by Alex Laidlaw
Somewhere in the midst of all this we found a nurse, or maybe he was some sort of night clerk. At any rate, this hulking figure wearing hospital scrubs had access to a nearby computer and was able to tell me that Richard Pistales was in an altogether different hospital. Apparently there was a second hospital on the mountain, one I hadn’t known about. Ricky, said the nurse or clerk, was at Montreal General, farther down the road.
How much farther? I asked.
The nurse clerk guessed it was a mile or so.
By the time I got to him, Ricky had been admitted into Primary Care. He’d been given a bed in a large room full of patients, each with their own similar bed on wheels so that they could be shuffled around easily. There were nurses swarming in and between everyone, both omnipresent and inconspicuous.
Liz was sitting next to Ricky’s bed. She was handling a scrap of wool from the sweater he’d been wearing, which the paramedics had cut off of him. Liz was quietly turning the scrap of wool back and forth in her hands.
It’s such a shame, she was saying. This was the nicest piece of clothing you owned.
Ricky, now awake and with his neck in a brace, was strapped to the bed with a stack of monitors over his shoulder. There were wires running between his body and the monitors, and an iv needled into his arm. Ricky didn’t know what was happening and every now and then he would ask us, so Liz and I would need to explain that he was in the hospital. We would need to explain to him why he was here, and every time we repeated the fact that he’d been hit by a van, he became frightened. Then his fright would transform into incredulity. It was as if he thought we were making it up. The trouble was that he had taken a serious blow to the back of his head, and besides that, he was drunk, so he was also disoriented. He couldn’t remember the accident, nor could he retain the information that Liz and I tried and tried to impart.
Let’s get out of here, said Ricky to Liz. I feel like shit, but really I’m fine, he pleaded with her. Come on Lizzy, let’s go. Take me home, he practically begged.
Liz maintained her composure. Babe, she said, we have to wait until the doctor can X-ray your brain.
She pointed out to me that Ricky was angry, which had to be taken as a positive sign. His anger, she said, shows that he’s himself.
Ricky complained he was thirsty, so we signalled a nurse who brought him some water in a small paper cup. When Ricky tried to drink, he felt sick. It looked like he was going to vomit, so Liz held up a garbage can, but because of his brace and the straps holding him down, Ricky couldn’t turn to the side and he wound up spewing all over the front of himself. At the same time, some of those monitors over his shoulder went into alarm. Suddenly there were nurses rushing in, and because there wasn’t enough room around the bed, I was pushed aside, which was fine by me. Seeing Ricky like that made my own stomach turn. My face felt hot and my neck was flushed.
I found a sink in the middle of the room where I wet a paper towel and applied it to the back of my neck. Hospitals sometimes had this effect on me. I felt light-headed, as if I might lose consciousness. Where I was standing, I was surrounded by people in beds, all with wires, tubes and needles disappearing into them, hidden under their gowns. There was something unnatural about it, something so abstract. The body was at the very centre of everything that happened in this place—the body injured, suffering and broken down—and yet in the process of it being mended, the body was completely debased. It was this disconnect between process and intent that had me feeling so faint.
I thought about my war story. I tried to imagine a scene like this, a hospital in the field, set someplace five miles back from the front. The floors would be covered in stretchers, row on row, with men gruesomely injured, horribly wounded, disfigured, crying out in pain.
Across from me was a woman in bed. Nothing more than a fat, middle-aged woman lying under a sheet. One of her legs exposed, there was the shape of a purple bruise. She looked exhausted, but as if she couldn’t sleep. Her arm was thrown up to cover her eyes, so I could even see the stubble of her armpit.
I looked at this woman and thought of my story. But how could any story measure up to the simple, honest fact of her—this woman, whose existence should mean nothing to me. How could any invented narrative ever stand up against the humble reality of this stranger-woman’s stubbly armpit?
