But my hand
Was made steady
By the hand of the Almighty
We forward
In this generation —
Triumphantly… .
The eleventh floor of St. Osyth’s Hospital reeked of Lysol and Pine Wax and nuns, like a soul scrubbed clean of its malodorous body, like the timeshare temple of a fussy Holy Ghost. On the cold parquetry outside the elevator a guy about my age lay snoring on his stomach, a purple velvet sofa cushion covering his head. I expected to come across his loved ones in the lobby occupying davenports like storm evacuees.
I passed a sister holding an I.V. in one hand and perusing in the other the number one best-seller, Whoever Dies with the Most Toys Wins. It was the autobiography of a retired CEO who began his career shining bootleggers’ shoes. The nun had an irresponsible, daffy look about her, and when I asked her what she thought of the CEO’s book, she yawned and called it caca: “But it’s fun between colostomies.” And she didn’t try to stop me when I hurried down the hallway—which was curious, I thought. But I just kept walking.
Room 1111 was at the end of the corridor, hidden in a luscious recession of shadow. The oaken door open-sesamed at my touch, revealing a room with a four-way partition. Behind the first partition stood a Plexiglas shelter housing an infant who looked pink and premature. Its brittle little arms were crucified with tubes and needles, but its mouth was gulping air, as if it wanted just to breathe. A sign on the Plexiglas cage said Temporary, and a Temporary sign announced the neighboring partition. Behind the second curtain lay a black kid on his belly, arms and legs spraddled in that absolute abandon only tiny children know when they give themselves to sleep. The child’s body twitched beneath a skimpy yellow blanket, his legs kicking out in a learners’-pool paddle. The third partition opened on a Cuban in her twenties, body gaunt and sucked in like a wasted paper straw; her eyes, bulbed and heavy, protruded from their sockets and strained at the jaundiced lids that covered them like tape. I was terrified, suddenly. Why was I here? Something swept upward from my chest to my throat and moistened all my mouth with a taste of copper pennies. I felt as if I were being forced to witness something, as if I alo ne could prevent a tragedy if I could simply keep my hand from drawing back the curtain. Pain is only there if we see it, after all. I could still turn around. I could turn and walk away. But I didn’t. I stood and I spoke the name, “Ian.” And as my fingers palsied out to draw back the last partition, a hand like a claw landed firmly on my shoulder and I turned to face the sister I’d eluded in the hall.
“Young man,” she demanded, “what’s your name?”
“Toby Sligh.”
“And I’m Cynthia Rose. But you can call me Sr. Cindy. We’re so crowded we’ve had to put some of them together. Even the baby’s got the virus, you know. Now, you don’t want to be bothering poor Fr. Scarcross. He just got to sleep after such a long night. And Night Owls, you know, they should keep to the lobby. Though, really, I think you’d be more helpful in the day. Why, Toby, you’re crying! You’re as bad as that other! It’s only sick people! … And your boy is here for you!”
Sr. Cynthia Rose—with that casual brutality nuns alone occasion, assured of their impunity—steered me past two hostile nurses back toward the elevator, removed the purple cushion from the sleeping boy’s head, and with three quick kicks, booted Ian awake.
“Christ!” Ian cried. “Fucking hell, Sr. Cindy!”
“I kicked you ’cause I knew that when you woke up, you would say that,” Sr. Cindy declared, and glared at Ian, and left. “Toby!” Ian sang, sitting up. “Hey! You made it!”
“Yeah.” I nodded. I wanted to hold him; I wanted to hit him. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Siddown,” Ian whispered. I sat. The floor was freezing. “You met Cindy Rose. She’s a regular cunt.”
Somewhere down the hall a nun cleared her throat.
Ian laughed and shivered: “Be careful … voices carry.”
For a while we sat there staring at each other, our legs crossed like Indians, Ian half asleep.
“Are you going to tell me what this shit is all about?”
“I will. In a minute. Be patient with me, Toby.”
Outside, in the street, another siren was singing. I remembered my vision of Ian before, in the back of the ambulance, face pressed and screaming. I thought about Juice, and the pink rose I’d stolen, and my mother, and my father, and the priest at convocation. I thought about Det. Thomas and the lady cabbie. I looked at Ian’s arms. They were creased and cold and blue.
