PigeonLab

Today.

Hospitals are the most nakedly beautiful places on earth.  The places where the two most phosphorescent points of our lives explode and then expire like the smoke of flash bulbs floating up, brushing the ceiling with the soot of our souls.  Hospitals are the places where our shapes are etched into the walls by the nuclear blast.  I love to tap my moistened finger to that mark and taste the burnt residue.

I am here at SF General only to participate in the end of a life, all of the other beautiful aspects of who we are, which are showcased here, will be secondary concerns.  Mr. Henley, the father of Kendall-my friend and fantasy-the girl who I have been forever chasing, was brought here after the paramedics found him shot in the stomach, bleeding to death in a dirtier part of the city than he had any business being in.  He is a hugely important man, but the paramedics didn’t gather that when they found him doubled over in an alley in the Tenderloin. They brought him here to SF General, the hospital for regular people, when he should have been taken to USF Medical Center.

Kendall is here, I lost sight of her just a moment ago.  She ran off to find the information desk.  My friend Stephen is also here, somewhere.  He ran in the front doors just ahead of me, but I don’t see him now.  He has taken Molly with him, which is ok with me because, during the cab ride over here, she was driving me fucking crazy.

Hospitals carry so much weight in our consciousnesses.  They’re full of death and pain, and an inescapable, uncomfortable-ness.  I have never been to a hospital when I was afraid that I might die, or even that someone I love might be.  I have never been afraid of an unknown that may or may not be gnawing away at my body while I wait, unable to stop it.  I often imagine, but I have never experienced, the horror of cancer, AIDS, or the paralysis of someone close to me.  If I had I might feel differently about hospitals.  Instead, to me, they feel more like airports, just a place where people arrive and depart.  It all feels so basically, beautifully human that I am not afraid.

I am afraid of finding out that Kendall’s father is not going to die and that she will no longer need me as her guide through the grieving process and then I would become separated, for the first time in six years, from the steady ache of longing for her that has become my comfort.  My piece of burlap worn down until it felt soft between my thumb and forefinger.

Kendall and I, along with Stephen and Molly, sped here in a cab.  Now that we are here the adrenaline is wearing off, leaving an aching drowsiness.  The sharp thrill of the ride is leaking away.  It’s getting harder to stay alert.  I tasted Kendall last night and now that taste is leaving.  The adrenaline and sex are evaporating off my tongue.  While we were screaming through the city at 75 MPH, I closed my eyes tightly and rolled down the window in order to etch the experience deeply.  I wanted to couple it with the cold city air, but after the doors of the hospital slid open and the heat and sounds of the people inside came out, I have only the silhouette of a music box left in my memory.

This hospital is crazy with the sensations of sick people, and people in need, and the people who are trying to help them. The personnel are unnervingly pragmatic.  Which lends itself to my policy of truth.  It does take, nevertheless, a certain amount of time to get used to.  To not feel threatened.  To feel not threatened.

I am in the lobby near the entrance to the emergency room, constantly getting in the way, convincing myself that I belong here, that I am one of the grieving.  In truth I am not, but who doesn’t enjoy, really revel, in the opportunity to be special in their grief?

I focus on the staff-so business like, void of emotion, too long in the saddle to get worked up about the things that make the rest of us hysterical.   Their faces are straight, detached.

I spot a piece of Kendall through the crowd in the lobby, she is waiting to talk to a nurse.  I squeeze through the crowed by pointing my shoulder and touching backs lightly with my fingertips.  I hear Kendall say, “I need to find my Dad.”  calmly to the round nurse standing amidst the crowd.

“What’s his name?”  The nurse turns here neck and her head at the same time like she is trying to balance her huge dirty blond hair like a bowl of fruit on her head.  He has an amazingly broad chest, and a pink cloth jacket over her nurse’s uniform.  There is zero emotion on her face.

“Richard Henly.” Says Kendall, looking up at the nurse.   She has a smoker’s face, lined with wrinkles.  Kendall’s voice is shaking slightly, which is unusual for Kendall.  She is hard to rattle, but her father is in the hospital, he has been missing for two days and… It occurs to me that this is the first time that I have ever heard his first name in the six years that I’ve known Kendall.

