“You could do anything you want,” he says, not sounding like he means it.
“What else could Tarzan become, except lord of the jungle?”
“He could have been a dancer, if he wanted. Or an ice cream man. Whatever he wanted.”
“Did you ever want to do anything else, besides this?”
“Never. Not ever.”
“How about now?”
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, no. I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so.” He startles when his pager vibrates. He looks down at it. “I’ve got to go. Just tell Jory if the pain comes back again.”
“Come over here for a second,” I say. “I’ve got to tell you something.”
“Later,” he says.
“No, now. It’ll just take a second.” I expect him to leave, but he walks over and stands near the bed.
“What?”
“Would you like some juice?” I ask him, though what I really meant to do was to accuse him, ever so sweetly, of being the same as me, of knowing the same indescribable thing about this place and about the world. “Or a cookie?”
“No thanks,” he says. As he passes through the door I call out for him to wait, and to come back. “What?” he says again, and I think I am just about to know how to say it when the code bell begins to chime. It sounds like an ice cream truck, but it means someone on the floor is trying to die. He jumps in the air like he’s been goosed, then takes a step one way in the hall, stops, starts the other way, then goes back, so it looks like he’s trying to decide whether to run toward the emergency or away from it.
I get up and follow him down the hall, just in time to see him run into Ella Thims’s room. From the back of the crowd at the door I can see him standing at the head of the bed, looking depressed and indecisive, a bag mask held up in his hand. He asks someone to page the senior resident, then puts the mask over Ella’s face. She’s bleeding from her nose and mouth, and from her ostomy sites. The blood shoots around inside the mask when he squeezes the bag, and he can’t seem to get a tight seal over Ella’s chin. The mask keeps slipping while the nurses ask him what he wants to do.
“Well,” he says. “Um. How about some oxygen?” Nancy finishes getting Ella hooked up to the monitor and points out that she’s in a bad rhythm. “Let’s get her some fluid,” he says. Nancy asks if he wouldn’t like to shock her, instead. “Well,” he says. “Maybe!” Then I get pushed aside by the PICU team, called from the other side of the hospital by the chiming of the ice cream bell. The attending asks Dr. Chandra what’s going on, and he turns even redder, and says something I can’t hear, because I am being pushed farther and farther from the door as more people squeeze past me to cluster around the bed, ring after ring of saviors and spectators. Pushed back to the nursing station, I am standing in front of Jory, who is sitting by the telephone, reading a magazine.
“Hey, honey,” she says, not looking at me. “Are you doing okay?”
See the cat? He has died. Feline leukemic indecisiveness is always terminal. Now he just lies there. You can pick him up. Go ahead. Bring him home and put him under your pillow, and pray to your parents or your stuffed plush Jesus to bring him back, and say to him, “Come back, come back.” He will be smellier in the morning, but no more alive. Maybe he is in a better place, maybe his illness could not follow him where he went, or maybe everything is the same, the same pain in a different place. Maybe there is nothing at all, where he is. I don’t know, and neither do you.
Goodbye, cat, goodbye!
Ella Thims died in the PICU, killed, it was discovered, by too much potassium in her sauce. It put her heart in that bad rhythm they couldn’t get her out of, though they worked over her till dawn. She’d been in it for at least a while before she was discovered, so it was already too late when they put her on the bypass machine. It made her dead alive — her blood was moving in her, but by mid-morning of the next day she was rotting inside. Dr. Chandra, it was determined, was the chief architect of the fuck-up, assisted by a newly graduated nurse who meticulously verified the poisonous contents of the solution and delivered them without comment. Was there any deadlier combination, people asked each other all morning, than an idiot intern and a clueless nurse?
I spend the morning on my IV pole, riding the big circle around the ward. It’s strange, to be out here in the daylight, and in the busy morning crowd — less busy today, and a little hushed because of the death. I go slower than usual, riding like my grandma would, stepping and pushing leisurely with my left foot, and stopping often to let a team go by. They pass like a family of ducks, the attending followed by the fellow, resident, and students, all in a row, with the lollygagging nutritionist bringing up the rear. Pulmonary, Renal, Neurosurgery, even the Hypoglycemia team are about in the halls, but I don’t see the GI team anywhere.
The rest of the night I lie awake in bed, waiting for them to come round on me. I can see it already: everybody getting a turn to kick Dr. Chandra outside my door, or Dr. Snood standing casually with his foot on Dr. Chandra’s neck as the team discussed my latest ins and outs. Or maybe he wouldn’t even be there. Maybe they send you home early when you kill somebody. Or maybe he would just run and hide somewhere. Not sleeping, I still dreamed about him, huddled in a linen closet, sucking on the corner of a blanket, or sprawled on the bathroom floor, knocking his head softly against the toilet, or kneeling naked in the medication room, shooting up with Benadryl and morphine. I went to him in every place, and put my hands on him with great tenderness, never saying a thing, just nodding at him, like I knew how horrible everything was. A couple of rumors float around in the late morning — he’s jumped from the bridge; he’s thrown himself under a trolley; Ella’s parents, finally come to visit, have killed him; he’s retired back home to Virginia in disgrace. I add and subtract details — he took off his clothes and folded them neatly on the sidewalk before he jumped; the trolley was full of German choirboys; Ella’s father choked while her mother stabbed; his feet hang over the end of his childhood bed.
I don’t stop even to get my meds — Nancy trots beside me and pushes them on the fly. Just after that, around one o’clock, I understand that I am following after something, and that I had better speed up if I am going to catch it. It seems to me, who should really know better, that all the late, new sadness of the past twenty-four hours ought to count for something, ought to do something, ought to change something, inside of me, or outside in the world. But I don’t know what it is that might change, and I expect that nothing will change — children have died here before, and hapless idiots have come and gone, and always the next day the sick still come to languish and be poked, and they will lie in bed hoping not for healing, a thing which the wise have all long given up on, but for something to make them feel better, just for a little while, and sometimes they get this thing, and often they don’t. I think of my animals and hear them all, not just the cat but the whole bloated menagerie, crying and crying, make it stop.
Faster and faster and faster — not even a grieving short-gut girl can be forgiven for speed like this. People are thinking, She loved that little girl, but I am thinking, I will never see him again. Still, I almost forget I am chasing something and not just flying along for the exhilaration it brings. Nurses and students and even the proudest attendings try to leap out of the way but only arrange themselves into a slalom course. It’s my skill, not theirs, that keeps them from being struck. Nancy tries to stand in my way, to stop me, but she wimps away to the side long before I get anywhere near her. Doctors and visiting parents and a few other kids, and finally a couple of security guards, one almost fat enough to block the entire hall, try to arrest me, but they all fail, and I can hardly even hear what they are shouting. I am concentrating on the window. It’s off the course of the circle, at the end of a hundred-foot hall that runs past the playroom and the PICU. It’s a portrait frame of the near tower of the bridge, which looks very orange today, against the bright blue sky. It is part of the answer when I understand that I am running the circle to rev up for a run down to the window that right now seems like the only way out of this place. The fat guard and Nancy and a parent have made themselves into a roadblock just beyond the turn into the hall. They are stretched like a Red Rover line from one wall to the other, and two of them close their eyes, but don’t break, as I come near them. I make the fastest turn of my life and head away down the hall.