Inside are a single bed, a telephone, and a poster of a kitten in distress coupled to an encouraging motto. I think of my dream cat, moaning and crying.
“I’ve never been in a call room before,” Wayne says nervously.
“Relax,” I say, pushing him toward the bed. There’s barely room for both our IV poles, but after some doing we get arranged on the bed. He lies on his side at the head with his feet propped on the nightstand. I am curled up at the foot. There’s dim light from a little lamp on the nightstand, enough to make out the curve of his big lips and to read the sign above the door to the halclass="underline" Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
“Can you read that?” he asks.
“It says, ‘I believe that children are our future.’ ”
“That’s pretty. It’d be nice if we had some candles.” He scoots a little closer toward me. I stretch and yawn. “Are you sleepy?”
“No.”
He’s quiet for a moment. He looks down at the floor, across the thin, torn bedspread. My IV starts to beep. I reprogram it. “Air in the line,” I say.
“Oh.” I have shifted a little closer to him in the bed while I fixed the IV. “Do you want to do something?” he asks, staring into his lap.
“Maybe,” I say. I walk my hand around the bed, like a five-legged spider, in a circle, over my own arm, across my thighs, up my belly, up to the top of my head to leap off back onto the blanket. He watches, smiling less and less as it walks up the bed, up his leg, and down his pants.
See the zebra? She has atrocious pancreas oh! Her belly hurts her terribly — sometimes it’s like frogs are crawling in her belly, and sometimes it’s like snakes are biting her inside just below her belly button, and sometimes it’s like centipedes dancing with cleats on every one of their little feet, and sometimes it’s a pain she can’t even describe, even though all she can do, on those days, is sit around and try to think of ways to describe the pain. She must rub her belly on very particular sorts of tree to make it feel better, though it never feels very much better. Big round scabs are growing on her tongue, and every time she sneezes another big piece of her mane falls out. Her stripes have begun to go all the wrong way, and sometimes her own poop follows her, crawling on the ground or floating in the air, and calls her cruel names.
Suffer, zebra, suffer!
Asleep in my own bed, I’m dreaming of the cat when I hear the team; the cat’s moan frays and splits, and the tones unravel from each other and become their voices. I am fully awake with my eyes closed. He lifts a mangy paw, saying goodbye.
“Dr. Chandra,” says a voice. I know it must belong to Dr. Snood, the GI attending. “Tell me the three classic findings on X-ray in necrotizing enterocolitis.” They are rounding outside my room, six or seven of them, the whole GI team: Dr. Snood and my intern and the fellow and the nurse practitioners and the poor little med students. Soon they’ll all come in and want to poke on my belly. Dr. Snood will talk for five minutes about shit: mine, and other people’s, and sometimes just the idea of shit, a platonic ideal not extant on this earth. I know he dreams of gorgeous, perfect shit the way I dream of the cat.
Chandra speaks. He answers free peritoneal air and pneumatosis in a snap but then he is silent. I can see him perfectly with my eyes still closed: his hair all ahoo; his beady eyes staring intently at his shoes; his stethoscope twisted crooked around his neck, crushing his collar. His feet turn in, so his toes are almost touching. Upstairs with Wayne I thought of him.
Dr. Snood, too supreme a fussbudget to settle for two out of three, begins to castigate him: A doctor at your level of training should know these things; children’s lives are in your two hands; you couldn’t diagnose your way out of a wet paper bag; your ignorance is deadly, your ignorance can kill. I get out of bed, propelled by rage, angry at haughty Dr. Snood, and at hapless Dr. Chandra, and angry at myself for being this angry. Clutching my IV pole like a staff, I kick open the door and scream, scaring every one of them: “Portal fucking air! Portal fucking air!” They are all silent, and some of them white-faced. I am panting, hanging now on my IV pole. I look over at Dr. Chandra. He is not panting, but his mouth has fallen open. Our eyes meet for three eternal seconds and then he looks away.
Later I take Ella Thims down to the playroom. The going is slow, because her sauce is running and my sauce is running, so it takes some coordination to push my pole and pull her wagon while keeping her own pole, which trails behind her wagon like a dinghy, from drifting too far left or right. She lies on her back with her legs in the air, grabbing and releasing her feet, and turning her head to say hello to everyone she sees. In the hall we pass nurses and med students and visitors and every species of doctor — attendings and fellows and residents and interns — but not my intern. Everyone smiles and waves at Ella, or stoops or squats to pet her or smile closer to her face. They nod at me, and don’t look at all at my face. I look back at her, knowing her fate. “Enjoy it while you have it, honey,” I say to her, because I know how quickly one exhausts one’s cuteness in a place like this.
Our cuteness has to work very hard here. It must extend itself to cover horrors — ostomies and scars and flipper-hands and harelips and agenesis of the eyeballs — and it rises to every miserable occasion of the sick body. Ella’s strange puffy face is covered, her yellow eyes are covered, her bald spot is covered, her extra fingers are covered, her ostomies are covered, and the bitter, nose-tickling odor of urine that rises from her always is covered by the tremendous faculty of cuteness generated from some organ deep within her. Watching faces, I can see how it’s working for her, and how it’s stopped working for me. Your organ fails, at some point — it fails for everybody, but for people like us it fails faster, having more to cover than just the natural ugliness of body and soul. One day you are more repulsive than attractive, and the goodwill of strangers is lost forever.
It’s a small loss. Still, I miss it sometimes, like now, walking down the hall and remembering riding down this same hall ten years ago on my big wheel. Strangers would stop me for speeding, and cite me with a hug. I can remember their faces, earnest and open and unassuming, and I wonder now if I ever met someone like that where I could go with them, after such a blank beginning. Something in the way that Dr. Chandra looks at me has that. And the Child Life people look at you that way, too. But they have all been trained in graduate school not to notice the extra head, or the smell, or the missing nose, or to love these things, professionally.
In the playroom I turn Ella over to Margaret and go sit on the floor in a patch of sun near the door to the deck. The morning activity, for those of us old enough or coordinated enough to manage it, is the weaving of God’s eyes. At home I have a trunkful of God’s eyes and potholders and terra-cotta sculptures the size of your hand, such a collection of crafts that you might think I’d spent my whole life in camp. I wind and unwind the yarn, making and then unmaking, because I don’t want to add anything new to the collection. I watch Ella playing at a water trough, dipping a little red bucket and pouring it over the paddles of a waterwheel. It’s a new toy. There are always new toys, every time I come, and the room is kept pretty and inviting, repainted and recarpeted in less time than some people wait to get a haircut, because some new wealthy person has taken an interest in it. The whole floor is like that, except where there are pockets of plain beige hospital nastiness here and there, places that have escaped the attentions of the rich. The nicest rooms are those that once were occupied by a privileged child with a fatal syndrome.