In my oldest fantasy, everything is perfect after the giant bicycle accident. My friends and I clench our teeth as if imitating sharks, all our appendixes ruptured, such a crowd of us that they have had to call a second ambulance. The pain weighs us down on our stretchers as cleanly as a bag of sand. We are all injured, a good strong word from The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, as we drift in white vehicles toward the great white floodlit face of the hospital.
I suppose that now, supported by my barely sufficient graduate student insurance, I’m the closest I’ll ever come to that fantasy. But unlike the structures I used to dream about, grand hospitals with their square and dignified faces looking out over districts of residential greenery, this is just a community hospital, set like a pumping station against the riverbank, windows sealed against this valley’s moist heat. The pain I feel is something awkward, off balance, tilting toward nausea, something I can’t quite get the rest of my body around. Its drug-dulled, destabilized ache is almost lost beneath the continuing swoon of relief that came with what I was told this afternoon—that I still have two testicles and have been delivered of merely a benign cyst.
In the old dream that I loved so much, we waved back and forth between ambulances. I would like to do something like that now, but there’s nobody to wave to, and I don’t feel well enough. When you love hospitals as much as I do, it’s easy to forget that the reason we go into them usually spoils the luxurious emptiness of the time we spend there. Even the shapes of the nurses seem harsh in their bleached white. It has been said that youth is wasted on the young; I guess you could say hospitals are wasted on the sick.
But I have had a second piece of good news: I actually know one of the nurses here. We worked together in the Buckeye Lounge when she was still a medical student. Still— that’s the important word, for in a town like ours, the law requires that even a strongly ambitious woman dramatically lower her career goals, so as to keep them more in line with those of whatever local carpenter or tinsmith such a woman invariably marries. I like to put things in terms of laws and theories, because in a valley full of those people whose cars and trucks surround this sealed capsule of a hospital, I can talk to myself knowing that if they heard me they would never understand a word.
So Leslie dropped out of medical school (you could say it “came to pass”) because she was in love with a gentle, generic, cigarette-smoking fashioner of gentle porcelain objects and so became a nurse instead, for which I have no right to criticize her, which brought her here, to the only hospital in town.
* * *
And as long as I have all this time to fantasize, I might as well think about my other favorite fantasy nurse—Nurse Danko of The Rookies, Kate Jackson’s first prime-time role. Nurse Danko was that Platonic nurse construct of which real nurses are but shadows on a cave wall. Every time someone got injured (and many were injured but few killed in those kind and violent seventies), he always ended up in Nurse Danko’s hospital, and Nurse Danko was always on duty and was always his nurse.
It is significant to me that Leslie looks more than a little like Nurse Danko—the same dark hair, the same keen face, precise without being prim, soft without being sentimental. Lacking Kate Jackson’s on-set stylist to comb her out between takes, Leslie had to opt, in the Buckeye Lounge at least, for a single short pigtail.
* * *
What I love about the hospital is that except for during visiting hours, it’s an area free of people in pickup trucks. Even the janitors don’t have them. I can’t think of another place to better shut yourself away from such people—though I know I’m not being fair—from their mindless good luck, away from that sensibility that understands nothing but has a bumper sticker for everything. I love that the windows don’t open, that a truck with a bad exhaust system can climb the hill on the other side of Silver Creek, and I won’t hear anything but the long afternoon hush of a hospital, a calm yet agitated equilibrium, that gentle bounciness of background nonmusic for which years of soap opera have secretly prepared us.
The night is even better. From my window last night, still at risk, still under the hazard of… orchiectomy (a word I had never heard before but knew enough Greek vocabulary to know immediately what it meant and that it was already a word I did not like), I could see what must be a storage room in another wing of the hospital, a chamber full of such a deep, late-night blue light that I didn’t know it was possible for anybody on so much medication to wake up at such an hour. No metaphor; that was it: the middle of the night. If you wake up in a hospital, it is wonderful to know that things go on all night, that the republic endures out in its dark fields (whoever it was that said that) and that somewhere a nurse is counting tablets onto a plastic tray.
Even the nonprofessional staff members of this hospital have a kind of delicate unsqueamishness that could never squeeze itself into a one-size-fits-all cap. The faces of the orderlies are calm, even living as they do with the chance that somebody they are talking to will die under the knife, as happens sometimes, in rooms full of delicate electronic objects.
How strange, on a warm afternoon, to think of the two populations of our moist valley separated by the crosshatched glass of the emergency room. On the business side of the partition, the young girls have become so good at filling in the emergency admission forms that the wheezing speed of everything around them hums down a notch.
