The End of the Ocean

Chapter 16 DAVID

We didn’t sleep, neither Lou nor I. It was just the two of us in the tiny cloth cubicle.

I had hung a sheet over the doorway. It created some form of privacy. Even though everyone could hear us.

I mopped up the vomit on the floor with a dry rag I’d found in the broom closet. I hoped I could find some water to wash with in the morning. My fingers smelled. But I grew accustomed to it, became immune.

But more smells emerged; now it started coming out the other end.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lou cried suddenly. “Now!”

She wanted to run out but I stopped her.

“Use the bucket,” I said.

“No, I don’t want to use the bucket.”

“We won’t make it to the toilet.”

She stopped moving. Hesitated. Made a face, and then crouched down. Apparently she couldn’t hold it in any longer. She pulled off her underpants and bent her knees, completely naked. Helplessly, she tried to aim into the red plastic bucket.

I held her, helped her hit her mark.

It happened immediately, exploding loudly towards the bottom of the plastic bucket.

I could hear people moving around in the cubicle around us. They knew what was happening. They found the sound of it disgusting.

I was embarrassed, but then I caught myself. It wasn’t my damn fault. And above all, none of this was Lou’s fault.

She sat down on the bucket. Her bottom was so tiny that she almost fell inside. She defecated some more.

When she finally finished there were red marks on the backs of her thighs from the bucket.

I dried her without a second thought, even though I had stopped doing so two years ago. She had liked learning to do it herself. But now she was shaking terribly.

The roll of toilet paper was almost finished. I had to find more. But the last time I went to the bathroom, I couldn’t find any.

I pulled on her underpants. They hung loosely around her hips. I lifted her up. Her body almost disappeared in my arms.

I laid her down in the bed. Pulled the sheet over her. She occupied only a small part of the mattress.

The bucket was left on the floor, stinking.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“What if there’s more?”

“I’m going to empty the bucket now.”

“But what if I don’t make it? If it gets on the bed?”

“It will be fine.”

“But what if?”

I pulled out the only sweater I had and tied it around her waist and beneath her crotch, like a diaper.

At one point in the middle of the night I ventured out to the first-aid barracks. I knew they were open round the clock.

But it was locked and the windows were dark. Two bags of trash lay outside. One of them was open and turned upside down; hypodermic needles and soiled bandages lay in the grass.

She wailed.

She retched again and again. Only yellow strings of slime came out of her mouth.

“Drink,” I said, and held the cup out for her.

But she couldn’t even keep water down.

“I don’t want to,” she sobbed between heaves.

“It’s better,” I said. “It’s better to throw up water than not to throw up anything.”

What didn’t come out at one end, came out the other.

The odors mingled. Soon I no longer noticed them.

She slept, woke up, fell asleep again.

Every time she fell asleep, I thought that now, finally, it had passed.

But then it returned. As if somebody had grabbed hold of her stomach. Pulled at it. Twisted it. An instrument of torture being screwed deeper and deeper inside her.

She’d had tummy bugs before. But never anything like this.

I tried to remember what Anna used to do. Things she’d had in the first-aid cupboard. Charcoal tablets. Loperamide. Now I had nothing. And Lou refused to drink fluids.

I had nothing. She only had me.

Anna. Where are you? How the hell can you leave me all alone?

The hours dragged by. I was so tired. So groggy. So afraid. So awake. I lost all track of time, didn’t notice how much time had passed until I realized it was dawn.

I heard a sound just outside. Soft footsteps that stopped outside our cubicle.

Anna, I thought. She’s come now. She’s here. She heard Lou. Her child is ill. She can’t be away when her child is ill. It’s Anna.

“Excuse me?” a voice said. “Do you need any help?”

It was a man’s voice.

At first I was disappointed. Then I felt relieved, just because somebody had come. Anybody.

I pulled the sheet to one side.

It was Francis.

He stared at Lou. His eyes became shiny.

“I could hear her all night long,” he said.

“I guess everyone did,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“She won’t drink anything.”

“Have you been to the first-aid barracks?”

“Closed.”

“Did you get any sleep?”

“No.”

“Take my bed. I’ll sit with her.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t leave her.”

“You can hear everything anyway.”

His bed was neatly made, as if he hadn’t slept in it.

I lay down gingerly on top of the sheet, not wanting to wrinkle it. I lay completely still until I drifted off to sleep.

Her whimpers became a soundtrack for strange dreams.

I was in the water again. I was sinking. Above me it grew darker and darker. But I made no effort to get to the surface.

