May We Be Forgiven: A Novel

by Homes, A. M.

  An interruption, a clot, a stroke, a little leak in the head. An X-ray, an MRI, some blood work, tissue plasminogen activator, arrhythmia, interventional radiology, cerebral angioplasty, carotid endarterectomy, stent.

  I blame George: George and his desk, George and high-speed Internet. I am blaming what’s happening on everything from sitting at that desk for too many hours each day to the activities I’ve recently engaged in, both the physical exertion of suddenly having so much sex, and also the tension, the trauma. I’m blaming it on George and George’s fucking medicine cabinet. As a “news” man, George believed he needed to know about everything. So his medicine cabinet was stocked with everything from Viagra to Levitra, Cialis, Tadalis, Revatio, etc. The combination of his computer, his medicine cabinet, and the events of the last few weeks—namely, what happened to Jane—caused a kind of mania, a sexual insanity that comes to an abrupt halt with me lying on a gurney in the ER.

  Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better—does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

  A nurse is standing over my gurney. “Mr. Silver. There’s a problem with your insurance. It appears you’ve been canceled. Do you have the actual insurance card?”

  “Tessie.” I try to explain that there is no one to feed and walk Tessie. No one pays attention, no one does anything until I pull out the IV line. “Someone needs to walk the goddamned dog.” They’re trying to get me to lie back down and asking if it’s a real dog and explaining that there is a volunteer pet-minder program.

  “Call my lawyer,” I say.

  I am brought a phone.

  I don’t know why Larry’s number is embossed like caller ID in front of my eyes—Train and Traub, 212-677-3575.

  “Larry,” I say. “Tell Claire that I am having a stroke.” I say it, and I hear myself saying something that sounds like “Tell dare I’m outside having a smoke.”

  “What?” Larry says.

  I try harder: “Can you please tell Claire that I am having a stroke?”

  “Is this you?”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “Are you crank-calling me?”

  “No,” I say. I hear myself talking and it sounds like I’ve got rocks in my mouth.

  “I can’t tell her,” he says. “It’s manipulative. And, further, how do I know you’re really having a stroke and aren’t smashed?”

  “I’m in the Emergency Room, Larry; they’re asking for my insurance card, and I keep saying, ‘Don’t worry, I have insurance.’”

  “You have no insurance,” Larry says. “Claire dropped you. She asked me to drop you.”

  I throw up again, spreading sick over my gurney and across the EKG wires.

  “Because you’re still legally married, you may have some recourse. You can fight it.”

  “I can’t fight anything—I can barely talk.”

  “Maybe they have a patient advocate at the hospital.”

  “Larry, can you please ask Claire to fax me a copy of the insurance card,” I say, and the nurse takes the phone.

  “Mr. Silver really shouldn’t get agitated—he’s had a cerebral incident. Agitation is definitely not a good thing.”

  Larry says something to the nurse and she hands me back the phone. “He wants a final word,” she says.

  “Fine,” Larry says. “I’ll take care of it, I’ll fix this one. Consider it a favor, consider it the last favor I’ll do for you.” Did Nixon have to deal with shit like this, or did he hunker down with a bowl of SpaghettiOs?

  I think of Nixon’s phlebitis; was the first attack in his left leg in 1965 during a trip to Japan? I think of him during the autumn of 1974, just after his resignation, when again his left leg swelled and he also had a clot in his right lung. He had surgery in October, then a bleed, and remained hospitalized until mid-November, and when Judge John Sirica subpoenaed the former President, he was medically unable to testify.

  As I lie waiting for my turn in the CAT scanner, which I’m thinking is like a cerebral lie-detector test, I am all the more sure there’s a link between Nixon’s clots and Watergate. And, not to put myself in the same league, but I’m sure the episode with George followed by Jane’s death has caused my brain to blow.

  During the CAT scan to comfort myself I review Nixon’s enemies list.

