The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  That image haunted me at fourteen. I had imagined myself dramatically dead in just that manner, if only I could drive and had a car.

  “That photograph was his own private version of the old primitive painting, ‘Death On A Pale Horse,’ ” I read on a screen in front of me and realized I was looking at a website about me.

  Then the screen was gone and I was back in the tumult of the emergency room. “Intestinal blockage – massive fluid build-up,” said a female resident. “It’s critical.”

  “Rejected the drain,” said the intern who had failed to get it in.

  A male nurse spoke quietly to me like I was a frightened animal, put his hand on my chest to calm me, and stuck the tube into my nose and down my throat in a single gesture. A tall, wheeled IV pole with hooks that held my drains, feeding bag, urine bag, and various meters was attached to me.

  Doctors examined me further. I felt like my insides were grinding themselves apart. A bag hanging next to my head rapidly filled with brown goop that had been inside me.

  It was very late at night when I was wheeled onto elevators and off them, then down silent corridors. I was still dirty and wearing the damp hospital gowns when I was brought into a ward on the twelfth floor.

  A young Asian nurse named Margaret Yang took over. Before I was placed on a bed, she called and four orderlies appeared. Women talking in the accents of Puerto Rico, Ukraine, and Jamaica, brought me into a bathroom, sponged me off, put me under shower water, and turned me around under it saying, as I tried to cover myself, “It’s okay. You are as God made you.”

  3.

  Only when I was clean, in clean clothes and on a bed looking out at the night did I remember that I had been in this hospital forty-two years before.

  When I was a kid first coming into the city from Long Island, I woke one night with no idea who I was or where I was. The place I was in seemed vast, chilly, and sterile. The lighted windows in the brownstones across the street revealed stylish apartments and I knew it looked like a magazine cover without knowing what that was or how I knew this.

  A nurse told me I’d been found facedown in a hallway, bleeding from a cut on my forehead and without any wallet or ID. I had lots of alcohol and a couple of drugs in my bloodstream.

  A very old nun, thin and stiff, her face almost unlined, came around late in that night. She inspected the bandage on my forehead and talked about Dylan Thomas. I was still enough of a Catholic kid to feel embarrassed talking to a nun while sitting on a bed in just a hospital gown.

  “He was brought here not ten or twelve years ago after a hard night’s drinking. He died from that and pneumonia on the floor just below this one.

  “I thought of him when I saw you,” she said, looking at me calmly. “I wonder if you, too, are a young man who has an uneasy relationship with death.”

  I said I didn’t know if I was or even who I was.

  “Time will reveal those things,” she said. “You’re still very young.”

  Then I found myself looking at that long-ago night on a computer screen. It was all conveyed in images: a New Yorker cover of figures silhouetted against the lighted windows of their brownstones, a figure of a nun that seemed almost translucent.

  What appeared at first to be the famous drawing of the young Rimbaud unconscious in a bed after being shot by his lover Verlaine turned out to be a photo of Dylan Thomas dead in Saint Vincent’s Hospital – and became me at twenty-one with my poet’s hair and empty, blue amnesiac eyes.

  I pulled back from the screen and saw all around me a vast dark space with green globes rotating through it. Then I squinted and saw that the globes were the glowing screens that monitored each patient in this hospital. Beyond us, further out in the endless dark, were other screens in other hospitals, stretching on into infinity.

  4.

  Apparently I called out, because then Nurse Yang was speaking to me, asking if I was okay. The universe and the globes disappeared. Saint Vincent’s, as I saw it all these years later, seemed a small, slightly shabby, and intensely human place.

  “I’m so glad,” I told her. “You people have saved my life.”

  She was amused and said that this was what they tried to do for everyone brought in here but that it was always nice to be appreciated. When she started to leave, I got upset and she showed me how to ring for help if I needed it.

  After she was gone I lay in the cool quiet with the distant sound of hospital bells and the voices of the women at the nurses’ station. But I didn’t sleep.

  My fear that all trace of me would be lost while I slept was out and active that night. Lying there, it seemed likely that this person with a search engine installed in his head was not the me who had existed a few days ago.

  Drugs and the tubes siphoning the liquid out of my guts and into plastic bags had eased my pain and I did drift off every once in a while. But nurses and orderlies came and woke me quite regularly to take my signs and measure my temperature.

  At one moment I would be awake in the chill quiet of that hospital with a view out the window of the Con Edison building and the Zeckendorf Towers at Union Square visible over the low buildings of Greenwich Village.

  In the next, I’d be looking at a computer screen that showed a map of the old Village – a vivid 1950s touristy affair with cartoon painters in berets and naked models, beatnik kids playing guitars in Washington Square and Dylan Thomas with drinks in both hands at the bar of the White Horse Inn.

  Awake again in the dark, I waited, listened, half expecting the old nun to reappear. Instead what I got was a moment’s glimpse of the white-haired cop who had watched me get beaten. He looked at me now with the same deadpan.

  5.

