On Tuesday the doctor told me that I’d be leaving on Thursday. I argued with her, but she just smiled and nodded. I called the college human-resources office, but they told me that all medical insurance for retired employees was handled in Albany and that I had to send them a letter if I’d lost my insurance card.
“I haven’t lost my damn card.”
“Then show it to the people at the hospital.”
It seemed impossible that I could have lost control of my life so easily. From full professor with tenure to a homeless ward of the state. I was on the eighth floor of a building that took up two city blocks. I figured that it was nearly a quarter of a mile between me and freedom. But I had to try—blue pajamas and all. I’d carry a weapon with me. And if anyone tried to stop me, I’d throw down on them.
The only weapon I could find was a serrated plastic knife, but that would have to do.
At two o’clock on that Wednesday I closed my eyes to rest fifteen minutes more, and then I was going to run, regardless of what they did to me.
“Cecil,” came a voice with a francophone, West African inflection to it.
“Adegoke?” I said, without opening my eyes.
“I finally found you,” he said.
I mustered enough courage to open one eye, and there he was. Blacker than my doctor and tall and handsome in that gaunt way only Ghanaian men can manage: Adegoke Arapmoi, professor of film and culture, stood there beside my bed. Behind him was Jack Fine, a light brown and beefy teacher of archaeology who hailed from Baltimore.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Adegoke asked.
“I did. Your phone went straight to voice mail.”
“What happened?”
“Get me outta here, man. They wanna put me in a nursing home.”
Adegoke wore a lavender jacket, black trousers, and a bright, bright yellow shirt. All this topped off with a Panama hat. His white teeth glistened against black skin.
“I was in Ghana,” he said, “at the ten-year anniversary of the death of my father. When I got back you weren’t home. I had to wait until the night guard was on duty. He told me about your attack, but he didn’t know where the ambulance had taken you. Jack and I have been going from hospital to hospital.”
“Hey, Cecil,” Jack said. He was grinning, and so was I. “You look like shit.”
“You brought me new sheets, but they got stains on ’em,” Gil Holder was telling his nurse.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Jack Fine, who was at least six five, said to the woman.
“Yes?”
“Tell the doctor, and whoever, that we’re takin’ Professor Bentway home.”
“He has to be released by a doctor,” the young, pink-skinned woman explained.
“That’s OK,” Jack said. “Just as long as that release coincides with our egress from your institution.”
Jack was thirty-three years old and not that far away from his student days. He still slung big words around as if they made him sound smart. I usually felt embarrassed by the way he spoke, but that day I was filled with glee.
Gil Holder was actually smiling at my big friend.
“I brought you some of my son’s clothes, Cecil,” Adegoke said as the nurse fled the room.
He placed a large brown-paper bag on my bed.
Many years before, Addy had been my student at San Francisco State. He and my son, Eric/Simba, were the same age, forty-eight, but it was Adegoke who searched all the emergency rooms in Manhattan until he’d found me.
With my friends’ help, I got up and dressed. Jack even tied my shoes.
“What’s going on here?” Dr. Ifadapo asked as she came into the room flanked by two black men in security-guard uniforms.
Jack moved toward the little group. Addy got in front of him.
“I am Dr. Arapmoi from New York College,” he said. “Dr. Bentway is one of our professors. We have come to bring him home.”
“I have already signed the papers to release him to Morningside Nursing Home. You can apply for his release there.”
“He’s coming with me to my home now,” Addy said with certainty.
“The forms are filled out.”
Jack Fine snorted. The guards took notice of him. Gil Holder picked up some kind of bludgeon from under his pillow. Brightwood pulled the blanket up to his chin, and lovelorn Lagnan didn’t notice a thing.
The beautiful Nigerian stared into the handsome Ghanaian’s eyes for half a minute at least.
“Are you his guardian?” Ifadapo asked.
“I’m his nephew,” Addy lied. “And he’s coming home with me.”
For the next two hours they filled out forms and made recommendations. We walked down three long halls, took an elevator, and went to the checkout desk to retrieve whatever it was that I had in my pockets when I was brought in.
“This is a blue form,” the big bald brown man said from behind his marble desk. “You need a yellow form to get what we have. A blue form will get your clothes from the emergency room closet.”
Back to the elevator, down the halls, we returned to the nurses’ desk near my room.
“Oh,” the pink-skinned nurse (whose name tag read “Laura”) said. “I’m sorry. I should have given you the yellow form. Give me that one, and I’ll fill out another.”
“But he needs the blue paper to get his clothes,” big Jack Fine bellowed.
“Oh, right,” the nurse said. “You know we’re very understaffed. I’m lucky if I remember to make my rounds.”
The man wanting the yellow form had my wallet, in which I found my medical-insurance card.