On the other side of the glass, the patients and their families wait with hurt knees, bleeding hands, reactions to bee stings. It is summer and they are angry. It’s too crowded. Something is wrong with the weather. They have been shouting from car to car in the Wal-Mart parking lot about how the only thing the government wants to do these days is take money out of your pockets. Whatever it is they believe is going on with those people in Washington, they know it with such certainty that maybe it has to be true. The gathered thought of all of it pushes in the same direction, filled with the same sureness as the man from the Taxpayers Coalition for Congressional Term Limits, who every Saturday sets up a petition table in the store’s entranceway on the other side of the automatic doors from the old retired guy whose job it is to smile at everybody and say “Thanks for coming to Wal-Mart.”
I have been doomed from the start to have trouble with people in vehicles with engines powerful enough to screech their rear wheels when the light changes. It is the way of the world that in the critical days before some graduate student like me, working in a cocktail lounge, gets up the nerve to ask a waitress like Leslie out—that some local artist-cum-masonry contractor (or maybe a drug dealer using the craft as a cover) is going to walk into the bar, in the process of wandering from restaurant to restaurant, looking for waitresses.
The guy was focused, tiny eyes fixed on her, his cigarette dim in the bar light. What can I say but that she married him, a maker of gentle porcelain bric-a-brac? What could I do but wish them well? I looked through their registry at JCPenney and I’m sure they liked what I picked out. At those incense-flavored arts and crafts shows, in a booth next to the mountain dulcimer merchants, he makes (or launders) a lot of money. He gives her gentle porcelain jewelry. The only thing he has ever had the energy to tell me in the bar is that business is going great—of course, as are most marginal businesses not related to the actual economy.
We had that conversation back when she was still majoring in neurophysiology. I went to the Little Professor Book Center and ordered something called the Human Brain Coloring Book and colored in a few of the early plates, that we might have something to talk about as we restocked the bar glasses. Plate I-I: Introduction to the Human Brain. Because I Love Leslie, I had penciled across the top in several colors. Plate 1-2: Introduction to Brain Structure. Because I Love Leslie. Plate 1-4: Organization of the Nervous System. Same reason, improved calligraphy—but we never did end up talking about brain physiology, so I stopped coloring in the plates.
I remember a night when it was already too late. I drove out to see her in Cincinnati, where she lived on the hill of hospitals. We went out to dinner in my rented car; I couldn’t let her see my graduate student Honda Civic. The nicest thing she ever did was trust me (a gentleman, with almost all my coursework done) enough to let me sleep on her living-room floor. I didn’t know it at the time, but she already knew she was leaving med school to be back in the same town with her fiance, had already been accepted into the nursing program at Lawrence County Community College.
Never has the world of hospitals been so beautiful, there in the middle of them, in a little garden-apartment building curled up around itself like a fortress in the dangerous part of town. Those hospitals, alive, hummed in their white light: Baptist Memorial, Shriners’ Hospital, Beth Israel, their own little country, their own calendar of all-night hospital life. And never has the night run so deep, all night, when I couldn’t sleep from all the real coffee we had with dinner.
Once, on top of Baptist Memorial, the helicopter started up, a horrific crescendo for all those radiology residents catching up on sleep. It roared off, and half an hour later it came back, important beyond all sleep. I was happy to be there or anywhere else where I didn’t need to pretend I had a prayer of anything working out.
What a pleasure it was, without sleep the next morning, to kiss her good-bye and tell her I loved her and drive home actually crying from time to time behind sunglasses in a rental car that at least I was not embarrassed by. What a pleasure it was, tired, in my best herringbone sport coat, to stop at the truck stop halfway between our two mutually invisible cities in August, to sulk silent and well dressed in the air-conditioning over my fish sandwich, not knowing if the waitress saw me.
* * *
It was only a few weeks later that I ran into her in MacGoogle-burger’s. She was dancing to an anti-Semitic New Age band that neither of us liked much. She was already married by then. I took her hand as I talked to her, gently, unlike the drunks we both knew so well, who grab you by the arms and exhale in your face.
“Leslie, I have something to ask you,” I said, and she looked me in the eyes and listened because she already knew I was a gentleman, drunk or sober.
“When you’ve decided on your nursing specialty”—this shouted close to her hair over a pseudo-Jackson Browne refrain about homeless Palestinians—“please tell me what it is, because whatever your specialty is, I’ll be willing to get that disease on the condition that you’ll be my nurse.”
“Oh, Carl, that’s sweet.”
“I mean it,” I said, twice, and I think she heard me.
“That’s really sweet.”
