X-Ray

by Jamey Genna

Craig will soon work as an x-ray technician at a local hospital in the small western city where he lives. The city is burgeoning—everything is growing outward into the open dry plain, suburban mini-malls, Pep Boys franchises, Burger Kings, Perkins restaurants, hotels—the Holiday Inn added an additional wing and built a new interior court with a fountain for its room tower. Craig used to be a mailman—he had a mail truck that he drove around town, and it was a secure job, but it had no interest for him. So, Craig joined the army in order to get x-ray technician training. He has to go to London in a week or so. He is not yet an x-ray tech, but he is doing a voluntary internship at the hospital. Right now, he is limited to moving the arm of the equipment—telling women to lift their knees, to lie still, placing a pad over the breastplate to keep the machine from charring their fragile lung tissue with invisible radiation. X-raying tailbone, shin, and angles of bone. He is looking forward to boot camp because he wants the forced workout. Now he has to get up at six a.m. every morning to go to the local gym and get his abdominal workout in. The gym is where he met this girl he likes. She was there at six with her eyes barely open one day. He had seen her there before—teaching aerobics classes and playing squash or racquetball with other members or once with her husband.

Mornings he sits on one of the long benches in the weight room and he draws his knees into his chest and extends his legs out at particular angles to test the endurance of his torso. He teaches this technique to the girl he meets there. He is not yet interested enough in her to venture a fantasy about her. She can match him for curls and extensions and even has more endurance than he has, extending and tucking past forty or even fifty.

On another morning she is seated on the floor in the weight room, pulling the trapezius gripbar into her chest, when the pull-down bar over her head flips off its hook and clangs to the floor. It lands at an angle across her shin, leaving a metallic stripe across the muscle and a huge knot of a bruise on the bone. He rushes over to help her. That is when he tells her that he is leaving for London in about a week or so to be an x-ray technician. She seems to admire that about him—that he wants to be something besides a mailman.

That night he has a dream about her. That she is lying on the metal x-ray table and he tells her to lift her knee, to place her foot at this angle and this. Then he oddly pushes a safety pin through just the outer layer of the tender skin at the back of her waist and then into the elastic waistband of a swimsuit she is wearing. He wakes up and thinks about the weird eroticism of the dream and that is when he begins to think about her in earnest during his daylight hours.

A few days later, she is standing by herself watching a racquetball game, and he comes over to tease her that she did not show up for their six a.m. crunches. She turns to smile at him with a warmth and intensity that makes him want to put his arm around her in this very public place, but he settles for standing very close to her and leaning on the narrow counter overlooking the court, letting his shoulder and his elbow touch hers.

*****

Her name is Rachel and she likes the fuzzy blue x-ray tech shirt Craig is wearing to work out in. It is warm and smells nicely of the leather bench that she does her leg curls on and of some of his light male sweat. She’s pleased that he’s noticed her. She teases him about his obsession with his abs and says that she missed her workout, because she got fed up with getting up at six a.m. She says that no one really appreciated her efforts, but that if Craig really missed her, she might force herself to come to the gym at six again. “Just for you,” she boasts and then laughs it off.

Whenever she’s out jogging, she imagines that she runs into Craig everywhere she goes. She runs across the park and down the incline of the hillside where the summer Shakespeare festival is held, past the wading pond for little kids and the fountain where the little kids linger, too. She imagines Craig out playing tennis and that he sees her running by and he calls out to her and she goes over and he comes over to lean on the fence, and he’s wearing that blue x-ray technician shirt that is reversible. She sees that the shirt is a badge of honor to him.

While he is standing next to her at the racquetball court, she asks him to get her a blue x-ray tech shirt to work out in, too, and he teases her that they are hard to come by, but then later he gives her the shirt off his back and she keeps it forever and doesn’t wash it so she can always have that smell nearby.

Other times at home, she imagines, too, that he gives her a ride home from somewhere and they go up along the rims overlooking the city when it is very dark outside and down below, the whole valley of streetlights becomes a thing of pleasure, a view people pay good money to see and here it lies in front of them, free for the taking. They get a blanket out of the car and they walk out a ways to a flat area, and they lie on the edge of the rock rims and make love with all of the city glimmering and growing upward and outward below them, meant to be there just for the two of them. And the only thing that is still and flat is her mind while it focuses on the action of what he would do to her while they are lying on a blanket which they pulled conveniently from the back of his car and that they lie on, on the flat rocks and grass and needles. Or maybe they got it from her car, because she likes her car better than his. He drives a sleek, tan Nissan, but she has her own shiny new red Volkswagon with a stick shift and a license plate that says “GETUFF.”

*****

Craig touches the tip of her nose and says that sure, he missed her, and she tells him to come swimming at her house that day because she’s having an impromptu party at her condominium because she has it all to herself while her husband is out of town.

