Hothouse

by Chris Lynch

  “For godsake, DJ knew. About his own dad. How could DJ know and everybody else not?”

  Suddenly she starts poring over the newspaper as if the answer is in there, then just as suddenly she comes out with, “A lot of times, Russ, we allow ourselves to believe what we would like to be true, even if that truth is unlikely. A lot of times we can maintain the truth we need until we are made to see something else by force.”

  She does not look up from the paper as she says this. The radio, pulled off the night table and lying on the bed beside her, is playing soft jazz music now, but the room is filled with a mammoth silence anyway.

  I return to the room, the net, the news. The site, the comments section that follows the toxicology report article, is filling up fast.

  The message board is alight.

  … pair of disgraces …

  If only they were still alive … so they could be shot....

  I feel sorry for the families. The humiliation worse than death.

  How about the poor old woman?

  Heads should roll.

  Somebody’s got to pay. Got to pay.

  Mrs. Kotsopolis taught me in school … a wonderful, gentle soul....

  Their names shall live in infamy....

  That is the voice of the city, right there. That is everybody speaking, right there.

  I want to cut my wrists. I want to go to the park, and soak myself in gasoline, and make a brilliant bonfire of myself. What are they called in China? Burnt offerings.

  Holy shit. Holy shit. Jesus. My God. God help me.

  I am on my knees, by no effort of my own. It is as if I have been thrown right to the floor, by the power of those words from all those people, and they just keep coming. I am on my knees, leaning on the edge of the desk, just about holding myself upright, and still, still, holding down the key that is scrolling the words, the endless deathless hateful cascade of words directed toward the memory of my father. And I cannot stop reading. I’m like a body, electrocuted on a high voltage wire, tangled and unable to even fall off the charge.

  He was such a good man, my dad. He made me pancakes with faces on them, and a fire helmet on top traced out of red licorice. He saved that lucky little puke of a drowned kid. He did more selfless things in a month than every last one of these poster jerks have probably done in their whole cowardly lives.

  But I agree with them on this one thing: if he were here now I’d kill him myself. What did you go and do, Dad?

  How did nobody know about the other stuff? How did nobody know? How did they not stop him?

  How did I not know?

  I am still on my knees.

  It’s only his first time ever in the hospital overnight. That’s what he says.

  “Well, that’s the truth for all the time I’ve known him, and that’s a damn long time.” Russell is talking. Big Russell. He is taking DJ and me to visit my dad in the hospital after his surgery. Dad broke up his ankle pretty comprehensively when the guys were fighting a routine enough fire on the first floor around the back of a triple-decker.

  “You can never, never relax,” Russell is saying, to us, to himself, to my dad even though we’re not there yet. We are in the hospital, walking up the stairs to Dad’s floor. “It was my fault, it was everybody’s fault. We’re thinking it’s a little baby-ass fire and we’re hosing on it like we’re pissin’ in a flower bed, joking about what a shame the fire didn’t successfully gut this crappy house....”

  And the porches fell off. Just like that, like somebody came by with a great invisible cake knife and separated the triple-decker house from its triple-decker porches and down they came collapsing on themselves and then on my dad.

  “And he almost got away, too. Everybody managed to jump straight back in time, and your dad, who was closest to the house to begin with, almost made it but the damn thing caught his leg like an alligator snatching a dog off a canal bank.”

  We are on his floor now, but we are off visiting hours. Way off. I visited this afternoon with my mother, during normal hours, but Dad was quite groggy. And anyway, Russell said we needed a man trip, a proper guys-only visit.

  “He screamed and cried like a baby, I’ll tell ya,” Russell says as we near the nurses’ station. “It was very embarrassing for the rest of the guys.”

  “He did?” Both DJ and I gasp.

  Russell keeps walking down the corridor, but walks backward as he grins at us. “Dave? Your dad? Your goddad? My David? Not in this lifetime, children. You could pull that man’s damn head off, and if you listened real close you just might get a teeny small ouch. More likely he’d just say, Hey, pop my damn head back on.”