I spent another half hour at the hospital. For a while I ended up in a hallway just outside the main room that Ricky was in. There were still more patients here in their wheeled beds, but it was quieter. The lights were low, and the people were mostly asleep. I spent some time studying an informational chart on the wall about head injuries. It mentioned symptoms attending to long term effects, spoke of problems, possible complications and warning signs that one should look out for. By now it was well after two o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t sure there was much I could do hanging around the hospital. Ricky had been given a sedative, so he was sleeping. Liz was sitting by the side of his bed. When I told her I’d decided to leave, she offered to walk me out, but first she reached into the pocket of Ricky’s jeans, slung over the back of the chair, and extracted his pack of cigarettes.
Together we walked to the edge of a parking lot where I had locked my bike. We sat on a concrete divider and smoked. There wasn’t much for us to say. Everything seemed obvious and trite. In lieu of anything else, Liz and I ended up talking about the café. It was a boring, tedious conversation, but I think it did both of us some good just to sit and talk and share a smoke.
I was off work for the next two days. My son had started waking up early, sometimes as early as five o’clock. I got out of bed with him, and because it was hard to stay awake sitting around the apartment, I bundled us up against the cold, and wearing him in an infant carrier, took us out for a walk. Recently he and I had discovered that besides the all-night diners on Rue Notre-Dame, besides the neighbourhood strip club which seemed never to close, the only place open early nearby was the Atwater Market building. The shops and the market stalls themselves wouldn’t open up for another hour or so, but the building itself was a place to keep warm, so on those early mornings we walked to the market, crossing the barren fields and the railroad tracks. We waited and watched as the shops opened up. First the butchers and the bakeries, and then finally the small café at the end of the row where I could get a coffee before walking us home.
During those days I had no news of Ricky. I thought about visiting the hospital, but then decided against it. Aside from an illogical suspicion that I might not be able to find the building again, I just figured that it wasn’t my place. I was neither family, nor a close friend. In fact, I realized I didn’t even have a phone number for Ricky or Liz, because until now, I’d never needed one. I couldn’t even be sure if Ricky was still in the hospital. And if he was, I didn’t know if he would want to be seen.
By Wednesday I was back at work. First thing in the morning, Teresa called me into her office and asked why I hadn’t come to her to tell her about Rob.
Here we had someone stealing from us and drinking on the job, Teresa said. It was your responsibility to keep me informed about something like that, she explained. How am I supposed to do my job if you can’t be trusted to do yours? she asked.
A slew of defensive statements, of objections and qualifications, got caught and mixed up on the way to my mouth. In the end, I just loudly exhaled. After all, what was the point of trying to fight back? She had already won.
Why did you tell me he didn’t drink? was all I could finally manage to ask.
I never said that, Teresa snapped. What I said was that he didn’t even smoke.
Later, while we were working in the kitchen together, Teresa decided to tell me about the last time she hired Rob for a catering job. It was sometime last year, and she’d given him a simple list of dishes he was supposed to have prepared. She’d even trusted him enough to send her clients to pick up the food. So this husb
and and wife whose daughter was about to be married showed up at his apartment, she said. And this was first thing in the morning, but they found him drunk. He opened his door to them in his underwear and none of the food had been made.
Even as she told me this story, Teresa was laughing. Well, I guess he does have a real problem with alcohol, she said. Go figure. It’s just such a shame—he’s such an excellent cook.
Before the end of that day, Liz came in to do an hour’s worth of office work. She’d come from the hospital, she told me, and would be heading back that way immediately. Ricky still hadn’t recovered much. She said his brain had been hemorrhaging, and that it had been swollen for days against the back of his skull.
Walking home from work, I thought about the words hemorrhaging, swollen, brain and skull. I tried to connect these words with the thought of my friend lying there in his hospital bed, but every time I came close, I mean every time I thought I could almost understand what those words meant, I began to feel sick. I could see Ricky as he had been at the time of the accident. His body thrown like an object, dashed defencelessly onto the road. The look on his face as he moved in and out of his consciousness. His confusion, his obvious pain.
