by Sean Ferrell
One afternoon on her way out, she noticed someone staring at her from under the awning of the dark, abandoned hotel across the alley. At first she didn’t recognize that it was Mana.
Mana walked the half block to Sara. Neither wanted to talk, but Mana had come for something, and Sara waited. At last Mana cleared her throat. “You’ve got him all to yourself, don’t you?’
“I’m just trying to—”
“You know Joshua is his son?”
Sara felt herself sink slightly into the cement sidewalk.
Mana said, “If he ever comes back, you can ask him.”
“I never asked for you to go. You got yourself fired.”
Mana nodded, her jaw set, and again Sara smelled the stale smoke around her. Mana looked up toward the building. “Just don’t hurt him.”
“I won’t,” Sara said.
Mana turned and walked away, didn’t look back even though Sara stood and watched her until she disappeared at the corner. The street was a silent canyon. Sara imagined Phil waking with nothing to eat or drink and headed uptown to the latest restaurant she’d found with working electricity.
She continued that pattern the day after and the day after and beyond. She found new places for food and then, when the restaurants closed, new places. Some people had begun to farm in the parks, and simple markets formed, competed, merged. The days turned to weeks and soon enough weeks to years, and she and Phil had habits established so that daily routine was as natural as breath. Sara had come to expect that eventually Phil would succumb to his drink, or whatever it was that he suspected might kill him, and that she would have to find yet another new path, and new habits, and someone else to care for. She had thought that until the day I knocked at their door.
Sara finished telling me about Phil. I sat on the bed next to her. I held the tentacled device, and she laid a hand over it. “He has this.” She ran a finger along its side. “One like it anyway.” She touched the hidden switch again, and the arms slid away from the needle, soundlessly reaching out to hide and reveal the spike. It looked alive, as if it squirmed in her hands, eager to escape, threatening to strike if it had to.
“He would spend hours in his room, making lists, going through junk he brought home,” she said, “using this machine to pull little bits of memory to the front, to replay them, trying to live them for the first time again. And he drank. I left him alone, took care of the apartment. Joshua stopped coming at all. I never found out if what Mana said was true. I think it is. Phil never talks about Joshua or Mana. I never ask.”
She moved her fingers from the device to my hand. If I asked her any questions, I had a feeling the story would stop, would dry in her throat and catch and make her sick and she’d never tell it again, to me or anyone. I let her talk.
“Eventually Phil’s money ran out, or the bank closed or disappeared. He spent a week hanging around the apartment, realizing we had no way to buy anything, and then he stopped using that thing.” She pointed at the device. “And then he focused on his collecting. Saving the things of the world.” She shrugged. “If he was going to save the world, I had to find some way to get dinner.” She forced my fingers from the device, but not to get to the device, to get to my hand. She held it, tight. “There are people with money and memories. I take both and give one back.”
She was silent for a long time. Outside my window I saw the fluttering of green-feathered heads where parrots had gathered on the ledge and talked quietly to one another of traffic and stock prices, their chatter comforting. I put the device on the dresser.
“You should get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll find another room.”
She shook her head. “No. I’ll go.” She stood, and we looked at each other for several moments. Finally she said, “He might wake up and need me.”
I nodded, and then we reached for each other and fell as we tangled. I caught us on the edge of the bed, and we lifted ourselves onto it. She pulled herself from me long enough to remove her dress and then straddled me. Her skin tasted of salt, and she smelled of candle smoke. She tugged my shirt and pants from me, and I entered her. Joined together, we stilled, listened to our breath. When I moved again, I felt a desperation I didn’t know I could feel. I was blind, though I thought my eyes were open, and at the edge of my climax I gritted my teeth and whispered the name I needed her to have.
I called her “Lily.”
