The Pearl Diver Read Online Free PDF Page A

room and place all your belongings in one of those bags.” Still, the men are several steps away from her. Never closer.
    Dirty curtains, covering the glass on the door, are lifted by the wind brought in through the entrance. She steps inside, and before she can even close the door, her stomach is lost all over the floor. The smell of chemicals staggers her. The room is large, made even larger by the ceiling. A nurse hands her a bucket and a rag.
    “Close that door and clean this up. When you’ve finished, go over there behind the curtain and remove everything.”
    She throws up again. The nurse’s rubber boots flop as she hurries away.
    She cleans up, a stain left behind on the floor, then goes over and opens the curtain. A woman, old enough to be her mother, sits naked on a dirty mattress. Her left hand in front of her pubis, her right can cover only half of her breasts.
    “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”
    She walks out of the curtain-partitioned room.
    “Hurry up and get undressed.” The nurse points her back to where she has just left.
    The older woman turns her back to her, the long, bent fingers still where they were when she first entered. Red spots on her back. Some larger the farther down one looks. Her hair is like a swallow’s nest after a typhoon, strewn all over, eggs long gone. Her face, round as a ramen bowl, is untouched except for one red spot under her right eye. She moves as far away from the woman on the bed as she can, turns her back, undresses. She hides her change purse inside the pocket of her jacket.
The room is cold; many times she has been colder—those early-May dives—but the shame she feels gives this cold a raw edge to it.
    The curtain snaps open. She stands, for the first time in her life, naked before a man. Like those of the woman on the edge of the bed, her hands, too, instinctively cover the most private parts of her being.
    “Move your arms and stand up straight,” the doctor orders. She hears the words, but his mouth and nose are covered by a white mask, making it difficult to follow what he says.
    “Stand up straight!” She sees his mask move up and down, again hears the words, sees the doctor’s eyes behind black-rimmed glasses that sit crooked on his nose. He steps toward her. She uses the side of the bed as a support but feels her knees weaken, and with her arms still covering her, she hits the floor. The ceiling is a clear blue sky. Endless. The older woman speaks words she doesn’t understand; her hideous claws touch her face.
    “Don’t touch me!” she screams. “Nobody touch me!”
    The older woman jumps away, her hands back to her body.
    “Get up so we can disinfect you,” yells the doctor.
    She reaches for her clothes, but they are gone; stabs at a bedsheet, but there is only a mattress. She starts to cry.
    “Stop this foolishness.”
    The doctor clenches her arm, jerks her up by it. He has her above the elbow, the thick rubber glove a slimy cold, like a raw oyster in January. She’s taken into another room. The doctor tells her to lie on the bed, a plastic sheet atop it. First on her stomach. He checks behind her ears, the nape of her neck, under her arms, down her back, all the time making these sounds like he is sucking his teeth. He spreads her legs; the glove hurts as he touches her down there, makes all her skin ache, as if she’s sliding naked on ice. She notices, on her left arm, a large bruise already beginning to spread from where she fell on the floor. Spreading over the diving scar within the spot. Years ago. She keeps her eyes on the spot, the blue-green-black bruise scattered inside, around it. Keeps her eyes on it, tries to create a map from it. Yakushima. Like the island of Yakushima, round except for a little deviation on the top left side. His hands down the backs of her legs, the soles of her feet.
    “Turn over.”
    She does, knowing nothing that she is doing. Chilled tears dribble, drip down the side of her face, plunk against the plastic