THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 55
you got over it. “Blushing like a girl.”
Or boy.
But he knew that he himself could
still go pink-faced for no obvious rea-
son. Perhaps he was blushing now, in
his car, recalling the blushes of de-
cades ago. Though did you blush—it
was a paradox—if no one could see
you? And soon he would be conceal-
ing himself not just in a face mask
but in layers of protective clothing.
All to spare his blushes?
Was it the crumb in Mrs. Simms’s
bosom, or the vexing question she had
put to him? Was it the prospect that
lay behind the question, that had never
so invitingly floated before his vision?
That life itself might be a great choos-
ing of girls. Girls! How delightful.
What happiness.
But, if it was true, it was over now.
The women of his life. And he him-
self might be near the end, for all the
care he took with his protective gear.
Near the end and, so it seemed,
near the beginning. Ten. It was what
they said happened when you drowned.
You saw your whole life pass before
you. And it was what the patients did,
in the unit, when they reached the
end. Effectively, they drowned.T
he hospital was now very close. He
could see in the dip of the road its
tall incinerator chimney and the span-
gle of lit-up windows in the not yet full
April daylight. At any moment, he might
be chased and overtaken by an ambu-
lance, with a quick blast of its siren. One
morning, he’d been overtaken by three.In a few minutes, he would have to
switch off his memory. Apply himself
only to what was before him. He would
have to turn off his life.
How would this pandemic pan out?
No one knew. He could only do what
he could, for several uncountable
hours, in a place of great suffering.
And risk.
Some of the staff were near to snap-
ping, he could see. Psychiatry was not
his field, either, but he could see. They
had homes and families to deal with,
not just in their memories. They did
not have empty mansions with auto-
matic garage doors.
A cheery colleague had said in one
of their brief breaks that this was only
a blip. The pandemic was a blip. It was
just a great preliminary distraction
from the real calamity, that the planet
would be uninhabitable, for human
beings, within a century. Unless mir-
acles were performed.
He saw again the shimmering an-
cient trees, watching like sentinels over
the gardens. He saw the lawn. His fa-
ther had mowed it specially on the
eve of his birthday. He saw the party
frocks. He saw that wardrobe of ill-
nesses so gallantly put on by little souls,
then happily discarded. He saw Mrs.
Simms. Her bare shoulders. He saw
his mother. And he saw himself lying
in bed just a week later, his mother
leaning toward him and Dr. Hender-
son in his chair.
It was because of Dr. Henderson,
he was sure of it, that his mother had
wanted him to become a doctor. The
two of them had left his bedroom and
gone downstairs for their cups of
tea. He could hear only the murmur
of their voices. No words. Grownup
conversation. Then Dr. Henderson
had left.
But he heard again now his mother
saying to Dr. Henderson in the striped
chair, “Unless he’s just blushing,” though
with that look that was meant for him,
lying beneath the bedclothes. And so
he knew, after Dr. Henderson had com-
pleted his diagnosis, that it must have
been on his tenth birthday, at his won-
derful birthday party, that he’d caught
scarlet fever. WHATTHEANGELS E AT
as children we ate watermelons over trash bags in my aunt’s back yard
filled with so many black & blue-eyed crows
it stopped being an omen & they’d eat what fell to the ground
& our skin stayed onwe’d get yelled at for spitting seeds at each other
saliva thick with red
we made a war from the sweetest things
the flies made a mess of our dancing
the flies made a dance in our messesour mothers thanked god it was not the blood feared
a watermelon’s vine would wrap itself around you
if you fell asleep under them watching meteors
melons make magic under midnight moonsi once grew watermelons that flowers could sing
if i sat there singing
the way my aunts break out into song i mean beautiful
like that the flowers would start movingi’m so free i make a river on both sides of my mouth
a fruit full of kinship
it once grew wild & bitter
in the kalahari desertthe grandmother of all the watermelons the first water
my grandmothers share a bowl every sunday
and drip juice on the floor
but never stain a sole
the only fruit the dead can eat—Tyree DayeNEWYORKER.COM
Graham Swift on ghost worlds.