I NEEDS MUST PART, THE POLICEMAN SAID

by Richard Bowes

* * * *

“I Needs Must Part” is Richard Bowes’s fourteenth story to appear in F&SF. It’s intended to be a chapter in a novel tentatively titled, Dust Devil: My Life In Speculative Fiction. It’s my personal favorite just like all the other ones. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.

1.

In the predawn one morning last April, I woke up from a violent and disturbing dream. In it, I was somewhere that I realized was the Southwest with three other guys whom I knew in the dream but didn’t quite recognize when I thought about them later.

All of us were engaged in smuggling something—drugs as it turned out. We were tough. Or they were anyway, big guys with long hair and mustaches. There was, I knew, another bunch of guys much tougher than us with whom we didn’t get along, and there were cops.

The end of the dream was that I heard police sirens and was scared but relieved because they weren’t as bad as the other guys. The last image in the dream, however, was the cops smashing two of the big guys’ faces right into the adobe wall of the building we stayed in. And I knew, in the way one does in dreams, that the other guy and I were in for something as bad or worse. Then I woke up before dawn in my apartment on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

From the time I was a small boy I’ve been afraid of the long marches of the night, the time in the dark when the lights inside me went out. The fear that would hit me as my head was on the pillow was that I, the one falling asleep, would not be the one who woke up.

Imagining the fragility of my identity chilled me. I did fall asleep again though and dreamed once more.

This time, I saw the head cop with his short white hair and gray suit sitting in his car, smoking a cigarette, staring blue-eyed and expressionless at me. I was much younger than I am now, maybe in my mid-twenties instead of my sixties.

In my dream, I realized that I had been looking at a computer and had viewed all this on some kind of a website.

When I awoke this time, the sun was up. Except for my having seen it as a website, the dream seemed like a fragment of the past, a time when I might, in fact, have found myself in places almost as bad as the dream.

I felt sick, my stomach was upset, every bone and muscle ached, and each move I made took an effort.

Nothing seemed to have led up to this illness. I’d been to the theater the night before with my friend Ellen. We’d seen a show with music about eighteenth-century boy sopranos (played by women) and abducted orphans.

A few hours before that, an affair I’d been having for some time with a guy named Andre was broken off very suddenly. The man with whom Andre lived had called me up and said that Andre had told him everything. They both wanted me to stay away from him from now on. It was a once-a-week thing that had become routine and boring, as I told the man, and I asked him to say good-bye to Andre for me.

I’m a veteran of more than forty years in Manhattan and normally neither big, melodramatic Broadway shows nor sudden disruptions in love cause the kind of distress I felt that morning.

Even as I wondered if I should call my doctor, I was aware of a kind of web stream that ran constantly in a corner of my brain. The fever dream took the form of a constant Google search complete with web pages and blogs I couldn’t remember looking for.

Pictures and stories with elusive contexts appeared. At one point, I found myself looking at the profiles of the members of a tough cop unit somewhere in the Southwest. It had short bios, photos of them with mustaches and holsters and mask-like sunglasses.

As I wondered why and how I had looked this up, I saw a familiar face with a white crewcut and expressionless cop eyes.

I remembered I wanted to call my doctor. As I dialed the number, I thought of the tune and lyrics of a song I’d been listening to recently. It was by John Dowland, a poet and composer who was kind of the Kurt Cobain of Elizabethan England. Something in the melancholy grace of the tune, the resignation of the song’s lyrics had caught me.

* * * *

Now, oh now I needs must part,

Parting though I absent mourn.

Absence can no joy impart:

Joy once fled cannot return.

* * * *

Maybe this attachment had been a kind of harbinger, some part of my consciousness telling me I had started dying. I wondered how Dowland’s song “Flow My Tears” had affected Philip K. Dick when he’d used it in a title.

Somehow the call to the doctor never got made. I couldn’t remember what day it was. People who phoned me, friends, the godchildren who in sentimental moments I thought of as my kids, the woman who had been my work-wife before I retired from the University, seemed concerned.

Many things ran on the screen inside my head. The Macabres when I found myself looking at their site seemed like many a New York late seventies punk group. The photos showed the musicians—emaciated, decked in bondage accessories, with their hair hacked off at odd angles. A bit of one of their songs played. Then police sirens wailed just like they had when my friends and I had gotten caught.

I realized that the sirens were my phone ringing. A friend who had once been a nurse wanted the telephone number of my medical group and the number of someone who could take me there next morning.

* * * *

2.

That night was especially awful: a long confusion of dreams. Chris, my speculative fiction godchild who lives in Ohio, seemed almost frantic. He kept calling me but I was too sick to talk to him for more than a minute or two.

When I looked at my inner computer screen it showed me palm trees and bright sun and elephants. The Macabres now worked nearly naked in a prison chain gang. A woman with the face of a peacock seemed very familiar. I thought I spotted the policeman with the blue eyes that gave away nothing. He looked right at me and was about to speak.

Then my doorbell sounded and it was my friend Bruce who was there to take me to the doctor’s. With his help I walked the few blocks to my medical group office on Washington Square. A very concerned doctor ordered me into Saint Vincent’s hospital. Shortly afterward Bruce escorted me to the emergency room admittance desk. Then he hugged me and was off to another job and I was in the power of the hospital.

There was no waiting. I identified myself, was given a form to fill out, and was shown right into the middle of the beds and gurneys, patients and orderlies. Numbers flashed on computer screens, and machines beeped.

Nurses and doctors clustered around an enormously fat, comatose woman, then dispersed. A social worker took the life history of an elderly black man who very patiently explained to her how he had lost everything he had ever had and lived now in a shelter. A moaning patient rolled by on a gurney hung with IV bags. Two cops wheeled in a shooting victim.

Then an orderly threw back the curtains around a bed and told me to come inside. My clothes were taken away. I was dressed in two gowns—one worn forward, the other backward—and socks with skid-proof soles. I was bled and examined and hauled through cold corridors and X-rayed.

Tubes got attached to me. A catheter was stuck up my urinary tract; at one point a very new intern tried to stick a tube down my throat and I choked and gagged. A horrible brown goop came up my guts and into my mouth and nose. My hospital gowns got soaked and there was commotion. People talked about me as if I were dead or not there.

