The Exquisite

SIX

In my room there was one large window and across the window was what I took to be a bird net, but the whole time I was there I never saw a bird go by. Once in a while I saw balloons though. Floating up past the window, up past the black net. It wasn’t hard to imagine where they came from, those metallic pink, blue, and yellow, I think, balloons: a small man next to a helium tank. He would have dozens of balloons, and it was far from inconceivable that occasionally after handing one to a child or a friend of a patient, even very carefully, it would slip free. The small man would look up at the sky then at his client then reach for another balloon. On the house, of course. That night, when he got home, his wife, dressed in worn high heels and holding a plastic tumbler, would ask him how he had done. It would take him a while, maybe a swallow or two of his wife’s drink, before he admitted that he had been “forced” to do another two-for-one, which had cut into the day’s profits. She would scold him halfheartedly, then fix him a drink, ask him to describe the child in question, and tell him she would have done the same. This balloon salesman scenario, which was a little different each time it came to me, was the explanation I settled on, although I was never able to confirm it. At any rate, the sight of the balloons put me in mind of my earlier days, specifically the fact that it used to please me greatly as a child, as I suppose it pleased many others, to ingest the helium of balloons and to talk. It used to please me, as it might have those many others, to say, fuck you, Mississippi. Try it and you will see why. I remember several times being disappointed that ingesting helium did not, in addition to making my voice sound so interesting, render me buoyant. Helium did, I suppose you could argue, provide me with a cast for my left arm that several of my fellow fifth graders signed and drew on with brightly colored markers. One of these illustrations was of what its artist, one Eva Grace Cotrero, explained was a moon lamp, a device she was working on that was supposed to promote healing by harnessing moonbeams. There was also a stick-figure drawing of Conan waving his Cimmerian steel sword, but it was much more difficult, because of its placement, to see. My friends wanted to know what it was like to jump off a shed roof. I told them what the doctor had told me: that it was like being a coconut and cracking your shell.

I saw a guy really crack his shell once. West Twenty-second Street. Ninth floor. Guy just looked both ways and jumped. No yelling. Didn’t even kick his feet. Just fell. Big coconut. I told Job, the night nurse, that I had heard him hit the ground.

Job said, yeah?

Yeah, I said.

Only this wasn’t Job. This was the doctor.

Hello, Doctor, I said.

How are you feeling today? asked the doctor.

Just fucking fine, I said.

The doctor was young and Dutch and didn’t mind if I swore. At least up to a point and depending on the context. From Amsterdam she was. Apparently she had a green card and was just months away from getting naturalized.

You know, a professional degree and connections, she said.

That still works even in this climate of international mistrust and general unproductive uncertainty? I said.

Apparently, she said.

She also said things like, no, your case does not trouble me at all, and, yes, I have had experience with similar cases, and, don’t worry, you are progressing very, very nicely.

I don’t want to progress, I said.

It’s not productive to speak that way, Henry, she said.

She was tall and skinny and had blond hair pulled back up over her ears. They were nice ears. I used to mainly focus on them when she would come in. They were very small and looked like little curled-up hands, like what you see sometimes in reproductions of those in utero sonograms. Sometimes I was just lying there and wasn’t in any state to do much of anything, and sometimes the doctor would lean over me to do something and then I could see her ears up close. Once I tried to reach up and touch one. Or thought I did. It danced and spun just out of reach of the hand I thought I was holding up to it. She had excellent teeth, too. I told Job this. Job concurred. He said that yes the doctor did have nice fresh-looking choppers, and nice pink gums for that matter. She was one healthy-looking customer. Looked like she could take apart a couple of nice raw steaks without burping. Like she could really rip them up. It was little wonder they were letting her stay.

We then talked for a time about teeth and gums. Mainly his and mine.

I won’t show you mine, I said.

I’ll pull back your lips and look after you’ve had your meds and you’re asleep, he said. Do you want to sleep now?

Are you going to pull my lips back and look?

Yes.

I thought about the morphine hitting my system, about following it off down into the orange-colored depths, about going deliciously, temporarily blank.

O.K., hit me, I said.

Job hit me. Nice and hard.

I’m not sure how long I was initially scheduled to spend in the hospital, but I am now in a position to affirm that anything approximating a reasonable interval has long since elapsed. It is possible that relevant information was provided to me at some point and that I may well have it somewhere, maybe over on the shelf in the little armoire they’ve given me, but if it’s there I don’t know what it says. I do know, as I’ve mentioned, that time has passed and that I often, after receiving an injection, after the appealing aforementioned heat and blankness, dream. Many dreams — most dull, some not, a few of which recur. In one of them, which sometimes follows the nasty dream involving the cabdriver, I suddenly wake and the room, which is my room, is filled with wind and the wind is talking and what it is saying is not nice. The wind is not nice, and it howls around me, and talks and whispers, and I am on my bed awake and can’t move. Or I am standing, say, in the center of the kitchen, and I can’t move and there is no wind, but there is something there, something that doesn’t like me. But mainly I am flat on my back in my bed, and I am awake and can’t move, and there is the wind. There is the wind, and it talks and I can’t move and I am flat on my back in bed. It is cold, and I am frightened. Sick.