  Arnold M. Picker

  Alexander E. Barkan

  Ed Guthman

  Maxwell Dane

  Charles Dyson

  Howard Stein

  Allard Lowenstein

  Morton Halperin

  Leonard Woodcock

  S. Sterling Munro Jr.

  Bernard T. Feld

  Sidney Davidoff

  John Conyers

  Samuel M. Lambert

  Stewart Rawlings Mott

  Ronald Dellums

  Daniel Schorr

  S. Harrison Dogole

  Paul Newman

  Mary McGrory

  I am admitted to a semi-private room on a monitored floor. It occurs to me to call my “regular” doctor. Every word is a struggle. I do my best to explain my situation. The doctor’s office manager tells me it’s in God’s hands, and besides that, the doctor doesn’t practice outside of the city, and, more to the point, he’s on vacation. She asks if I would like to be transferred to Death Israel when the doctor is back.

  “What is Death Israel?”

  “The hospital where the doctor is affiliated,” the office manager says.

  “Sounds anti-Semitic,” my roommate says, having heard it all.

  “I hope I’ll be home before…” I say, my speech sounding slightly more coherent and familiar.

  “If you change your mind, let us know,” the office manager says.

  “There’s nothing worse than actually needing a doctor,” my roommate says.

  “What are you in for?” I ask, though I think it comes out sounding more like “Why you here?”

  “The show is over,” he says. “Clock’s ticking down. Have you noticed I’m not moving? I’m stuck—all that’s still going is my brain, or what’s left of my brain. By the way, are you blurry or is it me?”

  Before I can answer, the dog volunteer comes in. “I’m a Furry Friends Companion Consultant.” She pulls up a chair and takes out an information packet and forms. “Do you have a cat or a dog?”

  “Both.”

  “If a stranger opens the door, would they attack? Where is the food, and how much do they each get? Is the dog all right overnight—or do you need a nighttime companion? We have students who occasionally will do sleepovers.”

  “How long am I going to be here?” I ask.

  “That’s a question for your doctor. Adoption is also an option in some cases.”

  “Someone would adopt me?”

  “Someone might adopt the pets—if, say, you weren’t going to be going home.…”

  “Where would I go?”

  “To a skilled nursing facility, for example, or onward.…”

  “Dead. She means dead,” the guy in the next bed says. “They don’t like to come out and say it, but I can, because, as I mentioned, I’m heading there soon.”

  “You don’t seem so sick,” I said to the guy. “You’re perfectly coherent.”

  I wipe drool from my own mouth.

  “That’s what makes it so rough,” the guy says. “Totally compos mentis, aware of everything, but that won’t last for long.”

  “Did you consider hospice?” the furry friend asks my roommate.

  “What’s the difference—the art on the wall? They all smell like shit.” His hand comes up to his face. “Was that me or someone else?” he asks, and no one says anything. “My hand or yours?”

  “It was yours,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” the furry volunteer says, “but you two will have all day and I’ve got things to do.”

  “All day, or not,” the dying man says.

  “About the pets
—their names, ages? Do you have the house key with you?”

  “Tessie is the dog, I don’t know how old, and Muffin is the cat. There’s a spare key under the fake rock on the left before the front door—a fake key and ten bucks.”

  The dying man hums to drown out the conversation. “Too much information,” he says. “More than I should know.”

  “Like, what, you’re going to get out of bed and steal my house?”

  “Can you take dictation?” the dying man asks.

  “I can try.” I push the call button and ask for paper and pencil.

  “It’ll be a while,” the nurse says.

  “I’ve got a dying man who wants to confess.”

  “We all have needs,” she says.

  I nap. In my sleep I hear gunshots. I wake up thinking my brother is trying to kill me.

  “It’s not you,” the guy in the bed next to me says. “It’s on TV. While you were sleeping, a cop came to see you. He said he’ll be back later.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Can I ask you a question? Are you the guy who killed his wife?”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “I overheard someone talking about a guy who killed his wife.”

