I felt sick, my stomach was upset, every bone and muscle ached, and each move I made took an effort.
Nothing seemed to have led up to this illness. I’d been to the theater the night before with my friend Ellen. We’d seen a show with music about eighteenth century boy sopranos (played by women) and abducted orphans.
A few hours before that, an affair I’d been having for some time with a guy named Andre was broken off very suddenly. The man with whom Andre lived had called me up and said that Andre had told him everything. They both wanted me to stay away from him from now on. It was a once-a-week thing that had become routine and boring, as I told the man, and I asked him to say good-bye to Andre for me.
I’m a veteran of more than forty years in Manhattan and normally neither big, melodramatic Broadway shows nor sudden disruptions in love cause the kind of distress I felt that morning.
Even as I wondered if I should call my doctor, I was aware of a kind of web stream that ran constantly in a corner of my brain. The fever dream took the form of a constant Google search complete with web pages and blogs I couldn’t remember looking for.
Pictures and stories with elusive contexts appeared. At one point, I found myself looking at the profiles of the members of a tough cop unit somewhere in the Southwest. It had short bios, photos of them with mustaches and holsters and masklike sunglasses.
As I wondered why and how I had looked this up, I saw a familiar face with a white crewcut and expressionless cop eyes.
I remembered I wanted to call my doctor. As I dialed the number, I thought of the tune and lyrics of a song I’d been listening to recently. It was by John Dowland, a poet and composer who was kind of the Kurt Cobain of Elizabethan England. Something in the melancholy grace of the tune, the resignation of the song’s lyrics had caught me.
Maybe this attachment had been a kind of harbinger, some part of my consciousness telling me I had started dying. I wondered how Dowland’s song “Flow My Tears,” had affected Philip K. Dick when he’d used it in a title.
Somehow the call to the doctor never got made. I couldn’t remember what day it was. People who phoned me — friends, the godchildren who in sentimental moments I thought of as my kids, the woman who had been my work-wife before I retired from the university — seemed concerned.
Many things ran on the screen inside my head. The Macabres when I found myself looking at their site seemed like many a New York late seventies punk group. The photos showed the musicians — emaciated, decked in bondage accessories, with their hair hacked off at odd angles. A bit of one of their songs played. Then police sirens wailed just like they had when my friends and I had gotten caught.
I realized that the sirens were my phone ringing. A friend who had once been a nurse wanted the telephone number of my medical group and the number of someone who could take me there next morning.
2.
That night was especially awfuclass="underline" a long confusion of dreams. Chris, my speculative fiction godchild who lives in Ohio, seemed almost frantic. He kept calling me but I was too sick to talk to him for more than a minute or two.
When I looked at my inner computer screen it showed me palm trees and bright sun and elephants. The Macabres now worked nearly naked in a prison chain gang. A woman with the face of a peacock seemed very familiar. I thought I spotted the policeman with the blue eyes that gave away nothing. He looked right at me and was about to speak
Then my doorbell sounded and it was my friend Bruce who was there to take me to the doctor’s. With his help I walked the few blocks to my medical group office on Washington Square. A very concerned doctor ordered me into Saint Vincent’s hospital. Shortly afterward Bruce escorted me to the emergency room admittance desk. Then he hugged me and was off to another job and I was in the power of the hospital.
There was no waiting. I identified myself, was given a form to fill out, and was shown right into the middle of the beds and gurneys, patients, and orderlies. Numbers flashed on computer screens, and machines beeped.
Nurses and doctors clustered around an enormously fat, comatose woman then dispersed. A social worker took the life history of an elderly black man who very patiently explained to her how he had lost everything he had ever had and lived now in a shelter. A moaning patient rolled by on a gurney hung with IV bags. Two cops wheeled in a shooting victim.
Then an orderly threw back the curtains around a bed and told me to come inside. My clothes were taken away. I was dressed in two gowns, one worn forward, the other backward, and socks with skid-proof soles. I was bled and examined and hauled through cold corridors and x-rayed.
Tubes got attached to me. A catheter was stuck up my urinary tract; at one point a very new intern tried to stick a tube down my throat and I choked and gagged. A horrible brown goop came up my guts and into my mouth and nose. My hospital gowns got soaked and there was commotion. People talked about me as if I was dead or not there.
It reminded me of an accident scene. I heard police radios, saw flares illuminating a nighttime car crash. I saw a familiar picture on a computer screen. It was in black and white, a 1950s newspaper shot.
A kid in his late teens had been thrown onto the branch of a tree by the force of a collision. He hung there bent at the waist over the branch of the tree, his loafers gone, his legs still in jeans, his upper body bare. The cool striped shirt he wore now hung down over his head. That was probably for the best: the face and eyes under those circumstances are not something you’d want to see.
That image haunted me at fourteen. I had imagined myself dramatically dead in just that manner, if only I could drive and had a car.
“That photograph was his own private version of the old primitive painting, ‘Death On A Pale Horse,’ ” I read on a screen in front of me and realized I was looking at a website about me.
Then the screen was gone and I was back in the tumult of the emergency room. “Intestinal blockage — massive fluid build-up,” said a female resident. “It’s critical.”
“Rejected the drain,” said the intern who had failed to get it in.
A male nurse spoke quietly to me like I was a frightened animal, put his hand on my chest to calm me, and stuck the tube into my nose and down my throat in a single gesture. A tall, wheeled IV pole with hooks that held my drains, feeding bag, urine bag, and various meters was attached to me.
Doctors examined me further. I felt like my insides were grinding themselves apart. A bag hanging next to my head rapidly filled with brown goop that had been inside me.
It was very late at night when I was wheeled onto elevators and off them, then down silent corridors. I was still dirty and wearing the damp hospital gowns when I was brought into a ward on the twelfth floor.
A young Asian nurse named Margaret Yang took over. Before I was placed on a bed, she called and four orderlies appeared. Women talking in the accents of Puerto Rico, Ukraine, and Jamaica, brought me into a bathroom, sponged me off, put me under shower water, and turned me around under it saying, as I tried to cover myself, “It’s okay. You are as God made you.”
3.
Only when I was clean, in clean clothes and on a bed looking out at the night did I remember that I had been in this hospital forty-two years before.
When I was a kid first coming into the city from Long Island, I woke one night with no idea who I was or where I was. The place I was in seemed vast, chilly, and sterile. The lighted windows in the brownstones across the street revealed stylish apartments and I knew it looked like a magazine cover without knowing what that was or how I knew this.