Tikki

After so many months of war, I want to write about love. And what better love than one that defies all space, all boundaries, and time. Love that is truly immortal.

By Michael Oren

There were times, when recording his vitals or calling for a nurse to change his pan, that she felt him looking at her. His eyes shockingly bright and topaz-colored seemed to follow her out of a face drained of all but gray and rippled with wattles and jowls. She could almost hear him as well, calling out to her by the name stitched on her crisp green scrubs—Dr. Hamilton—or by Astryd, her first name, or by Tikki, the nickname which only her mother knew. All of which was creepy for she had never been introduced to this patient, vegetative since the day of her arrival, nor of course exchanged a word with him. Chalk it up to insomnia, she told herself. Must cut down on the Valium.

Not that she lacked for downtime. Between check-ups, she could lounge in a comfortable den astride the bedroom, lie on the sofa, and pry off her shoes. She could catch up on her reading—Flaubert was her latest craze—or respond to the endless emails from her mother, needling her about her love life, and from relatives asking for checks. Eyes crimpled, she could shut out the bleep-and-whir of the machines that kept the old man breathing and hear the birdsong coming through the large bay window above her. Opening its latch, she could let in the fragrance of rose petals and honeysuckle wafting from the gardens below. She had no reason, Dr. Astryd Hamilton, to complain.

Yet she did. Quietly, for she was a private person, but acridly she griped about the student loans and family obligations that had her working here, as a personal physician earning absurd amounts of money instead of serving on the staff of a major medical facility, researching, publishing papers, helping humanity. People would assume that she’d gotten into med school on less than her own merits and was incapable of landing a residency. People would think that a woman this beautiful—paisley-eyed and succulent-mouthed, her sienna skin offset by jet-black locs and cornrows—had gotten by solely on her looks. In fact, she had no boyfriend, Astryd, nor much need for one. Her desires had been supplanted fossil-like by frustrations.

Returning to the den and its sofa, Astryd picked up her copy of A Simple Heart but soon began nodding off. Sleep had avoided her for several nights now, a harried wakefulness stoked by a sense of impending trauma. Dreams approached but never materialized, snippets of longings and rage.

Even now, drifting off, she failed to find total rest. She tossed, rather, on the sofa for untold minutes until awakened by her inner alarm. It’d rung since her childhood, a secret siren that summoned the strength to overcome near-poverty on the island, to excel on exams, and graduate from mainland universities. To survive on her own in a foreign land, far from her family, and emerge unscathed from three long-term relationships. An inner bell sounded, and Astryd glanced at her watch. Time to register the old man’s oxygen levels, adjust his tubes, and press her stethoscope to the brittle cage that barely held his heart.

With sterile professionalism, she performed. If she were going to be reduced to this, high-end babysitting, she would accomplish it with the same precision for she always strove for. That insistence no doubt contributed to the failure of her affairs—the men good enough for her certainly, on paper, but still intimidated by her and ultimately cruel. Gathering up their shattered dignity, they broke up with her, and though she cried, she was happy to see them go. Real love—tested, effective, pure—was unattainable. Why settle, then, for placebos?

Astryd completed her tasks and drew the blanket over her patient’s husk. Weird that she knew so little about him, just titbits overheard from the staff. A first name—Edmund or Edgar—and a personal history that began with manual labor and ended, now, with riches. Yet alone, no family surrounding him, no wife, only an overpaid physician at whom she swore he stared.

Though sightless, his eyes seemed to seize her. Watering, wincing slightly, they fixed on her and drew her into their blue. Nonsense, she thought, remembering what she’d learned about patients in this condition, technically alive but braindead. Don’t be an idiot. And yet she would swear she could hear her name being whispered—Dr. Hamilton, Astryd, even Tikki. The old man’s mouth, barely a crease, never moved.

She left the bedside and retreated to the den and its sofa. Instantly, she sensed a change in the temperature, a breeze. The cool of an early spring morning drifted into the den along with the garden’s sensual scents. It took her a second or two to realize the latch on the window had been opened—jimmied from the outside—and an earthenware vase positioned on its sill. Left for her was a spray of blue-violet hyacinths.