  I shrug. “My wife is divorcing me. She canceled my health insurance.”

  Someone comes in and says, “Which one of you asked for a priest?”

  “We asked for paper.”

  “Oh,” the guy says. He goes out and comes back with a yellow legal pad and a pen.

  “Where to begin?” the dying man says. “For certain, there are questions that will go unanswered. The difficulty is that there is not an answer for everything—some things cannot be known.”

  He begins to spin a story, a complicated narrative about a woman—how they came together and then apart.

  His story is beautiful and eloquent, Salingeresque; they didn’t speak the same language, she wore a beautiful red scarf, and she got pregnant.

  I try to get it down. As I’m looking at what I’m writing, I see that it’s not making sense. I’m not writing in English. Whatever marks I’m making on this paper are not anything that another person could read. I focus on catchphrases, I draw pictures, I try to make a map—I am all over the page, hoping I can clean it up later. He’s going on and on, and right when we get to what I think would be the end, the dénouement, the guy sits bolt upright. “I’m not breathing,” he says.

  I push the call button. “He’s not breathing,” I shout. “He’s going from pale pink to deep red, kind of purple.”

  Soon the room is filled with people. “We were in the middle of a conversation, he was coming to the punch line, and then, suddenly, he sat up and said, ‘I’m not breathing.’”

  Now he’s sputtering, choking, in trouble, and more people come, and it’s like an audience. They’re all standing there watching the guy.

  “Are you going to just watch or are you going to do something?” I ask.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” the nurses say.

  “Of course there is,” I say.

  “He’s DNR. Do Not Resuscitate.”

  He wanted to die a good death. But look at him. He’s struggling like he’s choking to death.

  “We know not when or how we will be called home,” one of them says, and then they whip the curtain between the beds closed.

  “That is not okay,” I say, hauling my damaged self out of the goddamned bed and peeling the curtain open.

  He’s bucking and heaving and seems to be begging for someone to do something. Despite the tangle of EKG wires hanging off my chest and my double IVs, I get close to him, my exposed ass edging the nurses out of the way. And in my mind he’s telling me to sock it to him, so I do. I give him one hell of an uppercut, slamming him in the gut with all I’ve got.

  His mouth drops open, his teeth come flying out, and he gasps for breath. “Fucking dentures almost killed me,” he says.

  “You said you didn’t want to be resuscitated,” the nurse says, indignantly.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to choke on my own goddamned teeth.”

  “I thought it was an embolism. Did you think it was an embolism?” one nurse says to another.

  “Do me a favor, send me home, where at least I can shoot myself when I’m ready.”

  “Would you like me to call someone?” the nurse asks.

  “Like who?”

  “A representative of the hospital? Case-management personnel, the patient advocates? A doctor? You tell me.”

  “Start at the top and work your way down,” he says. “And change my forms immediately. Clearly you don’t know the meaning of DNR.”

  Half an hour later, a woman comes with the forms rescinding the DNR order. “It can take a while before the change makes its way into the system, so how about I put a sign on your door.”

  “Do what’s necessary,” the man says.

  “PLEASE SAVE THIS MAN,” the woman writes on the dry-erase board mounted on the door that already lists our names and that we’re IN DANGER OF FALLING/USE PRECAUTIONS.

  In the middle of the afternoon, the pet person comes back, with photos of Tessie and the cat sitting on George and Jane’s sofa next to some nice-looking young fellow. “You’re squared away,” she says happily.

  The cop from the park comes—he’s in uniform and carrying an FTD Big Hug bouquet—flowers with a stuffed bear clinging to the side of the vase. “Listen, I want to apologize—I treated you badly, you deserved better.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  The cop sits on the edge of my bed, and we make small talk, and then, when there’s really nothing more to say, he tells me that he’ll come back again another day.

  “That was painful to watch. He must be in the program,” the roommate says when the cop is gone.