  It is with great relief we receive that clarification.

  It’s what I already knew anyway, but it’s good not to have it blown apart.

  “How are ya, love?” Russell says to the nurse on duty.

  “You know the rules,” she says. It is eleven forty-five p.m.

  “I do indeed,” he says sweetly. “Is our hero awake?”

  “All of our heroes are going to be awake if you do not lower your voice.”

  “Sorry,” he says, and points silently in the direction of Dad’s room, shuffling little baby steps in that direction. It’s like he’s playing a game of charades, and he’s been assigned the word impish.

  “Check that, boys,” Russell says quietly as we approach Dad’s door. “You see the way it is? Keys to the city, our own whole set of alternative rules, that’s what the likes of me and this guy in here have. People appreciate us. People love us. ’Cause we earn it. Remember that. Proud?”

  “Proud,” I say, quick and snappy like a little kid.

  “Embarrassed,” DJ says, but he says it with a slanty grin. Looks just like his dad.

  “Hey,” Dad says when he sees us slip in. He gives us a big wave and a groggy beaming smile. He is in a double room, but the other bed is empty.

  “Do it hurt?” Russell asks, leaning in to hug Dad.

  “Well,” Dad says, “the ankle hurts like hell, down there. But by the time it travels up here”—he taps the side of his head—“the pain seems to have lost its way.”

  “I see,” Russell says, pinging a finger against Dad’s intravenous drip. “Here, let’s confuse it a little more for good measure.”

  He pulls a square flat bottle of spiced rum out of his back pocket.

  “Should those things be mixed, actually?” DJ asks.

  His father turns a look on him, eyebrows to the ceiling. “Perhaps there is a party elsewhere you need to be pooping?”

  DJ shrugs.

  “Ah,” Dad says happily, but wearily. He takes the bottle and unscrews the cap. “It’s only a pint. Not sure how long I can last though, to be honest.” He takes a sip.

  He makes another big sizzly ahhh sound. Russell reaches for the bottle, but Dad yanks it away.

  “Wrong Russ,” he says, waving me over.

  I feel like I have been knighted or something. My face goes blush-hot. I go up to him, and he hugs me, grabs the back of my head hard, and pulls my cheek to his bristly cheek.

  Then I take my sip.

  If I lit ten stick matches and then swallowed them all together while they were still lit, that would be approximately this feeling.

  I make a face, a failed smile with a grimace that must make me look like a doctor’s office skull. But the men don’t laugh at me. I pass the bottle to DJ, who raises it like a salute to my dad, then takes his sip.

  He makes the doctor’s office skull face.

  The room is very warm all over. The men drink, then drink again, their faces speaking of butterscotch and warm hot chocolate and there does not appear to be pain in the mix anywhere.

  We pass the bottle around evenly. Dad seems to waft in and out of sleep, but even when his eyes are closed he is smiling a smile of understanding, and every time his eyes pop open again they pop right on me.

  “This is kind of fun,” DJ says after his third touch of the bottle.

  “Yeah,
Dad,” I say, “you should get hurt more often.”

  “I am planning to,” he says as he drifts off for the last time tonight, still grinning contentment.

  Dad got hurt more often over time, so I got to know the hospital fairly well. County is not renowned for heart surgery or plastic surgery or solving anything previously unsolvable, so we don’t attract a lot of big-name patients. Big-name around here almost exclusively refers to the reason that got you admitted, rather than anything that happens to you once you check in.

  There is one big name in our hospital now. Helen Kotsopolis.

  And I have to see her. I have to tell her I am sorry, because I am, and apologize for my family. And beyond that, I have to tell her how sorry my dad is. Because I know he is. I know how sorry he is, and I know he needs me to do this as much as she needs to be told. Mrs. Kotsopolis can forgive him or not, she can slap my face red raw and I will stand there and take it for as long as necessary, but I have to go in.

