"Event Horizon, in general relativity, is a general term for a boundary in spacetime, an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side is never seen again."
***
The difference between a cliché and a reality is experience. Anyone can tell you the streets are full of stories. Everybody knows that poetry runs in rivulets through the concrete canyons, and novels crowd up the subways, packed like bodies deep underground. Those tall misty towers do something to the mind at a distance, and they do something different up close, around the roots. Clichés are substitutes, insulation: not false, but not necessarily true either. Maybe Kesey wrote it best when Bromden said that thing about ranting and raving.
The girl - we can call her M - arrived some weeks ago in front of the Dr. Emily’s clinic on Southern Boulevard. There is no Dr. Emily. They stamp that on the big purple awning over the wind-up steel gate because it sounds friendly and arm-around-the-shoulders. When we swung in with the Mobile-1, the Dr. Emily's staff were unlocking the doors. Finding a parking spot for the RV-sized clinic-on-wheels is not an easy thing to do at any hour, on any day, in the grid.
M came for her scheduled D&C at about 8:30 that morning, when most of the local shops were just opening up. We had been there for over an hour already. When I first saw her she was walking snap snap down the street in low heels, teetering somewhere between fourteen and old, and about five or six weeks along. At that stage I was still remembering girls by what they wore - unless they were white - and M was perfectly camouflaged. She was Hispanic. She was wearing a dull red shirt and old jeans and was toting a big catchall purse, and she was alone. She almost certainly lived nearby, probably along Southern Boulevard; the predominantly black neighborhoods were farther west down 149th, and we were well out of range of the white suburbs way up to the north. I learned most of this later, of course. The veterans of the Mobile-1 can pick up on these things instantly after two or three years. Julie, our chief counselor, grew up outside the city, but she has learned how to read faces and bodies so well that she can’t even explain to me how she does it, and I’ve given up asking. Now I just watch.
Julie spotted M as she crossed the intersection and moved to intercept, but M was expecting us. Her mouth was wire-thin as she snap snap snapped right past the Mobile-1 and directly towards Dr. Emily’s big purple sign, and the enforcers hustled her off the sidewalk quickly. So we just watched, and she gave us the finger before she disappeared inside. Business as usual.
And then she came back out again. The entire crew of the Image Clear Mobile-1 ultrasound clinic stopped what they were doing. Nobody comes out the front door. The Dr. Emily’s enforcers usually make sure they leave out the back by the truck mechanic’s pit so that the girls in the waiting room never see anyone back out. But M walked out and straight up to Julie. They talked for a while on the sidewalk, near the iron subway grate so that their conversation wouldn’t carry over to where the enforcers stood smoking and glowering in their white lab coats.
Julie and M spent the rest of the day talking in our mobile clinic. Whatever passed between them - whatever blend of words and tears and truths - hung there like an original moment, safe from the sun and from eyes and from airless high-rise windows. By the time I stepped back into the relative cool of the Mobile-1, it had elongated into a kind of old-stone cathedral. M had stripped herself of her cattle-pen consternation. She sat with me and talked while Wadiya prepped the table and the computer. She was smiling now - a big toothy confidence. I noticed her eyes had a tinge of green.
I watched her face as she saw the static on the ultrasound monitor resolve itself into a head, then an arm, then it was a boy, and she just stared in amazement. I will see her face forever, transfixed with the sight out of time, staring back into the face of a sacramental humanity. Nothing of earth can boast the height of that indelible moment, and no power of heaven can blot out that eternal instant. For a brief space we were able to pierce the heavy veil, while the city shuddered and rolled outside, where we couldn’t hear it.
Wadiya took some measurements, checked for any potential complications, and calculated M’s due date: November fifth. M was glowing, her hands clasped in Julie's. After the ultrasound M and Julie made arrangements for pre- and postnatal care, and Julie gave M our booklet of free infant care suppliers. Before she left, M, smiling wider than ever, gave us all a hug -- even me, although I had my camera around my neck.
M kept in touch with Julie for the next week, but I was busy with other work on the Mobile-1. The next day the main enforcer at Dr. Emily’s put a curse on me, or so Mark said, and he's been at Dr. Emily's two years longer than any of us. Two weeks later Julie managed a turnaround by keeping up a text-message conversation with a teenager who was actually on the procedure table. The week after that, some of the crew went down to the Jersey Coast for a day to do some outreach work in the nasty, brutish, and gilded slums of Atlantic City. While we were there Julie sent us an e-mail from the city. M had gone ahead and aborted a few hours earlier. Just that fast. Why M felt the need to let us know, I am still not sure. I never got the chance to see her again after that day. Julie kept in touch with her, but after a while she started getting answering machines, dial tones. Maybe the world came crowding back in, and time like mist drowned out the color of that consecrated moment. Two days after she came to one of our offices - the non-rolling kind, this time - and met with Mark. She couldn’t look him in the eye, but he held her hand and they talked for a few hours. When we got back to the city, we had a meeting. We replayed the whole incident like a game plan, searching for clues, traps, errors. How did it happen? Mark left the room. The rest of us shrugged underneath our shirts and started pacing, if only to make sure, in those first moments, that the floor was still reliable.
If you could freeze time on any given city block, it would take a hundred years to gather up all the stories, and another hundred to weave the harvest into a single cell small enough to fit between covers. For the observer type, it's a weird effect: something akin to being tossed headlong from a moving helicopter over Victoria Falls, and trying to examine each drop of water on the way down. But the question is, would you? Tourists move quickly, and there is safety in numbers.
The streets are full of stories. Now there is one less.
No comments:
Post a Comment