Something within him was manipulating him in an evil way, toying with him. While he was off doing nonsensical things—impressing those Liberty High School girls—his grandmother was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
“Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I know?” he repeated. Mrs. Novak looked up at him in confusion. “I’ve got to go to her,” he said.
“Your mother wanted you to stay here. I’m making you supper.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got to go to her. There’s not much time left,” he added in that tone of confidence that he was beginning to hate. He fought back the morbid images that threatened to rush over him.
“But how will you go?”
“I’ll hitchhike,” he said and rushed out of the house. He ran down the hill and turned the corner. He had to get to the Community General Hospital in Monticello. It was a good ten miles away; he couldn’t ride a bike there fast enough.
He stopped and looked down Main Street for a moment. The village looked deceptively peaceful and friendly, and for that, he hated it. Everyone should be coming to his aid. Storekeepers should be at their entrances, all wearing expressions of deep concern. Traffic should be moving in more funereal fashion. It was a sick irony that the world could go on while tragedy struck someone in the midst of it.
He ran up to the corner from where he and his friends often hitched rides to South Fallsburg and Monticello, and he stood there staring at the oncoming traffic. There wasn’t much of it this time of the day, and what there was didn’t look very promising. There wasn’t a car he recognized.
Then he closed his eyes and willed himself a ride. He willed with all his might.
“You owe me this,” he told himself; he told his magical powers. “You owe me this.”
He stuck his hand out with his eyes closed and when he opened them, a car had stopped. It was Peter Sills. For a moment he didn’t move toward the car. The big man looked out at him expectantly. Had he forgotten I was the boy who almost caused him to hit me with his car? David wondered.
David also hesitated because of the times the car had appeared to be a hearse. He was fighting back all the depressing thoughts as it was. He wondered if he could get into this car, even to go see his grandmother who was taken to the hospital. He couldn’t help the indecision.
“You looking for a ride or not?” Sills asked.
“Yes sir.” David opened the door and got in.
“Where you headed?” Sills asked as he started away.
“I’ve got to get up to the hospital. My grandmother was taken there.”
“Oh? You’re in luck. I’m going right by it.” Sills looked at him. “I know you. You’re Roselyn’s boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes sir.” Why didn’t he recognize me from the other night? David wondered. He certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.
“So her mother’s sick?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear it.”
“How’s Mrs. Sills feeling?” David asked politely.
“Why, do you boys talk about her?” Sills said sharply.
“Talk about her? No sir. I just heard some of my mother’s friends talking about her.”
“Yeah,” Sills said. “Well, she’s not feeling well.” He was quiet after that, so quiet that David had the eerie feeling he was riding in a hearse. He was afraid to look back for fear that there would be a coffin behind him. After awhile he sat as still as Mr. Sills. The heaviness made him more than anxious for the ride to end.
6
The Community General Hospital, the biggest one in the county, was located on a hill, up a side street just at the entrance to the village of Monticello. The hospital consisted of two very large, red-brick buildings. David had been here a few times before. He was here relatively recently when his mother had had gall bladder problems. He vaguely recalled being brought to it himself when he was very little. He had developed a high temperature, which they discovered was the result of a bad case of measles. He didn’t stay long, but the experience was significant enough to create a set of automatic reactions in him whenever he approached the place.
“This is it,” Peter Sills said. He didn’t look at David. “I oughta know,” he added.
“Thank you,” David said.
“I hope your grandmother feels better,” Sills said.
“Thank you,” David said. He got out of the car quickly and didn’t look back. He was afraid that if he did, the car would look like a hearse again. And he did not like to think about what that would portend for his grandmother.
When he started for the hospital, his heartbeat quickened; he broke out into a sweat and his chest tightened, making it difficult to take deep breaths. Nevertheless, he went swiftly to the front entrance—two big glass doors—entered and marched right up to the visitors’ desk. The sign right above it announced that children under twelve were prohibited, and children under sixteen unaccompanied by an adult were prohibited.
The woman behind the desk was a pink lady, one of the community women who had volunteered her time. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she took her position very seriously, nevertheless, and had even assumed the personality of a bureaucrat. She held the power to grant a visitor’s pass. He thought she was a woman about his mother’s age, although she had a much thinner, harder face with cold, brown eyes and a thin mouth with lips pressed tightly together. She had her dark-brown hair pulled so tightly into a bun at the back that her strands looked as though they were about to tear up from her scalp. She was reading a magazine and seemed not to notice him.
David paused before speaking to her and looked back at the security guard who stood by the elevators. When he turned back, the lady looked up.
“Yes?” There was no warmth in her voice.
“My grandmother was brought here. I’m supposed to meet my mother.”
“Who’s your grandmother?”
“Gussie Gelfand,” he said. The woman looked down at her list. Suddenly David thought that her pink outfit, which was really only a large apron over her own clothes, looked ridiculous. She was in a costume, dressed for some absurd performance. Her life consisted of going from one role to another. She had no true self, or the one she had was so small in terms of its responsibility and meaning to others that it was insignificant.
“I don’t see any Gussie Gelfand,” she said dryly.
