They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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27 S The other day at the shelter we had a young woman, twentyseven , who’d slit her wrists. She’d done it poorly, across the line where forearm becomes hand. You have to draw the blade up, follow the path of the vein back toward the heart. Instead they found her by the river, one hand tossed toward the water meaning to stop the coagulation, but it hadn’t worked, or at least not fast enough, not before the middle-aged woman who spends her afternoons in the shade beneath the bridge had found her. So young, the other nurses kept saying, but I disagreed. She would heal. She would have those bandages around her wrist for some time. She commented on this when I first spoke with her—what a cliché, she said, looking down at the bright white, clipped and tucked—and I liked her. How do you get used to it? Viv asked me once. These are people’s greatest tragedies and you have to stick them with needles and ask after their meals and their shit and act as if it were all a matter of course. No delicacy in it, no privacy. They hate 28 you, you know, she added as an afterthought—because it’s your job to be there, you didn’t choose them but they need you. I did choose them, I insisted to her. This is what I wanted, to be there with them. And what is there to be delicate about, or private? The girl’s sleeves stiffened brown the next day. The half-toothed woman who had run screaming back up to the sidewalk. And think of that room, the magazines and newspapers piling up. We read everything, but what did we understand, really ? I sat on the floor in the dog hair, I’m comfortable here, I wanted to point out, I don’t need anything else. When what we were working toward was no more than: a building blown into glass and metal. More than anything Ford wanted to unfold the paper in the mornings and see this. Z nodded, we all did, but Z’s ideas were grander, well crafted, another vocabulary. I didn’t agree with Ford, but we were kin in a way, we both wanted to live in our bodies and not in sentences enduring. His words were like him: to the point, bodied. You could feel it in his fingers twisting the wires, his words. He and I were alike, we would suffer for anyone. We were indelicate. We wanted the smell of sex, vomit, shit. Fine, cleaning the dried layers from the wrist’s newest creases—this was survival. Fine, asking for what we wanted, refusing what we didn’t and like children pushing it away, burning and burying. ...