Woman on the Edge of Time

That doctor. What was his name? Youngish, with fine thin brown hair worn straggling, not quite long, not quite short, he kept yawning and trying to suppress the yawns so that his jaw muscles flexed strangely as he questioned Geraldo and wrote entries on a record form. Geraldo was almost demure. He had a good manner with authority, as any proper pimp should, respectful but confident. Man to man, pimp and doctor discussed her condition, while Dolly sobbed. The doctor asked her only her name and the date. First she said it was the fourteenth and then she changed it to the fifteenth, thinking it must be after midnight. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious.

“Listen to me, Doctor–I didn’t hit her! You take my niece into another room away from him and ask her if I hit her. Hehit her!”

The doctor went on making notations on the form. She was a body checked into the morgue; meat registered for the scales.

She tried to tell the nurse who gave her the injection, the attendants who tied her to the stretcher, that she was innocent, that she had a broken rib, that Geraldo had beaten her. It was as if she spoke another language, that language Claud’s buddy had been learning that nobody else knew: Yoruba. They acted as if they couldn’t hear you. If you complained, they took it as a sign of sickness. “The authority of the physician is undermined if the patient presumes to make a diagnostic statement.” She had heard a doctor say that to a resident, teaching him not to listen to patients. She had been through that last time in, when she had had a toothache. It had developed into a full abscess before the nurse and the attendants stopped interpreting her complaints as part of her “pattern of illness behavior.”

Fool, poor fool she had got herself locked away again. She had jumped into the fire. Why had she done it? Why?

Yet lying in enforced contemplation, she found that clean anger glowing in her still. She hated Geraldo and it was right for her to hate him. Attacking him was different from turning her anger, her sorrow, her loss of Claud into self‑hatred, into speed and downers, into booze, into wine, into seeing herself in Angelina and abusing that self born again into the dirty world. Yes, this time was different. She had struck out not at herself, not at herself in another, but at Geraldo, the enemy. She had not been wrong to try to defend Dolly, her closest one now, her blood, her almost child. How could she allow Geraldo to carve up Dolly’s body? She had smashed his nose, yes; for all her pain, she smiled as she saw that moment. She had smashed his nose and he would never look quite the same. Last time in she had accepted the doom of sickness; the weight of the heavy judgment they passed out here she had bowed to. This time she was not ashamed. She would get out fast She would be clearly competent, sane, together.

How long did she lie strapped to the bed? Day was the same as night. They had forgotten her and she would die here in her own piss. Sometimes she could not stand it anymore and she yelled as loud as she could and begged the walls to open. Moments were forever. She was mad. The drugs made her mind strange. She was caught, she was stalled. She floated trapped like an embryo in alcohol, that awful thing the Right to Life people had in that van on the street. She was caught in a moment that had fallen out of time and would never be over, never be done. She was mad. Yes, now she was crazy. How could she doubt it, lying wet in her own piss while her body screamed and the drug thickened her to lead.

Sometimes she slipped down into a hot, muggy doze and sometimes the pain from her back or her rib or her mouth tore through her sleep and she woke wild with grief and wept. “Please, please, please come. Please let me out. Someone. Please!” No response came. That was madness. To weep and cry out and curse and scream, and it was as if she had done nothing. She was dozing in that feverish half‑sleep without rest or relief, when the door banged open. Two attendants came in and untied her.

She pitched forward, weak as string. She could see in their faces disgust, boredom. She smelled bad. She stank! They hauled her along the hall like a bag of garbage and they paid no attention to what she tried to say. “Please, I beg of you, listen. I was beaten before they brought me here. My rib hurts so much! Please, listen!”

“So I said to her, it’s all right for you. You don’t have to deal with these animals all day.” The woman was a husky dyed blond who spoke with a slight Middle European accent. “All you do is come in two days and play games with the better ones. It’s easy for you to pass remarks.”

“Those OT’s have it easy.” The other woman was six feet tall, hefty and black. “You better believe it. We just don’t live right, Annette. We just the muscle around here.”

“But Byrd gives me a pain. She’s no better than she ought to be. You know, she lives with a man she’s not married to. Lives with him openly in an apartment in Chelsea.”