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.