by Matt Burgess
“The bathroom is next door,” the nurse says. She winks. “You probably have to tinkle anyway, am I right?”
With both hands wrapped tight around the cup, Isabel walks out of the room, leaving Alfredo and the nurse behind. The nurse takes her ponytail and drapes it over her other shoulder. She tells Alfredo to sit tight and make himself comfortable. She says the doctor should be with them shortly. And then, like Isabel before her, she walks out of the room.
Abandoned, Alfredo fiddles with the sink. Turns it on and off. He taps on the door to the metal cabinet, which makes a solidly tinny sound, like rain on a rooftop. He wonders if there are some prescription pills inside this cabinet. Some painkillers maybe. He taps on the metal again, as if expecting any Percocets or Vicodins to tap back. With a steady hand, he fingers the handle to the cabinet door. His breathing is disconcertingly calm.
Maybe he’s been cured. Maybe now that he stole that E-beeper and got away with it, he will never again hyperventilate. Maybe—oh Lord—maybe he should’ve kicked the air out of someone else’s throat a long time ago. He doesn’t like thinking about it. He’d felt like one of Winston’s video game street fighters: somebody hit a button, and Alfredo’s foot flew forward. It was something his brother might have done—hurt a stranger on instinct, like an animal—and Alfredo long ago promised that his brother’s methods would never be his own. He sold coke, so Alfredo sells weed. He made deliveries, so Alfredo stands on a corner, lets the duff buyers come to him. He got pinched robbing a catering hall, so Alfredo doesn’t even walk past catering halls. He treated Isabel poorly, so Alfredo treats her—or at least tries to—in the way she deserves. But what about Vladimir? The kid’s eyes were bulging. His face flushed red. He may have swallowed his own tongue. He may … oh fuck this. Alfredo can stand in this examination room by himself and feel guilty, or he can open the cabinet door, add some prescription pills to the clear plastic baggie of scrips he already has in his pocket, get caught by Isabel, get caught by the doctor, and then watch the Medicaid form get torn in half, forcing Isabel to give birth on a wood-slatted bench in Travers Park, Santeria priestesses easing Christian Louis’s head from her womb. Or Alfredo can follow Isabel and the nurse and bounce on up out of here. Go looking for a restroom of his own.
The first bathroom door he finds is locked. Maybe he didn’t give the knob a good-enough turn. Maybe if he just—nope, it’s locked. Because he doesn’t want to just stand outside the door and wait, his arms folded in front of his chest; because he does enough of that at work, on the corner; because the whole idea right now is to keep moving and stop thinking—Alfredo goes in search of another restroom.
Doctors zip past him. Nurses, too. Everyone wears sneakers, and everyone, it seems, gives Alfredo a look. It’s not quite a disapproving look, but it’s close, and Alfredo gets the message: You know, son, you can’t just wander around a hospital, and (clutching clipboard to chest) if I weren’t so busy… Maybe they’re right. Alfredo in the wrong place at the wrong time might cause mortal damage. Say he trips over a plug to one of those beep-beep machines, or bumps into a perfectly calibrated microscope. But give me a break, Alfredo thinks. Not like he’s going to slip on a banana peel and send high-priced hospital equipment toppling down one after another like so many dominoes. No, what really worries Alfredo is making a left at the end of this corridor and witnessing someone’s private misery. A woman’s mastectomy consultation. A little girl shiny pink with third-degree burns. Because what Alfredo sees now is more than enough. Patients in gurneys, exposed, pushing away turkey sandwiches, crying, calling out for help. Alfredo hastens his steps. If he weren’t so far gone already, he’d go back to Isabel—if he even knew how to get back. He has arrived at this point in the hospital by making end-of-corridor turns indiscriminately, without reason to his lefts and rights, and while he won’t exactly admit he’s lost, he’s as close as a man can get. Ah, but what’s that? He passes a ladies’ restroom, and the feminized glyph on the door gives hope. She’s all dolled up in her triangle skirt, and so her stick-figured boyfriend must be close by. And here he is, the old pimp. End of the hall.
