The highlight of each day comes around ten when Brianna, one of the nurses, wheels the breakfast cart onto our floor. “Morning,” she hollers to every room, her phlegmy cackle reverberating through the halls as she makes her rounds. She’s missing her bottom front teeth and lets her dentures dangle from her mouth when she asks, “Hotcakes or omelet, honey?” I learned early on that hotcakes are the only viable option, the omelets rubbery and so banana yellow they seem to taste like Yellow No. 5. Brianna likes Riot TV, so she sits for a few minutes beside my bed under the pretense of helping me with my breakfast—she unpeels the foil lids from the coffee and orange juice, something I’m grateful for because I can’t manage with my hands the way they are, and cuts apart the hotcakes and sausage links. She’s riveted by Riot and laughs great belly laughs whenever someone’s hurt—cheerleaders landing on their necks, kids’ teeth broken by pogo sticks—actually crying because she’s laughing so hard.
On my second day awake, Brianna told me I’d been lying here for five days already.
“Where’s here?” I asked her.
“Saint Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Youngstown. Do you know where Youngstown is?”
“Ohio—”
“And I thought you’d say heaven—”
I’ve been in this hospital for a little over five weeks. I’m in the uninsured wing, with street people and drug addicts and howling lunatics housed three or four to a room, the kind of clinic I floated through not long ago when I was hooked on brown sugar. Compared to the others here, though, I’m in comfort: one of the administrators told me I was in a private room because my bill’s already been paid in cash—mystifying, though Timothy did say he’d take care of my medical expenses. When the administrator asked for my name and social security number, I told her I couldn’t remember, a response that must be somewhat typical here because of the way she breezed through the rest of the form without cross-examining me.
“Will you give us permission to run a face scan or DNA match against the national database?”
“Not if I don’t have to—”
“Most people don’t,” she said. “I’ll just write unidentified, uninsured, male, on the forms—”
“That’s accurate,” I told her.
At midnight the channel flips to infomercials selling bulk discount gemstones and I think of Albion, usually remembering her standing above me on that pile of bricks, her hair loose in the wind. I can no longer remember the color of Albion’s eyes, but when I think of them, they’re the gray of storm-wracked skies.
When I finally drift to sleep, I dream of Hannah.
The doctors keep me updated—there’s a trio, one in Boston, the other two in Mumbai, faces on HD screens mounted on a roving turret. A doctor rolls into my room every other day or so, but since the turret webcam’s loose on its mounting, the doctors rarely face me when one of them speaks.
“Whoever healed you may have saved your life, but they didn’t do you any favors,” says Dr. Aadesh.
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“Bones not set properly. Ligaments in your knee aren’t healing correctly. You’ve lost your right eye, something that may have been avoided if you were brought to the hospital sooner. Severe radiation exposure, near lethal, you were lucky there was enough blood supply for the transfusion—”
The doctor reads through my litany of injuries, asking how I feel about each one—the Re-Growth splints in eight of my fingers, the splint and cast for my obliterated knee and the compound fracture of my right shin. Chemosutures for the knife wounds on my face, shoulders, hands and chest. The sensor in my glass right eye wired to my visual cortex. I’m supposed to wear specialty glasses, now—thick lenses in bulky black frames meant to assist my left eye in tracking the same focal points as the sensor in my right.
“Very good,” says Aadesh. “Dr. Hardy will check on you the day after tomorrow. Do you have any questions for me?”
“I do have a question,” I tell him. “I think the glasses might need an adjustment on the prescription—they wear out my good eye. I have to take them off every so often or I get headaches—”
“I apologize,” says Aadesh, “I can see you clearly through the monitor, but I can’t hear you. Can you try to adjust the volume? Or, no, I’m seeing here the volume is set at high. The audio must be out. Please go ahead and submit your question to the on-call nurse and she’ll contact our company directly—”
The turret spins in place, roves from the room—I hear it progressing down the hallway, like someone’s driving a remote-controlled car out there.
Brianna’s got to be closer to seventy than sixty, but her hair’s smoothed and dyed a bright blonde and her eyes are young. She leans in when she’s talking, touches your arm.
“You don’t have Adware,” I mention one morning while we’re watching Riot.
“What do I need that for?” she asks. “My kids’ kids have that. I saw this man at a fair, had magnets inside his fingers, actually under the skin so he could just touch a piece of metal and hold it. Said he kept erasing his credit cards. Shivers, honey. Look at you, with that fake eye plugged into your brain. I don’t need that shit inside my body—”
“You could watch Riot all you want,” I tell her. “You could sit back and make it seem like you’re right there with them—”
“We’re watching the follies of man,” she says. “Why would I want to be closer than I am now? Besides, I got better stuff to do, like teaching you to piss for yourself—”
When I can stand with crutches, Brianna walks with me down the hallway to the toilet near the nurses’ station and waits out in the hall until she hears the flush. She walks me back and sees me back into bed.
“Rehab,” she says. “Keep walking, you’ll be all right—”
Toward the end of the fifth week, I’m scheduled at the attending doctor’s offices on the first floor. I crutch myself down, even managing the stairs between floors 3 and 4 where the elevator’s out. The attending doctor’s taciturn, uninterested in small talk—I’m just one of several people who’ll pass through her office that day. She examines my body using a checklist of injuries sustained—hand-scanner X-rays, cold rollers over my chest. She’s especially concerned about the knife wounds and my right eye. I do a sight test for her, trying to read smallish letters from across the room, failing miserably—they all look like the letter D to me, or maybe E. She sends my glasses off to the lab downstairs for a better prescription and at the end of our appointment signs my papers.
“You’ll be discharged this afternoon,” she says.
The hospital administrators present me with a hoodie and sweatpants from the gift shop, recompense for the blood-soiled clothes the doctors had to cut from me when I was first brought to the ER. The sweatshirt says St. Elizabeth’s, Youngstown, Ohio—only an XL, but once I put it on I’m swimming in it and realize just how much weight I’ve lost in the weeks since I’ve been here.
Brianna brings in two bags along with my lunch—my backpack from the zone and a duffel bag I’ve never seen before.
“I sprung these for you,” she says. “Ain’t looked inside, ain’t nothing missing—”
My last lunch at St. Elizabeth’s is a soy burger with limp fries and an aluminum can of Pepsi. My fingers never healed correctly, just like Dr. Aadesh said, all five fingers on my left hand reset in a twisted, knotty mess. Difficult to pop the tab on the Pepsi, I can’t get a grip even with my right hand and I don’t have as much strength as I should, but I manage.