This is the note Griffin gave me, on expensive notepaper with his name at the top:
SILVIA WEISS
POSSIBLE APPENDICITIS
COMPLICATED
Then a squiggle I could not make out.
PLEASE CALL—NEEDS CT SCAN ASAP
On my third attempt, I managed to convince a taxi driver to wait for me long enough to explain that we were talking life or death—but nothing infectious—and I needed him to turn into the street I was on the corner of to collect an old lady. Silvia lowered herself in as I stood awkwardly by, not sure how to help and scared to touch her. Griffin’s nurse tutted at my ineptitude. Silvia, maybe doubting me too, or wanting to show me she was doing okay, gave the driver an address.
“Isn’t that the address we went to last night?” I asked as I registered it.
“That’s where I’m supposed to go, isn’t it?” She was sweating, eyes bulging. I felt sweat trickling from behind my knees now too. I didn’t think it was. I thought Griffin wanted us to go to a different place—a hospital—but I didn’t know where it was, so I hoped I’d misremembered the address of the surgery the previous night and we were going to the hospital, because after a while the numbers and avenues all blurred into one. I hoped that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault for not intervening. I hadn’t because I didn’t want to be wrong. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be culpable for what might happen to her as a result of wasting time.
The taxi turned into the dead-end street that reached the edge of the river with the surgery from the night before with the loud machinery. I told myself I must have got it wrong about the hospital.
“If it’s appendicitis,” Silvia said feverishly as the driver counted out the money and I tried to unstick my legs from the leather seat to slide out, “it might go at any moment, yes?”
“Yes. Well, no. I don’t know,” I said. I knew I could check if I turned roaming on, but it didn’t feel like a good idea to know. I edged her into the surgery, moving with her old body as if it were a numb part of mine, and showed the note Griffin had given me to the receptionist on duty.
“I don’t think we can help with this,” she said. “Does she have an appointment today?”
“Call Griffin,” Silvia said through spit that was gathering in her mouth, the plea disappearing like foam in the distance it had to go between her and the receptionist.
We watched her speaking into the receiver.
“Yes,” she said, her nod and smile so American and so misleading. “You are not supposed to be here—you’re supposed to be there.”
“Where?” I asked, holding Silvia up by her armpit.
“New York Presbyterian Hospital.”
We went through the incremental process of exiting the surgery again, using the side door rather than the rotating one, which Silvia could not keep up with. In the next taxi, the suspension was worse and the driver was angry. I tried to hold her down in the seat as we jerked around.
“I made a mistake.” She said it as if she wanted to confess. We were stationary. Her eyes began roving around the interior. “Now I’m going to die waiting.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault, it was Griffin’s. He wasn’t clear.”
When she didn’t reply, I wondered whether this was even the mistake she meant.
In the emergency room I imagined someone would address our emergency, but we were confronted instead with armed guards and a woman with a clipboard, who surveyed me as if I might be about to do something criminal unless she could prevent it.
“What is your relation?”
“Her granddaughter.” These words no longer thrilled me—they now implied a kind of bondage.
She began talking over me as I tried to explain, flicking my hand away as I tried to deliver Griffin’s note about the appendicitis, the complications, and the urgency. I wanted the woman with the clipboard to be terrified for me, to sweep Silvia away behind some curtain and fix everything. Instead she was laboriously slow with the form, looking at me with either boredom or disdain, as if she did not believe a word I said.
“I’m adopted,” I explained, as if I were explaining to a police officer that this was in fact my own house that I was breaking into.
After that, the hours passed in sudden jumps. Something was moving very fast (in proportion to the eighty-one years preceding it), which was time running out for Silvia, and something else seemed not to be going at all—the hospital, into whose care this last, fast portion of her life had to be entrusted. It was like staring at an hourglass timer—sand falling, powdery and thin, between two solid bulges that seemed to be growing or shrinking much more slowly than the sand falling between them. I tried to give my note to every nurse and doctor we encountered, but no one seemed interested in it and no one took it, which is why I still have it. Silvia was laid on a cart and wheeled through the maze of hallways, sometimes part of a larger design, a horseshoe or a hexagon, and sometimes just on and on like a warren with no clear structure. Along it were some shut doors and some that opened onto other scenes of suffering, sometimes lone figures and sometimes whole families separated by curtains, and then back to a long, doorless hallway again, in which we were alone.
It seemed we were being shown a longer, scenic route so that we might fully appreciate just how many lives were ahead of Silvia’s in the queue for salvation. The fact that we had “walked” in, as the nurse so breezily put it, rather than arrived by ambulance, seemed to count against us. They were resolutely, aggressively, demonically composed and even smiled and joked with colleagues they passed. Finally, after some prodding of Silvia’s abdomen, we were given the verdict: “We need to do more tests.”
The doctor we were with at that moment, the only one whose name I managed to hold on to like a splinter of driftwood in the sea of green and blue uniforms, was Ryan. A colleague of Ryan’s had already taken a blood sample, but the blood had hemolyzed, Ryan explained, so he was going to do it himself.