“You go through that door on your left,” he said, now quite friendly, “and down the hall until you get to the emergency room. You pass through there and come to a desk behind a Plexiglas barrier. The woman there will help you find your clothes.”
There were dozens of people sitting in the disheveled maze of blue vinyl-and-chrome chairs that furnished the emergency-room waiting area. A sleeping, or maybe unconscious, child in his mother’s arms, a man with blood seeping from his face and both arms, an old man (my age) staring out a window with his lower eyelids drooping away from the orbs—open and red. One man sat silently crying, his hand swollen to the size of a football. A young woman with haunted eyes had such severe flatulence that no one could sit near her. You could see the pain from her belly in the twist of her mouth and the humiliation of her eyes.
“Where’s the doctor?” an old woman in a wheelchair asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“This is terrible,” Jack Fine said to Addy.
“At least they have a place to go,” the Ghanian said.
Behind the Plexiglas window on the other side of suffering sat an ocher-skinned, almond-eyed woman. I thought she might be Cambodian or Vietnamese.
“Put the form in the slot in front of you,” she said without looking up.
I placed the blue form where she asked, and she picked it up. When she noticed what it was, she frowned, then sighed.
“We’re very busy,” she complained.
“It’s my clothes,” I replied, realizing that my breath was coming short again.
“You came in DP-twenty-seven,” the woman replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asked.
The hospital sentry hesitated. She said, “DP. Deceased Person. The first doctor who saw you declared you dead.”
Ana, the young nurse/receptionist, led us to a door behind her kiosk. It was small and green and opened into a dark room. A light came on automatically when we entered. We realized with awe that we had entered a vast chamber lined with deep bins that were filled with hundreds of bundles of clothes bound in brown paper and secured with tan masking tape.
I could hear the breath singing in my windpipe.
“You OK, Cecil?” Addy as
ked.
I didn’t answer. While Ana searched through certain piles of bundles I looked around. Most of the brown-paper packages had the name and date of death scrawled on the tape. One read: reynard, milton 10/11/07; deceased. Some of the slips had fallen from their bundles. There was Julia Slatkin, Harris Montoya, and Po Li. The dust and lint gathered in my throat and lungs, and I felt the beginnings of another respiratory attack. I should have run out of there, but running for me was a thing of the past.
That one room led to another, where there were no bins and even more bundles of clothes, piled all the way to the eighteen-foot ceiling. I thought about the concentration-camp films that came out when I was a young man just out of the air force, right after the war. The Nazis took everything that their victims owned: hair and teeth, shoes and clothes. I felt that I was in the presence of some great crime that I would never be able to prove.
“Here it is, Cecil,” Addy said. “Here’s that robe I brought you from Accra.”
In the taxi I opened the window and let my head loll out, the wind forcing its way into my lungs. All I had to do was open my mouth.
Adegoke’s wife is spending the summer with her family in Nice. His daughter has gone to Singapore, and his son is on a film shoot in southern Mexico. My old student gave me a room with a window on the twenty-seventh floor of university housing. Here I’ve been sitting for the past three weeks waiting for breath to return, so that I might escape to a Caribbean island; there I hope to forget what I learned among the bundles of death.
Reply to a
Dead Man
When the doorbell rang, I had no inkling of who was there or what his or her business might have been. I was sitting at the dining table in a room that had never been used for entertaining. Books and notepads, two weeks’ worth of newspapers, and a few stacks of dirty dishes were piled here and there around the dark-stained hickory plank. I had been perched there writing a letter to my sister about the death of our brother in the fall.
It was now spring, and this was the first time I’d reached out to Angeline. I had missed the funeral. Our brother had been buried in Cincinnati by Dearby, his fourth wife. She, Dearby, told me that if she was going to pay for the burial, then he’d be interred in the same cemetery as her and the rest of her family.
I was having a hard time, financially, when Seth passed. I’d just lost my job as a regional manager for Lampley Car Insurance, and my unemployment checks hadn’t been enough to pay the rent. I couldn’t take time off from my temp position at Lenny’s Auto Parts, and the funeral was on a Wednesday, a workday. My boss, Alan René Bertrand, didn’t particularly like me, and so I couldn’t even take the chance of asking him for the time off. Lenny’s paid $22.50 an hour, the best temp rate in town, and so I sent a dozen white lilies and a note thanking Dearby for honoring my brother.
You see, I knew that Dearby and Seth were on the outs when he died. My sister told me that Seth had been seeing his second ex-wife, Althea, again, and Dearby was threatening to kick him out of the house.
She, Dearby, called to tell me about Seth.
“He had a heart attack,” she said. “I warned him about the high blood pressure and his weight. He wouldn’t listen. He never listened.”
I was thinking that Dearby was pretty big herself.
As if she could read my thoughts across the two thousand–plus miles that separated us, she said, “I know that I’m big, but my heft is fruit fat, weight from fresh fruit with fiber and natural sugars. My doctors tell me that I’m OK the way I am.”
