When I got home I plugged my phone into the wall and waited for its comforting ping of awakening. The life-starting-over sound. I posted and then deleted a picture of an IV drip I had taken in the hospital. Two people—Dwight’s friends—had liked it immediately, but something told me it was a monstrous thing to have done. There were messages on Silvia’s answering machine. I didn’t know how to work it and was slightly afraid of it, so I unplugged it to stop the beeping, which I could not distinguish from the incessant beeping noises in the hospital I continued to hear in my head.
It was the first time I had been alone in Silvia’s apartment. The door to the bathroom was open, still with the yellow stain and the smell of dying flowers. I fell asleep thinking of things that, if I held them in my mind hard enough, might keep Silvia alive through the operation. As I began to slip out of consciousness I got that falling sensation. I realised I had not bought her the flowers I’d told myself I would buy to give to her after the operation. I remember thinking I wanted to get out of bed and buy some in the middle of the night. I remember thinking that if I managed to keep the flowers alive in the deathly heat of her apartment, this would somehow keep her alive in the operating theatre too.
In the morning, Dr. Griffin called and gave me his summary of the night’s events. He got me to imagine the head of an asparagus spear so that he could describe to me what had happened in the operation, but the idea made me feel sick. What I understood was that she had survived. I didn’t know what the ICU was either, but that was where she was, and he gave me the visiting hours. I walked back to the hospital the following afternoon, when Griffin said she would be awake. I could hear only the creepy, stalker sound of it: I see you. I see you. I see you.
I couldn’t stop myself. I continued to murmur it under my breath as I bought pink roses on the last block before the hospital.
I see you I see you I see you.
As I walked through the hospital hallway, trying to remember the directions I had been given, I observed myself from above.
I see you I see you I see you.
When I reached the ICU, I was told I was not allowed to take flowers inside. The nurse on duty agreed to keep them in water under her desk but made it clear that this was as big a favour as favours could be; she was supposed to throw flowers in the trash. Silvia had her own room, and her bed looked out over Roosevelt Island. When I went in, I felt immediately shy. More shy than I had felt entering her apartment for the first time, creeping into the hallway as things took shape in the darkness. As she had been then, she seemed to be asleep, but after I sat beside her for a few moments I sensed that she was not.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
Slowly she opened her eyes. I felt a pain in my throat like a stuck bone.
“My nurse for now”—Silvia indicated the whiteboard where a name had been written—“is called Santa. I make them write names up there because there are so many of them to keep track of. They don’t talk or act like real people, most of them.”
Her voice was flat. I wondered if I detected reproach in it. I wondered if she somehow knew that I had posted a picture and deleted it.
“Does it suit me?” she asked, following my gaze to the wires snaking between her body and the unmusical machines that attended her. “I always say computers are the scourge of our age.” She tried to swallow the saliva collecting in her throat; the fishbone in mine would still not go down. “Computers and cancer. It’s an excuse for nobody to come check on me in person.”
I unpacked my bag onto her legs. “I brought you these,” I said, “but you seem pretty well provided for. I don’t think you’ll be needing much of . . .” I gestured to the neck pillow and animal socks with grippy toes I had laid on top of her sheet. “I brought flowers too, but I’m not allowed to give them to you, they said.”
Silvia closed her eyes again, as if she hadn’t heard. “I had a nightmare. Morphine nightmare, I guess.” She kept her eyes closed as she spoke. “Nat, you, that boy you’re seeing, Ingrid and the son-in-law, their children and some others—a man and a woman—and a dog.”
“And what were we doing?” I asked after a pause.
“You were all there having a party.”
“All where?”
“Right there.” She indicated with her eyes. “At the foot of my bed. Your boyfriend was in the corner on his machine.”
“How did you know it was him? You’ve never met him.”
“From your description, of course. Or I made him up. I don’t know. And one of them, the husband, Nat’s son-in-law, he came up to me in the bed and pressed his hands down on me, as if he were trying to push them right through me.”
“And what happened?”
“I was saying, Get out, get out.”
I looked into her face to see that she was frowning with concentration.
“Then I got out myself and ran across the road and down an alley. I fell into a puddle and then they found me and brought me back to the hospital. I had mud on my face and feet.” Her voice had the kind of extreme flatness that is unnatural, like Astroturf compared to natural grass, the flatness that conceals something, like rage or grief. “Then I went back into it.”
I flinched. The bone was piercing. I couldn’t breathe.
“Outside on some steps a very strange man came across the lawn with a big black beard and little round glasses and gave me a very hard handshake. I knew I must be in the Hamptons. There were young people with tennis rackets, and Ingrid said, Oh, you missed my mother! Unfortunately, she’s not dying, but you are. She wanted me to swap bodies, and I said, Who cares? or something—” Her saliva was running out. “I have more to tell you, but my mouth—”
She flopped her head to one side as emphatically as she could to tell me that she wanted something in that direction. An orange stick was poking out of a white paper cup. It had a kind of swab on the end, submerged in water.