In the meantime, anyway, when I wasn’t dozing deep in my fine hospital pillows, which I did a lot, or being injected by Job or one of his colleagues, I watched, perused back issues of National Geographic and Scientific American, and picked through some of the books that floated around the waiting rooms. Most of them were standard mystery/thriller/romance fare that left me pretty cold. One, though, was a book of stories about a character with an unpronounceable name who gets up to all kinds of fascinating adventures in the far reaches of the galaxy or on the earth before dinosaurs had set up their shop or on the moon when it was still supposedly possible to make a day trip there. These stories reminded me of my interest, when I was a child, in telescopes, and of peering through them — even when they were broken, for example in old junk shops, or had their caps still on in the fancy stores — at whatever night sky full of dazzling lights and shimmering creatures that I could conjure up in my mind. Another book that I did more than pick through was a sad, strangely appealing narrative written by an author of the Germanic persuasion. My interest in this one can likely be attributed to the narrator’s bizarre interests and the highly tenuous quality of the causalities he implied. On one half page, for example, a piece of silk would be torn and on the next a whole forest would be knocked down. Also, the narrator was always being hospitalized or talking about other people who were and things were just generally going to pieces. My favorite section of the book was about beautiful gold and ruby Chinese dragons, how when they rolled over, deep within the earth, seas went dry and mountains crumbled. I told Job about this part, then read it to him, and he said, yeah, and looked out the window, and said, I get that.

Once or twice, in the early days, they brought injured fire- and policemen into the hospital for treatment and cheers went up. I did not see these people being brought in, just extrapolated them from the cheering once I had been told, the first time, what the cheering was about. Everyone of course cheered fire- and policemen in those early days, even if their injuries were not directly related to the events downtown. I cheered them too, from my bed, even deep within the windy vagaries of my evening morphine, probably even, several times, when there were none of them around. But mainly, in the hospital, it was TV and magazines and books and consultations and medications. I.e., routine. It was this routine, and my growing familiarity with the staff and their patterns of movement, and the fact that one of the cabinets down the hall had a faulty lock on it for a short period of time, that eventually allowed me to steal a few things that I was able, through Job, to sell.

I don’t do this regularly, Henry, said Job, after I’d passed on a few choice articles to him one night.

Me neither, I said.

I got a guy, said Job, makes everything easy. But I only see him once in a while.

I’ll let you handle it.

Yeah, that’s right. I’ll handle it. And, Henry, they catch you and you start singing, you’re just some homeless guy with a dent in his head, correct?

Mum’s the word, Job.

That’s right.

Except that, Job …

Yeah, Henry?

You didn’t really put that too nicely.

You’re right, I’m sorry. I was trying to make a point and got carried away — like I say, I don’t do this very often, obviously I need to work on my technique.

You do.

I know.

I’m not just some guy — I mean, no one is just some guy. I used to have a girlfriend, you know.

I know. You told me.

So I slipped a little, I said. So I got lost. We’ve all got a little maze upstairs. We all take a wrong turn sometimes and end up who knows where, shivering in the shrubbery.

Now, there you lost me.

Are you being funny?

No.

I’m paraphrasing. It’s from the book.

What book?

This book I’m reading. The Rings of Saturn. The one with the dragons. Whatever. What I’m thinking right now is that the dent in my head could be a lot bigger, correct? It could be an unplanned hole. A place to put a fist. A cup holder. An ashtray.

Job let me go on a little bit longer then smiled, put a hand on my arm, gave it a hard squeeze, and told me to can it.

I smiled back and canned it.

I liked Job, very much actually. Not least because of his tendency, not always intentional, to slip into passable Edward G. Robinson imitations when we were discussing business. He also had an excellent low-grade sense of humor, especially about other patients, and was willing to listen to everything I had to say about the doctor, often offering me humorous advice along the lines of, you should just come out and ask her for a xerox of that ear. Probably, of course, this isn’t funny unless you have some morphine in you. Or maybe it is anyway, I don’t know.

Sometimes, late at night, Job would sit by me as the evening meds nestled into the soft and secret areas of my brain and whisper strange little things or seem to whisper them as my eyes went shut. In this way, and in the ways I have just described, the early days and nights passed.