"What happened to your face?" I point to a row of fresh st.i.tches above his eye.
"Call it a welcome-back present."
"I fed the dog and stayed until the cops were finished, and then I called your lawyer-he"s coming later."
"They don"t want me back on account of how I "ran away." It"s not like anyone told me what the checkout policy was and that I needed some sort of permission to go."
A hospital housekeeper pa.s.ses through with a metal mop and bucket.
"Is he contagious?"
"No, just violent; come in," I say.
A young male doctor wheels in with an enormous lighted magnifying gla.s.s. "I am Chin Chow and I am here to pluck your face." The doctor leans over him, plucking shards from his face. "You"ve got no t.i.ts," George tells the doctor.
"And that is a good thing," Chin Chow says.
I go to the nurses" station. "My brother has st.i.tches in his head-they weren"t there when he left the house this morning."
"I"ll make a note that you"d like the doctor to speak with you."
I go back to George, his face now a polka-dotted canvas of b.l.o.o.d.y red spots. "Chow Fun f.u.c.king plucked me, trying to get me to confess: "Oh, so what bring you here today? You have rough night at home?" He f.u.c.king dug holes in my face with no anesthesia. "Stop," I said a hundred times. "Stop. Stop. Stop." "Oh, you a big baby, cry, cry, cry. You a big boy now, act like a man." That was no doctor, that was an undercover agent, trying to pry a confession out of me."
"Really? I think he was making conversation. I doubt he knows why you"re here."
"Yes he does, he said he was going to read all about me in the New York Post." And with that George starts to cry.
"Aw, come on, don"t start that."
He sputters a little longer and then, snorting and snuffling, he stops. "Are you going to tell Mom?"
"Your wife is having brain surgery and you"re worried I"m going to tell your mother?"
"Are you?"
"What do you think?"
He doesn"t answer.
"When did you last see Mom?" I ask.
"A few weeks ago."
"A few weeks?"
"Maybe a month?"
"How many months?"
"I don"t f.u.c.king know. Are you telling her?"
"Why would I? Half the time she doesn"t even know who she is. How about this: if she asks about you, I"ll say you were transferred overseas. I"ll send her tea from Fortnum and Mason and let her think you"re still a big macher."
He wriggles on the gurney. "Scratch my a.s.s, will you? I can"t reach. You"re a pal," he says, breathing deep with relief. "A pal when you"re not a complete son of a b.i.t.c.h."
An orderly brings George a lunch tray, and, arms and legs bound, he manages to contort himself sufficiently that with his knees he bounces it off the tray table and onto the floor.
"One per customer," the lunch lady says, "try again tomorrow."
"Start an IV on him so he doesn"t get dehydrated," I hear the nurse say without missing a beat.
"They"re not f.u.c.king around," I tell him, when she pulls back the curtain, needle in hand, with four guys singing backup behind her. "Speaking of lunch, I"m going to the cafeteria."
"You may not die today," he says, "but I will unwind you like a spool of thread."
"Can I bring you anything?" I ask, cutting him off.
"Chocolate-chip cookies," he says.
I go through the cafeteria line, circling steaming trays of mixed vegetables, stuffed sh.e.l.ls, meat loaf, cold sandwiches made to order, pizza, doughnuts, cereal; I go around and at the end my tray is empty. I circle again and get the tomato-rice soup, a bag of Goldfish crackers, and a carton of milk.
When I tear the package open, orange crackers take flight, littering the table and the floor around me. I collect what I can. They are different from what I remember; I"m not sure if it"s the Goldfish in general or the flaw of the hundred-calorie pack-they"re smaller and flatter and now with facial expressions. They float on their sides, looking up at me with one eye and a demented half-smile.
I eat thinking of the "worm" in the Chinese food, of the way the man at the deli near my apartment says "tomato lice." I eat picturing the pot of soup on my mother"s stove, soup that formed a membranous skin across the top as it cooled, and how she would obliviously serve me that stringy clot, which I always ate imagining that it was really blood.