“Why in the hell are we sitting on the floor?”
“Those sofas in the lounge—I kept rolling off ’em. I had this falling dream, and I fell, and hit the floor. I mean, I really hit it! I dreamed it, then it happened! When you’re a kid,” Ian said, and yawned big, and mopped his eyeball, “you’re told, if that happens, you die in your sleep. But I didn’t die, did I? I’m right here, Toby! But it shook me up, ya know? S’from now on, I’ll take the floor.”
Ian looked me over with his good eye, searching: “You’ve been crying, Toby Sligh.”
“You know that I have.”
“So you do love me, then! That’s great … no more lies.”
I was disappointed in him.
“That’s right … no more lies.”
One day after Christmas in Chemistry class a new guy arrived with a patch across his eye. Without introduction he sat next to me, opened up his spiral notebook, and began to scribble notes. He had the finest handwriting I had ever seen; I got a little dizzy just following his pen. Halfway through the lecture Brother Loyal, our teacher, introduced Ian, and Ian said hello. He learned all our names and sat back in his seat and looked at me and smiled, and leaned his knee against mine. We sat there for half an hour, our quiet knees touching, Ian’s pen decorating his paper with ink. I was already, then, a little bit in love with him. His hair smelled of chlorine. His skin was bleached and clean. And his knee leaned against mine with a soft, milky pressure; I felt drunk and stupid, and when the bell rang, I jumped. After class we ate lunch in the shadow of the chapel, me and Ian and Bubba and several other idiots. But I didn’t say a word. I just sat and watched and listened. Ian told stories, and Ian told jokes, and he bragged about the girls he had screwed back in New Orleans. Ian lied to everyone, and everyone believed him, and when we asked him what had happened to his eye, he wouldn’t say.
By the end of lunch he had already become the most interesting and popular boy in our class; and by the end of the day, when I asked him for a lift, and I told Juice not to worry, I had found a ride home, Ian took his patch off and showed me his stitches and the blue mucky bulb that looked like a dirty marble. “Can I touch it?” I asked. He pressed my hand against his wound. “What’s it like?” I whispered. “I only see half the world. And I lied,” Ian sighed. “I didn’t screw all those girls. I’m a virgin , Toby Sligh. Are you?” I said I was. We played Ping-Pong that day at his parents’ country club and went swimming in the pool, and I touched him underwater. “You don’t mind my eye?” Ian asked later on, when we were in the shower at the country club, together. “No, I don’t mind. What really happened to it?” “Just an accident, Tobias,” Ian Lamb confessed to me.
Ian stood and stretched and shook the sleep off of his body. He offered me his hand; I looked, but wouldn’t take it. “I’m glad you came, Toby. I need you tonight. I need you more than ever… . Get off of that floor.”
“I’m not budging, Ian, till you tell me what’s up.”
“I’ll show you what’s up. Ever worked in a clinic?”
“A what?”
“We’re on duty. Community service. Kickliter okayed it. Me and you, kid. You’ll have to get permission from your mom and dad, Toby.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause my mother moved out.”
I was crying then, again. Ian Lamb looked embarrassed. He might have touched my shoulder. If he did, I didn’t feel i
t.
“When was that?”
“Yesterday.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“How could I tell you?” I erupted; I was pissed. “You’ve been acting so strange! How the hell could I tell you? I give you a flower, you don’t even thank me! You blow up in the library! You freeze Juice and me! You phone from St. Osyth’s! I thought you were dying! How could I tell you? How the fuck could I tell you?”
“Quiet, now, Toby.” Ian’s arms closed around me. “Let’s go get some coffee.” We kissed cautiously. “It’s all right. Shhh. I’ll get you some coffee. We’re all right, Tobe. It’ll all be all right.”
In the St. Osyth’s snack bar I told Ian everything.
