Part 3 (1/2)
”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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt 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.