Coronado

ICU

This woman, Carrie, regular in the bar, she says to him, “There was a guy around asking about you.”

Daniel turns on his stool. He catches the reflection of one of his eyebrows in her iris, and it bothers him, makes him feel as if it’s trapped in there and she might not give it back.

He says, “What guy?”

She shrugs, taking his eyebrow with her as she turns back to her vodka-n-whatever. “Some guy. He was in earlier. Wore a tie and everything. I asked him if he sold cars.”

“Did he?”

“He said no, but guys, you know? Lie about a fucking hangover they’re puking in the sink. This guy once, right? Calls me Doreen, okay? Doreen. Shit…”

She rattles her ice cubes. She takes a hit off her cigarette.

He waits for more but she juts her head forward and bulges her eyes to get the bartender’s attention.

He says, “So this guy who didn’t sell cars…”

She nods several times, quick, but she’s nodding at the bartender and she says, “’Nother, hon’, thanks.” She turns toward him, blowing smoke. “Your name’s Donnie, right?”

“Daniel.”

“Danny, I got to tell you, this guy? He said I should stay the fuck away from you.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to this. He’s never bothered this woman. Barely spoken to her. She’s a regular, he’s a regular. He’s bought her a drink or two. (Once, yeah, back in December when they were the only two in the place the entire night, he bought her four and danced with her once, the jukebox playing “You Got My Sugar but I Got You, Sweet” as the snow fell like cotton swabs outside the high green windows. Then the bartender said closing time and Daniel asked her if she was okay to drive and she laughed and the sound of it was like a bird screeching above the ocean and she slapped both hands on his chest and said, “Yeah, I’m fine, sweetie. You go on home.”)

He says, “Why?”

“Why what?” Lifting her drink to toast the bartender for bringing it.

“Why stay the fuck away?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. But he meant it.”

“But you never met him before.”

“So?”

“So why trust his opinion?”

She looks at him.

It’s his nose in her iris this time, the tip of it, bobbing.

“Tim,” she calls.

Tim is the bartender. He makes his way over, leans his elbow by her glass, eyebrows up. Tim likes no one. Tim has a single red tattoo on his right forearm. It’s covered in hair and faded. A flower with a broken stem and the word good-bye underneath it. Tim is the kind of guy Daniel doesn’t understand with awe.

Tim says, “What?”

Carrie says, “This guy’s bothering me.”

HE GOES TO one of his other bars. He tries to tell the bartender about Carrie, her crazy story, her getting him ejected, but the bartender’s got glasses to wipe.

It’s a younger crowd in here, noisier, but he finds a corner seat and watches the TVs. Basketball on one, bombs on the others. Roofs and streets of the ancient city lit up like a thousand tongues, licking the sky, afire. A yellow ticker running below it all that Daniel finds gorgeous and absurd. The world needs a yellow ticker, he is pretty sure. Just to keep score. Just to rid it of things of the nonticker variety. She was here… CNN… She’s not… FOX NEWS… Two kids… CSPAN… Die alone… MSNBC…

A guy he knows, gin-n-tonic-hates-his-job-curly-amber-hair sits beside him and sighs. “Time was you didn’t have to wait for a toilet in this place.”

Daniel says, “Saturdays.”

“Time was…,” the guy says.

On the TV, something blows up, breathless and huge.

“Time was…,” the guy says.

Guy’s got two feet of bar in front of him, he keeps missing it with his elbow. His hair is dark with sweat.

Daniel stares up at the TV, wondering if the guy will face-plant.

Another tongue goes afire. A man with a microphone and a beige safari jacket with a shitload of pockets blocks the flaming tongue. He looks somber. Respectful.

Daniel wonders where they sell those jackets.

Guy beside him snores.

Bartender leans in and says, “Two guys in here earlier?”

“Yeah?”

Bartender turns his chin, yawns into his fist. He reaches down for a bottle of peach schnapps. “Looking for you.”

“What?”

Bartender looks at him. “Wore ties and everything.”

Daniel’s boss says, “Now don’t cry.”

Daniel says, “I’m not crying.”

“Well, you are.”

“I’m sorry.”

His boss says, “I’m sorry. Jesus Christ. It’s just, you know, the times. It’s just, you know, the fucking economy. Your COBRA, though? That’s good another, like, nine months.”

Daniel says, “I’ve worked here for—”

“Don’t, all right?” His boss hands a box of tissues across the desk.

