by Jon Cohen
It would sure be something. Maybe ears. Or eyes. ER always seemed to be having a special: knee night, “sprain two and we’ll wrap the second one for free.” Sometimes, though, the ER was a variety store: In room 1, there’d be an OD; in room 2, an allergic reaction to a bee sting; in 3, pulmonary edema; in 4, a psych case; in 5, a laceration of the chin; and in 6, an MI. Mix and match. Some of this, some of that. It got on Iris’s nerves waiting to see what was going to walk through the ER doors. Or crawl. Or come in on a stretcher. The news was overwhelming and it depressed her: Human beings just did not have the slightest idea how to take care of themselves. The things they do—take the wrong medication, or the right one but too much of it, or too little. Cut off the tip of a finger with a steak knife or a carrot peeler. Break a hand in a baseball game, or by dropping a log on it, or in a fight with a goldfish. Yes, Iris once had a patient who got mad at his pet goldfish and smacked the side of the aquarium hard enough to break his index finger and dislocate his thumb.
Iris had another feeling about ER. The people who came in with all their cuts and dog bites and broken ankles and sudden fevers and unusual discharges were practicing for death. This, of course, didn’t include the people who were delivered to the ER dead, or dying—people who had already passed the final exam. Iris believed that, every so often, a person just had to taste mortality, just a nibble and a lick, succumb to a few stitches, or a strain requiring an Ace bandage and a trip down the hall to X-ray, but not all the way down the hall, not down there to the white door at the end, the unmarked door to the morgue, not yet. Maybe they thought by practicing, by their slow accumulations of little wounds and illnesses, they’d acquire a knowledge and a readiness, so that when the time came, they’d know how to open the door. But Iris was a nurse. She understood about the door, how it was loose on its hinges, liable to swing open at any time, sometimes with a terrible suddenness and force. Or ease open, creaking, which was just as terrible, like with the Tube Man, for whom the door remained ajar for months before it finally closed behind him.
Oh great, Iris said to herself, rounding the corner to ER, Inez and Winnie. Looks like I’ll be working my ass off tonight. Inez and Winnie, two of the regular ER staff nurses, stood over by the narcotics box giggling and talking in low whispers. When crunch time came, usually from 5 to 8 P.M., they’d still be standing there, giggling and gossiping. Then Dr. Gunther walked out of room 3, and Iris’s night, which hadn’t even started yet, went from bad to worse. Dr. Gunther admitted practically every patient who came into the ER. Admissions, with all the paperwork and tests, tripled the work of a nurse. Iris had been hoping Dr. Lords would be on. Dr. Lords’s motto was “Patch ’em and pitch ’em.” He knew how to clear out an ER, how to keep the traffic flowing. With Dr. Gunther, the traffic backed up for hours.
Iris walked over to Inez and Winnie. Inez looked up and snapped her bubble gum by way of greeting. Iris had once seen Inez blow a large pink bubble during a code, a telling example of Inez’s reverence for human life. Winnie was even worse. During a code, at least Inez and her bubble gum would show up, while Winnie would simply disappear to that mysterious place where coworkers always seem to hide when you need them. Home in bed? Iris wondered. Shopping at the mall?
“So they pulled you here,” said Winnie.
“Looks like it,” said Iris.
“You pissed?”
“No more than you’d be if you got pulled to Intensive Care.”
“Then you must be really pissed,” said Winnie with a pleased smile.
“Work is work,” said Iris.
“Yeah,” said Winnie, as if she had any idea in hell what Iris was talking about.
Iris checked out the patient information clipboards, numbered one through six, to correspond to each of the ER examination rooms. All the clipboards were in use, so all the rooms were full. Three rooms had lacerations in them: Two fingers and a nose. A nose? Iris read the clipboard. The Accident/Illness Description box read, “Patient states was feeding pet cockatoo, ran out of peanuts, cockatoo bit nose. Laceration two cm’s, on right nostril. No active bleeding at present.” So, Iris thought, looks like the ER will be having a special on lacerations tonight. Oh well, at least Gunther couldn’t admit those.
Inez said, “Yeah, ain’t that a bitch. We’re full already. You want to take whatever’s in rooms 1 and 2, I’ll take 3 and 4, and Winnie’ll take 5 and 6.”
