by Paul Hoover
Rose and I leaned against the building behind us, amazed at the swiftness of events and unable to run. A few squadrols pulled up on Monroe Street, and about fifty cops wearing riot gear marched around the corner, holding extra-long clubs ahead of them like flagpoles, one end braced on the stomach. The first row was especially impressive. They were tall and heavy, with faces like bulldogs’. By now the street was mostly deserted, but the sidewalk was swarming. The cops had dragged off many of the demonstrators and stuffed them into squadrols. The riot squad spread out to sweep the street, creating a rush of onlookers in our direction. Clinging to the building didn’t work. Somebody knocked into me with tremendous force, and I fell into Rose. We went down on the sidewalk, pressed against each other. Somebody stepped on my back, then several people fell on us. Rose pushed me in the face with both hands, as if I was smothering him, and somehow I got to my feet and started running. It must have been in the wrong direction, because there was a stinging blur. I couldn’t see and hear anymore. I was lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood, dead to the world.
Mistakes get made at the hospital, no doubt about it. There’s a test they give to find the site of a spinal injury. The doctor puts the patient on an X-ray table, injects a radiopaque dye into the spinal column, and tilts the table to make the dye run up or down. He watches the traveling dye bump along the column, and the beauty of medicine is never more clear. When the dye reaches the injury, it stops or spreads, and the doctor makes a note on the chart. On the day Dr. Wing performed the test on Johnny Matthews, a twelve-year-old quadriplegic who’d been struck by a stray bullet on New Year’s Eve, things didn’t go so well. The story was that the doctor forgot what he was doing and allowed the dye to flow all the way to the brain. This caused a respiratory arrest, and the boy died on the table. Wing covered his tracks by shading the history and progress notes. No one in the family was astute enough to sue, but the nurses knew what had happened. When Wing sat down with them in the employee dining room, they’d leave or sit in icy silence.
That’s why, when I woke up on the neurological unit and Dr. Wing was looking into my eyes, I was a little concerned. His cold finger lifted an eyelid while he shined a light in there.
“I think he’s awake,” he said to the nurse. It was Eileen Bass, from the day shift.
There was an IV in my right arm, and the bed rail on the other side was up. There was also a tightness in my left arm that I realized was a restraint. This was quite a surprise, since they’re usually only applied when the patient is out of his mind.
“Nagloo,” I said.
The doctor stood back from the bed in an attitude of caution, but Eileen came close to look at me.
“Why, he’s all right,” she said. “He’s trying to say something is all.”
She lifted the small green oxygen mask from my face and rubbed the cheeks to get the red marks out. It must have been on for quite some time, because the skin felt numb.
“Are you all right, hon?” she said, giving me a pat.
“Fine,” I said. “What happened?”
“We had to tie you down,” she said. “You were pulling out the IV.”
“I don’t remember.”
Wing took her place as she went to the other side and straightened the covers. “We put you on the intravenous basically for feeding. We didn’t know how long you’d be out. We’ll start you on a liquid diet at lunch and see how you tolerate it.”
“Can you take off the restraint, please? It’s hurting my arm.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling OK?” he said in a patronizing voice. “You didn’t behave very well last night.”
“I promise to behave.”
“That’s a good boy,” he said, patting me on the head. He waved his hand, and Eileen started undoing the restraint.
“You’ve had a concussion,” said Wing, pushing on the bridge of his glasses. “We’re going to do some tests, but if everything works out, you can think about going home in a couple of days.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Brain scan, skull X rays, and EEC.”
“You think I’ve got a fracture?”
“We’ll see.”
He looked like he’d been on duty for a day and a half already. His clothes were wrinkled and his face sagged. Yawning broadly, he rubbed his hand through the thick black hair that was matted here and sticking out there.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Nine in the morning,” said Eileen, struggling with the final knot.
“So I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon?”
“That’s right,” said Wing, looking at his watch.
The nurse got the restraint undone, and I lifted the arm to get blood into it. The shoulder was a little sore.
Wing looked into my eyes again with the penlight, as if frowning at the back of a cave, then held up four fingers and asked me how many there were. Pulling down the sheet, he stuck a little pin into the soles of my feet to see if there was feeling. There was. Then he ran his fingernail the length of the sole, from heel to toe, to see which way the toes would curl. If they curled down, it meant you were OK, and if they curled back toward your face, you were brain damaged or something. I was not brain damaged, but I had a huge ache where the head met the spinal column. I pointed to where it hurt. Wing frowned.
“Not good?” I asked.
“Could be a subdural hematoma. Some people can walk around for a week with one, then they drop dead from it, just like that.” He snapped his fingers with finality. “It’s just like a time bomb, a walking time bomb.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
“Usually it’s a sign if one eye dilates more than the other.”
“What should I do—carry a mirror?”
He was one of those guys who had worked so hard ever since med school, he couldn’t tell if you were kidding.