It was a name she might have forgotten, or forced herself to not remember. She might never have heard it before. When I said it, she stilled, her body tensed, and she came with a shudder. I heard her sobbing through it and came myself, arched into her and through her. When our shaking stopped, I drew away and looked down at her. Her face was in shadow; even the glint of her eyes was gone, either closed or turned off, I couldn’t see. She rolled away from me, pulled herself from the bed, and stepped into the bathroom. She closed the door.
I lay in darkness and listened to water run in the sink, strained to hear more. When she returned, light clung to her damp skin. She padded across the floor, nude from the waist up, her skirt pressed to her with one hand. She looked newly baptized.
“I would stay, but he might wake up. He gets scared.”
“I understand. I can come by in the morning.”
She smiled. “You should.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, then drew back to look me in the eye. “I’ve helped someone in so much pain, I don’t want to do it again. I want someone to help me this time.”
I nodded and watched her dress, wondering what I should call her. I regretted that the name I’d carried inside me had leaked out. How badly did I crave her that I toyed with the very things that would kill us both? Reclothed, she returned to the bed and bent to kiss me again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
After she left, I lay back and watched the ceiling flicker from a streetlight that turned on and off at random intervals. It blinked out, and I wondered if it would come back on, and before it could, I fell asleep.
I WORKED FOR most of the next day, trying to let the book-hauling trips to and from Grand Central distract me from the fact that events seemed to be stuck on rails that ran off a cliff. By midafternoon the main concourse had grown so hot that even the painters stopped work. Some climbed from their scaffolds, others slept where they were, high above the floor. I left and walked back to the West Side, back to Lily, for that was how I thought of her now. She was a woman afflicted by baptisms and allowed those around her to arrange them. Phil had provided one and I another. For her sake I hoped she found a way to handle a third.
At first I thought their apartment empty. Despite the open windows, the room smelled of sewage. Nearly too afraid of what I would find, I walked toward retching sounds in the bathroom. Phil was nude, straddling the toilet, a bucket on his lap. Lily held him upright. Both poured sweat. Phil retched into the bucket again, and as he did, the strain forced something out the other end and into the toilet. He moaned and pulled his head from the bucket to gasp lungfuls of air. His eyes rolled in his skull, stared over me, unseeing.
Lily looked up at me with tears and sweat on her face. “Help me.”
I stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders. She knelt in the tub, eyes on Phil. He shuddered and nearly fell from my grasp. His skin was cold and wet; his head lolled. Vomit streaked his chest and lap. He retched again, then screamed. At the end the scream turned to words, a jumble of nonsense that made Lily cry openly.
“How long has he been like this?”
She shook hair from her eyes. “All day.”
We needed to get liquid into him. “Can you find some ice?”
“I can look.”
When she’d gone, I took firmer hold of Phil. He was moaning, but I couldn’t tell if he even knew I was there. “I’m going to move you, Phil.” He moaned in response. My arms under his, I raised him into a standing hug. I stepped into the tub and brought him down as carefully as I could, although his head still knocked against the edge. He made no sound or movement. I thi
nk he was tired of sitting; to rest in the tub might have been a relief. I laid him in the tub, his head to one side. As if he had waited for the moment, he groaned and closed his eyes. His legs were streaked with his thin feces. I dumped the bucket into the toilet, flushed, ran water into the bucket, and dumped it again and again. Then I found a hand towel, wet it with soap, and began to clean Phil. Lily returned with a small bowl filled with crushed ice.
“I’ll do that,” she said, and held the ice toward me.
“It’s okay, I can finish.”
Her face grew hard. “Give me the fucking towel.”
I handed her the towel. She put the bowl down, and I washed my hands before taking the bowl and sitting near Phil’s head to slip slivers of ice between his pale lips. Phil accepted them, his eyes shut. In his fitful sleep, his lips worked and the ice melted, running from them as often as down his throat.
Lily squatted and wiped the towel over him, her face still hard. She let the sink run so that she could wash and wring out the towel with less fuss. She worked for several minutes until he was mostly clean. Her anger at the illness, at him, was palpable and vibrant.
