“Before the operation you were threatening me with mutilation. Now…”
“I’m going to offer you my job.”
“Right,” I said. “But you don’t exist. You told me so.”
He seemed a bit amused. “That’s not as big a deal as you make it seem.”
“And the phony charges?”
“Could also not be a big deal. That depends on you.”
13.
Then he was gone and it was morning. The door of my room was open, the cleaning crew had departed, and the hospital was waking up. Pain had begun to gnaw at my guts. I hit the button, waited a few minutes, and then hit it again.
Scott walked by and I called him. He had just come on duty. He had other patients but he stopped for me. “How are you?”
“Bad night.” I wanted to tell him about the men endlessly cleaning the floor and the smell of ammonia but I didn’t.
“Did McGittrick talk to you again?”
“Sorry I bothered you about that. I feel stupid.” What I was sorry about was having brought him to McGittrick’s attention.
“It’s why I’m here. We’re going to get you ready to return to your ward. I want you to walk before then.”
Later when he was watching me push my IV stand around Recovery, I asked him, “Does everybody in this hospital know about McGittrick?”
He grinned. “If they worked with Mary Collins they do. I started out with her.”
When they came to take me back upstairs Scott said good-bye and I knew it was unlikely I’d ever see him again. Unless, of course, I took McGittrick up on his offer.
When I returned to the twelfth floor, I was in a new room all by myself. Jamine was gone. Even Nurse Yang, busy with her current patients, barely remembered him. That’s how it would be with me.
I hit the painkiller button, got up, and walked. I needed the pole to lean on a little. Nurses and orderlies nodded their approval. I was a model patient, a teacher’s pet.
When my phone rang it was my godchild Chris planning to come in from Ohio and stay with me after I got out of the hospital. Friends came by. Flowers got delivered. I fell asleep, exhausted.
It was getting dark when I awoke and there was commotion and a gigantic man was wheeled in. “Purple,” he said. “Don’t go far from me, girl.” My new roommate had a private healthcare worker. He called her Purple which wasn’t her name and which made her quite angry.
He sang Prince songs. He called people by names he’d given them. He told me he was an architect who had stepped through a door in a half-finished building he’d designed and fallen two floors because there was no floor on the other side. All the bones in his feet had been shattered. It took the healthcare worker and all the orderlies on the floor to help him change his position in the bed.
At one point I dozed off but awoke to hear a Jamaican orderly whom he called Tangerine, saying, “I do not have to take this. I will be treated with respect. My name to you is Mrs. Jackson.”
“Oh Tangerine!” he cried in a despairing voice.
I hit the pain button, got up, and walked to the window overlooking Seventh Avenue. In the night, the streetlights turned from red to green.
McGittrick’s face danced on the window in front of me. A computer screen on a nearby station counter faced the window and was reflected on the dark glass.
When I turned to look the computer screen was blank. I turned back and the face was there. It might have been the drugs or I may have been asleep on my feet. But as hard as I looked McGittrick remained.
Then Jamine’s face appeared on the screen. McGittrick said, “He stands out kind of the way you did, flirting with death but afraid of it. Bear in mind that if you don’t work for us someone else will — maybe him.”
“What exactly would I do?”
“Be around; make sure all is running as it should. Be a cop,” he said. “Think it over.”
“Okay. But when I sleep from now on, you have to stay out of my dreams.”
“You’re not dreaming. It’s just easier to reach you when you’re asleep. But we’ll give you a little time to consider.”
When I came back to my own ward, the nurses at the desk, as if they sensed something about me, looked up as I passed by. When I went into my room the architect was crooning a song to his caregiver who was telling him to shut up.
They stopped when they saw me and I wondered if I was marked somehow.
“Look,” I said, “I’m recovering from major surgery. I need to sleep.” They stared at me, nodded and were quiet. I hit the painkiller button and hit it again every few minutes until I drifted away.
14.
I awoke and it was morning. The architect, quite deferentially, asked if I had slept well. “I made sure all these ladies kept very quiet so you could rest and get better.”
This guy was a harmless lunatic with none of Jamine’s vibes. I thanked him.
Then Mrs. Jackson helped me wash up and I was taken for x-rays. When I returned the architect was gone, brought to another ward for physical therapy, Nurse Collins said.
She was on duty and had come in to check on me. “You’re doing well,” she said. “They didn’t get you this time.”
“Who was Immaculata? Who is McGittrick?”
“I don’t think she was any kind of angel and I don’t think he’s a banshee because I don’t believe in them. Ones like that lurk in the cracks of every hospital there ever was. Most places they don’t even know about it anymore. But they still have them. Give them the back of your hand.”
I’d begun feeling that if I performed certain tasks — walked rapidly three times around the floor, say, then I was practically recovered.
That night I paused on my rounds and looked out the window. The Greenwich Village crowds on a Friday night in spring reminded me of the rush of being twenty and in the city. I thought of Andre and how I’d lost him just before I got sick.
McGittrick was reflected in the window “You know,” he said. “That guy that got away might still be with you if you’d been well when his friend called. We can let you replay that scene.” Cops offer candy when they believe you’re beginning to soften and cooperate. But they still can’t be trusted.
“I enjoy the sweet melancholy of affairs gone by,” I said. “I’d like to be with Andre as if nothing ever happened. But I’d know that wasn’t true and wouldn’t be able to stand it.” As I headed back to my room, I said, “Thanks, though.”
As I hit the pain button, a young guy who’d had an emergency appendectomy was brought into the room. He lay quietly, breathing deep unconscious breaths. I passed into sleep remembering moments when someone with whom I’d made love fell into slumber like this just before I did.
15.
The next morning was a Saturday. A resident and a nurse came in and drew a curtain around my bed. They detached me from the catheter, pulled the feeding tube out of my throat and out through my nose.
That morning I ate liquids for the first time since I’d been there. Everything tasted awful. I forced myself to eat a little JELL-O, drink clear soup and apple juice because that was the way to get better.
Dale, my roommate, cast no aura, had no vibes that I could feel. He was twenty-seven, a film editor who had collapsed in horrible pain on Friday night. He was getting out later that day. His insurance paid for no more than that.
After ten days in the hospital, I was a veteran and showed him how to push his IV rack, how to ring for a nurse.