The boy was behaving strangely outside in the corridor as others came and went. Outpatients, and their companions. The boy did not want to go away, neither did the boy want to remain.
You want something to happen, finally. You want something to be decided and the results revealed.
You did not want anything to happen. You did not want any results.
The boy knew of results. The boy knew that some results are irrevocable.
The grandmother’s name must have been called, for the grandmother stood suddenly, looking frightened, which the boy wished he had not seen, but he’d seen, so he would try to forget seeing, which is not so difficult as you’d think. A smiling youngish nurse in pastel smock and pants came to escort the grandmother into the interior of the medical unit walking with her as if steadying her, and they disappeared. And the boy was dry-mouthed, observing. And the boy backed away, and turned away.
Approximately ninety minutes, the grandmother would be in Ambulatory Surgery. All this time, unfolding before the boy like an elaborate card trick.
THE BOY WAS CRAZY for his smartphone which could occupy him for many minutes. On the boy’s smartphone were countless apps—a small galaxy of apps. But the boy had more than the smartphone in his sweating hand, he had also his geometry text weighing down a pocket of his khaki cargo pants. He’d become the sort of wiseass kid who tells adults he likes geometry for its orderliness and sanity.
The boy was wandering on the second floor of the Pavilion. Discovered a stairway, and ascended. Too restless to stay in one place plying the smartphone.
He thought I should have the car keys now. In case something happens, Grandma has to stay in the hospital overnight.
It began that way, usually. Tests, overnight.
Through floor-to-ceiling glass panels on the third floor the boy observed a waiting room furnished exactly as the waiting room in Ambulatory Surgery. Here too were rows of chairs, and a few wheelchairs. Except here, the patients were all young girls.
Slender girls with long straight hair to their shoulders, falling down their backs. Girls with size-zero figures. Beautiful angel-girls, with faces that clutched at him. Hot-looking except they were, on second glance, too skinny—scary-skinny. Though they wore loose-fitting clothes you could tell they were scary-skinny for there were girls like that at his school, not many but a few, and of these some of the most beautiful girls, you learned not to stare at, but you stared. He’d turn away now but a face on the other side of the glass panel so clutched at him, such a face, he was paralyzed. Counting nine girls in the waiting room. And with them—he’d hardly noticed—older women who had to be their mothers. A waiting room exclusively female.
The boy stored up the information to relay to the grandmother on the drive home—“Guess what it was?—Eating Disorders Unit.”
The grandmother would say, “Eating Disorders! I could envy them, that kind of condition.”
The boy would say, reprovingly, “Actually, they die. A lot.”
He knew, he’d read statistics on the subject. And a girl in his class had died—(of a heart attack?)—who’d weighed only seventy-seven pounds at the age of fifteen.
The boy would entertain the grandmother, but maybe not with Eating Disorders.
The boy exited the Pavilion and was struck by hot gusts of wind rushing across the vast parking lots.
The boy hiked around the hospital to check out Lot B, a half-mile away. Just to see that he knew where he’d parked the car. (He did.) The landscape was part primeval, gouged-out earth, mounds of red earth. Hot rushing winds that took away his breath. Hi. Bet you wondered where I was.
Back inside the Medical Arts Pavilion the boy liked feeling invisible among a continuous stream of strangers. At sixteen you’re an invisible age. He sprawled on a vinyl sofa by the burbling fountain. Couldn’t prevent himself from counting the shiny copper pennies in the fountain, that he could see: thirty-two.
If he counted again, possibly he’d get another number. He thought in wonderment Why? Why do people do such fucking stupid useless things? It was envy he felt, not scorn.
The boy checked his smartphone for the fifteenth time that morning. Mostly, he deleted messages. His thumbs had become practiced assassins. His life had become a series of rapid deletions—you deleted them before they deleted you.
Boring! The boy was restless suddenly, jumped up and took an elevator to the fourth floor—Pulmonary, Acute Asthma—took stairs down to the third floor where he leaned over the railing gazing down at the burbling fountain. From this height, you couldn’t see the shiny copper pennies and you would not speculate on what asshole-useless wishes they were.