As I was administering the swab to her mouth, the door slid open behind me and the visitor pumped twice on the hand sanitizer. I turned around. A nurse moved past me towards Silvia as if I weren’t there.
“Are you able to lift up your tush?”
“Tush? I’m not Jewish.”
The nurse’s eyes narrowed and her expression became cold as she went about bathing Silvia, unmoved by her whimpers.
I left the room, filled a conical paper cup with icy water. I swallowed hard. The bone was still stuck. I moved aimlessly around the ward, reading the noticeboards and the thank-you cards sent to the hospital. There was a very cold room for families to wait in, with a vending machine, a television, and dark leather chairs. I was sick with exhaustion. I sat down but couldn’t sleep. When I went back in the nurse was resettling Silvia in the bed and asking her how much pain she had on a scale of one to ten as she touched various parts of her body.
“I need to pee,” Silvia said when the nurse touched her abdomen.
“You need to void your bladder?” the nurse corrected.
“Sincerely. I’m going to wet myself.”
“You’re catheterized.”
When she had left, Silvia said, “She hovers, that one—and pats me, which I don’t need.”
I made a sympathetic face and said, “Is that one Santa?”
“No. I don’t know.”
The nurse came back in. I moved to leave the room again, but Silvia stopped me. “Don’t bother with the bedpan,” Silvia said, apparently ignoring the information the nurse had just given her. “I can’t go now after all.”
“I meant to ask you,” the nurse said after a calculated pause, moving her tongue to one side and then the other, chewing it, “you’re DNR, right?”
Silvia looked blank. Out of habit, I replied for her.
“What’s DNR?”
“It’s a form she signed. Means if she loses consciousness, she does not want to be resuscitated.”
With a rush of warm saliva, the bone dislodged itself. I swallowed, free at last.
“What does that mean, th
ough, your question?”
“If she wants to—”
“If it’s a form she’s already signed,” I said, cutting in so the nurse could not repeat herself, my voice trembling between extreme politeness and extreme aggression, “then surely you don’t need to check, and if you do, you should check her records outside, in private. You should not be asking an elderly woman who has just come out of surgery whether or not she still wants to die, as if that is likely to happen. Which”—I shot a look at Silvia—“it’s not.”
“Okay, lady.” The nurse shifted her weight to her other hip and chewed her tongue some more. “I’m just doing my job.”
“No, you are not,” I heard myself roar at the stocky stranger. “Who even are you? Are you a doctor? Maybe you should check privately with one of the doctors. Now is not the best time”—I took a few paces towards her, and she backed a little towards the wall—“and what difference does it make what she says now if she’s already written on the form that she wants to die?” I did not wait for an answer. “If she said, No, actually, I do want to be resuscitated, it wouldn’t make a difference, right? Not if it is written”—I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain—“fucking”—I slammed the wall—“written down. Then it doesn’t make any difference if you try to change it after.”
And now I know this to be true for everything.
The nurse left and I crouched down to try and settle my breathing. For the first time in Silvia’s presence, I felt completely unselfconscious.
“I belong and donate to a compassion group,” Silvia said calmly after a few moments. “And I want to uphold those wishes. No chest compressions or anything.”
Tears came again, but silently this time.
“And it’s my choice. No one else’s.”
A loud sob broke.
“It’s no life,” she said, more gently. “If the heart stops—”
I gasped for air as if I’d been winded.
“It’s in my will.”
“But that was beyond . . .” I said, staring helplessly at the door for a second, then wiping my face and covering it in my hands.
“My life is nothing. Nothing. These tubes . . . it’s an invasion. I don’t see anybody. Except Nat. I don’t want to. I don’t go out. I don’t want them to see me. It’s over. This is not life as I know it—I want someone to let me die.”
“But what about me?” I blinked. I realised it felt good to cry now. “I see you. I’m here. I’ll always be here if you want. I’ll do anything you need me to.”
Silvia looked at me intently, and my tears subsided as I took in what she was asking. I held my face for balance and sat back against the wall. A long silence passed in which I fought my instinct to run by stretching my legs out in front of me and grinding my heels into the linoleum. She let the silence grow. Her stare told me that she knew what I was capable of.
“G’day, folks!” Her nutritionist arrived. She did not bother with the sanitizer or seem to notice that I was sitting on the floor, my face wet with tears. “How are you feeling today?”
“I don’t feel too hot,” Silvia answered meekly.
“I bet you’re missing your vodka, aren’t you?” This was said without reproach. “Dip your swab in.” The nutritionist proffered a flask.
“What a jolly lady she is!” Silvia cried.
“Our secret.”
“I like your hair. Are you the one who grew up in Queens? Hasn’t she got lovely skin too?” I nodded. The woman had a kind of punk hairdo with piercings all up her ears.
“I like your ear studs. Do you take those out every night?”
The flask came out again.