I heard her whimpers from far below and thought I needed to get to her. That sinking was a good thing.

That I wanted to sink.

Francis’s voice pulled me up slowly. He was singing to her.

It was broad daylight. The hall had come to life around us, but I couldn’t hear Lou.

I hurried in to them, stopped in the doorway. She was sleeping peacefully.

“Go ahead and get some more rest,” Francis said.

“That’s OK,” I said and sat down beside him.

He looked at me. “You need to sleep.”

“No, I don’t.”

I turned towards Lou. She was lying on her back, with her arms over her head and her hair spread across the pillow. She was breathing calmly.

“Nice kid,” Francis said.

“Yes. She is,” I said.

“You’re lucky.”

“Yes.”

I remembered the bandage he had taken out of the trash can in the first-aid barracks. Was it a kind of keepsake? The only thing he had left?

“Do you have a daughter?” I asked. “A grown daughter?”

He looked away. “I have a daughter… No, I had a daughter.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I mean… my condolences.”

The words felt heavy in my mouth. I couldn’t remember ever having spoken the phrase previously. Old fashioned, it belonged in a museum. But it was what people said.

“Contaminated water,” he said. “Poisoning. It all happened so quickly.”

Poisoning. So quickly. So quickly. A dead daughter. Two dead daughters.

“I think this is the same thing,” I forced myself to say.

He turned to face me again. “What did you say?”

I drew a breath, and tried to speak normally. “Lou ingested some water yesterday, from a rainwater tank in a garden.”

At first he didn’t reply. Then he said slowly: “It’s usually fine. It was bad luck, what happened to my daughter.”

“Bad luck?”

“She didn’t have much strength left.”

“But Lou… She’s so thin.”

I laid my hand on her forehead.

“Do you think she’s very warm?” I asked.

“I haven’t touched her,” he said. “Just been sitting here.”

“Feel her forehead. Please.”

He stroked her face with his good hand.

“She’s warm”

“Right?”

“But I’ve seen worse.”

“Really?”

“Don’t think her temperature is even 39 °C.”

“No?”

“It’s 38.5. Tops.”

“But she won’t drink anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Almost nothing.”

“It’s going to be all right.”

He looked at me and smiled as if I were a little boy. It made me feel like a child. I was a boy. He was the same age as my father. He could have been my father. I almost wished that he was my father.

“You said you’re from Perpignan?” I asked.

“Yes…”

“Where are you headed, then?” I asked.

“I was headed here.”

“Same here,” I said. “We were headed here.”

“And then?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We’re waiting for someone. For my wife. And my son. He’s just a baby. His name is August and he’s one year old.”

“You’re fortunate,” he said. “You have someone to wait for.”

The entire day passed. He stayed nearby. We took turns sitting with Lou. She didn’t get better. A few times I got some water into her. It always came straight up again.

She spoke very little. With every passing hour she became more and more unresponsive.

Several times I went to the first-aid clinic. But it was still closed.

I asked a security guard. He didn’t know anything, hadn’t seen the doctors for several days.

And there was still no toilet paper.

In the afternoon Francis was gone for a long time. I started wondering whether he had given up on us and I had worked up some anger by the time he came back. But the anger melted away when I saw what he’d found.

A soda. A can of sugary soda. I couldn’t remember the last time Lou had had something like that.

“Where did that come from?” I asked.

“She needs sugar and fluids,” he said. “And salt.”

He held out a small bag of kitchen salt. “Before you give her the soda, pour this in it.”

He gave me the salt and the can of soda. I sat there holding the can in my hand, taking in the sensation of the smooth metal against my fingers.

The list of ingredients included additives. Artificial sweeteners, with neither fruit nor berries.

But the sugar was the most important thing, after all. And the salt.

She slept for another few hours. But more calmly and she woke up less and less frequently.

Then, around midnight, something finally happened.

I had fallen asleep, and was lying in bed directly across from her, but I woke up immediately when I heard her talking.

“Thirsty,” she said. “Daddy?”

I sat up quickly.

“Yes.”

I rushed to open the can. The sound was the most beautiful thing I had heard in a long time. The sigh of the bubbling carbonation when I lifted the aluminum tab.

“Soda?” Lou said. “Soda!”

“Wait,” I said.

I poured some of the salt into the soda. It fizzed upon contact with the carbonated liquid.

I put one hand under her head and held the can up to her lips with the other.

She swallowed.

She drank. Large gulps.

Finally she was drinking. My child was drinking.