by Jon Cohen
Inez’s performance took the focus temporarily off of Louis, and everyone in the room breathed again. The lab tech stopped shaking her vial, the patients remembered their injuries and cradled them, and Dotty the ward clerk was able to speak.
She shook her head and said to no one in particular, “Somebody please tell me what in hell is going on in my ER this afternoon?” Then she called over to Iris. “Supposed to be a full moon tonight? Must be an extra full moon coming tonight.”
Gracie emerged from the group that surrounded Louis and took a tentative step or two toward Iris, hesitated, then continued forward.
“Excuse me,” Gracie said, looking down at Iris.
Iris looked back up at her, somewhat vaguely, and then she slowly cleared. She glanced again at Louis, then returned to Gracie. “He’s hurt?” Iris said. Then she realized that was a foolish question. “I mean, of course he is, or you wouldn’t have brought him here, right?”
“That’s right,” Gracie said. “He had an accident.”
Iris peered around Gracie again. “His arm, huh?”
“Yes we think”—Gracie gestured at her neighbors—“that it’s probably broken.”
“That’s a lot of people come with him. You’re his mom?”
Gracie nodded.
“And all those people… relatives?”
“No,” said Gracie. “Neighbors. Involved in his rescue. Who felt they should accompany him.”
“Jeez, that’s a lot of people.”
Francine had broken off from the group and was already relating, in excited detail, the story of Louis to a friend she had spotted in the waiting area. Her arms flapped as she spoke.
Iris, with Gracie at her side, approached Louis. She was unable to look at him from so close a distance. She looked instead at his arm. “I’m Iris Shula,” she said softly. She gently lifted Louis’s shirtsleeve.
“I’m Louis Malone,” Louis managed through his teeth. Even her whisper touch caused crackles of pain.
“Definitely broken. Definitely,” Iris said. “Okay, you want to come back with me to room 4?”
“But these other patients, in the waiting room, aren’t they before me?”
“We treat you according to the severity of your injury. Mostly that room’s full of bug bites and little cuts. You got a good-size break, and you’re trembling and your skin’s kind of cool, all symptoms of early shock. You need to be seen.” It was easier for Iris to talk to him when she adopted her no-nonsense nurse tone.
Carl and Bert, on either side of Louis, and Gracie, Bev, Donna, and Kitty took a step or two forward. Francine saw them and hurried over. Iris put her hand out. “No, no. I’m afraid you people will have to wait here.”
That was it? You mean we have to hand him over? Disappointment swept through the group. Francine said in a little voice, not wanting to rile Iris, “But, you know, we were the ones rescued him.”
Iris hesitated, then said, “I’m sure you did, ma’am. But you see, he’s here now. You’ve done your part, and now we have to do our part.” She waited, as if for a group of children to relinquish the treasure they deeply desired but knew they could not keep.
Carl, whose lead the others had followed since Louis had landed in the tulip bed, took the first step away from Louis, slowly released his arm. Louis felt the sudden absence of Carl’s touch and missed it terribly. On his other side, Bert let go. For a brief instant, Louis felt lighter than air, adrift, as he had been at the moment he left his window and gravity had not yet found him, so that he was unsure whether he would fall or rise. Gravity found him now in the form of Iris, solid and low to the ground. She reached up and took hold of him. When she touched him, Louis knew at once that he was earthbound, that in her grasp he would not be allowed to drift.
“I got you,” she said. “You hold on to me, and I’ll hold on to you.”
Everyone in the Emergency Room watched. They had never seen anything like it, such a fit. A pair mismatched to all but each other. That’s what Louis and Iris looked like, briefly, as they moved slowly down the hall together toward room 4—a pair, a couple enwrapped in one another’s arms, on a stroll. What a couple. Iris, whose physical limitations were utterly apparent, low and slightly stooped Iris. And at her side, looming above her, Louis, his misfortunes unapparent, and therefore dreadful because of what was not revealed but only hinted at by the scarf that adhered to the misshapen contours of his hidden face.
