Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  It was delicate and soft. A little girl’s hand, a writer’s hand.

  They asked him what hospital.

  “The hospital in Venice.”

  “It is beautiful in Southern California.”

  “No, the Venice in Italy.”

  “Great, I’ve never been. But maybe we go somewhere we can drive our rig instead.”

  The Naked and the Sibella

  Behind the drawn ER curtain he was attended to by what appeared to be a score of supremely professional and ethereally kind men and women, a diversity of age and race and ethnicity, a snapshot of both California and New York, which qualified as my two homes. More EKG’s, a chest X-ray, two more nitroglycerin tabs, blood draws. The oxygen refreshed. The monitors beeped and chuffed, buzzed and hummed.

  “What day is it?”

  “Who is the president?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “What is the year?”

  “What is your name?”

  “What is the year?”

  ✴✴✴

  Eventually, time drifted and slowed and suddenly we no longer appeared to be in crisis mode, at least as far as I could tell, but why should you trust me? Myron appeared to have stabilized, for now. The doctor, baby-faced enough to have once been a fellow student of mine, gently but firmly broke the news. (Sibelladvisory: I don’t think he was an intern.) The doc said Myron’s ticket had been punched for the night. He was going to be admitted, once he got out of the ER. If he ever got out of the ER, he intimated, semi-ominously. The first furious rounds of blood test results and EKGs were encouraging,

  but we had some ways to go. Myron balked at the prospect of a hospital stay. “It’s my birthday.” He lied and said he had dinner reservations. He didn’t ever need a reservation at Carmine’s. The attending made a cameo and glanced at Myron’s hospital wristband identification to verify. “It is your birthday.” He returned two minutes later bearing a chocolate cupcake with swirled blue icing, a tongue depressor doing duty as a candle. “Happy Birthday.” Nice, no?

  Go on, Sibella.

  On birthdays, Myron told me, he usually tried to write a poem. Would he ever stop surprising me? His attempts invariably led to meaning-of-life dime store philosophy, he said, which is the death knell of poetry. He long ago resigned himself. Never would he compose his version of Dylan Thomas’s great “Poem in October”: “It was my thirtieth year to heaven…”

  Okay, you got me. I’ve been temporarily laying off the collusions for a while, for obvious reasons.

  In case it isn’t too late to fill you in, I can suggest in what strange regard I must have held Myron when I say that I would never have imagined him to have a birthday. Yes, of course, he had to have been born and it must have taken place on a certain memorialized day. But it never crossed my mind that he was the kind of person who had a birthday or that anybody including him would ever note the occasion. Birthday cakes, songs, parties at the zoo when he turned ten, baseball bats and piñatas, trying-too-hard cards (Happy Birthday, Mister President…), skinny black tie presents.

  The fact is that at Hard Rain we never acknowledged the day, and accountability for that oversight must be borne, at least partly, by Myron himself. No, I didn’t conceive that he popped out of an egg, but I also never associated him with the conventional markers of life that make event planners and card companies wealthy. All to say, a little late to Myron’s birthday party was I. Because here he was experiencing the possibility of the ultimate conventional marker of life: its termination. Feel free to wonder if I myself popped out of an egg and I can see why you might be inclined. FYI, my mother has the research results to argue to the contrary.

  Thanks, Mom, and I owe you a call. And who taught you how to text? I wish you were here with me right now.

  Stop, Sibella, stop. If there are any moments you should stay in, all you Deepak Chopra Kale-Munching Types out there meditating, those moments would definitely include being in the ER alongside your hospital-gowned boss with a PICC line in his arm.

  Within a few hours the birthday boy’s chest pressure had alleviated. Calm settled over the scene, the wait for diagnostic resolution commenced. Had there been in fact a cardiac event and was Myron at risk? They didn’t know yet. The two of us were inside this darkened, curtained-off space and I felt the hours pass slowly by, like floats on the never-ending Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He dozed off and woke up and then dozed off again, and he surely wasn’t up to a conversation. Having nothing else to do, I struggled to resolve mentally all the problems with Hard Rain and Fig and, honestly, YGB. I got nowhere, and Myron was adrift. But he was, as I said, stable. Silenced and stabled. Being nothing but a reluctant tourist to such a rarefied alien domain, I wondered what the weather and the food were like and if they all dressed like Murmechka.

