I awoke with a fever, my sheets soaked through. It was 4:30 a.m. I was due in at work at seven. I couldn’t get up; I was nauseous, dizzy. I felt a retch, and then the next thing I knew my mouth was full of vomit. I tried to keep my mouth closed to keep from spewing on the floor until I could get to the hallway bathroom, but I couldn’t hold it back. It went all over my blanket and the floor. I managed to fall out of bed and half crawl to the waste basket where I retched again. I could barely hold my head up. The room started spinning. I thought I was dying.
I crawled across the hot desert sands. The sun blistered my back. My tongue was swollen. My heart was racing even though I knew I had to be dreaming. A conveyor belt with people on it went past me. There were old ladies and old men, people I had known, patients I’d had. The belt had small clouds under it, and gradually the belt went up into the sky, into the far distance, and I looked up and I saw a hotel up there and I knew it was heaven where they were all going.
Not me. There I was crawling on the hot sand, crawling past horned young men wearing bandoleer gun belts sitting in beach chairs smoking weed. They gave me the thumbs down as I crawled past. AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” blared from the speakers.
I woke up again at 6:25. I was still on the floor. I had a horrendous headache and felt parched. I tried to get up, but my head spun even worse than before. I knew I had to call work, but I didn’t think I could reach the phone on my desk. I tried to stand and I threw up again.
The phone rang. I managed to get it. I tried to hold myself against the desk, but I was too weak. I curled back down to the floor.
“Where the hell are you? You’re on the schedule. Get your slacker butt in here. We’re getting killed this morning.”
“I’m sick,” I said.
“Sick? No, you’re not, not unless you call in four hours ahead of time, you’re not sick, you’re tardy. Now get in here.”
“No, I’m really sick.”
“Out drinking, you ought to know better. You’re a young man; you can work with a hangover. I did all the time in my day.”
“No, no, I’m really, really sick.”
There was silence on the other end.
“What do you want me to do about it? Are you telling me you’re not coming in? It’s an unexcused absence.”
“I’m sick.”
I guess my voice sounded puny enough that he took some notice.
“Are you all right? You’re never sick. You got a broad there?”
“No, I’m sick. I’ve got a fever.”
“All right, since you never book off, I’ll let this one go. Be here tomorrow or call in. Four hours notice. I’m cutting you slack this time.”
I hung the phone up.
I had some aspirin and some ginger ale. I took four aspirin. I had the worst headache of my life. The ginger ale was flat.
I guessed I had some kind of twenty-four-hour bug, and the best thing would be to just lie there and let it pass. I didn’t have a thermometer, but I knew I was burning up. My head was spinning so much I just prayed I could sleep and wake up and be better.
I thrashed. I felt like I was on some kind of mind-altering drug. I was back in my dream crawling across the sands when all of a sudden I came across a set of feet. They were old with long nasty toenails that hadn’t been cut for years, thick, curved, brown and green fungusy nails. The legs were thick and edematous, elephant-like legs. I looked up and saw an old woman sitting in a wheelchair. She shook her head. “Shame,” she said.
“Help me,” I said.
“What have you done to deserve help?”
“I’ve got to drink. I’m dying.”
“Grab hold of my leg.”
I hesitated.
“Go on, grab a hold!”
I grabbed and held on and suddenly I was being whisked through the air. I don’t know if I was more scared of falling or getting stuck to her legs, my arms sunk into her edematous skin as I held on. I was so parched I lapped the beads of moisture on her legs. She swatted the top of my head. “I didn’t say you could drink!” We flew through a spinning psychedelic tunnel. I saw the pages of a calendar fly off like in the old time travel movie, the pages going backwards, November, October, September, August, July, June, 2004, 2003, 2000, 1999, 1994, 1989, 1977, 1971, 1963, 1952, and then we popped out in the spring of 1949. There were flowering dogwood trees. We were on the streets of Hartford, in the North End except the houses were all beautiful, freshly painted with flower gardens, and children playing in the yards, birds singing.
“Recognize that house?” she said.
I did. It was the house on Ridgefield Street. It had a fresh coat of light robin blue paint. The grass was a thick green and a giant oak tree grew in the yard that was surrounded by a white picket fence. “It’s Miss Broadbent’s house,” I said.
“It’s the Broadbent family’s house,” she corrected me. “Mr. Broadbent’s at work at the typewriter factory. His wife’s in at the Wadsworth Museum attending a lecture. That’s me in the kitchen, preparing the dinner—I was employed there for nearly twenty-five years, and up in the bedroom there...”
And the next thing I knew I could see right into the bedroom. “There’s young Terry Broadbent. Look at that smile on her pretty face.” She lay on her freshly made bed, staring at the ring on her finger, a big diamond engagement ring. “She’s twenty-three years old.” She had such a beautiful clear complexion. She looked like she was in a trance.
“Doesn’t she look like she’s the happiest girl in the world?” my escort said. “Young man took her out last night, proposed, gave her that ring, and, well, gave her a little bit more than her mommy and daddy know. Young people today aren’t any different from what they were back then. They all have those needs. I did myself at a time, if you can believe that. Look at her staring into the diamond. What do you think she sees?”