  Finding somebody in County is not the hardest thing in the world, so I expect to locate Mrs. Kotsopolis’s room quickly. I stop first in the gift shop, across from the dining room on the first floor. It’s only about eight by twelve feet and has the same collection of spirit boosters they probably carry in every hospital—candy, teddy bears, paperbacks. But I am surprised to find that they carry one of the biggest selections of watches I have seen outside of a jewelry store. They are all propped up nice, too, in this elevated, lighted case that serves as a partial wall between the gift shop and the main corridor. Men’s watches, ladies’ watches, pocket watches, tiny tabletop clocks with exposed works that twist this way and that and catch even more of that strong, too-strong hospital light.

  “Why so many watches?” I ask the older lady who has come from behind the counter to dust right in front of me. There’s not even any dust here. She thought I was going to steal something, more like.

  “Those are our big fund-raiser,” she says. “County Volunteers Organization takes donations of old timepieces. They refurbish them, polish them up, change batteries and springs and whatnot, then we sell them. We even have one gentleman who’ll put an inscription on one for you—if there’s room.”

  “Wow,” I say, looking back over the varied but uniformly shiny collection.

  “You want to see one? You want me to open up the case?”

  “I’d love one,” I say. “But I don’t think it’ll be quite right. Maybe next time.”

  “Maybe,” she says, and goes back to dusting. I think she really is dusting.

  I find a blue stuffed cat. It is a lot bluer than Mrs. Kotsopolis’s cat was, bluer than anybody’s cat ever was. And I get a very small box of Belgian chocolates shaped like seashells.

  I take the stairs up the three flights to where my mother said she is. I don’t dare ask downstairs because if they didn’t let my mom in to see her, I won’t stand much of a chance. I will need to find her myself.

  She’ll have to see me. She will have to see my face, and then she cannot mistake what is inside me, who is inside me, and what I bring with me. She will see, and then she will let me sit with her, and then I will have the chance to tell her what kind of a man my father was and then we will see. That’s all. Then we will see.

  And we will live with what we see.

  I pass a setup on the last landing before the top floor. It’s a wall telling all about the hospital’s radio station, which I have been hearing since I got here without even hearing it. I look up at the speaker above me, listen to some guy speak gently yet enthusiastically about Judy Garland, and then play “Over the Rainbow.” The postings on the wall tell me that I, too could provide this service if I had some free time, a generous spirit, and an interest in music, conversation, and/or humanity. There is a request box which I look into and find a couple of gold Rolo wrappers and nothing else. Above the box, a stack of request forms is tacked firmly to the board.

  I push my way through the doors on the top floor, and already I don’t like what I smell. The whole building smells like a hospital, of course, but the farther you walk in from the street, and then the farther you walk up, from the street, the farther you get from the scent of air, and health, and happiness. This thing that lives up here on the top floor, far away from the entrance and the free world, is a thick and sad and chemical-covered blend of rot and poison no matter how wonderful the work of all the people trying their best here.

  I chew gum. I chew half a pack of gum as I walk quietly along the walls like a rodent, trying not to be caught, trying to get where I need to get. There is a lot of busy here, and I try to just be one more part of the effort. I peek my head in the first door, and find one old guy, staring high up at a TV that isn’t on. There is a curtain separating him and the next person, who barks for a nurse with enough bellow to convince me that this is not Helen Kotsopolis’s room and I should get out of the way. Next room’s empty. Next room is a guy sitting upright with his arm out sideways at a ninety-degree angle and a series of long naillike things sticking out of it. His hand doesn’t look life color.

  He reminds me of a story my dad brought home, of a motorcycle guy who took his bike out for an early spring slick-road test and by the time the Hothouse team scrambled, the bike was mangled and this guy and his shoulder were connected in just the tenuous way two sneakers are connected when they are thrown over a telephone wire. My dad and his pals got this guy and his arm saved.