  A gauzy apparition-size wonderful nurse appeared. Petals on a wet black bough. Things had now calmed down enough for a collusion or two. I don’t believe I hallucinated her and I wished I understood the appeal of haiku. But you sit in an ER for a long time and see what kind of inane connections you make. In four hours, this nurse said they would draw more blood. They were on the trail of an enzyme called troponin. It is a reliable indicator of a cardiac event, and they needed a retest. She looked optimistic. You might assume, as I did, that optimism is in short supply in an ER, but you would be wrong, as I was. The nurse once had an Italian boyfriend, she confided, apropos of absolutely nothing, but if you hang around an ER long enough you might think everything is apropos of everything else. She said every woman needed at least one Italian bad boy boyfriend. I couldn’t validate that contention, though Caitlin certainly might, and yet the idea sounded oddly attractive today. I cannot recreate the context, but she threw out some idiomatic Italian expressions, including “Ti voglio bene,” the charmingly indirect Italian way of saying “I love you.”

  Thanks, Google. Sometimes you rock.

  You know how when somebody is starting to learn a foreign language, they can’t help showing off and saying stuff like “the word for pie in Latvian is the same as the word for flounder,” yuck yuck, and they sign off emails in chummy unspeakable Croat. Well, this nurse was full of language lessons herself, but it was more than okay here in the ER. In case you find this information handy, say if you’re sleeping with somebody—why must I punish myself by bringing this up?—you say, “Ti amo,” but “Ti voglio bene” you can say to a good friend or family member. She wasn’t addressing me or Myron, but considering the day and the life Myron and I were having and the kind of people we were no longer sleeping with, it was consoling and encouraging to hear the love sentiment expressed by a human being in our midst.

  Unless I had completely lost track, I was in the middle of the longest stretch of waking life—thirty-six hours—that I could recall when I hadn’t been occupied by reading a manuscript or a book. Or Proust.

  When Myron fell back to sleep, I couldn’t help but attend to the disembodied voices bouncing off the ward’s walls. The abject moaning, as of a suffering animal, from a far-off corner. The demented but eloquent articulations of an elderly woman one bed over. The rich baritone of docs examining one patient after another.

  “Where did you get these bruises?”

  “How many times did you fall?”

  “Do you remember if you ate today?”

  “Take a deep breath.”

  “Does this hurt?”

  “How about this?”

  Myron stirred and, as if he had awakened after a long journey on a plane, which could have been similar to his experience, he might have had a funny taste in his mouth. I know I did. He had a few things he wanted to say: “As lightning bolts go, this one I should have seen coming. Where else would I wish to be on my birthday if not here? It is good to be reminded, as if I needed to be, how brief life is, how tenuous the hold we have on our love
d ones. The makings of a poem? No. At the same time, this dime store philosophy seems anything but.”

  I had never heard Myron weigh in like that or say something like “loved one.” The title of a pretty good novel by my favorite misanthrope, Sir E. Waugh, now that I think about it. Which made for an unfortunate connection insofar as that novel was about the funeral trade.

  Once again, let us return to our regularly scheduled pogrom.

  Hours later, after the troponin search party returned, Myron’s doctor informed him the test results had all gone his way. “It’s probably a tiny risk to be discharged, but let’s not take it. You need to see the cardiologist in the morning, do a treadmill test. Happy birthday.”

  A few minutes later, guess who walked in wearing her blue scrubs?

  Wrong. Not Ashlay, who has already made too many surprise appearances. Here is a little giveaway clue. There was Dr. O’Kelly stitched on her chest in the area where she would have had her Muse tattooed had she once been as drunk and stupid as me or I.

