In the early morning hours of December 29th, expiring slowly in the emergency room alcove, I had plenty of time to remember. I was tested, slowly, for flu, for this and that, with little result. I had undergone my appendectomy in the same hospital two weeks earlier, but no one in the emergency department seemed inclined to look at my electronic record. I had brought a folder with the printouts and a CD from the Florida hospital, and I had just enough presence of mind to offer it to the doctors. They were not interested. “We do things our own way,” said the resident. The doctors and nurses seemed unable to complete a sentence, let alone think about my case as something with a history.
I could see, or rather hear, why they were distracted. The familiar sounds from beyond the curtain drew my attention as well, even as my vital signs worsened and the infection spread through my blood. An alcoholic beyond the curtain to the right, an older lady from the sound of her voice, kept crying out “Doctor!” or “Nurse!” A second alcoholic, to the left, was a loquacious homeless man. When asked for his belt, he riffed on the idea of the “Belt of Orion,” comparing himself to the hunter and rapist of Greek mythology. Whenever approached by a female doctor or nurse, he said, “You belong to me; don’t try to fight it.” One of the nurses declared that she didn’t belong to anyone. When he was discharged, he was asked the standard questions about whether he felt safe at home. This was absurd, since he had no home and was going back out into the cold. It was also obscene, since his answers to the questions involved the sexual violence he imagined perpetrating upon the nurse who was asking them.
Two policemen sat just beyond the curtain, observing two wounded young men. With nothing much to do, the cops moved closer together, just in front of my curtain, and loudly talked the night away. I learned how the police department organizes its shifts. I heard stories of drunk driving, abandoned vehicles, domestic assault, and, the favorite theme, rumbles in the open air that the police were powerless to stop. Some of the stories were funny, like the one about the woman who was caught, shovel in hand and dirt on her knees, undoing the gardening work of her neighbor.
The two police officers preferred different topics: the one bureaucracy, the other criminality. The one who liked to talk about crimes used the terms unperson and unpeople. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, an unperson is someone whose memory has been expunged by the state. It seemed, though, that the policeman had in mind African Americans he regarded as criminals. I wanted to speak to him about that, but lacked the strength.
I was fading. After three hours in my alcove my fever reached 104. My blood pressure crashed: 90/50, 80/40, 75/30, 70/30. I was hanging somewhere in between. Sepsis kills people, and mine was not being treated.
While I was in this suspended state, the sounds from beyond the curtain never ceased. My senses took it all in, my brain formed the words uttered by everyone around me, but I was no longer mediating the stimuli. I was not in charge, or there was not enough left of me to be in charge. The policemen’s conversation kept coming through, as did the drunken shouts, the squeak of shoes on the floor, the wheeze of an automatic door, the slap of a hand on the button that opened it, the knock of a bed against it. The curtain to my alcove followed the bodies of people passing by, or danced with a draft from beyond.
* * *
When I closed my eyes in the early morning hours, I could still see the moving curtain. The rippling became hypnotically regular, from right to left, like an invertebrate sea creature undulating with the waves. The color of the curtain deepened from yellow to ochre. An inky black around the edges replaced the fluorescent white of the lights outside.
For five hours, from about one to about six in the morning on December 29th, I had trouble remaining conscious. Each time I closed my eyes the rippling ochre curtain beckoned. I tried to keep them open. The blood pressure reading behind me provided a point of focus. Each time I turned back from my vital signs towards the curtain, though, I would eventually have to close my eyes. Then the color of the curtain would change to ochre, its movements would become darkly voluptuous, and I would remember.
My whole life did not rush before my eyes. It was rather that my ability to suppress memories dissolved. A few images of childhood came on heavy, with punching force. I could no longer induce them to make way for other memories or for new thoughts. It was strange to be a spectator of the real, rather than a referee.
The memories of adulthood were less about what befell me and more about what I learned from others. When I concentrate on what I read, I have a very good memory. Much of my thirties and forties I spent reading first-person accounts of the Holocaust and other German crimes, Stalinist mass shootings and famine, ethnic cleansings, and other atrocities. These came now, too, unbidden, a thousand jabs: one after the other, book after book, document after document, photograph after photograph.
A Ukrainian boy asks to starve to death in the open air rather than in underground barracks. A Polish officer hides his wedding ring so that it will not be plundered when he is murdered. A Jewish girl leaves a message for her mother scratched on the wall of a synagogue: “We kiss you over and over.” Something in me paused over a Jewish orphan taken in by childless Ukrainian peasants: “You will be like a daughter to us,” they said, she remembered, I remembered. Something in me hesitated over the story of a woman whose special gift, as she hid Jews in her apartment, was to behave as if nothing extraordinary were taking place. Poise. Existential poise. A certain photograph I had looked at regularly for twenty-five years appeared before my eyes again: a Polish Jew named Wanda, full of self-possession. Wanda had refused the German command to go to the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 and kept her two boys safe throughout the war. Her husband, their father, was murdered.
It went on, the black and white of remembered words and images, the ochre curtain rippling in the background, neither near nor far, neither on this side nor that. I was with others. At first I was uneasy with the society of the dead, but this passed. I had learned from them. In some way I remembered what they remembered. Wanda’s younger son grew up to become a historian, who approved my dissertation fifty-five years after his mother had saved him from the ghetto. Twenty years after that, I found the record of what his mother had done, and wrote about it myself. Life is not just inside people; it passes through people.
It was the ochre curtain I didn’t like; it was the passage into death, repulsive and attractive, that I feared. I never drew it in my diary; I remember it all too well.
* * *
My body was not well cared for during the early hours of December 29th. Fluids brought my blood pressure up some, but no meaningful treatment took place. The doctors and nurses could not spend more than a few seconds at a time with me, and rarely made eye contact. They ran their blood work, forgot the results, misreported them, ran off. The permanent distraction of doctors and nurses is a symptom of our malady. Each patient has a story, but no one is following the story.