“They came to the house,” his ex-wife says.

“When?”

His ex-wife says, “I can’t let the boys go with you.”

He says, “What?”

His ex-wife says, “I just can’t. They asked all these questions.”

His ex-wife looks at him, love or pity trapped behind her skin, her bones, those eyes.

“They?”

Love, he thinks. Today, we’ll say it’s love.

She nods. “There were three of them.”

The man approaches Daniel in the express self-checkout aisle. Daniel runs a container of half-and-half over the red laser-light scanner and watches the price appear on the screen in front of him. He’s just realized that a sudden-impulse People buy tips the total of his items to thirteen, one over the limit, and he hopes that the scanner won’t sound an alarm, cancel the whole transaction, alert the management, the line of customers behind him. He looks over his shoulder and the man is standing next to him. Wool scarf over a suede jacket and a dark polo shirt. Lean. A sweep of brown hair hanging over his forehead, so perfectly sharp you could crease a sheet with it.

“How you doing?” the man says.

“Fine.” Daniel waves a box of Rice-A-Roni over the red beam.

“Hell of a news day,” the man says.

“Yeah?” Daniel tries to look distracted by his open plastic bag in its metal bin.

“Oh, sure.”

Daniel places a head of lettuce on the scanner. He faces the screen and selects “produce.” He enters “lettuce” on the screen that follows that one. The price appears in bold and is added to his subtotal.

“Seems a high price,” the man says.

Daniel scans a half gallon of skim milk.

“For lettuce,” the man says.

In the parking lot, the man right behind him, Daniel wonders if he should walk to his own car or loiter by someone else’s.

The guy says, “Daniel.”

Daniel stops, looks back at the man with his nice clothes, his L.A.-white teeth, his lack of groceries.

The man puts his hands in his pockets and leans back on his heels. Daniel can’t think of anything to say. The man’s eyes are the clear and the bright of skyscraper panes.

The man looks down at his shoes and gives them a small smile, as if surprised they still cover his feet, as if conferring with them about how they got there.

He looks back at Daniel, and the small smile holds.

The man says, “That’s your car, right?”

A woman pushes her shopping cart past them, wheels scraping the loose cement. A small boy walks a few steps behind her, talking to his action figure, tugging its head to see what will happen.

Daniel waits for the man’s eyes to change.

The man jingles the change in his pockets and raises his eyebrows up and down.

Daniel says, “I don’t know why you’re—”

The man takes a step toward him. Then one more. He looks into Daniel. He says, “You want it to be one way. I understand. I do. But it’s the other way.”

Daniel feels a small vibration below his Adam’s apple, as if a beetle, nestled in the hollow of his throat all winter, is waking up.

Daniel says, “I just want—”

The man shakes his head. “It’s the other way.”

He says, “I just want everything to go back to—”

“Ssshh,” the man says.

The man says, “Daniel.”

The man says, “Knock-knock.”

Daniel says, “Who’s there?”

The man gives him another smile, slightly broader, and leaves the parking lot.

He decides to name the man Troy. He seems like a Troy. Logical, smooth-haired, stainless.

He sees Troy outside a bar one night. He’s across the street, leaning against a wall and eating what could be yogurt, using a plastic spoon. Another time, he’s at the mall, where Daniel has gone to wander, to feel other people, hear piped-in music no matter how bad, if only because he hasn’t programmed it himself. He finds something comforting in this, a freedom in the freedom from decision similar to when he comes across a movie on TV, mid-story, and it’s a movie he owns on DVD, one he could easily play on the TV himself, without commercials, and with the added advantage of being able to pause for bathroom breaks and beer runs. And yet he doesn’t insert the DVD into the player. He doesn’t opt for control.

And so the mall speakers play “Lady in Red.” They play “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.” They play Céline Dion and Dave Matthews and Elton John and Mariah Carey. And Daniel, who likes only one of those songs, feels buffeted.

Troy passes him and stops to smile at something in the window of the Payless shoe store. As if the loafers are particularly amusing. As if, through glass, they tell him jokes.

His ex-wife says to him on the phone, “I’m sorry you’re going through this. You’re a nice guy.”

“I am?”

“You are.”

He says, “Would you tell them that?”

She says, “They don’t listen. They’ll never—”

The phone dies.

Nothing sinister.

Batteries.