“She was just brought here by ambulance.”
“Oh. That’s an emergency room admission. I haven’t got the information yet. What was wrong with her?”
“Heart attack,” David said. He couldn’t keep the tears from building up in his eyes, but they were quickly turning into tears of hate. Why was he wasting all this time talking to this woman while his grandmother needed him?
“Then she’d be on the fifth floor in CCU. You can’t see her anyway.”
“What?”
“They only take visitors five minutes before the hour. It will be about fifty minutes.”
“But, I gotta see her right away.”
“Why don’t you just wait here until your mother arrives.”
“My mother’s here, with her. I gotta see her,” he repeated.
“I’ll call up and get them to tell your mother you are here,” the pink lady said without smiling. She lifted the receiver as though it took great effort to do so. She spoke to someone for a few moments, then hung up. “They’ll locate her soon. Take a seat,” she said. She looked down at the magazine on her desk.
David stared at her for a moment, then turned abruptly and walked out of the hospital. He went around the ambulance entrance to the emergency room, moving both out of anger and fear. He was afraid he wouldn’t get to his grandmother in time.
The emergency room doors opened automatically, and he passed into the corridor. The security guard on this end was talking to a nurse and had his back to the doorway. David went quickly through a second door and into the first floor hallway. He followed the signs indicating stairway and took the stairs up
to the fifth floor, running up the flights.
When he entered the fifth floor, he paused. The effort and excitement had done something to him. He wasn’t just sweating and tired. He felt as though he were glowing. His hands looked luminescent. He thought his feet would burn footprints into the floor as he went along.
The nurses and nurses’ aides who saw him ignored him. An elderly man seated by his room in a wheelchair out in the corridor looked up at him as he passed by, but said nothing. It was as if a rush of warm air had washed over the old man. Indeed, David felt invisible.
At the far end of the corridor were two doors labeled CCU. A sign on the outside of the left one indicated visitors could enter only five minutes before the hour and remain for five minutes. He hesitated and then opened the door.
How could he ever forget that moment? What he saw would live on in the world of nightmares. The images would dwell in darkness, emerging only when called forth by the voices of evil. No horror movie, no comic book tale of terror, no suspense story on the radio would ever compare.
Was this a hospital of the dead? Had he passed through some barrier between the real and the unreal? If he walked through this doorway, would he ever be able to return to the land of the living? What he confronted nearly made him shriek with horror.
Every bed within was inhabited by a different kind of corpse. Some resembled ghouls and vampires as they would have been drawn up in comics, but no drawing did justice to the morbid ugliness he witnessed.
To his right, a man tried to save himself from drowning in a pool of his own blood, only the blood was thicker and more like red mud. Every time his arms fell back into the pool and rose again, they lost some more of their flesh. The exposed bones gleamed. The man gasped, but his effort produced no sound. His mouth had become a deep, gaping dark hole, a tunnel leading down into a cavern that looked bottomless.
To his left was a woman who was clawing away the flesh of her own face as if she couldn’t wait to become a skeleton. Her body fell around the bed in red strips. She had already clawed away most of her upper body. He saw her exposed heart fluttering and shifting about like a fish out of water.
Directly ahead of him and to the right was another patient in the throes of death. His face was boiling, the bubbles building and bursting all over his cheeks and forehead. An ugly, dark-brown liquid emerged, flowing down his neck and dripping off his chin.
David covered his eyes with his hands, but he didn’t retreat. He took a few steps farther and uncovered his eyes. Although the horror dissolved, when he looked at the rear of the room, he saw his mother standing beside a coffin. He could see she was holding his grandmother’s hand.
He looked at the nurses’ station. The nurses seemed like mannequins, frozen in position, staring at heart monitors. None of them looked his way, nor did any of them look directly at the patients.
What could this be?
He continued toward the rear of CCU, until a nurse appeared from behind a curtain closed around a bed. She reached out and touched his shoulder. Her fingers felt like sticks of dry ice, burning cold. When he turned to her, she seemed to have no face—just an aseptic-looking white surface with two dark holes where there should be eyes. Her mouth appeared, but when she spoke, her upper and lower teeth were connected and simply stretched like chewing gum.
“Who are you here to see?” she asked, her voice so slow and so distorted it sounded like a record slowing down to the lowest speed on a phonograph.
“My grandmother.”
He didn’t wait for her response. He rushed forward to his mother’s side, but when he got there, the coffin had become a hospital bed. For a moment she didn’t realize he was there. He looked back and saw that all the ghoulish patients were normal again. They were just elderly people, hooked to machines that monitored their heartbeats.
He turned to his grandmother. She looked tired and older, older than he had ever seen her. She was on her back, and her eyes were closed. The oxygen mask was over her nose and mouth. Her right arm was at her sides, and his mother held her left hand in hers.
“Oh, David,” his mother said, finally realizing he was standing beside her. “How did you get here?”
“I hitched.”
“Poor Grandma,” she said, turning back.
“What happened?”
“I found her on the kitchen floor. She’s had a bad heart attack.” She looked at him, her tears streaming down her cheeks. “The doctor says it’s very bad.”
