FROM THE AUTHOR: In his generous essay/review of my novelette, Richard Larson refers to the story as a “speculative memoir,” a blend of speculative fiction with memoir. It’s the story of a narrator with the same name as the author who gets sick, nearly dies, goes into a hospital, is operated on, and released. The story involves memory and hallucination. I wanted among other things to make the reader feel the ways that dream and memory overlap and the way Time carries the world we once knew away from us. Over the years, friends and lovers and family members, sick and sometimes dying lay in hospital beds and spoke of their dreams and hallucinations. I’d seen more than one while still alive go off to another kingdom and look back on this world as a semi-stranger. I was afraid of this, kept a pen and notebook with me at all times and wrote down what I saw while conscious or remembered when I woke up.
Before I got sick I’d been listening to a John Dowland song, “Now, Oh Now, I Needs Must Part.” The aptness of the lyrics and the way they tied into hallucinations of my own evoked the Philip K. Dick title,
Shortly after I got out of the hospital the National Public Radio show RadioLab broadcast an episode titled “Memory and Forgetting,” about how memory is created and implanted, manipulated and lost. They also did a show on sleep and explored the fringes of that land in which we spend so much of our time.
As I write this essay, the place in which my story is mainly set, the legendary Greenwich Village institution Saint Vincent’s Hospital, harbor for the Village poor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beacon in the nightmare landscape of AIDS in the 1980s, is in the process of closing its doors. It’s being described as a casualty of the changing urban demographics, of modern medical practice. I think of it as having been carried away in the stream of time which moves ceaselessly as we sleep or are distracted or lie sick in bed and leaves only our flawed and distorted memories.
1.
In the predawn one morning last April, I woke up from a violent and disturbing dream. In it, I was somewhere that I realized was the Southwest with three other guys whom I knew in the dream but didn’t quite recognize when I thought about them later.
All of us were engaged in smuggling something — drugs as it turned out. We were tough. Or they were anyway, big guys with long hair and mustaches. There was, I knew, another bunch of guys much tougher than us with whom we didn’t get along and there were cops.
The end of the dream was that I heard police sirens and was scared but relieved because they weren’t as bad as the other guys. The last image in the dream, however, was the cops smashing two of the big guys’ faces right into the adobe wall of the building we stayed in. And I knew, in the way one does in dreams, that the other guy and I were in for something as bad or worse. Then I woke up before dawn in my apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
From the time I was a small boy I’ve been afraid of the long marches of the night, the time in the dark when the lights inside me went out. The fear that would hit me as my head was on the pillow was that I, the one falling asleep, would not be the one who woke up.
Imagining the fragility of my identity chilled me. I did fall asleep again though and dreamed once more.
This time, I saw the main cop with his short white hair and gray suit sitting in his car, smoking a cigarette, staring blue eyed and expressionless at me. I was much younger than I am now, maybe in my mid-twenties instead of my sixties.
In my dream, I realized that I had been looking at a computer and had viewed all this on some kind of a website.
When I awoke this time, the sun was up. Except for my having seen it as a website, the dream seemed like a fragment of the past, a time when I might, in fact, have found myself in places almost as bad as the dream.
I felt sick, my stomach was upset, every bone and muscle ached, and each move I made took an effort.
Nothing seemed to have led up to this illness. I’d been to the theater the night before with my friend Ellen. We’d seen a show with music about eighteenth century boy sopranos (played by women) and abducted orphans.
A few hours before that, an affair I’d been having for some time with a guy named Andre was broken off very suddenly. The man with whom Andre lived had called me up and said that Andre had told him everything. They both wanted me to stay away from him from now on. It was a once-a-week thing that had become routine and boring, as I told the man, and I asked him to say good-bye to Andre for me.
I’m a veteran of more than forty years in Manhattan and normally neither big, melodramatic Broadway shows nor sudden disruptions in love cause the kind of distress I felt that morning.
Even as I wondered if I should call my doctor, I was aware of a kind of web stream that ran constantly in a corner of my brain. The fever dream took the form of a constant Google search complete with web pages and blogs I couldn’t remember looking for.
Pictures and stories with elusive contexts appeared. At one point, I found myself looking at the profiles of the members of a tough cop unit somewhere in the Southwest. It had short bios, photos of them with mustaches and holsters and masklike sunglasses.
As I wondered why and how I had looked this up, I saw a familiar face with a white crewcut and expressionless cop eyes.
I remembered I wanted to call my doctor. As I dialed the number, I thought of the tune and lyrics of a song I’d been listening to recently. It was by John Dowland, a poet and composer who was kind of the Kurt Cobain of Elizabethan England. Something in the melancholy grace of the tune, the resignation of the song’s lyrics had caught me.
Maybe this attachment had been a kind of harbinger, some part of my consciousness telling me I had started dying. I wondered how Dowland’s song “Flow My Tears,” had affected Philip K. Dick when he’d used it in a title.
Somehow the call to the doctor never got made. I couldn’t remember what day it was. People who phoned me — friends, the godchildren who in sentimental moments I thought of as my kids, the woman who had been my work-wife before I retired from the university — seemed concerned.
Many things ran on the screen inside my head. The Macabres when I found myself looking at their site seemed like many a New York late seventies punk group. The photos showed the musicians — emaciated, decked in bondage accessories, with their hair hacked off at odd angles. A bit of one of their songs played. Then police sirens wailed just like they had when my friends and I had gotten caught.
I realized that the sirens were my phone ringing. A friend who had once been a nurse wanted the telephone number of my medical group and the number of someone who could take me there next morning.