  I’m thinking this is that very guy. It doesn’t have to make literal sense because it makes bigger sense than that. And the old guy staring up at the TV is the guy my dad pulled from under his car when the jack kicked over. And the kid right now, right this minute shouting for his morphine is the same kid who my dad pulled out of the river on Labor Day when he should have been fishing with me. Saved the kid so he could go on and do whatever other stupid thing he’s done now to get himself hospitalized. I always hated that kid.

  This place is full of people owing their lives to my dad, is what I’m thinking. Including Mrs. Kotsopolis.

  He was a great man. He was an extraordinary guy.

  My time is running out and I start just looking for names on doors, and I am three doors from the nurses’ station when I think I do read it, Mrs. Hel—

  “Excuse me? Can I help you, sir?” a tall red-haired woman in a crisp uniform and a small smile wants to know.

  “I was just looking for someone,” I say.

  “I figured as much, since most of our doctors don’t go skulking up and down with a blue stuffed kitty under their arms. Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for and I can help you.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Ok, well, I’m looking for Mrs. Kotsopolis, Helen, Kotsopolis?”

  “Right, and who are you?”

  “I’m … a friend.”

  “Are you now? Well, sir, I’m sorry, but you are in fact here outside of regular visiting hours, in addition to the fact that Mrs. Kotsopolis is only a few days out of intensive care, so it’s a very delicate time for her....”

  “I won’t stay long,” I say, “I swear. I just … want to have a few words, see that she’s all right....”

  “Are you family?”

  You would think that would be a simple question. You would think, if I were planning to be honest there would be one obvious answer and if I were planning to lie there would be another, equally obvious one.

  I would say I am, yes, is the answer that feels honest right now, so I say it.

  “I would say I am, yes.”

  “More importantly though, would I say you are?” the nurse asks. “Because, no offense, but you are not exactly conducting yourself in the manner of someone who is supposed to be here. Again, I mean no offense, but we are trained to take note of this kind of thing.”

  Trained pretty well, it occurs to me. I feel weirdly, distantly reassured by this, by the nurse’s protecting the patient from the likes of me.

  I don’t feel like jousting with her, don’t feel capable of it, anyway.

 
“Can’t I go in? For even just a minute?”

  She turns her head, craning toward Mrs. Kotsopolis’s door, steps back, looks in the small dark window. I inch up and peek over her shoulder.

  I see her. That is her, I recognize. I see her eyes, and I swear she is looking right at me.

  “What are you doing?” the nurse says when she swings back around to catch me.

  “Just … having a look in, like you were.”

  “Well, I’m supposed to have a look in. I work here. You don’t work here, and you are not, I believe, a family member, so I think I’ll have to ask you to leave and let Mrs. Kotsopolis get her rest.”

  “She’s not all burnt up,” I say, maybe too brightly.

  “No,” the nurse says, “it was more about the smoke than the fire … and who are you?”

  “Does that mean you are thinking of letting me in?” I ask.

  “That means I’m thinking of calling security,” she answers.

  Reflexively, I stick out both hands, offering the stuffed blue cat and the swirly shells of Belgian chocolate.

  “I don’t often get bribes,” she says with a skeptical grin.

  “Can you see she gets these?” I ask.

  She takes them, holds them like you would if you were going to keep them. I know she isn’t.

  “Who’re they from?”

  “Russell,” I say. “A friend of a friend.”

  A friend. Of a friend.

  I was afraid to tell somebody I was my father’s son.

  I back away, and the nurse eyes me suspiciously. Suspicious, but not mean.

  I head back down, down the corridor the way I came, and down the stairs. I stop when I hit the landing, the one with the setup for County Hospital Radio.

  Requests, right. They take requests. They welcome requests.

  I’m feeling pretty much like an insider at this point as I navigate the corridors of the place, my request form in my hand and my head down so as not to attract attention. Most people around here seem to have badges.

  I knock gently at the door that says it’s the radio station. There is a pause long enough to cause me to knock again, and a bit louder.