Later, he looks at her in the pictures he gets developed in London. He took one of her that day and in it she is wearing a yellow camp shirt with a silly yellow and black leopard-spotted bikini with yellow ties on the sides, and everyone is eating tacos from Taco John’s and in the picture her hair falls forward over her face. She tries to catch the taco meat and the lettuce as it spills out of the cracked shell and she has that goofy sideways grin on her face in the picture. Everybody in the picture is brown and crinkly from lying in the sun all day. He was surprised that day when she asked him to come back later and watch videos alone with her. But he did it anyway.

*****

One time many years later, she lies on an x-ray table and remembers him—that he was going to be an x-ray tech and she wonders why she thought of him now after all these years. She had gone jogging and felt the bones in her foot give and throb and a hard knot of pain in one spot reminded her that her foot hadn’t ever healed from when she broke it. When she lay on the metal table, she didn’t want to pull her knees up and lie still because she had a pain in her tailbone, too, from all her years of teaching exercise classes and from running all the time. She can’t lie flat on a table anymore. This makes her really want to cry, because once upon a time, she could lie flat on her back without a second thought.

*****

The night at her condo, they drink cheap Sutter Home White Zinfandel and they watch unremembered videos and stay up past the time when the networks go off the air and then they eat grapes and then they finally shut the lights off and pretend they are just going to drop off into a drunken sleep, but they share one more grape and then a kiss and then another couple of grapes and then another couple of kisses. They are the nicest kisses Rachel can remember in a long time.

Rachel knows that Craig can’t want anything from the relationship. He just wants companionship, one last connection to America. And the next night when he is out with the guys at a local bar she goes and hunts him down and she gets him to take her drunken self home again, and this time she cries after they make love and in the morning the phone rings while they are standing on the tile hugging each other—her in his blue x-ray shirt, so he politely leaves as she goes to answer it.

*****

After Craig goes to London, Rachel thinks about his brown skin and his nose, which was a little large, and his crooked pinky finger on his right hand as it spread out against her hand. And of his feet, his torso—his prize abs, everything she can think about, she does. Every minute she can remember, she plays over and over and over again in her mind, and what she can’t remember, she tries to fill in. She can’t remember what he said when she was crying. She imagines getting on a jet plane and going to London to be with him, but she knows Craig doesn’t want anything from her—he just liked her for her brown skin and her long hair.

*****

Craig told himself he didn’t want anything from her, that he just liked her. But when he looks at her picture while living in the barracks outside of the London army base, he gets a notion to write her a letter. In it, he tells her about his new workout regime and numerates the exercises he does and even describes how to do them for her. He tells her it rains all the time in London and that they have many different kinds of beer and that they drink their beer warm there. And then Rachel writes him back and tells him about running in the fall and breaking her foot, and then how cold the weather is in the city, and then he gets a notion to call her at Christmas time, because she sends him a picture of herself on her Bahamian vacation and in the picture she’s packing her suitcase to go back to the city. She’s wearing a black see-through shirt with a black bra underneath and her long hair hangs partly over her face in the picture and she’s smiling her goofy smile, and he wonders what made her laugh when he wasn’t there if she had such a terrible time like she told him in her letter. In her letter, she tells him she hated every minute of it. She tells him about the cocaine and the couple they went with, and her jogs on the beach, but she leaves out the specifics about why she hated it. She tells him about the bluish black sky at night and the clear, see-through blue of the ocean, and the pink conch shells and eating conch, pronounced conk, out of the back end of a pickup truck, and there being no meat in the grocery stores, but plenty of alcohol, gold, and perfume, and about the casinos and the throwback discos and losing her luggage, and the absolute glory of the heat.

She leaves out the part about the arguments and the coke rage and the steel bar that cut into her back from the pullout couch, which they had to sleep on because the other couple owned the timeshare.

While Craig is on the phone with her at Christmas time, she talks very quietly as if they are just friends, which they are. At the end of the conversation, he jokingly tells her that maybe someday she could come to London to visit. It’s possible. He could x-ray her foot, make sure everything’s healed properly.

Then in the spring she writes him a letter, long about Easter, and in it she says that she’s going to try to work things out with her husband. He writes her back and tells her that he respects that—that he understands. When he comes back to town the next summer on leave, he sees her swimming laps in the club pool by herself, but he doesn’t go over to say hello to her.

*****

When Rachel is lying on the x-ray table, she feels the cold steel pressing into the sore point of her tailbone and the ache of it is just enough to justify the tears springing to her eyes. Even though her foot has never healed, she doesn’t really feel that hurt anymore. That hurt is one that she has grown to tolerate to the point where she hardly knows it exists anymore. She could run and run, down the hill in the park, past the fountain, past the tennis courts, or up that steep trail she found to the rims where there’s actually a flat space of rock covered with needles and soft grass, perfect for running on, and where down below the city is lying very still.