The TV was on all during the day. I watched shows that I’d never heard of before, game shows and sporting events, the shopping channel and daytime soap operas. I didn’t have much concentration. I didn’t know how long I had been in that bed or how long it would be before they committed me to the nursing home.
When I tried to get up, the male nurses would push me back down. Anetta might not call for weeks, and I did not call her number often enough to remember it. Simba had moved to Tanzania and refused to talk to me for reasons that he kept to himself.
Days had passed. The beautiful Nigerian doctor dropped by in the afternoons. She was friendly but would not let me go.
Todd Brightwood had been signed in as a patient suffering from various ailments that led to his attack of illness. Gil Holder kept making and remaking his bed, complaining about the hospital staff. Bret Lagnan suffered in silence the abandonment by his wife (whose name I never got.) I marked the time, slowly garnering my strength for the moment when I could escape that wing of Saint Jude’s Hospital set aside for the poor, hopeless, and black.
None of the men in my room had visitors, but I met a man across the hall who agreed to have his son bring me some pants and a T-shirt. The son wasn’t coming back until Friday though, and Dr. Ifadapo hadn’t yet decided which day to have me committed to the nursing home. The attack had exacerbated my emphysema, and so I couldn’t walk very far without resting. It was going to be a strenuous escape, if I could even make it.
On Tuesday the doctor told me that I’d be leaving on Thursday. I argued with her, but she just smiled and nodded. I called the college human-resources office, but they told me that all medical insurance for retired employees was handled in Albany and that I had to send them a letter if I’d lost my insurance card.
“I haven’t lost my damn card.”
“Then show it to the people at the hospital.”
It seemed impossible that I could have lost control of my life so easily. From full professor with tenure to a homeless ward of the state. I was on the eighth floor of a building that took up two city blocks. I figured that it was nearly a quarter of a mile between me and freedom. But I had to try — blue pajamas and all. I’d carry a weapon with me. And if anyone tried to stop me, I’d throw down on them.
The only weapon I could find was a serrated plastic knife, but that would have to do.
At two o’clock on that Wednesday I closed my eyes to rest fifteen minutes more, and then I was going to run, regardless of what they did to me.
“Cecil,” came a voice with a francophone, West African inflection to it.
“Adegoke?” I said, without opening my eyes.
“I finally found you,” he said.
I mustered enough courage to open one eye, and there he was. Blacker than my doctor and tall and handsome in that gaunt way only Ghanaian men can manage: Adegoke Arapmoi, professor of film and culture, stood there beside my bed. Behind him was Jack Fine, a light brown and beefy teacher of archaeology who hailed from Baltimore.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Adegoke asked.
“I did. Your phone went straight to voice mail.”
“What happened?”
“Get me outta here, man. They wanna put me in a nursing home.”
Adegoke wore a lavender jacket, black trousers, and a bright, bright yellow shirt. All this topped off with a Panama hat. His white teeth glistened against black skin.
“I was in Ghana,” he said, “at the ten-year anniversary of the death of my father. When I got back you weren’t home. I had to wait until the night guard was on duty. He told me about your attack, but he didn’t know where the ambulance had taken you. Jack and I have been going from hospital to hospital.”
“Hey, Cecil,” Jack said. He was grinning, and so was I. “You look like shit.”
“You brought me new sheets, but they got stains on ’em,” Gil Holder was telling his nurse.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Jack Fine, who was at least six five, said to the woman.
“Yes?”
“Tell the doctor, and whoever, that we’re takin’ Professor Bentway home.”
“He has to be released by a doctor,” the young, pink-skinned woman explained.
“That’s OK,” Jack said. “Just as long as that release coincides with our egress from your institution.”
Jack was thirty-three years old and not that far away from his student days. He still slung big words around as if they made him sound smart. I usually felt embarrassed by the way he spoke, but that day I was filled with glee.
Gil Holder was actually smiling at my big friend.
“I brought you some of my son’s clothes, Cecil,” Adegoke said as the nurse fled the room.
He placed a large brown-paper bag on my bed.
Many years before, Addy had been my student at San Francisco State. He and my son, Eric/Simba, were the same age, forty-eight, but it was Adegoke who searched all the emergency rooms in Manhattan until he’d found me.
With my friends’ help, I got up and dressed. Jack even tied my shoes.
“What’s going on here?” Dr. Ifadapo asked as she came into the room flanked by two black men in security-guard uniforms.
Jack moved toward the little group. Addy got in front of him.
“I am Dr. Arapmoi from New York College,” he said. “Dr. Bentway is one of our professors. We have come to bring him home.”
“I have already signed the papers to release him to Morningside Nursing Home. You can apply for his release there.”
“He’s coming with me to my home now,” Addy said with certainty.
“The forms are filled out.”
Jack Fine snorted. The guards took notice of him. Gil Holder picked up some kind of bludgeon from under his pillow. Brightwood pulled the blanket up to his chin, and lovelorn Lagnan didn’t notice a thing.
The beautiful Nigerian stared into the handsome Ghanaian’s eyes for half a minute at least.
“Are you his guardian?” Ifadapo asked.
“I’m his nephew,” Addy lied. “And he’s coming home with me.”
For the next two hours they filled out forms and made recommendations. We walked down three long halls, took an elevator, and went to the checkout desk to retrieve whatever it was that I had in my pockets when I was brought in.
“This is a blue form,” the big bald brown man said from behind his marble desk. “You need a yellow form to get what we have. A blue form will get your clothes from the emergency room closet.”
Back to the elevator, down the halls, we returned to the nurses’ desk near my room.
“Oh,” the pink-skinned nurse (whose name tag read “Laura”) said. “I’m sorry. I should have given you the yellow form. Give me that one, and I’ll fill out another.”
“But he needs the blue paper to get his clothes,” big Jack Fine bellowed.
“Oh, right,” the nurse said. “You know we’re very understaffed. I’m lucky if I remember to make my rounds.”
The man wanting the yellow form had my wallet, in which I found my medical-insurance card.
“You go through that door on your left,” he said, now quite friendly, “and down the hall until you get to the emergency room. You pass through there and come to a desk behind a Plexiglas barrier. The woman there will help you find your clothes.”
There were dozens of people sitting in the disheveled maze of blue vinyl-and-chrome chairs that furnished the emergency-room waiting area. A sleeping, or maybe unconscious, child in his mother’s arms, a man with blood seeping from his face and both arms, an old man (my age) staring out a window with his lower eyelids drooping away from the orbs — open and red. One man sat silently crying, his hand swollen to the size of a football. A young woman with haunted eyes had such severe flatulence that no one could sit near her. You could see the pain from her belly in the twist of her mouth and the humiliation of her eyes.