I eat the soup, pretending it is blood, pretending that I am transfusing myself while Jane is upstairs having a "craniotomy and evacuation"-those are the words they used. I imagine a surgical stainless dust-buster sucking out the porcelain and bone. I imagine her coming out of it all with steel plates like armor and required to wear a football helmet twenty-four hours a day.
Did she even know it was happening? Did she wake up thinking, This isn"t real, this is a terrible dream-and then, when it was over, did she have a pounding headache? Did she think my hair was a mess?
She is in surgery, my spilled seed loose inside her, swimming furiously-as much as we did it with protection, we also did it without. Will anyone discover me swimming there? Do I need a lawyer of my own?
The soup warms me, reminding me that I"ve not eaten since last night. A man with two black eyes pa.s.ses, lunch tray in hand, and I think of how my father once knocked my brother out, flattened him, for not much of a reason. "Don"t be confused who"s the boss."
I think of George: the dent in the Sheetrock from his foot "slipping," the coffee cup inexplicably flying out of his hand and smashing against the wall. I think of a story Jane once told me about heading out for Sunday brunch and George hitting a trash can as he backed out of the driveway and then getting so angry that he went back and forth over the can, rocking the gears from forward to reverse and back again, hurling the children this way and that, stopping only when Ashley threw up. Do outbursts against inanimate objects signal that someday you"re going to kill your wife? Is it really so shocking?
In the hospital men"s room, as I"m washing my hands, I glance in the mirror. The man I see is not so much me as my father. When did he show up? There is no soap; I rub hand sanitizer into my face-it burns. I nearly drown myself in the sink trying to rinse it off.
My face is dripping, my shirt is wet, and the paper-towel dispenser is empty. Waiting to dry, I carve Jane"s name into the cinder-block wall with the car key.
A hospital worker almost catches me, but I head him off with a confrontation: "Why no paper towels?"
"We don"t use them anymore-sustainability."
"But my face is wet."
"Try toilet paper."
I do-and it catches in the stubble of unshaven beard and I look like I"ve been out in a toilet-paper snowstorm.
Monday, in the late afternoon, Jane comes out of surgery; they bring her down the hall attached to a huge mechanical ventilator, her head wrapped like a mummy, her eyes black and blue. Her face looks like a meatball. There is a hose coming out from under the blanket, a urine bag at the end of the bed.
I kissed her down there last night. She said no one had ever done that before, and then I kissed her again, deeply. I made out with her down there. I used my tongue-no one will ever know that.
I am telling myself that I did what I was told. Claire told me to stay. Jane wanted me-she pulled me towards her. Why am I being so weak? Why am I looking for someone else to blame? I ask myself, Did you ever think you should stop yourself, but in the moment you couldn"t or didn"t? Now I understand the meaning of "It just happened." An accident.
The doctor tells me that if Jane survives she will never be the same. "Even in the short time she"s been with us, there has been a decline. She is retreating, folding into herself. We cleaned the wound and drilled holes to accommodate the swelling. The prognosis is poor. Does her family know? The children?"
"No," I say. "They"re away at boarding school."
"Let them know," the doctor says, leaving me.
Do I call the children directly or do I call their schools first? Do I phone their respective headmasters and explain, Their mother is in a coma and their father is in shackles and perhaps you could interrupt study hall and suggest they pack a bag? And do I come right out and tell them how awful it really is-do I interrupt the children in the middle of their day to let them know that life as they know it is over?
I reach the girl first. "Ashley," I say.
"Is it Tessie?" she asks before I can say more.
"Your parents," I say stumbling.
"A divorce?" She collapses into tears before I say more, and another girl calmly takes the phone.
"Ashley is not available right now."
To the boy I say, "Your father has gone insane. Maybe you should come home, or maybe you don"t want to come home, maybe you never want to come home again. I remember when your parents bought the house, I remember picking out things."
"I"m not sure I understand."
