View From a Kite Page 3

  Get up, slide into your robe and slippers, get in the chair. Pull the comb out of your robe pocket and drag it through your hair as she wheels you down the dim corridor. One quick pee stop. She and the chair wait outside the stall door—this is to prevent you from making a bolt for freedom or, more disastrously, drinking an unregulated and unapproved amount of water. Brushing your teeth is strictly forbidden. A stray swallow of minty foam will skew the results and—think about it—do you want to do this any oftener than you have to? You do not.

  You’re off to the elevator, a creaky beige enamel job that would be in a museum if the directors of the Museum of Elevators knew this model was still in existence. The doors lurch open, crash shut. The cables moan their little paean to senile dementia.

  There are a few moments to ponder the irony of the fact that the more you heal, the more likely you are to require this procedure: gastric lavage. That’s nurse talk for gastric washing. Gastric washing is patient talk for suck out your stomach.

  We are all required to gather everything that comes out of our noses and mouths. Special containers with lids live in our rooms to contain all our paper tissues and their juicy contents. The tissues are burned in the basement. We all have little plastic jars with little plastic lids that we are supposed to carry around in our pockets whenever we leave our rooms. We are to spit everything into them. The nurses take the jars away every day and give us new ones. In The Magic Mountain, the patients have elegant little blue glass bottles to spit into, but there has been a serious decline in style since the nineteenth century. We are reduced to plastic screw-tops. This ward full of innocent-looking people in bathrobes and slippers—who would guess our pockets are loaded with enough TB germs to infect an entire city? Pray one of us doesn’t escape. Pray one of us, escaped, doesn’t trip getting on a bus in those stupid slippers and smash the tacky—but lethal— plastic vial. (Lack of breakfast combined with the vertical position before sunrise always makes me fanciful.)

  Here we are at the Treatment Room, an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. They’re going to mistreat me because I can’t hawk up enough to suit them.

  Once a month, a nurse brings you three specially marked vials. Before breakfast, before tooth brushing, for the next three mornings, you have to cough up what’s accumulated in your throat and lungs overnight. The ward resounds with the echoes of this revolting chorus. Got a weak stomach? Skip this next bit. Feed the cat. Go for a walk.

  If you can do this—hawk up—for the three mornings with results that please the nurses—I mean cloudy swirling things in the bottom of the jar—you’re off the hook. They send your gunk off to be tested and you get the results back in a couple of weeks: positive, or negative. Positive, and you’re depressed for days. Negative is encouraging: the drugs are winning, the germs are cornered, you aren’t infectious. Three negatives in a row and they let you out for a weekend. You are officially Not a Public Menace.

  By this point, however, you’ve usually healed to the point where you aren’t producing much of anything and that’s when they start the gastric washings. Some people, like me, never produce enough sputum to culture. Rotten lungs, but they won’t give anything up. I put this down to all that training-to-be-a-lady my mother put me through. Enough of her teaching stuck so that I could not, cannot, hawk up.

  After the first gastric washing I spent half the next night hanging over the side of my bed, practically standing on my head, container poised to catch anything, anything at all. Tried to will gunk from my lungs. I do believe I might have prayed. Nothing. Couldn’t do it. Can’t do it.

  They work in twos. They’re cheerful.

  “Going to be a nice day,” says Number One as she measures the distance from my nose to my stomach by dangling a length of clear plastic hose down the front of my chest. She decides on the appropriate length, holds the max point between thumb and forefinger. Number Two hands me a glass filled with two ounces of distilled, sterilized water. We have a routine by now. Number One takes the end of the hose with her free hand, and threads it up my nose, down the back of my throat, down my esophagus, and into my stomach. I told you to go for a walk. A half-second before she hits my gag reflex I swallow a tiny amount of water and keep swallowing little sips as the tube moves downward. Not a muscle moves because not a muscle can. I am clenched. I am locked down, totally focused on not puking up the tube. Every time you puke it up, they start over. You don’t get out of that room until they get what they want. Once the tube is in place I start to breathe again, shallowly, through my mouth.