He drives out to interview for a job. He does this every day. Always with a blue Toyota Sequoia four or five cars back in traffic. He would have expected something boxier, brown, low-to-the-ground, American. No. A big-ass, bright blue SUV. With fog lights.

Sometimes they pass him. Just for shits-n-giggles, he supposes. Always back behind him when he reaches wherever he’ll interview. For jobs he never gets.

This morning, he’s in the medical district. Six hospitals in a seven-block area, connected by breezeways, connected by parking lots, a food court in the center of the tallest building so the anxious and the grieving and the doctors and the bedpan-cleaners can eat Sbarro, Au Bon Pain, Panda Express, Dunkin’ Donuts.

That’s where he’s going — the Dunkin’ Donuts. That’s what he’s been reduced to. The economy, you know. A college graduate (not much of a college, true, but just the same…) with fifteen solid years of work experience. And this is the sum total of his life. Interviewing for an assistant manager’s position. At a doughnut shop. Nearing forty.

At best, if all returns to normalcy, he will still be alone.

As he pulls into one of the garages on the eastern edge of the seven-block perimeter, a beige Volvo pulls up behind him, and then the lumpy Sequoia noses up behind the Volvo.

He takes his ticket. He pulls forward. The yellow gate-arm goes down behind his car, and he sees in his rearview as the driver of the Volvo reaches for her ticket from the machine and drops it. He watches the ticket fall to the ground and then a tuft of wind flicks it under the car. The woman gets out of her car. She seems confused as to where the ticket went.

Daniel feels a flapping in his chest, an odd and startled faith. He watches the woman peer at the ground like it contained cave drawings, sees the Sequoia trapped behind her, and he puts his car in gear and drives up the ramp.

He turns with the curve of the ramp, and he sees Troy’s smile and his wife’s trapped pity, and he sees his mother who died in this same hospital complex surrounded by beeps and blips and a TV hung above her that was void of sound but primed with image, and he fishtails coming out of the first turn and those wings flap harder.

He reaches the second floor and cuts the wheels hard and passes a DO NOT ENTER sign and drives up the exit ramp. It’s a blind curve, and he envisions the grille of another car appearing before him as if through water, and he wishes he were going fast enough for the risk of fatality to lie in the risk of collision. He wishes all light was bone white.

He comes out of the curve onto the third floor and he pins the wheels again, goes up the next exit ramp, and he knows that even if the Sequoia has cleared the gate by now, it can’t hear his tires in relation to where it would expect them to be. He begins to feel blessed.

He drives up the final exit ramp and reaches the roof. It’s near empty up here, and he parks by the first door he sees, trembling and happy. He hopes that someday he has grandchildren and lives to see them just so he can tell them that once he drove up three exit ramps in a parking garage and never hit another car.

He steps out of the car and faces the door.

There’s a sign on the door that reads TURN RIGHT, and he almost does, and then he realizes the sign could be referring to the doorknob, so he turns that to the right first, and the door opens.

Just to be sure, he turns his body to the right, sees nothing but rooftop and then a ledge and then the hospital complex spread beyond the roof in industrial patinas of sandstone and white brick and eggshell window squares.

So it was the knob.

He walks down two flights of stairs and sees another sign: CONCOURSE TO GAAR BUILDING. He likes the sound of that — concourse — so he goes through that door and finds the concourse. It’s more like a breezeway actually, and he crosses it and passes a doctor and two nurses and a guy in a johnny leading his IV-stand across the carpet as if it’s a slow relative, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter clenched in his other hand.

A few minutes later, he finds himself in a corridor with bluish gray carpet. From there, he can see the roof of the parking garage. The Sequoia sits beside his Honda, hulking. Men in ties stand outside of it. One leans into the Honda and cups his hands on either side of his face and peers in through the driver’s window.

Daniel watches, waiting for something to happen, and he begins to realize that the men are doing the same thing.

Half an hour later, a black Suburban pulls onto the roof and parks. Troy gets out of it. He crosses to the other men. There is talking, gesticulating, hands that point vaguely in the direction of the exit ramp, the door, the sky. In the pointing, Daniel can see their humanity, their frustrated ineffectuality, and it comforts him to realize that these are men who do, in fact, sleep in beds. Have children possibly, mothers who still harry them, dry-cleaning tickets in their wallets.

Daniel can’t be sure from this distance, but Troy seems angry. At the very least annoyed. He points at Daniel’s car in such a way that Daniel knows it’s no longer his. Not in any relevant sense.

