19
As I was changing into street clothes and cutting my hospital bracelet, two cops came into the ICU and walked down the aisle between beds. I recognized them, Cipatli and Dott, from the Thirty-Second Precinct. Dott was a short, easygoing black guy with a shaved head. The other guy, Cipatli, was a skinny Mexican with a pointy face, like a fish. Cipatli came up and said, “Bitch almost got you.”
I asked if they’d found her.
“I ain’t tryin to dampen your hopes or anything,” Dott said. “But you know what the chances are of finding a crackhead when we don’t even got her name? I wouldn’t hold my breath, know what I mean?” He flipped a sheet on his little notebook and said, “One of the bystanders. A woman—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“She filed a complaint. We got a statement from your partner.”
“What’d he say?”
Cipatli, the Mexican guy, said, “Your partner said he was taking Rolly to the bus. Just bringing him in when some crackhead walks over, starts yelling, starts causing problems, and then she stabs you.”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s exactly what happened.”
Dott scribbled in his pad.
“He said you picked Rolly up in some alley.”
“An abandoned building,” I said. “One five two. Between Bradhurst and Douglas.”
He scribbled.
“Your partner said you were just taking the guy out.”
“We were just bringing him out to the bus.”
“And she walks over?” Cipatli prompted me.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“From where? From the stoop where she was sitting?”
“Right. From the stoop.”
He went on writing.
“And she was with someone?” he guided me.
“Some church guy. Clean-cut. With a cross around his neck. A gold-chain thing.”
“Yeah, we know the guy,” Dott said.
“You didn’t . . .” Cipatli hesitated. “Hit the church guy or nothin?”
“Nah. No way.”
“Or your partner?”
“No.”
“What about Rolly? They say he came in with a torn shirt. Was that from falling?”
“Yeah. He fell,” I said. “He was drunk. And he fell. The guy’s homeless. It’s not a surprise he’s wearing a torn shirt.”
They nodded approvingly.
“After he tripped we were helping him up, and the crackhead came over. The other guy, the church guy, was talking to us while the crackhead got her knife.”
“So the church guy distracted you?”
“You could say that.”
“Even helped her in some way?”
“Yeah. He helped her.”
“And you didn’t touch the church guy?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t touch the patient?”
“Not except to help him.”
“And then?”
“Then I was stabbed.”
“So you were helping the patient. Rendering patient care. Doing your job. When the church guy interfered with you. Distracted you. And you were slashed from behind by the crackhead.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Dott scribbled one last thing, flipped the pad shut, and looked up.
“That oughtta do it.”
“What’d Burnett say?” I asked again, and Dott said, “What you and your partner say corroborates completely. That oughtta do it,” he said again, with emphasis, and I knew that nothing would happen with the complaint. I thanked them.
“Agh,” Dott made a sound in his throat.
“Yeah, no problem,” Cipatli said.
They seemed embarrassed even being there. When the police got shot we were the ones who treated them. As long as we didn’t kill someone outright there wasn’t much chance of a complaint going anywhere.
The two of them shook my hand and walked back up the aisles, both with their heads tilted, listening to their radios.
20
Down on one knee, I placed my head between the iron window bars. I saw an open area with cords and pulleys on the ceiling and long narrow strips about the length and width of a bowling alley. There were a few men in white in the far strip, darting back and forth with swords. Three young women with their masks off stood idly in the corner, talking. I walked over and tried the door. It was unlocked. I entered a passageway and there was a second door held open with a metal chair. Inside, Emily sat on a bench with one foot up, tying her white shoe. When she saw me she didn’t even bother to shake my hand. She finished tying her shoe, put her foot down, stood, and turned into the club.
“You’re early,” she said. “Myra won’t be here for an hour.”
Emily started for the far end. I stood there. She came back.
“You don’t wanna come?”
“Where?”
“You ever fence?”
I just looked at her.
“Well, it won’t kill you. Come on.”
Emily draped some leather smock over my head. It was heavy, like the lead apron at the dentist’s. She gave me a foil, showed me how to hold it out, how to stand, and that was all the introduction I got. She edged forward in the crablike way that fencers move, clacked my foil on one side, clacked it on the other, and then surprised me by thrusting. I could feel the weight of the foil through the apron. She told me to hold the foil up again. I did. The same thing happened. Clack on one side, clack on the other, then she struck me in the chest, hard enough to knock me back.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Can’t hurt that much.”
“Whatta you call that much?”
I showed her where my wound was. I told her not to hit outside the apron. She raised her foil.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” she said.
For the next hour she hit me all over, even on the shoulder and back a few times, but she did not come close to the wound. She had amazing dexterity with the foil. Once we started she did not talk to me at all. Her withdrawing manner dropped away with what seemed like relief, and she became impassioned, reckless. Bouncing back and forth, like an excited bird, she slashed with the foil. Slashed with it again. She let out little mad cries. Clack clack thrust. Clack clack thrust. Again and again she attacked with the light foil, striking impotently at the thick pad.
