Maybe it was worth it to pray, even if I didn’t believe it anymore.
“Odin,” I said, and closed my eyes. “PLEASE HELP AK47 TO WAKE UP. I PROMISE I WILL BRING HONOR TO YOU AND TO HER AND TO EVERYONE IN VALHALLA.”
I must have been saying it very loud because the nurse came in and asked if everything was okay.
“I heard shouting,” she said.
“I was shouting my praise for AK47,” I said, and since the nurse probably didn’t know I called her that, pointed to AK47 to show that it was her that I was shouting praise for.
“Okay,” the nurse said. “Maybe we can keep the praise to a level below shouting. We have other patients who need rest.” She smiled and I said that was fine, I already did my praise shouting for the day.
* * *
AK47 did not have any family, and she had chosen Gert as the person to say when it was okay to take her off the machine that was helping her breathe and eat. We were in the hospital, standing all around her. Gert was not arrested. But he had to go back to the police station after, because he was a very important part of their plans for other people like Toucan.
Gert was talking to the doctor, who was saying that AK47 might not wake up. The tests they had run came back and the results were not good. Her brain had been hit very hard by Toucan, and blood had gone into it and that was very bad.
“But her body is alive,” I said.
The doctor said he would leave us alone to talk, closing the door behind him. AK47’s machine blipped and bleeped. Gert and I stood side by side, watching over her. Just outside the window, beside AK47’s bed, was a tall office building. I could see a lot of people moving around in it. They reminded me of ants. I wondered if they were looking out and seeing us and asking themselves what we were doing that made us look so sad and depressed.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Gert walked to the window and pressed his face against the glass.
One of AK47’s feet stuck out from under the sheet. Her toes still had bits of silver nail polish. I had brought a nail clipper with me, since in Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings when a warrior dies, the nails need to be clipped off so that they can’t be used to build a ship called Naglfar to bring Ragnarok, the end of the world.
I went toe to toe. “What are you doing?” Gert asked
“Saving the world by ending it,” I said.
AK47’s nails weren’t long anymore. The nurse must have cut them. But there was enough to cut, and I kept the pieces of nail in my hand. When I got to her hands I felt her fingers. They moved whatever way I wanted them to. There was no AK47 telling the fingers to go one way or the other.
He came over. “Can I do some too?”
I handed him the nail clippers. “Be careful,” I said. “She doesn’t like them too short.”
Gert went around AK47, very carefully. There were five fingers for him to do, and he kept her nails in his hand.
I thought about Toucan, how now he was a corpse, with horse eyes. The thing that scared me most was the way his mouth had opened and it was like he was screaming, only nothing came out. There was no more soul inside of him.
All at once Gert jumped back. “Holy shit,” he said.
AK47 was blinking.
“What are you freaks doing?” she said. Her voice was not her normal voice, but it was the voice of a person who was alive.
chapter thirty-six
Gert stopped going to summer school. He said that it was impossible to concentrate on making up the credits that he’d missed with AK47 in the hospital, and he came to visit her. Sometimes they fought and I waited outside, and when I came back in they were in the hospital bed together, holding hands, Gert’s head on her shoulder with his eyes closed.
I visited AK47 as much as I could, which was not every day since I was working more and more at the library.
At first she had to use a wheelchair, because her brain didn’t know how to talk to her legs anymore. Then she taught the brain to speak, with the help of a physiotherapist who made her practice first moving her toes and then her legs.
“You ever hear people speaking Japanese?” AK47 said. “Well, that’s what it’s like. My brain’s speaking Japanese and my legs can’t listen.”
One day she was able to walk with a walker, one foot at a time, very slowly.
Gert and I cheered when she showed off her walker, which folded up, and then when she could take steps without the walker, with just a cane made of metal, I sung her praise.
She was able to go back to her own apartment. Gert wanted her to stay with us. She said that it was important that she do things on her own, which made Gert mad at first.
Then he started going back to summer school. “You should be worrying about that, not me,” AK47 told him.
One day she phoned the library while I was at work and said she needed to talk to me.
“Come alone,” she said, and I thought that Gert’s birthday was in less than one month, and she wanted to plan a gargantuan birthday party for him. Maybe we could order the Viking stripper for Gert again, as a joke. I said I would be over after work, and took the bus and walked across the park from the bus stop to her apartment building.
AK47 buzzed me in and when I came to her door she yelled that it was open. I came inside and saw that there were suitcases, black ones with wheels, sitting by the door.
She came out of her room with a backpack over her shoulder, using her cane and moving one foot at a time.
“You want to help me with this?” she asked, and I ran to take the backpack. She told me to put it with the suitcases.
“Are you going back to the hospital?” I asked, because sometimes she had to go back to spend the night and had to bring a bag filled with things she’d need.
“Not exactly.” She sat down on the couch, very slowly, and began massaging her leg.
“What does that mean?”
“Sit,” she said, pointing her cane at the chair across from her. “I want to talk to you.”
I sat down. AK47 set her cane between her legs, leaning her chin on the end, where you hold on with your hand.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
“Leaving what?”
“Leaving the city. The state.” She smiled. “Probably not the country, but maybe the country. Depends how I feel.”
I blinked, trying to understand what she was saying. When I started to talk, she held up her hand. “Listen, I was thinking about all of this stuff, about Gert and being in the hospital. There are some people I need to see, from my own family.”
“I thought you didn’t have a family. I thought they all died in Arkansas.”
“Arizona, actually. And I know I said that, and to me they’ve been dead. Not dead dead. Just…” AK47 took her chin off the cane and started slowly spinning it like a top. “I’ve been meaning to go and see them, I guess.”
“Are Gert and I going with you? Because I need to request the time off work and Carol would like at least one week’s notice before I can take time off and get approved.”
“Oh, Zelda, I know you’d go to hell and back for me. But I’m going solo on this one.”
I felt a ball in my throat.
“When are you coming back?”
Instead of answering, she told me to bring her something. “It’s in the bedroom. I wanted to have it out before you came, but I didn’t have time.” She patted her weak leg. “Limpy over here makes things difficult.”