Brainstorm

by Robert Wintner

  But I too am all used up. So I go along with a little laugh: got you, Jane. Good one, huh? Jane titters, and I suggest, “If you wouldn’t mind, Nurse Jane, Rachel needs her hair washed in thirty minutes. Between now and then could you please see that we’re not interrupted by anyone?”

  “I’d love to help you wash your hair but I have three other patients, and that’s thirty minutes out of my day, so I don’t think that can happen.”

  “How many patients does Leah have?”

  “Three. She was supposed to be your nurse but we switched because the little guy she was working with yesterday really wanted her.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “I’ll try to help if I can. I just . . .”

  “That’s fine. Could we have some privacy?” She leaves. Another nurse enters. I admonish politely as I can, but it still comes out, “Get out, please.” It’s been seven days, nonstop. This nurse also leaves, pulling the curtain behind her.

  I give it a minute to calm down but doubt that this space is ever calm, which is counterintuitive to healing. The place rotates like a tube of broken glass with no mirror to reflect symmetry and no beauty. Nothing thrives here; you only get more breakage, chaotic refraction and sharp edges.

  Rachel is inconsolable. It’s seven days now of no solid food, no physical movement and no sound sleep, except of course for the anesthesia during brain surgery. What a nap.

  “We’re going to change our strategy,” I say.

  “We don’t have a strategy. We gave up. Unless maybe we had a secret plan that I’d sneak up on them and jump in bed and make them slice me up and poke me full of nails.”

  I laugh. “That’s very good. You are doing terrific. Now we’re going to get out of here.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “We need calmness. Inner calmness. We can change your pressure and flow. I know we can.”

  “I’m going to die,” she says.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “Go ahead. Die in your mind anyway.”

  “Great. Should I close my eyes?”

  “Yes. Listen: Do you remember when we dabbled in meditation?”

  Of course she must. It was only a few years ago during the breast cancer resolution. She didn’t really respond to my suggestion of meditation, but when the healers and other non-surgical counselors called for visualization, she wanted to try it—not meditation but visualization. I explained to her that there is no difference between the two, that visualization is meditation with imagery. Imagery is an integral component of internal change. And death is a primary image.

  She lay listless, tears rolling, eyes closed.

  “Do you remember what I told you? With death comes new life. You’ve done this. I have to tell you, I think it’s an extremely small number of people who have the chance of doing that, you know, dying in your mind, and now you get to do it twice.”

  “Oh, boy,” she squeaks over the knot in her throat.

  “Die in your mind as if everything before is over. Then we begin. Imagine a body of water, deep and still. Imagine it from now on, at least until this time tomorrow. You can keep your eyes closed or open. It doesn’t matter. But as much as you can, imagine water, deep and still.”

  We share the watery imagery, until she opens her eyes and says, “I have to pee.”

  By now she’s adept at unplugging herself. The intravenous leads are easily snapped apart at fittings in the lines near the injectors. She sits up and pulls them all off. I unplug the monitor, stow the cord and help wheel her to the potty seat. We get her back into the bed and re-plugged. “Sometime tonight you’ll have your hair washed and you’ll be cleaned. No more scrabble between now and tomorrow. No more visits. Talk between us will be minimal. We’ll meditate our way out of here.”

  “Yes. And in a little while you’ll walk out of here. You’ll have a beer and breathe some air. You’ll be able to sleep.”

  “Please.” She sighs and closes her eyes.

  We sustain silence, or at least what can be salvaged of it for an hour, till she opens her eyes and says, “Please go.” She is on the verge of tears again, her face half swollen and drawn deep in sadness. I can’t help but mirror her feeling, for we do suffer a death in the family, one that meditation cannot assuage. I press on for calmness. I rise slowly and move to her. I bend and kiss her and tell her we’re on our way out of here. I promise to get her out of here by tomorrow, if she’ll only go along with my little game.