Who, she wondered, and why? Prints on the sill told of a workingman’s fingers along with still-fresh nicks from a ladder. But peering out, Astryd saw nothing, just rows of burgeoning flowers, one after the other, filing off into the distance. Shrugging, hugging the vase to her chest, she closed the window but purposely left it unlatched. Some doctor, she berated herself. “Such foolishness,” she could almost hear her mother warning her. A girl could get herself killed.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully and by evening, after summoning the nurse to shift the old man’s body and freshen up his sheets, Astryd went home. Or hardly to a home but to a sparsely furnished apartment, two-and-a-half spartan rooms with a single bed and a TV she scarcely had the energy to watch. This was the life she’d sworn to lead until her debts were paid off and her relatives shunted. Until she could figure out what, besides freedom, she wanted—companionship, perhaps, or compassion. Love lay beyond belief.

Another near-sleepless night, not even the Valium helped, and dreams of thorny hyacinths. Her inner alarm aroused her at dawn, sent her stumbling into the shower and punching into the scrubs inscribed with her name, Dr. Hamilton. Well before her shift began, she entered the old man’s estate. She didn’t go directly to his bedroom, though, but paused to peek into the den.

The bay window was once again gaping, and another gift left on the sill. A terra cotta bowl brimming with strawberries. They glistened in the morning light, claret-red and sweating. Outside, she still saw nothing, only fresh fingerprints and ladder-nicks and the gardens surging into bloom. Plucking one of the strawberries, lodging it between her lips, she drew in the juice and pondered. A prowler was on the loose, a stalker—should she alert one of the members of the staff? Or should she simply ignore whoever it was having a lark at her expense and focus on the assignment at hand? Yes, that’s what she would do, Astryd determined, and turned back to her patient’s room. The window, though, remained open.

The old man was just as she’d left him the previous evening, furled over his knees like a fallen leaf and rattling. She straightened his body as best she could—even now, denuded, it was hefty—and took his blood pressure. She perused a printed EKG and the charts hung at the foot of his bed, all the while aware of those eyes. They were staring at her again, sightless but penetrating. His wrinkled mouth remained still but again she heard her name called out—her names, rather, formal and intimate. But instead of creepy this time, the feeling was warm, as if she, and not the old man, were being nursed. “Thank you,” she wanted to tell him. “You’re sweet,” but didn’t.

Instead, she rushed out into the den, half-expecting to find another surprise on the windowsill but not to gasp so loudly it nearly sounded like a scream and might have become one if the young man weren’t trembling so violently.

“Please…don’t…”

“Don’t what!” Astryd barked, stunned by her own ferocity. “Don’t call the police? Don’t get you thrown into jail?”

“Forgive me,” he muttered. “I just couldn’t help it anymore.”

“Help what? Breaking and entry? Assault?”

“Just seeing you from down there. In the gardens where I work. Day after day.” He looked up at her with a face no less beautiful than hers, sunbaked, fine-featured, and smooth, manly yet boyish. His hair was a ganglion of gold. He, too, wore scrubs, though his were khaki not green and dirt-stained on the knees and elbows. No name was stitched on the breast. “I had to meet you.”

“And now that you have, I suggest you go out the way you came in.” With her chin and finger, she pointed toward the window. “Now.”

“Yes. Of course. I’m going.” The young man muttered while nevertheless remaining in place. Only his hands seemed capable of movement, callused, soil-laced hands kneading a canvas boonie hat. “Just let me…just for a second…Look.”

His eyes, already wide, broadened and bathed her in blue. The sensation was not unpleasant—on the contrary, Astryd felt reassured by this intruder, intrigued. Her mother’s voice came to her again, reminding her that this is exactly how women get killed, but the sight of this man-child—protective and harmless, virile and sweet—overpowered it.

“Second’s over,” she said with a fold of arms across her chest. Being stared at like that, so fervidly, made her feel naked suddenly, stripped of scrubs and undergarments, yet somehow inviolate. Another second passed and several others, but Astryd no longer spoke.