Ryan looked over Silvia’s arm and frowned. “Can’t find a vein right now,” he said. “Flushing needs to be very gentle—they blew up the vein. See that purple lump?”
Another patient was wheeled next to us in the hallway, where he began to sing, flat on his back like an upturned turtle, flapping his arms, simultaneously crooning and conducting an invisible choir from the trolley, his head slightly inclined towards me and Silvia. Without warning, as if suddenly spotting a fish to spear, Ryan plunged the needle into Silvia’s arm, clasped in his own. Her face froze in an expression of agony.
“Nope,” Ryan said, inspecting the syringe. “Have to try again.”
Silvia drew her knees up towards her chest and closed her eyes tight. He speared twice more.
“Got it,” he said with evident satisfaction.
“What’s your name?” Silvia said, tears sliding out from under her eyelids.
“Ryan,” Ryan said happily.
“I’ll remember that. It was my first husband’s name.”
“We need you to have a CT scan,” someone said, addressing me more than Silvia, who seemed to have passed out, though on hearing this she woke up.
“Haven’t I already had one?”
The person shook her head.
“But I feel like I have. How long have I been here? I don’t like going in those tunnels.”
“No, sweetheart, it’s not the MRI, it’s not as claustrophobic. Not really.”
“Can’t you just open me up now? I’m getting claustrophobic just being in this hallway.”
Before the scan she had to drink a liquid—a contrast fluid—that would make her insides into a picture. I tried to explain to the guy who told us this that because of her throat, Silvia had trouble swallowing much except neat vodka. He nodded and walked away. The contrast arrived in an enormous pink beaker full of ice like a Slush Puppie. It took Silvia about an hour to drink it. I sat next to her, helping her sip. Finally she was wheeled away for the scan, and I waited outside, beneath
a TV monitor mounted to the wall. It was showing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The contestant was on his $100,000 question:
Which of the following is now depicted by LEGO figures at LEGOLAND, Florida’s Miniland USA exhibit?
A: Crazy cat lady
B: Grain site explosion
C: Crab attacking man’s face
D: Public hanging
I had just settled on C when Silvia was wheeled out again.
“I want to die,” she said. “I really do.”
As they were going to operate, she wasn’t supposed to have anything further to eat or drink, but they didn’t tell me, so I kept giving her water each time she asked.
“Just wet my lips,” Silvia begged. “My mouth is so damn dry.”
I complied, using my pinkie to administer tiny droplets. I reminded myself of Dwight. He kept his bees on the roof of his building in Dumbo and carried a pipette with sugar solution on him at all times to save dying bees he found in the street. He used to take it out of his pocket when he was anxious or bored and play with it as if it were a nipple. I tried to send him a message to let him know what was happening; I wanted somebody to comfort me. I didn’t know what to say in the message. I tried a few different things. Nothing would come out right. My fingers were all shaky so typing was hard, and yet some of the more absurd autocorrects seemed better suited to the situation than what I could think of to say. Then my phone died just after I sent the message, so no comfort could come from it anyway.
A man in a blue blazer with a badge saying VOLUNTEER came towards us. I followed him around a corner.
“Excuse me, what time is it?”
“Ten-thirty,” the man said, smiling as broadly as a barbershop singer.
“At night?” I asked. There was no natural light.
“Yup,” he said, still smiling. “What time you think it was?”
“Like lunchtime, maybe.”
I had been awake pretty much solidly for two days.
“You want me to get you something to eat?”
“Yes, please.”
He disappeared and returned with a sandwich, cling-filmed onto a black plastic plate and labeled HAM & CHEESE. White bread, slit into two triangles. I peeled the top, fibrous layer back, revealing marbled pink ham, shining under the hospital lights like an oil slick, and the narrow yellow of the cheese that had fused underneath it. They looked like they had been treated with something that meant they would never go bad, even if I had to wait there forever.
It tasted only like texture, like frozen moss beginning to thaw. Once I’d eaten, I found I was exhausted. The adrenaline that had been keeping me awake for so long was absorbed entirely by the bread like a mattress. I was so tired that I picked up the pink beaker full of melting ice that had contained Silvia’s contrast and began to drink. “Fuck,” I said aloud, remembering, and I replaced it on the yellow chest of drawers on wheels that had been left next to us in the corridor.
The chest had a top drawer with a label reading, ISOLATION STICKERS.
The next drawer down said, SHIELD MASKS, SHOE COVERS, CAPS.
The next drawer down said, WHITE GOWNS.
The next drawer down said, YELLOW GOWNS.
By the time I had lowered my gaze to the bottom drawer, I was asleep.
I jolted awake. Tried to stay upright and alert by reading the notice on the wall opposite.
IT’S THE LAW
IF YOU HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY OR ARE IN LABOR, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RECEIVE (within the capabilities of this hospital’s staff and facilities):
an appropriate medical screening examination
necessary stabilizing treatment (including treatment for the unborn child)
and, if necessary, an appropriate transfer to another facility
YOU HAVE THIS RIGHT EVEN IF YOU CANNOT PAY, DO NOT HAVE MEDICAL INSURANCE, OR YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO MEDICARE OR MEDICAID.
