Ecstatic

by Victor La Valle

  He opened one eye to look at me. – Last year, this man went into Queens General to remove some warts and they took off both his legs. I’m telling you. I believe that shit.

  I touched the top of Ledric’s head, but that only made it slide backward until he was looking at the ceiling. The boy had very little muscle control.

  – Okay Ledric. At nine we’ll go over to the clinic on Brookville Boulevard.

  The green-tiled one-story building at the southwest corner of 147th Avenue and Brookville Boulevard had been a Sons of Italy Lodge (Per Sempre) then changed to a cash-only medical clinic housing doctors from four continents, none of them North America.

  It was shaped like a Cambodian pagoda, with a fenced lot next to it; I parked the Oldsmobile Firenza there. When I’d returned the Dodge Neon to the rental office I glued the trunk shut at the lock, hoping the people at National wouldn’t notice— they hadn’t.

  I went into the clinic to borrow a wheelchair, but Ledric wouldn’t fit so I came back with one of the carts used for unloading medical equipment. Just a wide flat tray on wheels. Ledric slid out of the Oldsmobile’s backseat and flopped face-first on top of the cart. I had to push him through the delivery entrance.

  We would have been in the waiting room three hours if Ledric hadn’t started gasping. Once that happened an angry elf-owl of a nurse let me roll my brother to a small room where a stubble-necked Russian doctor asked a few questions, moved Ledric’s head around. The doctor diagnosed this easily.

  – Botulism, he said.

  26

  A condition that demands hospitalization.

  The real torture to the Russian physician was that he’d have to release us from his highly profitable care there. He didn’t have the equipment in this tiny clinic on the tri-corner hat border of Laurelton, Rosedale and Far Rockaway.

  Though Ledric tried to protest again he was making no sense because he couldn’t shape words; he might as well have been a manatee booing.

  I wanted to take him to the hospital in the Oldsmobile, but the Russian doctor wouldn’t let me. He was afraid I’d ignore his diagnosis and take Ledric home hoping he’d pull through. The Russian was already well acquainted with the rational paranoia of people without health insurance. – Botulism is not like a fever, he said.

  – How am I going to pay for an ambulance?

  – Your brother will die without it.

  – Can you get them to come down on the price?

  The Doctor huffed, but only a little; I doubt he’d been well off when practicing in St. Petersburg. He touched my shoulder. – Your brother goes to Queens General. It is reasonable and his care is precise.

  Queens General hospital in north Jamaica is a choir of gray buildings taller than most in Southern Queens. I could say that it’s run down but that would give the wrong impression, make you think the place was a quagmire. It was a decent operation and if money came into the coffers they spent it on equipment.

  I followed the ambulance to the hospital the whole time wondering how I’d missed another day shift in the sticky mess of Ledric’s life. I parked and walked the overpass of the Grand Central Parkway then down 163rd Road. Made a left on the slight incline that leads into the emergency room. The place was pretty empty because it was only 11 AM. There were two hundred grievously wounded people waiting to get medical attention instead of the usual twelve hundred of most evenings.

  I had the good fortune of having a family member who’d been brought by ambulance and diagnosed with an illness rarely seen in America anymore. When I told the nurse at the front desk his name (she was behind Plexiglas so I had to shout) I was sent up to Ledric’s room immediately. In the elevator I wondered how much a private room cost. I hoped they had him bunking with other people.

  He might as well have had a Barcalounger near his bed for the excess space they’d given. How about a wide-screen television with a host of private movies and a masseur on call, since we’re spending Anthony’s money? I would’ve felt better, maybe nonchalant, if I believed that Ledric had even collected loose change in a jar. The penniless creep. He couldn’t have asked for the room, too weak to say it, so some clerk had assigned this manse.

  I left when the doctors finally came. They asked me to leave. There were two of them. When I returned in twenty minutes they’d written down Ledric’s many symptoms but had done nothing to repair his health.

  – What are you going to do for him?