It reminded me of an accident scene. I heard police radios, saw flares illuminating a nighttime car crash. I saw a familiar picture on a computer screen. It was in black and white, a 1950s newspaper shot.

A kid in his late teens had been thrown onto the branch of a tree by the force of a collision. He hung there bent at the waist over the branch of the tree, his loafers gone, his legs still in jeans, his upper body bare. The cool striped shirt he wore now hung down over his head. That was probably to the good: the face and eyes under those circumstances are not something you’d want to see.

That image haunted me at fourteen. I had imagined myself dramatically dead in just that manner if only I could drive and had a car.

“That photograph was his own private version of the old primitive painting, ‘Death on a Pale Horse,’“ I read on a screen in front of me and realized I was looking at a website about me.

Then the screen was gone and I was back in the tumult of the emergency room. “Intestinal blockage—massive fluid build-up,” said a female resident. “It’s critical.”

“Rejected the drain,” said the intern who had failed to get it in.

A male nurse who spoke quietly to me—like I was a frightened animal—put his hand on my chest to calm me and stuck the tube into my nose and down my throat in a single gesture. A tall wheeled IV pole with hooks that held my drains, feeding bag, urine bag and various meters was attached to me.

Doctors examined me further. I felt like my insides were grinding themselves apart. A bag hanging next to my head rapidly filled with brown goop that had been inside me.

It was very late at night when I was wheeled onto elevators and off them, then down silent corridors. I was still dirty and wearing the damp hospital gowns when I was brought into a ward on the twelfth floor.

A young Asian nurse named Margaret Yang took over. Before I was placed on a bed, she called and four orderlies appeared. Women talking in the accents of Puerto Rico, Ukraine, and Jamaica brought me into a bathroom, sponged me off, put me under shower water and turned me around under it saying, as I tried to cover myself, “It’s okay. You are as God made you.”

* * * *

3.

Only when I was clean, in clean clothes and on a bed looking out at the night, did I remember that I had been in this hospital forty-two years before.

When I was a kid first coming into the city from Long Island, I woke one night with no idea who I was or where I was. The place I was in seemed vast, chilly, and sterile. The lighted windows in the brownstones across the street revealed stylish apartments and I knew it looked like a magazine cover without knowing what that was or how I knew this.

A nurse told me I’d been found facedown in a hallway, bleeding from a cut on my forehead and without any wallet or ID. I had lots of alcohol and a couple of drugs in my bloodstream.

A very old nun, thin and stiff, her face almost unlined, came around late that night. She inspected the bandage on my forehead and talked about Dylan Thomas. I was still enough of a Catholic kid to feel embarrassed talking to a nun while sitting on a bed in just a hospital gown.

“He was brought here not ten or twelve years ago after a hard night’s drinking. He died from that and pneumonia on the floor just below this one.

“I thought of him when I saw you,” she said, looking at me calmly. “I wonder if you too are a young man who has an uneasy relationship with death.”

I said I didn’t know if I was or even who I was.

“Time will reveal those things,” she said. “You’re still very young.”

Then I found myself looking at that long ago night on a computer screen. It was all conveyed in images: a New Yorker cover of figures silhouetted against the lighted windows of their brownstones, a figure of a nun that seemed almost translucent.

What appeared at first to be the famous drawing of the young Rimbaud unconscious in a bed after being shot by his lover Verlaine turned out to be a photo of Dylan Thomas dead in Saint Vincent’s Hospital—and became me at twenty-one with my poet’s hair and empty, blue amnesiac eyes.

I pulled back from the screen and saw all around me a vast dark space with green globes rotating through it. Then I squinted and saw that the globes were the glowing screens that monitored each patient in this hospital. Beyond us, further out in the endless dark, were other screens in other hospitals, stretching on into infinity.

* * * *

4.

Apparently I called out, because then Nurse Yang was speaking to me, asking if I was okay. The universe and the globes disappeared. Saint Vincent’s, as I saw it all these years later, seemed a small, slightly shabby and intensely human place.

“I’m so glad,” I told her. “You people have saved my life.”

She was amused and said that this was what they tried to do for everyone brought in here but that it was always nice to be appreciated. When she started to leave, I got upset and she showed me how to ring for help if I needed it.

After she was gone I lay in the cool quiet with the distant sound of hospital bells and the voices of the women at the nurses’ station. But I didn’t sleep.

My fear that all trace of me would be lost while I slept was out and active that night. Lying there, it seemed likely that this person with a search engine installed in his head was not the me who had existed a few days ago.

Drugs and the tubes siphoning the liquid out of my guts and into plastic bags had eased my pain and I did drift off every once in a while. But nurses and orderlies came and woke me quite regularly to take my signs and measure my temperature.

At one moment I would be awake in the chill quiet of that hospital with a view out the window of the Con Edison Building and the Zeckendorf towers at Union Square visible over the low buildings of Greenwich Village.

In the next, I’d be looking at a computer screen that showed a map of the old Village—a vivid 1950s touristy affair with cartoon painters in berets and naked models, beatnik kids playing guitars in Washington Square, and Dylan Thomas with drinks in both hands at the bar of the White Horse Inn.

Awake again in the dark, I waited, listened, half expecting the old nun to reappear. Instead what I got was a moment’s glimpse of the white-haired cop who had watched myfriends get beaten. He looked at me now with the same deadpan.

* * * *

5.

I came out of a doze, awakened by a gaggle of bright-eyed young residents. “Mr. Bowes,” one of them, a woman with an Indian accent, said, “We were all amazed by the X-rays of your intestines. It was the talk of the morning rounds.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the blockage they were extremely distended. You came very close to having a rupture which would have been very bad. You could easily have died.” All of them, a small Asian woman, and a tall rather dizzy looking blond American boy, and a laid back black man, nodded their agreement and stared at me, fascinated.

“How did this happen?” I wanted to know.

“We believe it was from twenty-three years ago when you had cancer and they removed part of your colon,” she said. “After all this time, the stitching began to unravel and adhered to the other side of your intestines.”

