In we come, side by side, through the doors that jolt back from us in alarm, and all I can think is that the hospital is a death factory and that we have come to it like the walking dead, haggard, sallow, shoeless. “My daughter,” I say to the nurse at the admittance desk, “she’s — they called. You called. She’s been in an accident.”
Maureen is at my side, tugging at the fingers of one hand as if she’s trying to remove an invisible glove, her shoulders slumped, mouth set, the wet blouse shrink-wrapping her. “A car. A car accident.”
“Name?” the nurse asks. (About this nurse: she’s young, Filipina, with opaque eyes and the bone structure of a cadaver; every day she sees death and it blinds her. She doesn’t see us. She sees a computer screen, she sees the TV monitor mounted in the corner and the shadows that pass there, she sees the walls, the floor, the naked light of the fluorescent tube. But not us. Not us.)
For one resounding moment that thumps in my ears and then thumps again, I can’t remember my daughter’s name — I can picture her leaning into the mound of textbooks spread out on the dining room table, the glow of the overhead light making a nimbus of her hair as she glances up at me with a glum look and half a rueful smile, as if to say, It’s all in a day’s work for a teenager, Dad, and you’re lucky you’re not in high school anymore, but her name is gone.
“Maddy,” my wife says. “Madeline Biehn.”
I watch, mesmerized, as the nurse’s fleshless fingers maneuver the mouse, her eyes fixed on the screen before her. A click. Another click. The eyes lift to take us in, even as they dodge away again. “She’s still in surgery,” she says.
“Where is it?” I demand. “What room? Where do we go?”
Maureen’s voice cuts in then, elemental, chilling, and it’s not a question she’s posing, not a statement or demand, but a plea: “What’s wrong with her?”
Another click, but this one is just for show, and the eyes never move from the screen. “There was an accident,” the nurse says. “She was brought in by the paramedics. That’s all I can tell you.”
It is then that I become aware that we are not alone, that there are others milling around the room — other zombies like us, hurriedly dressed and streaming water till the beige carpet is black with it, shuffling, moaning, clutching at one another with eyes gone null and void — and why, I wonder, do I despise this nurse more than any human being I’ve ever encountered, this young woman not much older than my daughter, with her hair pulled back in a bun and the white cap like a party favor perched atop it, who is just doing her job? Why do I want to reach across the counter that separates us and awaken her to a swift sure knowledge of hate and fear and pain? Why?
“Ted,” Maureen says, and I feel her grip at my elbow, and then we’re moving again — hurrying, sweeping, practically running — out of this place, down a corridor under the glare of the lights that are a kind of death in themselves, and into a worse place, a far worse place.
THE THING THAT disturbs me about Chicxulub, aside from the fact that it erased the dinosaurs and wrought catastrophic and irreversible change, is the deeper implication that we, and all our works and worries and attachments, are so utterly inconsequential. Death cancels our individuality, we know that, yes, but ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and the kind goes on, human life and culture succeed us — that, in the absence of God, is what allows us to accept the death of the individual. But when you throw Chicxulub into the mix — or the next Chicxulub, the Chicxulub that could come howling down to obliterate all and everything even as your eyes skim the lines of this page — where does that leave us?
“YOU’RE THE PARENTS?”
We are in another room, gone deeper now, the walls closing in, the loudspeakers murmuring their eternal incantations, Dr. Chandrasoma to Emergency, Dr. Bell, paging Dr. Bell, and here is another nurse, grimmer, older, with deader eyes and lines like the strings of a tobacco pouch pulled tight round her lips. She’s addressing us, me and my wife, but I have nothing to say, either in denial or affirmation. I’m paralyzed, struck dumb. If I claim Maddy as my own — and I’m making deals again — then I’m sure to jinx her, because those powers that might or might not be, those gods of the infinite and the minute, will see how desperately I love her and they’ll take her away just to spite me for refusing to believe in them. Voodoo, Hoodoo, Santeria, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I hear Maureen’s voice, emerging from a locked vault, the single whispered monosyllable, and then: “Is she going to be all right?”
“I don’t have that information,” the nurse says, and her voice is neutral, robotic even. This is not her daughter. Her daughter’s at home, asleep in a pile of teddy bears, pink sheets, fluffy pillows, the night light glowing like the all-seeing eye of a sentinel.
I can’t help myself. It’s that neutrality, that maddening clinical neutrality, and can’t anybody take any responsibility for anything? “What information do you have?” I say, and maybe I’m too loud, maybe I am. “Isn’t that your job, for Christ’s sake, to know what’s going on here? You call us up in the middle of the night — our daughter’s hurt, she’s been in an accident, and you tell me you don’t have any fucking information?”
People turn their heads, eyes burn into us. They’re slouched in orange plastic chairs, stretched out on the floor, praying, pacing, their lips moving in silence. They want information too. We all want information. We want news, good news: it was all a mistake, minor cuts and bruises — contusions, that’s the word — and your daughter, son, husband, grandmother, first cousin twice removed will be walking through that door over there any minute…
The nurse drills me with a look, and then she’s coming out from behind the desk, a short woman, dumpy — almost a dwarf — and striding briskly to the door, which swings open on another room, deeper yet. “If you’ll just follow me, please,” she says.
Sheepish suddenly, I duck my head and comply, two steps behind Maureen. This room is smaller, an examining room, with a set of scales and charts on the walls and its slab of a table covered with a sheet of antiseptic paper. “Wait here,” the nurse tells us, already shifting her weight to make her escape. “The doctor’ll be in in a minute.”
“What doctor?” I want to know. “What for? What does he want?”
But the door is already closed.
I turn to Maureen. She’s standing there in the middle of the room, afraid to touch anything or to sit down or even move for fear of breaking the spell. She’s listening for footsteps, her eyes fixed on the other door, the one at the rear of the room. I hear myself murmur her name, and then she’s in my arms, sobbing, and I know I should hold her, know that we both need it, the human contact, the love and support, but all I feel is the burden of her — there is nothing or no one that can make this better, can’t she see that? I don’t want to console or be consoled. I don’t want to be touched. I just want my daughter back, that’s all, nothing else.
Maureen’s voice comes from so deep in her throat I can barely make out what she’s saying. It takes a second to register, even as she pulls away from me, her face crumpled and red, and this is her prayer, whispered aloud: “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
“Sure,” I say, “sure she is. She’ll be fine. She’ll have some bruises, that’s for sure, maybe a couple broken bones even…” and I trail off, trying to picture it, the crutches, the cast, Band-Aids, gauze: our daughter returned to us in a halo of shimmering light.
“It was a car,” she says. “A car, Ted. A car hit her.”