After an hour Myra came in. I waved to her but she just kept walking to the locker room. I felt myself flush. Emily, whose timid manner returned as soon as she lowered the foil, pretended not to notice. When Myra came out of the locker room she pulled her mask on and immediately started a bout. Emily walked over and Myra stopped, pulled off her mask, and they spoke with their backs to me. After a minute, in an impatient manner, Myra waved. I waved back. Then she started fencing again. Emily returned, smiling. “She’s in the middle of a bout,” she said. I figured there was no reason to go over and speak with her. I went on practicing with Emily, and Myra worked out for the entire afternoon at the other end of the club.
21
It was Sunday and Norman and I had gone out to Queens to see Dad. He was lying there with white marble over him, leaves on the grass all around, and piled up in drifts near the headstone. We each had rakes, working with our backs to each other.
“A nurse from surgical talked to me,” Norman said.
I was quiet, drawing the rake through the grass.
“Yeah,” I said. “So what?”
“She was talking about a bottle of Dilaudid.” He placed the rake in the grass as if he’d go back to work. Then he lifted it again. “Are you a junkie?”
“I don’t take that shit,” I said. He was quiet, raking. “I did it for money.”
He paused, gripping and regripping the rake. I felt him looking at me.
“You got caught, I couldn’t’ve helped you,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you to,” I said.
He pulled the rake through grass. I di
dn’t say anything more about it and neither did he, but by the jerky way he moved I could tell he was thinking about it. After a while he said, “What happened to the pictures?”
“Whatta you mean, what happened to them? Nothing happened to them. I developed them. That’s it.”
I could tell what he was thinking.
“I was just helping a friend out with the Dilaudid. It’s not because of the pictures.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“The pictures are crap, but I got a few of him that are o.k. I’m glad to have them. He looks happy.”
“I’m sure you want to think that.”
“I just said that’s the way he looked. Not that he was happy. And not that it makes any difference,” I added. “It’s obvious he wasn’t. Do you think it’s not obvious?”
The metal tines of Norman’s rake scracked against the hard ground. I pulled dark leaves into a sodden clump. The weight of cold leaves against my hip as I hauled a sack to the trash. Bare branches spread against the sky. The clouds were high and in long thin ridges. I sat some distance away on the frozen ground, looking up through branches in the dwindling light. Norman was working his way around a tree with a hoe, hacking at the hard earth, loosening it up to plant bulbs. I closed my eyes and listened to the hoe cutting into the soil. He was working furiously, with more effort than it really required. I was cold. I got up. The headstone was stained with bird droppings. In the dim light it looked very dark, and the droppings very bright, very white. I brought my camera out and took a photograph. Norman turned, holding the hoe.
“Nice, Frank,” he said. “He’d like that.”
“I don’t think he’d mind,” I said.
22
She was waiting at the edge of the dry fountain, that navy sweatshirt in a lump beside her.
“You got your camera?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I saw something. You can take a picture of it.”
We walked toward West Third.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see. You’ll like it.”
We got to the corner of the park and she pointed at the street. It was a pigeon squashed by a car. A red smear on concrete, with a few feathers.
“Aw Jesus,” I said.
“What?”
“Some dead animal. I don’t want a picture of that.”
“I guess if that was a person you’d be more interested.”
“It would be a more interesting subject, anyway.”
She made a little sound in her throat and crooked her head. She seemed disappointed. After a moment, in a different tone, she said, “Come on. I need an ice.”
We walked down West Third Street. We looked at CDs and tapes spread out on the sidewalk, and then went on to Saint Mark’s where we stopped at one of the outdoor arcades and played Ms. Pac-Man. I sucked at videogames, didn’t care about them, and was killed three times in less than two minutes. She was better, and as she played I watched her grow fierce, competitive, like when she fenced, though, at the end, when the blue demons began to move very fast, and the sound grew loud and ominous, and it seemed hopeless, she suddenly held her hands from the controls, closed her eyes, and only knew she’d been eaten from the sound. She turned to me, smiling sheepishly. “I can’t stand to see it,” she said. A minute later we went over to an Italian bakery on Second Avenue where they sold ices, but we’d dawdled too long with the CDs and the videogame and they were locking the door just as we arrived. Emily banged on the window. She dropped her bag and banged on it again. A waiter inside went by without looking.
“He hears me. He pretends he doesn’t hear.”