Other doctors appeared: the gastroenterological resident spoke to me, my own internist popped in. They told me that I was out of immediate danger. Sometimes the blockage eased all by itself. Sometimes it required surgery. The surgeon would see me the next day.

My bedside phone had now been connected. I made some calls. People came by, friends and family, old flames and godchildren. They brought flowers and disposable razors, my CD player, a notebook, they gave me backrubs and went out and asked questions at the nurse’s station. They established my presence, showed the world that I was someone who was loved and cared for.

Margaret Yang came and sat for a while, talked to my sister Lee who was visiting, about this unique old hospital and how they were all devoted to it. I wanted to hang on to everyone—nurses, friends, family—who was there in the bright daylight.

They had brought me the Dowland CD. The counter tenor sang:

* * * *

Part we must though now I die,

Die I do to part with you.

* * * *

Gradually on that lovely spring day with the sun pouring down on the old bricks of the Village, twilight gave way to night. Lights in the hospital dimmed, the halls got quiet.

When I was operated on for cancer it was uptown at Mount Sinai. The ward I was in overlooked Central Park and at night in the intensity of my illness and fear and the drugs inside me, I saw lights passing amid the leafless winter trees.

And I imagined an alternate world called Capricorn where people dying of cancer in this world appeared to the population as glowing apparitions.

The night before that operation, I awoke with the feeling I was falling through the furniture, through the floor, and thought I was falling into Capricorn.

Remembering that, I saw a picture of myself, ethereal and floating amid a stand of winter trees in a hospital bed. The white-haired cop was showing it to me on a screen.

“When we spotted that, we knew you were in no way run-of-the-mill,” he said. “Our seeing you like this confirmed an initial report from when you were in this place as a kid with a busted head and no memory. Someone spoke to you and said you had an uneasy relationship with death and the potential to see more than the world around you.”

* * * *

6.

Some people have the gift of being perfect hospital visitors. The flowers my friend Mark brought the next morning looked like a Flemish still life, his conversation was amusing and aimless.

He sat beside my bed that morning and I told him about a book I’d once written.

“The first thing I wrote after I had cancer was a fantasy novel called Feral Cell. In it people dying of cancer in this world are worshipped in an adjacent world named Capricorn. They call our world Cancer and call themselves the Capri.

“The faithful among them find ways of bringing a few people who are doomed on our world over to theirs. To prevent us from drifting back here, we are dressed in the skins of deceased Capri, drink their blood, which is called the Blood of the Goat, and are objects of awe.

“But there are others on that world—decadent aristocrats, of course—who hunt us. They throw silver nets over us and drag us down. They skin us and drain our blood and use those things to cross into this world.”

“That must almost have made getting sick worthwhile,” he said.

“The future New York City I depicted in the book—turn of the third millennium Manhattan—was all open-air drug markets and rival gangs of roller skaters and skate boarders clashing in the streets. What we got, of course, was gentrification and Disneyland.

“A lot of being sick is like one long nightmare. In my Capricorn everything was terror and magic. At night, patients in a children’s cancer ward could be seen floating amid the trees of a sacred grove.”

Mark walked with me as I pushed my IV stand around the floor. One of the hall windows overlooked Seventh Avenue. Outside on a glorious day in spring, traffic flowed south past the Village Vanguard jazz club.

“The low buildings make it look like the 1950s,” Mark said.

“Time travel,” I said.

It was a quiet Sunday. Later that afternoon, my godchild Antonia was giving me a backrub. Suddenly a dark-haired woman, not tall but with great presence and wearing a red dress suit, appeared. She introduced herself as the one who would be my surgeon if the intestinal blockage didn’t ease. And I knew that it hadn’t and wouldn’t and that she would operate on me.

As night came and friends and family had departed, I thought of Jimmy when he was a patient at this hospital. Jimmy had been a friend of mine in the years of AIDS terror. He designed and constructed department store window displays.

Since I’d first known him he talked about the little people inside his head, the ones he relied on for his ideas.

“Last night they put on this show with fireflies and ice floes. Perfect for Christmas in July,” he’d say. “Sadly, what I’m looking for is ideas for Father’s Day which is, as always, a wilderness of sports shirts and fishing tackle.”

Just before Jimmy died in this very hospital, I came into his room and found him in tears.

“They’re all sprawled on the stage dead,” he told me.

* * * *

7.

Without being aware of a transition to sleep, somewhere in the night I became part of a Milky Way of bodies lying hooked up to lighted screens. I saw all of us, patients here and across the world, floating in a vast majestic orbit.

Then the cop, tough, his blue eyes giving away nothing, watched as I looked at the photo he’d handed me.

It showed me in my dream of the Southwest along with my companions who would later get arrested and beaten into pulp.

“How did you know these guys?” he asked.

“I was a friend of one of them. Louis.”

“Friend, you mean like a boyfriend?” He displayed no attitude, but past experience with cops made me wary. I shook my head.

Then he told me, “It must be tough for someone like you. Kind of comfortable, retired, having something like this from his past brought up after all these years.”

“Nothing like that happened to me. It’s just a dream.”

“A dream, maybe, but made up of bits of your past.”

Then I heard voices and he was gone. Lights went on in my room and curtains got drawn around the other bed. Since my arrival I had been the only patient in the room. That ended.

“In here.”

“Easy.”

The new patient cried out as they moved him. Through an opening in the curtain, I saw nurses and orderlies transfer him to the bed. Then they stood back and two young surgeons from the emergency room approached. From their talk, I learned that the patient had been in some kind of an incident that had damaged his scrotum.

The doctors spoke to him. “We saved one testicle and your penis,” they said. “But we couldn’t save the other.”

The patient asked a question too mumbled for me to hear and a doctor said, “Yes, you’ll have full function.”

Then they were gone and almost immediately the kid slept and snored. His name, I found out later, was Jamine Wilson and he was nineteen.

* * * *

8.

Dawn was just about to break. I opened the notebook and wrote out a will, divided my possessions among my siblings and friends. Making out a will was a way of trying to hold onto my self, to indicate that I still knew who I was and what was mine.

That afternoon my sister Lee visited me. I had named her my executor. I dreaded the thought of living in a coma and said I didn’t want extreme measures to be taken to keep me alive if I couldn’t be revived. She went out to the desk and informed them of this.