They will wait by his car, he is pretty sure. By eluding them, even for a moment, he has broken the unspoken contract. They will watch his house. Tap his phones, if they haven’t already. Wait for him in bars.

The wings have stopped flapping in his chest. It feels hollow in there, a basin vulnerable to wind. He resists the urge to sink. To sit on the floor and cover his head with his hands.

He thinks about surrendering or apologizing. He thinks about going down there right now and saying, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

But sorry for what? He hasn’t done anything. He’s just a guy and one day they came looking for him. One day, his name blipped across a screen. One day, he popped up on a list. And that’s not his fault. Though he still feels like apologizing. It’s natural, he supposes, to not want to be the cause of any sort of ado, any kind of mass consternation. It’s a judgment, no matter how nebulous, of your entire life.

But even if he had something to apologize for, he can’t. It’s too late.

He watches them surrounding his car. They are angry. Pretty soon they will come looking for him. Carrying their anger. He has an image of them walking down the corridor toward him, serving trays held above their shoulders. Waiters. Professional. Indifferent to the cuisine.

He wanders. HE does so, knowing he will be found. He wanders with terror and loneliness caressing the back of his neck and the conviction that he has exiled himself from the world he knew and all her touchstones. He follows signs that intrigue him on some elemental level and ends up outside the SICU. He looks at a few more signs in the corridor. CICU, ICU, NICU. He leans against a wall. Surgical Intensive Care Unit, he decides. An unfortunate acronym, given the location. CICU must be Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, ICU is obvious, but NICU leaves him at a loss. Neurological?

A nurse passes him. She’s wearing scrubs with a bright paisley flower print. She looks distracted as she sips from a Subway cup. Daniel can hear the sucking of the straw, down at the bottom, trapped among the ice cubes. She uses the heel of her hand to hit a silver button the size of a cymbal on the wall and the two doors to SICU open, and she tilts her head in his direction and says, “The nurse will find you in the waiting room.”

He says, “I’m sorry?”

She jiggles the cup absently. “It’s just, you know, we like to keep the corridors clear.”

“Sure.”

She moves her head slightly, a gesture that Daniel takes to mean that the waiting area is behind him.

“It’s okay,” she says. “We’ll let you know. Soon as we do.” Daniel nods and she steps through the doorway and the doors close behind her.

A few minutes later, a young woman, maybe twenty-five, trots past him and stops outside the door. She’s dressed for a night out. She smells of perfume and liqueur. She’s pudgy, addled, made luminous by fear.

There’s a sign over the cymbal-button that says DO NOT ENTER SICU WITHOUT CONTACTING NURSE STATION. LIFT PHONE.

The phone is to the right of the button and the woman lifts it and waits and presses her forehead to the wall and closes her eyes and then jerks back and speaks into the phone, stumbling, cowed:

“Yes. Yes? This is Mr. Brookner’s wife. Paul Brookner? I’m his wife. I got a call. I’m… I’m Paul Brookner’s wife. Oh? Okay.”

She hangs up and steps back from the wall, stands in front of the doors and presses the button and tilts her head back for a moment like she’s waiting to be beamed up, and the doors open and she tugs her blouse down over her skirt and touches her neck and the underside of her chin with splayed fingers.

She walks through the doors and Daniel feels crushed for her and her tragedy, whatever it may be, a sweeping empathy he rarely feels for the people he knows.

Ten minutes later, a man in a tie comes down the hall toward him. Daniel lowers his head, looks at his shoes. The man comes abreast of him, and Daniel watches his cuffs swing past him and the man turns to his right and enters the ICU.

Daniel breathes, and a small man with a Slavic accent says, “How are you?”

Daniel focuses. The man is too close. He is about fifty years old. He is short and wears a blue barracuda jacket with red lining over a white pinstripe shirt open at the collar and black jeans.

Daniel says, “Excuse me?”

The man peers up at him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” Daniel can hear a defensiveness in the words he didn’t intend.

“Who is it?”

“Who is what?”

The man’s eyes gesture over Daniel’s shoulder. “You’re here to see?”

“My father,” Daniel says, not sure why.

“He is sick, yes?”

Daniel nods.

“Of?”

Daniel wishes the guy would take a step back. “I really don’t want to discuss it.”