Intragender modesty has little virtue in a place with bedpans and sponge baths, with male doctors asking female patients to disrobe and nurses sliding catheters into the heads of penises. Alfredo walks into one of the hospital’s few men’s rooms, one of the few lavatories with multiple stalls and multiple urinals. A guy stands hunched over the sink and washes his hands. Alfredo hurries past him, unzipping as he goes. His bladder—which had been considerate enough to keep quiet on the long journey over here—now belts out an aria. He takes aim at a little blue urinal cake. It is not as much fun as pissing into a urinal full of ice cubes, but at least Alfredo has the gratifying pleasure of seeing his pee turn green. He gives himself a couple of perfunctory shakes, flushes the lever with his elbow, and makes his way back to the sink where that guy is still—still!—scrubbing away.
“Oh man, I hate this fucking place,” the guy says. “The diseases? You kidding me? I’m not OCD or anything, but I must’ve come in here five times already. Just to wash my hands. You know how many germs are floating around here?”
No, but Alfredo does know that men shouldn’t talk to other men in the men’s room. The two of them stand at the sink, which is a more acceptable conversational district than the urinals or (God forbid) the stalls, but still. This is the bathroom. Alfredo wouldn’t talk to his father in the bathroom. Maybe it’s a hospital thing—they have a way of breaking down people’s boundaries. And actually, Alfredo feels a little desperate to talk to someone himself. He points to the sign above the sink and reads the words aloud. “ ‘Washing hands saves lives,’ ” he says. “Well there you go. You’re doing a service.”
“I been here ten minutes. I should get a fucking Medal of Honor.”
“You wanna hear something? My girlfriend—she’s eight months pregnant, okay?” She is, of course, only seven months pregnant, but Alfredo tells meaningless lies to stay in practice. “She’s got these monthly prenatal checkups. I don’t have to come, but I come. Nothing for me to do except hold her hand. Which is fine. I love her. But I gotta take off time from work to get down here. And I really need to be at work right now, know what I mean? Because, like everyone else, I’ve taken a big financial hit since nine-eleven and when this fucking baby comes, God bless him, you know how much it’s gonna cost me? For diapers alone? You know how much I’m paying already for things? You know how much I’m gonna have to pay?”
“Everyone pays,” the guy says. He splashes water on his face. He is in his mid- to late twenties. An obvious fake tanner enthusiast, he has turned his white skin orange, probably thinking it makes him look healthier, more vivacious, and maybe it does, but not today. Today his head sags. On his face he carries a day’s worth of beard—a cluster of hair on each artificially tanned cheek, shadows on the chin and upper lip. Worst of all, an arrowhead of stubble pokes out from the center of his hairline. Alfredo guesses the guy is the reluctant owner of a widow’s peak, and part of his daily routine is shaving it off with a razor. Just one more thing he didn’t get to do today. Alfredo knows tired, and this dude is tired. The guy looks in the mirror and scowls. “Insurance, no insurance. Kids, no kids. Doesn’t matter. Everyone pays. Right out the ass.”
Alfredo pulls out his bag of prescription pills. He leaves it on the edge of the sink, while he goes to the paper towel dispenser. He needs to dry his hands thoroughly before touching the pills. He can’t have the greens of OxyContin mixing with the blues of Viagra.
“Well,” the guy says, looking at the bag.
“So what are we thinking here? Insomnia? Pain? Depression?” Alfredo looks from the inside of the bag to the guy in front of him, going back and forth as if one will tell him about the other. As if Alfredo is a used car salesman, trying to size up this mark as a Vette guy or a Cadillac gent. Inside the bag, Alfredo’s fingers pinch a Xanax. “Anxiety?” he says. “Is that what we’re talking about?”
; “Here I am. Complaining about hospitals. And you’re a fucking pharmacist.”
“Well, I left my prescription pad at home.”
The guy turns off the faucet and the bathroom goes quiet. He smiles. Alfredo expected to catch him off-balance, to pressure him into a quick, one-pill sale. The way Alfredo imagined it, the guy gives him twenty bucks for a Xanax because Alfredo convinces him he actually needed it, or because the guy convinces himself twenty bucks ain’t a bad deal to get away from an aggressive Puerto Rican pusher. Now, however, Alfredo’s starting to think he imagined this all wrong.
“Stress,” the guy says. He grins like a wolf sniffing at a rabbit hole. “What have you got for stress?”