  Number Two, who has been holding my shoulders, asks, “All right?” and I nod yes. I’d nod As well as we can damn well expect! but that’s not in my repertoire of gestures.

  Number One takes a syringe the size of a cannon, attaches it to the end of the tube dangling from the outside of my nose, and hauls back on it. Up through the clear tube gurgles the two ounces of water I’ve swallowed, various stomach acids, and—the point of all this, the treasure we’re diving for— all the bits that have come up from my lungs overnight and been swallowed into my stomach while I was asleep.

  That’s it.

  They put it in a jar, mark it with my name, send it to the lab.

  Oh, yes. The tube. Still dangling from my face, isn’t it?

  Nurse Number One asks, “Ready?”

  I clench again, nod yes, and—hand over hand—she whips it out as fast as she can. Fast is better, we’ve discovered. Slow is slow, gagging torture. Fast is one big heave as the end flicks the gag reflex on the way out. There’s nothing in the stomach at this point so it’s one sickening shudder and then it’s over. If this is the third morning in a row, it’s over for another month. By this point I’m shaking and involuntary tears have sprung from my eyes. Nurse Number Two hands me a damp wash-cloth to wipe my face and tells me how well I’ve done.

  The good girl in me smiles at the nurses. She’s been brave, she’s been good, she lives to please. The bad girl, well, she’s in her usual snit. Lying in a heap in my quaking belly, howling, It isn’t fair! Why me? It isn’t fair! Same old sorry tune.

  When I get back to my room the sun is exploding though the windows and the breakfast tray is on my table. How, you ask, can she possibly consider breakfast after such an appalling experience?

  Practice. Lots and lots of it. Put the icky experience in the closet, slam the door, lift the stainless steel lid off your bacon and eggs and dig in. Sooner or later, no matter what happens to you, if you don’t kill yourself, you’re going to lift your head, look around, and realize you’re hungry.

  Breakfast is the only meal of the day I can be reasonably sure is edible. Lunch and dinner—well, one horror story at a time. Breakfast is freshly squeezed orange juice, a pot of hot water and a tea bag. It’s not much like real tea, but it’s hot and wet. The toast is just the way I like it: warm, limp, triple-buttered—they’re always trying to fatten us up. There is a pot of jam. Bacon—and this is important—very well cooked. I loathe slimy, limp bacon with white fat bubbles and half the grease still in it. I don’t care if it’s hot or cold—they serve it both ways, at random—just so long as it’s brown and you have to eat it with your fingers. If you try to poke it with a fork, it should shatter. Everyone else complains, but I think it’s perfect.

  Then, the eggs. They give me three, because someone’s noted I eat breakfast, if nothing else. I always have two, occasionally the third. They’re huge, hard-boiled, from free-range chickens, I’ve been told, which explains the yolks: bright orange, almost incandescent. The first time I cracked one open it frightened me. I thought the chickens had been poisoned or something. Eggs are actually supposed to look like this, it means they’re chock-full of vitamins and minerals and the odd barnyard bug. I chop them up, stir the orange and white up together so I don’t have to put on sunglasses, pepper and salt the bejesus out of them, and eat.

  On the northeast corner of the tray is a bowl of porridge. This I ignore, usually. It may be Red River cereal, which is birdseed an
d don’t let them tell you any different. It may be oatmeal, the glue that sticks Scotsmen together, according to Cousin George. The San version tastes like a nasty bit of old Scotsman got stuck to it. It may be cream of wheat and sometimes, in a fit of nostalgia for my lost childhood, I will spoon up a few bites. When I was sick my mother used to give me cream of wheat, with enough brown sugar to melt into syrup, and a big melting blob of butter on top. I eat a bit, then I hit a lump and nostalgia flies out the window.

  It seems peculiar that a person whose stomach acids have been sucked out could digest such a breakfast, but I do. Even more peculiar is that in less than a year I’ve gone from being a student who drank coffee for breakfast and lunch and avoided solid food until I hit the Burger King with my friends after school, to a patient who scarfs down a lumberjack’s breakfast, and then nibbles on air the rest of the day. But then, the world has a habit of turning upside down. So why should anything surprise us?

