His eyes went from the doctor's face to mine, back and forth. They were wholly without emotion or recognition, without presence, lifeless and flat as lentils; and otherwise he made no visible effort to move. His arms lay out beside him on the bed. His feet had thick, horny undersides, as though sandal soles had been grafted on. The toes turned in.
He was probably older than he looked.
'You can talk now, sir. Though you're going to have an awfully sore throat for a while. Can you tell me who you are?'
The doctor's name was Bailey. He bent to hang an oxygen cannula over the man's ears and adjust it Straightening, he looked across the bed at me and shook his head.
Through two narrow windows set together in a corner I could see only the mist roiling outside-not even the city's lights. We were on the third floor.
'Can you tell me what day it is, sir? Do you know where you are?'
Just those eyes, arcing back and forth.
That blankness.
'You're going to be allright. You've had an accident You're in the intensive care unit at University Hospital. You came in last night, Tuesday. So this is Wednesday.' He paused. uNow can you tell me where you are?'
He waited a moment. Still nothing.
He turned away.
'I don't know. Looks like we're definitely going to need a neuro consult.'
He dropped the endotracheal tube with its cluster of tape into a wastebasket beside the bed, went to the sink and squirted Betadine from a dispenser mounted on the wall. Started washing his hands.
'You want to page the medicine intern for me? I'm getting no breath sounds on the right,' a nurse called from one of the beds across the room. At the central desk a unit secretary picked up the phone. 'Also a stat chest and an ABG.'
Bailey stepped from behind the partitioning curtain. 'I'm already on the unit,' Bailey said. 'Excuse me, Mr. Griffin.'
He went across to the bed and, after listening a moment with his stethoscope, asked for something. The nurse passed him a syringe. He tapped at the man's ribs a time or two, then, holding the syringe like a dart, jabbed it into his chest.
'Pressure's going down. O2 up to 84.'
A second nurse came over carrying a bundle, pushing a bedside table. She set the bundle down, tore open the tape sealing it and unfolded greenish-gray material from around a stainless steel tray, coils of rubber tubing, surgical instruments in clear sterile packages.
With one of those instruments Bailey punctured the chest again just below the syringe. With another that looked like a combination between cooking forceps and needle-nose pliers he threaded a rubber tube into the chest, stitched it in place, and attached a plastic bottle.
A chest tube, for pneumothorax. At one point before she died, Baby Girl McTell, Alouette's baby, LaVerne's daughter's baby, had five of them.
'Okay, looks good. Let's get a stat chest to confirm. Good catch, Nancy. ABG when you're ready?'
The nurse was listening to the man's chest. She glanced up and nodded, moved her stethoscope to the other side. The second nurse was tossing instruments into the tray, disposables into the trash.
Bailey came back across the floor.
I nodded towards the man on the bed between us. He hadn't taken his eyes off Bailey the whole time. Now the eyes swung to me. Still, empty, depthless. Like shallow water. His face, though deeply lined, with hard planes and full features, somehow just as emotionless, just as blank.
The word wiped came to me. Then a flurry of synonyms: erased, undone, deleted, obliterated, expunged, dissolved, consumed.
Bailey again shook his head.
'Always hard to say, especially at first, with cases like this. The trauma itself can temporarily short-circuit everyday connections. And sometimes people come up with really weird responses to emergency dings. He was beaten on the head. Almost certainly there's been some degree of anoxia. We don't even have any way of knowing what kind of shape he was in before all this.'
Again he began scrubbing his hands at the sink.
'We'll watch him. I'll have neuro in for a look. Not much else I can tell you right now. Could be a whole different ball game by morning.'
He'd hung his lab coat on the end of the bed. As he reached for it, the man on the bed said, 'You got my book.'
We both turned.
'What?' Bailey said.
'My book. You got it.'
'He was carrying a book when he came in,' I said. 'They found it in his clothes downstairs.'
'Who are you, sir? What's your name?'
'You got my book.'
'We have to know who you are, sir.'
'You got my book,' he said. Then, politely, added, 'Sir.'
I got the book from the inside pocket of my coat and handed it to him. He took it: thefirst time he'd moved. He looked at the front cover, turned it over, opened it and looked inside. Then he looked at me and nodded.
'My book.'
And that was it. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
I moved out to the waiting room where, mostly alone, I passed the night watching the dreary banter of talk- show hosts and guest celebrities, a rerun of The A-Team in which the boys defended a Vietnamese giocer in East L.A. from marauding Latino gangbangers, a couple of movies whose plots, characters and climactic car chases were indistinguishable.
There might be no connection at all between David and this patient, of course. He could simply have found the book somewhere; come across it in curbside trash, a basement, some abandoned room or building.
I wasn't sure I wanted to think too closely about where or how he might have found it. For a long time now, years, when I thought of my son at all, I had assumed he was dead.
But this man might have found the book at a shelter of some kind, maybe in New York; it could have made its way there, even been left there by David himself. Or at a church, the kind in which people take refuge, the kind that hands out blankets and feeds the destitute, keeps a cache of Bibles and books and old clothes on hand for them.
Last night in ER-no, it was night before last now-Craig Parker had suggested that the patient's clothes, apparent castoffs but recently cleaned, might have come from one of the churches or missions.
Around twelve the guy polishing the floor shut off his machine, got a thermos of coffee from his cart, and started telling me about the house he and his girlfriend were buying up on Valence. Needed some work, sure, but he could do that himself, take his time and do it right, meant they were getting a real bargain. Been looking a long time. Not many bargains left anymore. He just loved those old shotguns. Only problem was it was next door to a cemetery, and he wanted to know if that would bother me. I told him I loved cemeteries.
Twenty-year-old sitcoms for an hour or so then. Fred Sanford had the big one. J. J. strutted around his family's project apartment explaining his latest scam.
Starting about two-thirty, a security guard walked by three times within the hour, finally stopping to ask could he help me and who I was with.
Not much choice after that. (1) Religious programming. (2) News repeating itself over and over like a stutter. (3) The last half of a movie from 1938. Pick one.
Around five a nurse on break sat beside me and, smoking three cigarettes in fifteen minutes, told me the story of her life. Sadly it wasn't much of a story or a life, and she knew it.
As I watched dawn take over the window, it came to me that I had utterly missed my Wednesday classes- not only missed them but not even given them a thought It was the first time in years anything like that had happened. Since I'd gone looking for Alouette.