Alfredo thinks one thing: cop. It’d explain the cynicism, the condescending grin, the nonchalant appraisal of drugs. And if he were a shield-chaser, late twenties would put him at just the right age for the NYPD’s narcotics squad. Here’s Alfredo about to get locked up over twenty measly dollars. With Isabel waiting for him on the other side of the hospital! He looks for bulges on the guy’s hips, by his ankles. He looks for cheap shoes, skin puffy with alcohol, coffee-stained teeth, powdered sugar around the mouth, a wristband with the color of the day, a palpable and nauseating air of superiority. Alfredo goes back through their conversation—did the guy laugh at his own jokes? Is he here visiting his partner, winged in some Elmhurst shootout? Does he use fake tanner because he never sees the sun, because he walks a beat all night and sleeps all day? Alfredo zips up the bag. He says, “Sorry, but I don’t have anything for stress.”
“Sure you do. I saw some Zoloft in there. White oval pill? Looked like you had the hundred millis.”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Alfredo puts the bag in his pocket. “That was something else.”
The guy smiles like he washes his hands: for way too long. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Stress can be a positive thing. Keep you sharp. Alert.”
“Maybe I should join the army then,” Alfredo says. “Go over to Iraq like they’re talking about. Take down Saddam. Plenty of stress there, I bet.”
“Ha ha. Get that Medal of Honor, huh?” He rips a paper towel out of the dispenser. “You don’t have any Zoloft? That’s cool. What I really want—hey, stick around for a second. What I’m really looking for is some Ecstasy. You got any X, my friend?”
Holding a cup of her own warm pee, Isabel hurries into the examination room. She finds it empty. She walks back out, checks the room number above the door, looks both ways down the hall. Feeling embarrassed, exposed—her pee is shockingly yellow—she goes right back into the room and sits on the examination table. The strip of paper crinkles under her ass. Her feet dangle. Is it possible for a grown adult human being to sit with her feet kicking at air and not feel ridiculous? In the movie version of her life—Isabel knows this one’s a stretch—her pee would not be so yellow. She’d be better hydrated. Inside that cup, Isabel imagines, it smells like the Port Authority bus terminal. She eases herself off the table and goes to the sink. She bends her head to the nozzle, drinks cold water straight from the tap.
“Just last week I look out my window and see my wife in the backyard. Gardening. She doesn’t know I’m watching. And I catch her taking a long drink from the hose, and I’m thinking how lucky am I? How incredibly beautiful is this wife of mine?”
He is a big-bellied Indian man, with receding hair and one large eyebrow stretched out across his forehead. If his wife is beautiful, or even moderately attractive, then this is one lucky man indeed. Consider the eyebrow alone. Exceptionally bushy, it threatens to sprout tentacles, threatens to grab the stethoscope off his shoulders, to pass him scalpels whenever he needs them. More hair shoots out of his nostrils and from the cuffs of his lab coat. This is Isabel’s sixth prenatal exam and her sixth doctor.
He takes her cup of pee. He looks down and away, clucking his tongue.
“But I didn’t get you anything,” he says.
Isabel stares at this Indian man, at his big belly and fleshy nose, and she wonders—briefly, insanely—if this is Alfredo in disguise. She used to have thoughts like these when she was a kid, when she imagined her white, elderly third-grade teacher, Mrs. Rosenstock, was really her mother dressed up in a wig and rubber mask. At school, Isabel would whisper words in Spanish while looking into Mrs. Rosenstock’s eyes for some glint of understanding. At home, she would raise her hand at the kitchen table, hoping to catch her mother unawares. Ridiculous? Of course. But never were Mrs. Rosenstock and Isabel’s mother spotted in the same place at the same time!
“Have you seen my boyfriend?” she asks the doctor. “He was in here like a minute ago.”
“Afraid not.” With his thumb, he flips the cap off the cup of her urine. A white stick appears in his hand, and he jabs it into the cup. He stirs, as if mixing café con leche. This is normally the lab tech’s job, but the doctor gives the impression that he must keep his expert hands occupied. Isabel imagines that when he goes home to India, if he goes home to India, he spends his vacation administering physicals to the entire population, checking every pulse, asking every man, woman, and child to open up and say aaaaaaaaah. “Please, my dear. Sit down.”
