A Map of Tulsa (23 page)

Driving back to the hospital, I was head to toe the modern applicant, my skinny arm on the gearshift, my spherical head too improbable for anything but the cartoon of contemporary life. I treated myself to more of the rooftop whiskey at St. Ursula’s, not to celebrate my success with Lydie so much as to celebrate my careering life. It always went most out of control exactly when it landed. I went down only when the whiskey had sufficiently blurred my grandiosity, such that I felt nineteen and twenty-four in the same breath.

Adrienne lay twinkling in the lights of her monitors. I stared. And then I went out onto the ward to get coffee.

“Well here you are,” I said, coming back. “Would you like some coffee?” I had brought two cups.

Adrienne had been asleep for days. And on so much medication, she would dream. In her dream she would hear us, and in her sleep would misconstrue. Her head
would sag, heavy with medication, encrusted and scared, smeared with confusion. She hadn’t spoken coherently since her injury, Lydie said. Nor supposedly had she been cognizant to understand anything. Yet she was fighting, according to the rhetoric. She churned. I thought she probably guessed.

She had murmured, when they fitted her with her neck brace, “No water, no water, no water”; Lydie and Rod had both mentioned this to me. It was a rumor started by the doctors, and it was supposed to be proof of her orneriness surviving.

I dragged a plastic armchair over to the bedside, pushed it completely flush with the rail, and added a pillow so I could sit level with the bed.

“You may wonder why I’ve come here,” I said. I noticed a MasterCard-sized sensor that had pulled partway loose above her breast, and I leaned forward to fix it. The irritation there was crosshatched and red. But I pressed the sensor back down.

While craned over, I wanted to pull up her blanket for her. I held my breath. There were so many bandages, and they rustled as I pulled. I dragged her blanket up to her neck, and then I plopped back into my chair.

“You wonder why I’ve come here.” I took up the second cup of coffee and held it in my steepled hands; I forced myself to drink. Then, a toast. “To Adrienne Trismegistus Thrice-Greatest. Killer of Indians. Dinosaur and friend. Old triceratops.”

I had hitched up my pants and went out to the bathroom once more. The urinal was sculpted and clean. Once upon a time, I remembered, I tried to write Adrienne
the most beautiful emails. They may not have made much sense to her, but a Saturday afternoon would go, composing one. It was the joy of that semester back at college. I was never so fluent. Or so accomplished, as after staying up all night, when I wandered the campus at dawn feeling spent, as if I had just written a term paper or something. I wandered the public parks going over what I had written in my head. Out of all of it there was only one line I could still remember: “The connections between us, Adrienne, are more intricate and more awesome than I am, on my own.” She never let me write drivel like that when we were dating.

She had been a better editor than college—Adrienne stood up and intimidated me more than college ever dared to. She wanted to be the opposite of a meritocracy: born wealthy, mostly unfriendly, but agog with unearned talents. After I met her I tried to go ahead and be like her, running ahead of myself like a dog, barking, looking back at its dull human master and wondering why he couldn’t keep up. I could write a new college application essay:

I wondered how many more days Adrienne might sleep. I wanted very badly to talk to her. And yet I could leave tomorrow and she might never know I had been here. Lydie might think less of me if I disappeared, but that wouldn’t matter.

A nurse was in Adrienne’s room. She jumped when I entered.

“Hey,” I said. This nurse was checking and replugging some of Adrienne’s wires—like a switchboard operator would, in a hurry. She left the blanket folded back, as it had been before I ever got here.

The room smelled like Windex now. With the night nurse gone the room fell deathly quiet, except I could hear some heat pipes. Or rather it was something in this room, perhaps some new medical equipment, clicking and knocking—I looked—or I thought it might be Adrienne’s pants, the astronaut pants that kept her blood flowing, pockets filling and refilling with air—but the astronaut pants were not going, actually. They had been turned off.

I got up and walked around to the other side of the bed. Adrienne’s left forearm—the one wrapped in its cast, braced up to the fingertips in a steel splint—wobbled from the elbow. Her arm was having a kind of slow spasm or something; it was knocking against the aluminum part of the bedrail at slow, clip-cloppy intervals.

“That’s very spooky of you,” I murmured, grasping her bedrail. I wondered if I envied her, lying there. “Soon you’ll be transformed,” I told her. “It won’t take long. The old Adrienne will cease to exist. You’ll grow
new skin, new bones. So and so. They may even fit you with retractable claws.”

“What about my hands?”

It was her. It was a pencil flung off the penthouse rail and I had to fly—

“—Your hands are beautiful.”

She rang the casted hand so violently against its rail that I jumped backwards.

“Not this,” she said, flailing it against the rail.

“Your cast,” I hissed, seizing it, trying to keep her from breaking it, “it’s in a cast.”

“I can’t see,” she explained, almost conversationally. Time raced outside, and I stared at her open mouth, alive now with its characteristic contours, grimacing. Hoarse, heaving: She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know who I was.

“Should I get a nurse?”

Her blindfolded face managed to wither, as if impatient.

“It hurts,” she said.

“I know.” I was still gripping her left hand.