She kicked the door, the waiter looked up, and we ran partway down the block. The waiter, a fifty-year-old Italian guy with slicked hair and a rounded belly covered by an apron, stepped out. “Hey, kick this!” he bellowed, stood defiantly a moment, then saw Emily coming back and turned. He locked himself inside the store and smiled through the glass. Emily kicked the door, then saw me watching her and was suddenly sheepish again, shy. She hurried back, saying, “I really wanted an ice.” We crossed Houston and went on toward the Lower East Side. She lived in a four-story building with a fire escape up front, graffiti on the door, and garbage cans lined up in the entrance. We walked into a long, thin apartment with a small kitchen to the left and her bedroom at the end of a dim hallway, where a bicycle leaned against the wall. There were dirty clothes everywhere. Old soda cans, old soda cups with straws, six or seven coffee cups with dried grounds at the bottom, fast food bags crumpled and left on the floor, books and newspapers everywhere. She lay back on a futon and said, “You ever been to Norway?”
“No.”
“I’ve been thinking of going to Norway. They got these fjords there. Like these little passageways of water. Really pretty. Really scenic. Like you can’t believe how nice they are. You read that book Mysteries ?”
“Nah.”
“It’s set in Norway. I’m thinking of going there.”
She showed me the book, Mysteries, that she’d spoken of, and while I was looking at it she said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“I’m twenty-one. I’ve never been anywhere. I figure, better go now, you know. While I’m healthy.” She massaged her leg. “Cramps,” she said. “I gotta drink more water.” Then, “My father lives in Norway. I haven’t seen him for like . . . thirteen years or something. But I thought, you know, why not? It’s gotta be nice. Snow. Clean little towns. Norway.”
There were a few large pillows along the wall near the radiator. I sat.
“Your mom there?”
“Dead. Kidneys,” she said.
“My dad’s dead, too,” I said.
Her face darkened. I figured Myra must have said something. Emily picked a speck from the sheet and tossed it toward the window.
“Myra told you,” I guessed.
“She said you had a picture.”
I felt around in my jacket pocket and dropped the print near her leg. She held it up. Studied it for a while.
“He looks like a good guy.”
“Yeah, he was a nice guy. He wouldn’t’ve wanted to hurt anyone.”
She set the print on the sheet. She nodded, as if deciding something.
“That’s how you got into medicine,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Your brother’s a doc, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You had these family troubles. And so you wanted to help other people.”
“You should see how I help,” I said.
“I think that’s it,” she said. Then, “Your mom still around?”
“She’s still alive.” I made a motion like I was smoking a joint. “They weren’t together long. She lives in Washington State. I don’t talk to her much.”
“At least you got a brother.”
“At least,” I said.
She opened a New Yorker, the cover marked with a mosaic of moon-shaped arcs—perfectly rounded stains from the bottom of a coffee mug. There was a battered boombox on the mantel of an old fireplace. Tapes without cases scattered around it. Mostly stuff that was popular on college radio stations at the time—Cure, R.E.M., Lou Reed, Replacements—music that I knew, too. I put on Nothing’s Shocking and she went on with her New Yorker. I found a photography book against the wall beneath the window. It looked like it had been rained on, and still had a library card in it, due about eight months before. We read for a while, not talking much. When the tape was over she got up and flipped it and went back to reading. Then held the magazine across her chest and lay back.
“You’re looking at the Winogrand?”
“Yeah.”
“You like it?”
“He’s great. It’s depressing he’s so good. I’ll never be that good.”
“I get like that with the fencing. Overwhelmed. Intimidated.”
She rolled the magazine and tapped it in her hand.
“You know a lot abou
t it? The photographs?”
“Just what I like.”
“Who do you like?”
“Arbus, Evans, Weegee, Golden, Hujar . . .”
She nodded. She’d never heard of any of them. She didn’t pretend she had.
“Well, I’d go see em at the Met. Take a look. You want to?”
I said I did.
I stayed at her apartment for an hour. When I decided to go she just waved from the bed, didn’t even try to get up to shake my hand.
“It was good seeing you, Frank.”
“Good seeing you, Emily.”
“Shut the door behind you,” she said when I was in the hallway.
I pulled the door shut. When I was a few floors down I heard the bolt turning.
23
Leaning against the wall of the loading bay, Hock went through the photographs of Burnett and Rolly, holding a few up into the dim light, hiding the prints from the other medics when they walked past. Not that they would have cared. With the crack wars and the crime explosion, we saw it all. A few pictures were nothing. Hock looked at the shot of Burnett with his forearm around Rolly’s neck.
“Looks like he’s strangling him,” Hock said, laughing. He straightened the prints and said, “Burnett says you’re seeing that HIV girl?”
“That what he said?”
“He says he saw her with you in the hospital. He says you’re fucking her.”
“I’m seeing her friend,” I said. “Not her.”
“Well, Burnett says it wasn’t her friend visiting you.”
“She was at the clinic that day. She just came to visit.”
“Ah,” Hock said.
I wasn’t sure if he believed me or not.
“She saw me on the news,” I added.
“Came up to see the patient-beater?”
“Something like that.”
Hock lit a cigarette. He smoked with the cigarette between his first two fingers so when he inhaled it was like he was putting a hand over his mouth.
“You heard they made a new regulation,” he said. “After that Dilaudid thing. Nurses can’t pass on the medication. Has to go straight to the patient.”
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