  CHAPTER 6

  Three of the kids from school came to visit yesterday, three girls I was in grade eleven with a million years ago. I watched them breathe shallowly, trying to avoid the germs. I couldn’t figure out why on earth they came, they weren’t particular friends of mine. They were pink and perky and they made me tired. Everyone at the San is yellow, or white, or grey. Finally I figured it out: these were the good kids, the ones who collect points for visiting the sick and giving their old stuff to the poor. Definitely not friends of mine. I’d been contemplating building a seriously bad reputation before my life blew up. Visiting me is probably worth a badge or a better seat in heaven or something to them. Also, Mary Eileen had her mother’s car and they planned to go shopping in Sydney, after a decent interval of shifting about on chairs in my room. There was a school dance coming up and they had nothing to wear, Alice told me. There was a great sale on at Dalmy’s. They left me a bag of Smarties.

  “See you soon,” they said.

  “Have a good time at the dance,” I said as I waved them off, then settled down to suck, morosely, all the colour off the Smarties.

  I went to my first high school dance when I was fourteen. I had to beg for days to get permission to go. The night of the great event I went over to my friend Clara’s house. Susan, the third member of what Susan’s father called “The Unholy Trinity,” was already there, with her collection of makeup.

  Susan’s mother sold Avon and although Susan wasn’t supposed to wear any of the stuff outside the house, she was allowed to play with it; she had years’ worth of samples. Her mother had used her as a mannequin to perfect her make-up skills when she was just starting out selling, and Susan had passed her knowledge on to us. On Saturday mornings we’d hole up in a bedroom to practice and by the time we were thirteen we could circle our eyes in black with a steady hand and blend three colours of shadow like master Impressionists.

  The night of our first dance, towels pinned around our necks so we wouldn’t smudge our clothing, we spent two hours painting, blending—striving for that fragile balance between beauty queen and hooker. When we finally put down our brushes, Clara’s father—a tired, good-natured man we liked because he was totally oblivious to what we put on our faces—drove us to the gym.

  All the good-looking guys had long since been cut out, branded, and were going steady—occasionally traded back and forth between the grade eleven and twelve cheerleaders when they, the cheerleaders, felt in need of a change. The guys left were too shy, spotty, or socially inept. They clustered against the back wall, fooling around, scarfing down sandwiches, sneaking out the gym door to smoke or spike their punch with vodka.

  I felt like part of a display of sweaters, on sale. The boys fingered us with their eyes and went back to joking. I danced with Clara and Susan, and we tried to seem fascinating and witty and uncaring. Then one of the grade ten boys asked Susan to dance and she abandoned us, dancing six in a row until he managed to extricate himself and was swallowed back into the joking crowd. She returned, sweaty and smug, and hauled us off to the ladies, making a great to-do about fixing her hair and makeup, tugging her sweater into place and sticking out her breasts. Clara and I linked arms and left her to go dance together. We were wickedly jealous of the little snot. She had to come after us, convince us that she’d had a miserable time, he’d stepped on her foot twice, and his breath was mint over garlic, before we’d talk to her again. She was lying, of course, she’d had a fabulous time, but she’d quit gloating so we allowed her to be our friend again.

  On later occasions we all got asked to dance, so then it was all right. No one felt left out at the post-dance discussion, sleeping over at one another’s houses. Then Clara started going steady and when she stopped telling us anything, we figured she was getting in over her head. They danced only with each other, slow close waltzes and wild sexy shimmies.

