stand in the cold, somewhere on a desolate corner of Philadelphia's Jefferson University Hospital; and I full-heartedly intake the carcinogenic fumes into my fresh lungs. It labors my breathing as the red blood cells are filled with nothing good to come.
Are you going to judge me now?
No, you can’t. Because you weren’t there.
Let’s all grit our teeth, fake a smile and delude ourselves with laughter on a sunny afternoon.
The herd of us enter the clean building; it’s dressed to kill. White walls, glass skylights. Sanitized, ammonia and antiseptic scented. We soon flood the ICU 5th floor with our naivete. Our voices are rhythmical, like a Shakespearean sonnet gone very wrong, the agitating echoes of the iambic pentameter banging against the doldrums.
Lucky room number 4. My uncle, he is crouched comfortably on an arm chair but as soon as he catches sight of familiar faces, his eyes light up and he impatiently pulls all the wires off his blood vessels, disconnecting himself from the beeping monitors. He thinks we’re there to take him home today. You all laugh about this and raise your voices until the nurses come around to reconnect the cords that he so loathes. The rest of them are ordered to wait in the family room with the NFL game on. They continue to admire the glass walls, skylights and structure of empty balconies.
No, you weren’t there.
It is only me and my aunt who remain. While you all banter away, discussing summer vacation plans to the Bahamas and next week's trip to Hong Kong, it may be the last season for this man. But placing all negativity aside, I think back to the humble ending of Requiem for a Dream, the way every single character is calm and composed in a fetal position. Was this the final return to innocence? Solitude.
Like a cranky child, he frets with the nurses. Confused and bewildered, he gets crankier when they explain their procedures in a foreign language that only excacerbates. His back is bare and exposed against the gown. I notice how his skin is still smooth like a baby's as it glistens against the light. He is a bit embarassed knowing that I am in the room. I step out without a word.
He gets up now, quick! Like a fish darting out of a pond, his body stumbles hastily next to the unfinished buttered biscuits on the lunch tray and red hermetic bins by the wall. He creeps into the bed and falls into the same position again, with needles to his neck and wires tangled up. They try to fix him up. One points to the monitor and then to his own heart. The cords are there for your (points).
“Heart? No, hurt.” he answers. Funny how these two words get mixed up with eachother.
They attempt to strip him down, replacing the soiled gown with a fresh one, with white blankets and all. “What’s happpening? Who are you?” They call me back in to translate for him, calm him down.
I falter to answer Nurse Holly. She is a strong one, you can tell. Long blond hair, blue eyes and thick arms, she thinks she can carry the entire weight of the world on her thin shoulders, I assume. She fakes a smile and attempts to carry him to bed earlier. This is your brother. Not senile. Not an object. He tried to run away in the morning because he did not know where he was, she recalls. He refuses to look into her yellow flashlight. You can barely distinguish his pupils. She fakes another smile and goes away for a moment.
Holly returns with needles, some sort of sedative, waiting for the doctor for 10-15 minutes to replace the tubes in my uncle’s neck. He must lay on his back, she clarifies, that he will surely reopen his incisions the way he is positioning himself. He remains with his knees against his frail chest, and reaches to scratch the wound, heightening the sensation across his skin.
In the entirety of my visit, she asks me to translate for the wife.
“Can we give it to him?” she asks, to inject something foreign, invade him, calm him with the holy needle so that they may be able to replace the tubes.
I think for a second and say, “If you can?” I have no idea what to do at this point. I am rueful of every word. It’s almost 4 PM.
He rests now because he has not slept at all in the morning while we were previously bantering away, frolicking and eating what we want, poisoning our bodies all we can with sweets and salts on our wounded souls. For all we know, in the back of our minds, we’ll resemble something similar, sometime soon. Hopefully not too soon. We shield ourselves from other’s misfortunes with talks of wealth, cars, clothes and what we do not have.
I stand in the tiny room, knowing I can not run from fear. Barely audible, but persistent with his strong will, he recognizes us but not where he is. Nurse Holly tells me he was previously disoriented but not medicated. I stand at a safe distance, avoiding eye contact. Slowly but surely, I grit my teeth and bear a wide smile, grinning from ear to ear. We leave on a quieter note. Carefully, I run my hands through my mother’s locks of hair in the elevator. It is thin but quite soft.
What to say, what to say?
Shut up, I think in the back of my mind as everyone else calls him a child. He was such a brat during his early years. A rebel, an orphan, vulnerable now. They continue their bantering in the car. We talk of other things, like Mormons and the "wrong religions." On another note, I inform them that there was a trailer bus parked in front of Sullivan at NYU the other night, with the words "Welcome Home" tattooed to the front of the hood. The people inside were hippy-like, long beards, long skirts and multiple wives? Can they persuade NYU students, one asks.
"No of course not, we're democrats." As if that reply made any sense at all!
Then, talks of babies. In the beginning of October, after NY Cares day in Brooklyn, I heard a baby crying on the chute when we were already in the subway station of the G train. I called the cops on the payphone because I didn't want it to be another dumpster baby. The shrieks were pretty loud, coming from the sewer? Moving on...
We ride to the gleaming sunset with numbing thoughts and I glare at the greenery that reddens across the freeway, it deadens as it fades into the dark of night. It is absolutely beautiful.
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