“I know,” he said. He stepped closer and gently took his grandmother’s hand from his mother. She smiled and ran her hand over his head.
“She loves you, David. She loves you so much.”
“She won’t die. I won’t let her die,” he said. “Don’t worry.” He looked up at his mother, and she saw that his eyes burned with determination. The look surprised her.
“We can’t help what will be, David,” she said. “We’ve got to be strong.”
“We can help,” he said. “We can.”
“Oh David, David.” She looked back at her mother and then shook her head. “Mrs. Novak was going to make you dinner.”
“I don’t want dinner. How can you think of eating now? I want Grandma to get better. She must get better,” he added and turned away from his mother. He pressed a little harder on his grandmother’s hand and closed his eyes. It was time to will her back to health. He could do it; his mother would see.
“We’ve got to go out, David. There are other patients here. We’ll come back later.”
“They don’t matter anymore,” he said. “They’re all dead.”
“Oh David. You mustn’t say such a thing. Come on. We’ll come back.”
“No, I can’t leave yet. You go.”
“They won’t let you stay here by yourself. Come on. We’ll go down to the cafeteria and have something to eat.”
“Eat!”
David’s mother stepped back as though he had slapped her. She felt the fire in his eyes. The nurse at the main desk came around and started for them. His mother anticipated her and met her halfway.
“It’s my son,” he heard his mother tell her. “He’s very close to my mother.”
“He can’t stay here much longer, Mrs. Steiner.”
“Just a few more minutes,” his mother pleaded. The nurse relented. “David,” his mother said coming up behind him. “You can only stay another minute.”
“Go on,” he said. “I’ll come out right behind you. I just need a minute,” he added, the tone of anger still strong. She shook her head and started out of CCU, shrugging to the nurse. She expected that it would have to be the nurse to drive him away from that bed.
But David turned and glared at her. The nurse looked at him and then went back to her desk. He smiled to himself. He could do it; he could save his grandmother and pull her from this graveyard. He actually saw himself looking down into her grave, willing the coffin to open, and reaching in to take her uplifted hands.
He pressed her hand to his lips and closed his eyes. Be well, he thought. Be well. He pushed all thoughts of death from his mind and dwelt only on happy scenes. He heard his grandmother singing one of her Hungarian melodies; he saw her smiling as she stood over him to watch him eat one of her home-baked cakes. In all these memories, she was alive and vibrant and happy. He would bring her back to that.
He opened his eyes and stared at her. Her eyelids fluttered and she turned his way. He saw the smile form on her face.
“Grandma. Don’t worry. I’ll make you better.”
“David.” Her voice was muffled in the mask. He leaned over the bed. “You can do nothing for me. Do for yourself,” she said.
“I’ll make you better Grandma,” he insisted and closed his eyes. He felt her fingers move slightly in his hand, and he opened his eyes again.
“My Gypsy eyes,” she said. He struggled to hear her. “You mustn’t think you can do too much,” she said. “And you must be afraid of what you can do. Promise me, David.”
&
nbsp; “I promise, Grandma. Get better. You must get better.”
“Look at me, David. Look with your Gypsy eyes. Will I get better?”
“No!” he couldn’t help raising his voice. Her fingers in his hand turned to bones. He saw his grandmother become a skeleton right before his eyes. “Grandma!” he shouted. In moments two nurses were at his side.
“Come on now, son, you’ve got to leave. You’ve got to let your grandmother sleep,” the nurse on his right said. He didn’t look at her; he didn’t take his eyes off his grandmother. The nurse on his right began to press her fingers harder into his arm.
Reluctantly, he turned away from the bed. It wasn’t working; he couldn’t stop death after all.
“If you let her sleep, she might get better,” the other, younger nurse said.
“She’s nearly dead now,” he whispered. His cold, clear statement wiped the smile from her face quickly. She looked to her partner.
“Come on, son,” the older nurse said.
He started away, but before he reached the door, he turned and looked back. His grandmother’s bed was a coffin again, only now the lid had begun to lower over it. Without further hesitation, he rushed out of CCU.
His mother was waiting in the little waiting room outside. She stood up quickly.
“David!” He nearly ran past her. He stopped and joined her in the room. She put her arm around him. “I feel just as bad as you do, David, but there’s nothing more that we can do. We’ll go downstairs and at least drink something and then come back five minutes before the next hour, okay?”
“There’s no need to come back,” he said. “She’ll be dead before then.”
“Oh David. The doctor said you can’t tell about these things. She could struggle like that for days.” He looked at his mother hatefully and sat down on the light-brown, soft, vinyl chair to his right. She shook her head.
“David…”
“It’ll only be a few more minutes,” he said. “Can’t you wait?”
“But David, honey…”
She saw he wasn’t going to move. She shook her head, bit her lower lip gently, and looked out at some people going toward the elevator. Confused herself about what she should do, she walked to the window and looked down at the parking lot. But she didn’t stand there long. It was only a few more minutes before she heard her name called and turned to see the CCU head nurse who had appeared in the waiting room doorway.
Sight Unseen Page 10
