A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra Read Free Book Online Page A

dishes, undressed, and slid beneath the sheets. Her fingers crawled through the covers for his.
    “Things are getting worse, aren’t they?”
    “No,” he said. “Nothing is getting worse.”
    “I don’t have much time left, do I?”
    These moments were the least bearable, when her meandering trail of questions led to clarity and he couldn’t say what was lost to her. Did she really think he’d spent the day shearing sheep sold, slaughtered, andconsumed long ago? Had she already forgotten Havaa sleeping beside her, the girl’s slender body like a splinter of warmth in the dark room, or was the girl the material of dream itself, burned away by morning light? An equally disturbing thought: what if she consciously participated in these delusions to placate him?
    “None of us does,” he said, and squeezed her hand.
    When her breaths stretched into sleep, he slid his fingers from her loosened grip and contemplated the next day. What would it be like to treat a patient again? Was he capable? Six months had passed since he had last treated patients at the clinic, but he remembered their reluctance as he led them into the examination room, as they realized their bodies had betrayed them once by sickness, and again by forcing them to rely on an incompetent physician. Sometimes he wondered if his own self-loathing manifested itself as harm to his patients, as if some dark part of his heart wanted them to suffer for his failures. And, now, to be confronted with Sonja, a surgeon whose renown had even reached Eldár. She had asked what he would do with an unresponsive patient, and he, in a blundering moment, had taken it to mean quiet or unwilling to talk , and had thought of the mute village baker, who communicated only through written notes—which had proved problematic the previous winter when the baker suffered from a bout of impotence he was too ashamed to write down, even to Akhmed. Akhmed had resolved the problem—shrewdly, he thought—by giving the mute baker a questionnaire with a hundred potential symptoms, of which the baker checked only one, and so had saved the baker’s testicles, marriage and pride. But Sonja didn’t know that; he’d been too flustered and embarrassed to explain. She had glared at him, knowing that an imposter like him could never belong to the top tenth. She hadn’t asked how he had come by her name, why he’d come to her specifically. He hadn’t intended to hide the truth from her, but when she didn’t ask, he saw no reason to tell her about the chest stitched together with dental floss.

    Sonja had made a bedroom of the office of the former geriatrics director, a man she’d never seen but whose tastes conjured an image so defined—browline glasses, a wardrobe predominantly tweedy in character, finely sculpted features, dainty hands—she could have identified his body among the dead. The gerontology department had been closed in the first war due to a scarcity of resources and the general consensus that prolonging the lives of the elderly was a peacetime enterprise. But the director, a bachelor who devoted a healthy portion of his monthly paycheck to office décor, had the most extravagantly furnished office in the hospital, so of course Sonja was quick to make it hers. A vermillion Tajik rug sprawled across the floor. At the end of the desk stood an antique vase swathed in ornate Persian patterning, beneath which she had found a photograph of a woman framed against the Black Sea, smiling curiously, undated and unidentified, a ghost of the director’s life that survived him. Here, the director had spent his life loving a woman he hadn’t seen since his twenty-first year, when his father had married her to a Ukrainian for fear of ruinous scandal; the woman was his half sister, and the love he felt for her caused him so much confusion he could only express it as love for the bewildered and incoherent elderly. The desk was pushed against the wall and on it lay a final payroll still