“That wouldn’t be very practical, would it?” he said.
“Subdurals can be tricky,” said Eileen. “Remember Weinstein?”
“Before my time,” Wing said.
“He was getting married, and when he went to step on the wineglass, he went down on the back of his head.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Wing.
“About his falling?” I asked.
“About stepping on the glass. It’s supposed to consecrate the marriage.”
“The poor guy’s eyes looked like stoplights,” Eileen said. “He went into a coma for six weeks, and his wife, Sheila, brought things from home for the bedside table. There was a picture of her in her wedding dress and one of his mother with her cocker spaniel. It could just break your heart.”
“Did he die?” I asked.
“No,” she said, brightening. “It was like a miracle, really. She sat beside the bed, holding his hand, and one day he just woke up.”
“Don’t tell me,” Wing said, holding up his hand. “It was the power of love that saved him.”
“Actually, it was the bread.”
“Bread?” we said together.
“It wasn’t just the pictures she brought. There was this loaf of bread.”
“I see,” said Wing, as if that was possible. After all, there were healing molds like penicillin. But how did she get him to eat it?
A tall kid in a white intern’s jacket walked in the room. His blond hair fell over one eye; his pink hands were huge.
“Walters!” said Wing. “Just the man I wanted to see.”
“Is this the patient?” said the intern, looking at Eileen, not me.
“Yes. I want you to take him to EEG, but first do a full work-up.”
“OK,” said Walters with no enthusiasm. He acted like he wanted to be outside playing basketball with his friends.
“Walters here is your doctor,” Wing said. “I’m just supervising. If there are any problems, you let me know, hear?” Then, as if Walters weren’t there, he said, “He looks young, but he’s brilliant. Best scores on the state boards in thirty-seven years.” Wi
th that he left the room, and Eileen went with him.
Walters didn’t have much to say. As he did yet another workup, he sighed a lot and looked out the window. He seemed to know what he was doing, which was exactly what Wing had done. If I wasn’t mistaken, my toes curled the opposite direction this time, but he didn’t say anything. He looked very sad and disconcerted.
“Is something wrong?”
“I was just thinking about home,” he said.
“You miss your parents?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I guess you’re on a pretty fast track.”
“Pretty fast,” he sighed. “Dad thinks it’s not fast enough.”
“You’re not from Chicago, are you?”
“Elwood, Illinois. Downstate.”
“Are you going back there to practice?”
“Got to. The chamber of commerce is paying my tuition.”
“You have a contract with them?”
“I have to take up with Dr. Summers, who’s about to retire, and stay in town for at least five years.”
“Do you want to do that?”
“Oh, sure,” he said morosely. He went to look for a cart to take me to EEC.
There was coughing on the other side of the curtain. I’d thought I was all alone.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hi!”
“I didn’t realize I had a roommate.”
“The name’s Feller,” he said, “Arnold Feller.” His voice sounded muffled, as if it passed through two or three doors.
“Any relation to Bob?”
“Who’s that?” he asked softly.
“Baseball player, one of the greats.”
“I don’t follow sports,” he said.
“My name is Holder. Jim Holder.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“I got hit on the head at a demonstration,” I said.
“What were you demonstrating?” he asked with great labor.
I realized he thought I meant a Ronco vegetable slicer or something. “You sound like you’re in pain,” I said. “Maybe we should talk later.”
“That’s all right. I like to talk.”
“Too bad I can’t reach the curtain.”
“Me neither,” he said.
A suction pump engaged on his side, a little motor that sounded like someone’s fingers tapping on a table. He must have had surgery, since the pump, called a Gumco, is used to drain a wound.
“I don’t see a TV in the room,” I complained.
“It’s over here, up on the wall. I’m watching ‘Captain Cartoon.’”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“With these shows you don’t need sound,” he said.
“The doctor says I might have a subdural.”
There was no answer for a while. Then he said, “What did you say?”
“I might have a subdural,” I said much louder, as if calling over a wall. “A bruise on my brain.”
There was another long pause.
“It can knock you over anytime,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Just like that.”
It was my turn not to talk. I thought I could hear, very distantly, the frantic sounds of cartoon mice pounding each other with clubs. After a while, his suction pump went silent.
“You there?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Just checking.”
WALTERS wheeled in a cart, but its pad was missing, which filled me with horror. Somebody must have recently used it to take a body to the morgue.
“There’s no pad,” I said. “It’s got to have a pad.”
“I had a hard time finding this one,” he whined.
“Where did you get it?”
“Back by the elevators.”
“Look in the stationery closet around the corner from there.”
“Doggone it,” he said, as if complaining to one of his parents.
We got off the elevator on the third floor and wheeled down a long hall, Walters’s long head over me like a horse’s. At the very end, there was a door that was painted red instead of stained and varnished. A plaque on it said, EEG and under that
DEATH STUDIES.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “what’s Death Studies?”