  The physicians nodded, but without looking up from their papers. They didn’t seem wealthy, either one. For instance, their watches were cheap. Digital faces with plastic bands. One wore black while the flashy one’s was orange.

  – It’s not botulism, said the first one. He told me like he was solving an illusionist’s trick.

  The second one agreed and laughed to prove it. – It is not botulism.

  – But the Russian doctor was so sure, I said.

  The first put his hand up. –There’s a good chance your friend over there spent too long in a gulag.

  – You should take his diagnosis with a tranquilizer.

  – We’ll probably end up giving Mr. Mayo a purgative, that’s all.

  – Oh that’s good, I said.

  – He’ll get the runs, the doctor with an orange watch clarified. He pointed at things a lot just to show that gaudy colorful band. We’re going to let Mr. Mayo sleep a while and check on him tomorrow.

  – But he’s not asleep. I don’t even think he’s breathing, I said.

  – He’s breathing under his own power.

  –The next time you want to get well, come to us. I’ll bet this Russian would amputate your foot if you came in with whooping cough. They laughed at the doctor and it seemed, in his absence, at me.

  I thanked them anyway as they left. Sitting next to Ledric in a chair I kicked my feet. Hospitals are quiet when you need them to be.

  I couldn’t sleep, but I was exhausted. I took off my shoes, so that helped. Ledric was as big as the bed. The nurses had dropped the metal guards from the sides of the mattress because he wouldn’t have fit on it otherwise.

  I walked around the room in my socks to see him from all angles. Even crouching at the foot of the bed, staring up from his feet to the rise of his belly. I pulled the sheets above his ankles while I was down there just to see those five-pound potatoes he called feet.

  It was like I had an audience with my own body; a chance to see how I’d look laid out on a bed. Except for his face we were enough alike. I walked to the window, blocking daylight, and Ledric’s figure worried me. I don’t mean his weight; the lonesomeness. Other than myself no one else was going to visit.

  When I sat next to him again, heard his fuzzy breathing, I forgot sympathy and only remembered the burden. How had he become my responsibility? Nabisase and Grandma expected me at home. Was this how my mother felt before we went to Virginia?

  To pass the next hour, since Ledric wasn’t going to tell any jokes, I tore off the cover of the hospital phone book and wrote a few more quick movie entries. Night of the Hatchet, Bet They Die, Easily Eaten. Why did the one-eyed drifter take his hatchet to the people of Tarpenny, Florida? In a surprise twist, they were a town of warlocks and witches and the drifter was a righteous man.

  I looked at the words and felt guilty because I wasn’t going to give Ishkabibble a film. Only summaries of them. Not a movie, just letters.

  After an hour and a half I left the room to call Grandma and yelled when I heard that Nabisase had skipped school a second day. They were happy to know Ledric was safe.

  At home we ate dinner in the living room. We watched television awhile, sitting on the same sectional couch watching the same show, it was actually pleasant enough.

  The nice thing about working as a house cleaner is that there’s some room allowed for personal crisis. The Third World isn’t running out of reserves to fill the posts.

  Between a short day shift at Sparkle then another night at Clean Up I went to visit Ledric on November 15th. He didn�
�t seem to have moved since I’d left the afternoon before. It was a good sign, though, that he was still breathing without equipment. I guess that was a good sign.

  While I waited I touched his hand. I picked lint out of his hair. There was even some on his eyebrows. What a dummy. I hoped he was alright.

  The general practitioners returned after I’d waited an hour, both smiling, holding Ledric’s many medical forms. I thought they were going to discharge him and these were the bills.

  Instead each guy tried to outkind the other. If one shook my hand, the other put his hand on my shoulder. The first offered me a stick of gum and the second gave me a whole pack. I thought they were preparing me for an outrageous invoice.

  – We looked at the results and had a neurologist in to see Mr. Mayo. We feel very confident now in our opinion that Mr. Mayo has contracted botulism.