Iris gave her a look and picked up her clipboards without a word. “Whatever’s in 1 and 2,” as if Inez didn’t damn well know. The patients were either going to be real sick, so Gunther would admit them, or so repugnant, like an alcoholic in DTs or a GI bleed, that nobody would want to take care of them. Sure enough, Iris read her clipboards, a patient from a nursing home in room 1. That almost definitely meant a Code Brown, nursing lingo for a patient covered in shit, which nursing home patients usually were. This one suffered from dehydration and syncope, fainting spells. In room 2 there was an asthmatic, a Pink Puffer. Another admission, but no big deal. Give her some IV aminophylline and clear her right up. Iris eyed the waiting room as she went into room 1. Half-full, with the usual mothers yelling at kids, people holding homemade bandages to their small injuries, some lady in the corner mumbling earnestly to herself—people practicing for death. Iris sighed and went in to check her first patient.
“Hello, Mr. Toofer,” said Iris to a long wad of sheets and blankets that covered a stretcher that was pushed against the wall. Presumably, somewhere underneath those sheets and blankets, there was a Mr. Toofer. Nursing home patients often completely hid themselves deep within their bed linens, for reasons Iris did not wish to contemplate.
“Mr. Toofer, you in there, sir?” said Iris again, lightly touching the sheets. She also sniffed the air around the stretcher, a reflex of nurses with potentially incontinent patients. Hmm, maybe no Code Brown after all. Things were looking up. Now if she could just find Mr. Toofer.
A slight rustling sound from the stretcher. Iris realized the sound was Mr. Toofer speaking.
“What’s that, sir?” Iris said, going up on her toes and leaning close.
“You’re mighty tiny,” came the voice of Mr. Toofer from beneath the sheets.
“How do you know that? You can’t even see me from under there.”
Mr. Toofer’s head popped up from the other end of the stretcher. Iris had been conversing with his feet. Mr. Toofer, for all his dehydration and syncope, had managed to turn himself around on the stretcher when no one was in the room.
“What are you, a foot doctor?” Mr. Toofer let out a few raspy heh-heh-hehs. Then his head dropped back down on the stretcher. Iris moved down to address the head, which he hid again beneath the sheets.
“Mr. Toofer, why’d you turn around on the stretcher?” said Iris, who, in spite of her negative feelings about ER, felt a growing fondness for this particular patient.
“To face the door, young lady. Why else?”
“Why do you have to face the door?”
“Them what don’t face the door get shot in the back. Don’t you know nothing about the Wild West? I just told you rule one. Want to know rule two?”
“What’s rule two?”
“Don’t trust nurses whose noses don’t come up to the stretcher.”
Iris slowly peeled the sheet back from Mr. Toofer’s face. “I’m short, Mr. Toofer, but you can trust me.”
“Well, if you ever do tell a lie, at least it won’t be a big one,” he said, letting loose with another string of heh-hehs.
Mr. Toofer was one wrinkly old man. When they got some fluids in him, though, some of those wrinkles would disappear.
“Sir, you got a face that tells me you’ve done some living. How old are you?”
“In dog years or people years? In dog years, I’ve been dead since 1950. In people years, I’m ninety-three.” Mr. Toofer lifted his white head a little higher off the stretcher and looked around. “Say. Say. I’m not in my room, am I?”
Mr. Toofer was not as with it
as he’d sounded. Iris touched his arm. “No, you’re at the hospital. You’re in the Emergency Room of Barnum Memorial Hospital.”
“Did I do something wrong?” He tried to pull the sheet back over his head. Iris stopped him. He looked at her vaguely. “Say. Do I know you? Weren’t you just in here?”
“I’m Iris, Mr. Toofer, your nurse. And you’re in the hospital because you’re sick.”
Mr. Toofer brightened. “Oh yeah? Sick? Is it fatal, what I got? I’m waiting for something fatal. At ninety-three, you’d think I wouldn’t have so long to wait.”
“Nothing fatal. You just need some fluids and a little medicine.”
Mr. Toofer lifted a thin white arm off the stretcher and crooked his finger at her. “Come a little closer. That’s it. Say,” he whispered, “how about we forget about all this? Why don’t you take me out to my Oldsmobile, and I’ll just kind of slip out of the parking lot. That sound reasonable to you?”
