not staying, dear. It’s time for me to go too. We’re just headed in separate directions.’