“Open Hand is already over there stocking the fridge, and I’m doing great off the IV.”
Yale appreciated that Rafael didn’t say it apologetically. He’d been a perfect roommate. Before Rafael, Yale had shared a room with a tall man named Edward, who kept saying in a sad voice that this was the happiest he’d been in his life, that unit 371 was the first place he’d ever fit in. Prior to Edward there’d been an uncomfortable straight guy, Mark; before Mark was a man named Roger, whose enormous Irish Catholic family surrounded him as PML took his motor control and his speech but left his brain function intact, at least for a while. On an early stay, Yale had roomed with a guy who had ten Dixie cups lined up on the windowsill, each with an acorn planted inside. He was trying to sprout them before he died so he could give oak trees to ten of his friends.
And after all this, Yale had been lying in bed one day recovering from a lumbar puncture when they wheeled someone in on the other side of the curtain, and he heard the normal sounds—nurses explaining things about IVs, call buttons, something about the smoking deck—and then he heard someone say, “You know what I want on my Quilt panel? Just a giant pack of Camels!”
Even before he called Rafael’s name and the nurse pulled back the curtain, Yale knew it was him. It had to be the most cheerfully anyone had ever checked into unit 371, but Rafael had his routine down, his favorite nurses. He knew which volunteer would read your tarot if you asked. This time he’d packed a bag of VHS tapes for the lounge, a stack of photos for the wall. It was a homecoming for him, or at least he played it like one, and Yale had the sense that if Rafael weren’t tethered to IVs, he’d have leapt out of the bed to come bite Yale’s face.
For the few weeks they were together while Yale could still breathe, they’d talked every night. Old gossip, new gossip, politics, movies. When old staffers from Out Loud came to visit Rafael, they’d pretend they were there to visit Yale too. But then one morning Yale had a dream that he was swimming at the bottom of the Hull House pool, looking up but unable to surface—and when he awoke, it was to struggle for breath in a room devoid of air.
“I’ll miss you,” Yale said.
Rafael shrugged and said, “I mean, it’s not like I won’t be back.”
Yale was tired after he left, but he’d been afraid, for the last couple of days, of falling asleep. He didn’t fear dying in his sleep—he’d take it, at this point—but waking up under water again. He wasn’t afraid to close his eyes to his last day but to close them to his last good day. And so for now he kept them open, kept Fiona talking. He asked her to sing him “Moon River,” and she said, “I still don’t know the words!” but she managed anyway, laughed her way through it.
She said, “Nico would have loved it here. The art room! Can you imagine? I guess I’m picturing a version of him that would live a little longer. Like, if he got sick now and had good meds and everything. I mean, his nurses wouldn’t touch him. And here you get massages.”
“Well, I used to. Before I had tubes everywhere. But yeah. He would have liked it.”
She looked so tired. Her hair was limp and greasy, her face swollen. She should have been home taking care of herself, resting up before the baby came—not sleeping on her side on a cot in his room. Most people’s own families didn’t do that for them. He asked if she was okay.
“My back just hurts,” she said.
“You don’t have to sleep here.”
“I want to.”
He said, “Fiona, I hate that I’m putting you through this again. I’m worried what this is doing to you.”
She rubbed her eyes, made a feeble effort to smile. “I mean, it’s bringing back memories. And it’s killing me that it’s you. You’re my favorite person. But I’m pretty tough.”
“That’s what I mean, though. I keep thinking of Nora’s stories about the guys who just shut down after the war. This is a war, it is. It’s like you’ve been in the trenches for seven years. And no one’s gonna understand that. No one’s gonna give you a Purple Heart.”
“You think I’m shell-shocked?”
“Just promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I’ll find a shrink in Madison. I will.” Then she said, “Is there anyone—is there anyone you wish would come here that hasn’t? I could call your dad, if you want. If you have any relatives, any old friends—even if it were awkward. If I had a magic wand. Is there anyone?”
“I don’t feel like making small talk with my cousins.”
She looked upset. “If there’s anyone in the world that you’d want to see, even if you didn’t think they wanted to see you. Is there anyone at all?”
“Christ, Fiona, you’re making me feel really friendless right now. Unless your magic wand can bring back the dead, no. You’re as bad as the chaplain.”
The chaplain wouldn’t stop checking if Yale wanted anything, wanted to chat. “No,” Yale said every time, at least when he had air to talk, “and I’m Jewish.” Yale had once caught him composing himself before he walked into the room, making his face as sad and pious as he could, pouting down at the Bible in his hands. Not long after that, he saw Dr. Cheng do the exact opposite. Yale was in the hallway waiting to be wheeled down for his bronchoscopy; Dr. Cheng had stood outside a patient’s door reading through his notes, looking deflated. It wasn’t an expression Yale had ever seen on him before. It occurred to Yale for the first time that Dr. Cheng was only around his own age. And then he lowered the notes, drew himself erect, took a breath Yale could hear from yards away, and transformed himself into the Dr. Cheng Yale knew. Then he knocked on the door.
Fiona gave up on her questions and scooted closer so she could stroke the skin between Yale’s eyebrows. He couldn’t stand to be touched anywhere else anymore, but that one spot worked. He closed his eyes.
He said, “When I was a kid, I used to shut my eyes in the car when we were ten minutes from home. And then I tried to feel it, feel that last corner that was the driveway. I tried not to count the turns, just sense when we were home. And I usually could.”
Fiona said, “I did the exact same thing.”
“And when I couldn’t breathe, I was doing it too, but with—you know, with the end of things. And I know I’ll wind up doing it again. I’ll lie here with my eyes closed, and it feels like, Okay, this is it. This must be it. Only it’s not.”
“Sometimes it was like that with the car too,” Fiona said. “Didn’t you ever have that? It would feel like you were done, and you’d open your eyes, and it was just a red light.”
“Yes. Yeah, it’s like that.”