  She neither speaks nor nods. I tell her I love her more than ever. She grimaces, as if such words are patronization at this point. Look at her, all carved up with a shaved head and fifty-six stitches where silky blonde hair used to be. Two dozen sensors and needles stick out of her arms and legs. A few more are pasted all over her chest. Her skin is sallow and drawn. One eye is swollen shut and seeping. The other is dark and baggy.

  “No shit. I couldn’t do this like you. Not that you’re doing it as well as you did yesterday. But you did it. You’re doing it. You’re a major player. Off the charts. I didn’t doubt that you could do it, but you’re standing pretty tall right now. I can’t believe how rare you are, to get to do this twice.” She smiles uncertainly for an opportunity she surely could have lived happily without. I put my hands on her chest, on her shoulders, on her cheeks.

  I leave.

  Nurse Jane watches from the corridor, waiting with more sympathy and misunderstanding. I attempt a smile and say, “She’s always been happy to a fault. Exceedingly happy. This depression worries me, and I know you’re busy. But I can tell you she’s inherently happy because her needs are so simple. You may think that a woman like her asking to have her hair washed is casual or vain or—”

  “No, I don’t think that at all. I just don’t know if I’ll have time.”

  “All I’m saying is that she’s severely depressed, and a hair wash could go a long way in cheering her up. Maybe if you viewed it as a mood elevating drug or a minor procedure. You know she hasn’t slept or eaten or moved around in eight days now. This place is taking a toll. She’s still at critical risk for spasm and seizure, and I think if washing her hair could lift her spirits, then maybe it should be a priority.”

  Nurse Jane wants to comfort me but only in the confines of her understanding. She takes initiative now, sharing her true feelings with a tough customer, one who could perhaps benefit from the insight and experience of the staff here. “You know,” she begins. “This was unavoidable. This depression. I think it’s for the best. My professional opinion is that it’s a necessary part of acceptance. She’s only now finally hearing what we’ve been trying to tell you, that—”

  “No, Jane. You still don’t get it.” I smile to compensate my own understanding. “Rachel heard you and all the staff the first time, but you have yet to hear her. You’re worse than Christians around here, with your God-awful righteousness and rightness. Anyone who doesn’t agree with you or go along with your understanding is irrational. We come from a different belief system, Jane. We wouldn’t be here if we had a choice, but we don’t have a choice, so we’re going along with your religion as far as we can. But you should make no more mistakes, and please, no more presumptions. She has no reason to be depressed other than this overwhelmingly depressing place. Will you please make time to help her wash her hair?”

  I am in Nurse Jane’s face, so to speak. This, too, Jane understands, but to what advantage or with what reception I cannot tell. She nods, nearly tearful herself, which may be cause for hope. She promises to wash Rachel’s hair if she can find the time. I assure her I can ask for no more than her best effort.

  Nurse Jane and I go our separate ways on that fragile truce. I descend and depart and drive ten blocks to where I sit and stare, till I tire and walk to the sofa where I lie down and sleep.

  I rise early and call. I am patched through, and Rachel says, “Good morning, dear. I got my hair washed. I feel much better. I’m going to—”

  “Sh . . . Water. Deep and still.”

  “Oh. Ye
ah. Okay. Are you coming down?”

  “Soon.”

  11

  Free at Last

  I arrive at eight. We sit in repose until ten-thirty, when a man comes to fix the sound on the TV. I didn’t know it was broken. Rachel says that it can’t go up loud enough to drown the wailing of the Zen-fountain woman, but it helps.

  At eleven the Doppler Ultrasound woman arrives. We’re watching the science fiction network, where a woman is being interviewed on her ability to channel another soul, whose voice comes through her body much differently than her own voice. The other voice says things the channel woman would never know to say. How could she?

  The Doppler Ultrasound woman is still Nancy. She is methodical and formal, saying she’ll need a few minutes to get set up. The TV is a drain on meditative repose in the normal world, but here it helps homogenize the ambient chaos.