It sounded very reasonable to Iris. She could almost picture it, Mr. Toofer looking natty in a white suit, behind the wheel of the Oldsmobile of his dreams, driving off into whatever sunset was waiting for him.
“I can’t,” Iris whispered back to him. “I can’t, I’m sorry.”
“Well,” Mr. Toofer sighed. “You looked like a sensible young woman, so I thought I’d ask. Here’s an easier one. How about finding me a urinal? I got to piss so bad, I could fill a bathtub.”
When Iris went in to check on Mrs. Horner, the acute asthmatic in room 2, she was sitting bolt upright on the stretcher, puffing into an oxygen mask. Like many chronic lungers, her personality was on the low end of pleasant, which Iris immediately discovered when Mrs. Horner whipped off her mask and snapped, “It’s about goddamn time. I coulda died in here.” She pushed her mask back onto her face and took three or four dramatic breaths.
Iris kicked into her neutral professional gear. It didn’t pay to be genial; that just made the lungers crankier. Iris understood, and didn’t take their moods personally, or at least tried not to. She imagined that to be chronically short of breath was akin to spending twenty or thirty years half-drowning in high waves while the rest of the beachgoers frolicked blithely on shore.
“Hello, Mrs. Horner,” Iris said. “I’m Iris, I’m your nurse, and I’ll—”
Mrs. Horner whipped off her mask. “Hold it. Hold it right there,” she gasped. “You’re not my nurse. There was someone in here, Candy, Mandy…”
“Sandy,” said Iris. “Her shift ended. Now I’m assigned—”
“Oh, you are? Assigned? Is that it? I have no choice, of course. They just assign you somebody, whether you like it or not.”
Iris could hear Winnie and Inez cheerfully chattering out at the nurse’s desk. She said, “Mrs. Horner, you’re making yourself more short of breath. Why don’t you lie back on the stretcher, and let me—”
Mrs. Horner suddenly pushed Iris’s hand away. Iris had been about to take Mrs. Horner’s blood pressure.
“Get that thing away from me. You’re not doing that.”
Iris heard something snap. Her own mood, perhaps? No. Just Inez’s bubble gum out in the hallway. “Mrs. Horner, this is only a blood-pressure cuff. It’s not going to hurt you.”
Mrs. Horner’s bulging Pekingese eyes glared at her. “You’re right. Because it’s not going on me.” She took some breaths. “That thing cuts off my circulation. Cuts off my oxygen.”
“It goes on your arm, not around your throat.” Although in your case, thought Iris, I might make an exception.
“I don’t care. Leave me alone.”
“Okay, Mrs. Horner. I’ll start your IV then. Get some medication in you.” Iris began to assemble things from the IV tray.
“Oh no you don’t. I get my medication by mouth.”
“You’re too sick for that now.”
“I got my rights, Shorty. You’re not—”
With that, Iris marched over to the door, closed it, then turned around to face Mrs. Horner. She raised a finger and pointed it like a loaded gun, directly at Mrs. Horner’s nose. “Mrs. Horner, I’m sorry. But you caught me at the wrong hour of the wrong day of the wrong fucking year.” Mrs. Horner held her breath, not an easy thing for a chronic lunger. Iris continued. “Now, in my opinion, you’re a sick lady. But if you don’t want us to treat you, that’s your choice. Like you said, you got rights. But it’s pretty warm out there for May, Mrs. Horner, and in that heat, and breathing the way you are, I bet you last under an hour. Then we get you back, by ambulance this time, and we might even be able to save you. I doubt it, though, from looking at you. Now, if you don’t want me to help you, then there’s the door. There are plenty of sick people out there who do need my help. And one more thing. My name’s not Shorty. It’s Iris. It’s not a great name, but it’s the one I got, and you sure as hell better use it.”
Mrs. Horner looked at Iris, remembered to breathe again, then fell back against the elevated head of the stretcher with her arm straight out. “Here,” she whispered. “For my blood pressure. Not too tight though, okay… Iris?”
“No sweat, Mrs. Horner,” Iris said, wrapping the cuff. “You won’t even feel me pump it up.”