The man places a soft hand on his wrist. “It’s good to talk. Yes? I think it is. My mother. She is here.” The man’s head tilts in the direction of the ICU.

“What is it?”

“Pneumonia.” The man shrugs, as if indifferent to the particulars.

Daniel says, “Open-heart surgery. My father. Things went wrong.”

The man nods, and his eyes are tender. He holds out his hand. “My name is Michael.”

Daniel shakes the hand. “Daniel.”

“My mother?” Michael says. “She is old. Ninety-six. But she is my mother, you see? Ninety-six, a hundred and six, what difference? She is my mother. She is sick.” His hands shake slightly. “Your father?”

Daniel takes a moment to compose himself. He’s beginning to believe his story, to feel his father is in there, hooked up to tubes, hoses, beeping boxes.

“He’s seventy-eight,” Daniel says. “He’s a strong man.”

Michael nods and claps his shoulder. “Now you must be the strong son. Strong for him. It is this way with things sometimes.” He leans against the wall. “Ah, the waiting.” He sighs and drums his fingers on his thighs.

At two in the morning, he looks out another window and he can see them on the roof by his car. Two of them. One takes the night air. He leans against the grille of the Sequoia and smokes a cigarette.

Daniel goes back to the ICU waiting room. It’s the waiting room for all the units on the floor. Someone must have figured that when it came to the loved ones, no S or C or N was necessary. At this point, it’s all ICU.

He is alone except for a Brazilian woman who snores under the TV, pieces of the Sunday paper scattered at her feet.

He has been here for four hours. Doctors and nurses come and go but pay attention only to the families of their own patients. Strange faces, it is assumed, are the problems of other nurses, other doctors.

Daniel pulls a chair close to the one he’s sitting in. He does so carefully, quietly, so as not to wake the Brazilian woman whose name he has forgotten. She is here for her husband; he was in a car accident. Glass wedged in his throat, pieces of plastic from the underside of the dashboard infiltrated his stomach. His surgery has been going on for five hours. They have no children. He works two jobs, sends the money home to a brother. He and the brother hope to open a gas station in two years outside São Paulo. Then, she told Daniel, they will have children.

Daniel places his feet up on the chair. He places his coat over his chest. He feels the need for sleep as he hasn’t since he was a child. He feels that today he has developed a kinship with grief and trauma and nurses’ asses. He feels it in his bones: love — for the pudgy woman who’d come from a party, for Michael, for the Brazilian woman, her nose pepper-spangled with dark freckles. He feels flushed with it and exhausted by it. But it’s a good exhaustion, earned, he feels.

He stays in the hospital complex for a month.

At some point, they tow his car. But they don’t leave. He sees Troy ten days in, wandering the main street, eyes glancing up at the windows. He rotates to a different hospital every day, returning to the first every seventh. He wanders into ICUs, SICUs, CICUs, even NICUs, which have nothing to do with brain trauma and everything to do with babies, some of them the size of peanuts as they lie under egg-shaped glass, huff into masks, writhe their fists and feet into the air.

It is assumed he is a father, a husband, a brother, and while he has been all those things in his life, he has never felt those roles so proudly or direly as he does here.

He watches the war in waiting rooms with the loved ones of the injured, the impaired, the damaged and broken and internally soupy, the brain-dead, the cancer-stricken, sickle-cell-stricken, terminally anemic, HIV positive, jaundiced, tumor-ridden. He hears stories of rare diseases with odd names. He hears of sudden flicks-of-the-switch in the cerebral cortex, the aorta, the left and right ventricles, the kidneys and pancreas. (And of these, he learns that more than anything, you should pray for a healthy pancreas. Once it goes wrong down there, modern medicine pretty much skips the rest of the show.)

Take care of your colon too. Exercise, for God’s sakes. Stay away from the fried food, the cigarettes and liquor, asbestos.

But there’s more — don’t cross streets where the noon sun is sure to hit the windshields bearing down on you. Don’t swim drunk. Don’t swim at night. Don’t swim. Don’t work on the electrical yourself. Don’t anally pleasure yourself with a Coke bottle (a rumor, true, going around one of the surgical wards, but a good one; everyone gets a laugh). Don’t ski anywhere near trees. Don’t live alone. Don’t climb a stepladder while pregnant. Don’t laugh while eating. And whatever you do, don’t retire. Half the people in here are less than a year removed from retirement, and Daniel hears the same tragic-comic stories night after night. He’d taken up fishing, he tended to his garden, he’d been planning a trip, she loved lemonade, she went on long walks, she was knitting an afghan the size of your house, he bought into a time-share, they took up golf.