  Following the woman who channels another soul is a practicing psychiatrist, on hand to explain the channeling phenomenon. He says the woman creates a belief in her subconscious mind that this event is actually happening, so she’s legitimate instead of fraudulent. “She believes, you see,” the shrink says. “That’s how we differentiate between legitimacy and fraud. But that’s all it is, a personal belief. It’s not really happening.”

  “I could have told you that,” Nancy says, tweaking her diodes and capacitors, prepping the goo that goes on the skin to facilitate the ultrasound test. We turn off the TV to dwell on the still waters at hand.

  By way of transition, I tell Nancy, “You express your personal beliefs, Nancy. But how can you know your personal beliefs are sounder than that woman’s beliefs? What makes you believe you’re right in your beliefs?” Nancy doesn’t need this. She only wants to clear another test, moving onward to sundown and payday. “Belief is personal by nature, Nancy. Let me give you an example.”

  She waits tolerantly, but when I take my place at the foot of the bed, sitting on the edge of a chair with good posture, chest open, hands on knees, eyes mostly closed, body still, she doesn’t press. She proceeds.

  Anyone in proximity to Doppler Ultrasound can attest to its uniquely eerie sound. Maybe we set the stage for it, dousing the TV and our own talk, going snake-eyed with good posture or as close to it as we can manage, conjuring imagery of slow flow and calm waters. The room quickly fills with the Doppler Ultrasound of stellar bodies in their hurtle through space—they and the attending spirits are with us at full speed, right there in 909 West. We feel no friction because you have none in space, and we scream across the cosmos. We hurl so fast along with the spirits, both good spirits and bad, light spirits and dark, that we needn’t sort them out. We are all of all at full speed. We move fast but slow, seeking only calmness in the whirl, peace at the speed of light.

  After sounding the vessels on each square centimeter over the left temporal lobe and adjacent area, Nancy sets a hand on Rachel’s forehead to pull it her way, so she can get readings from the other side of the head, the far side. But she stops when I stop her, speaking gently: “No, Nancy. We’ll have no head pulling today. And no neck twisting. Move your machine to the other side of the bed.”

  Nancy doesn’t need this either, and since it represents real effort, she glances up, prelude to a what-for. But if sweet looks could kill she’d be dead. She smiles back at me, neither sweetly nor sincerely and certainly not more than halfway. She moves the whole shebang to the other side of the bed, grunting and groaning, less methodically and formally and with a great show of effort.

  Rachel retains her repose, and in no time the spirits can be heard soaring and looping and whooshing about the room again.

  In a few minutes we’re done. Nancy scans the printout, nods slowly and wrinkles her forehead. “These are better. Much better,” she says.

  “How can you tell? You haven’t worked the formula.”

  “Oh, you can tell when you’ve done this as long as I have.”

  “I hope you’re right, Nancy. I hope you can tell what happened here, too.” She laughs short. “I don’t like to think that you’re close-minded here. But I do wish you could open up to things beyond the dogma. You might consider possibilities. Like that woman on TV and what she believes is happening every time you believe something else is happening. You might consider the difference between explaining something and explaining something away. That’s a pitfall for people who work here too long. You feel compelled to explain everything else away.”

  She is curt on her departure. Rachel is relieved that it’s done and we have apparently passed. She is up, disconnecting, unplugging and packing her things. I remind her that the place runs like molasses, that she should retain her meditative repose. She asks what for. I laugh and tell her: for no reason at all.

  In a while Sue arrives with a new game, cribbage, because scrabble is suspect.

  I take my leave to get lunch and begin reentry to the world of livelihood. I think this vacation could be the most expensive yet.

  The end. Or the beginning of the next phase at any rate. Who can tell when it’s actually over, short of gasping and realizing what your last thought will actually be? The highs and lows don’t stop. Like the night of the day of liberation from intensive care.

  I return at seven to find that Rachel is officially released but still waits in the maelstrom. Pam is the new nurse and is very busy with patients in greater need of service. I’m glad she’s scarce, but we need to push that last official documentation that will allow this inertia to break.