One of the girls from Eating Disorders was walking slowly in his direction. Except that the girl’s eyes were open and unnaturally wide, she might have been sleepwalking.
She might have been nineteen though she looked fifteen. Crinkly red-brown hair fell halfway down her back. Unlike most of the Eating Disorders girls she wore tight-fitting clothes—black Capri pants, a sweater so tiny her tiny breasts were showcased like Dixie cups. Her wrists were so small, the boy stared seeing how he could loop his crude guy-fingers around them twice. He was staring at the girl so intensely, the girl took notice and laughed at him.
“Am I somebody you think you know? Or—are you somebody I’m supposed to know?”
The girl was just so gorgeous. The boy hoped his mouth wasn’t drooping open like a dog’s.
Anorexic girls had breaths like acid. It was part of all that the girls didn’t know about themselves. The boy knew that, when the girls looked in mirrors, they saw something totally different from what normal people saw, but he couldn’t imagine what they saw.
“Sorry. Am I scaring you?”
The question, from the girl, should have made no sense, but made sense. The girl laughed. Her laughter sounded like small flames darting.
Clumsily the boy said, “I’m looking for the elevators.”
“Not looking very hard, are you? Elevators are over there.”
The boy was telling one of the guys boastfully This girl I met, she’s really cool. She’s a little older than I am. Smart . . .
“Are you in ‘Eating Disorders’? There’s almost no guys, I never run into guys.”
The boy laughed. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.
“Do I look like ‘Eating Disorders’?”
“Well, don’t be so smug, Fred,” the girl said, “you could be, one day.”
“I don’t think so. I like to eat too much.”
“We all like to eat too much. That’s the definition of ‘Eating Disorders,’ stupid.”
She was the most gorgeous girl he’d ever seen in actual life but being called Fred or stupid wasn’t a turn-on for him.
He’d turned away. He had somewhere to get to. The girl caught the look of surprise and hurt in his face and relented.
“Excuse me? Hey.”
The boy turned back, but hesitantly. Body language suggesting he didn’t trust her but maybe, he’d be surprised.
“I’m on fucking meds, see? That’s why I say fucking stupid things I don’t mean, Fred.”
The boy said OK. That was cool.
“Yes, but you don’t mean it. You’re looking like you want to escape. My point is, I didn’t mean it. I don’t mean it.”
The boy said OK. But he had to leave now.
The girl said, in a rising voice, “It isn’t OK, asshole! I’m talking to you.”
“Miranda!”—a woman was approaching the girl, agitated. A mother-looking woman from whom the girl flinched with a look of such juvenile loathing, the boy was shocked.
“What the fuck do you want? Where the fuck did you come from?”
The woman tried to placate the girl but her mistake was to touch the girl’s flailing arm.
“Fuck fuck fuck you. I said—fuck you.”
The boy escaped to the elevators. He heard angry sobbing, and angry whispering, and a sound of struggle, but he did not g
lance back.
THIS GIRL I met yesterday, she really came on to me. Must’ve been, like, twenty years old. So hot . . .
“Fuck you, Fred. This is going nowhere.”
The boy’s aloud voice was cracked, hostile. The boy was feeling loosed as an electron spinning into space—no gravity, no “orbit.”
HE’D SKIPPED BREAKFAST that morning, now he was ravenously hungry.
In the first-floor café he ate. Stuffed his face. Washed all of it down with a giant chemical-Coke. You’d think you couldn’t buy such toxins in a hospital café but you’d be mistaken.
He loosened the belt of his jeans. He was a skinny kid, and skinny kids bloat fast.
Why was there so much bias against suicide? People should do what they fucking want.