Then we talked and listened to Jamine Wilson in the next bed on his phone. He talked about buying hot iPods. He called a woman and told her to bring him burgers and fries from McDonald’s.

He lived in a halfway house to which he didn’t want to return. A social worker came by and informed him that he would have to be out of the hospital the next morning. He ignored her.

“Where are you now,” he asked the woman on the phone. “Can’t you get on the subway?”

My sister left when they came to take me downstairs for X-rays. They gave me barium and recorded its progress through my digestive tract. I was there for hours, lying flat on a cold metal slab while they took each series of shots, resting, sleeping sometimes on the metal slab, until it was time for the next pictures.

It reminded me of the esoteric forms of modeling. Hand models, foot models; unprepossessing people with one exquisite feature. “Intestine model, that’s me,” I told the technician who smiled and didn’t understand.

I dozed and saw a screen that read, “An example of his early modeling work.” And there I was, very young, in Frye boots and jeans and leather jacket, a kerchief tied around my neck but with my hands cuffed behind me. It looked like some S&M scenario I might once have posed for. But the setting was the Southwest of that dream.

Then they woke me up and took some more X-rays.

When I got back to the room, Jamine’s hospital lunch was untouched beside his bed. I had taken nothing by mouth for days. He looked up at me dark and angry. Our eyes met and for a moment I saw a bit of myself: the kid in the nightmare, the one who’d ended up in this hospital with his memory gone. And I think, maybe, he saw something similar.

“Where are you now?” he asked someone on the phone, then said, “You were there five minutes ago.”

Some time later, his caller finally arrived, whizzing down the hall on a motorized wheelchair, the McDonald’s bag on her lap. She was Hispanic with eyes that looked hurt or afraid.

She maneuvered her chair next to the bed. The two of them ate. He chewed noisily, talked while he did. “I was so scared,” he said. “When I saw all the blood. And it took so long for them to call for help.”

The cell phone rang and he talked to someone. Shortly afterward a girl and a guy in their late teens came down the hall on their chairs. These were his friends from the halfway house. They seemed oddly impressed by whatever had happened to him.

Before the evening was over there were five wheelchairs in the room and I realized that Jamine too must have one. I was surprised by how quiet and lost everyone but Jamine seemed. At some point they were told they had to leave. My roommate turned off his phone and went back to sleep.

* * * *

9.

The room, the ward, the floor, the hospital grew silent.

“The place ran with ghosts,” Randall, an old queen I knew when I was first in the city, had said about the very classy hospital uptown where he had been for major heart surgery.

“They came and talked to me at night, taunted me. An awful man I lived with when I was young and stupid and new to New York was cruising the halls like it was still nineteen twenty-five. He was a cruel bastard, physically abusive, and I’d walked out on him. He told me he was waiting for me, that sooner or later he’d have me again.”

Randall liked to have me stay at his place once or twice a week. It was an easy gig. He really got off on having a young guy around. Give him a chance encounter in his own apartment with a twenty-two-year-old in jockey shorts and he was happy.

“I know when I pop off, that awful sadist will be waiting for me, and I’m afraid,” he said.

I smiled like he had made a joke and he shook his head and looked sad. He died at that hospital a year later and I felt bad. He’d been good to me, generous, kind. I liked him well enough then but I really understood him now.

Deep in the night the cop and I stood at the window and looked at the very late traffic flowing south on Seventh Avenue. I could tell by the car models that it was the late 1960s. The constant flow of traffic downtown was like the passage of time.

“We can do it, you know,” he said. “Bring you back forty years to face trial.”

“For what?” I asked. “What crimes did I ever commit that were worth that kind of attention?”

“Look at yourself.” Again the screen came up and it was the three guys whose faces I could almost remember and myself all in boots and jeans and leather vests and kerchiefs around our neck. Like musicians on an album cover imitating desperados.

The one farthest away from me handed a cloth bag to the next guy who handed a smaller brown paper package to the guy next to me who handed me a white packet and I turned and handed a glassine envelope to someone not in the picture: like a high school textbook illustration of a drug distribution system.

“A kid died from something you sold,” the cop said. The screen showed a girl, maybe eighteen, sprawled on the floor of a suburban bedroom with a needle in her arm and a Jim Morrison poster on the wall.

“None of that ever happened,” I said. “I never did anything like that.”

“We don’t plant this stuff. It was inside you. Back in nineteen sixty-nine a family wants vengeance,” he replied.

I saw myself from behind kneeling with my hands tied at my back. All around on the sand, my clothes lay in strips where they’d been cut off me. My belt and my boots were tossed aside; the kerchief I’d worn around my neck was now tied over my eyes. Behind me the three other guys all hung by their necks from the branches of a tree.

The cop said, “You’ll wish they’d hanged you too. What the family wants to do will make what happened to that black kid in your room a joke.”

Then I saw myself frontally. Mutilated and bleeding to death into the sand, my mouth open in a silent scream.

That woke me and I lay in my hospital bed in the first dawn light. But I had trouble shaking the dream.

* * * *

10.

Greenwich Village was partly an Irish neighborhood in the days gone by and Saint Vincent’s still reflected that. My nurse that morning was Mary Collins, an old woman originally from Kerry with a round unlined face, the last of the breed. I’d established my credentials, told her about my grandparents from Aran.

After the policeman had mentioned that initial report, I’d asked Mary Collins about the nun I’d talked to. She looked at me and said, “You saw Sister Immaculata. I haven’t thought about her in years. They said she roamed the halls and talked to the patients. Some of them she comforted, others she frightened.”

“But she was real.”

She shrugged. “Well, when I first worked here, they told stories about catching glimpses of her. But I never did.”

Behind the curtains around the other bed, Nurse Yang spoke quietly to Jamine. “No matter what our health issues, we need to eat healthy food. Try this orange juice.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Try it for me.” And we heard him slurp some orange juice.

“She has the patience of Job,” murmured Mary Collins and turned to leave.

I said, “There’s this guy I keep seeing in my dreams. He looks like a cop, shows me all kinds of things, threatens to drag me back to face punishment for crimes I never committed.”