  Pam tells me that I must learn to be patient sooner or later and now is as good a time as any, so why don’t I sit down and behave for a change? We haven’t met, so I know I’m suspect on the ward. Never mind. Pam must make a call and sign off so Rachel can move to the third floor, but she blocks like a defensive linewoman. She too is suspect, proving a point.

  I find Nurse Claudia, who is again the charge nurse and has also had enough of an overbearing, reflexive resister like me. She admonishes, “They know she’s coming down. We spoke to them. They said they’ll come and get us when they’re ready, and that’s what they’ll do. They have patients to discharge down there, and until they do, they have no room for your wife.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Listen, Mister. This is a hospital. A trauma center. Nobody cares about your personal comfort. We have emergencies all the time here, so things get pushed back. Now, go on down there and have a seat or get out.”

  I don’t doubt her sincerity, but here too common sense preempts her impatience. “Are you going to tell me what time that was? Or do I have to ask on the third floor?”

  “It was three o’clock.”

  “Does this hospital actually discharge people at eight o’clock at night?”

  “No. We don’t.”

  “Then a room is either waiting right now on the third floor, or it’s not. That means either you will call them right now, or I’ll go down there. If the room is ready, I’ll take my wife down there. If it’s not, we’ll go home. It’s on you.”

  Boy, does she ever hate a pushy jerk like me, one who is better off neutralized with a phone call than set up for more macho noise. But she’s not going to make the call with me standing there, so I can just go on down there and have a seat.

  She makes the call but doesn’t like it. I wait around the corner. It’s rhubarb, rhubarb, mumbo jumbo, till she heats up on a gasp of disbelief. She nearly chokes, “What? No! You were going to call us! Since three? Well, that’s just great! This asshole is reading me the riot act, and I’m telling him to get the hell out of here. That’s just great!”

  I’m waiting when she rounds the corner. I preempt her again with, “We’ll be getting ready. In ten minutes we’re heading down, with or without a field guide.”

  The field guide arrives five minutes later, a much larger woman who may not be a candidate for a relationship with Nurse Claudia but only because the larger woman is much happier. She freely concedes that this system will work you stupid unless you
work it first. She rambles, “You would not believe how many people would have sat there all damn night waiting for something to fix itself out of thin air. I’ll tell you something else; that room there in Intensive? That room runs you two thousand dollars a day. You’re sitting there at midnight: Bingo! Two grand, baby.”

  The world changes in an elevator ride. We’re rolled to a room with four walls, a door and a bathroom with a shower. The window overlooks Elliott Bay, and the door closes to blessed silence, but not before Rachel springs off the gurney so fast her gown flies open, exposing her back end. “Oh, I’m liking this!” the big nurse says.

  “Oh, yeah, she’s resilient,” I say, and the big nurse squints at me, like I’m blind to the Promised Land.

  In mere minutes we’re alone again, back among the living silence. Rachel is happy again, grinning and knowing she’s on her way. I go down to the car and bring up the dozen bouquets that arrived in the last few days. No flowers are allowed in Intensive Care. They’re wilting now yet glorious in effusion of color and scent.

  The next morning I’m jolted awake by a phone call at seven. But it’s okay—the attending physician came around and asked why she’s still in the hospital. She is discharged. The paper shuffle will take two hours. She’ll be done by nine. With another shot of adrenaline that I know is inching me nearer the big one, I lunge to pee, shower, dress and drive down. She’s dressed and packed when I get there, and I weaken on seeing her with a silk scarf tied around her head like Aunt Jemima used to wear. She’s radiant again, again happy and ready to ride.

  Speet Patorogy comes around to assure us we’re doing all right. Physical rehab says it will be dicey the next few days. I tell this nurse she’s in denial; Rachel could click her heels and win a race around the block.

  The pharmacist is downstairs waiting with a grocery bag—a big brown paper one, no shit—full of drugs. In a minute we’re in the car and in five we’re in the office, because maybe it’s better that we spend the night in town rather than ninety minutes away.