“You’re doing things to our patients.”
“And what are those things?”
“Putting them back together, I don’t know.”
“So you’re going to tell someone, ‘Nainoa’s doing I don’t know’?”
She tucked her hands into her pockets and shook her head.
It was the end of the shift and my skull was angry and crammed with sharp dehydrated headaches, I wanted her to see this, to accept she didn’t know what I was, leave me be.
“I know you’re doing something,” she said.
“I’m doing my job.”
“That’s the problem,” she said.
“What?”
“Not like that. I just mean”—she cleared her throat—“is this the best place for you?”
“Erin—”
“We’re in one of the worst parts of the city,” she said, “and I still don’t think we help as much as—”
“Spit it out,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be in this station,” she said. “You should be in, I don’t know, a war hospital or a—a—Calcutta. Where there are thousands. Millions.”
“I’m not Jesus,” I said. I’d seen the strand of gold she wore around her neck, coming on shift or going off it, the delicate cross, the ash on her forehead in spring.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I want to work here.”
“No one wants to work here,” she said. “Except people that can’t go any farther. We’re just Band-Aids. Think of all—”
“The people I could help, I know, you already said that. I appreciate your perspective on my life,” I said. “It means a lot, especially coming from a girl whose sole accomplishment off shift has been to binge-watch whole television seasons.”
Erin’s brow furrowed, her jaw flexed as she turned so that I could see the profile of her face, she watched the city two streets over, the plastic bags hooked by the air, the gray-cracked property lot stitched with weeds. “Wow, okay,” she said.
Inside me the storms of all the animals and humans I’d touched were churning, so that, yes, I was standing on a sidewalk, concrete holding me up and air that smelled of dryer sheets in my lungs, me talking with her, Erin, yet also I was the panting ribs of the graveyard owl from Kalihi that knew only green hunger sleep shit fly fly breathe hunger breed breed fly hunt breathe fly and red fight fight take fly fear, and also I was the old woman I’d treated on an earlier shift in Portland, who had collapsed on her walk to the park and her blue flashes of forty years waking at the certain side of my husband our curled mornings under the sheet, the orange and pink and brown cradling of a child to my breast its sleeping in a warm milk-drunk state and the long white pain of her regrets that streamed so fast among the others, a roiling mass of lives, all inside my body all at once, every one of my patients. They all stayed resident and never left my skull, and though they would come and go inside me in waves, the intensity of them was rising in a rush after these last few months, since the night with the addict. The more I understood what we were all made of, the more everyone I’d touched stayed inside me, still crying out, showing me their injuries over and over and over and over and over.
“Don’t pretend you know what this feels like,” I said.
Erin put her hands up. “I’m sorry I said anything,” she said, then pivoted and started to walk away. “See you around.”
I wanted to stand there, to think about what she’d said, but I knew if I did she’d realize she’d had an effect on me, so instead I gathered my wallet and phone, a few other things from my locker, and started out for my apartment by foot, I’d catch a bus on the way when I needed, but first I had to think.
Erin wanted me to be something more, the same as my family always had, the same as I did, as well. But I couldn’t, I wasn’t. I was only here. It was that I didn’t know enough yet, I decided. I couldn’t move on to something else because I hadn’t yet mastered what I was, and if whatever came after this asked more of me than I was capable of …
I was turning these thoughts over, barely stopping for crosswalk signals, jaywalking in slants across busy thoroughfares, when something caught my eye. I’d passed two buildings, the alley between them, and saw the asymmetrical slab of a dead Labrador, resting a hundred feet down the alley.
I had no idea what had happened to it but I was certain it was dead, felt the rigor mortis running along its torso, as unyielding a curve as a frozen hillside, and when I touched the body the colors I felt inside were barely more than whispers of violet and midnight blue. The dog was long dead. I searched inside anyway, all along the body’s length, finding the jagged wound of the broken skull, there but crushed by something I could only assume was a tire. Even with my eyes closed and everything in me pouring into the dog’s body I knew I couldn’t do this, the body wasn’t listening the way they normally did, eagerly awaiting my vague explanation of how to make themselves right. I thought again of what Erin had said, what my family had always alluded to, what I was supposed to be, I flexed myself harder, trying to encourage the life to show itself again, just for a moment, so I could harness it. Something in my head popped, went bitter, bursts of fire and twisting ache all along my back as I bore down, how can a skull recognize itself, to want to be whole again, there was nothing, then the echo of nothing.
I dove further in, I forgot myself. All blackness, could I start something, I tried and failed, it was like yelling into the bottom of a lake. I pushed harder, my whole body gripping the idea, the want of life, can I make the life here again, you’re going to come back. I gasped, opened my eyes briefly. The same gray alley and stained stucco walls, my vision splattered with the patterns I’d been seeing inside, then came chill swamps of sweat at my armpits, neck, crotch. I gathered myself again, closed my eyes, flexed everything.
There was a spark, something shifted in the dog’s body, the trickle of electricity that was all that was left of a life, it was something at least, it was in the dog again when it hadn’t been a moment before, and I held it with my mind along with the injuries—the skull fragments, the messy smear of teeth and jaw bone—and pushed harder. The electricity flared then faded, the dog went dark in my mind and my whole skull hurt, the teeth I’d been grinding, something behind my nose made a crepitus sound. I wouldn’t let it go, no, having resuscitated something of a soul. My hands were still there, somewhere, holding this animal’s body, the legs that had padded softly and flexed and shot the often desperate hungry body between the dark barrels of trash cans, the hot relief of recently parked cars, legs that supported a trembling, casual defecation, legs that had cupped and tapped and batted trash and rats and kittens, this animal had tasted joy and terror and time, I could bring it back. And the spark inside became a steady trickle of light, and the trickle became a flood, and brightness coursed through the animal’s body like a city waking from a blackout.
I opened my eyes. The dog’s skull was sealed and it lay there, gently panting through its thawed fur, as warm and leathery as a boot left in a sunny mudroom. It stood, shivered, shook its head so hard its ears made slapping sounds against its perfect skull, then trotted away, leaving the alley.