She left the bathroom and came back a minute later with a blanket, which she tucked around him and pillowed under his head. He was silent through her efforts. When she was done, she collapsed to the floor beside me and looked at me with red eyes and a set jaw.
“He’s dying,” she said.
I thought of lying and telling her he was not, that this was some effect of not drinking or too much drink, that if we could hold him here long enough he’d recover, but I saw in her face her expectation. She waited for the lie, and I wouldn’t give it to her. I took her elbow, and we led each other to sit on the nearest bed. She started to cry, and I held her hand. We heard nothing from the bathroom. After a while she checked on him and returned with fresh tears on her face.
I said, “Is there a hospital?”
She shook her head. “No one’s been seen in the hospitals for years.”
“I can go look for a doctor.”
She ran a hand across her face. It had an effect like a magician’s wand. Her eyes lifted, and she was steeled. “You can look if you want to. I won’t ask you to.”
I nodded and stood, unsure what I should do. With the sun setting, Phil asleep in his tub, nothing seemed like the proper response. Nothing felt appropriate. I said, “I’ll be back.”
Lily didn’t answer, but I knew she’d heard.
I can’t recall the walk toward the park. My mind was a void. I embraced it. My head was too full of what I knew. I found myself in front of Emma’s stand. She was locking handouts and pamphlets into the cupboards at her feet. When she saw me, she smiled.
“If you’re here to bring me more phonebooks—” Her smile fell. “What’s happened?”
“I need a map that shows all the hospitals in the city.”
She started to dig. “Oh, God, oh, God.” She knocked her organized piles over and grabbed a stack from a back shelf. She pulled the map open and shoved it toward me. “It’s Phil? He’s sick?”
I spread the map on the counter. She pointed at a few spots marked with a blue H.
“These,” she said. “The map is very out of date. Lots of streets have changed. And good luck finding a doctor. Don’t remember the last time the hospitals were open.”
I folded the map up and thanked her. The sun was already low enough that she stood in deep shadow. Her hand reached out and grasped my wrist. Her skin, thin and pale, felt like rose petals.
“Good luck, honey.” Her voice was thick. I walked away, east, toward the nearest hospital on the map. I don’t know if I realized then that it was the one I’d been born in.
I reached the East Side after dark. I stood before the vacant building and looked up at its black windows. Unlike almost any other building I’d seen, this one was completely abandoned—not a single light in a single window, no squatters moving among the rooms. Perhaps there was too much superstition about disease or ghosts of the dead. Whatever it was, the neighborhood gave the building its space. I felt myself cross an invisible barrier at First Avenue, and I stood at the entrance, gazed through the multiple doors into what had been a waiting area.
I didn’t bother to enter. There was no one there.
The building across the street, which had once been dorms for medical students, was a wide structure with eight floors and a hundred windows on the front of it, many of them filled with incandescent light. I walked up to it with little hope. In the entrance sat a woman with three small girls hiding behind her. All of them were shoeless and wore simple white dresses, even the mother. They hovered like spirits in the dark.
I raised a hand as I approached. “I need a doctor. A man is very sick.”
She shook her head. “None here. Sorry, hon. I haven’t seen a doctor in weeks.”
“Where was that?”
“One traveled by but didn’t stay. She was headed upstate, to family.”
I thanked her and left her and her children. They’d grown brave as I’d spoken to their mother and now chased me along the sidewalk to the corner. When I turned and headed west, they stopped and talked to one another in whispers. I didn’t look back. I felt an absurd fear that the hospital recognized me.
I returned to Phil’s building, the moon now overhead, echoes of the day nipping at me up the stairs. An occasional crash of metal, a cough, a scrape around a corner. I would find Lily and tell her how sorry I was, how I couldn’t locate a doctor. I knew I wouldn’t leave Phil’s apartment to go back to my empty, soulless hotel. I knew the next day I’d go to find her breakfast and lunch, that I’d bring her dinner and sit with her to care for Phil. I knew that we would watch him slowly die.