Someone, it didn’t matter who because it might have come from any one of the watchers, let out a high, sharp laugh, like the bark of a seal. Several people put their hands to their mouths, thinking the sound had come from them. Iris and Louis kept moving; they had not heard, or heard and knew, as only such a pair of people would know, that in that laughter there was no joy or approval. That laughter was like a dog’s smile that is not a smile at all, but a frightened show of teeth. Gracie turned and looked at the watchers in the waiting room, and they all wore dog smiles. Then she turned again and opened her mouth as if to call out a warning to Louis and Iris, but they had disappeared into room 4.
Someone touched Gracie’s elbow and said, “They’ll be all right. You take it from ol’ Herb, they’ll be just fine.”
Gracie stared at the old security guard smiling up at her with his gappy dentures. There was nothing dangerous in his smile, and she felt comforted for a brief moment. She was about to thank him, but he was suddenly off, tipping his hat to her before he stepped through a door beside the Coke machine and vanished.
Iris helped Louis up onto the stretcher in room 4. She stepped back and hesitated before she spoke. She glanced at him, and he glanced at her, then they both stared down at the linoleum floor.
“I’m going to have to take a look now,” she said.
When he lifted his good arm and pressed his hand against the scarf that hid his face, she shook her head and said, “No, no, I didn’t mean that. Not there. Your arm. I’m going to have to get a good look at your arm. I’ll have to cut off part of your shirt. Okay? So I don’t have to move your arm around. Okay?”
Louis slowly nodded. “Okay.”
Iris worked carefully with a pair of bandage scissors, cutting the shirtsleeve well above the break in Louis’s forearm. He watched her, sitting erect and still on the edge of the stretcher as she worked on him.
He said, “Were you here sixteen years ago?”
She finished with his sleeve and bent close to look at his arm. “Seems to be a clean break. Big bump, but clean. I’ll have to get Dr. Gunther to look at it, and we’ll have to get you to X-ray for some films.” She wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his good arm. “Sixteen years ago? No. I just been here a couple years. What was sixteen years ago?”
“Just wondering,” Louis said.
“Oh,” said Iris. “Well, no, I wasn’t here then.”
“But it was you I saw?”
“Sixteen years ago?” said Iris.
“No, at the end of last summer. In the parking lot. The cemetery.”
“That was me, yeah. You remember that?”
“I remember everything. Most everything, anyway. I don’t get out much, you see, so it’s important I remember.” Louis shifted on the stretcher and felt a warmth growing on the part of his face that was not numb. What was he saying?
Iris said, “Why don’t you get out much?”
“Because,” Louis said after a minute, “because I stay inside a lot.” Then he added, “More than most people, I guess.”
“Oh.” She inflated the blood pressure cuff. “You keep to yourself, then, is what you’re saying.”
“Yes,” said Louis. “That’s it exactly. I keep to myself.” For sixteen years. But he didn’t say it.
“Sometimes that’s best,” Iris said, writing his pressure on the ER sheet. Her hand was trembling slightly, and she had trouble fitting the numbers in the correct column.
Neither of them spoke. Iris pretended to write more numbers in columns. Louis crossed, then uncrossed his legs. Iris heard
herself suddenly say, “I don’t get out all that much either, really.”
Louis watched his legs crossing and uncrossing. “So that when you do,” he said, “when you finally do, it becomes… it becomes…” He stopped. Unbearable, he did not say. It becomes almost unbearable to be amidst what you have gazed upon season after season, to touch what you have only seen for sixteen years, to speak not sentences in a dream where the words have always been from me to me, but in ordinary tones, in sounds that rise from my chest and pass between what is left of my scarred lips and reach you, you there inches before my face, you there in pure white whom I must not mistake for a white vision, another vision in the endless visions that have filled my hours.