"Your mother has had an accident," I say, wondering if I should tell him how bad it really is.
"Was it Dad?" he asks.
I"m caught off guard by the directness of his question. "Yes," I say. "Your father struck your mother with a lamp. I tried to tell your sister, but I didn"t get very far."
"I"ll call her," he says. I am grateful for not having to go through that again.
I am standing in an empty hallway washed with stale fluorescent light. A man in a white coat comes towards me; he smiles. I imagine him like a wicked wizard whipping off his white coat, revealing a judge"s robe. Is it possible that your brother knew you were shtupping his wife and so he got up out of his sickbed and got himself home?
"I am going to limit my comments for now. I feel bad enough about the whole thing," I say aloud in the hallway though no one is listening.
I move to the Family Waiting Room. Again, I dial. "George hit Jane with a lamp," I say to Jane"s mother.
"That"s awful," she says, not realizing the gravity of what I"ve told her. "When did that happen?"
"Last night. Is your husband home?"
"Sure," she says, sounding a little vague.
In the background I hear him ask, "Who is it?"
"It"s your daughter"s husband"s brother," she says. "Something happened to Jane."
"What happened to Jane?" he asks, taking the phone.
"George hit her on the head with a lamp."
"Is she going to press charges?"
"Most likely she is going to die."
"That"s not the kind of thing you say to be funny."
"I"m not joking."
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," he says.
I want to go home. I want my life back. I had a life of my own. I was in the middle of something when all of this happened, wasn"t I? What was happening? I don"t have my date book, but there had to be something, a dentist appointment, dinner with friends, faculty meeting. What day is it? I check my watch. In five minutes I am teaching a cla.s.s. Twenty-five undergraduates will file into a cla.s.sroom and sit nervously in their chairs, knowing they have not prepared, knowing they have not done the reading. The course, Nixon: The Ghost in the Machine, a close examination of the unexamined. They sit like idiots waiting for me to tell them what everything means, to spoon-feed them an education. And while they numbly perch, they compose letters to the Dean; one complained that he was being asked to write in cla.s.s, another calculated the cost per session of each of the twenty-two sessions in the semester and made a list of things he could have bought for the same or less money.
I have yet to put a dollar cost on the stress of having them stare blankly at me for ninety minutes two times a week and showing up during my office hours, asking me, "What"s new?" like we"re old friends and then sitting down as though they own the place and telling me how they can"t get "an angle on things." And before they go, wanting me to pat them on the head and say, "You"re a good kid," for nothing, for no reason. There is about them a kind of casual ent.i.tlement, the sort of thing that when I was growing up would have gotten you a lecture for bad att.i.tude and a week of detention.
In all the years, I"ve never failed to show up, have only twice had to reschedule a cla.s.s, once for a root ca.n.a.l and the other a gallbladder attack.
I call the university, I call my department, I call the secretary of the Dean of the school to which I am affiliated-voice mail everywhere. I cannot find a real person to talk to. What will happen if I don"t show up, how long will they sit there? I phone the security office. "This is Professor Silver. I have an emergency."
"Do you need a paramedic?"
"I am already in the hospital, but I am supposed to teach a cla.s.s in two minutes; could someone go and put a note on the door telling the students that I have canceled?"
"One of our men, an officer?"
"Yes."
"That"s not what we do."
I try another tactic. "But of course it"s exactly what you do. If no one shows up, if no one of authority takes charge, there could be rioting. This is a course on politics, and you know what that means-radical ideas are loosened, the students feel empowered, mark my words."
"What should the note say?"
"Professor Silver has had a family emergency and will not be in cla.s.s. He is sorry and will make it up to you."
"All right, then, and what building and room?"
"Can you look it up for me? I never pay attention to the names and numbers."
"Hold," he says. "Silver, there is no cla.s.s today. You"re in the School of Arts and Sciences, your people are on vacation. Party on the beach..."
"Oh," I say. "I forgot. I simply forgot. Thank you."
I had a life. I was doing something.