Nurse Collins paused. In the silence, I heard Margaret Yang say, “Would you try this cereal?”

“His name wouldn’t be McGittrick would it?” Mary Collins asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Immaculata and McGittrick both—ah you are a rare one! If that’s how it is, tell him to back away. While you’re a patient in this hospital, you’re ours, not his.” She winked and nodded at me and I guessed she was doing for me what Nurse Yang was doing for my roommate.

Word came that my surgery was scheduled for that night. The exact time was not set. Jamine was on his cell phone. He was due to be released from the hospital that afternoon and sent back to his halfway house. I wondered about the pain he didn’t seem to be feeling and the desperate moment that had left him partially castrated.

Lying there, I thought of people I knew who had come out of surgery with hallucinations attached to their brain like parasites.

A few years before, an old professor of mine was not doing well after heart surgery. He was incoherent. Things hung in the balance and then with his eyes shut and seemingly unconscious, he said quite clearly, “Surgeon Major Herzog of the Israeli Air Medical Brigade orders you to get off your asses and get me cured.”

“Herzog straightened things out,” my professor told me a few days later when he had rallied and begun recovery. “The first time I saw him was shortly after the operation. I came to and he was standing in full uniform at the end of my bed reading the computer screen. He told me I was someone they needed to have alive and he was going to save me. Then he changed some of the instructions on the screen.”

No one on the staff had ever heard of Surgeon Major Marvin Herzog. The doctors attributed the now rapid recovery not to a series of crisp orders and clandestine changes in the patient’s treatment but to the body’s wonderful will to live.

A week or two later when I visited him at home, my professor told me, “Doctor Herzog said last night that usually they don’t let people like me see him. But he thinks I can handle it. He explained how his unit oversees everybody who’s under anesthesia....”

As he went on, I had realized he was still talking to his imaginary Doctor and maybe always would.

Finally I was wheeled out for more X-rays. When I came back hours later, doctors, nurses, and Jamine’s social worker were in attendance. His motorized chair, a shabby, beat-up item, had been brought into the room. When he was helped into it, he screamed with pain. A hurried conference took place out in the hall. The patient was helped back into bed.

Late that night, he was still there, talking quietly into his cell phone. It had been arranged that he was to be sent, not to his halfway house, but to a rehab facility. He seemed pleased. Was it for this that he or someone else had used the knife?

McGittrick had noticed him. Was that a first sighting, like Immaculata observing me all those years ago?

* * * *

11.

That night I waited at the window feeling very small and lonely and watched the taillights of the cars as they rushed into the past.

A woman I know underwent a long and intense operation for cancer. During the hospitalization that followed she was well taken care of by the hospital nurses and orderlies and seemed to love them.

She walked with help immediately after the operation as you’re supposed to. Everyone was amazed at how quickly she moved, looking around impatiently, fascinated by the other rooms on the floor—the vacant ones with their empty beds, the locked doors that led to conference rooms and doctors’ hideaways.

Later, when reminded of this, she remembered nothing of her treatment. All she could recall was a movie being made night after night in which her body was used to portray a corpse. The ones making the film were criminals, threatening and intimidating her. The hospital workers were helping them. This went on all during her time in recovery.

She wanted to walk as quickly as possible, she said, so she could escape. Her fascination with the rest of the floor was because those were places that figured in the dreams. She pretended to love the staff because she was terrified of them.

By daylight she found them drab and ordinary, devoid of the desperate drama they held during her nights.

Then someone calling my name interrupted me. Word had come that the surgical team was ready and the gurney was on its way.

I went back to my room and the gurney was there. As I was loaded aboard and my IV pole was strapped to its side like a flag, I saw my godchild Antonia, twenty years old, but tiny as a child, come down the hall. Somehow she had gotten into the hospital at that late hour.

In that wonderful place, it was quite all right with everyone that she accompany me down to surgery. “You’ll have to leave before they begin the procedure,” one of the nurses told her.

Off we went and the attendant sang as we rolled along and told me that I was going to be fine. Then deep in the hospital, far into the night, we were in the surgical anteroom. One of the young doctors who had operated on Jamine was part of the team.

He and the others seemed like college students as they joked with Antonia and me while we awaited the surgeon who was late. Then she was there in her red jacket and dress and greeted us all.

I thanked Antonia for being with me as they hooked me up. I held onto the image of her, as everyone smiled at me and I was gone while wondering if I was ever coming back.

* * * *

12.

When I awoke a young man with a shaved head said, “Good morning, Richard, you’re in surgical recovery, my name is Scott Horton and I’m a nurse. How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve just been hit by a truck but haven’t felt the pain yet,” I said, and he grinned, nodded with approval, pleased I was coherent enough to attempt a joke.

Just before I had awakened, in the moment between darkness and light, I had been in the vast space with only the light of the hospital patients’ computer screens revolving around me like suns in galaxies.

In the way it happens in dreams, I knew these were all the unconscious patients in all the hospitals in the world. Together we formed an anima, an intelligence. Most of us were part of this for a few hours, for a day sometimes. For a few it was for months and even years.

The policeman looked up from the computer with his white crewcut, his battered nose, his cigarette.

“Someone told me your name is McGittrick,” I said.

“If that name pleases you....” He shrugged.

“In other words I’m making you up as I go along.”

“Somewhere inside you knew someone oversaw the intersection of one world and the next. First you put a face on that one. Now you’ve found a name for me. Mostly I don’t deal personally with people in your situation. I don’t have to because they aren’t aware of me.

“We could keep you in a coma for as long as you live. Instead we are sending you back a changed man,” he told me. “You’ll never be able to forget what you’ve seen and you’ll never again accept the waking world as the real one.”

I had been going to ask him what he wanted. Instead, I had awakened to find Nurse Horton.

In the bright early morning in the hospital, he showed me a new button on my IV stand. “You press that when you feel any discomfort and the painkiller is injected directly into your bloodstream,” he told me. “You can do that at five-minute intervals whenever you feel you need to. I’ll be back to see you very shortly.”