She has questions about the health of her baby, but the doctor, breathless, runs her through tests as if trying to outpace her anxieties. He makes little eye contact. He takes her blood pressure, squeezes her hands and ankles, puts her on the scale, asks about varicose vein developments, pulls the stick out of her urine cup, draws blood from her arm—and all the while, Isabel feels like she’s not even in the room. But when he lifts the bottom of her shirt, she goes stiff. She lies on the table, smelling the lemon tea on the doctor’s breath. She closes her eyes. Because she is all alone, she summons Christian Louis. She hopes not to hear the names of new diseases, but rather his kind, soothing words: Is okay, Mama. Relax.
But Isabel’s ears are stuffed. She hears nothing and the doctor’s hands are cold. Checking for fetal size and position, he palpates the uterus, prods at the baby’s head and shoulders. Isabel’s fists are clenched, her body rigid. Despite his mama’s summons, Christian Louis does not appear on the inside of her eyelids. All she sees is darkness. But Isabel keeps the hope. Her eyes stay shut, and in the middle of darkness blooms a crimson ring. It is only the imprint of the fluorescent light above her head, penetrating the thin skin of her eyelid. But to Isabel, whose eyes are still closed, it is a small red world, on fire.
———
She sat in Travers Park and watched the handball games. It was 1998. She was fifteen years old. She’d gone down to the park because at home her mother’s new boyfriend was moving in, carrying his boxes into the apartment and plopping them down in the living room. Out on the handball court one man in particular caught her attention. Wearing a wife-beater, banging into the other players, he hammered the ball, swung through it as if it owed him money. After the game, while the other guys reclined against the fence or doused their heads in water, the man stood alone in the middle of the court. Isabel moved toward him. She was frightened but she sounded strong and calm when she told him he was very sweaty and if he wanted to cool off he ought to take her to the movies. His cheek twitched. You smell good, he said. With an almost snarl he told her his name, as if daring her to be unimpressed. Jose Batista Jr. looked down at the hand she extended toward him. He laughed.
He fingered her on the floor of the movie theater. This was before stadium seating. The two of them were lying down between rows of seats. Isabel kept her head off the floor, so she wouldn’t get any spilled soda in her hair.
When he drove her home, she asked him to come upstairs and meet her mother’s new boyfriend.
That night, trying to fall asleep, Isabel decided she won’t go to any more movie theaters with Jose. Can’t shit where you eat, as the expression goes. She established new rules. Kissing and hand-holding were fine. If necessary, he may feel her up and/or she may give him a handjob. But there will be no bj’s. There will be no more fingering. There will
be absolutely no sex. Underline that one. Put it in bold.
Forget the subway. Forget about taking the R train from Roosevelt Avenue to Woodhaven Boulevard. Jose had a van. He drove her to the Queens Center Mall, where he bought her jewelry from Claire’s. Junky bracelets, that kind of thing. They shared a plate of nachos from the food court, and afterward he asked her if he had any gunk in his teeth. On the drive home, he showed her the van’s hiding spots. Behind interior panels and underneath seats, he kept bags of coke and weed, vials of crack, things Isabel had never seen before.
He said if they’re not going to have sex, then there wasn’t no point to kissing. It was all signs of affection, right? He stopped holding her hand. He asked if she’d ever heard of blue balls. He told her his friends thought she was immature, that he could do a lot better.
Her first experience with consensual sex: the Costco parking lot, in the back of Jose’s van, where silver duct tape covered the rips in the seat cushions. A cardboard lemon tree dangled from the rearview mirror.
She said she had her period. She said she had to go to work. She said she had to write an essay on John Adams for school. She said, cough cough, that she was sick. She said she got her period again. He told her he could do much better. He told her he had girls lined up. Once she found a used condom in the back of his van, and when she confronted him about it, he said, Promise you won’t laugh? I come back here sometimes and masturbate into rubbers. She believed him.
Sometimes when they were having sex, she’d step outside of her body and sit in the front seat and do something real cool and casual-like. File her nails, for instance. Or flip through a magazine.
He never hit her. He told her he loved her. When he drove her home and her mother’s boyfriend was smoking a cigarette on the stoop, Jose escorted her to the front door, let her hang off his powerful arm.