“The place ran with ghosts,” Randall, an old queen I knew from when I was first in the city had said about the very classy hospital uptown where he had been for major heart surgery.
“They came and talked to me at night, taunted me. An awful man I lived with when I was young and stupid and new to New York, was cruising the halls like it was still 1925. He was a cruel bastard, physically abusive, and I’d walked out on him. He told me he was waiting for me, that sooner or later he’d have me again.”
Randall liked to have me stay at his place once or twice a week. It was an easy gig. He really got off on having a young guy around. Give him a chance encounter in his own apartment with a twenty-two-year-old in jockey shorts and he was happy.
“I know when I pop off that awful sadist will be waiting for me, and I’m afraid,” he said.
I smiled like he had made a joke and he shook his head and looked sad. He died at that hospital a year later and I felt bad. He’d been good to me, generous, kind. I liked him well enough then but I really understood him now.
Deep in the night the cop and I stood at the window and looked at the very late traffic flowing south on Seventh Avenue. I could tell by the car models that it was the late 1960s. The constant flow of traffic downtown was like the passage of time.
“We can do it, you know,” he said. “Bring you back forty years to face trial.”
“For what?” I asked. “What crimes did I ever commit that were worth that kind of attention?”
“Look at yourself.” Again the screen came up and it was the three guys whose faces I could almost remember and myself all in boots and jeans and leather vests and kerchiefs around our necks. Like musicians on an album cover imitating desperados.
The one farthest away from me handed a cloth bag to the next guy who handed a smaller brown paper package to the guy next to me who handed me a white packet and I turned and handed a glassine envelope to someone not in the picture: like a high school textbook illustration of a drug distribution system.
“A kid died from something you sold,” the cop said. The screen showed a girl, maybe eighteen, sprawled on the floor of a suburban bedroom with a needle in her arm and a Jim Morrison poster on the wall.
“None of that ever happened,” I said. “I never did anything like that.”
“We don’t plant this stuff. It was inside you. Back in 1969 a family wants vengeance,” he replied.
I saw myself from behind kneeling with my hands tied at my back. All around on the sand, my clothes lay in strips where they’d been cut off me. My belt and my boots were tossed aside; the kerchief I’d worn around my neck was now tied over my eyes. Behind me the three other guys all hung by their necks from the branches of a tree.
The cop said, “You’ll wish they’d hanged you, too. What the family wants to do will make what happened to that black kid in your room a joke.”
Then I saw myself frontally. Mutilated and bleeding to death into the sand, my mouth open in a silent scream.
That woke me and I lay in my hospital bed in the first dawn light. But I had trouble shaking the dream.
10.
Greenwich Village was partly an Irish neighborhood in the days gone by and Saint Vincent’s still reflected that. My nurse that morning was Mary Collins, an old woman originally from Kerry with a round unlined face, the last of the breed. I’d established my credentials, told her about my grandparents from Aran.
After the policeman had mentioned that initial report, I’d asked Mary Collins about the nun I’d talked to. She looked at me and said, “You saw Sister Immaculata. I haven’t thought about her in years. They said she roamed the halls and talked to the patients. Some of them she comforted, others she frightened.”
“But she was real.”
She shrugged. “Well, when I first worked here, they told stories about catching glimpses of her. But I never did.”
Behind the curtains around the other bed, Nurse Yang spoke quietly to Jamine. “No matter what our health issues, we need to eat healthy food. Try this orange juice.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Try it for me.” And we heard him slurp some orange juice.
“She has the patience of Job,” murmured Mary Collins and turned to leave.
I said, “There’s this guy I keep seeing in my dreams. He looks like a cop, shows me all kinds of things, threatens to drag me back to face punishment for crimes I never committed.”
Nurse Collins paused. In the silence, I heard Margaret Yang say, “Would you try this cereal?”
“His name wouldn’t be McGittrick would it?” Mary Collins asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Immaculata and McGittrick both — ah, you are a rare one! If that’s how it is, tell him to back away. While you’re a patient in this hospital, you’re ours not his.” She winked and nodded at me and I guessed she was doing for me what Nurse Yang was doing for my roommate.
Word came that my surgery was scheduled for that night. The exact time was not set. Jamine was on his cell phone. He was due to be released from the hospital that afternoon and sent back to his halfway house. I wondered about the pain he didn’t seem to be feeling and the desperate moment that had left him partially castrated.
Lying there, I thought of people I knew who had come out of surgery with hallucinations attached to their brain like parasites.
A few years before, an old professor of mine was not doing well after heart surgery. He was incoherent. Things hung in the balance and then with his eyes shut and seemingly unconscious, he said quite clearly, “Surgeon Major Herzog of the Israeli Air Medical Brigade orders you to get off your asses and get me cured.”
“Herzog straightened things out,” my professor told me a few days later when he had rallied and begun recovery. “The first time I saw him was shortly after the operation. I came to and he was standing in full uniform at the end of my bed reading the computer screen. He told me I was someone they needed to have alive and he was going to save me. Then he changed some of the instructions on the screen.”
No one on the staff had ever heard of Surgeon Major Marvin Herzog. The doctors attributed the now rapid recovery not to a series of crisp orders and clandestine changes in the patient’s treatment but to the body’s wonderful will to live.
A week or two later when I visited him at home, my professor told me, “Doctor Herzog said last night that usually they don’t let people like me see him. But he thinks I can handle it. He explained how his unit oversees everybody who’s under anesthesia…”
As he went on, I had realized he was still talking to his imaginary Doctor and maybe always would.
Finally I was wheeled out for more x-rays. When I came back hours later, doctors, nurses, and Jamine’s social worker were in attendance. His motorized chair, a shabby, beat-up item, had been brought into the room. When he was helped into it, he screamed with pain. A hurried conference took place out in the hall. The patient was helped back into bed.
Late that night, he was still there, talking quietly into his cell phone. It had been arranged that he was to be sent, not to his halfway house, but to a rehab facility. He seemed pleased. Was it for this that he or someone else had used the knife?
McGittrick had noticed him. Was that a first sighting, like Immaculata observing me all those years ago?
11.
That night I waited at the window feeling very small and lonely and watched the taillights of the cars as they rushed into the past.
A woman I know underwent a long and intense operation for cancer. During the hospitalization that followed she was well taken care of by the hospital nurses and orderlies and seemed to love them.