  I came out of a doze, awakened by a gaggle of bright-eyed young residents. “Mr. Bowes,” one of them, a woman with an Indian accent, said, “we were all amazed by the x-rays of your intestines. It was the talk of the morning rounds.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because of the blockage they were extremely distended. You came very close to having a rupture which would have been very bad. You could easily have died.” All of them, a small Asian woman, a tall rather dizzy-looking blond American boy, and a laid-back black man nodded their agreement and stared at me fascinated.

  “How did this happen?” I wanted to know.

  “We believe it was from twenty-three years ago when you had cancer and they removed part of your colon,” she said. “After all this time, the stitching began to unravel and adhered to the other side of your intestines.”

  Other doctors appeared: the gastroenterological resident spoke to me, my own internist popped in. They told me that I was out of immediate danger. Sometimes the blockage eased all by itself. Sometimes it required surgery. The surgeon would see me the next day.

  My bedside phone had now been connected. I made some calls. People came by, friends and family, old flames and godchildren. They brought flowers and disposable razors, my CD player, a notebook, they gave me backrubs and went out and asked questions at the nurse’s station. They established my presence, showed the world that I was someone who was loved and cared for.

  Margaret Yang came and sat for a while, talked to my sister Lee who was visiting, about this unique old hospital and how they were all devoted to it. I wanted to hang on to everyone, nurses, friends, family who was there in the bright daylight.

  They had brought me the Dowland CD. The countertenor sang:

  Part we must though now I die,

  Die I do to part with you.

  Gradually on that lovely spring day with the sun pouring down on the old bricks of the Village, twilight gave way tonight. Lights in the hospital dimmed, the halls got quiet.

  When I was operated on for cancer it was uptown at Mt. Sinai. The ward I was in overlooked Central Park and at night in the intensity of my illness and fear and the drugs inside me, I saw lights passing amid the leafless winter trees.

  And I imagined an alternate world called Capricorn where people dying of
cancer in this world appeared to the population as glowing apparitions.

  The night before that operation, I awoke with the feeling I was falling through the furniture, through the floor, and into Capricorn.

  Remembering that, I saw a picture of myself, ethereal and floating amid a stand of winter trees in a hospital bed. The white-haired cop was showing it to me on a screen.

  “When we spotted that we knew you were in no way run-of-the-mill,” he said. “Our seeing you like this confirmed an initial report from when you were in this place as a kid with a busted head and no memory. Someone spoke to you and said you had an uneasy relationship with death and the potential to see more than the world around you.”

  6.

  Some people have the gift of being perfect hospital visitors. The flowers my friend Mark brought the next morning looked like a Flemish still life, his conversation was amusing and aimless.

  He sat beside my bed that morning and I told him about a book I’d once written.

  “The first things I wrote after I had cancer was a fantasy novel called Feral Cell. In it, people dying of cancer in this world are worshipped in an adjacent world named Capricorn. They call our world ‘Cancer’ and call themselves the ‘Capri.’

  “The faithful among them find ways of bringing a few people who are doomed on our world over to theirs. To prevent us from drifting back here, we are dressed in the skins of deceased Capri, drink their blood, which is called the Blood of the Goat, and are objects of awe.

  “But there are others on that world – decadent aristocrats, of course – who hunt us. They throw silver nets over us and drag us down. They skin us and drain our blood and use those things to cross into this world.”

  “That must almost have made getting sick worthwhile,” he said.

  “The future New York City I depicted in the book – turn of the third millennium Manhattan – was all open-air drug markets and rival gangs of roller skaters and skateboarders clashing in the streets. What we got, of course, was gentrification and Disneyland.

  “A lot of being sick is like one long nightmare. In my Capricorn everything was terror and magic. At night, patients in a children’s cancer ward could be seen floating amid the trees of a sacred grove.”

  Mark walked with me as I pushed my IV stand around the floor. One of the hall windows overlooked Seventh Avenue. Outside on a glorious day in spring, traffic flowed south past the Village Vanguard jazz club.

  “The low buildings make it look like the 1950s,” Mark said.

  “Time travel,” I said.

  It was a quiet Sunday. Later that afternoon, my godchild Antonia was giving me a backrub. Suddenly a dark-haired woman, not tall but with great presence and wearing a red dress suit, appeared. She introduced herself as the one who would be my surgeon if the intestinal blockage didn’t ease. And I knew that it hadn’t and wouldn’t and that she would operate on me.

  As night came and friends and family had departed, I thought of Jimmy when he was a patient at this hospital. Jimmy had been a friend of mine in the years of AIDS terror. He designed and constructed department store window displays.

  Since I’d first known him he talked about the little people inside his head, the ones he relied on for his ideas.

  “Last night they put on this show with fireflies and ice floes. Perfect for Christmas in July,” he’d say. “Sadly, what I’m looking for is ideas for Father’s Day which is, as always, a wilderness of sports shirts and fishing tackle.”

  Just before Jimmy died in this very hospital, I came into his room and found him in tears.

  “They’re all sprawled on the stage dead,” he told me.

  7.

  Without being aware of a transition to sleep, somewhere in the night I became part of a Milky Way of bodies lying hooked up to lighted screens. I saw all of us, patients here and across the world, floating in a vast majestic orbit.

