What Is The What

CHAPTER 19

'Let's go, Valentine.'

Julian is standing in front of me. He has returned.

'MRI. Follow me.'

I stand up and follow Julian out of the emergency room and down the hallway. The floor smells of human feces.

'Homeless guy shat in here,' Julian tells me, his walk surprisingly nimble. We reach the elevator bank and he pushes the button.

'Sorry you got mugged, man,' he says.

We step into the elevator. It is 1:21 a.m.

'Happened to me, too. A few months ago,' he says. 'Same kind of thing. Two kids, one of them had a gun. They followed me home from the store and got me in the stairwell. Stupid. They were about two hundred pounds, both of them put together.'

I glance again at Julian. He's powerfully built, not the sort of man one would expect to be targeted for a mugging. But if he were wearing his hospital uniform, perhaps they considered him a peaceful man.

'What did they take?' I ask.

'Take? They took nothing, man. I'm a vet! I was back from Iraq five weeks when they tried that shit on me. The whole way home I knew they were following me. I had plenty of time to decide what to do, so I made a plan: I was gonna break one of their noses, then take that guy's gun and shoot his friend with it. The one I didn't kill I'd hold till the cops came. He'd spend the rest of his life scared straight. Hey, what's your middle name, anyway-how do you say it?'

'Achak,' I say, skipping quickly over the first syllable. In Sudan, the 'A' is barely audible.

'You heard of Chaka Khan?' Julian asks.

I tell him that I haven't.

'Forget it,' he says. 'Dumb reference.'

This man makes me ashamed that I didn't do more against my attackers. I, too, have been in a war, though I suppose I never was trained the way this man Julian was. I glance at his arms, which are carved and tattooed, at least three times the size of my own.

The elevator opens and we arrive at the MRI unit. There is an Indian man waiting for us. He says nothing to either of us. We walk past him and into a large room with a circular tomb in the center. A flat bed extends from the hole in the center.

'You ever done one of these?' Julian asks me.

'No,' I say. 'I've never seen a machine like this.'

'Don't worry. It doesn't hurt. Just don't think of cremation.'

I lower myself onto the white bed. 'Do I keep my eyes open or closed?'

'Up to you, Valentine.'

I decide to keep my eyes open. Julian leaves my side and I hear his footsteps, almost silent, as he leaves the room. I am alone as the bed glides into the chamber.

The ring above me whirs and rotates around my skull and I think of Tonya and Powder and remember that they are free and will never be caught. By now they are selling my possessions to a pawn shop and have deposited Michael at whatever place he considers home. They believe they have taught me a lesson and they are correct.

Above me, the smaller ring begins to turn inside the larger ring.

I have high hopes for this test. I have heard of the MRI; its name was invoked many times, by Mary Williams and Phil and others who sought to discover why my headaches persisted. And now I will finally know what is wrong with me, I will receive the answer. At Pinyudo one day, under a striped white ceiling of clouds, Father Matong taught us about the Last Judgment. When boys such as myself made clear we were scared of being so judged, he allayed our fears. Judgment is relief, he said. Judgment is release. One walks through life unsure if he has done right or wrong, Father Matong said, but only judgment from God can provide certainty about the way one has lived. I have thought about his lesson many times since. I have been unsure about so many things, chief among them whether or not I have been a good child of God. I am inclined to think that I have done so much wrong, for otherwise I would not have been punished so many times, and He would not have seen fit to harm so many of those I love.

The noise of the machine above me is steady, a mechanical murmur that sounds at once reassuring and utterly certain of itself.

I know that the MRI is not the judgment from above, but still, it promises to release me from so many questions. Why does my head still ache so many mornings? Why do I so often dress with a piercing pain in the back of my head, its tendrils shooting from the back of my skull into the very whites of my eyes? I have hope that if I know the answer to questions like these, even if the diagnosis is dire, I will have some relief. The MRI might explain why I continue to receive occasionally mediocre grades at Georgia Perimeter College, even though I know I should be and can be excelling there. Why have I been in the United States for five years now and seem to have made so little progress? And why must everyone I know die prematurely, and in increasingly shocking ways? Julian, you know of only a small portion of the death I have seen. I have spared you the details of Jor, a boy I knew in Pinyudo, who was taken by a lion only inches from me. We had gone to fetch water at dusk, walking through the high grass. One moment I could feel Jot's breath on my neck, and the next I could smell the animal, its dark-smelling sweat. I turned and saw Jor limp, dead in its jaws. The lion was looking directly at me, emotionless, and we stared at each other for days and nights. Then he turned and left with Jor. Julian, I do not want to think of myself as important enough that God would choose me for extraordinary punishment, but then again, the circumference of calamity that surrounds me is impossible to ignore.

The inner ring has performed a full revolution and now stops. The quiet in the room is absolute. Now footsteps.

'Not too bad, right?' Julian is at my side.

'Yes, thank you,' I say. 'It was interesting.'

'Well, that's that. Let's head back downstairs.'

I stand and need a moment to steady myself against the machine. It is warmer than I had expected. 'What happens now?' I ask. 'Do you read the results?'

'Who, me? No, no. Not me.'

We pass the operator behind the glass and I see, in the dark room, screen images of a cross-section of a head-mine? — colored in greens, yellows, reds. Like satellite pictures of weather systems from another planet.

'Is that me?'

'That's you, Valentine.'

We stand for a moment at the glass, watching as the screen changes to what I assume are different sections of my brain, different ways of seeing it. It is a violation, that this stranger can examine my head without knowing me.

'Does that man examine the results?' I ask.

'No, not him, either. He's just the technician. Not a doctor.'

'Oh.'

'Pretty soon, Valentine. Right now there's no one here who knows how to read the scans. That doctor doesn't come in for a while. You can wait where you were before. You hungry?'

I tell him I am not, and he gives me a doubtful look.

We ride the elevator back up. I ask him if he killed one of the boys.

'That's the one thing I didn't do. The second they called me bitch, I turned on them, threw one of their heads against the wall, and kicked the second guy in the chest. He hadn't even pulled his gun yet. The one kid was unconscious against the wall and the one I kicked, he was on the ground. I put my knee on his chest, took the gun and played with him for a few minutes. Put the gun in his mouth, all that. He pissed his pants. Then I called the cops. Took them forty-five minutes to get there.'