Brother and the Dancer. Keenan Norris
Читать онлайн книгу.
recession might kill a whole medical system.
For reasons having to do with their jobs and collective bargaining agreements and the economy, which he didn’t understand, his parents could get medication and have their teeth fixed through Kaiser Hospital, but had to go to County Hospital in emergency situations. The family drove to the County Emergency Room, where a fat male nurse whose breathing Touissant could hear from up the hall placed him in a wheelchair, told his parents to bide their time in the waiting room and pushed Touissant a few feet before leaving him in the chaotic hospital hallway. He could hear his parents complaining just over his shoulder and knew that they hadn’t followed the nurse’s orders. Touissant watched the fat man wobble out of view. He remembered his granny all of a sudden. Not that she was dead, that he hadn’t forgotten. What returned to him was the memory of a story she had told about his dad swallowing a coin. She was still a young woman then and his dad was just a child. He had been to a downtown fair and had brought home the bronze token he found in the dirt below a row of rickety bleachers. Somehow the token got into his throat.
She took him to the Cook County Hospital Emergency Room. (Had to hitch a ride with a neighborhood man because her husband was outside the city somewhere breaking in the new Thunderbird that would soon carry his restless ass and his whole family to California.) At the hospital, the assigned nurse left the boy and his mother in the first available hallway, much as Touissant had been left by the vividly unhealthy county hospital nurse. His granny told Touissant how that was the first and last time she had seen men chained to a wall and examined orally and rectally with flashlights. These were prisoners from Cook County Prison, trucked in after nightfall for their check-ups. It was the first and last time she saw a man stabbed through the neck yet still alive enough that he was explaining the basics of football and the Bears defense to a young, innocent-looking female nurse as she wheeled him down the hallway. She had seen many other things, of course, that were just as shocking, the Southern marigolds in bloom before springtime and black soldiers arriving back from the War with their backs straight and human rights on their lips, and union strikers in Chicago and Mexicans in Fresno beat near as low as any Mississippi Negro. And it was not the first time that she had seen newly dead corpses. But it was the first time her son had seen anything so frightening. Elderly folks expired in their wheelchairs, young men dead on their stretchers with body parts only half-hidden from view, their limbs still trembling slightly when a nurse or doctor would rush past. It was the first time he had seen dead men.
Touissant didn’t like the idea of trembling corpses in Cook County Hospital. He looked around the San Bernardino County Emergency Room: Up and down the hallway where the nurse had left him other white- and blue-coated nurses idled and walked and sprinted back and forth between their respective responsibilities. Now and then someone who he figured was a doctor by the stethoscope hanging from his pocket would maneuver through. Wheelchairs with flu-ridden kids and infirm adults crowded the hall, making movement a difficult talent, part pushing, part cussing, and many acts of agility. The wheelchairs, piloted by medical professionals, family and friends and by the patients themselves, spun this way and that, dashed up and down, came and went. Two gurneys were parked at the very end of the hall. Each was a mantelpiece outfitted with a fallen flag: blankets covered what Touissant thought might be dead people. He could see what looked like the outline of a long nose, open lips and two bony knees underneath one of the white hospital sheets. The second stretcher was a little more obvious: Touissant could see where the blanket sagged back into what looked like a man’s large round head. A faint patch of red was visible where the blanket sagged. The dead man had a hole in his head.
He remembered how his granny’s story had ended: the hospital hallway scared his dad so deeply, she said, he actually digested the coin and cured his own self. By the time her husband and his Thunderbird got to the hospital, the crisis had concluded. But when Emmett Till was murdered not too long after and the body was brought back North to Chicago and lain in state at the Southside church for public viewings, he refused to go. Lines stretched for blocks on end, black folks come to see the symbol of white man’s evil. But her boy thought the body had a ghost in it and might start moving, like the bodies on the stretchers in the hospital when people got too close.
Whether he had wanted to or not, his dad had seen something important in Cook County Hospital, Touissant knew. What he had seen was scary. It had made him hate death forever. But it was important as knowledge. And now the boy realized that he had seen and learned something, too: a few days from now, in Fresno, at the funeral, his granny’s corpse, lain in her casket, would not be the first dead body his eyes would know. He had seen death already, a few days before he was supposed to, in a random way that had nothing to do with funerals or churches or family or love. He had seen two corpses and there was no going back from this. He imagined his granny’s body, how the preparers would have the make-up imperfectly done on her face, one side smudged and darker than the other. A Sunday church hat with roses but no marigolds crowning her head, sprigs of her white hair falling like unmowed blades of grass from beneath the Sunday hat. And an old frayed familiar dress to lay her to rest in. It would be a different way of dying than this under-a-sheet, mouth-open, hole-in-the-head hospital stuff. Her skin would not be a discolored shade of green as he imagined was the fate of the corpses in the hallway. Her temple would not be caked with blood that seeped into the sheet set over it. Her death scene would be a world away from what he was seeing now, but not because it would be perfectly planned and brought off. It would be different because the proper hat and flowers and things placed upon her would be put there with love and memorial knowing. These corpses didn’t have luxury like that. They were simple corpses. The boy’s young mind wrapped itself around death and the different deaths of loved and unloved people.
Now Touissant knew he would never die. Not only had he seen the hidden dead, he had had a virus steal into his body and try to kill him from the inside out. The virus had become a fever and the fever a seizure and the shape shifter had fought deep within him the way diseases and bullets got inside and killed people every day. But his body was not dying. His mind and imagination were not dying. They were fully alive. He felt more sensitive to every moment, every smallest piece of his life, every beat of his heart.
The fat black nurse, who had skin the color of new pennies, returned with two hospital-white blankets, which he laid carefully over the two gurneys at the back of the hallway. Now neither corpse could be seen. Their subtle outlines were perfectly hidden. Satisfied with that, the nurse wheeled the boy who knew that he would never die into the examination room.
Riding home in the backseat of his dad’s new car, Touissant said nothing. His dad was driving and his mother was talking. He could tell that his dad was gearing the car up and down, testing its braking and acceleration and the basic precision of its design to trick his mind into thinking about something other than Granny’s death. Meanwhile, his mother was talking in that way that meant she was absolutely sure that the things she was saying about the twins’ day-camp schedule and about the doctor’s orders for monitoring a child after a febrile seizure were of great importance.
Touissant didn’t know what to think about. His granny was dead, he knew that. His memory of her rested peacefully amid his many thoughts. He remembered that in the examination room the doctor had told his parents that it was probably the extreme summer heat of the Inland Empire, as compared to the milder summers that Touissant had experienced closer to Los Angeles and the coast when they were still in college, that had caused the seizure. The doctor’s advice was not complicated. Too much heat was bad for children, keep cool.
Touissant looked up at the sun above the San Bernardino Mountains. The sun controlled everything. It was God and the Devil. It brought seizures and killed children, as well as all the other weak things in the desert. Afternoon now: the sunscape was retreating a little at a time, dying over the mountains, allowing for evening and nightfall. Then the temperature would drop like a shot bird. And the desert would become unpredictable under that darkness, a mixing of summer and winter, everything roasted and dry but simultaneously stiffening up with the sudden wind and sunless air. Even in absence, the sun was everything; its absence as powerful as its presence, bringing cold and flu even as it scorched the earth and left the land dead and fallow.
Touissant saw a lizard perched atop a stop sign. It was a gray mannequin, the most still of all living things. Further up the way, he could see prairie dogs moving