by Adam Rapp
I was totally desperate for a cigarette.
After weighing myself, I started wandering. Following the nurse’s orders I did use the wall for balance, and it was a pretty good idea, as my legs were weak and my skull felt too heavy for my neck. I got a head rush and sort of stumbled into this little kid’s room. He was lying on his back, on top of the covers, wearing Chicago Cubs pajamas and hugging this big black first baseman’s mitt. I stood in the doorway and watched him for a minute. There was a bandage around his head, so much gauze you couldn’t even see his hair. His skin looked all weird and bluish. For a moment I thought he was dead.
“Are you the guy who’s s’posed to read to me?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly strong and clear.
I said, “I was just sort of walking around.”
“You’re a patient?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m a patient.”
“Which room?”
“I don’t know the number,” I said. “The one with the weird plant.”
“Oh, that’s Grover,” he said.
I went, “Grover?”
“I had that room a few times last month. The nurse asked me to name the plant.”
I was like, “Cool name,” and continued hovering in the doorway.
There was a pretty intense sadness in this room, a feeling that no one ever visited, like it had been lost through a black hole in the hospital and the only way to be admitted back into the ranks of the afflicted was by solving some sort of impossible medical riddle.
His chart hung off the end of his bed all sad and metallic, like a thing placed there not to mark his progress but rather to record his slow, deliberate inching toward death.
He said, “If you’re looking for a cigarette, you should ask the lady at the front desk.”
His insight hit me in the knees like an aluminum baseball bat. I felt myself teeter a bit.
I was like, “How did you know I was looking for a cigarette?”
“I’ve already had three smokers in here today.”
The kid yawned and adjusted the mitt on his chest.
“So you’re not the reader?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“The last guy smelled like onions. He kept trying to read that stupid book about the elephant.”
“Babar?”
“Yeah, Babar,” he said. “So boring.”
The kid moved the mitt over his face and in this totally sophisticated FM radio voice said, “Some experts from Yellowstone National Park believe that if a man sits still enough in the presence of a bear, the bear will speak great unknown truths to him.”
I said, “Whoa.”
He put the mitt back on his chest and went, “That was on the Discovery Channel earlier. I can’t watch it but I can listen. Wanna watch Discovery Channel with me? They’re s’posed to be doing this thing on the great hermit penguins of the Arctic.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I should get back to my room. I’m not used to being on my feet.”
And this was true. I could feel my weakness spreading.
“Sit down,” the kid said. “I don’t bite.”
I sat on a chair.
We were quiet for a moment.
“So what are you in here for?” I asked.
“A vessel broke in my brain.”
I went, “Like a blood vessel?”
“Yeah, a blood vessel. A few months ago, I started knocking my head against the wall. They made me wear a football helmet. Since the medication, I haven’t been hitting things with my head, but I can’t see sometimes and I have to come in every few weeks. Sometimes they do stuff to my brain.”
“Like what?”
“They go in my head and look around. They shaved all my hair off last time.”
“So you’re like bald?”
“Uh-huh. Wanna feel it?”
I went, “No thanks,” and felt my own head instead. It was cold and stubbly.
I asked, “Can you see now?”
“Not too good. Mostly shadows. I saw one of the orderlies earlier. He had big ears. The nurse said I’ll prolly be able to see more stuff tomorrow. What about you? What are you in here for?”
“Um, I sort of punctured my eye.”
“Ow.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re just walking the halls?” he asked.
I was like, “Yeah. They haven’t let me move for like a week. I’ve been totally cooped up.”
“The venous pressure thing, huh?”
“Yeah. You too?”
“I’m not supposed to be moving now, but I move, see?” he said, suddenly standing in the middle of his bed. He was so small he looked ceramic, like one of those Nativity statues they set in front of churches. He turned a full circle and sat back down.
“Sometimes I even get out of bed,” he added.
“You’re beating the system,” I offered. “How old are you?”
“Seven and a half. I’ll be eight on St. Patrick’s Day. What about you?”
“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in November.”
He said, “You’re tall, aren’t you?”
“How can you tell?”
“Your voice.”
I said, “My voice isn’t deep.”
“It’s not deep but it’s tall. Are you a seven-footer?”
“I’m a little over six three.”
“Oh,” he said. “My dad died last week.”
It came out just like that. He could have said his dad weighed seventy-seven pounds or he liked blue cheese salad dressing. It was a harmless biographical fact.
I was like, “How’d he die?”
“He had lowkemia. He was bald, too, but he wore this wig that made him look like Grover Cleveland. At least that’s what my mom said.”
I swallowed.
I breathed.
I said, “Sorry. Are you like sad?”
“No,” he said. “But my sister is. And so is my cat.”
“What’s your cat’s name?”
“Leroy.”
“Cool name. What kind of cat is he?”