I held his arm and said, “Please don’t go away. I saw this guy just before I came to. The nurse upstairs called him McGittrick. He said they were using my mind while I was unconscious, that he could keep me in a coma for as long as I lived.”

He smiled. “Well, you tell McGittrick to back off. You’re my patient. We have you now and we’re not letting go. We’re going to get you cleaned up and I’d like you to walk a little some time today.”

An orderly came in and took my temperature. One of the young doctors who had assisted in the surgery came by. “Things went very well. We’re confident we removed the obstruction. We opened you up along the old cancer surgery scar. We didn’t find any cancer this time.”

Another orderly took blood. Scott returned and the two of them helped me sit up and put my feet over the edge of the bed. “You’re doing great,” he said and the orderly agreed. I slid off the bed and my feet found the floor.

The orderly pushed the IV stand. Scott held me. I walked around the room. The sun was shining outside.

“I think I can do this by myself,” I said. They made me take hold of the handle bar. I pushed it out the door and into the hallway and back again.

“Very good,” they told me and I lay down on the bed. I was sitting propped up when my sister and brother-in-law came in. My surgeon dropped by in her red suit and talked with us. Everyone seemed very pleased.

When I was alone, Scott brought me some paper and a pen that I asked for. He sat with me for a little while, told me that he was thirty-three years old. That he came from a town outside Boston and lived now in Chelsea within walking distance of the hospital. I wondered who he lived with but didn’t ask.

I wrote Scott a rambling thank you note/love letter and added at the end of it, “People who have hallucinations after operations sometimes don’t seem to come all the way back. Part of them gets lost. The hallucination can be at least as good, as powerful and compelling and meaningful as real life. Especially since real life is as a patient, the victim of a disease. The hallucination is so engrossing that they don’t want to leave it behind. I’m afraid that will happen with me.”

Scott had gone off duty by the time I finished writing. I spent a very bad night in the recovery ward. People were waxing the floor, cleaning the walls. The nurses were slow to respond. Being awake was a nightmare.

Then McGittrick was with me. “You’re not supposed to talk about what I’ve told you, asshole,” he said. “That other time, you wrote that book about the world where people dying of cancer could become gods. But you made it Science Fiction and anyway nobody read it so that was okay.

“That young nurse who thinks he’s so tough? ‘We have you now and we’re not letting go,’ he says. When his time comes he will be ours and he won’t even know it’s happened.”

“What’s the point of all this?” I asked.

“You know how people when dying feel themselves drawn toward some kind of glowing light? They find it comforting. Well, those globes floating in the flickering brain, the warm light of death and the promise of peace is you and all the other assholes hooked up to machines, each contributing his or her little bit. Last night you were part of the light dying souls were drawn toward. That’s one of the things we do.”

“Why an old cop, why not an angel with a fiery sword?”

“You don’t believe in angels. You have a thing for the law. Your kind usually shows that by being bad and getting caught. The cuffs go on and you swoon. You were too bright to get a criminal record. Our reports say you have promise.”

“Before the operation you were threatening me with mutilation. Now....”

“I’m going to offer you my job.”

“Right,” I said. “But you don’t exist. You told me so.”

He seemed a bit amused. “That’s not as big a deal as you make it seem.”

“And the phony charges?”

“Could also not be a big deal. That depends on you.”

* * * *

13.

Then he was gone and it was morning. The door of my room was open, the cleaning crew had departed and the hospital was waking up. Pain had begun to gnaw at my guts. I hit the button, waited a few minutes, and then hit it again.

Scott walked by and I called him. He had just come on duty. He had other patients but he stopped for me. “How are you?

“Bad night.” I wanted to tell him about the men endlessly cleaning the floor and the smell of ammonia but I didn’t.

“Did McGittrick talk to you again?”

“Sorry I bothered you about that. I feel stupid.” What I was sorry about was having brought him to McGittrick’s attention.

“It’s why I’m here. We’re going to get you ready to return to your ward. I want you to walk before then.”

Later when he was watching me push my IV stand around Recovery, I asked him, “Does everybody in this hospital know about McGittrick?”

He grinned. “If they worked with Mary Collins they do. I started out with her.”

When they came to take me back upstairs Scott said good-bye and I knew it was unlikely I’d ever see him again. Unless, of course, I took McGittrick up on his offer.

When I returned to the twelfth floor, I was in a new room all by myself. Jamine was gone. Even Nurse Yang, busy with her current patients, barely remembered him. That’s how it would be with me.

I hit the painkiller button, got up and walked. I needed the pole to lean on a little. Nurses and orderlies nodded their approval. I was a model patient, a teacher’s pet.

When my phone rang it was my godchild Chris planning to come in from Ohio and stay with me after I got out of the hospital. Friends came by. Flowers got delivered. I fell asleep, exhausted.

It was getting dark when I awoke and there was commotion and a gigantic man was wheeled in. “Purple,” he said. “Don’t go far from me, girl.” My new roommate had a private healthcare worker. He called her Purple which wasn’t her name and which made her quite angry.

He sang Prince songs. He called people by names he’d given them. He told me he was an architect who had stepped through a door in a half-finished building he’d designed and fallen two floors because there was no floor on the other side. All the bones in his feet had been shattered. It took the healthcare worker and all the orderlies on the floor to help him change his position in the bed.

At one point I dozed off but awoke to hear a Jamaican orderly whom he called Tangerine saying, “I do not have to take this. I will be treated with respect. My name to you is Mrs. Jackson.”

“Oh, Tangerine!” he cried in a despairing voice.

I hit the pain button, got up and walked to the window overlooking Seventh Avenue. In the night, the streetlights turned from red to green.

McGittrick’s face danced on the window in front of me. A computer screen on a nearby station counter faced the window and was reflected on the dark glass.

When I turned to look the computer screen was blank. I turned back and the face was there. It might have been the drugs or I may have been asleep on my feet. But as hard as I looked, McGittrick remained.

Then Jamine’s face appeared on the screen. McGittrick said, “He stands out kind of the way you did, flirting with death but afraid of it. Bear in mind that if you don’t work for us, someone else will—maybe him.”

“What exactly would I do?”

“Be around; make sure all is running as it should. Be a cop,” he said. “Think it over.”