Finally, he said, “My name is Ned,” and gulped. “The gardener,” and she thought who cares? Still, she found herself saying, “And mine is…” only to pause, aware that introducing herself would be crossing a line from which there was no way back. But back to what, she wondered. “Mine is…”

“Dr. Hamilton.” He pointed at the forearm that was covering the embroidery of her name and smiled. The smile of a friend not seen for many years, of a lover who awakens from dewy dreams. “Astryd,” he added, “Astreed,” in her island accent.

“How did you know that?”

Ned shrugged. “There are many things I don’t know.” He edged toward her, hesitantly at first, then striding. The boonie hat fell to the floor. “I’m just the gardener,” he said. “You’re the physician.”

With hyacinths in his eyes and a breath that smelled of topsoil, he came closer. Astryd didn’t flinch. She was trying to place his face, its slender nose and tapered lips, which she might have seen before, and struggling not to succumb. She failed.

“Tikki,” he whispered, leaned slightly forward, and kissed her.

And Astryd kissed him back, hungrily and tenderly at once. In the center of the den they embraced, as oblivious to the birdsong as they were to the pumps and respirators purring in the next room. They kissed and suddenly she felt his sinewy arms lifting her, could feel his body, its beds and borders like a garden she was desperate to tend. Limply, she was led to the sofa.

Afterwards, she slept. A plush sleep such as she hadn’t enjoyed in months, possibly years. But her inner alarm eventually aroused her, and she awoke to find herself alone and naked on the sofa. A breeze, softer than the morning’s, entered through the bay window which Ned had exited, leaving only footprints on the floorboards and earth marks on her back. Quickly, Astryd dressed and hurried to her patient’s bedside.

His condition had worsened, she noted. Blood pleasure down, pulse up, oxygen levels lowering. Yet she sensed a new animateness about him—vegetative, yes, but sentient. From steel wool filaments, his hair regained some of its elasticity, his mouth less a rictus than a device for conveying desires. Life vaguely stirred in his cheeks. All this was in her imagination, Astryd knew, an offshoot of the joy she so recently experienced with Ned.

Had that really happened? Could it be she’d just made love with a man she’d never met before, a gardener who climbed through a window? It was all too improbable, especially for a stolid person like Astryd, yet deliciously so. Still, the thought occurred to her that perhaps she’d only fantasized it, a delusion brought on by too many ineffective Valiums.

These questions taunted her as she increased the flow in one IV and replenished the bag in another. She fought the urge to rush through the tasks, reminding herself of her oaths, yet she couldn’t wait to return to the den and its sofa. “Will he come again?” she questioned out loud. “Or will he be threatened, just like the others, and run?”

“Dr. Hamilton…”

She glared at the old man, as if the sound might have emanated from him. But he continued to lie there motionless, mute except for his wheezing. Yet his eyes were wet with words.

“Astryd.”

No, the voice came from outside the bedroom—the den! She tore off her gloves and ran.

“Tikki…” he managed to utter before Astryd leapt at him. But, lithe and supple, Ned absorbed the blow and once again hoisted her onto the sofa.

The light by the time they’d finished was dwindling. Dusky smells infiltrated through the window from below. Yet they continued to lie almost on top of another on a sofa made for catnaps. They spoke of their lives—her childhood on an island, which, materially and metaphysically, could not have been further from where she was now and her constant need to outdo. Ned, by contrast, had never left the estate, like his father, raking its gardens. Not expecting too much from life, just the glory of growth and color. They talked, a chiaroscuro of limbs, well into the night.

So it continued for the next several days, Ned ascending twice, sometimes more, to be set upon and ravished by Astryd, cradled and clasped. The little time she spent at home, and the even fewer hours she devoted to her patient, passed trance-like. Ned, suddenly, was her only reality and the rest mere facsimiles. Ned, a man at peace with himself, accepting of her and eager to learn, a listener. And yet, after tracing their pasts and racing through the present, their conversations invariably stalled.

“A future? How can there be?”

“Why? Because I’m a simple workman?”

“No! No!” Astryd pounded her temple onto his chest. “Because I am not a free woman. I owe money, lots of money, and my family expects my support.”

Ned laughed high and throaty—even that was half-boy—and held her to his flank. “But you could leave it all. Follow me out of the window, through the gardens, into the world. Follow me out, tonight.”