“Black. He gets in trouble ’cause he jumps on the curtains. My mom took his claws off.”
“Does your mom visit you here?”
“She’s down in the cafeteria.”
I pictured his mom down in the cafeteria, eating macaroni and cheese out of those weird Styrofoam containers.
“My sister’s comin’ by later, too,” he said. “She promised me Chicken McNuggets. They’re good with peanut butter.”
“They are?”
“Yeah. Stick around. You can try it.”
I said, “I should get going. They’ll probably freak out if they don’t see me back in my room.”
Then the kid raised the baseball mitt to his face and did it again.
This time he said, “The Alaskan polar bear is one of the great Arctic nomads. She dines on fish and the occasional sea lion. Those who cross her path better have a dogsled nearby or they might wind up as the evening’s main course. Just ask this pesky otter.”
I said, “That’s pretty impressive.”
“I can do this thing on the caribou, too,” he said, lowering the baseball mitt. “But I’ll save that for next time.”
Then we were quiet. I could hear things moving down the corridor. Gurneys and wheelchairs and monitors.
“So when are you getting out of here?” I asked.
“As soon as my sight comes back. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Sometimes it takes a few days. The lady from Children’s Services wants to teach me Braille. Just in case I don’t get it back this time.”
For some reason, thinking of him blind made me want to sit on the floor, so that’s what I did.
But after a second my head started feeling really heavy. So I pushed myself off the floor and sat back in the chair.
“So you play baseball?” I asked.
“I used to,” he replied.
“What position?”
“Center field.”
>
“Good arm?”
“It’s okay. I can make it back to the infield.”
“Pretty impressive. Can you hit?”
“I was starting to figure it out. The bat’s pretty heavy, though. You don’t play, do you?”
“No.”
“You don’t like sports,” he said with a slight smile.
“How do you know I don’t like sports?”
“I can just tell.”
I said, “You’re pretty smart, huh?”
“Your voice gives it away. Why don’t you like sports?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your voice says you don’t like much of anything.”
I said, “That’s so not true. I like stuff.”
“What do you like?”
“Um, I like girls. And cigarettes. And I totally worship greyhounds.”
I wanted to say morphine, too, but that would have made me more of a criminal than I already was.
“Dogs are better than people,” he said.
“I’ll agree with that.”
“When I come back, I want to be a schnauzer.”
I said, “Come back from where?”
“The dead. We all get reincarnated. My aunt Francine has a schnauzer. His name is Mister Big Stuff and he eats spaghetti.”
I laughed and it made my lungs ache. I tried not to cough in fear of that whole venous pressure business.
The kid sort of turned to me. The flesh over his eyes looked gray and thin.
“So what are you good at?” he asked.
I said, “I don’t know. Nothing really.”
“You gotta be good at somethin’.”
“I’m okay at math, I guess.”
“You are?”
“Sort of. I’m actually the number two Mathlete at my school.”
“What’s twelve times twelve?”
“A hundred and forty-four.”
“Six times six.”
“Thirty-six.”
“One-third of sixty-six.”
“Twenty-two.”
He said, “You are good at math.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Wanna sign my glove?”
“Um. Sure.”
“There’s a marker in the thumb slot.”
I walked over to him and took the glove. There were signatures all over it. Little pictures of things, too, like smiley faces and flowers and a baseball with bumblebee wings.
I signed my name and handed it back.
He pulled the mitt close to his face and tried to read it and then he touched the area I signed and went, “What’s your name?”
“Steve,” I said.
“Steve what?”
“Steve Nugent. They call me White Steve.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m really white.”
“I found a white corn snake once. They said it was an alpine.”
“Do you mean albino?” I said.
“I mean albino,” he echoed, correcting himself and laughing a little. “My mom made me give it away ’cause I kept puttin’ it in the bathtub.”
I laughed again and so did he.
I said, “What’s your name?”
“Steve.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Steven with a v or a ph?”
“A v.”
I was like, “We’re both Steves!”
“Yep.”
“That’s pretty cool, right?!”
Then he went, “Steve squared,” and that’s when I started crying. I have no idea why but I couldn’t stop. The kid just sat there and listened.
“Sorry,” I said, wiping my unshielded eye. My tears were hot and they stank like medicine.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Crying’s like rain. It makes the grass grow in your soul. That’s what my mom says.” Then he very classily changed the subject and went, “Even in the horizontal mountains of Ojai, the shifty mountain lion is a force to be reckoned with. If you cross its path, don’t turn around or you may find one clinging to your back.”
For that one he didn’t use the glove. But he still assumed the sophisticated FM radio voice.
“I made that one up,” he said.
“You’re pretty good.”
“Penguins in twenty minutes.”
“I better get back to my room.”
“Okay.”
“Take it easy.”