I told him how my mother had yanked me out of school and about how I’d helped her set up her apartment and about how my dad was half crazy with worry and about how, well, I wasn’t all that well myself. Ian asked me what I thought had really happened to my mother and I said I didn’t know, I didn’t have a fucking clue. I described Det. Thomas and his lame interrogation, and I told him how my dad had sworn he hadn’t ever cheated, and how he swore on Mom’s behalf that Mom hadn’t cheated either, and how I believed him, how I had to believe him, how I didn’t have a choice, how the truth is never chosen. And I told him how my mother had had me lie to Dad, and how I felt like shit for playing his trust off of hers. Then Ian swore he’d help me any way that he could figure, and as we sat huddled over a rickety table in the cozy buzzing shadows of the Koffee Mate machines, our fingers almost touching, our eyes in each other’s, we’d never felt closer or deeper in love.
It was an oasis, the St. Osyth’s snack bar, at five in the morning—an oasis of us. The room was packed to insomniac capacity, each sleepless soul in his or her own weary world—worried spouses or lovers who wouldn’t or couldn’t sleep and overworked doctors who couldn’t and shouldn’t sleep and hunchbacked chainsmoking gossiping nurses who rubbed each other’s wrists and wore their nights beneath their eyes. The air was infested with secondhand smoke and everything seemed filtered through carcinogenic dreams as Ian, who’d dismantled his empty coffee cup, blew a flurry of Styrofoam chips in my face.
“I’m blind!” I cried.
He brushed the snowflakes off my lashes.
“Well, open your eyes, because I’ve got a secret, too.”
I’ll always remember the way Ian looked, that dreamy, smoky morning, when he told me what he told me. His face was pinched and flushed and excited, caffeine rushing in percolated surges to his cheeks. But his eye was downcast and water-blue and shattered-looking, like the headlights of Christ’s Chevy in my mother’s backyard. And his voice was filled with something I had never heard before, a language he had shared with no one else until now.
“He’s here.”
“Who is?”
“That man at convocation.”
“What man at convocation?”
“That Jesuit priest… . ‘Fr. Scarecrow,’ Juice called him. He talked about God.”
Ian stood up and dug some quarters from his pockets. He got fresh cups of coffee and handed one to me.
“Drink up,” he told me. I did and scorched my tongue. “I’m gonna tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“He’s got AIDS.”
We were silent for a while; we were looking at each other; we were looking for an exit; we were looking at our hands.
“How do you know?”
“It’s an AIDS ward, Toby. The clinic where we’re working. You saw the patients there.”
I remembered the baby crucified with I.V. needles, the skinny black kid swimming laps in his sleep, the gaunt Cuban woman with the paper straw body, the limp partition separating someone’s pain from mine.
“His name is Fr. Scarcross—Sr. Cindy let it slip—and he used to be principal of Sacred Heart High.”
“So much for patient confidentiality,” I mumbled.
“She’s dumb and indiscreet,” Ian said, and spilled some coffee. “She knows we shouldn’t be here. She’s an idiot, Tobe.”
“She didn’t try to stop you?”
“She did, but I sweet-talked her. Said we were Volunteens for a program called the Night Owls. Nuns can be so trusting.”
“She’ll be sore tomorrow.”
“I’ll just say we thought we had the graveyard shift or something. Don’t worry, Toby. I’ve got it figured out.”
“And McDuffy and Kickliter?”
“They won’t mess with me. I’m valedictorian. I’m going to Yale. I’m the motherfucking Jesuit ideal made flesh. They’ll slap my wrist, kiddo. I’ll play the innocent.”
“Do they know about Scarcross?”
“If they do, it’s hush-hush. A Jesuit with AIDS? That’s lousy PR, Toby. And Sr. Cindy said AIDS wards are so overcrowded Fr. Scarcross is lucky to get a bed at all. But he’s Catholic, you know. This is a Catholic hospital.”
Outside, a paramedic unit splashed our faces pink. Ian stuck his finger in his coffee cup to test it.
“Aren’t McDuffy and Kickliter and the others afraid that if we volunteer here we’ll talk to somebody?”
“To somebody ’bout what?”
“About Scarcross being here.”
“But we won’t talk about it. It’s our secret now, Toby. We’ll have to take a vow of confidentiality.”
“Just like Sr. Cindy.”
“Just like Sr. Cindy.” Ian’s eyes were in mine. “But we’ll keep our vow, now won’t we?”
Outside the windows of the snack bar the night was caving in. It lay like scattered ashes on the quiltwork of the dawn.
“Have you talked to Fr. Scarcross?”