“And because I still have ambitions,” Astryd whispered. “I still what to amount to something. Medically. To prove…” She could confess things like this to Ned, her dogged self-love dueling with insecurities. “Fact is this whole thing”—by which she meant her employment at the estate, the dirt prints on the floor, their bodies stacked for hours on the sofa—“is impossible.”

“But what isn’t?” Now it was Ned’s turn to whisper. “The oceans, the field mice, the sky. All of them utterly impossible. Yet here they are.” He practically sang to her. “And so are we.”

Steadily, he persuaded her. Yes, they would run away—any place was good enough if sufficiently infused with their love. For that’s what she felt toward him already, a roiling, shimmering love unlike any she’d ever known. Inexplicable, irrefutable. And fueled by it, they would travel to a faraway town, rebuild her career and establish his landscaping business. Sculpted lawns for her clinic and their house, a yard for their boisterous children. For once her dreams were coherent. No more hectoring mother, no more relatives nagging for cash. All that remained was to finish her work at the estate. She couldn’t leave the old man, not now with the end so near. For even toward this semi-menial job, Astryd was a person of commitments.

And she fulfilled them, dutifully measuring the blood sugar and ketones levels, feeling for fremitus with her hand. The echocardiogram documented her patient’s descent. Yet his topaz eyes remained opened, unclouded, and moist. More intensely, they focused on her, forced her to gaze into a face which, despite its ravages, somehow seemed familiar. His mouth, though unmoving, seemed to fill with her names.

“Tikki,” she distinctly heard, but it wasn’t the old man speaking but her mother once again excoriating her in her head. “Silly girl, only fools believe in fantasies,” she badgered, a woman who believed in sorts of magic—potions, incantations, the transmigration of souls. Changing the bedsores bandages, Astryd cringed. “You going to get yourself hurt or worse,” her mother went on while her daughter examined the skin for lesions. “For once just listen to me, Tikki.”

“Tikki,” came another voice from the den. Ned’s. The sound of it astonished her, for she didn’t remember telling him that or any of her names. Yet there was little he didn’t know about her. Their lives had become enmeshed.

A few more tests remained, but Astryd convinced herself that these could wait until the evening. She needed to spend every available moment with Ned, treasuring them, dreading the last when he escaped once more through the window. She would leave it unlatched¸ though, ready for his return.

That night, they made love more frenetically than usual. The sofa rattled loud enough to waken the entire estate and yet no one, not even the duty nurse, disturbed them. “Now, Tikki,” he exhorted her. “Tonight.”

“Not yet, my love. Almost.”

“But almost might be too late.”

“Never!” She locked her arms around his torso, so tightly their bodies blended; her fingers got lost in his hair. “You’ll always be here. Always have and always will.”

And with that, she fell asleep. A dreamless slumber, it would have anesthetized her until morning if not for her inner alarm. Only this time, the ringing wasn’t internal. She sprung up from the sofa, clutched her clothes, and hurried to the bedroom. There, the heart monitor was emitting a single whiny tone. Flatlining.

There was nothing more to do. Though not her responsibility, Astryd arranged the cadaver on the bed, folded the arms across its chest, and drew down the eyelids. “Everything is impossible,” she remembered Ned saying, “and yet everything is.” Everything, that is, Astryd thought, except immortality. People age, people sicken, and no amount of wishing can prevent it. The world might allow for a doctor and a gardener to randomly meet and improbably love, but not for a dying old man, no matter how rich, to live.

He was gone and Astryd was free. From that night onward, she would no longer have to meet others’ expectations and the money she earned would be her own. And Ned’s. Through an open bay window that world had opened up for her. To claim it, she need only return to the den.

But the den was empty. The sofa sat unruffled, as though no one had even laid on it, the floors spotless. Astryd gasped, she moaned, and finally blushed. Everything is possible, perhaps, she reasoned, and yet her mother was right: only fools believe in fantasies. Ned was gone and most likely never existed, a mere projection, a wish. The last magic act of a departing soul. Alone in the scrubs that reminded her of her name, Dr. Hamilton examined the window. Its inside latch was locked.