“Ok, well go over there to the information desk.” Says the nurse, pointing limp-wristedly.  Her eyes are set back deep into her head behind caverns of flesh. They are red and empty flashing neon signs that read, ‘No help.’ Kendall is already gone.

I find Kendall at the information desk inside a swarm of people, all trying to make themselves heard over the shouting of everyone else, everyone shouting louder for clarity.  There must be twenty people here trying to get information.

“Excuse me, which room is, Marvin Gilney in?”

“Are you family?”

“No. But, please, can you just tell me which room, please?”

“I can not tell you unless you are fam-i-ly.”  The woman at the desk says this slowly, enunciating each letter, savoring their authority.  People are crying, people are flapping their arms in the air and pointing their angry fingers in the faces of the tired nurses behind the desk.  Kendall is in the mix, her tall frame is dwarfed by the presence of a giant man behind her, who lucky for him, has the advantage of shouting above the rest of the people.  “Excuse me! Excuse me!”  He keeps shouting while the nurses are trying to help a nice looking young couple who can’t decide whether to split up and yell separately at the man and the woman at the desk, or remain united and just yell at the woman at the desk. They split up.  He yells at the nurse behind the desk, and she yells up at the man, which seems like a poor decision. “We just need to get to the pharmacy from here.” Says the mis-matched man, “Can you tell me where it is please?”

Kendall sneaks in below the arms of the giant, which are now resting on the counter. The attendants are too busy with the rest of the swarm to notice her as she peeks her head over the counter at the room chart to see which room her father is in.  She takes off down the hall toward the ICU doing the kind of walk/run kids do in front of lifeguards.  I don’t want to get split up from Molly and Stephen who are still missing, but I can’t leave her alone.  I will have to come back for Molly and Stephen.

Neither of us says a word in the elevator.  We don’t even look at each other.  It is not a comfortable silence.  We have known each other for so long, shared so many intimate life details.  We were close once, but right now she might as well be deaf and I might as well be dumb.  My feelings for her have traveled so far in the last twelve hours.  Yesterday, I would have done anything for her attention.  Now, I didn’t even want to spend three floors with her.  As we reach our floor I think about doing that thing where you jump up when the elevator is about to stop, and you then you slam into the floor.  I actually have my legs bent a little anticipating the lurch, but my inner adult gets a hold of me and I decide against it.

I wait for her and then step out into a bloodless hallway lit by two rows of fluorescent lights covered with clear, jagged plastic panels.  The rows of lights extend off along the ceiling towards infinity.  The hallway is empty except for two roller stretchers that are pushed up against the wall in between doors.  It feels colder than in the elevator.  Kendall pauses, sighs, and then starts clipping down the hall.  Six doors down from the elevator, she stops in front of room C-26.  Kendall turns the handle quickly, with a snap, and I hear her breath in sharply, preparing for the shock.  She doesn’t hold the door for me.  I let it close quietly in my face as I realize there is no place I’d want to be less than with the two of them.

Kendall may need me, but I can’t deal with the man who, Kendall once told me, controls so much of her life.  I know that he is tall with broad shoulders, flaxen blond hair like his daughter’s and unsettling blond eyebrows with thin, steel-blue eyes set on haughty cheek bones.  Before I met him or saw pictures, I imagined him with a furled brow and a look of constant expectations never met, never satisfied.  He is much more disarming in real life.  In his real face is hidden a hint of doubt that I think he covered with progress.  He was never satiated by Kendall’s conquest of childhood’s rights of passage, things like the dean’s list and state tennis championships.  From what she told me, he never allowed her be happy with those victories herself.  He taught her that life was a constant preparation for the next, more important stage.

Kendall and I have never been “together”, but early in our friendship I considered the time that we spent together an unofficial form of dating, a relationship, which was intimate and serious.  The truth is that she was mine for a while only because she needed someone, after the death of her mother, who wouldn’t challenge her.  I had never worked up the courage to ask if she was interested in me, mostly because I was honest enough with myself to know that she wasn’t.