  “There’s trouble,” I overheard Mrs. D’Arcy say to Miss MacLean. She headed out onto the dance floor to pry them apart. Every year, two or three girls graduated in June and got married immediately afterwards, graduation robes and wedding gowns flowing over expanding middles. Every year a couple of grade elevens left at Christmas, went to visit relatives elsewhere, finished high school a year late in another town, or went to work and never came home again. At fourteen I’d decided I was never going to have sex, at fifteen I decided I would if I was married, at sixteen I thought I might when I turned eighteen, but only if I could find an anonymous doctor in another town who didn’t know my parents and who would give me a prescription for birth control pills. But only when I was at least eighteen, maybe older. I had plans, I was going to go to university, get a degree, be a writer, and live in an apartment in New York or Montreal or Paris. Getting married at seventeen was not an option, but making love was an experience I thought I ought to have, as a writer—how could I write about it if I hadn’t done it? That, and the fact that I was deliriously attracted to the grade twelves with deep voices, sidelong charm, and leather jackets. Creeping up over me like the tide was an indisputable horniness. It rose and fell with my cycle, coinciding—irritatingly—with ovulation, so that I knew if once, just once, I gave in without at least two kinds of birth control, I’d be nailed to the wall, disgraced, my chance for the writerly life blown to the four winds. Fortunately, none of the grade twelve guys paid me any attention. A little of that sidelong charm focused in my direction and I could have been in serious trouble. Clara was an idiot, but she wouldn’t listen to any advice from us—and what could we say to her that she didn’t already know? It’s hard to think straight when your in-sides are molten honey and your brain is hormonally induced candy floss.

  CHAPTER 7

  They’ve given me the run of the library. It’s a stale, silent hallway in the basement with pipes, painted yellow, running overhead. Books lie on their sides, have possibly been like that for decades. Pick one up and there’s a dark rectangle in the dust. There are librarians, sort of. Some volunteers come in once a month to re-shelve books left on the two rickety tables, one table under each hanging light bulb. The volunteers can’t have any idea of what’s actually there. Past the True Romances and dog-eared Agatha Christies is a world of unbelievably bad novels, circa 1930. Every last one of them has got some poor soul expiring of consumption. The women are all frail and ethereal, with masses of floating, light-brown hair, and they usually do some poor sod good by kicking off—some dipsomaniac brother or lover who swears to reform while clutching the dear departed’s transparent, chilly hand. They all have brown or dark burgundy covers (the books, not the drunks), all smell like mould, and have all been “donated to the hospital in loving memory of…” in spidery brown ink.

  Also, I’ve found a number of old medical and public health texts on tuberculosis, which form the basis for my ongoing research. I’m trying to educate myself. Know thine enemy, as it were. Some of their treatments are quite gross, as if they thought puking up was good for you. Some, like tea with rum, were obviously to help you choke down the less yummy concoctions. Onions were wildly
popular, both as nutrition, and as a cure. W. Lintz, in 1915, attempted to test the onion theory on guinea pigs, but the tuberculosis-infected guinea pigs refused to eat the onions, preferring death to bad breath. Lintz tried inoculating them with mashed-up onions, but the only effect was to piss off the guinea pigs. The eighteenth-century Europeans and their lobster-and-white-wine treatment is much more to my taste. Alas, we get none of that here. Times have changed, and not for the better.

  RECOMMENDED NOURISHMENT FOR THE TUBERCULAR

  1.Fresh milk (woman’s, goat’s, ass’s, camel’s). —Claudius Galenus, AD 130

  2.A wolf’s liver boiled in wine. —Pliny, circa AD 61-112

  3.Extract of a quarter-pound of mutton suet boiled down in a pint of milk. —eighteenth century

  4.Lobster and light wines. —Europe, nineteenth century

  5.Artificial asses’ milk. Bruise eighteen garden snails, with one ounce of heartshorn shaving, and ounce of eryngo root… —The Family Oracle of Health, England, nineteenth century

  6.Garlic, onions, radishes. —antiquity to nineteenth century

  7.Mush of several kinds, boiled at least four hours. Raw oysters, eggnog, tea with rum , jelly sandwiches, or Dundee marmalade. —1900

  CHAPTER 8

  The minister’s been in again, harassing me. Once again I regret my slavish adherence to the manners my parents saddled me with. Why can’t I just tell him to piss off? I didn’t invite him here, I’m not interested in what he’s got to say.

  I’ve had a problem with the concept of God-the-Father and his real-life, hand-picked, balding mouthpiece for a number of years. Somewhere about the time I was eight or nine I graduated from the Infant’s Sunday School and moved up to Junior Sunday School. In Junior School you are required to memorize a new Bible verse and recite it each week.