7.
Without being aware of a transition to sleep, somewhere in the night I became part of a Milky Way of bodies lying hooked up to lighted screens. I saw all of us, patients here and across the world, floating in a vast majestic orbit.
Then the cop, tough, his blue eyes giving away nothing, watched as I looked at the photo he’d handed me.
It showed me in my dream of the Southwest along with my companions who would later get arrested and beaten into pulp.
“How did you know these guys?” he asked.
“I was a friend of one of them. Louis.”
“Friend, you mean like a boyfriend?” He displayed no attitude but past experience with cops made me wary. I shook my head.
Then he told me, “It must be tough for someone like you. Kind of comfortable, retired, having something like this from his past brought up after all these years.”
“Nothing like that happened to me. It’s just a dream.”
“A dream, maybe, but made up of bits of your past.”
Then I heard voices and he was gone. Lights went on in my room and curtains got drawn around the other bed. Since my arrival I had been the only patient in the room. That ended.
“In here.”
“Easy.”
The new patient cried out as they moved him. Through an opening in the curtain, I saw nurses and orderlies transfer him to the bed. Then they stood back and two young surgeons from the emergency room approached. From their talk, I learned that the patient had been in some kind of an incident that had damaged his scrotum.
The doctors spoke to him. “We saved one testicle and your penis,” they said. “But we couldn’t save the other.”
The patient asked a question too mumbled for me to hear and a doctor said, “Yes, you’ll have full function.”
Then they were gone and almost immediately the kid slept and snored. His name, I found out later, was Jamine Wilson and he was nineteen.
8.
Dawn was just about to break. I opened the notebook and wrote out a will, divided my possessions among my siblings and friends. Making out a will was a way of trying to hold onto myself, to indicate that I still knew who I was and what was mine.
That afternoon my sister Lee visited me. I had named her my executor. I dreaded the thought of living in a coma and said I didn’t want extreme measures to be taken to keep me alive if I couldn’t be revived. She went out to the desk and informed them of this.
Then we talked and listened to Jamine Wilson in the next bed on his phone. He talked about buying hot iPods. He called a woman and told her to bring him burgers and fries from McDonald’s.
He lived in a halfway house to which he didn’t want to return. A social worker came by and informed him that he would have to be out of the hospital the next morning. He ignored her.
“Where are you now,” he asked the woman on the phone. “Can’t you get on the subway?”
My sister left when they came to take me downstairs for x-rays. They gave me barium and recorded its progress through my digestive tract. I was there for hours, lying flat on a cold metal slab while they took each series of shots, resting, sleeping sometimes on the metal slab, until it was time for the next pictures.
It reminded me of the esoteric forms of modeling. Hand models, foot models; unprepossessing people with one exquisite feature. “Intestine model, that’s me,” I told the technician who smiled and didn’t understand.
I dozed and saw a screen that read, “An example of his early modeling work.” And there I was, very young, in Frye boots and jeans and leather jacket, a kerchief tied around my neck but with my hands cuffed behind me. It looked like some S&M scenario I might once have posed for. But the setting was the Southwest of that dream.
Then they woke me up and took some more x-rays.
When I got back to the room, Jamine’s hospital lunch was untouched beside his bed. I had taken nothing by mouth for days. He looked up at me dark and angry. Our eyes met and for a moment I saw a bit of myself: the kid in the nightmare, the one who’d ended up in this hospital with his memory gone. And I think, maybe, he saw something similar.
“Where are you now?” he asked someone on the phone then said, “You were there five minutes ago.”
Some time later, his caller finally arrived whizzing down the hall on a motorized wheelchair, the McDonald’s bag on her lap. She was Hispanic with eyes that looked hurt or afraid.
She maneuvered her chair next to the bed. The two of them ate. He chewed noisily, talked while he did. “I was so scared,” he said, “when I saw all the blood. And it took so long for them to call for help.”
The cell phone rang and he talked to someone. Shortly afterward a girl and a guy in their late teens came down the hall on their chairs. These were his friends from the halfway house. They seemed oddly impressed by whatever had happened to him.
Before the evening was over there were five wheelchairs in the room and I realized that Jamine, too, must have one. I was surprised by how quiet and lost everyone but Jamine seemed. At some point they were told they had to leave. My roommate turned off his phone and went back to sleep.
9.
The room, the ward, the floor, the hospital grew silent.
“The place ran with ghosts,” Randall, an old queen I knew from when I was first in the city had said about the very classy hospital uptown where he had been for major heart surgery.
“They came and talked to me at night, taunted me. An awful man I lived with when I was young and stupid and new to New York, was cruising the halls like it was still 1925. He was a cruel bastard, physically abusive, and I’d walked out on him. He told me he was waiting for me, that sooner or later he’d have me again.”
Randall liked to have me stay at his place once or twice a week. It was an easy gig. He really got off on having a young guy around. Give him a chance encounter in his own apartment with a twenty-two-year-old in jockey shorts and he was happy.
“I know when I pop off that awful sadist will be waiting for me, and I’m afraid,” he said.
I smiled like he had made a joke and he shook his head and looked sad. He died at that hospital a year later and I felt bad. He’d been good to me, generous, kind. I liked him well enough then but I really understood him now.
Deep in the night the cop and I stood at the window and looked at the very late traffic flowing south on Seventh Avenue. I could tell by the car models that it was the late 1960s. The constant flow of traffic downtown was like the passage of time.
“We can do it, you know,” he said. “Bring you back forty years to face trial.”
“For what?” I asked. “What crimes did I ever commit that were worth that kind of attention?”
“Look at yourself.” Again the screen came up and it was the three guys whose faces I could almost remember and myself all in boots and jeans and leather vests and kerchiefs around our necks. Like musicians on an