“What happened to her fiancé?”
She chortled, and then said, “We’ve got more stops to make, grab on again.” And whoosh, we sped toward downtown. I was holding on to her ankles. We stopped at a bar on Main Street and rolled right through the front door. There in the bar, several young men laughed raucously as the waitress brought them another round of drinks.
“So you gave her a ring,” one said.
“Yes, I did, and that was it. She couldn’t say yes soon enough after all these evenings of saying no, if you know what I mean.”
“You didn’t?”
“I did.”
“A ring, isn’t that a lot just to get there or are you really going to marry her?”
“I told her I had to get my business up and going, and of course I have my business trips.”
“You are a cad. What did the ring set you back?’
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I went to see a client. No one answered the door. It was open so I went in calling her name. Found her dead on the living room floor. Cold and stiff. Eighty-seven, she just dropped. I saw the ring there nice and shiny and thought, ‘Hey now, there’s my ticket.’ She didn’t have any relatives so I knew no one would miss it.”
“That’s too much. That’s evil.”
“Well, she’ll never know. And I tell you, if there’s evil in me, there’s some devil in her. She was no lame kitten.”
“What a snake,” I said to my escort.
“That’s right, and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”
“He gets struck by a bolt of lightning.”
“You read this story before?”
“No, I was just guessing.”
“Let me do the telling.”
“Was it a bolt of lightning?”
“No, no.” She shook her head. “He went to jail for twenty years for theft.”
“For the ring?”
“No, they never found out about that. He was embezzling company funds. They sent him to jail, and he died there of electrocution—accidental in the kitchen—not state sanctioned.”
“Does she know that?”
“Yes, she does, but all she’ll tell people is he died in a horrible accident before they could marry.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, people believe what they want. The good part of their souls believes in the good part of other people’s, in the possibility of their redemptions. You see, the heart wants to be loved. The heart wants always to be believed. That’s why it’s so easy for a heart to be stolen.”
I woke up vomiting again. My head was exploding. The phone rang.
It was a wrong number. An oddly familiar young female voice asked for me, but she hung up saying she had the wrong Tim.
Then there I was again, back in dream hell, my mouth full of sand. I was facedown in the hot desert. “Up, boy!” A gangbanger kicked me in the ribs. He wore a Chicago Bull’s jersey and had gold chains dangling around his neck. “Yo, I ought to just put you down for what you did, stealing my hard earnings like that. I got four kids could have used that change. I was their only provider.”
“I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. Everybody knows. Grab on to my Nikes, I got some things to show you.”
I touched his red shoes and the next thing I knew I was whistling through the air as Air Drug Dealer flew me over housetops, and treetops, and judging from the roads I saw where we were headed—Carrie’s.
We went right through the walls—into the bedroom. I saw a badged uniform and gun slung over a chair. “That woman likes cops, don’t she?” he said. “Why’d she hang out with you? You’re just a petty thief.”
“Please, do I have to see this? I’m going to be sick,” I said, and I threw up.
“What do you think she’s looking for? A good time? Or true love? Wipe your mouth now. I personally think it’s true love. But life ain’t about the finding. You found my money and you thought you’d found the answer. You didn’t find nothing but a load of trouble.”
“Can we go?”
“Yes, but we ain’t done. We got another stop.”
And I rode back into Hartford on his red heels and we landed on the roof of Miss Broadbent’s house on Ridgefield Street, and we hung upside down looking in the window. I saw her there in bed. She lay there and cried. She cried and she cried. She looked lost in her mind.
“Take that in, young fool, take that in. No repair for that pain.”
My head was pounding when I awoke. I did not know whether it was day or night. I was spinning.
I saw a specter at the foot of my bed. I knew I was just having some crazy Ebenezer Scrooge hallucination, but it was what was in my head and I couldn’t wake up out of it. The specter was an old man from whom I had stolen fifty dollars. He looked at me somewhat kindly and that surprised me. “Come, young man,” he said. “Take my hand. I have a place to take you.” But we didn’t go anywhere. The room changed though. The paint peeled from the walls. There were cobwebs on the walls like it was a forgotten attic. I looked at my hands. They were old and veined. The man held up a mirror and it was me, but I was eighty years old, bald, wrinkled. My joints hurt, I was short of breath. I felt tightness in my chest. I looked over at the desk and saw ten pill bottles and saw I was on a medical bed with the side rail up. I felt my penis. I had a catheter in me. By the bedside there was a faded picture. It was my picture of Carrie, but she didn’t look old. She looked just like she did today. The door opened and I saw two EMTs saunter in.
“He’s cold,” one said, touching me. “Some rigor in the jaw.”
They put electrodes on me. “Asystole. All three leads. What time is it?”
“10:42.”
The other one wrote it down on his pad. “10:42 it is. What a fucking place to end up. No family, I’d guess. I wonder where he keeps his dough? Check under the mattress.”
I tried to move, to wake up, to startle them, but I couldn’t. I was dead. Stone cold.