“You too.”
I hovered at the door for a second. We didn’t say anything. He hardly moved in the bed. He was above things somehow. He was somewhere else, flying with butterflies and other weightless, pollen-dusted creatures. When I think about it now, part of me believes that I could have stayed in that doorway forever. It may have been the closest thing to a good feeling I’d had since I kicked in all those TVs, not counting the morphine, of course.
For some reason I felt sentimental and went, “Sorry about your dad.” My voice bounced around the silent room for a moment and then I left.
In the hallway, my hospital pants made little whispery noises. Other half-blind patients were searching for the wall like me: old men, children, middle-aged women with heads covered with gauze.
When I finally got back to my room, I was exhausted and happy to return to bed. There was no more morphine, but that was probably good; otherwise I’d probably be a full-fledged Red Grouper by now.
I woke up in the middle of the night and walked into the bathroom. I removed my diaper and urinated in the toilet for the first time. To urinate standing up somehow made me feel like a regular person again.
In the mirror, my reflection was almost yellow. Man, those fluorescent hospital lights can make you pretty ugly. My lips were thin and blue. My ears looked somehow manually attached, like they were bought at some weird anatomical hardware store and screw-gunned to the sides of my head.
The medical tape holding my eye shield was loose, and I couldn’t help taking a look.
Dr. Black had warned me the last time he had taken a pressure reading. “You might not like what you see,” he said, packing up his slit lamp. “I wouldn’t be tempted to peek just yet.”
He said that the damage had caused some atrophy in the muscles around my eye and it might be pretty scary. He said it was “looking small” but assured me that in time it would return to its original shape.
When I removed the metal shield, my left eye told me that its partner had been replaced by a small, puckering anus, a thing plucked from the ass of a flying rodent or some totally emaciated bullfrog.
My knees started to go, but I leaned against the sink. I eventually reaffixed the shield and tried to erase the image from my mind.
I couldn’t go back to bed so I walked out into the hall, where a few orderlies were mopping the floor.
My legs felt pretty wobbly.
“Can I help you, Steve?” the nurse on duty asked.
“I just wanted to walk around a little,” I said.
“Be sure to use the wall,” she replied, and returned to her computer.
I found myself back in front of that little kid Steve’s room. He was still lying there, his baseball mitt resting on his chest. The light was off, and someone had brought him a poster of Sammy Sosa and taped it to the wall opposite his bed. Sammy was wearing a Cubs away jersey and smiling like his life depended on it.
I took a step into the room. Steve was sleeping pretty hard.
“My mom died,” I said. I had no idea that was going to come out of my mouth, but it did. I sort of waited for him to respond, but he didn’t. “She was a pediatric nurse,” I continued. “She helped little kids. She used to do this thing,” I remember hearing myself saying. “She’d try to look Chinese. She’d like squint her eyes and make her teeth look all bucked out or whatever and then she’d say, ‘Pass the chop suey, Louie.’ It was totally racist but she didn’t mean it to be.” Then I said it to him, I said, “Pass the chop suey, Louie. Pass the chop suey . . .”
But that little kid Steve would
n’t budge. Perhaps he had left his body and was roaming some unknown corridor where other kids were hiding from diseases or tumors or the ICU boogeyman.
“She had breast cancer,” I added. “And she died.”
Then the on-duty nurse was suddenly behind me. She said something but it didn’t register. All I remember is that her voice was kind and gentle and sort of tired.
She moved me away and closed the door to Steve’s room. Was this supposed to mean that he had died, too?
I sat on the floor.
It was hard and cold.
I could feel this totally thick sort of anguishy feeling taking over my body that has never quite left.
28.
When Shannon Lynch left this afternoon, he gave me all the coins he used to stick up his nose. He also gave me that Sam Shepard play, Buried Child.
“Here,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said back.
Then he sort of pinched my cheek, which I thought was pretty weird, but I have to say that I’m glad he didn’t try to kiss me again. He gave me his phone number at that place in Lake Geneva.
“Call me,” he said.
“I will,” I said, and I honestly plan on doing that.
“You should talk to your dad,” he said when we were in front of the main building.
I sort of half nodded and told him to take care of himself.
It’s sort of odd that he said that thing about talking to my dad, because we really never talked about that situation, but Shannon Lynch is obviously pretty perceptive about things.
Then he got into this white Burnstone Grove van and they pulled away through the front gate.
I felt sad when he left and I hope we stay in touch.
So back to the story part. . . .
The story part the story part the story part the story . . .
At some point my aunt Ricky moved in with us. I have this theory that certain members of your extended family are up above the clouds hovering in a radio-controlled fleet of hot-air balloons, and when a parent dies, some official representing the Office of the Great Family Tree or whatever steers them down from the sky so they can descend on your life and be totally annoying.