Now, after six years, I see that I have wasted most of my love on her.  I believe that I only have a certain ration, kept in a wine flask, and most of it has spilled out through the holes she left in my libido.  She has left me sticky with the moisture of a heavy, early love, and that coating has for the last six years repelled anyone else who might want to get close to me.  It’s a fiber optic point of pain that pricks me every time I think about it.  A prick that represents my guilt: deep down, I know the whole thing is my own fault, the whole of her abuse.

I let the door close, leaving Kendall alone with her father.  Now I need to find Molly and Stephen.

*

Molly is in the courtyard of the hospital, a square patch of grass with concrete paths, paced mostly by the Very Sad and the Newly Alone, the perfect setting for Molly’s melodrama.  She is planted on a stone bench, one foot bent awkwardly, toe to the ground, ankle outward.  Both hands placed palm down on either side of her legs with the fingers wrapped tightly around the edge, gripping the stone.  Her knuckles are snow-white.

Molly considers me a disgusting thing because she is Kendall’s best friend.  Molly knew how I felt about Kendall from day one.  Kendall is totally blind to the way that Molly and I treat each other, the way we try so hard to avoid each other.  She chose to ignore it for her convenience.  Molly never had a reason to like me, so she never pretended to.  Through four years of college Molly never once talked to me about her best friend.   She didn’t want to acknowledge that I played a part in the life of her charge, Kendall.  Molly was never able to admit to herself that someone other than herself meant anything to Kendall.

As I approach she moves to the middle of the bench so that there is no room for me.  I stand, head bent and hip into wind, trying to figure out how to ask her what she is doing out here, why she isn’t inside consoling Kendall.  Molly looks away as she quietly explains.

“Kendall’s just stressed right now.  I know she sort of lost it on the ride over here but I don’t blame her.”  Molly was forgiving herself for forgiving Kendall.  Molly was going to stand by her.  She looks defeated as she stands up and walks back into the building.

*

I watch Stephen through the thin wire grid of an institutional window.  He is standing in a supply room on the opposite end of the building from the ER.  He’s clutching a prescription bottle in his hand.  His hands are shaking too much for him to be able to open the childproof cap.  When I open the door he pulls the bottle behind his back slowly.  Like it makes any difference how he hides it.  It’s as if he is saying, “Yeah, I know you see me trying to hide this but I have to do it anyways, so I’ll do it real slow so it doesn’t look like I care too much.”

“Hey,” is what he says to me.  Then he says, “Where did you guys go?  I walked in and then I lost you.”  He says this and then lets out a nervous chuckle.  Right away he looks past me, over my shoulder, which tells me he feels bad about lying.  I know that he “lost us” because he disappeared as soon as he possibly could, but I don’t have the stomach to reprimand him for it.  “Yeah, we went up to the third floor to find Mr. Henley’s room.”  I look him in the eyes while I say it.  “You should go up there and be with Kendall.  She needs you.”

“She doesn’t need me, you know that.  She might need you again soon though.”  He is grinning.

Stephen looks down at his feet, then up at me, then down the hall while he says, “No, not right now.  I just want to hang out here for awhile.”  I can tell that he’s nervous, his face is flushed, his pockets are bulging with bottles of prescription drugs taken from someone’s bedside. I decide not to bring it up.  The veil has dropped, and I see him now as the lonely liar that he has always been.  He made me believe he had a handle on all things, that he was the puppet master, he even convinced himself, and the reality that he will never be able to delude himself again is settling over his face like an icy mask.  He side steps me, and I turn placidly to watch him creep down the hall before I follow him into the oncology wing, it’s on the way to Mr. Henly’s room.  “There are so many kids in here,” I think before I realize this is the children’s area.  Bald, ravaged refugees, they have large eyes, which are blank.  They are just wells of pain, disproportionately deep when you consider the length of their lives.  They are experiencing a life’s worth of pain without the dilution of a lifetime’s worth of experiences.

