The Shadow Catcher

Emergency Receiving is surprisingly small, and therefore fully populated. There are whole families here and I’m reminded how much misery can come down in any given household after supper. Mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles — everybody has that oh, shit look, except the kids, and there are plenty of them, playing Game Boys on the floor. There’s an ATM against the wall next to a flower-arrangement machine with sprays of pink and white carnations on rotating shelves, a machine dispensing Get Well cards, a Coke machine and posters warning about sexually transmitted diseases. And there’s the smell. That HOSPITAL SMELL — three parts disinfectant, two parts fear. Five parts institution food. Chemically enhanced “beef”-flavored gravy.

There’s a single woman on duty behind a sliding glass partition and I tell her why I’m here and she tells me, “No visitors until nine tomorrow morning.” I repeat that I’m here at the hospital’s request and that I’ve driven all the way from California and that if she could only call the cardiac nurse on duty in the cardiac department we could get to closure here and make this work between us.

She makes the call and after asking me my name again tells me someone’s sending someone down to come and get me. “You can wait in there,” she says, indicating the open door across the hall from us marked CHAPEL.

Just what I need right now: a moment alone with MY THOUGHTS with visual prompts from OUR LORD. But the Chapel is that rare attempt at interdenominationalism that succeeds, in a quiet but weird way. Two pews deep, it’s a pentagon-shaped blue-tinted refuge featuring an altar, of sorts, which is more of a lectern on which there are some candles, some pre-printed card-sized excerpts from the Gospels. Please God, one line in the ledger reads, I give up drinking and I give up women then you help my little girl. Milagros, pinned to the altar cloth with safety pins, rattle when I brush against them. Pictures of children, those photo-booth standards of our public schools, are stuck in the frame of a portrait of the Virgen, while on the less Catholic side of the shrine a pebble sits on a starched linen doily next to a glass Shabat light. You for the cardiac? a voice sounds behind me.

I turn and nod at the security guard, armed and not dressed in pastel.

Let’s go, then, she tells me and leads the way down the hall to the steel doors of an elevator which she opens with a key on a chain on her belt.

I step inside.

She inserts her key in the touchpad and hits the 5 button, steps back and tells me, “You have a good night,” and the doors close.

When they open again, they open on quiet.

Most of these hospital floors, wherever you are, are the same: nursing desk faces the traffic. Nursing desk faces the elevator.

I approach and state my name.

The place is so very quiet I can’t help being aware that this is the floor where the heart patients sleep or lie awake listening for things like their pulses. Sign in, please, Miss Wiggins, I’m told and I sign a sheet on a clipboard and note the time: one fifty-two. He’s in five-oh-nine down the hall, I’m instructed. “The door’s open, it’s a semi-, but he’s all alone.”

I turn and face the dim hallway.

One of THOSE MOMENTS when walking seems surreal, when the force propelling me forward seems to exist somewhere outside my body, when what I am doing seems to be at the behest of some other me, a me who is watching all this and cursing her shoes for the sounds that they make, the only sounds I can hear that might be described as sounds that are human, the only sounds audible over the beeps that percuss through the doors like the pings of lovelorn dolphins’ code. And the rhythm, the steady rhythm of my steady steps keeps me from stopping outside his door, keeps me going for fear of breaking the spell and then I’m there in the room, in the weak light, facing him. His eyes are closed and there’s no comfort in watching an unconscious human attached to his guardian monitors, no sense at all of who he might be on his own, inside, behind the closed eyes and the lax-jaw expression. His arms are placed on top of the sheet and I lean down to look at the name on the blue plastic strip on his wrist and notice he’s wearing a thin yellow-gold wedding band.

I pick up my pace heading back to the nurse and I’m sure now my footsteps sound louder. She’s waiting for me but she doesn’t stand up.

“You know,” I remind her, “I’ve just driven all night to come here all the way from L.A.”

She has steady eyes, which I reckon might come with the job.

“Don’t you think you might have mentioned to me when you called that your John Wiggins is a black man?”

Those steady eyes do not flicker.