  “Myron, how are you feeling?” said Caitlin or Calypso or Dr. O’Kelly.

  “You really are an ER doc?” he said.

  Who saw that coming? (You’re lying, Kelly. I can tell when you’re lying—the giveaway is your jaws are moving.)

  “My shift started and why would you ever doubt me?”

  I myself had six-hundred thousand plus reasons he could doubt her.

  “Looks like you had a fake heart attack, but they’ll see for sure tomorrow. And if it was a fake heart attack, it doesn’t mean that the next time it won’t be a real heart attack.”

  I had a question for the grifter. “This is what you call your bedside manner, or is it bedside manners? Because you’re short and short on both.”

  “Will you ever be able to stop yourself from saying whatever crosses your mind?”

  “Let me think. No. Fuck you.”

  Myron’s turn. “That was some act you cultivated, with your book, your depraved rich boyfriend, the Cable connection. You went to a lot of trouble to publish a book, which means you’re like a million other people. But you and the whole Fontana rat pack, all pretty good actors. How much of what you told me contains a grain of truth?”

  “A grain? Everything I said had a grain of truth. And it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it? I had you in the palm of my hand for a minute, you have to admit.”

  “Speaking of admissions, do I have to spend the night?”

  “That wasn’t my call. But I’ll be back later, before you’re sent upstairs. Rest easy, Myron, you son of a bitch. You should have bought my book. But you’re probably right, it sucks a little. As do lots of your books. I’m working on a new one, and I’ll send it your way when it’s done. But I am sorry about one thing. It was a mean trick, what we played on you in Venice. See, Sibella? I have a smidge of a conscience. And I have sworn off decadent rich Italian boyfriends forever.”

  Should I have introduced her to the nice nurse with her bad Italian boyfriend issues that she didn’t regret? Pass.

  “And don’t you worry, Sibella, I’ll take good care of him. I always knew you two would end up lovers.” Luvahs.

  She brought up another topic. “Meant to ask you before in your office. The beard, Myron? Since when?” His facial hair was flourishing and the itching reduced to a nonfactor.

  “Since the very day we had lunch and you and I made history, or almost did. You like it?”

  She shrugged so as to indicate not so much.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep it.”

  I had one other thing to bring up with her: “Been mulling. The whole Pork/Fig extravaganza—and Pork’s multiple identities. You’re a doctor. I suppose. Was that real, or was that another piece of Fontana bullshit?”

  It was the minute before that I formulated in my mind the question, and without planning, I was asking it. I do that. How do I know what I think until I say it? It turned out that Caitlin had one more surprise up her lab coat sleeve.

  “Define real.”

  “You know, like a heart attack real. That real.”

  She laughed that chilly laugh of hers. “Oh, Sibella, you are such a sweet tall child. But finally, bravo, you figured it out. Took you long enough. Congratulations. Isn’t Porphyry a great actor? Multiple personalities. Dissociative identity disorder. Seriously? Please. What a brilliant play. He had you both going, didn’t he? That was a beautiful plan Cable came up with, I have to tip my hat. And about Porphyry, never underestimate a desperate man who feels he has one last chance to make it—even if he has to hang on his famous dead brother’s coattails. And never overestimate an arrogant man, like Myron, who’s had it his way for far too long. He trusts his judgment too easily. Soon as you both felt pity for miserable, cunning Porphyry, we had you by the balls. Too bad you canceled publication of the three books. They were pretty good in my opinion and they would have sold if you knew how to be a publisher again, if you ever went back to the good old days. Free advice: don’t make any future excursions into Fontana Town.”

  “Fuck, you guys are good,” I said. “Though not in that way. Don’t you have to be on your way to first do no harm? Give my sympathies to all your lucky patients.”

  Getting an MD degree and an ER job didn’t necessarily mean she had any brains any more than being a human meant she had a heart. I was glad when she took off. I was always glad when she departed any room or space I cohabited with her. Maybe she had squandered all that was left of her charisma somewhere in Fontanaville, which like Las Vegas would siphon it off like a bucket of silver dollars before a slot machine.

