Material

If you’re afraid you’ll have nothing to say, if you’re afraid your life will continue in its deep patterns: the airport, the casino, the emergency room.

Today I tried the emergency room. A friend had taken her father there. His mind is somewhat blurred, his body pretty worn, and then he broke his leg.

When the family went to talk with a doctor, I stayed alone with him. Well, as alone as people can be parked in the hallway of an emergency room. Medical professionals constantly strode past us, not making eye contact. He had achieved “admitted,” but not “bed” or “room.” Hallway it was.

If you think you know and understand time, then the airport, the casino, the emergency room. The whorehouse? Outside it was December gray, as if weather had given up on itself. And though I entered in the daylight, I would exit into a dark parking garage.

The first time the huge bin of dirty linens came around the corner, I said, “whoa, that’s a big load, nice driving,” and then it happened ten more times, with dirty linens, with trash, people wheeling whirligig machines that gave various types of waves, or potions, or carried blood vials to the vampire overlords.

A man unseen to me but heard was raving about how he had to go to the bathroom, and he was told he had to wait, and wait in his room, and he explained how many hours he had been there. I don’t remember his number, because my friend’s number was 13 when I arrived and 16 when I left.

Hours! You know how much youtube that is?

Hours.

“Sometimes you wonder if you’ve done enough,” my friend’s dad said.

“I know,” I said. ”I wonder about the same thing.”

We talked about other things– North Carolina pine trees and tobacco, swimming– but this is what almost made me cry.

I remembered I miss spending time in a dementia ward. 

I miss being with people who may not know who the hell I am, apart from a person sitting near them, listening or talking. Something about the way they receive my attention makes me feel like they know and appreciate I am with them, not somewhere else, wishing we were both somewhere else, or that they were fixed or corrected. I don’t feel that way about people with dementia. I don’t think they should be some other way. I think there are parts of them that are more honest. I think they are less deceptive than the rest of us. I think they know they don’t know what’s going on, and are living with it. This reminder helps me. I don’t know what’s going on, and so I try to avoid living with it.

Anyway I sat in a wheelchair because we were not in a room but in the hallway (the hallway, though, marked with “Hallway 6,” a printed sign, an upgrade, I was told, from the handwritten sign), I sat and sought conversational material that might work for this, the father of my good friend, with whom I have spent no time at all before this day. He’s heard all about me, and I’ve heard all about him.

There are these people you meet only at the hospital, relatives of friends or friends of relatives, and you both say, hi, how are you doing, and you both say, oh, okay, like, I mean, I’m standing up categorized as not needing hospitalization.

The man who was demanding to go to the bathroom was told by another patient (who was black), “Sit down. You’re making black people look bad.”

I got thirsty, went back to the waiting room, and two different people tried to help me purchase a bottle of water. The machine would not cooperate.

I returned without water.

Monitors beeped as if they were being paid by Putin to drive us mad.

A man came out of a room and said, “If we were having any more fun, it’d be illegal, right?” He was an old white guy wearing a t-shirt that said “Grandpa.” One of his legs was all wrapped up, but he was managing to hobble to the bathroom.

“We had that room last time,” I said.

“I had this room, and I had that one,” he said, gesturing across the hall.

“You do know this place!” I said.

A woman who had lost most of her hair and weighed hardly anything walked slowly by us. 

A man in a large body told the nurse, “Let’s go ahead and do this, I know they’re going to want this,” as they stood by the scale, and I tried to look away and clearly not pay attention to what happened next.

My friend’s dad said, “If my mouth were any drier, I’d be spitting cotton.” No food or drink for him, even though they had decided he could not have surgery today, no new order had come through to change his rules.

“I think you said you had kids, or one kid?” he said. 

I had not said this, but I had said I had many siblings, but whatever.

“You have to teach them the right way to be, or they’ll get swept away, you know.”