A nurse told me I’d been found facedown in a hallway, bleeding from a cut on my forehead and without any wallet or ID. I had lots of alcohol and a couple of drugs in my bloodstream.
A very old nun, thin and stiff, her face almost unlined, came around late in that night. She inspected the bandage on my forehead and talked about Dylan Thomas. I was still enough of a Catholic kid to feel embarrassed talking to a nun while sitting on a bed in just a hospital gown.
“He was brought here not ten or twelve years ago after a hard night’s drinking. He died from that and pneumonia on the floor just below this one.
“I thought of him when I saw you,” she said, looking at me calmly. “I wonder if you, too, are a young man who has an uneasy relationship with death.”
I said I didn’t know if I was or even who I was.
“Time will reveal those things,” she said. “You’re still very young.”
Then I found myself looking at that long-ago night on a computer screen. It was all conveyed in images: a New Yorker cover of figures silhouetted against the lighted windows of their brownstones, a figure of a nun that seemed almost translucent.
What appeared at first to be the famous drawing of the young Rimbaud unconscious in a bed after being shot by his lover Verlaine turned out to be a photo of Dylan Thomas dead in Saint Vincent’s Hospital — and became me at twenty-one with my poet’s hair and empty, blue amnesiac eyes.
I pulled back from the screen and saw all around me a vast dark space with green globes rotating through it. Then I squinted and saw that the globes were the glowing screens that monitored each patient in this hospital. Beyond us, further out in the endless dark, were other screens in other hospitals, stretching on into infinity.
4.
Apparently I called out, because then Nurse Yang was speaking to me, asking if I was okay. The universe and the globes disappeared. Saint Vincent’s, as I saw it all these years later, seemed a small, slightly shabby, and intensely human place.
“I’m so glad,” I told her. “You people have saved my life.”
She was amused and said that this was what they tried to do for everyone brought in here but that it was always nice to be appreciated. When she started to leave, I got upset and she showed me how to ring for help if I needed it.
After she was gone I lay in the cool quiet with the distant sound of hospital bells and the voices of the women at the nurses’ station. But I didn’t sleep.
My fear that all trace of me would be lost while I slept was out and active that night. Lying there, it seemed likely that this person with a search engine installed in his head was not the me who had existed a few days ago.
Drugs and the tubes siphoning the liquid out of my guts and into plastic bags had eased my pain and I did drift off every once in a while. But nurses and orderlies came and woke me quite regularly to take my signs and measure my temperature.
At one moment I would be awake in the chill quiet of that hospital with a view out the window of the Con Edison building and the Zeckendorf Towers at Union Square visible over the low buildings of Greenwich Village.
In the next, I’d be looking at a computer screen that showed a map of the old Village — a vivid 1950s touristy affair with cartoon painters in berets and naked models, beatnik kids playing guitars in Washington Square and Dylan Thomas with drinks in both hands at the bar of the White Horse Inn.
Awake again in the dark, I waited, listened, half expecting the old nun to reappear. Instead what I got was a moment’s glimpse of the white-haired cop who had watched me get beaten. He looked at me now with the same deadpan.
5.
I came out of a doze, awakened by a gaggle of bright-eyed young residents. “Mr. Bowes,” one of them, a woman with an Indian accent, said, “we were all amazed by the x-rays of your intestines. It was the talk of the morning rounds.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of the blockage they were extremely distended. You came very close to having a rupture which would have been very bad. You could easily have died.” All of them, a small Asian woman, a tall rather dizzy-looking blond American boy, and a laid-back black man nodded their agreement and stared at me fascinated.
“How did this happen?” I wanted to know.
“We believe it was from twenty-three years ago when you had cancer and they removed part of your colon,” she said. “After all this time, the stitching began to unravel and adhered to the other side of your intestines.”
Other doctors appeared: the gastroenterological resident spoke to me, my own internist popped in. They told me that I was out of immediate danger. Sometimes the blockage eased all by itself. Sometimes it required surgery. The surgeon would see me the next day.
My bedside phone had now been connected. I made some calls. People came by, friends and family, old flames and godchildren. They brought flowers and disposable razors, my CD player, a notebook, they gave me backrubs and went out and asked questions at the nurse’s station. They established my presence, showed the world that I was someone who was loved and cared for.
Margaret Yang came and sat for a while, talked to my sister Lee who was visiting, about this unique old hospital and how they were all devoted to it. I wanted to hang on to everyone, nurses, friends, family who was there in the bright daylight.
They had brought me the Dowland CD. The countertenor sang:
Gradually on that lovely spring day with the sun pouring down on the old bricks of the Village, twilight gave way tonight. Lights in the hospital dimmed, the halls got quiet.
When I was operated on for cancer it was uptown at Mt. Sinai. The ward I was in overlooked Central Park and at night in the intensity of my illness and fear and the drugs inside me, I saw lights passing amid the leafless winter trees.
And I imagined an alternate world called Capricorn where people dying of cancer in this world appeared to the population as glowing apparitions.
The night before that operation, I awoke with the feeling I was falling through the furniture, through the floor, and into Capricorn.
Remembering that, I saw a picture of myself, ethereal and floating amid a stand of winter trees in a hospital bed. The white-haired cop was showing it to me on a screen.
“When we spotted that we knew you were in no way run-of-the-mill,” he said. “Our seeing you like this confirmed an initial report from when you were in this place as a kid with a busted head and no memory. Someone spoke to you and said you had an uneasy relationship with death and the potential to see more than the world around you.”
6.
Some people have the gift of being perfect hospital visitors. The flowers my friend Mark brought the next morning looked like a Flemish still life, his conversation was amusing and aimless.
He sat beside my bed that morning and I told him about a book I’d once written.
“The first things I wrote after I had cancer was a fantasy novel called Feral Cell. In it, people dying of cancer in this world are worshipped in an adjacent world named Capricorn. They call our world ‘Cancer’ and call themselves the ‘Capri.’
“The faithful among them find ways of bringing a few people who are doomed on our world over to theirs. To prevent us from drifting back here, we are dressed in the skins of deceased Capri, drink their blood, which is called the Blood of the Goat, and are objects of awe.