The space of one paragraph

Two hours ago she had sat up in bed, said Make the words go away. He woke, asked what she’d said. I just want to sleep, she said. In the bathroom he found pill bottles that hadn’t been on the counter before when he’d brushed his teeth. The voice on the poison control line told him to inventory all she’d ingested. Even the words? Now he sits in the ICU waiting room trying to focus on the copy of Maldoror between the TV’s blue flicker and the April lightning licking the windows. Nearby patients doze, watch TV, talk quietly: Guess I’ll get the papers and go home. Crows never follow you at least. I tell you there’s no bridge that don’t end in midair. It’s like love was gravity not a hurt word. The nurse comes over. Want to see her, or are you good? The nurse fish-eyes his book’s cover: a gaunt man, mouth agape, struggles out of a coffin. In the patients’ room, she sleeps on a cot, under a blanket the same blue as her pale blue eyes. The look on her sleeping face that of a trapped raccoon. Tear-carved creases trace her nostrils, the corners of her eyes. The IV drips something clear into her arm. Her lips and chin, stained black by the charcoal cocktail they’d fed her. Or has she been drinking ink again, the fucking words. Behind the door to the small bathroom he sees tile walls splashed with her nightmares, regurgitated, unpunctuated. Sentences sidewind down to the sewers, baptize blind reptiles, dark clots of signifiers swept off by subterranean rivers. She looks as light as a leaf on a puddle, raw as a frog skinned by dry prairie grass. Every colour in this room is a grey that goes on for miles: highway, newsprint, stormfront. Her closed eyes drugged past dreaming, but all she’d dreamt was fractal vortices of vomit. Whatever’s dripping into her arm opens an umbrella under depression’s mental monsoon. This is the third emergency hospital trip since they started dating, the second since they moved in together. Earlier today he’d clocked ten hours at the florist’s, wrapping bouquets of Colombian carnations for corporate Mother’s Day orders, the unventilated warehouse air cloyed by pesticide. A lizard tiny as his pinkie darted out of a box, got lost in the walls. She floats in a bed beyond hope, treading neurochemistry’s heaviest water. He sits in a chair beyond exhausted. And quick as that lizard he knows he doesn’t love her and can’t tell her. Beyond the curtains other patients crouch, cornered by IV stands, telemetry screens, trays of baked steel, crates of spent syringes, boxes of ferrets nesting in wet red cotton. Code indigo, intones the intercom. When did he return to the waiting room? From the TV drifts a documentarist’s dulcet voice: These men are exploring a world never before seen by human eyes. A bathyscaphe drifts down the blackest ocean. Its camera raptures the creatures of the ocean floor, creatures that move by pulsing, that resemble snowflakes or equations, their veins coursing with antifreeze not blood. Creatures who may get better or kill themselves, now or years from now, either way he can’t bear to know. He picks at his fingernail quicks. All we know about life in these depths of the ocean, the documentarist says, would barely fill the space of one paragraph. As would anything he might write about the depths he’s in. He closes his eyes, wants to walk out, hole up in the apartment, smoke weed and read about squids in flight and bowers of hermaphrodites until he can’t tell whether he’s awake or dreaming. Dark machines hum in the hospital basement. Near the ceiling perch unblinking birds. The faces of the quiet patients glow cathode blue.