She drew up her lip. Her gums were marvelous, like the reddest part of a watermelon. “You’re in the way,” she panted, “you’re all in my way.” She was beginning now to try to scoot up on her other elbow, as if to rise, and then she gave that up, and began instead to gesture with her free right hand pointing upward and left, and then coming down clumsy, finlike, on her mask; I groped vaguely to catch it and seized that hand too, pulling it away.

“Adrienne.”

She strained to shake her hand out of my grip, but I wouldn’t let go. I could feel all the separate flexors roiling beneath my fingers like a piano, a silent appassionato. This was finally Adrienne. Her lips were twisting, twisting and relenting. “Go get a nurse,” she finally gasped. I obeyed; I let go of her arms and was almost out the door when I stopped and turned back—she thought I was gone. Craftily, she crooked her bare arm out from the sheets and suddenly tore at the mask. The blue mask snapped askew, quite crooked on its strap. She struck it again, agile now with her thumb about to hook beneath it—I was back at the bed and yanked that hand backwards, her cast arm rose, and I had to wrestle my elbow down for leverage, holding both her arms now, my torso beached halfway on top of hers, restraining her completely. My face hovered above her face: her bruised cheekbone stood out where the mask had been, the skin there looked raw, I would have to replace the eye mask exactly in its old outline—and coming out under the edge of the eye mask was her eye—what should have been the white of her eye but was red, a lake of red, and the blinking lid was black.

“It’s for medical purposes,” I breathed, trying to sound authoritative. “Don’t hurt your—fuck!” She stabbed her free thumb into my arm and gouged upward, at the blood vessels below my wrist. I let go for a second and then I shook her unhurt arm so hard I feared I would break it.

“Adrienne!”

The eye mask’s elastic band had slipped over the widest point of her head and was now beginning to contract, slowly inching itself off. While I lay there, the
section of eye that I could see increased, and within the red came a razor-thin wisp of blue, the gassy corona about a dead black star, the dilated pupil, a hole in space. Falling, my face had to fix itself. I did and didn’t want her to recognize me. For all I knew her vision was deranged. Quick as I could I released the hand that was in the cast and reached to replace her mask. The eye, blinking weakly, snapped itself together. The iris contracted, and took on a look of intelligence. In the instant that I replaced the mask, I wondered if she had seen me.

Her free cast flew back and came down on the side of my head, and her legs began to shake as if uncontrollably. I should have called a nurse but it hurt too much, even to laugh at the blow, and so I plunged my head into the pillow beside her ear. “Adrienne. Is this the first time you’ve been awake?” She was silent. Her ear was silent. My head was smarting. “Listen,” I said, in a voice that seemed flooded to me with my own identity. I had stopped whispering. “Do you know what’s happened?”

Her lips stiffened.

“You know you are in the hospital?”

“Yes.” Her breath was like a foul warm wind. “I thought I was blind.”

“You broke your back.”

She spasmed again, a mechanical insistence of life, and then raised her casted hand high to strike the bedrail, making a mighty knell that filled the ward. I let it fall and then I closed in on her, my chest across her chest, my arms across her arms, my head beside her head, until, like a propeller winding down, her body shuddered and her spasm stopped. My head was almost kissing her. I
pulled back slightly, and saw her lips puckered, as if on the point of an idea.

Then a strong orange arm pulled me away, and the nurse tabbed the spigot that controlled Adrienne’s morphine, letting two slugs drain into Adrienne’s blood. “You should have called me,” the nurse said, as Adrienne’s eyes, underneath the mask, probably closed.

“She was awake.”

The nurse surveyed Adrienne. “Well. You calmed her down.”

“Did I hurt her?”

The nurse stiffened. She was an older woman, she was strong, her tanned skin creased at her elbow and wrists.

“She was trying to take her mask off, so I had to restrain her.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Is it on my breath? It stays on your breath.”

The nurse stood there, considering.

“Did she hit you? You’re bleeding.” She examined my head. I winced. The nurse came back with gauze and rubbing alcohol. “I called her mother,” she said.

“Her aunt? Lydie said she was going to try to sleep—”

“Well, she’s on her way.”

“I wish you had asked. I mean, is this an emergency?”

“She asked to be called in the event that the patient woke up.”

I scraped my fingernails down my tongue, trying to get rid of the taste of whiskey. I sat down to wait. From the
ding of the elevator, from her boots on the waiting room carpet, I could hear Lydie coming. She stood, draped in an unseasonable fur, filling the doorway, her face haggard and un-made-up.

“Hey Lydie.”

“Is she awake?”

I explained about the morphine. Preemptively, I sketched out the scene with the eye mask and the spasm. I didn’t mention that I had been drinking. Lydie shed her fur and laid it, like a blanket, across Adrienne’s midsection. She listened respectfully, nodding but not giving anything away. Then she carried herself out of the room, presumably to see the nurses.

When she came back, Lydie stood for a while at the foot of Adrienne’s bed. I expected her to take a chair, but she stayed intent, her arms braced on the bedrails. I wouldn’t have thought Lydie needed such moments.

“What do the nurses say?” I asked.

“She’ll be out for a few hours.” Lydie sat down opposite me, businesslike. I saw what it was that her face was missing: the eyeliner. “Jim,” she said, “we have some spare time here.”

“I know you were looking forward to a good sleep,” I said.

She made a very small smile and shook her head, casting her eyes back toward Adrienne. Then back to me. “So, Jim. Are you going to make your flight in the morning?”