THIRTY-FIVE

They polish the floors of a hospital with a machine that glides. The operator clings to a handle like a power lawn mower, the newly buffed floor shining. He sets out little signs, WARNING, WET FLOOR, a swath of light where the machine has passed.

Maybe I expected someone to stop me, so early in the morning. Maybe I expected the institution to be closed, forgetting that it never shut down, open twenty-four hours a day. Visiting hours, I was thinking. Come back later. People would look at me and know there was something wrong.

But they ignored me, the woman with the clipboard, the bald man on the phone. I passed by like someone who wasn’t there.

Maybe I took a wrong turn, distracted by a Pepsi machine, thirsty again, no coins in my pocket. I was lost in a room of weight machines. Over by the window was a big yellow spa, Olympic size, a brand I had never seen before.

“I took it easy on the garlic,” she was saying. “Perla said it might cause gas.”

The door was open but I knocked anyway. The sound turned Sofia into a statue, Woman with Spoon. She was holding a Tupperware bowl on her lap, and a long stainless steel spoon was dripping onto the floor. Dad had a napkin on his front, sitting in his wheelchair fully dressed, the same pants I had picked out for the hearing.

“Zachary, Florence is frantic,” Sofia said at last. It was rare for Sofia to refer to my mother by name, not your mother or she.

I had interrupted something between husband and wife. I considered leaving. Maybe the weird sensation I was experiencing was hunger.

“She got home around midnight and you were nowhere,” Sofia was saying.

I made a show of calm, finding a chair, the metal legs stuttering against the floor tile. I didn’t sit down yet, my knees feeling stiff and unreliable. “Minestrone for breakfast?” I asked. My words came out hoarse, leathery.

“Call your mother,” said Dad.

A drop of soup had stained the baby blue napkin tied around his neck. I located a chair in the corner under a pile of professional journals, some of the mail he was getting around to at last.

“Don’t bother sitting down,” he stage whispered. “Go call Flo,” he said, the respirator forcing him to pace his words. “And tell her you’re all right.”

Sofia looked away, blushing a little, maybe embarrassed to be suddenly a part of a family fight.

“You make it with ham hocks,” I said. I knew how I sounded. I was buying time, making conversation. “Cook it two or three days. I had it once, remember? That time Dad and I came back from the Marin headlands cold and wet. We had captured a rare butterfly, the Muir hairstreak, in a grove of giant cypress. I thought your soup was the best stuff I had ever tasted.”

She smiled at the compliment but didn’t put much energy into it, her mind on other things. “I didn’t bring the right spoon,” she said. “This one keeps dribbling.”

His pants needed to be ironed. The room had a stale, medicine smell, a smell like plastic, a TV fresh from the store.

“You’re not,” he said, waiting to get in rhythm with the breath machine, “going to sit there like that.”

My dad had no right talking to me like this, especially in front of Sofia. In a minute or two, I told myself, I would get a paper towel and wipe the drops of minestrone off the floor.

Dad gets this expression on his face, a silent shout. This was my dad’s usual style, Mr. Agreeable until he gets impatient. Sometimes you hope people will evolve, and they don’t.

I left the room, and this time people saw me, lowering a clipboard to say something, looking up from the waxing machine. It didn’t matter. I was leaving. Outside I hurried across the parking lot, like a man I read about once who had caught himself on fire and couldn’t stop power-walking out of town as fast as he could, keeping a few steps ahead of the pain.

But I did stop, finally, and watched a sea gull pecking at a squashed wrapper on the sidewalk, spearing it, taking it away. If I make a video someday it will be about flies and vultures, how we shouldn’t hate them. A man wiped his windshield with a towel, tilting his head to catch the angle of light off the glass. Cars started up, exhaust feathering into the cool morning.

Until I die I will remember: I stepped out of the shadow while Steven Ray McNorr unzipped his pants and peed, a long, steaming arc into the hedge beside the driveway.

He never saw me. He took his time, shook himself off and tucked himself back into his pants. It took a while, the zipper snagging. Then he slammed the truck door. He had trouble finding the right key, while I watched with the .38 in my hand.

And couldn’t use it.