“My only request,” I said to her, “is that you won’t go into oncology.” That continues to be my all-time favorite moment between us, because it is the kind of joke that only a man who knows what the word “oncology” means can tell to a woman who knows what the word “oncology” means and whose husband without question does not know what the word “oncology” means. And though he sprawls upon her body nine times a week, with his mustache particulates pungent as an ashtray—and I might as well bring it out into the open that he almost certainly is making her gasp with his tireless, doggish, no doubt uncircumcised, thrusts—still, the two of them belong to two different nations: the people who look up words in the dictionary and the people who don’t. I’m not afraid to admit that I belong to that population unable to dwindle themselves down far enough to believe in the same God who protects all those filter-tip folk who go through life blessed against cancer, their cigarette smoke drifting over to the no-smoking tables. Two nations. What Leslie and I, and no one else, have had between us amounts to nothing less than a unit of human knowledge. Her husband must bend forward with his cigarette to follow along with infomercials for political third parties, as they grow old together.
* * *
I lay on a tall bed beside a window in a little room on the first floor of the hospital. The anesthesiologist was joking around about something. Rock and roll was playing over the radio, which seemed so strange in a hospital that I thought it meant I was going to die. How right to be swept up in that music when you have something to be afraid of, electric like metal under the tongue, a song with fear in the notes themselves; how beautiful to be swallowed up in this, in the middle of the summer, behind sealed windows with black gaskets around the edges, looking out from the surgery and radiology level into a thicket of green weeds as you plunge asleep.
* * *
For a long time after I woke up, my doctor didn’t come around, and I didn’t know how many balls I had. It’s not the kind of thing I wanted to ask a nurse, even though one of them kept coming in and pulling my covers up.
Now, every half hour, it’s a different nurse looking under the covers. Now that I know I’m all right, it makes me proud for some reason to be examined this way. It is the luxury of pain, I suppose, if that still means anything with the drugs we have access to. The old dignity of a wounded bicyclist. The weirdness of that inch of glass, as if in a submarine, between our world inside and the land of bad mufflers outside. There seems to be no connection between us and the scene out there: the bridge over the little river, nothing but cars all day, not a walking figure since I checked myself in.
I have almost given up on Leslie ever coming around when suddenly she walks into the room and stands there for a moment with her face in that tight smile I remember so well from the time I told her I would be willing to get sick.
It is the first time I have seen her in uniform. I used to think that black was the most beautiful color on a woman, but now I know, at once and forever and beyond question, that it’s white. The shadow of it clarifies the gradations of her skin color and funnels my attention up to the hard blue of her eyes. My attention is drawn there so quickly that at first I don’t notice that she has her hair pinned back—a bit severely, it seems to me—under her white cap.
“Well hi, Carl,” she says, and immediately I remember how strong my painkillers are, like jellyfish over my face as I try to talk. I don’t know if this is just a social visit or if I’m on her watch.
“Hello Leslie, it’s... really good to see you.” What a privilege to be allowed to talk slowly and to know that she’ll still be listening at the end of the sentence, such as it is.
I don’t know what I expected with the hair. Nurses always have their hair pinned. The only place you see nurses wearing their hair loose is in a porno movie. She must be on an official visit, because she does what all the other nurses have done. She pulls away the sheets, lifts my gown, and stares mildly at the wounds I haven’t seen yet. I lie there in the mild white of this room, my dark bruises bathed in the reflection of her uniform, which throws white light off of itself as if we are in a commerrial for Clorox 2, its brightness overpowering the greenish cloud shadows outside.
And there she is above me, locked away forever in her gentle porcelain marriage, her clear features uncomplicated by anything but the fact of how beautiful she will remain for the next few years, until she gets hard and fat and has to quit her job for babies. For now, at least, I am sick and she is my nurse. I am more than sick; I am injured. And somehow, as if I am again nine years old and imagining myself groaning bravely in the ambulance, somehow the condition of being injured brings me close to being as perfect in my fashion as she is in hers, leaving me half exposed on the bed in front of her, with a plastic thunder mug hooked over the bar at the side of the bed, yet more of a man, I would like to think, than her eternal, unblemished, nicotine, coitus partner.
If this were an episode of The Rookies, this would be the moment they freeze the frame and roll credits. She helps me sit up and lets me see for the first time the dark bruise of my numbed intactness, and I feel a kind of triumph fill the little room—which I still have to pay twenty percent of—but then with this much Percodan, everything feels like triumph. The sun comes out, far away outside the glass, around it a polarized rainbow.
Even her teeth are perfect as victory radiates out into the un-air-conditioned world. I can imagine that everybody who has ever taken anything I loved away from me is trapped out there in the open and can’t get into the shade, their moles and freckles mutating in the sun. One by one, the third-party rallies disperse, still angry but not sure what about; credit cards come up declined at gas pumps; and all over America the bumper stickers, even those put on just last week, have begun peeling away like old Band-Aids when there is no cut underneath.