“I know you are,” I said, to fill the empty space in our conversation, an emptiness that loomed like the blank line at the bottom of a boilerplate contract.
“What do you want me to do with him?” she asked.
“Um . . .”
“The body, Roger. What do you want me to do with the body?”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“I know that,” Dearby said. “He’s gone, and somebody has to bury him.”
“Oh . . . Oh, yeah. Right. Um . . .”
I got up from the table, remembering that awkward moment, half a year ago, when I had to tell Dearby that I didn’t have the money to help pay for a funeral.
The walk from my worktable to the front door wasn’t long. No distance in my 634-square-foot half-home in the Wilshire district was that great. The other side of the subdivided house was inhabited by a woman named Rose Henley. I had seen Rose only once, a few days after I’d moved in seven years and ten months earlier. She’d rung my bell and introduced herself as my neighbor.
Rose Henley was old, maybe sixty, and she had one gold tooth. She was fairly short, even for a woman, and her black hair was sliding into white. She was a white woman, broad-faced and stout.
“Mr. Vaness?” she had said, all those years ago.
“Yes?”
“I’m Rose Henley, your neighbor.”
“Oh. Hello.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt, just wanted you to see my face. And I wanted to see yours.”
“Would you like to come in?” I asked, not putting much heart into it.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I just wanted to greet you. I don’t get out very much.”
This was no exaggeration. I had not seen nor had I heard from my neighbor since.
But that day, when I was writing to my sister, Angeline, about our brother Seth’s death, I was sure that Rose was at my door. I didn’t get much company since losing my job. The friends I had liked to party, and I couldn’t afford the gas money, much less my part of the bill at our favorite bars and restaurants.
After I was fired, I had asked my girlfriend, Terri, if she would move in so we could share the rent.
Terri broke it off with me three days later.
No one ever knocked at my door, and Rose was the only person I was acquainted with in the neighborhood. It had to be her, I thought; that was just cold, hard logic.
So I opened the door looking down, expecting to see my diminutive neighbor’s wide face under a thatch of black hair turning white.
Instead I was looking at the red and blue vest of a white man even taller than I. He had a bald head and not much facial hair. His skin was the color of yellowing ivory, and his eyes were a luminous gray—like a mist-filled valley at dawn.
“Mr. Vaness?” the stranger asked, in a magnificent tenor voice.
“Yes?”
“My name is Harding, Lance Harding. I am here representing the last wish of Seth Vaness.”
“What?”
“I work for a small firm called Final Request Co. We execute the last wishes of clients who have passed on.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
I looked the slender tenor up and down. He had on a nice suit, but it was reddish brown, not a lawyer’s color in my estimation.
“No, Mr. Vaness. We at FRC don’t execute wills. Our job is to deliver messages from the dead.” He smiled after the last word, giving me a slight chill.
“Uh-huh. You use a Ouija board or somethin’?”
“We are engaged by the deceased before their demise.”
“My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?”
Harding smiled and nodded.
“He died six and a half months ago,” I said. “What took you so long?”
“His wish was for us to execute his desire not less than half a year after his demise.”
“Is this some kinda legal thing?”
“It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,” Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. “Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.”
“Seth didn’t have much,” I said. “He couldn’t ha
ve anything to hide.”
“We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.”
“So you’re—”
“May I come in?” Harding asked, cutting off my question.
“Oh,” I said.
“Is this a bad time?”
“No, no it’s OK, I just . . .”
“I came by on Wednesday, but you weren’t here,” Harding said. “Your neighbor, Mrs. Henley, told me that you were at work.”
“You talked to Rose?”
“May I come in?”
My house was untidy, to say the least. When I have a girlfriend, I usually pick up and air out my little place at least once a week, but I lose the drive when I’m unattached. As a rule, the mess doesn’t bother me unless I have unexpected guests.
Harding didn’t seem put off by the clutter. I moved a small stack of old comic books from a chair next to the one I had been sitting in and gestured for him to take it.
“The Fantastic Four,” he said, looking at the topmost magazine as I set the stack on the table next to him.
“They were my father’s,” I said. “I have one through twelve. Know anybody who might want to buy them?”
“Your blood father?” he asked. “Patrick Hand?”
I nodded, wondering how he knew my real father’s name.
He flipped through the issues, smiling slightly. Harding was maybe ten years older than I. That would have made him about fifty.
“Not in mint or near-mint condition,” he said. “That makes them nearly worthless. At any rate, these books call up your father from across the pale. That’s a connection that money can’t buy.”
“How do you know my father’s dead?”
“Both of your fathers,” he said. “Patrick, who sired you, and Norland, who married your mother and adopted her three children.”
“How do you know all that?”
“They were Seth’s fathers too.”
The Awkward Black Man Page 20
