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fall 2003 | The Culture Issue

The Visit

Lauren Rosenblum

A bed squeaks and moans. I can hear my feet beneath me. I intend my steps to fall languidly. I turn left and then right and right again. Then I turn around and start again.

The women in pink and blue don’t notice me. Beneath the vague noise of many televisions, they are tapping furiously on keyboards, flipping pages of binders, closing and opening drawers. They wear their pastels unconvincingly, like insincere Easter eggs.

It smells of urine and cuts that won’t heal. There is no single source, no puddle to be mopped or room to be scoured. It seeps from the walls, the vents. It’s bottomless. I imagine it’s the stench of overwhelming unhappiness, of yearlong depressions and broken relationships, of lost children.

I was drunk when the phone call came, drunk and flirting with the waiter. And I didn’t stop. Just blew my nose in a cocktail napkin and reapplied lip-gloss. The problem with cell phones is that bad news loops around the planet, leaving cryptic messages at home, at work, until it finds you shamelessly laughing with a man who couldn’t make you smile. Not really.

I peek into the rooms trying not to be seen. Some are lying in bed, silent. Others are chatting with relatives, as if they are in their own wood-paneled living rooms. I spy an obese black man, his face riddled with sores, sitting on the edge of his bed, struggling to make the gown cover his full expanse.

I pass the pink and blue women again. A printer makes spitting noises. An old Hispanic woman cries, “Raoul, Raoul? Where are you Raoul?” I can see her dark leathery feet hanging over the edge of the bed.

I find a dead end flanked by two windows that overlook the Hudson River. It’s twilight and the sun bounces off the river. I look down at the people in the cars ten floors below and try to guess what they’re thinking. That one’s mystified. That one’s despondent. That one doesn’t like her husband or her children. That one has untenable anger. That one has never known fury. That one should leave his girlfriend and be standing here with me, holding my arm as the silent tears stream down my face, breathing carefully into my hair.

I sit on the window ledge resting my hands between my legs. I close my eyes, wishing for anything.

I told my neighbor I had to go the hospital. I asked her to take care of my cat. She answered that she would pray for me. I wonder what that means. Pray for me. I envision her kneeling at her bed, my cat clamoring over her legs. Her hands are folded together underneath her chin while her flat feet are turned away from God and her eyes are looking upwards. She probably wears a nightgown to bed, big and thick with small yellow daisies.

She’d add me last to the list. “Oh, and that nice girl in 4D,” she’d say. “Please keep an eye out for her.” 

I lean against the window. I hear a cracking sound. I can feel glass crumbling against my weight. The shards tumble to the ground below, hitting the side of the building and breaking into small pieces. My body follows, headfirst. My head smacks against the edge of metal framework and I feel the pain in my skull. My body continues to drop freely, effortlessly, like an early fall leaf. Suddenly the earth pulls me down hard. My bones give out; my insides are crushed by the impact. My heart tries to continue to pump blood through my body, but it’s too traumatized and the pathways far too damaged. It gives up.

I find an anemic living room with couches and end tables. I sit near the window so the winter sun will shine hotly on my face. There’s a family of fat people. A fat daughter in her twenties sits in a wheel chair talking to her fatter mother. The mother looks guilty, like she clumsily passed on an errant gene. Her thinning hair is cut short and she is grasping a wad of tissues too big for her pudgy hands. The daughter is convincing her that it’s better to have the operation now, why wait until it gets worse.

“I’m glad I’m here with these doctors. They say they’re the best,” the daughter tries.

She searches her mother’s face. The mother doesn’t respond. She pulls the tissues between her hands like warm cotton candy.

I get up to continue my walk along the corridors and run into a man in a long white coat.

“Hello,” he says, not unkindly. “Can I help you?”

“No. I imagine there are many other people here who you should be helping.”

He looks at me and I look back at him. He invites me for dinner later that evening. I continue my wonderings until it’s time to meet. I go home with him to his apartment near the hospital, spacious because it’s in Harlem, not because he wears white and has steady hands. I stay awhile and he says I can hang up posters of Monet’s water lilies wherever I want, just not in the bedroom. I do the laundry and fold the sheets into careful squares, ironing them just after they come from the wash and again just before I put them on the bed. We have a baby that we name Leif Eric, after the explorer, Leif Erickson. Eventually we all go down to city hall. The man in the white coat and I say our vows. He never asks why I was there that day. The baby sleeps through the short ceremony.

I find myself in front of the room. 1016. North. Her name is taped to the room number. Fisher. And a sign. Falling hazard. I walk inside. Past the bathroom (for patient use only), past a slight black woman sleeping with her mouth open.

She doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t think. She can’t see, can’t smell. If she could even sense me, she’d get up and offer to make me something for lunch. She’d feel the emptiness growing beneath me and hold my hand. She’d make me write thank you notes for the nurses.

Her skin seems to have changed. Mottled with light brownish spots that have grown darker and wider with age. I wonder if that is how I will look. She has pinprick sores around her mouth from the chemo and her hair is falling out. Not in clumps, like I imagined, but in wisps, like what I find on the pillow in the morning after a haircut.

I try to memorize her hands. Pale and thin, with the veins showing through. Like my own, but hers have always seemed slimmer, more fragile. I remember how they felt against my face, my hair. We’d argue until we were too tired to argue any more and I’d rest my head on her lap, resigned to losing another battle. She’d brush the hair off my face, carefully with an open palm. Her hands were too gentle. They were never angry with me.

The doctor comes and introduces himself with a weak handshake he must reserve for women. He doesn’t look like the doctors on TV. He doesn’t seem rushed.

I quickly determine his uselessness, wastefulness. He tells me yes and in the very same breath no. He calls her Mrs. Fischer, but she hated that, Mrs. Fischer was my mother-in-law, she’d say, I’m Renee. He speaks loudly when he sees her, “Mrs. Fischer, how are we today?” We? Who is we? We is mother and father, brother and sister. We is not doctor and patient when the she can’t answer, won’t answer, anyway. He doesn’t know; he doesn’t even pretend to know.

Later that night I sit beside her, watching, as she starts to shudder and shake, then dwindle and fade. Her breaths are fewer, more like sighs, and the next one never came. I tell her I love her and that I will be okay because someone told me once that they can still hear up until the very end.

The Doctor tells me he’s sorry, but I don’t think so. Maybe he’s sorry for me, but not for her. There’s no sympathy for the dead.

I take the A train home. It speeds into lower Manhattan with abandon. 125th Street to 59th in a sigh. I didn’t even get the chance to ride out the empty time. Time where I can do nothing. Really do nothing. When I don’t even have to think. Just ride.

I don’t get off the train. I ride into Brooklyn and then onto Queens. I finally get off at the airport and take the shuttle bus to Terminal 3. I look at my choices. British Airways. Lufthansa. Korean Air. I choose Korean Air and buy a ticket to Seoul. The pretty Korean woman eyes me, but not suspiciously. She hands me my boarding pass and I notice her hands are older than her face, blue and tired. I land in Korea twenty-four hours later. Seoul is gray and smudged, like someone brushed against it before it dried. I find a job teaching English to businessmen who call me Miss Missy. They stand too close in the elevator so I learn to arrive early and leave late.