Words so big to me they blocked out the sky. I rubbed my foot over the grass mat. I felt like I was praying. He said: Ms. Gray, I am not your bathroom monitor. I smiled a little at that. I know, I said. You’re right, I said. But just once, I said. I could hear him breathing. On the street, someone honked. I said too, louder, that maybe it was good if Lisa pretended to have cancer some of the time because otherwise she pretended to have cancer all of the time. When can I see you again? I asked, down to the floor. The sentence knocked around in my mouth like a hard candy. My magnet was moving forward but my body kept still. I could feel the pull, dark and thick, and he said he’d come by to check on me in a few days. Really? I said. Yeah, he said. That would be really great, I said. Come before Sunday, I told him, it has to be before Sunday. I think I can come Saturday, he said.
And please tell Lisa, I said, that I’ll check on her soon. Okay, he said. I lifted up my head. I had been talking mostly to the floor the whole time. It took every bit of myself that was there, slogging up from the depths, but I put a hand on his arm. Good, I said. He looked at my hand. We both looked at my hand.
spent the next two days in bed. I knew the school schedule by heart and on the minute, imagined the kids shifting from class to class, facing their math substitute, Elmer back under the table, Danny coated with rubber bands. No Ann. A zero next to her name in the roll book. Absent. Lisa with angry stitches all over her fore head, telling the younger kids she got them by banging against the wall as hard as she possibly could because she wanted to see what it felt like to break open your head. Shaking her maraca of pills, and dancing.
The art teacher called to say it was too bad, some parent called to yell, my mother called to remind me that we were all going to dinner that Sunday night for my father’s fifty-first birthday. I almost laughed out loud, that she’d told me which birthday it was, just in case I’d forgotten. Ah, I said51I stared at the 50, unfolded on my bed.
On day three, I tucked the 50 in my pocket, picked all of Jones’s numbers off their nesting spots inside my towels and hung them carefully off my arm, in order.
I left my apartment and walked downtown.
““T’sible sigz The movie theater was still playing BANK ROBBERY! which made me walk even slower, and the hardware store remained OPEN but empty. I didn’t see any more loose numbers, but by now lots of merchandise had been stripped from the aisles. I counted twelve missing hammers and a bunch of missing buckets and one of the clocks on the wall was gone. There was a trail of red licorice on the floor of Aisle Three. I asked some pedestrians on the sidewalk if they’d seen Mr. Jones, but they seemed preoccupied and all of them had shovels or pliers in their pockets.
Isn’t he from the stationery shop? asked a woman with two wrenches poking out of her purse.
I shook my head and held up my arm, but she didn’t stay long enough to see. The wax numbers hit against each other, friendly.
I wandered until the shadows turned my skin aquamarine, which meant I was at the foot of the biggest building in town, and it occurred to me that maybe he was in there and that’s where he’d been the whole time: sick. Pulling open the glass doors, I entered the lobby, air tinged from the tint of the transparent walls. The pale fish like nurse at the front station told me there were five joneses in the hospital, but three were women, one was a child, and the fifth, she said, was a visitor from Nebraska who’d stepped on a nail.
She beamed at me. Anything else? she asked.
My fingertips brushed the strings on my wrist. As long as I’m here, I said, do you think you could you tell me an Ann DiLanno’s room number?
She checked. DeLanno, she said. D-e?
D-i, I said.
DiLanno, she said. That’ll be 9°7.
I took the thick-cut water like elevator to the ninth floor, an
underwater dive upward, blue windows rising, stomach falling, floor after floor, sick people in cubicles, a spot of sun in the center of each pane of blue glass.
The doors opened and I stepped onto the floor, which buzzed with coughing and coffee and low voices and bings, and I walked the hallway, slow. 9°1, 9°3. Muttering how sorry I was. 905. The door was white and the number was brass.
907Heart pounding, knuckles pressed to the door frame, I edged my face forward, peering in, but Ann’s bed was a tight empty ship, and a nurse with a turquoise bow tie strode by and told me Miss DiLanno had checked out late that morning.
How’s she doing? I asked, but he’d already turned the corner to tend to someone else’s broken something.
I stepped into Ann’s room, with its boxy metal machines and IN.
standing by itself. There was one flower left on the floor, a limp daisy missing half its teeth. I looked out the window but the glass distorted the ground so I just saw a few dark rectangles that were benches and the messy blob by tops of trees.
A person came in with blue window cleaner and squirted it on the blue windows. I held Mr. Jones’s numbers close to my body.
Back at the elevator, I pressed the Down arrow and a man in a suit waited with me, and when it came we both got in and I pressed 2 L and he pressed 6. We dropped three easy levels and then the doors opened to the sixth floor. A huge sign faced the elevator that 0 said CANCER WARD, in dignified type on a panel of brass.
The man in the suit walked off, into.
I stood and looked at that brass panel.
2 Elevator doors are polite. They do not rush you.
They accomo date last-minute decisions.
O-P
he Cancer Floor didn’t look how I’d imagined. Most people had hair, and the tiles were white in the light, and the magazines in the lobby area were about cars, of all things. I’d wandered only three doors down when I came to the one that said VENUS on the chart.
I wasn’t prepared to say anything so I walked past, fast, first, and my peripheral vision found a person inside, a splash of red, TV on.
I circled the floor.
I passed the magazine lobby, the nurse station, passed the elevator and the bathrooms. Most of the room doors were open and I walked by a boy making blanket sculptures on his bed and two women in nightgowns standing at the window. I walked by an old bony woman in the middle of a rigorous phone call, and a man playing checkers against himself. I could see the Venus door approaching from a mile away and slowed down the closer I got.
One step. Two steps. Three steps.
I didn’t look in. I walked right by.
The boy’s bed sculpture was the ocean now, blankets rising and cresting in waves, and one of the women by the window was trying to get the stain out of her nightgown. The bony woman was gesturing wildly with her bony arms to the phone. The man had reached the end of his board and kinged his red checker.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time looking in my father’s medical books on skin disease. They have pages and pages of color photographs. When I had friends over, this was usually a place we ended up-stuck behind the living room couch, eyes squinted, book open, daring each other: I bet you can’t handle 135; kiss page 257, and I’ll give you my dessert.
Mrs. Venus’s door approached again.
I walked very slowly. Turned my head as I passed the open frame.
I saw the wig on her head, so bright it looked like a teenager’s first experiment with hair dye. She was laughing at the TV. Her eye whites were not clear.
Straight ahead. Keep walking.
Lobby. Bathrooms. The elevator doors opened but no one came out.