“I know it seems strange,” she was saying, in a matter-of-fact tone, “but we’ve just grown apart.”
I tried to speak up, to interrupt, to tell her to shut up and come on back home — to life. But then I was standing on a golden Caribbean beach where a new home was waiting for somebody.
Gravity shifted and I was no longer in my seat. There were voices thundering and lights and darkness. I was blind as well as breathless, thinking about my daughter and wishing that she was with me. My girl, Anetta, would not let her father die. At least, I remember thinking, at least my memory would not be lost as long as she was alive and little Olive, her baby girl, was there in the world beyond the darkness that enveloped me.
“You bettah git away from me, niggah,” a man declared in a jagged tone that was steely and thin as a dagger.
The angry words dissipated in the air, and everything was dark and silent again. Breath flowed cold and rich through my nostrils. My head was stuffed with cotton wadding, and there were no independent thoughts rising from my mind.
I drifted.
I was in a coffin, under the ocean, watched over by fishes that did not know or care to know my name or species. They flitted, fornicated, and fled in fear when shadows fell upon them. Water leaked in slowly, excruciatingly so. One drop every thirty seconds or so, that’s how I figured it. But what did I know? And what did it matter now that I was dead and interred and forgotten, buffeted by the currents of the deep?
“Hey, brothah. Brothah,” a man was saying. He shook my shoulder, disturbing my eternal rest. “Hey, wake up.”
I made a noise. It was nowhere near a word, but it seemed to be enough for the grave robber. He was a dark shadow upon a screen of slightly lighter darkness, hovering to my right.
“Somebody in that bed across from you?” he asked.
What bed? What cross?
“Somebody in there?”
“Where?” I managed to say. It hurt my throat, way down past the Adam’s apple, to speak.
“I need a bed,” the man said. “Is they anyone in it?”
“Mothahfuckah,” the bodiless knife of a voice from before warned. It came from somewhere farther off to the right. The shadow moved away.
I tried to raise my head but failed. I tried to imagine myself in the world. That didn’t work either. Then I remembered an old trick. I evoked an image of Earth, allowing it to turn slowly. I watched, as I imagined God sometimes did, the passing of terrain, paying no attention to false national borders of fiefdoms. When a place I’d known moved by it would lighten, as if there were a powerful light below the surrounding soil and mountains. Ouagadougou, Cairo, and Accra flashed into my mind. I remembered a sandwich and a young Senegalese woman, an offer and a refusal, and afterward, for years, regret. There was Paris and London and, faintly, Amsterdam... New York.
New York. That’s where I was on the globe. The light was strongest there.
The cold, dry oxygen was too much. I started coughing and couldn’t stop. It was a rolling, hacking, wet and yet dry retching from my diaphragm all the way to my eyes. I was old Mr. Hawkins, dying in the apartment across the hall in 1946. I was the car alarm that wouldn’t stop in the middle of the night. I was Cecil Roberts Bentway, PhD, historian and cultural critic. And I would rather have been dead than go through one more minute of coughing.
Hands took hold of my head and jaw. I struggled against them, but most of my strength had been drained by the involuntary exertions. Something thick and wet was forced into my left nostril and down into my throat and then farther, into my lungs.
There was a vibration, a throbbing sensation, and I knew that someone was using a vacuum to suck the mucous from my flooded lung.
The coughing stopped.
For a while I relaxed on the hardtack sheets, sweating and sighing. I realized that the mattress was thin, that I could feel the whorls of the metal springs under my body. I lifted my rump up, let go, and felt the hint of a rebound — proving my surmise. This made me smile. I could still ply my dubious trade even while being but a hair’s breadth away from finality.
“Where’d this one come from?” a woman’s voice asked.
“I don’t know,” a young man said. “That bed’s s’posed to be empty.”
I raised my head enough to see that they were standing next to the bed across the way from me.
“He got an admittance form?”
“Nuthin’. Not even a clipboard.”
“Let’s go down to the front desk and ask them.”
“Nurse,” Steel Voice said.
“What?” the woman replied.
“My sheets is torn.”
“OK,” she said.
“When you gonna gimme new ones?”
“I’ll make a note at the nurses’ station.”
The young man and the woman that was a nurse talked more. Their voices receded as they left the room and moved down the hallway.
“Bastids,” Steel Voice said after they were gone.
The room slowly did a backward fade into daylight. For a long time I lay there on my back allowing names to flow through my mind, or maybe they were going that way without my consent. C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois, the poet and activist Jayne Cortez, and Amiri Baraka, who, under the name LeRoi Jones, wrote the play Dutchman. I considered their works and many others. Over the years I’d been a tough and, hopefully, loving critic. I’d taught young people of all backgrounds and races about people and ways of thinking that the university rarely emphasized. At seventy-five I’d bought a beach condo on a small island where I could finally finish my life’s work — Pagans in Pinstripes.
My throat, instead of hurting, was numb. I thought about my shoulders and elbows between the esoteric texts, and finally, after quite a while, I managed to rise up on one arm.
The room was larger than I expected. There were four beds with a good deal of space between them; one situated in each corner. The bed to my right, where the steely voice had originated, was being worried over by a thin black man in pale blue pajamas who had stripped the blankets and sheets and was remaking the bed. For some reason this task seemed Sisyphean. He worked methodically and with great care. There was something institutional about his movements.
Across the way, past my feet, a smallish but not thin black man was coiled under the blanket, staring suspiciously around himself. He clutched his woolen cover as if he were afraid that someone might come and yank it away.
At the diagonally opposite corner from me was yet another dark-colored brother. Sitting in a wooden chair next to the bed, he was also clad in pale blue pajamas. This silent sentry brought to mind a lost soul who had returned to the last place where he’d been alive. His morose expression and posture added to this impression. The man appeared to me like the only mourner at his own funeral, seated in the pews and at the same time lying in the coffin. He too looked to be past sixty.
I tried to think of the odds that four black men near or past retirement age might end up in the same hospital room together in Lower Manhattan. Weren’t there any white or yellow, olive-toned or brown-skinned men in their twenties or forties, any young black men who got sick and needed a bed?
“Hey, brothah,” called the paranoid man beyond my feet. I knew then he was the shadow who had first awakened me.
I looked at him but could not speak.
“If they ask you, tell ’em that I was brought in on a stretcher last night. Tell ’em that I was brought in on a stretcher.”
I glanced over at the man making and remaking his bed. He paid no attention to what our undocumented roommate was saying. I let my head fall back on the small pillow and felt the little bounces of jubilant springs. It was as if I were lying upon a huge lily pad; a bloated frog waiting for a passing fly. I closed my eyes and tried to remember getting to that place — seventy-five and hospitalized in a room occupied only by old black men. Had I really been a professor at a prestigious university? Had I once been present at Nelson Mandela’s eighty-second birthday celebration?