has a cocky grin on his face, and I watch it fade into sadness and regret.
And the images come and go faster now. I am barely able to register one face before it’s gone and another is in its place. Skip Devoe and Bobby Ruslander, and Bobby betrayed Skip and Skip sold him out to the Morrissey brothers, who left him with a black hood over his head and his hands wired behind his back and a bullet in the back of his head. And now they’re friends again, they have their arms around each other as if they’re posing for a picture. And they’re gone, and there’s Tommy Tillary and Carolyn Cheatham, and Tommy’s wife, Margaret, whom I never met but recognize at once. Tommy killed Margaret, and got away with it, and Carolyn killed herself, and I framed him for it, and he went to prison and was murdered there.
So many people, all of them dead . . .
Miguelito Cruz and Angel Herrera. Martin Vanderpoel and his son Richie, and Wendy Hanniford. Henry Prager. John Lundgren. Glenn Holtzmann and Lisa Holtzmann and Jan Keane.
Estrellita Rivera. Six years old, and it was my own wayward bullet that killed her so many years ago. Her eyes meet mine, and she smiles knowingly, and she’s gone.
Jim Faber, wearing the old army jacket he wore when I first met him, at the very first AA meeting I ever attended. Jim looks as though he’s going to tell me something, and I strain to hear it, and then he’s gone.
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Roger Prysock, wearing a zoot suit. Adrian Whitfield and Richie Vollmer and Regis Kilbourne. James Leo Motley. Peter Khoury and Francine Khoury. Ray Callander. Andy Buckley. Vince Mahaffey. Gerry Billings. Moon Gafter and Paddy Dowling. And more men, passing through my field of vision faster than I can summon up their names.
And then some women. Kim Dakkinen, with an emerald ring on her finger. Sunny Hendryx. Connie Cooperman. Toni Cleary. Elizabeth Scudder, who’d died because we shared a surname. I’d never met her, but somehow I recognize her, and then she’s gone.
And then Elaine. What are you doing here, I want to ask, with all these dead people?
Was I too late? Did he kill you, too?
She’s floating above the others, and it’s only her face, her perfect face, and she’s so young. She looks like a girl now, she looks like the girl I first met at Danny Boy’s table.
I look at her, and all I want to do is look at her, I want to look at her forever, I want to drown in her eyes.
And below us now there’s a great sea of people, there’s every person I ever knew who’s gone. My first wife, Anita. My mother, my father. Aunts and uncles. Grandparents, stretching back to the beginning of time.
Hundreds, thousands of people, and they fade out slowly, until there’s nothing there but space, empty space.
Then everything shifts abruptly, like a fast cut in a film. I’m watching from on high, and below me men and women in surgical gowns and masks are hovering around a table. There’s a figure on the table but I can’t see who it is.
But I can see the others. There’s Vince Edwards and Sam Jaffe from Ben Casey, and Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey from Dr.
Kildare, and Robert Young as Marcus Welby. Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin from Chicago Hope, and that guy from St. Elsewhere, and George Clooney and Anthony Edwards from ER. And I look at the women, and each one starts out as somebody else but they all somehow turn into Elaine. And I know that’s me on the table. I can’t see myself but I know that it’s me.
Someone says: Oh, fuck!
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It’s so hard to watch. It’s so hard to pay attention.
Someone says: We’re losing him.
So much easier to let go . . .
Someone says: No. No!
And the lights dim all the way down, and everything ends.
40
There may have been other times when I recovered consciousness, or at least hovered at its edge for a moment or two. But the first I retained any awareness of, after the curious vision of a roomful of television actors in surgical scrubs, was brief and indistinct. I was all at once present, after having been somewhere else for an indeterminate period of time. I was lying on my back, and I willed myself to move, and couldn’t.
Someone was holding my hand. I opened an eye and confirmed what I already knew: It was Elaine.
I thought, she’s alive. I squeezed her hand, or at least thought about it, and she turned her eyes toward mine.
“You’re going to be all right,” she said.
It seemed to me that I already knew that. I wanted to say something, but then my eyes closed and I went away again.
I came back and went away again a few more times, but before it seemed possible a couple of nurses got me out of bed and made me walk around in the hospital corridor. I was getting enough Demerol to keep the pain manageable, but even so, walking was still no pleasure.
They insist you do it, though, because that way you recover faster, so they can send you home and give your bed to somebody else.
By now I knew I was at Roosevelt Hospital, and that he’d done quite 284
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