The next few weeks passed too quickly, even as each day lasted too long to measure. Phil’s illness dried up, both ends stopped running out of control, and he retreated from the bathroom to his bedroom. He lay on a pallet stowed in a corner. His desk and papers dominated the room. Lily and I watched him in turns. I stayed during the evening and through the early morning, until just before the sun came up. I would wake midmorning with Lily whispering to Phil’s still shape beneath his dirty blankets. What she did during her time away from him, I don’t know. For my own part, I had a hard time leaving him. I’d known him only a short while. I had adopted him, it seemed, as much as he might have adopted me.
Most days he didn’t know we were there, or if he did, he ignored us. He spoke to invisible people, mumbled stories without beginning or end. He referred to distant memories as if they’d just happened, as if he fell into them again and again, caught in a loop where he answered the same unasked questions. He screamed answers, impotent.
In lucid moments Phil would recognize me and cry.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he said. I nodded and agreed. I offered him ice chips hammered from the edges of the rumbling kitchen freezer. He refused them and glared at me as if I didn’t, couldn’t, understand.
Other times he was more himself, quiet and speculative. He asked questions about my days at the hotel. I explained I was spending most nights in his apartment. I tried to hide the fact I was caring for him, as if he wouldn’t know.
“You shouldn’t be here watching an old man die. Neither should she.” He no longer used any name for Lily. I tried not to as well, lest I confuse him. I think we both recognized that to question either’s understanding of her was to question our own.
Sometimes we spoke of his items, his watchbands and eyeglasses, piles stacked on shelves to the ceiling on every floor of the building. “I know they’ll come around to collect them,” he said of the party guests. “When they do, make sure they only take what I gave them. They can’t just take whatever they want.”
“I understand,” I said. I didn’t say that no one would come, that only Emma had inquired after him, but that she was too broken by his illness to visit.
For two days he refused to eat or drink. He wouldn’t speak. He lay on h
is back, eyes on the ceiling. No matter when I looked at him, he was unmoving, staring. Finally, on the second day, well after the sun set, he asked, “What’s it like outside?” We had been quiet until that moment in the useless light from flickering streetlamps.
I said, “Same as always. It’s getting colder.”
He nodded as if this made sense, as if it followed some logic. “I remember when it got cold enough outside that we’d put cans of soda on the sill and they’d be frozen in an hour. Now it only gets cold enough to not sweat to death.”
“I can remember Central Park covered in snow.”
He laughed, a small gasp followed by coughing. “I know when you’re lying.”
“Why?”
“Your lips move.”
He did his best not to choke when he laughed at his own joke, grasping at breaths, holding tight to them for moments, eyes blinking rapidly. I did all I could, hand on his chest, feeling at the rattle within, poorly hidden sadness in my smile and a dagger of shame at how little I knew of living. I’d gathered information but created nothing, watched so many like Phil turn to dust in graves I celebrated for my witnessing. To know where the cemetery lies tells you nothing of lives. When he was gone, what could I say of him, his era? I was worse than a headstone eroded to blank.
During the days I slept, usually in Lily’s room but not with Lily. She either took care of Phil or left the apartment for long periods. I asked her where she went as if she owed me an explanation, as if Phil’s crying for her gave me some authority. When she refused to answer, I stopped asking and a mutual silence developed between us.
Occasionally she came to the room while I slept or would call to me when I was in Phil’s room watching him sleep. In those rare moments, we would lie together and I would enter her, similar to how it had been the night in my hotel room, but something like a veil drifted between us. I both hated and loved that separation. Some part of Lily was gone, hidden away, so obscured that I worried I might think of her as Sara again. Yet it was also perfect. This didn’t seem to be the woman who would arrive at the party; she was evolving into something else, something haunted and fixated. Perhaps I’d done what needed to be done, just by arriving here, by playing through this drama.