“Okay. But when I sleep from now on, you have to stay out of my dreams.”

“You’re not dreaming. It’s just easier to reach you when you’re asleep. But we’ll give you a little time to consider.”

When I came back into my own ward, the nurses at the desk, as if they sensed something about me, looked up as I passed by. When I went into my room the architect was crooning a song to his caregiver who was telling him to shut up.

They stopped when they saw me and I wondered if I was marked somehow.

“Look,” I said, “I’m recovering from major surgery. I need to sleep.” They stared at me, nodded, and were quiet. I hit the painkiller button and hit it again every few minutes until I drifted away.

* * * *

14.

I awoke and it was morning. The architect, quite deferentially, asked if I had slept well. “I made sure all these ladies kept very quiet so you could rest and get better.”

This guy was a harmless lunatic with none of Jamine’s vibes. I thanked him.

Then Mrs. Jackson helped me wash up and I was taken for X-rays. When I returned the architect was gone, brought to another ward for physical therapy, Nurse Collins said.

She was on duty and had come in to check on me. “You’re doing well,” she said. “They didn’t get you this time.”

“Who was Immaculata? Who is McGittrick?”

“I don’t think she was any kind of angel and I don’t think he’s a banshee because I don’t believe in them. Ones like that lurk in the cracks of every hospital there ever was. Most places they don’t even know about it anymore. But they still have them. Give them the back of your hand.”

I’d begun feeling that if I performed certain tasks—walked rapidly three times around the floor, say, then I was practically recovered.

That night I paused on my rounds and looked out the window. The Greenwich Village crowds on a Friday night in spring reminded me of the rush of being twenty and in the city. I thought of Andre and how I’d lost him just before I got sick.

McGittrick was reflected in the window. “You know,” he said. “That guy that got away might still be with you if you’d been well when his friend called. We can let you replay that scene.” Cops offer candy when they believe you’re beginning to soften and cooperate. But they still can’t be trusted.

“I enjoy the sweet melancholy of affairs gone by,” I said. “I’d like to be with Andre as if nothing ever happened. But I’d know that wasn’t true and wouldn’t be able to stand it.” As I headed back to my room, I said, “Thanks, though.”

As I hit the pain button, a young guy who’d had an emergency appendectomy was brought into the room. He lay quietly, breathing deep unconscious breaths. I passed into sleep remembering moments when someone with whom I’d made love fell into slumber like this just before I did.

* * * *

15.

The next morning was a Saturday. A resident and a nurse came in and drew a curtain around my bed. They detached me from the catheter, pulled the feeding tube out of my throat and out through my nose.

That morning I ate liquids for the first time since I’d been there. Everything tasted awful. I forced myself to eat a little Jell-o, drink clear soup and apple juice because that was the way to get better.

Dale, my roommate, cast no aura, had no vibes that I could feel. He was twenty-seven, a film editor who had collapsed in horrible pain on Friday night. He was getting out later that day. His insurance paid for no more than that.

After ten days in the hospital, I was a veteran and showed him how to push his IV rack, how to ring for a nurse.

Mark came by. I told him, “When I wrote, Feral Cell, I had the narrator drink blood. Blood of the Goat binds him to the alternate world, Capricorn. Blood of the Crab binds him here. As one world fades the other gets clearer. What I was writing about was being sick. It’s like this other country. You get pulled in there without wanting to and have to haul your ass out.”

He said, “Remember first coming to the city and how hard it was to stick here? Like at any moment the job, the apartment you were sharing, the best friend, the lover would all come loose and you’d be sucked back to Metuchen or Doylestown or Portsmouth. Kind of the same thing.”

The roommate was on the phone. “It felt like a bad movie, waking up and finding all these people staring down at me. The guy in here with me is this amazing Village character.”

He was still on the phone when his lovely Korean girlfriend came in with his clothes. She took his gown off him as he stood talking and dressed him from his skin out. It bothered me that he was getting out and I was still inside. As they left, he turned, waved good-bye, and grinned because he was young and this was all an adventure. I had more in common with Jamine than with this kid.

That evening, I was served a horrible dish of pasta and chicken but it was a test of my recovery and I ate a bit of it.

That night McGittrick said, “If it’s not love that interests you, how about revenge? Ones who screwed you around when you were a kid? You wrote a story about that. We can go deep into the past. You could go back and make sure they never did that to anyone else.”

I shook my head. “The one I most wanted to kill was myself. It took a long time to untangle that. This is who I am,” I told him. “I’m turning down your offer.”

He smiled and shook his head like my stupidity amused him. On the screen, I knelt blindfolded in the desert. “Did you forget about that?” he asked as I walked away.

* * * *

16.

Sunday morning, as I tried to choke down tasteless jelly on dry toast, a guy named John was brought in to have kidney stones removed. He was tall, thin, and long-haired, almost my age. “I was born on Bank Street, lived in the Village my whole life,” he told me.

There was something in the face with its five o’clock shadow and hawk nose that looked familiar. He was an archetype: the guy who held the dope, the guy who hid the gun, the guy who knew how to get in the back way. He was like Jamine. Like me.

It was confirmed that I was going home the next day. At one point that afternoon my niece walked with me around the floor. When we came to the window on Seventh Avenue, I looked around and realized there was no way that a computer screen could be reflected from the desk onto the glass.

“Thank you,” I told Margaret Yang later. “You people gave me a life transfusion.”

“We just did our job. You are an interesting patient,” she said. That night when I stopped and looked out, the traffic was a Sunday night dribble without any magic at all.

* * * *

17.

The next morning, I awoke with the memory of a visitor. The night before I had opened my eyes and seen Sister Immaculata. “I’m disappointed,” she told me. “That you aren’t willing to give others the same chance that was given to you.”

“What chance was that?” I asked.

“You were a stumbling wayfarer,” she said. “We helped you survive in the hope you would eventually help us.”

“What is it that you do?”

“Hope and Easeful Death,” she said with a radiant smile and I realized that I trusted cops more than nuns.

That morning they disconnected me from the last of my attachments. The IV pole was wheeled away.

John was about to go down to the operating room. He would spend this day in the hospital and then be released the next.