I thought then that I would never do well in a war. I was too squeamish, too sensitive, too easily overwhelmed.
That weekend, I had to work with Rob again. By now everyone knew about his drinking, but we had no one to replace him with just yet. Teresa had instructed me to pretend as if I didn’t know anything. She said Rob was going to come into work, and if he continued to drink, so be it. On Monday we would make a tally of however many beers had gone missing, and while firing Rob, Teresa would present him with a bill for whatever amount he owed.
On Saturday, Rob looked dishevelled. He came in fifteen minutes late and apologized, but I told him not to worry. He quietly set himself up with a task, and the morning progressed with us working separately, but side by side. At one point I overheard him talking with some of the baristas. He was standing by the espresso machine trying to explain to them how to pour a shot. I overheard the words bitterness and irritant, and I could see him trying to make a demonstration, but nobody was listening.
Throughout the morning he kept finding reasons to get into the walk-in fridge, and I found reasons to get in there after him. For me, it was just a curiosity, as I had no intention of reporting anything back to Teresa. By noon, I figured he had had six beers, and his mood had lightened considerably.
After the lunch rush, Liz came in to pick up a cheque. She stopped in the kitchen and told me that Ricky was doing much better now. He was still dizzy, had a headache and was suffering memory lapses, but all of that was beginning to fade. The doctors thought that in time, it was possible for him to make a full recovery. It seemed for now as if he was out of the woods.
I was relieved and felt a weight had been lifted. Liz went out the side door and as she did, the afternoon sun momentarily blazed into the kitchen, lighting up the counters, the food, the floors, the knives and the whites we were wearing. Rob had been standing next to me, so he heard everything that Liz had said, but he didn’t know Ricky and he didn’t know anything about the accident. Although he didn’t ask, I felt compelled to tell him what had happened. I told him about the accident and its aftermath, I told him about the show, about the band, about the music. I told him about the hospital, and about having gone to the wrong hospital at first. I even told him about the old man who’d been looking for his nephew.
After I finished, I imagined there would be an awkward pause. After all, I couldn’t really explain what had compelled me to tell the story at such a great length to Rob, but I didn’t have time to wonder about it because without missing a beat, Rob launched into a story of his own. And for so many reasons it was clear that he was making this story up as he went along, or if maybe there was some kernel of truth within it, he was smothering that truth in embellishment.
Rob told me that the year before last, he had also been hit by a car. Only at the time, he’d been riding a bicycle. The car, he said, had immediately fled the scene, and Rob had had to get himself to the hospital alone. Nobody stopped to help, he said, although he was very clearly distressed: wounded, bleeding and dragging his heap of a bicycle along. At the hospital, he said, they had sent him home. They told him there weren’t enough beds. They said all he needed was some rest, and so he went home and fell asleep on the couch.
When I woke up, I couldn’t remember a thing. I didn’t know what had happened, only that I was hurt so bad I couldn’t get off my couch. I couldn’t even get up, he said, to get myself a drink of water from the kitchen sink.
Rob said he spent three days wallowing and wasting away on his couch, and that he probably would have died if his boss at the time hadn’t realized that something was wrong.
See, because I hadn’t been in to work, and I hadn’t even been able to make a phone call, because I couldn’t even move to get to the phone and couldn’t even remember that I had a job, well, my boss figured that something must be terribly wrong because I was otherwise so totally reliable, so he called the police. The cops showed and broke open the door, then seeing so much blood and debris, the officers pulled out their guns. And that’s how they found me, said Rob. With their guns drawn, standing over his couch, asking him how this all had happened. And the thing was, I couldn’t remember, he said. But anyway, those cops saved my life.
When Rob finished talking, I didn’t know what to say. He went back to work, bending over his cutting board. I shook my head as if to clear it of a fog that had accumulated.