I sat up, fully awake now. I watched my mother—my real mother—running past where I sat and around a corner, gown billowing, not stopping but veering away from me.
“Higgins! Why don’t you listen to me?” A nurse was wrenching my mother’s arm. “Do you want something to drink? Nonalcoholic. Do you want water?”
Higgins, not my mother but a kind of ogress who looked like she might once have played basketball very successfully, rampaged along the corridor towards us. I stood up protectively, in case she was about to ram the cart or knock over Silvia’s IV drip.
“You want a muffin?” the nurse asked coaxingly. “How about a meal?”
Other nurses appeared at intersections in the corridor, trying to lay hands on her, but Higgins was unstoppable.
“What are you gonna eat? You don’t have any food at home.”
Higgins passed us again, smiling a kind of bovine smile, flaring her nostrils at me.
“Obviously a regular,” Silvia managed to say through spit. She nodded at a young man who lay facing us with a pink sick bucket between his big sneakers at the end of the gurney, which nearly touched the end of Silvia’s. His head lolled to one side; his blue hospital gown stretched open across one shoulder.
Patients and their next of kin swapped powdery gum. An elderly couple were stationed next to us: the man on a cart, the woman behind his head, rigid like a tombstone. They both used the word charming to describe things, so I could tell they were married.
“How do folks stay married so long?” the nurse was asking them as she put on the brakes of the cart.
“I don’t recommend it,” the wife replied.
“But the alternative is being alone, right?”
“That’s the alternative.”
“So do you recommend that?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m not alone, but I don’t recommend being a caregiver.” She seemed genuinely exhausted. “But that’s marriage for sixty-two years.”
The nurse whistled her admiration.
“He has a good heart, I know. But high blood pressure.” The woman began addressing herself to me as well as the nurse. “We lived in New Jersey when our sons were growing up. Then moved back.”
“Because you’re in love with the city?” the nurse prompted.
“Yes,” she said, sighing. “I’m in love with the city.”
The nurse left, and I turned my face to give them privacy.
“Don’t be too long,” the husband called to the nurse’s retreating back. “She’s a wild woman.”
I went to the bathroom and began to attack my skin in the mirror, squeezing every pore into an angry red mound. I reentered the corridor and tried to bow my head to make it less obvious in the harsh lighting, but when I returned to our spot, Silvia looked guilty too.
“It’s humiliating,” she said. “I’m embarrassed.”
“What is?”
She paused, feeling for a euphemism. “I’ve messed myself.”
I couldn’t find anyone who would help get her cleaned up, so she lay there, getting colder. I was angry at myself for finally leaving her side to go to the bathroom at the one moment that I could have been useful, when she needed to go herself. She pointed at the Kimberly-Clark logo on a box of gloves that had been left on the yellow chest.
“I have shares in those guys,” she pronounced solemnly. The morphine must have kicked in. “I spend so much time in places like this that I see how much goes to waste, because you have to buy in bulk and it never all gets used.”
“That’s smart.”
By the time we were told that Silvia was finally being taken into the operating theatre, she was delirious, memories coming to her out of nowhere but voiced as if she and I were in the middle of a conversation.
It was time to go.
“I’ll be right here,” I told her, “when you come out.”
“No, don’t wait. Go home, Rabbit. Go home.”
I remember gasping. Rabbit. A sliver of remembered sound hovered above me. I moved towards her to try to clasp it in my hands. I felt myself shrinking. Heard her calling me Rabbit in s
maller ears, saw her face from a lower vantage point, felt the voice to be more powerful than mine. Arms. A smell. “Skin a rabbit!” as she undressed me and put me to bed. I felt myself begin to cry, wanting to be so small.
“I can see his handwriting,” she mumbled as the brakes of her gurney were taken off and two nurses began to angle her out of her slot.
“What? What’s she saying? She’s saying something, wait.” Now that she was finally moving I didn’t want to leave her. I leant right by Silvia’s mouth. “Say again?”
“Three,” she said, a sudden force in her voice. “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
12
* * *
I retraced my steps out of the hospital, getting lost a few times, back through the sliding doors at last. I wanted to wait for her, but I also wanted to sleep. I wanted her to wake up in the morning, but I didn’t want her to wake up without me. Out from cool brightness to muggy darkness. The landscape felt changed, but I couldn’t say how.
Sometimes you can tell a homeless person only by the way they don’t move, or how long they don’t move for. There was one woman to whom I sometimes gave gifts of food I’d bought and couldn’t face eating. She always sat on the same metal bench by Silvia’s building, occasionally shifting ends with the shade. Only her lack of visible purpose gave her away. With others, it is the sense that they can never stop moving. They push past you with their wagons full of belongings towards some unknowable north. This time my homeless friend was not there, which disoriented me, so that I walked too far. Somehow this upset me so much that I began to cry. Both her not being there and the fact that in my exhausted, blistered, hollowed state, I had walked two blocks further than I needed to and would have to turn back.
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