“But there are others on that world — decadent aristocrats, of course — who hunt us. They throw silver nets over us and drag us down. They skin us and drain our blood and use those things to cross into this world.”
“That must almost have made getting sick worthwhile,” he said.
“The future New York City I depicted in the book — turn of the third millennium Manhattan — was all open-air drug markets and rival gangs of roller skaters and skateboarders clashing in the streets. What we got, of course, was gentrification and Disneyland.
“A lot of being sick is like one long nightmare. In my Capricorn everything was terror and magic. At night, patients in a children’s cancer ward could be seen floating amid the trees of a sacred grove.”
Mark walked with me as I pushed my IV stand around the floor. One of the hall windows overlooked Seventh Avenue. Outside on a glorious day in spring, traffic flowed south past the Village Vanguard jazz club.
“The low buildings make it look like the 1950s,” Mark said.
“Time travel,” I said.
It was a quiet Sunday. Later that afternoon, my godchild Antonia was giving me a backrub. Suddenly a dark-haired woman, not tall but with great presence and wearing a red dress suit, appeared. She introduced herself as the one who would be my surgeon if the intestinal blockage didn’t ease. And I knew that it hadn’t and wouldn’t and that she would operate on me.
As night came and friends and family had departed, I thought of Jimmy when he was a patient at this hospital. Jimmy had been a friend of mine in the years of AIDS terror. He designed and constructed department store window displays.
Since I’d first known him he talked about the little people inside his head, the ones he relied on for his ideas.
“Last night they put on this show with fireflies and ice floes. Perfect for Christmas in July,” he’d say. “Sadly, what I’m looking for is ideas for Father’s Day which is, as always, a wilderness of sports shirts and fishing tackle.”
Just before Jimmy died in this very hospital, I came into his room and found him in tears.
“They’re all sprawled on the stage dead,” he told me.
7.
Without being aware of a transition to sleep, somewhere in the night I became part of a Milky Way of bodies lying hooked up to lighted screens. I saw all of us, patients here and across the world, floating in a vast majestic orbit.
Then the cop, tough, his blue eyes giving away nothing, watched as I looked at the photo he’d handed me.
It showed me in my dream of the Southwest along with my companions who would later get arrested and beaten into pulp.
“How did you know these guys?” he asked.
“I was a friend of one of them. Louis.”
“Friend, you mean like a boyfriend?” He displayed no attitude but past experience with cops made me wary. I shook my head.
Then he told me, “It must be tough for someone like you. Kind of comfortable, retired, having something like this from his past brought up after all these years.”
“Nothing like that happened to me. It’s just a dream.”
“A dream, maybe, but made up of bits of your past.”
Then I heard voices and he was gone. Lights went on in my room and curtains got drawn around the other bed. Since my arrival I had been the only patient in the room. That ended.
“In here.”
“Easy.”
The new patient cried out as they moved him. Through an opening in the curtain, I saw nurses and orderlies transfer him to the bed. Then they stood back and two young surgeons from the emergency room approached. From their talk, I learned that the patient had been in some kind of an incident that had damaged his scrotum.
The doctors spoke to him. “We saved one testicle and your penis,” they said. “But we couldn’t save the other.”
The patient asked a question too mumbled for me to hear and a doctor said, “Yes, you’ll have full function.”
Then they were gone and almost immediately the kid slept and snored. His name, I found out later, was Jamine Wilson and he was nineteen.
8.
Dawn was just about to break. I opened the notebook and wrote out a will, divided my possessions among my siblings and friends. Making out a will was a way of trying to hold onto myself, to indicate that I still knew who I was and what was mine.
That afternoon my sister Lee visited me. I had named her my executor. I dreaded the thought of living in a coma and said I didn’t want extreme measures to be taken to keep me alive if I couldn’t be revived. She went out to the desk and informed them of this.
Then we talked and listened to Jamine Wilson in the next bed on his phone. He talked about buying hot iPods. He called a woman and told her to bring him burgers and fries from McDonald’s.
He lived in a halfway house to which he didn’t want to return. A social worker came by and informed him that he would have to be out of the hospital the next morning. He ignored her.
“Where are you now,” he asked the woman on the phone. “Can’t you get on the subway?”
My sister left when they came to take me downstairs for x-rays. They gave me barium and recorded its progress through my digestive tract. I was there for hours, lying flat on a cold metal slab while they took each series of shots, resting, sleeping sometimes on the metal slab, until it was time for the next pictures.
It reminded me of the esoteric forms of modeling. Hand models, foot models; unprepossessing people with one exquisite feature. “Intestine model, that’s me,” I told the technician who smiled and didn’t understand.
I dozed and saw a screen that read, “An example of his early modeling work.” And there I was, very young, in Frye boots and jeans and leather jacket, a kerchief tied around my neck but with my hands cuffed behind me. It looked like some S&M scenario I might once have posed for. But the setting was the Southwest of that dream.
Then they woke me up and took some more x-rays.
When I got back to the room, Jamine’s hospital lunch was untouched beside his bed. I had taken nothing by mouth for days. He looked up at me dark and angry. Our eyes met and for a moment I saw a bit of myself: the kid in the nightmare, the one who’d ended up in this hospital with his memory gone. And I think, maybe, he saw something similar.
“Where are you now?” he asked someone on the phone then said, “You were there five minutes ago.”
Some time later, his caller finally arrived whizzing down the hall on a motorized wheelchair, the McDonald’s bag on her lap. She was Hispanic with eyes that looked hurt or afraid.
She maneuvered her chair next to the bed. The two of them ate. He chewed noisily, talked while he did. “I was so scared,” he said, “when I saw all the blood. And it took so long for them to call for help.”
The cell phone rang and he talked to someone. Shortly afterward a girl and a guy in their late teens came down the hall on their chairs. These were his friends from the halfway house. They seemed oddly impressed by whatever had happened to him.
Before the evening was over there were five wheelchairs in the room and I realized that Jamine, too, must have one. I was surprised by how quiet and lost everyone but Jamine seemed. At some point they were told they had to leave. My roommate turned off his phone and went back to sleep.
9.
The room, the ward, the floor, the hospital grew silent.