The parents look hopeful, wearing worn out, self-conscious smiles. They are gentle, slow, and humble.  The mothers, brow down, concentrate over-eagerly on the treatment; the fathers try to maintain a positive attitude.  I keep a low profile and trail Stephen as he is poking around, looking into the rooms of sleeping kids, nosing around on the carts outside, looking for bottles.  Of course there aren’t any.

“Stephen, they don’t just leave drugs laying around,” I whisper.

Deadpan, he says, “They might.”

And I think, “Maybe they do.”

There isn’t a nurse anywhere around, which makes me feel guilty.  I don’t know why.  The wing is a U-shaped area, open in the middle except for a nurse’s station, with large glass doors along the edges.  The doors are standard size, but they sit within a larger garage like door that rolls up, I guess to allow heavy equipment in.

“Ok, let’s go.”  Stephen looks disappointed.  He’s angry that he hasn’t found anything, and the fact that he feels compelled to intrude into the rooms of sleeping cancer patients makes me feel sorry for him, and protective of him somehow.  Stephen, in his downward spiral, has lost the ability to empathize with people in pain.  He figures that everyone deserves their pain as much as he deserves his own, even if they didn’t earn it, like these kids.  It’s indicative of why he can’t control himself in the first place.

“Hey, let’s go see the girls,” I say cheerfully, trying to get Stephen out of this place and reunited with Molly and Kendall.  I don’t want to feel obligated to watch him anymore.

Stephen is reluctant, but I mention that I may have seen some drugs in Mr. Henly’s room.  He suspects me, but his inner addict takes control and just on the off chance that I’m telling the truth, he nods and we go.

*

The door to the elevator opens, and we step out into the hall, turn right and walk to room C-26.  I knock, wait for the door to open, and I see Molly.  Her expression is sour, like she’s been ingesting something awful. Kendall, I am sure, is the one leaving the bad taste in her mouth.  I shove Stephen into the room by the cloth of his jacket sleeve but I can’t manage to go in there myself.  I need to gather strength, steel my resolve.

*

The chair that I find is not comfortable, it’s not secluded and it does not afford me the space that I need to think.  It’s a yellow, puke green color and covered in pleather. Institutional.   It’s the only chair that I can find.  Every other chair in the entire hospital is occupied.  My chair is at the entrance to the ER, the same doors that we all entered into the hospital through.  Above my chair is a television set projecting a scene of mortal terror somewhere in the Middle East.  CNN is televising the event, it must have happened just minutes ago because they don’t have much footage yet.  They run the same three clips back to back to back interspersed with headshots of an anchor in New York.

*

Alone this time, I jump up just as the elevator hits the first floor, and on the way down I roll my ankle and strain it, more embarrassing than painful.  I rap quietly on the door of the room for the third time, Stephen opens it and lets me enter before heading to a windowsill. We are all here now, four kids and an adult body on a bed.  The room is crowded with people and unspoken thoughts.  Machines are beeping and crunching, a jungle of tubes. Molly is standing at the foot of the bed and Stephen is behind me on his sill, staring at his shoes.  He looks translucent, thin.  I look across at Kendall.

I stare for the first time at the flesh of Mr. Henly’s face, which has been etched into my memory with adrenaline and pictures.  The man in front of me could hardly be mistaken for either of the Mr. Henlys that I have come to know.  Not the quivering, prostrate, broken man, ready for death, or the success of a man that I viewed on the wall of his room last night.  His power tie is gone, the dirt on his face and hands has been cleaned, scrubbed away, and he has a bandage on his head, covering most of his hair.  This figure is foreign but unmistakably him, now as familiar to me as my own father.

I know that I am going to have to tell Kendall what I know.  Explain to the others how I know Mr. Henly, maybe better than they do, maybe even better than Kendall does.  I try to squash the panic.  Digging my way out of this is going to be an exhausting struggle.  My biggest concern is Kendall.  How can I tell her what I know about her father?  What I happened to find out accidentally?  If I tell her she won’t need me anymore.  She will discard me.  My choices are gleaming in front of me like scalpels.

