Getting Dad onto the trolley was difficult. Then I still had to wheel him out the airlock and strip off his hazmat suit before laying him on the floor of his office and calling for help. I needed the paramedics to believe that he had collapsed there rather than in the silo. It was safer for both us and the books. I even went back and hurriedly re-stacked the fallen volumes on the shelf. If Dad didn’t get better, I would never be able to return, but at least if the corporates had no reason to believe the books had been touched, they wouldn’t think it necessary to destroy them.
When we arrived in the ambulance, Mother had already been called to the hospital to begin the admissions process. Hospitals and banks all look the same: glassed-in clerks guard the assets against the desperate and undeserving. As a distant voice hissed through the microphone, Mother became shrilclass="underline" ‘You’re telling me, plus-sizers. I warn you it’s not pretty when I get my panties in a twist.’ I went over to her, took the plastic ticket from her hand and read, ‘Patient number 000473278RTY: Excluded from care due to high-risk lifestyle’. The paramedics had initially wheeled Dad over to the admissions gate but he had been moved aside to the waiting bay with a couple of other stretchers.
Ten minutes later, a doctor came out to meet Mother and led her to a side office. I followed. He waved Mother to a chair but had started speaking before she was even seated. He didn’t introduce himself. ‘Our records indicate that for a period of three years now, the patient has failed to undergo the required six-monthly post-CVA angiograms, cognitive, psychological and acculturation testing. Furthermore his working environment is rated category five for fungal hazards and he has no brand benefactor. This high-risk lifestyle that encourages pathogenesis is considered a refusal of treatment.’
All that EmPath medical LipService coiled around Mother, deflating her pneumatic curves and making her eyes bulge instead. I saw that she wasn’t going to say anything. But the doctor had to be told that the repository has strict health and safety measures – hazmat suits and airlock access. Even if, like everyone else, he believed books caused librarian’s lung, I had to convince him of that at least. I began to calibrate a medical defence regarding the repository’s lower respiratory risks compared to open-plan offices. It was in a report I had read from years ago when the silos were converted. Then I remembered I couldn’t tell him that – he would know I had read it in the repository. I had to slow down, carefully pull a stick from the pile without disturbing the sleeping logs.
Glancing up, I noticed that the doctor was already standing at the door, saying to Mother, ‘Your brand status entitles you to use a departure lounge. Here’s the access card for 15B.’ Then he was gone. I had become so careful about not saying the wrong thing that I had said nothing.
Mother looked as if a waxing strip had been ripped from her skin. ‘Oh, oh this is too body shaming. How could he leave me with such a visible panty line? I don’t think I can… I must change into something more demure.’ She left and I went back to the shuttered clerks to ask to speak to the doctor again. The only response was a finger tapping at a notice posted in the window: ‘Patient prognosis and therapeutics are discussed with haemorrh-aged next of kin only. Visitors sign in at entrance 3.’ A phonograph voice said ‘No LipService patch, no debate.’
Dad was going to die because I had been mute at the moment that mattered most. He had given me those years sitting reading, seeing language leap like static electricity. But when I needed words to ensnare a doctor, it was my tongue that was tied. I failed him. My fists flew at the window with the headlong certainty of beetles that they could get through to the other side. The clerk pressed an alarm and pulled down the blind. I was sobbing so hard that I couldn’t speak. A guard came and dragged me off to the Departure Lounge where Dad’s stretcher had already been moved.
I tried to tell him that I was sorry I had let him down. He probably didn’t understand what I was saying. They had given him painkillers and he slipped in and out of consciousness, a cat following the sunlight on its tour of a room. I climbed onto the stretcher next to him, still snuffling. With his good left hand, he patted the slight bulge on my belly that was the leather-bound volume and smiled with the left half of his face. The book’s skin and mine had been pursed together for long enough that it no longer felt different from the jostling of my thighs.
An orderly woke me when he came to take the body away. I went to wait in the lobby for Mother. Looking up from my chair, I saw a black satin dinner jacket that parted to reveal the sorrowing underside of a breast. The band of black velvet blooms on her head and the tenebrous netting extending to just over the tip of her nose made her lips glow like a red light in a window. She looked beautiful and pointless. ‘I’m ready to see him now,’ she said. I told her that he was already gone.
‘But he would’ve been so tickled to see me as a Frisson Froufrou angel of death.’ She turned around to reveal a pair of black-feathered wings.
It took a long time after Dad’s death before I could confront the book. It squatted across from me, a mutilated body that was closing in on me without having to move. In queasy sympathy, I imagined my own hide outfitting a book and yet still being able to taste the cloth and board binding of neighbouring volumes on a shelf, or sweaty palms on my back. It was like the compulsion to prod at a dead bird in a gutter with a stick and see its neck flop. I reached out my hand and with a fingertip took a swab of the squiddy leather. My mouth was a seashell carrying echoes of the ocean. That salty marine cleanness can turn so suddenly into the stink of docks. I wasn’t even sure which one was truer of the book. I wanted Dad to explain it to me. I wanted Dad. But Dad was gone. There was only Eda-Lyn.
I picked it up again and noticed that instead of a smooth wall of pages, the fore edge had crenellations, with some of the pages sunk deep and others protruding. As my thumb rode over the notches, fanning the pages, the changing fillips of stiff, thick pages and thin, lispy ones sounded like pins and tumblers aligning in a lock. Whirring past on the carousel of pages were titles and names I knew – The Emperor’s New Clothes, Edward Lear and Kafka. I saw what Dad had done and gave a little gasp of music-box delight. It reminded me of the patchwork book I’d made from the dressing-up clothes, because it was also stitched together from pieces of other works. The original anatomical treatise was gone and in its place was something created just for me. Stories I could keep now that I couldn’t go back to the repository. I didn’t recognise all the names on the page headers. He had kept things for this moment.
After the flyleaf was a text called The Fork in the Medicine Tree. It was a history of medical practice starting from the Middle Ages. The thought of doctors – and of the one who considered my father undeserving of his attentions – tangled impotence and rage in me, like laundry in a spin cycle. When I stilled the throes, I realised that it was just too prescient – as if Dad knew he would be refused care, knew that I needed to understand the men with knives who would slide fingers into my deep, dark crevices when I came of haemorrhage.
The 1163 Council of Tours prohibited clerical physicians from performing any treatment that shed blood. The scalpel’s cunning, dentistry and bloodletting were trades for barbers, bath-keepers and sow-gelders. Work for calloused hands. The physician trained as a scholar, examining books, not bodies. Next to this passage, Dad had written in the margin ‘copywriters & doctors’ – the two powers behind the patch, the two professions that held our tongues.