2.
That night was especially awful: a long confusion of dreams. Chris, my speculative fiction godchild who lives in Ohio, seemed almost frantic. He kept calling me but I was too sick to talk to him for more than a minute or two.
When I looked at my inner computer screen it showed me palm trees and bright sun and elephants. The Macabres now worked nearly naked in a prison chain gang. A woman with the face of a peacock seemed very familiar. I thought I spotted the policeman with the blue eyes that gave away nothing. He looked right at me and was about to speak
Then my doorbell sounded and it was my friend Bruce who was there to take me to the doctor’s. With his help I walked the few blocks to my medical group office on Washington Square. A very concerned doctor ordered me into Saint Vincent’s hospital. Shortly afterward Bruce escorted me to the emergency room admittance desk. Then he hugged me and was off to another job and I was in the power of the hospital.
There was no waiting. I identified myself, was given a form to fill out, and was shown right into the middle of the beds and gurneys, patients, and orderlies. Numbers flashed on computer screens, and machines beeped.
Nurses and doctors clustered around an enormously fat, comatose woman then dispersed. A social worker took the life history of an elderly black man who very patiently explained to her how he had lost everything he had ever had and lived now in a shelter. A moaning patient rolled by on a gurney hung with IV bags. Two cops wheeled in a shooting victim.
Then an orderly threw back the curtains around a bed and told me to come inside. My clothes were taken away. I was dressed in two gowns, one worn forward, the other backward, and socks with skid-proof soles. I was bled and examined and hauled through cold corridors and x-rayed.
Tubes got attached to me. A catheter was stuck up my urinary tract; at one point a very new intern tried to stick a tube down my throat and I choked and gagged. A horrible brown goop came up my guts and into my mouth and nose. My hospital gowns got soaked and there was commotion. People talked about me as if I was dead or not there.
It reminded me of an accident scene. I heard police radios, saw flares illuminating a nighttime car crash. I saw a familiar picture on a computer screen. It was in black and white, a 1950s newspaper shot.
A kid in his late teens had been thrown onto the branch of a tree by the force of a collision. He hung there bent at the waist over the branch of the tree, his loafers gone, his legs still in jeans, his upper body bare. The cool striped shirt he wore now hung down over his head. That was probably for the best: the face and eyes under those circumstances are not something you’d want to see.
That image haunted me at fourteen. I had imagined myself dramatically dead in just that manner, if only I could drive and had a car.
“That photograph was his own private version of the old primitive painting, ‘Death On A Pale Horse,’ ” I read on a screen in front of me and realized I was looking at a website about me.
Then the screen was gone and I was back in the tumult of the emergency room. “Intestinal blockage — massive fluid build-up,” said a female resident. “It’s critical.”
“Rejected the drain,” said the intern who had failed to get it in.
A male nurse spoke quietly to me like I was a frightened animal, put his hand on my chest to calm me, and stuck the tube into my nose and down my throat in a single gesture. A tall, wheeled IV pole with hooks that held my drains, feeding bag, urine bag, and various meters was attached to me.
Doctors examined me further. I felt like my insides were grinding themselves apart. A bag hanging next to my head rapidly filled with brown goop that had been inside me.
It was very late at night when I was wheeled onto elevators and off them, then down silent corridors. I was still dirty and wearing the damp hospital gowns when I was brought into a ward on the twelfth floor.
A young Asian nurse named Margaret Yang took over. Before I was placed on a bed, she called and four orderlies appeared. Women talking in the accents of Puerto Rico, Ukraine, and Jamaica, brought me into a bathroom, sponged me off, put me under shower water, and turned me around under it saying, as I tried to cover myself, “It’s okay. You are as God made you.”
3.
Only when I was clean, in clean clothes and on a bed looking out at the night did I remember that I had been in this hospital forty-two years before.
When I was a kid first coming into the city from Long Island, I woke one night with no idea who I was or where I was. The place I was in seemed vast, chilly, and sterile. The lighted windows in the brownstones across the street revealed stylish apartments and I knew it looked like a magazine cover without knowing what that was or how I knew this.
A nurse told me I’d been found facedown in a hallway, bleeding from a cut on my forehead and without any wallet or ID. I had lots of alcohol and a couple of drugs in my bloodstream.
A very old nun, thin and stiff, her face almost unlined, came around late in that night. She inspected the bandage on my forehead and talked about Dylan Thomas. I was still enough of a Catholic kid to feel embarrassed talking to a nun while sitting on a bed in just a hospital gown.
“He was brought here not ten or twelve years ago after a hard night’s drinking. He died from that and pneumonia on the floor just below this one.
“I thought of him when I saw you,” she said, looking at me calmly. “I wonder if you, too, are a young man who has an uneasy relationship with death.”
I said I didn’t know if I was or even who I was.
“Time will reveal those things,” she said. “You’re still very young.”
Then I found myself looking at that long-ago night on a computer screen. It was all conveyed in images: a
What appeared at first to be the famous drawing of the young Rimbaud unconscious in a bed after being shot by his lover Verlaine turned out to be a photo of Dylan Thomas dead in Saint Vincent’s Hospital — and became me at twenty-one with my poet’s hair and empty, blue amnesiac eyes.
I pulled back from the screen and saw all around me a vast dark space with green globes rotating through it. Then I squinted and saw that the globes were the glowing screens that monitored each patient in this hospital. Beyond us, further out in the endless dark, were other screens in other hospitals, stretching on into infinity.
4.
Apparently I called out, because then Nurse Yang was speaking to me, asking if I was okay. The universe and the globes disappeared. Saint Vincent’s, as I saw it all these years later, seemed a small, slightly shabby, and intensely human place.
“I’m so glad,” I told her. “You people have saved my life.”
She was amused and said that this was what they tried to do for everyone brought in here but that it was always nice to be appreciated. When she started to leave, I got upset and she showed me how to ring for help if I needed it.
After she was gone I lay in the cool quiet with the distant sound of hospital bells and the voices of the women at the nurses’ station. But I didn’t sleep.
My fear that all trace of me would be lost while I slept was out and active that night. Lying there, it seemed likely that this person with a search engine installed in his head was not the me who had existed a few days ago.