Daniel watches the war and feels cocooned here. Hospitals strip a lot from you — your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.

Would you like this magazine? I’m done with it.

Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat, take it.

I’m going to get a soda. Would you like one?

Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?

Even the employees in the gift shops and the cafeterias and the food court and at the coffee carts are, to a person, respectful and courteous. Never solicitous, but kind. Because they don’t know if your son just died, your wife just received chemo, you’ve been told you won’t see June.

There is a basic human concern in hospitals, a unity. And he begins to suspect he is addicted to it.

He is not there when Isabella takes Manuelo home after three weeks, but he hears the prognosis is good. But he is there when Michael gets the news that his mother has passed on, and he sits with him on the heating grate of a windowsill overlooking the city. Michael speaks softly of the flower beds she placed in boxes outside her apartment windows, speaks of her need to bake in times of grief, her inclination to purse her lips and go silent in times of joy. He tells Daniel she learned only the most rudimentary English, enough to get her green card, and then never spoke it again except to order meat from the deli.

“She would say, she would say, ‘Russia is my home. I did not choose the men who ruined it, who made me leave it. So I do not choose to face that I am not there.’” He claps Daniel’s knee. “Ah, she was a rough old woman. Farm stock, you see? Thick ankles, thick head.”

Daniel goes down in the elevator with him and they walk outside. It’s late, the streets silent and smooth with rain. Michael gives him his card. He is an instructor in martial arts.

“Karate?”

He shakes his head. “Soviet military techniques. No pretty philosophy, just attack.”

“You were in the military?”

Michael smiles and lights a cigarette. “I was KGB, my young friend.”

Before Daniel can think how to respond, Michael says, “It’s so nice to be able to say, yes? I was KGB. Just like that. I say it. It is said.” He raises his hands to the air. “And no one stops me. This country…”

Daniel says, “I’m not sure you’d get the same result if you said you were CIA.”

Michael keeps his smile and nods. He blows smoke into the air and follows it with his chin. “You have no father here.”

Daniel says, “I do.”

Michael chuckles and shakes his head at his cigarette.

Daniel says, “I don’t. Okay.”

“You are hiding. Yes?”

Daniel nods.

Michael says, “You will run out of space.”

Daniel looks around at the sprawl of buildings. “Eventually.”

“But by then — yes? — they could have stopped looking.”

A thought infiltrates Daniel before he can stop it: What would I do then?

He says, “They stop looking sometimes, do they?”

Michael nods. “It depends on the level of the offense. But, yes, oftentimes, they just go away.”

“To where?”

“Other things. Other files. You wake up one day and there is no one watching anymore.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Daniel says, but his throat fills with throbs at the prospect.

“And you are free again, yes?”

“Yes.”

Michael touches his arm, squeezes it to the bone. “I promised my mother I would take her home.”

“To Russia.”

He nods, still holding Daniel’s arm.

“But this,” Michael says, “this is home, I think.”

Daniel nods, though he’s not sure he understands, and Michael lets go of his arm.

Michael strips the coal off his cigarette with a slide of his finger and thumb, tosses the remains into a trash can. He sniffs the air.

He looks at Daniel. He says, “You have been my friend.”

“You’ve been mine.”

Michael shrugs.

“You have.”

Another shrug, smaller.

Michael says, “Eventually…”

“Yes.”

“One way or the other.”

“Yes.”

Michael smiles that soft smile of his. He takes both of Daniel’s shoulders in his hands. He squeezes them and his jaw is clenched below his smile and he looks into Daniel’s eyes and nods.

“Good night, my friend.”

“Good night.”

Daniel stands on the sidewalk. He can smell the rain in the night, though it has long since stopped falling, and he feels the hospital complex breathing around him.

If they really did stop looking…

If they really have lost interest altogether…

Michael reaches the corner and looks back, gives him a final wave, and Daniel waves back. An ambulance bleats. Lights come on in windows. Out on the main avenue, cars turn right, turn left, beep their horns. Two nurses pass him, one of them laughing as she tries to tell a story. They’re on their way somewhere, the local bar for nurses and doctors, he supposes. Or maybe not. Maybe to a restaurant. Maybe home. A movie.

Somewhere.