“You ever go to Washington Square Park?” he asked. “Look for me around the chess tables in the southwest corner.”

Then my friend Bruce was there, pulling my stuff together, helping me get my pants on, tying my shoes for me. I was in my own clothes and feeling kind of lost.

Nurse Collins was on duty, “Good luck,” she said as I passed the desk for the last time. She looked at me for a long moment. “And let’s hope we see no more of you in here.”

The taxi ride home took only a few minutes. The flight of stairs to my apartment was the first I had climbed in almost two weeks and I had to stop and rest halfway up.

I’d thought that when I got out of the hospital I would magically be well and had a hundred errands to do. Bruce insisted I get undressed again and helped me into bed.

“When what they gave you in there wears off,” he said, “you will feel like you’ve been hit by a fist the size of a horse.”

He filled my prescriptions for OxyContin and antibiotics, bought me food we thought I could eat, lay on my couch and looked at a book of Paul Cadmus’s art he’d found on my shelves. I dozed and awoke and dozed some more. People called and asked how I was. A friend brought by a huge basket of fruit.

Bruce taped the phone extension cord to the floor so that I wouldn’t trip on it. More than any other single thing, that spelled old age and sickness to me. It struck me as I fell asleep that Bruce was HIV positive and taking a cocktail of drugs to stay alive, yet I was so feeble he was taking care of me.

The second day Bruce came by in the morning, watched to make sure I didn’t fall down in the shower, helped me get dressed and went with me for a little walk. The third day I got myself dressed.

Late that night, I looked at myself in the mirror. It was a stranger’s face, thin with huge eyes. This was a taste of what very old age would be like. I missed the large ever-present organization devoted to making me better. My life felt flat without the spice of hallucination and paranoia.

The next day my godson Chris came to stay with me. That year we both had works in nomination for a major speculative fiction award. The ceremonies were to be held in New York City.

We were in different categories, fortunately. It was on my mind that if I could attend the ceremonies and all the related events, it would mean I had passed a critical test and was well.

Chris was shocked at first seeing me, though he tried to hide it. When one person is in his sixties and sick and the other less than half his age and well, their pace of life differs.

He adapted to mine, walked slowly around the neighborhood with me, sat in the park on the long sunny afternoons, ate in my favorite restaurants where to me the food all tasted like chalk now, read me stories.

The awards that weekend were in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. All the magic of speculative fiction is on the pages and in the cover art. The physical reality is dowdy. Internet photos of the book signing and reception show Chris happy and mugging and me fading out of the picture. Like those sketches Renaissance artists did of youth and old age.

As the awards ceremony dragged on I realized I’d be unable to walk to the dais if I won. I needn’t have worried. A luminary of the field, quite remarkably drunk, after complaining bitterly that he for once hadn’t been nominated, mangled all names and titles beyond recognition, then presented the award to the excellent writer who won. When it was over I rode home in a cab and went to bed.

Chris was nice enough to stay on and keep me company. One day as we walked into the park I saw John, my last roommate at the hospital. Looking as gray and thin as I did, he sat at a chess table in the southwest corner of Washington Square. The chess players share that space with drug dealers and hustlers.

I said hello. He nodded very slightly and I realized he was at work and that he was a spotter.

The spotters are paid to warn dealers if the heat is on the prowl or tip them off that a customer is at hand. I glanced back and saw John watching me.

One evening I took Chris to see a play that was running at a theater around the corner from my place. As we walked down narrow, old Minetta Lane, kids on motorized wheelchairs rolled past the Sixth Avenue end of the Lane.

For a moment I saw Jamine. Then I wasn’t sure and then they were gone.

One day on the street we found a guy selling candid black and white photos that his father had taken fifty, forty, thirty years ago on the streets of Greenwich Village. One shot taken from an upstairs window on West Tenth Street and dated 1968 showed the Ninth Circle Bar with young guys in tight jeans and leather jackets standing on the front stairs. I felt a rush of déjà vu.

That night on a website I saw that scene again, the street, the stairs, the figures. But this time there was a close-up. The kid in the center of the group was me. The other guys were my partners in crime from the dream.

I clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was a figure in a motorized wheelchair rolling up Minetta Lane toward the camera. My face was a twisted mask. My hands were claws. I was ancient and partially paralyzed: the ultimate nightmare.

“You see how long we’ve been keeping an eye on you. And how long we’ll keep it up,” McGittrick said and I awoke in the dawn light.

That evening when Chris and I kissed good-bye at Penn Station and he went off on the airport train, I felt the most incredible loneliness and loss. He’d been sharing his energy and youth with me and now I was on my own again.

Back downtown, I sat on a bench in Washington Square in the May twilight. Dogs yapped in the runs. As the light went away a jazz quintet played “These Foolish Things.”

McGittrick stood studying me. “Why,” I asked, “was it necessary to screw my head around as you’ve been doing?”

“Think of it as boot camp. Break you down, rebuild you. Would the you who went to sleep the night before you got sick have sat in a public park having this conversation?”

“How did you get into this racket?”

He smiled, “Immaculata recruited me. Said I was a restless soul that wouldn’t be happy unless I got to see a little more of life and death than others did.”

“And now?”

“I’m ready to move on. You’ll understand when you’re in my place.”

My guts, where they had been cut open and stapled back together, still hurt a little. I’d pretty much tapered off the medication but I needed to go home and take half an OxyContin tablet.

I arose and he asked, “Would you rather talk to Sister Immaculata?”

“That’s okay. You’re less scary than a nun.”

“You’ve got a while to decide,” he said. “But not, you know, forever.”

I nodded and continued on my way. But we both knew how I’d decided.

Dowland wrote:

* * * *

Sad despair doth drive me hence,

This despair unkindness sends.

If that parting be offence,

It is I which then offends.

* * * *

I had seen death and didn’t want to die. Maybe I was a restless soul or maybe I was too big a coward to face death all at once and forever.

From a little reading I’d done, some research on the Internet, I knew that injury or illness actually can change a personality. What I’d always feared had happened. The one who had gone to sleep that night a few weeks before had awakened as someone else.

And I now was different enough from the one I had been that I didn’t much care about that person who now was lost and gone.