  From his bed Ledric raised a pointed finger. He struggled to direct that mini-carrot at me. If he could speak, Ledric would be gloating: No hospitals I said. He would have, but couldn’t because the physicians pulled his arm back down then pulled the covers over his belly, right up to his sweaty neck. They snugly tucked him in and grinned.

  27

  A problem with dogs is that they can’t be reasonable. I don’t mean just the wild ones.

  When I came back from the hospital on Wednesday afternoon my reserves were tapped; a two-day snooze was in order. I wanted to try and get one, at least.

  Near my home I stopped at the old white house on the corner to rest against its low fence. My vision was spotty, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten since plucking Ledric from the room he rented.

  You did that, I crowed to myself. You saved the boy’s life.

  But forget five minutes of pride because Candan’s red Doberman chased me half a block home. It had been out wandering, I suppose.

  It could have caught up. It should have. Instead it paced me, staying about an eighth of an inch behind. Not snapping its jaws so much as clicking its teeth. I got so confused that I tripped. When I fell, just two houses from my own, the red Doberman stopped and waited for me to stand.

  Soon as I did it sparked again; snarling; going on until I was inside my yard with the gate closed.

  The dog then ran past my place, past Candan’s to the one-family home of Henry and Althea Blankets. Older folks with a fat German Shepherd. The red Doberman stopped there to bark hysterically at their yard until the German Shepherd inside the compound answered.

  After the German Shepherd started the red Doberman ran to the next house and did the same thing until an Irish Setter completed the quorum.

  28

  As I came in the house my sister apologized. – Not another day, she said, before I could.

  – You’ll go back to school tomorrow, I told her. Did you see those dogs outside?

  She pointed to her bedroom. – I packed my bookbag already. So how did Ledric look?

  – Big. Am I that size?

  – Did he seem any better though?

  –They hadn’t even started treating him yet.

  –That’s Anthony? Grandma yelled from the sectional couch. She stamped her good foot on the carpet, summoning me.

  She was covered in gossip magazines. Nabisase had walked to the store to buy soda and reading material. Grandma was turned on the couch so her right leg was up.

  – Put some rub on my leg.

  Grandma meant the mentholated gel, but that was for colds not fractured bones. – It’s not going to stop the pain, I told her.

  – I don’t want to talk of hospitals.

  –They helped Ledric, I told her. Eventually.

  – Sure. Just please rub. Just please rub. Your mother used to do it, but now.

  After I was done I rolled her gown back over the right leg and washed my hands in the bathroom. After that I bashed in my mother’s bedroom door.

  The lock held, but not the cheap wood around it. The door popped from its hinges after nine good kicks and then it was easy to get inside.

  The room still smelled like Ghost Mist, a perfume sold in stationery stores. Usually just beside the South Queens Tattler, a local version of the tabloid news. You were as likely to read about 6th District Representative Floyd Flake’s legislative agenda as the goat in Cambria Heights that looked like Billy Dee Williams.

  A streak the size of an otter had dried into one wall where a perfume bottle had shattered. Glass fragments stuck in the carpet hairs.

  Mom’s dresser sagged on its little legs because all four drawers had been pulled out, flung around, and without them the cheap wooden frame was weak from years of beatings.

  Some of her clothes were still on the ground. A shirt with the arms spread in an explosive diving pose. A pair of pants with the legs crossed over themselves in a sprint.

  My mother had never left a sloppy room in her adult life. Where do you think I learned to clean a house with such aplomb? How many weeks had she slept in this mess, preparing herself to leave?

  If I’d put the door back up, blocked the opening, Nabisase wouldn’t have seen. It was disconcerting to think about how many times we’d passed Mom’s room and didn’t fathom her life inside. Or felt too tired to ask.

  Nabisase went off when she saw the chaotic room. I guess it was unsettling. Down the hall, into the living room, where she didn’t scream but made a smashing sound. She broke the little Sidney Poitier statuette.

