Chapter 20 — The Cure109 #3
What I did then I did badly, because I am not a doctor and nobody in that room would help me.
I got down next to Calla and I got Fathom flat and tipped his big head back to open whatever was left of the airway, the one thing I half-remembered from a poster in a school corridor, and I told Calla to keep talking to him because I had nothing better to offer her than that, and I put the heel of my hand on the centre of his chest and pushed, and counted, and pushed, while a hundred aligned souls stood over us breathing in slow grateful unison and a girl with a clipboard explained to them in a voice like warm milk that what they were witnessing was a soul touching the very floor of itself and choosing to rise.
He was not rising. Under my hands he had gone slack and grey and terribly far away.
And then the room changed. Not because of anything Coral did.
Because of a sound from outside, low at first and then not low at all, a hard mechanical chop coming in off the water and growing, beating down on the roof and the deck and the careful flowers, throwing the linen flat, a sound from the surface world they swore they had no need of, arriving anyway, uninvited, enormous, and the whole basin lifted its serene faces toward the ceiling as a helicopter came down out of the clear blue sky three days after the storm and put itself on the lawn.
They came in fast and loud and graceless and wonderful, two of them in jackets with reflective stripes, dragging a hard orange bag, and they did not breathe at Fathom and they did not ask about his tide.
They put a needle in his thigh through his linen trousers inside four seconds of reaching him, the way it was always supposed to take, and then a mask over his face with a bag they squeezed, and they said sharp ordinary words to each other over his body, numbers, drugs, a count, the plain unlovely language of people whose entire job is that the body does not, in fact, know the way home, and has to be shown.
The basin watched the surface world save the man the tide had nearly killed, and did not blink, and rebranded it in real time.
“Do you feel that,” Coral said, into the downdraft, lit up, her voice raised for once because even she couldn’t out-serene a rotor.
“Do you feel how held he is. The tide reaches everywhere, loves. It reaches all the way up into the sky and it sends down exactly what’s needed.
Look what it sent him. Look how loved he is. ”
They got Fathom onto the board and strapped and lifted, and somewhere in it one of them said something to the other about a pulse, and a rhythm, flat and unexcited, the way they said everything, and it was the best run of words I had heard all morning, because it meant the needle and the mask and the ugly ordinary competence of them had caught him, and that he was still in there.
They carried him out across the flattened grass with Calla running alongside holding the rail of the board and one of them turned and said something to her I couldn’t hear and she shook her head and said something back and I caught the shape of it off her mouth, my passport, it’s in the salt room, I haven’t got my passport, and the rotor ate the rest, and they could not take her, or would not, and she stood on the lawn in the hurricane of it with her hands pressed to her mouth as they lifted her husband up into the sky without her.
He went up alive. I want that part recorded accurately, because for a long ten minutes that morning I had been sure he wouldn’t.
The last I saw of Fathom he was a strapped shape rising into a clear sky with a mask over his face and a stranger watching a monitor at his side, going somewhere with real machines and real medicine and people whose entire job was keeping him on the right side of the line, and then the helicopter tipped and went out over the water the way everything left this island, fast, and was a dot, and was nothing, and the sound of it thinned and the careful quiet of the basin came flooding back in to fill the space where it had been.
The flowers were flat. The linen was everywhere.
Calla was a small heap on the grass and two of the gentle ones were already crouched over her, breathing, telling her how loved she was, how loved he was, how the tide had held them both, and she let them, because what else was there on a rock in the sea, and that was the worst thing I saw all day, and I’d watched a man stop breathing over breakfast.
My mother was beside me. At some point her hand had found mine and neither of us had decided it, the body doing what the body did, and she was holding it hard enough to hurt and staring at the empty patch of flattened grass where the helicopter had been, and she wasn’t performing anything, there was no one left in her running the brand, there was just Deb, white to the lips, watching the place she’d been telling a hundred thousand strangers would teach her to stop being afraid.
Coral clapped her hands, once, softly, a woman calling a room gently back to itself.
“What a morning the tide gave us,” she said, and meant it, and they turned their faces to her the way flowers do. “Let’s hold the basin steady, loves. Fathom’s exactly where he needs to be. Shall we finish the bread?”