The boy checked his smartphone on the average of once every three minutes. He wasn’t addicted, it was just something he did. Other things felt boring, or old. You’d done them already. You’d heard them already. His geometry text he’d lugged to the hospital with the intention of catching up on the assignment but the environment was too distracting for concentrated work. The grandmother had said it was not a good idea for him to miss school for her but then the grandmother had relented saying he should get his assignments from his teachers and try to get some work accomplished waiting for her and the boy had said irritably that that was exactly what he’d planned to do, for Christ’s sake.
At each table in the café there were these trapped people—you had to be trapped if you were here, nobody would be here who’d chosen to be here even in the shining new hospital with bobbing welcome balloons. Even if the café was kind of attractive, not a bad place—the menu not-bad, for a place like this. Each person in the café was a visitor to the hospital or the medical center and each had a probably sad, possibly awful story to tell. (The medical center had a notable Oncology department, for one thing.) The boy who’d been stuffing his face didn’t want to hear a single one of these stories. The boy was sick of his own sad story.
Yet he was listening to two women talking together at a nearby table: one was in civilian clothing and the other was in a blue hospital nightie with a robe over it, hospital-issue socks. There was a needle in the back of the woman’s hand dripping intravenous fluids into her from a pole she hauled around with her, with a jaunty smile. The women looked like sisters—not-young, but not-bad looking—laughing more than would seem normal.
At the old hospital, patients would sneak outside with their IV poles and smoke. It was against hospital rules as it was against common sense but the boy had abetted one of these patients more than once.
One of these times she’d said, “Good news and less-than-good news.”
“Will I be able to tell which is which?”
The patient laughed. Laughter turned into a coughing fit. The plastic IV container quivered. “You’re right. There’s not much difference.”
Later she said: “The good news is, they’re stopping chemo. The bad news is, they’re stopping chemo.”
That had been the old hospital. The boy thought, The hell with the old damn hospital.
THE BOY TOOK the elevator to the second floor, turned right. He was feeling a little panicked now.
It was precisely ninety minutes. He’d had to resist coming early for it was a fact of this life, medical things are never completed early.
This time, the boy pushed open the doors and stepped inside. The boy checked in with the receptionist, gave the grandmother’s name and his own name. The receptionist called back to the medical unit. The boy was told please take a seat for the grandmother wasn’t out of recovery yet but the boy pretended not to hear for the boy did not want to be trapped in a seat, the boy wanted free use of his legs. The boy was too tall and too old to be drifting around the waiting area annoying patients in chairs, some of them in wheelchairs, drifting about the waiting room taking up magazines like Smithsonian, Scientific American, Your Health leafing through them then shoving them back in the magazine racks.
After about twenty minutes, the grandmother appeared in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse.
The boy stared at the grandmother and something began to fade in his head and he began to feel really weird but quickly recovered, pretty much recovered by the time the grandmother was wheeled to him with her hand uplifted—to him.
“Billy Bob: you’re looking kind of sick.”
The grandmother spoke in a jovial way. The grandmother had applied fresh lipstick to her bloodless lips, to suggest she was in a very good mood, looking and feeling damned good after the ultra-“invasive” procedure.
It was just—it was just the sight of the grandmother in a wheelchair was—a kind of a, a shock . . .
“Yes, my young friend. You’re looking kind of ghastly.”
The nurse who’d been pushing the grandmother in the wheelchair laughed at the grandmother’s humor. As the nurse helped the grandmother up and out of the chair the grandmother thanked the nurse saying in a voice of notable clarity that she felt “one hundred percent recovered” and did not require any more assistance.
It was medical protocol to wheel patients out of recovery, whether they felt weak or not. It didn’t mean anything, as the boy knew.
The boy was shaky. The boy was trying to think of a jokey response. The grandmother was laughing at him.
“Fooled you, eh? I saw your face.”
“Problem was, I saw your face.”
(This was pretty lame. The boy searched his brain for witty one-liners. All he could think of was you’re so ugly jokes. Like shoving your hand in a pocket desperate for a tissue—nothing there. Have to blow your nose in your hand.)
The grandmother was feeling good, she said. Oh maybe a little light-headed but good. There was no pain—none! Or, if there was, it was like in another room—not immediate. Taking the boy’s hand, so the boy felt her icy fingers, and another time worried he might faint, but didn’t.
