“You OK, man?” someone asked.
I opened my eyes and saw the rail-thin bed-maker. I would have bet that the frown on his face was the closest he ever came to expressing compassion.
“They don’t give a fuck about a niggah ’round here, man,” he said. “Most the time they late bringin’ you your food. An’ forget the bedclothes. It don’t even look like they wash ’em more times than not.”
I wanted to say something, I wanted to echo the roommate’s knowledge, but didn’t have the strength.
“That’s all right, brothah,” he said. “Get you some rest. If you need me to get you sumpin’, just say it or just raise your hand. You know I always got one eye open.”
It felt as if I had only blinked, but the man was gone. I knew then that I had to get out of there. I had to get away before I was swallowed up by that alien room with its condemned souls, devil nurses, and infiltrators.
I tried to remember what I had been wearing before the asthma attack. Most nights I fell asleep wearing a golden, scarlet, and royal blue Ghanaian robe. The first time I’d get up to urinate I’d take it off. Did my attack come before my first trip to the toilet?
“Mr. Holder,” someone said. She was addressing the bed-maker.
There was low light suspended in the air like an illuminated fog.
“What?”
“Have you used needles in the past five years?” the woman asked. There was a lilt to her voice. Nigerian.
“I ain’t nevah used no needles.”
“It says in your file that you were in prison for drugs,” she countered.
“Yes, I was. Heroin. But I ain’t nevah used no needles. The people I sold to used ’em, but I was always a Johnnie Walker Blue Label man.”
I dozed while the doctor and her assistants wheeled some heavy equipment to the side of the bed-maker, Mr. Holder.
I woke up again when a man all in white rolled an IV unit up next to me and lifted my right arm. As he looked for a vein I tried to pull away. But I was so weak that he didn’t seem to notice. I thought he should at least tell me what he was doing; that he should ask if I wanted the procedure or whether I was allergic to the yellowy fluid in the IV bag.
Seconds after the needle was pressed into the vein, my body passed out. I say it this way because I was in darkness and without physical sensation, but my consciousness seemed to rise above the bed and the body it held. I could hear everything. It wasn’t like normal hearing either. My ears were hypersensitive, like those of an ancient proto-dog at the edge of the Gobi Desert listening for sounds of beloved but feared humanity.
“She, she kicked me out,” the sad man who sat beside his bed whined. “Twenty-eight years, and she just kicked me out like a, like a stray dog. And I ain’t got nuthin’.”
“...brought me in last night,” the man in the bed across from me was saying to somebody. “Last thing I remembah I was walkin’ down One Thirty-Seven and I got dizzy. I grabbed for this lady to keep upright, but she hollered and pushed me away. When I woke up I was in this here bed... No. I ain’t got no one to call.”
“The X-ray reveals a dark spot, Mr. Holder,” the Nigerian doctor was saying. “It might be malignant.”
“Dark spot where?” the fastidious bed-maker jabbed, in his hopelessly harsh tone.
“The left side of your chest. Over your lung.”
“That ain’t no tumor. That’s where I got shot one time.”
“So you think that it’s a bullet?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why didn’t the doctor take it out?”
“What doctor? You think I’m gonna go to some doctor when all they gonna do is call the cops? Shit.”
“When I went back to beg her she was gone,” the sad man next to his bed said, and then he let out a low moan that didn’t sound human. “Carol next door told me that she had gone back down to North Carolina to her people. She had everything a’ mines. My Social Security card. My birth certificate. Only shoes I had left was on my feet... Yeah, my blood pressure’s high. Wouldn’t yours be?”
“Sugar diabetes, asthma, arthritis, glaucoma, thyroid condition, herpes, shingles, allergies to milk and shellfish...” The man across from me listed what seemed like every disease and condition in the doctor’s medical handbook. “No, I haven’t been takin’ my medicine. I ain’t got the money. So sick that I couldn’t work. No work, no rent. No home, and sooner or later you get dizzy and fall down in the street.”
“Ow!” Mr. Holder, to my right, shouted. “What you doin’?”
“Cutting out the bullet. It’s embedded in fairly shallow scar tissue.”
“Ain’t you gonna knock me out or nuttin’? Shit!”
“That would be more dangerous than the procedure, and a local anesthetic is contraindicated due to the bullet being so close to the heart.”
Mr. Holder moaned, and I could imagine the scalpel slicing into his chest while the male nurses held him down.
The IV forced on me was a powerful narcotic. I heard everything, it seemed. I can’t remember now if they were all speaking at once or if these conversations and other sounds happened over time. In my memory they all flow together. There was a singular endpoint though.
“There it is,” the Nigerian doctor said, and I heard the plink of metal on metal; the corroded bullet, I imagined, hitting a shiny chromium tray. This hard, metallic sound ended my free-floating awareness. I settled back down into the darkness that I feared and craved more than anything.
“Do you have a medical-insurance card, Mr. Bentway?” Dr. Ifadapo asked, her sculpted sub-Saharan features glistening black.
It was the afternoon of that same day, though it felt as if weeks had passed.
“It’s Professor Bentway,” I said, “and I already told your nurse that I’m insured by New York College.”
“We need the card.”
“Call the school.”
“They tell us that Professor Bentway has retired.”
“What do you want from me, then?”
“Is there someone we can call?”
“I don’t have my book with me. I got my one friend, but his phone is off. All I got to do is go home, and I could get the card for you. My apartment is only mine for a few more days. I’m supposed to leave for Saint Lucia. I got my tickets in the apartment too.”
“We can’t release you, Mr.... Professor Bentway. You can’t go on your own, and there’s no one to take you.”
“Just get me down to a cab.”
“The law won’t allow us do that, sir.” Her beautiful smile was maddening.
“You can’t keep me here.”
“We believe that you had a heart attack along with the emphysema episode. We will treat that, and then, if there is no other option, we’ll be forced to release you to a state-run nursing facility.”
“A nursing home?”
Smiling, the doctor got up and moved away to the charlatan across from me. The ex-con, Holder, was stripping his bed for the fourth time that day, and Bret Lagnan, the man who had been abandoned by his wife, sat there next to his bed suffering the ailment of a broken heart.
All my phone numbers were keyed into the cell phone that was on the dusty floor in university housing. It was midsummer, so no one was around anyway. And I was weak from the emphysema attack that, I was told by Dr. Ifadapo, was brought on by the air-conditioning, which circulated the dust kicked up by the movers. I could barely sit upright.
At times I was aware of the charlatan, Todd Brightwood, hovering around my bed looking for jewelry or pocket change. Holder told him to get away whenever he drifted to our side of the room. Lovesick Lagnan didn’t seem to know that anyone else was there.