  “Of course,” said Myron to me once she was gone, “she could be lying again.”

  “There’s always a chance with her, you’re right.”

  “Well, in any case, this was some kind of birthday,” he said. “How about let’s not do this again next year, shall we?”

  I told him that was a deal I could live with.

  “Me too. But I am glad you were here, and glad you’ll be at Hard Rain. It would not be the same without you.”

  I heard him and his plain-spoken words in a new way. What do they say in Italian? Right. Ti voglio bene. I was also convinced that tonight I was not going to allow anybody to die. Hell of a plan, huh? Having never received a job description of the junior editor job I did, I never bothered to ask for a job description of the editor in chief. Anybody would assume that one key bullet point would have to be: Keep the publisher alive and fucking kicking.

  Like the Leopard says, “While there’s death, there’s hope.”

  A Passage to Sibella

  Weeks passed and I finally signed up at the Y and crossed that off my bucket list. As for buckets, I had missed hoops. I love the smell of a locker room: the foot sprays, the talcum, the menthologized ointments, the damp towels, the bittersweetness of adhesive wraps around ankles and wrists. I love even more the echoes bouncing off the gym rafters. The screech that your sneaks make when you make your cut and the Sleepy Hollow sound of the dribbled basketball and the sweet rippling of the net when a shot from distance goes in, yessssssssssss, swish. I always felt at home at a gym and on the basketball court.

  I was in pretty good shape in general, still had my wind, could run up and down the court, but it would take a while for me to get back into basketball shape. Nevertheless, it was easy for me to get into a coed five-on-five pickup game, that night after work being no exception, and there’s a word you don’t hear much anymore: coed. Can’t say I miss it. I never knew the names of my improm two or four teammates at the Y, and they didn’t know mine, and usually players don’t introduce themselves. Considering how much back- and butt-slapping and high-fiving takes place during a game, anonymity always struck me an adorable affectation.

  During warm-ups for the we-got-next game, I intuited that most of them had played some kind of organized ball, college or at least high scho
ol, and that would mean they were acquainted with the elements of balling: screens, pick and rolls, clear-outs, box-outs, pass and cut aways, the man/ball/man/ball defensive mind-set. We shot free throws for opening possession, and my team lost, so we were going to begin on defense, my specialty. First team to twenty-one wins, three-pointers count.

  The eight guys ranged in age from thirty-ish to fifty-ish. There’s always a duffer suffering from male-pattern baldness at the Y with a big black brace on his knee and a white headband and he manages to talk himself into a five-on-five, and this game was no exception. There were two females, by whom I mean me and a woman in her late twenties who was a lot shorter than I. Unless I was wrong, and these days there was a solid chance I was, she was a ringer, and she was a gunner, and she was going to give me trouble, because the girls were going to guard each other, and my game was more inside and hers outside. My plan took shape: she might be able to shoot better outside the key, but I could capitalize on my height and post her up and score from in close. Points under the basket are precious. They appear effortless to the uninitiated, but they are anything but.

  Immediately before inbounding arrived the touchy moment of negotiation. Who goes skin, who goes shirts? Touchy, that is, in the context of female participation. I’ve seen it happen that females keep on their shirts if they find themselves on the skins team, and everybody compensates.

  My “man,” the other girl, took charge. She was not of that phony, gentlemanly school of thought. “We’ll run skins,” she called out, as she without hesitation whipped off her white T-shirt. I was glad she had not learned any lessons from Ashlay Commingle, because she revealed her white sports bra and stomach-crunched muscles, and her skins teammates complied and took off their shirts. Good, I thought, I wouldn’t have to feel self-conscious about my ink concealed under the navy blue T-shirt and, fuck, I needed to do something about that someday.

  Skins brought the ball up past half-court, and the designated ball handler, shortest guy on the court, as usual, executed a nasty crossover dribble and blew past his ankles-broken defender and took the ball right to the rack and scored. Okay, our opponent might be pretty good.