Iris looked at him and frowned. She was not having any of this. This… this what, she didn’t understand, but whatever this feeling was, she wasn’t having any of it, not about this patient, one of the endless patients who filled her hours. Iris, so firmly of the world, who slept dreamlessly, had no time to wonder about this patient, who would pass before her and be healed, or not be healed, but either way would be gone.
She said, all business now, “I have to ask you a few more questions. Do you have any food or medication allergies?”
“No,” said Louis.
“Are you taking any medication at this time?”
“No,” said Louis.
“Have you had a tetanus shot within the last five years?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“We’ll have to give you one then.” Iris made notes on her clipboard sheet. “Okay.” She looked up at him again. “One more thing. How did you break your arm?”
Louis tried to meet her eyes. “I was at my window.” He paused.
“Your window,” Iris prompted. “At your window and…?”
“And then I was out of it.”
“Out of it?” She tilted her head.
“By accident. Onto the ground,” Louis said quickly.
“First-floor window? Second-floor window?”
“Second floor.”
“Did you hurt yourself anywhere else? Your back? Your head?”
“Oh no, just my arm. I landed in a flower bed. Where it was soft. And I wouldn’t have even broken my arm if…” He didn’t go on. If I hadn’t twisted and turned trying to keep my hat and scarf in place.
“If?”
“Oh, I don’t know. If I was luckier, I guess.”
Iris started for the door, picturing in her mind Louis at the window, and then out of it, falling and falling. “I’d say you were pretty lucky. I’m going to talk with Dr. Gunther and set you up for an X-ray, and get you a couple of pain pills. If you need anything, press the call light, that button there above the stretcher.”
She pointed, then closed the door behind her and took a long breath. She kept seeing it, Louis at the window. She closed her eyes, opened them, and began to move down the hallway. She went three steps and stopped short, and made a sound, which Inez heard as she hurried out of room 1 blowing a large bubble.
“You say something, Iris?” Inez called down the hall to her.
Iris didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, so Inez shrugged and walked off.
Louis. The Tube Man had said “Louis,” not “loose.” Paula, the night nurse, hadn’t gotten the Tube Man’s final word right. Now the Tube Man’s words made sense, were brought to sense by the man in room 4. He fell from a window because he is the man in the window. She heard the Tube Man once more, as if she were again in his room and he was speaking to her in his whispering ventilated voice, his machine-breath coma voice. The Tube Man, the valentine-shaped dot of blood on his floor, his Cupid words like arrows piercing her heart. The man in the window is Louis. Iris pressed against the wall. And he has left his window, he has crossed his interminable lonely desert for me. My wounded Lawrence, whose eyes have endlessly searched the horizon, has found me. These unimaginable words came to Iris as she moved unsteadily up the hall toward the ER nurses’ station, touching the green wall for support.
Unnoticed by Iris who was in the nurses’ station trying to compose herself, unnoticed by Winnie and Inez who were busy with Big Bill Rose and the rest of the ER, unnoticed by anyone, the door to room 5 opened just a crack and an eyeball peered through it. Then the door opened a little more, and Harvey Mastuzek craned his scraggy neck and peered up and down the empty hallway. Coast clear, he thrust open the door and hopped out into the hallway, his skinny butt hanging out of the open back of his hospital gown. He lifted his nose to the air as if picking up a scent, then pointed his right index finger like a divining rod at the doors of each of the six ER examination rooms, settling at last on the one to the left of him, room 4. Soundlessly, he turned the handle to the door and hopped inside.
Louis, who’d been watching the door since Iris walked out of it, did not recognize the bedraggled man who skittered into his room and who now placed a pale trembling hand on his stretcher and peered up at him with intent eyes.
“Louis,” the man said.
The man spoke his name so sadly and so quietly. Louis leaned forward instinctively, to hear more, when the man opened his mouth to speak again. But instead of speaking, the man suddenly lifted his hand and laid it on Louis’s scarf-enshrouded cheek. Then he let his hand drop.
“Louis. Do you forgive me?”