“It’s the same as EEG,” he said, opening the door, “only we do it to see if you’re dead.”
Death Studies was a small windowless room, about the size of a Buick Electra. Walters could barely fit the cart inside. I had to stand in the hallway in my hospital gown, then climb back onto the cart once he’d wedged it in. Next to me was a large gray machine with dozens of lights and electrodes and a wide strip of gray paper under several dormant styluses. There was no technician, just a chair for Walters to sit on. It took quite a while to get me hooked up, since electrodes had to be placed all around my head.
As the machine jerked to a start, the styluses flipping like crab claws, I remembered one of the CO jobs I’d seen advertised. Every evening, at some university lab in New Jersey, they would hook you up to one of these machines. While you slept, the machine registered changes in your brain waves. They could tell if you were restless and if you were happy. They could tell if you were in a creative state and if you had a reptile mind. It was rumored to be hard duty, however. One CO reported that the loss of privacy he’d endured during sleep studies had made him nearly crazy. Something wasn’t right about sleeping under the gaze of a technician marking things on a clipboard. He said he aged ten years in six weeks.
I had no such problems. For some reason I was very relaxed, like a puppy curled up with a ticking clock. All sorts of things came into my head: Vicki throwing the roses, a math grade I got in grade school, the weatherman on channel 5 pointing at a bolt of lightning on a fuzzy map. The last thing I heard Walters say was, “It says here you’re asleep.”
Apparently I was, because I had a dream. In it, Dr. Walters was a patient, but he was forty years old. There were worry marks around his eyes, and the skin on his face was gray and tight, typical of alcoholics. In paper slippers and a hospital gown, he followed me down the hall, one arm straight over his head, like a student wanting to ask a question. I wanted to avoid him, and we chased through the hallways for some time. The question he wanted to ask was simple enough, I sensed, but I didn’t want to be bothered answering it. At one point, we stopped and listened to one of the residents in Ophthalmology sing a very beautiful song to two nurses. One of them gazed at him with great admiration, but the other was extremely agitated, scratching her arms with her fingernails until they were red with blood.
14
WHEN I GOT BACK to the room from Death Studies, where nothing unusual had been revealed—I was, for example, not dead—Arnold Feller was gone. The curtain was pulled back, revealing a bed so well made you could bounce an aspirin on it. Eileen Bass, who was still on duty, said an infection had developed in the incision and he’d been put in isolation. They didn’t transfer him in a cart; they moved the whole bed.
“Why the whole bed?” I asked.
“He weighs only about five hundred pounds,” she said. “Didn’t you get a look at him?”
“No,” I said. “What’s he in for?”
“Pickwick’s Syndrome—where you’re so fat you can’t breathe. They took out a section of his intestines so he can’t digest his food; he’s lost seventy-five pounds already.”
I said I didn’t know they did that sort of thing.
“He started gaining weight when his girl friend left him,” she said, “and just couldn’t stop.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You know what, though,” she said, “Arnold’s a wonderful man. You should talk to him some time. He understands things.”
The Food Service aide came in with my lunch tray, and the nurse left. Lunch consisted of beef broth, red Jell-O, and tea, but I didn’t feel very hungry. I watched two soap operas on what was left of Arnold’s rental. All the characters looked alike to me. The men had square jaws and looked stupid, and the women were p
retty in a mean sort of way. Then I watched some game shows, but in the middle of “Hollywood Squares” a skinny guy from TV Service came in and turned the set off with a key. He said if I wanted it back on, I had to pay three dollars a day. I instructed him to put it on the hospital bill, and he twisted the key again and left. The set came on. Charley Weaver’s face filled the screen, his moustache twitching. I didn’t catch what he said, but it must have been funny, because Rose Marie laughed a lot, showing her equine dentures.
In came Romona, Norm Cane, and Bolger of Personnel. They all had their professional manners on, so I knew it was trouble, I turned off the TV again.
“How are you feeling, son?” said Cane, putting an oily hand on my shoulder.
“Just great,” I said. “Never been better.”
“Sorry to hear of your ‘accident,’” said Bolger.
There was a pause as they decided who should speak, and Romona went to the door and closed it.
“Norm here has some questions for you,” she said, looking embarrassed.
“We understand you were involved in a demonstration,” he said, arching his eyebrows at Bolger.
“That’s right.”
“What was the extent of your involvement?” Bolger asked, sounding a little like Joe Friday on “Dragnet.”
“Let me see,” I said. “I think I probably went crazy and killed a few policemen.”
“This is no time for cynicism, young man,” Cane said. I noticed how yellow his skin was next to his white shirt collar. It was either a Miami tan or a liver condition.
“When we hired you,” Bolger said, “we had an explicit understanding that there would be no political activity. Isn’t that right?”
“I have a right as a citizen,” I said, “and the demonstration wasn’t on hospital grounds.”