I study Kendall, and although I know that she is a complex, and mostly vengeful person, her current expression is so innocently, deeply pained that I feel like I could never tell her what I know about her father.  It is something she should never have to carry.  The man is going to die, I can tell, and he’s going to take my obligation with him.

“Is he awake?”  I ask cautiously, to everyone.

“No.” Kendall says, “He was for a few minutes but he didn’t say anything, nothing that made any sense anyway.”

His skin is the pale, terrible color of dead skin under a band-aid, he already looks like a corpse, like a broken a limb so horribly out of place that you can tell from a hundred yards that it’s broken.

The scope on the heart rate monitor is still rising in peaks and valleys, which means that his heart is still beating and his brain is still in a deep but active state.

There is no good reason for me to have come here.  I guess I came out of an obligation to Kendall.  Because this is one of those life moments, the moments that go without asking, when friends are supposed to be there for each other.  I am also obviously out of place here now.

Kendall is standing over her father, watching him breathe, and in the silence I notice that the four of us have picked up the pattern of the respirator’s hushed beeping.  We are breathing in time, like we are all sleeping in unison.  I understand Kendall better that Stephen or Molly do.  It’s because she opened up to me so soon after we started college, and most of what I still know about her I learned during those first few malleable and vulnerable months when we arrived at school.  I have always believed in Kendall, I have faith in her, the Kendall that protected me.  The Kendall that was more beautiful than anyone that I could have ever hoped to be with, and shrewd enough to keep anyone from gaining my attention while she remained distant, like a selfish child with a toy: I don’t want him, but you can’t have him either.

It should have been obvious to me, after six years that the Kendall everyone else knows is a very different person from who she is to me. The reality of Kendall is that she isn’t afraid to need someone until they are used up.  She left me hanging on her always-tempting towrope while she moved ever farther away.  The Kendall, who is now standing across from me, is at her most vulnerable and her most hypocritical.  Her eyes are full with the realization that her father is close to death.  If she can feel so deeply and care so much, why couldn’t she have given that to me?  Instead, she gave me just enough to keep me interested; she loved to feel the tug of my need.

I despise her.  I am starting to despise all of them.  My faith in Kendall is dying with her father.  Stephen will never be able to escape himself.  Molly is so completely fucked in her own sweet and sour sort of way.  Why did we spend so much time trying to tolerate each other?  We should have told each other to fuck off years ago.  Kendall only keeps me around to stroke her ego, and I spent six years believing that she just needed to explore, that she would come back to me.  I actually believed that she NEEDED me.  I don’t want to pretend to like these people any longer, and the fact that I hold the secret to Kendall’s life makes me pity her.  I may not need her anymore but I do need to keep her secret.  It’s mine, the only thing that I will never relinquish to her.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” I say in a cool, steady voice.

“What?” exclaims Kendall. “Why would you say that?”

“What the hell is wrong with you DJ?”  Molly is incensed.  With both hands she is gripping the metal bar at the foot of the bed.  She repeats her question to me, “What the hell is wrong with you?”  She is shaking the bar.

“Nothing.”

“That’s a twisted thing to say.”  Stephen chimes in.  Then he starts to chuckle under his breath because secretly he thinks it’s hysterical, or maybe he’s just embarrassed, which makes him laugh even more.

“I just don’t think that he’s going to.”  My tone is completely flat.  “He’s been through a lot, and he doesn’t WANT to be here so…”

“What do you mean, ‘He doesn’t want to be here’?” Molly asks.

She stares me down in silence while she tries to figure out what I meant.  Kendall is still looking at her father’s face.  I want to tell her I know that her father is going to die and he’s going to do it right now.  There is nothing that she can do about it.  Kendall’s eyes soften and get wet.  She brings her hand up to her face, and pushes a tear out from her eye just to prove that she can cry.

“Goodbye, Mr. Henly,” I say, smiling at the old man.

“DJ, you can’t leave now, I need you.”  Kendall turns her pleading eyes to me.

“No Kendall, what you’ve always needed from me was to hear me say that I needed you.  The only good thing I could ever do for you was to leave you alone.  “Goodbye Kendall.”