Wrapping the thick cords once around her neck meant she wouldn’t trip over them. Alice took her time, dragging the battery pack and its tree of fluids alongside her, the IV pole jiggling, which was fine, except being on alert, making sure that all was safe, was even more taxing. Where visitors wore the mask and gloves and bib so they wouldn’t transmit anything, Alice wore them so she wouldn’t pick anything up.
In New Hampshire, after her numbers had started to climb, and the doctors had given her the okay, walking laps around the ward with Oliver had been her nightly chance to get out of that godforsaken room without some sort of test or probe, and she’d looked forward to that nightly hour as if it were her wedding. Barely managed ten laps that first go-around. By the time they’d released her, she was up to fifty, almost half a mile, thrusting her hands above her head for a five-lap set, jetting them out to the sides like an airplane and making circles for another five (the ward physical therapist had told Alice the exercises would prevent her arms from atrophying). Next to her, Oliver did the same, or held on to the IV tower so it didn’t wobble; he always counted out loud when they passed the nurses’ station and completed a lap, tracking Alice’s reps and pace. Every so often they broke into the chorus of that old Olivia Newton-John song. Nurses stared like these two aerobicizers were crazy, or made charmed cooing sounds, or else looked right through the two, just another day in paradise.
Using her body as leverage so the door stayed open, she rolled the battery tree out of her hospital room, and was surprised to find herself facing a different direction than when she left her New Hampshire room, the configuring of sink and supply nook different, too, more cramped, the shelves shorter, with supplies piled atop one another. The overhead lights were brighter, too, which seemed improbable, based on Alice’s memory of that place, only here was the evidence, glaring down, reflecting even more harshly off the tiles. The hallway seemed to run forever, like one of those visual effects to convey eternity — an Escher effect. Alice tried to remember specifics, his various lithographs. She thought of a hallway from some Kubrick movie, but couldn’t remember which.
Centered down in the distance on the other end, the outline of a person and an IV pole formed a small squiggle.
Expectations work against you, she remembered Eisenstatt saying. You think you know what’s coming. It bothered Alice that Dr. Know-It-All was indeed correct. She wouldn’t have believed that she’d gotten weaker since coming home, but walking fifty laps in this place seemed as possible as being named the queen of Spain. Her feet did not leave the floor; she shuffled forward, her old person’s shuffle, in the direction of what looked like a barricade, a bunch of overflowing industrial clothing bins, gathered on the right side of the hall — the near door’s sign read LINEN ROOM, and she made sure to give it a wide berth, navigating the rolling pole, a wide arc around the mess. Soon she was passing a stray metal stacking table, its shelves overflowing with uncovered trays of sloppy, half-eaten lunches and untouched dinners, Saran Wrap still clinging to the tops of their square trays. A bit farther down, beyond the door for the social services worker, sat a lab rack filled with blood vials. The hallway’s near wall was lined with flyers and pamphlets: guides to various radiation treatments, how to deal with this or that chemotherapy, support group flyers, checklists for talking to your children about your disease.
Thank Goddess there was something else to look at. That little squiggle down the hall had taken the form of a person. A fully dressed man: loose blue-and-black lumberjack shirt, black jeans worn to dullness, the clothes hanging off his body in a manner she recognized all too well from Oliver and his friends. Would’ve been unassuming if he hadn’t been pushing an IV stand. Alice immediately classified him: Phylum: grad student who lives down the hallway; Class: odd and interesting, with hints of intensity.
Moving parallel to Alice now, the man initiated eye contact. Gaunt, but not painfully so. Unwashed black hair splattered across his forehead, a boyish mess he was too old to pull off, but that held charm nonetheless. When Alice understood his brown eyes were trained on her, something inside her kicked up. She allowed a nod in his direction, kept on shuffling, the soles of her boots making scuffed sounds.
She’d made it down the hall, and completed a right turn, when he approached again — was it possible he’d lapped her?
His face almost alabaster in its paleness. A pronounced brow and pointed features made him look almost feral. Aquiline jaw muddled with a week of growth. “You need someone?” he asked. “To walk with you?”
She did not look at him.
“You sure?”
She wavered, but said, “Should be.”
For reasons unknown to her, Alice kept talking. “My drugs haven’t kicked in yet. And my counts are still high. The doctors felt I’d be okay—” She thought, laughed. “You know, I don’t think this is a very good hospital.”
His smirk was entertained, vaguely predatory. “I felt the same way when my doc asked if I needed to score.”
“I suppose I could use the company. After all, what can happen, I’ll catch cancer?”
He asked how she was doing. She gave him a tepid smile, and her fashion voice: “Let’s change subjects, shall we?”
The man acquiesced, taking hold of her IV pole, assuming the responsibility for pushing both of them. He volunteered that it was his fifth day here. The story of him getting here was honestly bizarre. He played keyboards, mostly session work, but since he had a station wagon, cats figured they could ask him to sit in a set, get him to haul and store their gear. “I was playing with my friend’s band at Brownies, you’ve been there, right?” He waited, checking if Alice had a reaction, continuing when there was none. “I’d had the flu, something. That shithole’s a total hotbox, so going in I knew it was going to be a long night. But it’s a gig, and, you know, playing is better than not playing. Anyway, behind the beat every song, head’s all sludgy, just slogging through.”
“You don’t say.”
“Carrying my gear outside afterward, arms were total noodles. I stopped to adjust my grip. Just looked up, like for a sec, up at the street. The old brownstones, snow hitting my face—”
Alice felt herself relating to and disappearing into the tale: the musician’s legs turned into buckling accordions; the sound of his keyboards hitting the sidewalk; it registering upon him that this clatter had to mean hundreds of dollars in repairs. She didn’t give in to the temptation to ask if he’d been under the weather beforehand. Alice was going to have to ask his name again.
He was explaining about a youngish woman who’d helped him get to an emergency room. “We were getting to know each other, seemed like we had a little connection.” So when this art school chick said she had to check her messages—“like the third time she’d said that, at two in the morning”—the musician should have guessed someone was waiting on her, or she was waiting on someone.