The young man said quietly, “I’ve been taking a medication.”
“Yes.”
“The oral route.”
“Yes. We all do this. A little white pill.”
“There are side effects.”
“A small pellet or tablet. White, pink, whatever.”
“Could be constipation. Could be diarrhea.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Could be the feeling that others can hear your thoughts or control your behavior.”
“I don’t think I know about this.”
“Irrational fear. Distrust of others. I can show you the insert,” he said. “I carry it with me.”
Max was scratching his forearm again, not with his fingers this time but with his knuckles.
He said, “Field goal attempt from near midfield—fake, fake, fake!”
The screen. Diane kept edging her head around to make sure it was blank. She could not understand why this was reassuring to her.
“Let’s go down to the field,” Max said. “Esther, tell us what’s happening.”
He raised his head now, phantom microphone in hand, and he spoke to a camera well above field level, his voice pitched to a higher tonal range.
“Here on the sidelines, this team exudes confidence despite the spate of injuries.”
“The spate of injuries.”
“That’s right, Lester. I talked to the coordinator, offense, defense, whatever. He’s happy as a pig in shit.”
“Thank you, Esther. Now, back to the action.”
It began to occur to Diane that Martin was speaking, although not necessarily to her.
“I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I’m looking at,” he said. “The face looking back at me doesn’t seem to be mine. But then again why should it? Is the mirror a truly reflective surface? And is this the face that other people see? Or is it something or someone that I invent? Does the medication I’m taking release this second self? I look at the face with interest. Interest and an element of confusion. Do other people experience this, ever? Our faces. And what do people see when they walk along the street and look at each other? Is it the same thing that I see? All our lives, all this looking. People looking. But seeing what?”
Max had stopped announcing. He was looking at Martin. They both were, husband and wife. The young man was peering into what is called the middle distance, staring carefully, in a measured way, and he was still talking.
“One escape is the movies. I tell my students. They sit and listen. Foreign-language films in black-and-white. Films in unfamiliar languages. A dead language, a subfamily, a dialect, an artificial language. Do not read subtitles. I tell them forthrightly. Avoid reading the printed translation of the spoken dialogue at the bottom of the screen. We want pure film, pure language. Indo-Iranian. Sino-Tibetan. People talking. They walk, talk, eat, drink. The stark power of black-and-white. The image, the optically formed duplicate. My students sit and listen. Smart young men and women. But they never seem to be looking at me.”
“They’re listening,” Diane said, “and that’s what matters.”
Max was in the kitchen putting food on plates. She wanted to go for a walk, alone. Or she wanted Max to go for a walk and Martin to go home. Where are the others, Tessa and Jim and all the others, travelers, wanderers, pilgrims, people in houses and apartments and village hutments. Where are the cars and trucks, the traffic noises? Super Sunday. Is everyone at home or in darkened bars and social clubs, trying to watch the game? Think of the many millions of blank screens. Try to imagine the disabled phones.
What happens to people who live inside their phones?
Max returned to his bourbon. Diane realized that the young man was standing now, abandoning his customary slouch, head back, looking straight up.
She thought for a moment.
“The painted ceilings. Rome,” she said. “The tourists looking up.”
“Standing absolutely still.”
“Saints and angels. Jesus of Nazareth.”
“The luminous figure. The Nazarene. Einstein,” he said.
-5-
Lost systems in the crux of everyday life.
The clinic was a sprawl of halls and rooms at street level and Jim and Tessa walked past doors, exit signs, blinking red lights, posted notices lettered by hand. Staff members hurried past wearing street clothes under their flapping tunics.
Other people from the van entered rooms or formed lines or stood around talking. A few had remained in the vehicle, destination unknown.
There was a woman crouched down on a stool in a cramped space, a cubbyhole.
“The administrator,” Tessa said. “The functionary.”
They joined a long line of people waiting to see the woman. The hall lights kept dimming.
After a time Jim said, “Why are we standing here?”
“You have a wound.”
“A wound. On my head. I forgot.”
“You forgot. Let me have a look,” Tessa said. “A gash. Shapeless. When we crash-landed and undid our seatbelts and jumped up to get the hell out of there, I saw that you were bleeding.”
“Hit my head on the window.”
“Let’s be patient and wait on line and then see what the official on the stool has to say.”
“But first.”
“But first,” she said.
They left the line and eventually found a vacant toilet. In that scant space he eased her against a bare wall and she opened her coat and unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and shorts and asked him if his head hurt and he responded by undressing her slowly and carefully and they talked about what they were doing, how, where, when, suggesting, advising, trying not to laugh, her body slowly lowering along the wall and he buckled his knees to maintain distance and rhythm.
Someone was knocking on the door, then speaking into it. Show some consideration. Another voice then, accented. Tessa whispered a list of nationalities as they completed the act and crudely wiped each other with tissues from the dispenser adjacent to the mirror.
They finished dressing and looked at each other for a long moment. This look summed up the day and their survival and the depth of their connection. The state of things, the world outside, this would require another kind of look whenever it became appropriate.
Then they went out the door and down the hall. The line was much shorter now and they decided to take their place and wait.
“I guess we can walk to their building from here if that’s the only way to get there.”
“They’re our friends. They’ll feed us.”
“They’ll listen to our story.”
“They’ll tell us what they know.”
“The Super Bowl. Where is it happening?”
“Somewhere temperate, in sunlight and shadow,” he said, “before shouting thousands.”
The woman in the cubbyhole looked up at them, another set of faces and bodies, all day, people standing, talking, listening, waiting for instructions concerning where to go, who to see, which hall, which door, and she nodded as if knowing in advance who they were and what they wanted.
She seemed glued to the stool she was sitting on.
“Our plane, we experienced a crash landing,” Tessa said. “He suffered an injury.”