  She could have kicked in windows, but my mother hadn’t made them. Nabisase picked the small head up, then threw it down again. Once the piece broke she took off her sneaker to crack the rest precisely.

  Grandma watched from her convalescence on the couch.

  I went to my mother’s bedroom and overturned the bed.

  29

  –You got French fried, I told Ishkabibble, because he looked worse today than he had a week before. I couldn’t stay home while my sister broke Sidney Poitier’s chips into bits of dust. After tossing Mom’s mattress around I needed to get out.

  Ishkabibble pulled the collar of his button-down shirt away from his skin; took out a plastic bottle wide as two fingers then rubbed lotion on various parts of his reddened neck.

  He was planning to meet me because I had a mortgage check for him signed by my grandmother, but she didn’t want him invited home. We agreed to meet on 147th Avenue and 223rd, though I bet if I’d let the scent of Grandma’s draft out to the wind the man would have found me in Sierra Leone.

  Before the money I gave him a large envelope.

  Ishkabibble’s enthusiasm went to rubble when he found it was no movie script.

  –That’s not what I wanted to do. This is it.

  – A book? he yelped after I explained.

  – A book. He was doused.

  – A book! He threw it to the ground.

  No worry though, I’d bound the sheets of paper in a gray plastic expandable folder. They were all in there: on the backs of Uncle Arms’s flyers, napkins from the coffee shop in Lumpkin. The torn-off front cover of a hospital phone book and many sheets of legal paper I’d found at home.

  – You don’t like it?

  –Tell me where the movie went.

  – Why worry about one when you’ve got two hundred of them here?

  Ishkabibble must have been used to this kind of disappointment. He thinks a woman should buy a Jeep Wrangler, but she wants an Acura. A guy borrows money to open a business and decides to burn it on a boat instead. No one wanted his advice, just his funding.

  – I can’t hardly read these. What’s this say?

  –The Dead Reserved a Room, I read. 1974. When a woman in her fifties, Dorie, inherits the old motel her grandfather once ran she travels there, to Michigan, in the hopes of making it a profitable business again. When she arrives a number of women from the local college are lodging there. At first there’s little to disturb their lives and the older woman befriends the college students. Eventually the girls are killed off. Each time it’s Dorie who finds them. She discovers that her gran
dfather is killing them from beyond the grave. He doesn’t want Dorie taking their advice: sell his hotel and move to Chicago where she’d always hoped to be in a band. A quieter version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of family businesses gone awry.

  – You have got to be kidding, Ishkabibble said.

  – Should I read another one?

  – I got it. I’ll take that. No problem. I’ll think of something. He tapped the collected pages. I never heard of any of these though.

  – And I’m sure you know the banking laws better Than I ever will.

  –That suit makes you look like a football player, he said. Big Man. Feel like helping me out now that I’m going to help you?

  He asked politely, and that made the difference.

  We didn’t walk far, still on 147th, but right before it reaches Farmer’s Boulevard. On one side of the street there were private homes, but across from those a hive of warehouses that saw local and long-distance deliveries fifteen hours a day.

  Next to a red weathered matchbox of a deli was a yellow home so humble its back was to the public road. The front windows and porch faced an abandoned yard not the street. Ishkabibble posed me right on the grass. He really told me how to stand; with my arms crossed and not to speak even if the guy inside said something to me. Ishkabibble knocked on the side door, which was actually the one that faced the street.

  There were no security bars over the windows. This didn’t create an air of freedom as much as implied there was nothing valuable inside.

  That side door opened then Ishkabibble stepped aside so that the man could come out. Bald, but with a fastidiously maintained long beard. More gray than black. A real mantle of righteousness. He shut the house door behind himself. They spoke a bit.

  Ishkabibble pointed backward, toward me. I thought he was bragging about my film encyclopedia. Getting a few advance sales. He was smiling if the homeowner wasn’t. I waved at the bald man and he pointed at me, a response I mistook for friendly.

  – You don’t threaten me, he yelled. Hear?