Chapter 7. Dyspnea
Dyspnea
Please … please.
You were there—in the ocean. My ocean. Your flesh, melting with my salt. The waves. The stones and door—the way I once was. My city. But no—no more.
Arms wide, you reached for me, filled with so much hope and relief.
And I—I opened for you, open, welcoming—a way of the past—but you swam away, terrified of me, of the sickness; it was in your eyes, wide with terror and spidery with blood; it was in your mouth as it dropped into a gasp—for air—but there is only water in this grave. This tomb of my city. My family.
Air hunger in your lungs, in mine; it rakes and gnaws in a forced struggle for breath, a fight for that which should be ours.
You will breathe, dear Marina Nuhad, you will breathe; walls thick with rich, deep oxygen, you will enter and you will breathe, fully, and feel the click of satisfaction at the bottom, it is yours and mine and ours—
not the air hunger. Not the starvation.
You knew what was down here—fallen, an abyss below the glittering sea; you saw—this remembrance, ours—and you wanted what once was.
Legs pushed off the pier; lungs gasping with anticipation; hungry eyes on my walls.
On my city. We hunger together. You saw me, and I saw you—craving, forcing yawns to suck more air into your fragile lungs, sighing and exacerbating the appetite, whetting the blade of your awareness of the lack that we share.
You wake at night and thrash in your twisted sheets and try to breathe—reality becoming nightmare—but it only comes in the short gasps of this perpetual, endless terror—
they don’t know what it means to drown on land.
You starved for your grandmother my Nuhad but her breath was the first to be stolen in the dark of night—cycle’s beginning—she sighed, she yawned, she clawed more air in an attempt to relive a time in the before.
And she had your mother, who grew up in this sighing, yawning, gasping starvation—and the craving became hers, and hers, and yours, and mine—
and with every hunger, a memory.
This rotting, willful dyspnea is made up of three parts, dear Marina Nuhad: it is a hunger because we starve, we crave; it is an ask, deep in your throat and chest, for more, because this is not a life; and in its completion, it is a dissatisfaction because you have done all you can, given everything to the starvation—
No more.
We will satiate one another.
Please … please.
The first thing Marina feels, even before she opens her eyes, is the staticky-smooth stitching of the bedsheet beneath her fingertips. Low yellow light filters through the backs of her heavy, heavy eyelids.
Confusion strikes her for a moment as she looks around.
A white sheet is draped over her body, and a tall gray curtain blocks part of the window beside her.
Clouds have already gathered in the small slit that she can see through; the storm is brewing.
The low, steady pulsing of a vitals monitor underscores this setting.
Marina turns her head slightly. The crinkle of the pillowcase moves with her.
There is a man seated beside her, slumped in a chair with one fist underneath his chin.
His eyes are closed, and his breathing is steady and low, matching the pace of his rising and falling stomach.
He looks familiar, though she knows him with floppy dark curls and at the entrance of Rania’s house, welcoming her inside.
Now, his hair has been shorn close to his head, giving him an air of vulnerability.
“Khaled?” Marina whispers. Disuse scrapes at her throat and she clears it. “Khaled?”
He stirs, lifting his head from his chin and blinking a few times. As he meets Marina’s gaze, he sits up abruptly.
“Hi. How are you feeling?” He stands and wheels the doctor’s stool to sit beside her.
“Where am I?”
He grimaces. “You’re in the hospital.”
“What? Why…” Marina trails off as her memory replays images of the ocean, feelings of falling. “Did I drown?”
“No, not exactly.” His fingers rise up to run through his hair for a moment before they touch skin instead, and they fall. “You fell into the sea. From the pier.” He winces again.
“I drowned?” Marina prompts.
“Almost. They had to pull you out. You were thrashing around.”
“Is that a hospital-worthy event?” She tugs at her nightgown and flinches with slight embarrassment.
“Ya’ani, I wish my grandmother was here. She would explain this better—she was there.” He sighs. “Apparently, they listened to your lungs and something sounded bad. You took in too much seawater, but they also wanted to observe you and maybe take some X-rays. I don’t know.”
As he speaks, Marina feels the truth of his words. It’s in the clouded obstruction of her lungs; even here, in the hospital, lying down, it’s like there are rocks scattered throughout the small alveoli. Oxygen struggles to snake past—there is only a thin stream of air getting to her.