“I haven’t. But I’d like to. That rose that you gave me, I left it for him. What he said about God—ya know, it really moved me. He’s dying, though, Toby. And it kind of frightens me.”
“That rose was for you.”
“I know it. I’m sorry.”
I looked at him and nodded; I wondered if he was.
“Yesterday, Ian, when me and Juice passed you, I saw you with my flower, but you didn’t even see me.”
Ian looked around and let his hand dandle mine. Already there was something unfamiliar in his touch.
“Yesterday, Tobe”—Ian’s tone was low and plaintive; his glass eye jiggled up in jerks and zigzagged down again—“when Scarcross was speaking, when he was speaking to us, I swear to you, Tobe, he was looking right at me, and I wanted to help him, he wanted me to help him, can’t you understand, Toby? I wanted just to —”
“Shhhh!”
An eleventh-floor nurse, harried on her coffee break, hurried over to Ian and plucked at his shirtsleeve.
“Whoever you are … Sr. Cindy wants you now.”
Sr. Cindy was standing by a doctor in a scrubsuit with his village smithy forearms folded fiercely on his chest. The doctor was blushing all the way up to his forehead, and Sr. Cindy wore the chastened aspect of a truant.
“Why are you here at this hour of the morning? Who gave you permission? Answer me! Now!”
The doctor shoved his face in mine as if I were the problem. “I—” I began, and cast a help-me glance at Ian. Ian was admiring the polished parquet floor.
“The other boy, the quiet one,” Sr. Cindy intervened. “He claimed that they were Night Owls. Volunteens from Sacred Heart. This boy, doctor, he only just arrived. I really don’t think he quite knows what’s going on.”
The doctor lunged forward and grappled Ian’s shoulders.
“Who are you?”
“Ian Lamb.”
“Why did you lie?”
“I wanted to see Scarcross.”
“Goddamn it!” roared the doctor. “I’ll call your principal!”
“Toby had nothing to do with this, sir,” Ian said. “I told him to come here.”
“And I let him in,” Sr. Cindy admitted.
“Yes, well, all right,” the frustrated doctor blustered, descending on Ian like a localized squall. “As for you
, Mr. Lamb, you won’t set foot in here again! This is a hospital!”
“Yes, doctor,” Ian said.
“There are sick people here!”
“Yes, doctor,” Ian said.
“You could put them at risk!”
“Yes, doctor,” Ian said.
“I’ll escort you out myself.”
“See you,” Sr. Cindy said.
From the elevator we spied Sr. Cindy at her station leafing through Whoever Dies with the Most Toys Wins. She was humming a tune, a forgotten playground chant, and it spidered like the hand of a child up my spine as I stood behind Ian, who was singing sotto voce:
Liar, liar,
Pants on fire,
Hang your britches
On a telephone wire …
We could also make out, as the elevator closed, the still-open door of room 1111, behind which lay a stranger I would meet the next day, not out of any real curiosity of my own, but out of a curiosity Ian Lamb had thrust upon me.
That dawn we made love in an industrial park, me and Ian, in the dark, behind a wall of damp cement. I remember Ian’s tongue, and the pressure of his body, and the chlorine in his hair, and his cock against mine. I remember the words that we said to each other, and the words we didn’t say, and the ones we didn’t dare. I remember the way we slid apart from each other, after we had both come, and how I wanted just to hold him. As we straightened our clothes, and let our hands lose each other, and walked the crooked quarter mile back to Sacred Heart, I would agree to apologize to St. Osyth’s Hospital and offer my services as a clinic volunteer. Ian, who would receive exactly as predicted a slapped wrist from McDuffy in response to St. Osyth’s call, would be forced to content himself with the Gospel of Scarcross secondhand and second fiddle through his second ear: me. And Ian would select for his new community service project, at my and Kickliter’s enthusiastic behest, outreach interaction with a crosstown shut-in: a shut-in who had no idea, in fact, she was a shut-in; a shut-in who had no idea, indeed, who Ian Lamb was; a woman who, against her better judgment, would snap up Ian’s offer of yard work and home repairs and befriend the secret boy who loved her son in secret; the boy who, in her son’s name, and in the name of Fr. Scarcross, would go about getting at the truth behind the lie that like the dark and lightsome seeds of a common garden weed would scatter upon touching and breed so many others.
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