17 Envoi
I woke up in the hospital under a morass of memories I thought had been lost forever. Wishful thinking, I guess. They must have been dislodged from whatever wrinkle in the brain they were stuck in when I was hit on the head, then — after I was launched full-throttle into a solid brick wall — released altogether. Memories of wanting and misspent time, they weighed on me; disappointments crushed my ribs, pinched my left leg, stung me like hornets in every joint, to say nothing of the pain in my aching head. They left me defenseless to the clinical invasions of the hospital staff, defenseless as well when, from behind the privacy curtain surrounding my bed, the female person I recalled as my sometime girlfriend, Rachel Ostrofsky, stepped forth.
She was wearing her black boots and blue raincoat, a Spanish-fan barrette like an unfolding wing pinning back one side of her shimmery hair. Her expression was full of a solicitude I expected to dissolve along with her physicality. But morphine pump notwithstanding, it seemed she was no hallucination. Her glow was so palpable I wanted never to traffic in hallucination again.
“You’re a memory come alive,” I heard myself mutter.
“Kafka?” came a voice from in back of Rachel. “The quote is from Kafka, am I right?”
The voice belonged, after he’d edged to her side — natty in his navy blazer and the woodpecker’s crest of his strawberry hair — to the diminutive party who’d decked me an age ago in the 348. I remembered (what didn’t I remember?) that he was a law student and could be an even smarter aleck than me. I remembered also that Rachel had once referred to him as her fiancé, though who even used that word anymore?
“We thought we’d find you hounded by reporters,” she said, with the breezy air of somebody trying to put a good face on a strained situation. Nor did her “we” escape my attention.
They stood over my bed, Rachel and her companion (Dennis, wasn’t it?), observing me like they might have a child they thought cute despite (or because of) its deformity. In one hand Rachel held a bouquet of purple flowers, in the other a newspaper. The paper was folded to a page displaying a grainy black-and-white photo, which she waved under my nose like smelling salts. “I started phoning hospitals the minute I saw it,” she said, pooching a lip in token of how much the image had disturbed her. I extended a hand to still her wrist and felt her blench at my touch. It was an alternative paper, a hippie rag, and the photograph was of poor quality and a bit out of focus. But you could make out clearly enough, amid the chaos of the panicked crowd and the club-swinging cops, a frizzy-haired white guy collapsed in the gutter near a fallen Negro with a bloody head. It took me a studious second to recognize the victims of what the paper called “needless brutality.”
I shut my eyes until the awful pressure in my chest was a little relieved. When I opened them Rachel was calling to a passing nurse to please bring her a vase for the flowers. The sharp-featured nurse fairly snarled as if to imply that her job description did not include responding to imperious requests.
There followed an awkward silence during which I wondered what Rachel had told Dennis about me. Whatever it was, his smug expression suggested he’d made his peace with it; I could only guess at the terms of the treaty. The nurse returned to hand Rachel, uncordially, a small water-filled Mason jar. Rachel placed the flowers in the jar, which was too shallow for their long stems and tipped over as soon as she set it on the nightstand.
“You shouldn’t have,” I said.
When she went to fetch a towel, Dennis scooted closer to the bed to ask, “Are you in pain?” the way a torturer inquires of his victim on the rack. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of answering in the affirmative, but I suppose he could tell from my squinched brow that I was hurting, because he grinned; though he resumed his masquerade of compassion on Rachel’s return. Squatting beside the bed to wipe up the spill, she made small talk, talk so trivial, in fact, that it was hardly worth replying to: she hoped I’d recover soon from my injuries, praised me for taking part in the march …
“I was only sightseeing,” I assured her, suspecting that she continued to wipe the floor in order to avoid having to get to her feet and face me. “I had no business there.”
Finally standing again, Rachel countered, “I disagree,” though she might have mustered a little more conviction. She added for good measure that my participation in the march was plainly heroic. “Quixotic,” inserted Dennis, his tone suggesting that the cause was lost all along: case closed.
It was then I felt the tears beginning to well up from some sulfurous source deep in my bowels. They’d always been my special brand of incontinence, the tears, and I bit my lip to try and hold them back, but the words that escaped my mouth gave me away.
“Rachel, what about us?”
She looked downright horror-struck before the pity set in. But rather than succumb to it, she straightened her spine and chose that moment to drop her bombshell. Ignoring the question that still hung in the astringent air, she stated with a forced informality, “Dennis and I have set a date.” It was to be a midsummer wedding, a small interfaith affair with a rabbi and a priest, for which they’d already chosen an ideal location on the river bluff. “We’d be pleased if you came,” she said disingenuously, while next to her Dennis bared his barracuda grin.
I was restrained by traction, catheter, and IV tube from inflicting further injury to my person. Murder and betrayal are the whole of the law, I concluded as I lay there bereft of speech. The monitor tangled in cords beside my bed blinked and whirred as if some jackpot had been struck: it was the signal for another pair of visitors to make their unannounced appearance from behind the curtain. This is your life, I thought.
Rachel and Dennis donned tepid smiles to greet them: the middle-aged man and woman shaking their heads in unison at the foot of the bed. “Oh, Lenny,” lamented the gentleman, and heaved a ten-pound sigh. His eyes behind his library-frame glasses were puffy, his nose porous and pickle-shaped like my own; the receding tide of his crinkly hair left behind it a littoral of wrinkled pink brow. Foursquare in a madras sport coat, he was holding, like the tail of a fish past its prime, the same hippie paper (the Glass Onion) Rachel had brought with her. “Lennylenny.” His sigh was seconded by the woman beside him, her attitude of condolence as subverted by her tangerine pantsuit as was his by the plaid sport coat. So far they’d refrained from advancing any closer, for which I was thankful, since the distance aided me in my effort not to recognize them.
“So Lenny,” the man ventured at length, “how do you feel?”
Rachel had thoughtfully worked some mechanism that caused the bedstead to raise me nearer to a sitting position. “Never better,” I managed, which was apparently the wrong answer, because the man practically barked, “Just what did you think you were doing down there?”
“Myron,” cautioned his companion with a hand to his sleeve, but no sooner did she quiet him down than she too started in on me. “Aren’t you even a little ashamed?” A neon vein pulsing at her throat.
From the bottom of my heart I admitted, “I’m a lot ashamed,” but their still-nettled demeanor implied that they didn’t believe me.
At that point Dennis cleared his throat and took a step in their direction, offering his glad hand by way of cutting the tension, and making conspicuous my failure to provide introductions. “I’m Dennis Kavanaugh,” he said, confident of the good impression he made on his elders. “And this is Rachel,” placing an arm around her waist, “my fiancée.” Whereupon the newcomers reflexively adopted a civil manner. The sport coat introduced himself as Myron Sklarew, the patient’s father, and cranked Dennis’s hand heartily in return. “I’m Mrs. Sklarew,” submitted his pantsuited spouse, “Lenny’s mom,” smiling sweetly as she pinched the tips of Dennis’s fingers.