It is assumed he is a father, a husband, a brother, and while he has been all those things in his life, he has never felt those roles so proudly or direly as he does here.
He watches the war in waiting rooms with the loved ones of the injured, the impaired, the damaged and broken and internally soupy, the brain-dead, the cancer-stricken, sickle-cell-stricken, terminally anemic, HIV positive, jaundiced, tumor-ridden. He hears stories of rare diseases with odd names. He hears of sudden flicks-of-the-switch in the cerebral cortex, the aorta, the left and right ventricles, the kidneys and pancreas. (And of these, he learns that more than anything, you should pray for a healthy pancreas. Once it goes wrong down there, modern medicine pretty much skips the rest of the show.)
Take care of your colon too. Exercise, for God’s sakes. Stay away from the fried food, the cigarettes and liquor, asbestos.
But there’s more — don’t cross streets where the noon sun is sure to hit the windshields bearing down on you. Don’t swim drunk. Don’t swim at night. Don’t swim. Don’t work on the electrical yourself. Don’t anally pleasure yourself with a Coke bottle (a rumor, true, going around one of the surgical wards, but a good one; everyone gets a laugh). Don’t ski anywhere near trees. Don’t live alone. Don’t climb a stepladder while pregnant. Don’t laugh while eating. And whatever you do, don’t retire. Half the people in here are less than a year removed from retirement, and Daniel hears the same tragic-comic stories night after night. He’d taken up fishing, he tended to his garden, he’d been planning a trip, she loved lemonade, she went on long walks, she was knitting an afghan the size of your house, he bought into a time-share, they took up golf.
Daniel watches the war and feels cocooned here. Hospitals strip a lot from you — your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.
Would you like this magazine? I’m done with it.
Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat, take it.
I’m going to get a soda. Would you like one?
Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?
Even the employees in the gift shops and the cafeterias and the food court and at the coffee carts are, to a person, respectful and courteous. Never solicitous, but kind. Because they don’t know if your son just died, your wife just received chemo, you’ve been told you won’t see June.
There is a basic human concern in hospitals, a unity. And he begins to suspect he is addicted to it.
He is not there when Isabella takes Manuelo home after three weeks, but he hears the prognosis is good. But he is there when Michael gets the news that his mother has passed on, and he sits with him on the heating grate of a windowsill overlooking the city. Michael speaks softly of the flower beds she placed in boxes outside her apartment windows, speaks of her need to bake in times of grief, her inclination to purse her lips and go silent in times of joy. He tells Daniel she learned only the most rudimentary English, enough to get her green card, and then never spoke it again except to order meat from the deli.
“She would say, she would say, ‘Russia is my home. I did not choose the men who ruined it, who made me leave it. So I do not choose to face that I am not there.’” He claps Daniel’s knee. “Ah, she was a rough old woman. Farm stock, you see? Thick ankles, thick head.”
Daniel goes down in the elevator with him and they walk outside. It’s late, the streets silent and smooth with rain. Michael gives him his card. He is an instructor in martial arts.
“Karate?”
He shakes his head. “Soviet military techniques. No pretty philosophy, just attack.”
“You were in the military?”
Michael smiles and lights a cigarette. “I was KGB, my young friend.”
Before Daniel can think how to respond, Michael says, “It’s so nice to be able to say, yes? I was KGB. Just like that. I say it. It is said.” He raises his hands to the air. “And no one stops me. This country…”
Daniel says, “I’m not sure you’d get the same result if you said you were CIA.”
Michael keeps his smile and nods. He blows smoke into the air and follows it with his chin. “You have no father here.”
Daniel says, “I do.”
Michael chuckles and shakes his head at his cigarette.
Daniel says, “I don’t. Okay.”
“You are hiding. Yes?”
Daniel nods.
Michael says, “You will run out of space.”
Daniel looks around at the sprawl of buildings. “Eventually.”
“But by then — yes? — they could have stopped looking.”
A thought infiltrates Daniel before he can stop it: What would I do then?
He says, “They stop looking sometimes, do they?”
Michael nods. “It depends on the level of the offense. But, yes, oftentimes, they just go away.”
“To where?”
“Other things. Other files. You wake up one day and there is no one watching anymore.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Daniel says, but his throat fills with throbs at the prospect.
“And you are free again, yes?”
“Yes.”
Michael touches his arm, squeezes it to the bone. “I promised my mother I would take her home.”
“To Russia.”
He nods, still holding Daniel’s arm.
“But this,” Michael says, “this is home, I think.”
Daniel nods, though he’s not sure he understands, and Michael lets go of his arm.
Michael strips the coal off his cigarette with a slide of his finger and thumb, tosses the remains into a trash can. He sniffs the air.
He looks at Daniel. He says, “You have been my friend.”
“You’ve been mine.”
Michael shrugs.
“You have.”
Another shrug, smaller.
Michael says, “Eventually…”
“Yes.”
“One way or the other.”
“Yes.”
Michael smiles that soft smile of his. He takes both of Daniel’s shoulders in his hands. He squeezes them and his jaw is clenched below his smile and he looks into Daniel’s eyes and nods.
“Good night, my friend.”
“Good night.”
Daniel stands on the sidewalk. He can smell the rain in the night, though it has long since stopped falling, and he feels the hospital complex breathing around him.
If they really did stop looking…
If they really have lost interest altogether…
Michael reaches the corner and looks back, gives him a final wave, and Daniel waves back. An ambulance bleats. Lights come on in windows. Out on the main avenue, cars turn right, turn left, beep their horns. Two nurses pass him, one of them laughing as she tries to tell a story. They’re on their way somewhere, the local bar for nurses and doctors, he supposes. Or maybe not. Maybe to a restaurant. Maybe home. A movie.
Somewhere.
Gone down to corpus
That sunday afternoon, I go up the walk to Lyle Biddet’s house and ring the doorbell. I’m hoping Lyle answers and not his mother or father, because I really don’t want to think of him as someone’s son. I want Lyle to answer the door so I can convince him, real friendly-like, that we’re having an off-the-cuff celebration to commemorate our four years playing football together for East Lake High. I’ll tell Lyle there are no hard feelings for him dropping that pass on the one and coughing up the ball on the thirty. No hard feelings at all. And Lyle’ll follow me back down the walk where Terry Twombley waits behind the wheel of his Cougar with the Lewis brothers sitting in back, and we’ll take Lyle on a little ride and find someplace real quiet and kick the shit out of him.