“I read through the notes and then get a picture and compare what I see when I meet the patient,” the nutritionist said, turning to me, suddenly serious, “and I think it will do her more harm than good right now to go cold turkey.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I don’t care for turkey,” Silvia added.
I went to the window and looked out at Roosevelt Island. Runners and cyclists went up and down the shore like ants.
“The river is moving really fast right now,” I said, my breath misting up the window in the fierce air conditioning.
“It’s no river,” Silvia said with sudden passion. “It’s an estuary.” She sucked on the swab. “Not many people know that.”
It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occurred to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.
When I left I was glad. The light outside was strangely yellow, the shadows purple. I could smell something faintly like burning. Coming towards me was a man dressed for rough terrain, clattering a stick along the concrete. When he passed he looked into my face, paused as if he meant to say something, and then continued as if he had thought better of it. I had the feeling that at any moment everyone around me was going to start fleeing from something. Out of the corner of my eye I thought some people might be inching backwards, pretending not to have started making their escape.
I went into a store to buy bottled water. This was an indulgence, but despite Silvia’s glowing references, I did not like the water that came out of the taps, which seemed to wall up my mouth as if I had eaten a dry biscuit. I bought a bottle that had a chatty label on the back:
The Butterfly Effect.
According to chaos theory, the tiny flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a cyclone on the other side of the world.
The company had applied the theory to projects they undertook in harsh regions of the world. I considered the supply chain: the bottler, buyer, shifter, drinker, the owner of the store, the harsh region of the world, the label, and the bottle-picker who would extract it from the trash and redeem it for nickels. Exactly as I had this thought, I put my hand into my pocket and felt a hard-edged thing: my psychic’s business card. I read the address and realised I was one block from Psychic Boutique.
I rang the bell and a girl answered who was not the girl who had given me the card—the one who had picked up the strong vibrations from me. This new one was called Samantha, though on the card I have it says READINGS BY ANNA. I felt that this was somehow wrong and that Anna, if she was truly psychic, should have come to the door as if she had been expecting me. Nevertheless, I liked Samantha, even though she did try to fleece me out of five hundred dollars. She informed me that if I came to her again, she could get a load of crystals in. She could tell instantly, without me saying one word, which I hadn’t, that amber would work nicely. Then throughout our session she kept alluding darkly to her “supplies.” I nodded or shook my head like a mute. I didn’t want to give her anything easily—I wanted to let the vibrations speak for me—but I couldn’t have said much if I’d tried. The choice of letters in the alphabet felt suddenly constricting. It was as though anything I said would immediately trigger concrete to begin pouring around my chair. I couldn’t think of any words I wanted to commit to saying if they were going to fix my fate for me like that. After she did the reading, she told me that I would need to come back every day for a week and that the first twenty-four hours after a reading were the most effective if I wanted to use crystals.
“What’s your hesitation?” she asked when I became shy about handing over Silvia’s emergency credit card. I still couldn’t formulate words, and we kept being interrupted by her young sons, who were taking it in turns to come in to tell her that the other one was annoying him. I could hear the soundtrack of a kids’ movie in a back room. She gave them her device, which had been facedown on the table next to her like a Tarot card the whole time, to play with.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That one is scared of being alone.”
On hearing himself discussed, the boy returned to defend himself. When he was again dismissed, his brother came in wearing a plastic bag over his head.
“Take that off. Cut it out.”
Psychic Sama
ntha ripped the bag off him, tugged back a curtain under the table where random household objects were stored, and stuffed it inside.
“I have a headache,” he said miserably.
“So put half a potato on it.”
“Okay,” I finally blurted. “Thanks so much, but I’d better go now, thanks very much for your help.”
She told me it was unlucky to share a reading with others, but the main point, the one that I don’t mind mentioning because it seems relevant to the story, is that she said I had a kind of evil spirit following me. “Obviously,” she added, “that sucks. But if we get you some amber—”
It was a negative energy, jealous and possessive, that wanted me to be alone. Someone maybe with robotic tendencies whom I would have to look after, who would take all my energies and not give anything back, taking even my body from me, and with whom I would be trapped in this cycle of giving and depleting and needing forever. I promised to come back once I had had a think about the crystals.
Walking home, I considered who it might be, this shitty spirit. It could, I reasoned, be pretty much anyone I knew. Susy, most likely. At the last block before Silvia’s, I told Dwight to come over, because I did not want to be alone in the apartment again and because I wanted to test him for robotic tendencies. There was something about the way he talked about manipulating the user, giving someone using one of his apps an illusory sense of mastery and of choice—like a magician with a pack of cards—that suggested he knew how to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities of humans but that he was not quite human himself.
He had not been inside Silvia’s apartment before, and when he arrived he walked around it silently as if he were in church, admiring things solemnly and looking at me with an irritating, earnest expression. I showed him Silvia’s three crates. He looked through a first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog from 1968, which had been Mark’s. He didn’t tell me it was very valuable, and when he asked if he could have it, I said yes.
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