In another few minutes Rob would put down his knife. He would walk to the door and head outside to smoke. In another few days he would be fired. And then, coming in some time after that to collect what would be left of his pay, he would corner me and recount in a harsh, conspiratorial tone how he had been mistreated, how he had been abused, how Teresa had taken advantage of him.
A few months later I would lose my own job, but by then it wouldn’t matter. It would be winter, there’d be snow on the ground. And later still, other seasons. Time would pass. Teresa would eventually run the café into the ground. There would be no more Riviera. No more heavy, early mornings. No more keys in pockets, nor light coming in at the window.
This fog, I thought, will lift and everything attending it will be dispersed.
Then She Smiled and Walked Away
I’ve been working for this one construction company now for almost a year, and lately it seems my boss has been shaping me into his errand boy. It sounds bad, but I actually like running errands. It beats hauling concrete, say, climbing all day up a steep path with fifty-pound bags on your shoulder. It beats digging a hole, working in the rain, looking for a leak in a water line. Because that’s the kind of work I have been doing otherwise, all of it much more strenuous, and more tiring than running errands. It’s important to me that I am not overly tired at the end of the day, because at the end of the day, I don’t have to work for anyone anymore so I like to have a little energy left to do the things I like to do. I like to read books, for instance. I like to lie back and think about things.
If I’m going to be running errands, what I might do is take a truck home with me at the end of the day. The next morning I will get in the truck and drive to the local dump, to the auto parts store, and then to grab a coffee somewhere. After that it’s to the lumberyard, the hardware store and the gas station. The company I work for operates out on an island, so we are always having to fill up about a hundred jerries with gasoline. Then I’ll load them onto the truck and head to the local marina to meet our barge. We have our own barge which is used to carry our vehicles back and forth. A truck will leave the island loaded with junk, and it’ll come back loaded with gasoline.
And what’s funny about all this is when I have to park one of these trucks overnight on the road out front of my apartment building. Because the thing is huge and ghast
ly, with old toilets, water heaters and bags full of garbage just about overflowing in the back. People must see it and think, My god, what kind of an asshole drives a truck like that? They must form an image of that person in their minds, and what’s funny is that I am not that person. I am young, a quasi-intellectual guy, fairly modest, quiet and slight. Most of my spare time is spent reading books and just thinking about things.
Really, most of my time I spend just trying to make sense of our existence. Because as far as I can tell, ours is an existence wherein not much of consequence happens. I mean, of course things happen along the way. We do bump into things now and then. But we also spend an awful lot of our lives just waiting and waiting, and I think that in fact we spend so much of our lives waiting for something to happen, that we begin to forget we are waiting, and we begin to believe that things are happening, when the truth is that, really, they’re not.
Most of what happens is trivial, cultivated, funny little things to distract us. Like when a few weeks ago two guys from the company were drywalling somebody’s house, and after they’d finished, our boss got a call from the clients to say that their cat was lost and they figured it was drywalled into the wall. The guys had to go back, help locate the cat, and cut into the wall to release it. Apparently they had boarded right over it. After that, of course, we all had a wicked laugh, but then we more or less forgot about it. And that’s the kind of thing that’s happening all the time. Good for a laugh, but quickly forgotten.
Recently though, something happened. It was around lunch one day, and I was at the marina waiting in the truck for the barge to come in. By the way, this is one of the best things about being an errand boy, how you can wind up with downtime throughout the day. Now I bring a book with me to work because I can often find time to read a page or two. Today I was reading one by Miriam Toews called A Complicated Kindness. For a minute though, I couldn’t find the book in my knapsack and I wanted to bang my head against the steering wheel because I thought I’d forgotten it at home. That’s one of the worst things that can happen, when you have an opportunity to read a book while being paid, but you find that you’ve forgotten it. Luckily though, I found it. It had been hiding near the bottom of my bag, partially hidden beneath the sandwich I packed for lunch.