Louis placed the voice then, and the eyes. The body had changed so, like his own, though the ravaging of it had been slower, an eating away.
“Mr. Mastuzek,” Louis said, as if he were ten years old again and addressing Harvey Mastuzek as a Saturday customer in Malone’s Hardware. How long had it been since he had waited on Mr. Mastuzek, that single time he had entered the store? It had been an entire life ago. “Mr. Mastuzek. Forgive you? Forgive you for what?”
“It was so beautiful, you see,” said Harvey, looking away.
“What was, Mr. Mastuzek?”
Harvey glanced around the examination room as if he were in another place. His eyes had softened, become hopeful. “The store. Your father’s store.”
“Yes,” said Louis.
“It was such a tidy place. It was a place of such clarity. Does that make sense, that things were clear there? You could see immediately, just by looking at all the supplies, that something could be done about everything.”
“Yes.”
Harvey’s voice took on the slow rhythm of remembrance. “You thought,” he said, walking up and down the examination room as if he were perusing the aisles of his remembered vision of Malone’s Hardware, “you thought, entering the place, that anything could be fixed. Not just the actual thing you sought to fix, the leaky pipe or the torn screen or the clogged drain, but all things, you know? It was a place that let you know that… that things could be held together, that if this happens, then you do that. Solutions, answers! Right there on the shelf, and all you had to know was what you needed, because if you needed it, Malone’s had it.” Harvey whirled around and looked wide-eyed at Louis. “And if Malone’s had it, if a simple hardware store in the middle of a nothing town like Waverly had it, then it was all around you, outside the store and everywhere. Life, is what I’m saying, Louis, life didn’t have to be such a goddamn hardship and a puzzle. Life was a fixable thing. If a thing goes wrong for you, and you know where to look and how to look, then you need not be hobbled by your calamities. You just reach right out, get the thing you need, and fix your leak and your torn screen, and yourself, most of all yourself, because it can be done, don’t you see?”
Louis nodded.
“Well it’s true, Louis, or it seemed true when I walked into Malone’s Hardware that day. That’s what I believed, looking around me and watching you and listening to you, it’s what I believed when you found me this.” Harvey reached out and placed a small black washer on the stretcher beside Louis.
“You handed me that washer and Jesus Christ, it came right to me, the idea of the washer almost dropped me to the floor. You see, when I walked into Malone’s Hardware and said, ‘I need me a
washer,’ I wasn’t asking for a washer at all; and when you found me the washer, and handed it to me, and I paid my thirteen cents, that’s not the transaction that really transpired. The transaction, I knew suddenly, was this: I was actually saying, ‘Louis, boy, I got me a host of calamities that I need not specify. Maybe I beat my wife and maybe I don’t, maybe I’m a drinker and maybe not, maybe I have the cancer eating through my bowels and maybe I don’t, and maybe I need a washer for the torturous dripping of my faucet and maybe not—what I need to know is, if a thing is broke, can it be fixed?’
“And you took me all over that store pointing out all the possibilities, the ways to mend a thing, the tape, the screws, the caulk, the hammers and nails, and in that small drawer at the back of the store, the washers. Harvey, I said to myself when you handed me that perfect washer, you see how easy it is? Solutions, answers, alternatives. I floated out of the store. And I said, Harvey, it’s going to be okay. A sorrow had been eased, lifted, Louis, by what I believed I learned in my brief encounter with you in that store. I was, for the first time in years, a happy man, a man with hope. I was going to be fixed.”
Harvey’s face was very near Louis’s now. “So I hurried home, and I went down to the basement and found me a screwdriver and a pipe wrench, then I bounded back upstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, all the while clutching my little washer like it was gold. I took off the faucet handle, and I removed the valve stem and scraped out the old washer, then slipped in my new one—the first nervous step along what I thought to be the road to my rehabilitation, the restoration of my luck in life. Then I put everything back together and turned on the faucet, and the water flowed as sweetly as a waterfall, and when I turned it off, no drips!