  “What program?”

  “One of the twelve steps—This-Anon, That-Anon, Everything-Anon-Anon. Step number nine is making amends for the harm you caused.”

  “Interesting,” I say. I’m tempted to tell him my story of crashing the AA meeting, but, given how much he knows about these steps, some things are better left unsaid.

  When dinner arrives, there’s nothing for him.

  “Nothing?”

  “I don’t have you down for any meals, but I might be able to get you a liquid tray,” the delivery woman says.

  I lift the insulated cover off my plate and find the main dish unrecognizable.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  The delivery woman peers over. “That would be our chicken Marsala.”

  “I’m dying,” my roommate says. “I have got no intention of drinking my last meal unless it’s very good Scotch.”

  “How about some carry-out menus from the nurses’ station? They’re always ordering in.”

  “That would be great.” He’s suddenly pleased; more than pleased—inspired.

  I put the cover back on my plate to keep the fumes from escaping and wait to see what happens next.

  “What do you want for dinner?” he asks as he’s going through the menus.

  “Anything but Chinese.”

  Excited, he pulls his cell phone out from where it’s been hidden under the covers and starts dialing. His ability to move is limited, but he’s on a mission. First he calls the burger place and orders two cheeseburger deluxes with fries and extra pickles, then the pizza place for a medium pepperoni pie, the deli for some rice pudding and cream soda. I ask him to have them throw in a couple of Hershey bars with almonds. And when the deli guy says it’s a minimum of twenty dollars to deliver, he tells the guy that he’ll give him a fifty-dollar tip if he also stops at the liquor store for a very specific bottle of Scotch. The man says he’ll do the job himself.

  “So what if I order more than I can eat? I’m dying, I don’t have to worry about leftovers. Is there anything special I can get you, something you’ve been dying for, no pun intended?” the roommate asks me.

  I used to like caviar, fresh-made cheese blintzes, chocolate
éclairs, and there was that doughnut I ate maybe forty years ago that I can’t ever forget, an orange cruller on a cold morning outside a polling place during the 1972 presidential election that was as close to perfection as any food can be. But the fact is, I’m lying in a hospital bed and am not exactly feeling any kind of culinary craving. “Thanks,” I say, “but I’m good with whatever you choose.”

  We wait. Will they remember to bring ketchup and mustard? Should we call back for mayo? We share a reverie about our love of mayonnaise, and he asks, Have I ever had Belgian French fries and dipping sauce, well done, salted and piping hot? Yes, I have, and his description of them is enough.

  It takes longer than you’d think. There’s a hospital to be navigated, security procedures downstairs—do they make them open the cheeseburgers?—elevators, corridors.

  “Can you get my pants out of the closet?” the roommate asks. I get up slowly and make my way to his closet, dragging my IV pole and wires and my left foot, which doesn’t seem to be fully functional. “Look in my pocket.”

  His pockets are loaded with cash, wads of twenties and a wallet filled with travelers’ checks, euros, and English pounds.

  “Looks like you’re going for broke,” I say, trying to make a joke.

  “The last few times I left the house, I made sure I went to the cash machine. You never know what’s going to happen and the worst thing would be to have no cash. We live in an economy and we die in an economy—wherever you go, you have to tip. No point being on a downward spiral and getting lousy service as you’re sinking. I prepaid my funeral years ago. You want the euros, take them.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I say, putting the foreign currency back in his pants.

  We bet on how long it will take each of the delivery boys to find us. I am the winner at thirty-eight minutes, and the roommate gives me a hundred bucks in “bonus points” when the cheeseburgers arrive. The pizza is a close second. “I’ve never delivered to a patient before, it’s cool,” the guy says. “I mean, as long as you’re not contagious.” The deli guy is the last to arrive. “Sorry it took me so long, I had to find someone to cover the register.” He hands over the bag of goodies along with the Scotch. My roommate peels off another hundred to cover the debt and offers him a drink.