  Then the cop, tough, his blue eyes giving away nothing, watched as I looked at the photo he’d handed me.

  It showed me in my dream of the Southwest along with my companions who would later get arrested and beaten into pulp.

  “How did you know these guys?” he asked.

  “I was a friend of one of them. Louis.”

  “Friend, you mean like a boyfriend?” He displayed no attitude but past experience with cops made me wary. I shook my head.

  Then he told me, “It must be tough for someone like you. Kind of comfortable, retired, having something like this from his past brought up after all these years.”

  “Nothing like that happened to me. It’s just a dream.”

  “A dream, maybe, but made up of bits of your past.”

  Then I heard voices and he was gone. Lights went on in my room and curtains got drawn around the other bed. Since my arrival I had been the only patient in the room. That ended.

  “In here.”

  “Easy.”

  The new patient cried out as they moved him. Through an opening in the curtain, I saw nurses and orderlies transfer him to the bed. Then they stood back and two young surgeons from the emergency room approached. From their talk, I learned that the patient had been in some kind of an incident that had damaged his scrotum.

  The doctors spoke to him. “We saved one testicle and your penis,” they said. “But we couldn’t save the other.”

  The patient asked a question too mumbled for me to hear and a doctor said, “Yes, you’ll have full function.”

  Then they were gone and almost immediately the kid slept and snored. His name, I found out later, was Jamine Wilson and he was nineteen.

  8.

  Dawn was just about to break. I opened the notebook and wrote out a will, divided my possessions among my siblings and friends. Making out a will was a way of trying to hold onto myself, to indicate that I still knew who I was and what was mine.

  That afternoon my sister Lee visited me. I had named her my executor. I dreaded the thought of living in a coma and said I didn’t want extreme measures to be taken to keep me alive if I couldn’t be revived. She went out to the desk and informed them of this.

  Then we talked and listened to Jamine Wilson in the next bed on his phone. He talked about buying hot iPods. He called a woman and told her to bring him burgers and fries from McDonald’s.

  He lived in a halfway house to which he didn’t want to return. A social worker came by and informed him that he would have to be out of the hospital the next morning. He ignored her.

  “Where are you now,” he asked the woman on the phone. “Can’t you get on the subway?”

  My sister left when they came to take me downstairs for x-rays. They gave me barium and recorded its progress through my digestive tract. I was there for hours, lying flat on a cold metal slab while they took each series of shots, resting, sleeping sometimes on the metal slab, until it was time for the next pictures.

  It reminded me of the esoteric forms of modeling. Hand models, foot models; unprepossessing people with one exquisite feature. “Intestine model, that’s me,” I told the technician who smiled and didn’t understand.

  I dozed and saw a screen that read, “An example of his early modeling work.” And there I was, very young, in Frye boots and jeans and leather jacket, a kerchief tied around my neck but with my hands cuffed behind me. It looked like some S&M scenario I might once have posed for. But the setting was the Southwest of that dream.

  Then they woke me up and took some more x-rays.

  When I got back to the room, Jamine’s hospital lunch was untouched beside his bed. I had taken nothing by mouth for days. He looked up at me dark and angry. Our eyes met and for a moment I saw a bit of myself: the kid in the nightmare, the one who’d ended up in this hospital with his memory gone. And I think, maybe, he saw something similar.

  “Where are you now?” he asked someone on the phone then said, “You were there five minutes ago.”

  Some time later, his caller finally arrived whizzing down the hall on a motorized wheelchair, the McDonald’s ba
g on her lap. She was Hispanic with eyes that looked hurt or afraid.

  She maneuvered her chair next to the bed. The two of them ate. He chewed noisily, talked while he did. “I was so scared,” he said, “when I saw all the blood. And it took so long for them to call for help.”

  The cell phone rang and he talked to someone. Shortly afterward a girl and a guy in their late teens came down the hall on their chairs. These were his friends from the halfway house. They seemed oddly impressed by whatever had happened to him.

  Before the evening was over there were five wheelchairs in the room and I realized that Jamine, too, must have one. I was surprised by how quiet and lost everyone but Jamine seemed. At some point they were told they had to leave. My roommate turned off his phone and went back to sleep.

  9.

  The room, the ward, the floor, the hospital grew silent.

  “The place ran with ghosts,” Randall, an old queen I knew from when I was first in the city had said about the very classy hospital uptown where he had been for major heart surgery.

  “They came and talked to me at night, taunted me. An awful man I lived with when I was young and stupid and new to New York, was cruising the halls like it was still 1925. He was a cruel bastard, physically abusive, and I’d walked out on him. He told me he was waiting for me, that sooner or later he’d have me again.”

  Randall liked to have me stay at his place once or twice a week. It was an easy gig. He really got off on having a young guy around. Give him a chance encounter in his own apartment with a twenty-two-year-old in jockey shorts and he was happy.

  “I know when I pop off that awful sadist will be waiting for me, and I’m afraid,” he said.

  I smiled like he had made a joke and he shook his head and looked sad. He died at that hospital a year later and I felt bad. He’d been good to me, generous, kind. I liked him well enough then but I really understood him now.