Glimmering

For nearly two weeks Jack passed in and out of fevers, in and out of ER and ICU, in and out of consciousness. There were glimpses of white-masked faces floating in the burnished bubble that was Saint Joseph’s jury-rigged AIDS ward, a terrifying memory of sudden darkness and screams, flame and shouted curses and the horrific certainty that he had somehow missed his own death and plunged straight into hell. But that was just the first minutes of the first blackout, before the hospital’s emergency generators kicked in and the ward’s sodium lights began to glow. Jack missed the next few blackouts, being too busy manufacturing his own. His fever soared and dipped. When he was conscious he felt giddy and exalted despite excruciating pain; felt himself wheeling far above the hospital building and looking down upon Untermeyer Park, the broad ruddy sweep of the river, and the Palisades. These flights would be interrupted by someone taking his temperature, his blood, fecal samples, swabs of tissue from inside his mouth. His upper arm ached from repeated stabbings with a hypodermic needle; his hands, when he could feel them, were cold, and his feet. This did not prevent him from flying—jumping, actually—after the first few forays he realized he could move faster and farther if he leapt into the air rather than attempting to pump his arms like wings. So he would leap, bouncing as upon a trampoline and holding his breath until he began to hang up there, each time a few moments longer, and at last he did not fall, he was above the world, between feedings and fevers, between planets.

Sometimes he saw faces that he knew. His brother Dennis; Jule Gardino; Leonard, but it was the Leonard of long ago, his sloe eyes brimming and his mouth close to Jack’s. He saw his former lover Eric, too, which confused him but filled his heart with such joy that he shouted, and was confused again when the nurses came. And once his aunt Mary Anne drifted past, long blond hair and paisley wrappings trailing behind her. Sometimes he heard music. Another man in the ward had a boom box; the nurses fiddled with it relentlessly, until they found a working broadcast band. What spilled out then was like what was going on inside Jack’s head, “Gimme Shelter” and La Traviata, Rent and old Ajax commercials, a man shouting about Jesus and the murdered pope. During his flights the music faded, and sometimes the carnival light as well. It was then that he would see a great unblinking eye moving slowly across the heavens, like a hot-air balloon. The eye terrified him: it grew larger and larger, until it filled the sky, turning slowly as it stared down upon the world, its black pupil opening into the abyss. He woke screaming, barely conscious of hands pushing him back onto the cot and the hot sting of a needle in his upper arm.

A day came when a new voice cut through the babble. A woman’s voice, half-familiar, but it wasn’t until he heard his doctor arguing with her that he realized it was Jule’s wife, Emma.

“Are you fucking crazy ?” That much morphine for two weeks—”

“Six days,” the other voice protested.

“—you goddamn bastards, you’re trying to kill him, aren’t you? You fucking cannibals.”

There was a clatter and the sound of scuffling, a shriek, and feeble applause from one of the other cots.

“—sterile, you’re not sterile !” the doctor cried.

“I’ll sterilize you, you son of a bitch—”

What happened next was mostly pain, experienced at varying speeds, as Dr. Emma Isikoff shouted and waved her phone and stalked between cots, yanking up patients’ charts and scanning them. “‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine! ’ ” she read, and in a rage threw the last chart onto an IV pump. “What, is this Verdun? You’re killing them! ”

Jack still hadn’t managed to do more than shake his head admiringly, when Emma commandeered a wheelchair from somewhere, lifted him, and deposited him gently on the frayed vinyl seat, thick with duct tape and newspaper padding. The trip from the hospital to Lazyland was a blur, barely glimpsed through the filthy, barbed-wire-framed windows of Emma’s Range Rover. And the next few days were horrible, more fever and convulsions from the abrupt morphine withdrawal, and a new regime of herbs and antibiotics administered by Emma.

“Remember that scene in Gone with the Wind? That’s what it was like in there.” Emma was a neurosurgeon on the staff at Northern Westchester, where (apparently) sick people were treated like gold: when the power went they operated by candlelight and never lost a patient. “Next time you have a seizure and go to the emergency room, I want you to call me, okay? Jesus.”

Jack smiled. Emma’s shift—nine days on, four days off—allowed her to stay with him. Which was lucky, since Keeley was too frail to serve as nurse, and all of Jack’s brothers were too far away or, in Dennis’s case, too burdened with their own children to help out.