Mark came by. I told him, “When I wrote Feral Cell, I had the narrator drink blood. Blood of the Goat binds him to the alternate world, Capricorn. Blood of the Crab binds him here. As one world fades the other gets clearer. What I was writing about was being sick. It’s like this other country. You get pulled in there without wanting to and have to haul your ass out.”
He said, “Remember first coming to the city and how hard it was to stick here? Like at any moment the job, the apartment you were sharing, the best friend, the lover would all come loose and you’d be sucked back to Metuchen or Doylestown or Portsmouth. Kind of the same thing.”
The roommate was on the phone. “It felt like a bad movie, waking up and finding all these people staring down at me. The guy in here with me is this amazing Village character.”
He was still on the phone when his lovely Korean girlfriend came in with his clothes. She took his gown off him as he stood talking and dressed him from his skin out. It bothered me that he was getting out and I was still inside. As they left, he turned, waved good-bye, and grinned because he was young and this was all an adventure. I had more in common with Jamine than with this kid.
That evening, I was served a horrible dish of pasta and chicken but it was a test of my recovery and I ate a bit of it.
That night McGittrick said, “If it’s not love that interests you, how about revenge? Ones who screwed you around when you were a kid? You wrote a story about that. We can go deep into the past. You could go back and make sure they never did that to anyone else.”
I shook my head. “The one I most wanted to kill was myself. It took a long time to untangle that. This is who I am,” I told him. “I’m turning down your offer.”
He smiled and shook his head like my stupidity amused him. On the screen, I knelt blindfolded in the desert. “Did you forget about that?” he asked as I walked away.
16.
Sunday morning, as I tried to choke down tasteless jelly on dry toast, a guy named John was brought in to have kidney stones removed. He was tall, thin, and long-haired, almost my age. “I was born on Bank Street, lived in the Village my whole life,” he told me.
There was something in the face with its five o’clock shadow and hawk nose that looked familiar. He was an archetype: the guy who held the dope, the guy who hid the gun, the guy who knew how to get in the back way. He was like Jamine. Like me.
It was confirmed that I was going home the next day. At one point that afternoon my niece walked with me around the floor. When we came to the window on Seventh Avenue, I looked around and realized there’s no way that a computer screen could be reflected from the desk onto the glass.
“Thank you,” I told Margaret Yang later. “You people gave me a life transfusion.”
“We just did our job. You are an interesting patient,” she said. That night when I stopped and looked out, the traffic was a Sunday night dribble without any magic at all.
17.
The next morning, I awoke with the memory of a visitor. The night before I had opened my eyes and seen Sister Immaculata. “I’m disappointed,” she told me. “That you aren’t willing to give others the same chance that was given to you.”
“What chance was that?” I asked.
“You were a stumbling wayfarer,” she said. “We helped you survive in the hope you would eventually help us.”
“What is it that you do?”
“Hope and Easeful Death,” she said with a radiant smile and I realized that I trusted cops more than nuns.
That morning they disconnected me from the last of my attachments. The IV pole was wheeled away.
John was about to go down to the operating room. He would spend this day in the hospital and then be released the next.
“You ever go to Washington Square Park?” he asked. “Look for me around the chess tables in the southwest corner.”
Then my friend Bruce was there, pulling my stuff together, helping me get my pants on, tying my shoes for me. I was in my own clothes and feeling kind of lost.
Nurse Collins was on duty. “Good luck,” she said as I passed the desk for the last time. She looked at me for a long moment. “And let’s hope we see no more of you in here.”
The taxi ride home took only a few minutes. The flight of stairs to my apartment was the first I had climbed in almost two weeks and I had to stop and rest halfway up.
I’d thought that when I got out of the hospital I would magically be well, and had a hundred errands to do. Bruce insisted I get undressed again and helped me into bed.
“When what they gave you in there wears off,” he said. “You will feel like you’ve been hit by a fist the size of a horse.”
He filled my prescriptions for Oxycontin and antibiotics, bought me food we thought I could eat, lay on my couch and looked at a book of Paul Cadmus’s art he’d found on my shelves. I dozed and awoke and dozed some more. People called and asked how I was. A friend brought by a huge basket of fruit.
Bruce taped the phone extension cord to the floor so that I wouldn’t trip on it: more than any other single thing that spelled old age and sickness to me. It struck me as I fell asleep that Bruce was HIV positive and taking a cocktail of drugs to stay alive, yet I was so feeble he was taking care of me.
The second day Bruce came by in the morning, watched to make sure I didn’t fall down in the shower, helped me get dressed, and went with me for a little walk. The third day I got myself dressed.
Late that night, I looked at myself in the mirror. It was a stranger’s face, thin with huge eyes. This was a taste of what very old age would be like. I missed the large ever-present organization devoted to making me better. My life felt flat without the spice of hallucination and paranoia.
The next day my godson Chris came to stay with me. That year we both had works in nomination for a major speculative fiction award. The ceremonies were to be held in New York City.
We were in different categories, fortunately. It was on my mind that if I could attend the ceremonies and all the related events, it would mean I had passed a critical test and was well.
Chris was shocked at first seeing me, though he tried to hide it. When one person is in his sixties and sick and the other less than half his age and well their pace of life differs.
He adapted to mine, walked slowly around the neighborhood with me, sat in the park on the long sunny afternoons, ate in my favorite restaurants where to me the food all tasted like chalk now, read me stories.
The awards that weekend were in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. All the magic of speculative fiction is on the pages and in the cover art. The physical reality is dowdy. Internet photos of the book signing and reception show Chris happy and mugging and me fading out of the picture. Like those sketches Renaissance artists did of youth and old age.
As the awards ceremony dragged on I realized I’d be unable to walk to the dais if I won. I needn’t have worried. A luminary of the field, quite remarkably drunk, after complaining bitterly that he for once hadn’t been nominated, mangled all names and titles beyond recognition, then presented the award to the excellent writer who won. When it was over I rode home in a cab and went to bed.
Chris was nice enough to stay on and keep me company. One day as we walked into the park I saw John, my last roommate at the hospital. Looking as gray and thin as I did, he sat at a chess table in the southwest corner of Washington Square. The chess players share that space with drug dealers and hustlers.
I said hello. He nodded very slightly and I realized he was at work and that he was a spotter.