They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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21 S Everyone always thinks that I’m fine, I’ll always be fine; people have always thought this of me. But it’s just that I know—well, time moves forward, death ends everything. If nothing else nursing school taught me this, every day. Each pathway, the messages traversing each synapse. The organs are softer and smaller than I had imagined. There are so many ways to destroy them. Our memories are not to be trusted—twisting stories together , lighting them so that we’ll watch, distracted, again and again. So that even today as I work in the shelter, as I prick a finger, check the blood sugar, all of them—Viv, Ford, Z, A— rush through me again. Before the shelter I worked for a while in a mental health institution. I thought after Vivienne that I would be ready for it. I had held her by the wrists, I’d heard the things she said. Z came to see her and she hated him then too, she swore at him and he couldn’t bear it. I was patient. I had cool washcloths and 22 when I needed to, I could restrain her. I learned to find her vein with the needle immediately. I could find it even now, I think. If blind I would still know her thin wild arm. I watched how memory left her. Then the present is terrible . I have seen this come to so many of them, they do the same thing again and again, they try to escape from time. But aren’t they free of it, for a moment, when the memory darkens? What Vivienne used to say. She talked for hours. There was no order. In this way for a moment she defied death. She didn’t move forward; she didn’t look back. The present stretched on and on, her back arching, her mouth howling. I didn’t want to sedate her: she was so alive. I left the institution. I saw her too often in the wide whites of eyes and the grasping hands, straining at the ceiling, the light, at I don’t know what, and after the shot the fingers curling inward like drying wings. I saw that they would never be like her, they never resurfaced. They smiled at me one day and the next their faces were slack and unreason had its way with their muscles . I couldn’t stand it. Here at the shelter sometimes people get better, and even if not, they know my name, their own. They have histories, even if their histories are lies. ...