She saw me going for the ice, the deranged woman, she must have seen my gambit when the lights went up. Then silence. Those her last words — she couldn’t speak any longer, her vocal apparatus had at last given out — perhaps she was dead, I thought, the claw still knotted in the fabric of my dress, and in truth I had no way of knowing if those were or would be — if those were and are forever her last words, the end of that hissing. I did not turn to look. She had no family here — no, none of the other women jammed in this stained and windowless chamber, little better than a closet, had family here. But the deranged one must have had visitors, I thought — it was her family who swaddled her head in pink towels, so that the blood leaking from her skull was less striking — such were my thoughts, which I knew to be nonsensical.
The deranged one had croaked at last, I thought, not turning to face her, not reaching and slapping at my own back to disentangle the claw, because I refused to slap at my own back. I thought She has finally departed this, our ruined city. Then a hiss, so I knew I was wrong. What she needed was water — water so she could continue to excoriate us. But I wouldn’t give her water, I didn’t want to hear her excoriations, not in all this filth.
Over the past months we’d grown accustomed to the accusers and attackers ranged round our patient — accustomed long before Kadhimiya hospital to the voices whispering and hissing or reproaching us with mute and burning condemnation — every soul in this our city hating us more and more; everywhere hate-crazed heads rotating in our direction, a whirring and clicking in each of these skulls. We ourselves despised the screams, even as we loved our patient — but we were the only ones who loved her.
Our patient provoked a fury in Father’s neighbors. They couldn’t take her screaming, they said. Each time that Othman and I visited Father’s Kadhimiya apartment (the apartment of my childhood, which is now again my apartment, in this, my second and inward-burning childhood — yes, since abandoning Othman to Adhimiya and his night-missions, since I smuggled away the salted heart, I have watched myself become again a helpless and quite stupid child, incapable of spooning ice into a parched mouth) a neighbor — a crone, without exception — would accost us in the lobby.
On this day (I’m speaking here of the past, of that time when Othman and I lived as husband and wife!) a widow — a crone, another of the deranged ones—laid her lobby trap in the stairwell and sprung it — without hesitation. She seized my arm and shook my whole body, through the upper bones of my arm, on account of the screaming. It annoyed her so much! so much! All the neighbors were in accord, said the widow-creature. Oh, yes, she said.
This creature told us that we had to put our patient away this week! today! It’s a danger! We’ll take steps!
Othman raised a hand. I can take steps too, he said — and grinned.
That mouth. Teeth so sharp, his threat expanding and gathering force above the cracked tiles of the lobby, blowing the deranged one back on her heels, then literally whirling her up the stairs.
This was not my Othman, but it was. The men have new eyes and new teeth, we are all becoming something else. We are growing in the filth and in the filth we’re purified, the eyes and teeth of the men gleam white, but they’re jagged, there are too many teeth in their mouths, too much white in their eyes.
Men came to our door on five nights to ask Othman for a favor — he went with them on the night-missions, there is no choice, he goes or he dies. He has not said a word to me about these night-missions. Only once did I ask; he stared with his vast white eyes, then turned away — but not before I saw the grin playing at his lips, Othman identical now with all of the men in this our city. I look at them in the streets, the vendors and cabbies and beggars, and I don’t see mouths, I see an explosion of jagged white teeth. I look into eyes and see whites and nothing else, rolling up and up. These men with their night-missions are by daylight enervated, shuffling things — after the night-missions began, silence reigned in the streets and alleys, and not only in Kadhimiya, but also in Haifa Street, and in Dora not a sound was to be heard; in the whole city, day and night, hours would pass in which only our patient, her screams, sounded (and the hissing of those around her) — but watch closely and you will see the men tilt back their heads and soundlessly howl, thrilling in that anguish that converts them all to a soldered wild religion of white eyes and teeth.
All this to say: a knock at the door, then Othman gone until morning (and before he went, I cut a strip from his heart).
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This and no more can I tell you about the night-missions.
Thus the men; but what of the women?
We have a secret from the men, oh yes.
The widow-whore perched on the landing two flights up, as we backed out of the lobby she eyed us, and I saw a spider inside her heart, the same size as her heart.
In my own heart, too, there is a spider the size of my heart — do you understand our spiders? Our secrets? In all women’s hearts in this city there is now a spider, the size of a heart. The men live without these spiders, the men just die and die, their teeth and eyes a blinding white. At long last the ambulance took our patient to Kadhimiya hospital. She was dying, would soon die, any hour now she’d be dead — for days, though, she has stared up into the corner of her room. Her bird-like eyes watch and her mouth screams — her eyes lock in terror on the dark shapes she sees and the cracked mouth emits one scream after another (she has no spider in her heart, thus the screams. A woman without a spider must go mad in this city, screaming without end).
The lights went out, and the sun burned through the filth of the high window until clouds of smoke rolled across the sky and the room — all of us — tipped once again into darkness.
The surgery itself was the wildest sort of chance, the operating theater run off of generators — machines for breathing and light, machines monitoring her vitals, precision instruments clattering and shushing as their power rushed and ebbed, you couldn’t trust them. I was thinking of this — of stents and dinars and our misplaced trust in machinery — when the deranged woman twisted the fabric of my dress, clawed at my back, and again I tasted the filth — the lights off, then on.
Father pressed his hand to our patient’s forehead, and for a moment I forgot about night-missions, stents, the duplicity of machines; at his gentle touch the wretched twisting of her face seemed for a moment to ease, and a look of repose crossed both their faces. But then the lights went off, and the filth was borne down on us. When the power came back Father had withdrawn his hand; he sat back in his chair, eyes registering nothing as she screamed; he started up again about the drive, the checkpoints — how I hated him then for his timidity! Othman, too, as though infected by Father, glanced once at our patient, at the place where Father’s hand had rested, and at my own hands struggling with the elastic straps, then he too looked away and spoke of his own drive in precise imitation of Father.
And what about our patient: Did she understand any of this, any of this filth? She is part of the filth now, I thought. She is now filth, that’s all, pure filth.
Our patient couldn’t look away from the stains in the corner, there was a fascination in her eyes — such fascination goes, I now understood, hand in glove with such filth, such terror.