CHAPTER THREE
WAS IT like being born, looking up from your bassinet and seeing those curious and strangely disconcerted faces, or was it more like dying, lying in your open coffin, eyes wide, gazing upon those same disconcerted faces, disconcerted by the newness of you and the unexpectedness of your act, by the sudden alteration in the norm of the neighborhood, and in the rules that placed you, Louis, in your house, hidden, and your hiddenness contemplated from a known distance, an inviolable distance, you in there, us out here, so what in God’s name—Louis saw in every pair of eyes that now blinked from the middle of every pale face that stared down at him—do you think you’re doing sprawled here in this tulip bed out in the world of blue May skies and a beaming sun that’s shining on every good citizen of Waverly, a term that has not, for sixteen years and up to this precise moment, included you?
Louis couldn’t decide, being born or dying, but it was something like that. His eyes moved from Kitty to Francine to Bev and Bert, and then to Carl. Then he did something the newborn and the dead never do: He spoke. If a dead man were to speak, he might just say the word that passed in a whisper from behind Louis’s scarf.
“Boo,” Louis said.
Wasn’t that what they expected from the monster of Waverly? Certainly Francine Koessler expected it. No one else could understand him, but she’d been listening so hard her ears about popped off, so when Louis went “Boo,” she jumped back behind the others with a little scream. “Get back, everybody. He’s crazy dangerous!”
They’d been standing in a circle around Louis, but they drew back, because this was not a normal man in a normal kind of accident. But Louis didn’t do anything except lie there, so they looked at each other, and positioned themselves around him again.
“He’ll attack. I seen him do it,” said Francine behind them, clutching her Minky.
Carl Lerner went down on his knees beside Louis. Kitty hunkered above Carl, because if Carl was going to do anything with Louis’s hat or scarf, Kitty wanted to be the first to see.
“Hey buddy. Can you speak? Where you hurt?” asked Carl.
And then, in a simple, ordinary gesture of human concern, Carl did something that no one, beyond Atlas and Gracie, had done for sixteen years. Carl, who had no memories or imaginings. Carl, who saw him as the recluse, but not the monster, because who has it in him, thought Louis watching in wonder, to do to a monster the thing that Carl now did. Which was to reach out across sixteen years and touch him with a hand that was lighter and more lovely than the teenage kiss of Ariel Nesmith.
“Hey buddy. Where you hurt?” said Carl, touching Louis lightly on the shoulder.
Louis stared at Carl’s hand. For a moment, under Carl’s touch, Louis wasn’t sure that he was hurt, that his broken arm hadn’t suddenly healed. And if his arm had healed, if
a painless knitting of bones had taken place, what then had occurred under his scarf and beneath the lowered rim of his baseball hat? Had he grown a nose, did he have his eyebrows back, if he licked his lips would they be smooth and full again, had Carl’s touch regenerated to pinkness and health the skin on his forehead and cheeks? But when Louis shifted the arm that lay twisted beneath his body, the pain was instantly there, sharp and terrible, and it caused him to involuntarily speak out the answer to Carl’s question.
“My arm.”
“It’s a trick,” Francine called out from beyond the perimeter of neighbors who surrounded Louis. “He’ll get you close, then strangle you with his scarf.”
The entire group, including Louis, turned their eyes to Francine. She hugged Minky to her. “Well,” she said, “I mean, he might.”
Kitty looked again at Louis. The moment was escaping her, she knew. Her chance, the years she’d spent waiting for him to reveal himself. She began to reach for his scarf, slowly, to inch herself toward the complete knowledge of his wounds, to unwrap his mystery.
Louis smelled her oversweet wine breath, then saw the hand coming. He felt no comfort in its approach, nothing of what Carl in his innocence had given to him.
Kitty said hoarsely, “We better… we better get the scarf off… loosen his collar. He needs air. I think he needs…”
Louis said, “No,” and at the same moment, another hand stopped Kitty. Not Carl, but Bert, reached down and plucked Kitty’s hand from Louis’s scarf, plucked it as he might pluck a weed from amongst his winning roses. At first Louis couldn’t decide whether it was the compelling force of decency which induced Bert to intervene or simply his fussy ways. Yes, most likely Bert couldn’t tolerate the incongruous sight of Kitty’s hand on Louis’s scarf, because nothing was so out of order as that, no two things belonged less in conjunction, like the weed and the flower. For an odd moment, Louis wondered which was which; in Bert’s mind, was Louis and his scarf the flower, and Kitty’s hand the weed, or was it the other way around?