Hospitals and ice cream parlors have the same lighting. Why? Why so fucking bright? Ted wondered at that as he took the elevator to the seventh floor. He wandered down a long hallway, checking numbers, catching glimpses of people quietly sleeping in their beds, only the machines keeping them alive making noise. Just a glance as he walked by. Looking at sick people was somehow like surprising someone naked; it was like you didn’t want to get caught doing it, but there was something fascinating there, a pull, the vulnerability, maybe, the universality. He felt suddenly vulnerable himself. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the roach. Just knowing it was there was a comfort of sorts. The one girl he could always count on—Mary Jane. He turned a corner, and at the end of a long, deserted hallway, he saw a dark-haired woman rise from a seat and start toward him. That must be the nurse, Ted thought, the one who called me—Marian or Maria, was it? I hope it’s that nurse. It was past four a.m.
“Lord Fenway?” the dark woman said, as she approached. Of course the lifelong joke of a name irked Ted, but he wasn’t irked at the moment, because this nurse was seriously otherworldly. She was definitely Latina, he speculated, but around her dark eyes he could see Asia—China or Korea—and a deep but attractive sadness he may or may not have been projecting. He became aware that he had stopped breathing, and also that he was very, very high.
“Theodore,” Ted finally corrected her—and immediately thought, Like a fucking chipmunk, Alvin’s bespectacled brother—and then set about correcting and recorrecting himself. “Or Ted. Ted. Theodore. Whatever. Theodore’s fine, but Ted. Ted.”
“Okay, I think we’ve reached a definitive conclusion. Ted it is. I’m Mariana. We spoke on the phone,” she said, smiling; her mouth was large, but perfectly in proportion to her pretty face, which was not large. How’s that possible, Ted wondered as the Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” played in his head, distracting him, so he banished the band to a back room in his mind to jam without him. Sssh for now, Jerry, I need to focus. Her beautiful mouth moved:
“Your father’s gonna be fine for now, we had to pump his stomach, but he’s gonna be okay in a bit.” That Puerto Rican accent. Shit. That hard lilt fucked with his computer. Ted felt his autonomic system had maybe shut off, and he was afraid he had to breathe consciously or he would forget and suffocate himself. And one and two and three and four. He couldn’t remember where he’d gotten this bud from, but fuck. He mustered, “The old bastard tried to kill himself?”
The nurse’s head pulled back a micron, imperceptible if you weren’t as stoned as Ted, but he saw that he had offended her with the callousness of his tone. He often forgot that it was unusual or unnatural for a son to hate his father, and even more unusual to express that in polite society.
“Your father’s got lung cancer, squamous. Terminal,” she said.
Lung cancer. Squamous. Ted told his own lungs to breathe. How is a natural person who has love for his father supposed to react to this news? he wondered. I have to act like that guy. I’d like to do that for this woman, he thought. And as he composed his face to approximate sadness, he felt an actual deep and horrible sadness fall over him, and he stopped it.
“It’s only a matter of months,” she said. “You didn’t know?”
“I just found out recently,” Ted said.
“How recently?”
“Very recently.”
“When?”
“Just now when you said it.”
She nodded. “He’s been sick for about three years.”
“We’re a close family,” he said.
He’d been sick for three years? Jesus Christ. He’d been given a couple years to live, three years ago. How scared had he been? How lonely? Had he had one of his young girlfriends to hold his hand? The nurse kept talking to him, at him. He heard that Marty had had “reductive surgery” that had been “minimally successful” two years ago. He heard the phrase “small cell,” and that chemotherapy had bought some time. He found himself quite unable to concentrate, so words such as “carcinoma” and “cytotoxic” started floating up at him untethered and meaningless, but full of evil import. More and more words like “cyclophosphamide,” “VP-16-123,” “1-ME-1-nitrosourea.” Ted had the sensation he was listening to a poem in another language, a poem about death. All the “-mides” and “-mines” even sight-rhymed in his mind’s eye. The nurse must have seen the curtain fall over his eyes.
“You okay? I’m sorry. I’m dumping a lot on you all at once. We can talk more later. Here…”
The nurse ran her long fingers down her white nurse’s skirt and put her hands in her pockets. She pulled on the top of her shirt, revealing momentarily a bra that was perhaps too nice, too lacey, and too red for this work and this place. She pulled out a small business card. Ted told himself to breathe again. “Always run out. Mariana Blades,” she said, extending her hand. “Grief Counselor.”
What? Grief. Counselor. Ted immediately thought of Charlie Brown and “good grief.” Was there a grief that was good, a good grief? Peanuts! But Marty was alive. She was a prematurely grieving counselor. She was more like a Death Counselor. So she consults with Death and tells Him who to take next? Ted felt a smile take over his face and did his best to reverse it. “Grief Counselor. Death Counselor,” he repeated, looking at the card. “That’s charming. Like ‘Phlegm Specialist,’ or ‘Wound Facilitator,’ or ‘Ambassador of Pus.’”