“What did they say?” Panic rises in Marina’s throat. She suddenly feels very alone in a country that is not hers. The sensation of feeling lost, again, wraps around her cold shoulders and sudden tears spring to her eyes.
“I don’t know exactly,” he says. A small agony is written across his face. “I wasn’t there.”
“Where’s Rania—eh, Im Omar?” Her voice is throaty.
“She had to go to work. It’s”—he checks his watch—“nine o’clock in the evening now. She had to help her employers with some party.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Three, four hours. I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure if I should wake you.”
“When is Rania coming back?” Marina asks, and she can hear how pathetic she sounds in this bare need. But Rania is her lifeline here—she’s the only comfort she has.
“Tomorrow morning. Don’t worry, Marina.”
Marina props herself up on her elbows and looks around the room.
A divider separates Marina from her roommate.
In the corner sits a tray of untouched food, save for an overturned, empty Jell-O container.
A rattling cart steadily wheels itself onto the linoleum floor of the room, and Khaled peers around the divider.
“Miss? Miss—can you please give my friend her information?” he asks.
A nurse comes around the edge and sighs. The bags beneath her eyes are deep, and though her hair is pulled into a bun, Marina can see how thin it is. She stands with her feet turned away from each other as she flips through her clipboard.
“Marina?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“The doctor wants to do an X-ray on you tomorrow and see what’s wrong with your lungs. It sounds like there’s a blockage or something. She doesn’t think it’s an infection, though.” She smiles tiredly and returns to the other side of the room.
Khaled waits, his back erect on the stool, and watches the nurse out of the corner of his eye. When she finally leaves, he spins back to Marina and leans in. His breath smells of sleep. It’s a new intimacy, a new boundary that shifts Khaled deeper into Marina’s space.
“We’re going to try and discharge you tomorrow,” he whispers.
“They had to take you to the closest hospital—there was no choice—but it’s Israeli.
And, saraha, it’s one of the worst ones.
Your American passport means little if you’re Palestinian.
This one is notorious for medical malpractice and negligence for us, and they always get away with it.
I wouldn’t trust anything they want to do. ”
“Why?” Marina asks, but her gut already knows.
“Listen,” he begins. “When my aunt was diagnosed with kidney disease, she did her dialysis in this hospital for about a month before she died. Why? There was nothing else wrong with her. The dialysis should have kept her going. But—”
“They killed her,” Marina finishes for him.
“Exactly.” There is a grave fire in his eyes that scares Marina from asking more details. He nods once, curtly. “And that’s just one story. Don’t worry. We’ll try to get you out tomorrow.”
Marina swallows. She wants her mother. She wants her yellow kitchen, and her shitty air-conditioning, and to be reading some terrible fantasy book on her brown and pink bed until Haifa inevitably comes in to interrupt, open her curtains, and make her laugh. “Okay. Can I call my mom?”
“Of course.” Khaled smacks a palm against his forehead and it’s so cartoonish that it almost makes Marina laugh.
She coughs instead, feeling rocks burrow into her lungs.
“I would have called her for you, but I didn’t know her number.
I just put some international minutes on here.
You know how to reach her? It should be”—he checks his watch again—“afternoon in the States. You should be able to get her.” He hands her his cell phone, and Marina sits up.
She punches the number in slowly. Guilt sinks into her stomach—she hasn’t called Haifa since she landed, and in the day and a half since arriving, Marina has lived a lifetime.
She wanted to find herself in her grandmother’s city, and now she feels stupid for even trying.
The phone grows warm by her cheek as she clutches it tightly.
“Hello?” Her mother’s voice is such a breath of home that tears instantly prick at the back of Marina’s eyes.
“Mama?” she whispers.
“Marina? Sweetie, are you okay?” Haifa’s voice becomes clearer; she’s clenching the phone closer to her cheek. “What number is this?”
“I’m fine,” Marina says, and relays the entire trip to her mother. Haifa gasps almost immediately, concern rushing her every word.
“Marina! Marina, oh my god,” Haifa says, not even waiting for her to finish. “I’m coming to you. I’ll come to you. Don’t worry—I’ll buy my ticket right after this.”
“No, Mama, it’s okay. Please,” Marina says, but she knows it’s fruitless to dissuade her mother now. Her breath comes in gaspingly short spurts. “I can come home.”