Oh Jesus: the grandmother’s fingers were so thin.
The boy escorted the grandmother from Ambulatory Surgery, down to the foyer. The boy would leave the grandmother at the entrance and the boy would run, run—run to Lot B—to get the car to pick her up.
“THE FUNNY THING about anesthesia—you’ve been out, but you don’t remember. When you wake up you aren’t really sure you are not dead, but you guess you aren’t fully alive either.”
The boy sniggered as if this was meant to be a particularly witty insight by the grandmother.
The grandmother was settling into the passenger’s seat. Now, the grandmother conceded, maybe she was feeling a little—tired. Maybe she’d close her eyes on the way home. Maybe at home, she’d have a nap.
The boy was thrilled by the new-model Acura in Bellanova White Pearl, that held the road so beautifully. A quiet engine, like a heart that doesn’t rattle.
He’d helped the grandmother select this vehicle. They’d traded in an older, inferior vehicle.
The boy felt good, driving. The boy felt very good.
“What did the doctor say? Was there an X-ray? Blood work?”
The boy hadn’t planned to ask these questions. Yet the boy heard himself ask these questions.
The grandmother was silent for a moment. The boy chose to ignore this moment.
Then, deftly the grandmother pitched her thin soprano voice in imitation of a singsong male voice, presumably Chinese.
“‘Results not in yet, Mrs. Cosby. Will call tomorrow morning.’”
The boy laughed. The boy felt great relief, laughing.
MASTIFF
EARLIER ON THE TRAIL, THEY’D SEEN IT. THE MASSIVE DOG.
Tugging at its master’s leash so that the young man’s calves bulged with muscle as he held the dog back. Grunting what sounded like Damn Rob-roy! Damn dog in a tone of exasperated affection.
Signs on the trail forbade dogs without leashes. At least, the massive dog was on a leash.
The woman stared at the dog not twelve feet away wheezing and panting. Its head was
larger than her own, with a pronounced black muzzle, bulging glassy eyes. Its jaws were powerful, and slack; its lips shone, and the large long tongue rosy-pink as a sexual organ dripped slobber. The dog was pale-brindle-furred, with a deep chest, muscled shoulders and legs, a short taut tail. It might have weighed two hundred pounds. Its panting was damply audible, unsettling. The straggly-bearded young man who gripped the leather leash with both hands, in beige hoodie, multipocketed khaki shorts, hiking boots, squinted at the woman, and at the man behind her, with an expression that might have been apologetic, or defensive; or maybe, the woman thought, the young man was laughing at them, ordinary hikers without a massive monster-dog tugging and straining at their arms.
The woman thought That isn’t a dog. It’s a human being on his hands and knees. That face!
Such surreal thoughts bombarded the woman’s brain waking and sleeping. So long as no one else could know the woman paid little heed.
Fortunately, the massive dog and its master were taking another hiking trail into Wild Cat Canyon. Eagerly the dog lunged forward sniffing at the ground, the young man following with muttered curses. The woman felt relief, the ugly dog hadn’t attacked her! She and her male companion continued on the main trail which was approximately two and a half miles uphill to Wild Cat Canyon Peak.
The man, sensing the woman’s unease at the sight of the dog, made some joke which the woman didn’t quite hear and did not acknowledge. They were walking single file, the woman in the lead. She waited for the man to touch her shoulder as another man might have done to comfort but she knew that he would not, and he did not. The man said, in a tone of slight reproof, that the dog was an English mastiff—“Beautiful dog.”
The woman felt the man’s remark as a rebuke of a kind. Much of what the man said to the woman she understood was in rebuke of her narrow judgment, her timorous ways. Sometimes, the woman amused the man, for these reasons. At other times, the woman annoyed the man and she saw in his gentlemanly face an expression of startled disapproval, veiled contempt. She thought He sees through me. My subterfuge, my ignorance. My desperation.