Ted felt pretty good about coming up with those three on the spur.
“I work with the dying through their final stages. From shock to denial to anger to bargaining and depression to acceptance and peace.”
“Sounds like a normal day for me. Except the peace part.” That joke landed nearby, but not quite where he wanted it to. He became aware of trying to be too funny in the circumstances.
“Specifically, what I am doing with your father is trying to help him, in his final days, to reach a state of acceptance, to seize the narrative of his life.”
“Oh, this is that Kübler-Ross stuff? James Hillman Jungian jive?” Ted said, trying to join with her, and display his erudition, but realizing immediately that he sounded like a condescending shithead. He felt deeply angry, angry at cancer, and she was there in front of him, and he was in danger of taking it out on her. He didn’t want to.
“You’ve read Kübler-Ross?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think?”
“Well, I haven’t actually read it read it, more like I’ve read about it, read it.”
“‘Read about it, read it.’ I see.”
If this conversation were a ball game, Ted would be 0–3 so far, with two strikeouts and a tapper back to the mound.
“This is a letter.” She offered him a leaf of yellow legal pad. “A letter he wrote to the universe.”
“This universe?” asked Ted, realizing that if he could not stop sounding condescending, he might as well own it. Seize in the now the narrative of being an asshole. Maybe she’d misread condescension as strength and intelligence. Fingers crossed. “The universe you and I appear to be in? He wrote it to this universe?”
She nodded and pointed at the letter. Ted didn’t want to read it; he continued riffing as he turned the letter over in his hand. “Do you need to address a letter to the universe? Dear Universe. Probably not, right? I mean, no need for the cosmic mailman, it’s already there in the universe that it’s addressed to.”
The nurse sighed and eyed the letter. Ted might have been beginning to try her patience. He began to read aloud.
“‘Dear Ted, I got the lung cancer. Which is fucked ’cause I always only bought the cigarettes that were harmful to pregnant women and babies, of which I am neither so I figured I was safe. Silly me. This just in—Tareyton ad account exec hoisted by his own tarry petard.’”
Ted looked up and said, “Funny. Sorta.”
“Get to the Red Sox stuff,” Mariana said.
Ted looked back at the letter. “Blah blah blah. Here—‘I was conceived in 1918, on the night the Sox last won the Series. An illegitmate son of an illegitmate woman, a different curse of the Babe.’ Clever quasi-historical pun. Illegitimate spelled wrong.”
Mariana smiled.
“What?” said Ted.
“Your father told me you wasted a first-class mind to throw peanuts at philistines.” Ted couldn’t decide whether he was happy that his father had described him like that to this woman, or unhappy. He went back to the letter, scanning down with his finger: “Blah blah blah … I think he’s lost his mind … here: ‘It’s June fifteenth and the Sox have a five-and-a-half-game lead. Surely they will finally win this year and then surely I will die, the prophecy of my miraculous birth coming full caduceous circle.’ Caduceous—go, Dad, with your thesaurus. That’s rather flowery and overwrought. ‘Until October, I am dying but cannot die. Until October, I can leap from tall buildings, catch bullets in my teeth, and shit silver dollars.’ Didn’t see that coming. ‘Until October, I am a god.’ Okay, well, I’d say there’s been definitely successful seizing of narrative happening here, and, wow, what drugs do you have him on and may I have some?”
Mariana said simply, “He needs you. He needs you to help him finish his life’s work, a healing fiction.” Mariana took his arm in hers and began to steer him toward one of the rooms.
“Fuck fiction,” Ted said. “I would think now is the time to face the facts.”
“Not a novel he’s actually writing down. He’s rewriting it in his mind, the novel of his life.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound too insane.”
“There are a million ways to tell a life story, Theodore.” Chipmunk ref? Let it pass … “As a tragedy or a comedy or as a fairy tale with baseball teams that can keep you alive like magical warlocks. He is trying to tell you his story his way.”
“I’m trying to appreciate what you’re saying, but you can’t just rewrite history,” Ted protested. “You can’t just rewrite the past. There are such things as facts that get in the way. Pesky facts.”
She stopped him in front of room 714, Babe Ruth’s career home run total. She pulled him a little closer, dropping her voice to a whisper, fixing him with her deep brown eyes. He felt her breath land on his face and ear. He lost his mind momentarily. This was probably as close to a woman he’d been in three years without paying for it. The Dead sang something again from “Sugar Magnolia” about coming up for air, trying to tell him something. Keep it down, Bob, Jerry, guys …
“The way your dad sees it,” she spoke, “he’s been the villain, he’s been the victim, and he’s been the goat. Now he wants to die a hero.” A man’s voice, ruined and harsh, vibrating on its few remaining vocal cords, came from within the room.
“Ask for her card, you moron!” was what his father called out.