Cape Disappointment (2 page)

THERE IS A TIME
as you're attempting to wake up when your brain slips cogs, and I am at such a place now, straining to regain consciousness, working to transfer myself out of dreamland and into some semblance of cogent thought. It is during this twilight of consciousness, while the cognitive motors grind, that I begin to believe I may be among the living.

It is a frightening but lackadaisical time for me as I lapse in and out of consciousness, unable to distinguish between reality and the haunting morphine nightmares that have riddled my perspective. At times I sleep so heavily I think I will never awaken. I strain and fail to move a body part that is either sore or going to sleep. Every inch of my body feels as if it's encased in concrete. When I try to move my legs, nothing happens, nothing. My body craves any position other than the one I seem to have been in forever.

Through half-open eyelids I glimpse people working in the room. Bandages are changed. My temperature is taken. A hand is laid across my brow. I feel numbness and then, at times, a dull pain. There are long periods when I know I am alone, other periods when nurses and doctors fuss and fiddle over me. I am jostled, poked, washed, and gossiped over, but nobody tries to awaken me. It is as if they know the undertaking is pointless.

And then, inexorably, after what might be two days, or maybe two years, I succeed partially in regaining consciousness. As I come out of the haze into the light, I see a woman in the room. She doesn't realize I'm awake. She is tall and slender and has flaming red hair. Sunshine angles into the room from a high window off to my right. I can see the glare on the walls and ceiling and in the highlights of her hair. She has a graceful way of moving and there's a wonderful fragrance I have a memory of but can't identify.

“Thomas?”

“Kathy?”

“No. It's Deborah. How are you?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“You're awake. You haven't been awake in a while.”

“Where am I?”

“Swedish Hospital. Do you remember any of what happened?”

“I can barely hear you.”

She moves closer, until her lips are next to my face. I can feel the heat off her body. “They said you would probably have some hearing loss. Hopefully, it will be temporary.”

Her accent is vaguely southern, with just a hint of Louisiana, or is it Tennessee?

“Thomas. Are you all right?”

My voice is hoarse and the words seem to scar my throat. I know this woman and she knows me, but I cannot recall her place in my life.

“Are you all right?” she repeats.

“I can't feel anything.”

“I so wish this hadn't happened.”

“Me too.”

“Can I get you anything? Should I call the nurse?”

“I don't think so.”

“Are they giving you enough pain medication?”

“I guess.”

She leans closer and kisses my cheek lightly. “Can you feel this?”

“I don't know. Where is everybody?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Everybody.”

“Thomas? Do you know what day it is?”

I don't even know what year it is. I don't know this woman's name, although she may have given it to me moments earlier. I don't remember what hospital I'm in, although I know I'm in a hospital. The meager knowledge that I am conscious and speaking to someone seems like a small victory. It feels as if I have been in this bed for weeks. My bones ache as if I've been in a crypt.

A pair of warm lips press against my cheek and work their way across my face to my lips. I'm probably not the world's best kisser just now, but she seems to be doing okay on her own. “You feel any of this?”

“Not a bit.” Her lips feel wonderful. I cannot help thinking it would be useful to know who she is and why she is kissing me. I have a wife, and even though I can't think of my wife's name, I know this is not her.

“Oh, but you're not married anymore.”

“Did I say that out loud?”

“You
were
married,” she replies, ignoring my query, then hesitating. “Your wife died.”

“I am married.” I want to tell her my wife's name. It's on the tip of my tongue.

“You're confused, darling. They said you would be.”
Darling.

Her green-eyed gaze is intense and close. I take a deep breath and think about what she's saying. I mull it over— my wife is dead?—and begin to lose focus, and after a while, when I open my eyes, I'm alone. I must have dozed off, I think, because the sunlight is gone and the hospital background noises seem muted. It's dark outside. I manage to turn my head and catch a glimpse of the window, where a windblown rain beats against the panes. The smell of perfume has been replaced with the tang of hospital bleach and disinfectant.

Time passes in small dollops when you're drugged and on your back and dozing twenty-three hours a day. I can hear a television down the corridor entertaining somebody whose IQ has no doubt been drugged down by 50 percent. The audience on the television reacts like the rabble at a public stoning. Eventually I realize there's somebody in the room with me, moving about briskly, working. My covers are lifted to one side, and I turn my head to catch a glimpse of an African American woman with a large, pretty face and shiny skin.

Her hair is straightened and worn in a chopped style with panache. She is somebody who thinks of herself as stylish, and she is. “Oh, you awake now, are you?”

“I guess so,” I mutter.

“Every news guy in town is waiting to talk to you. Oh, don't worry. Nobody's coming in until doctor says it's all right. They want to know all about the hero. We get calls at the desk from all over the country.”

“Hero?”

“That's right, hon. In the bombing.”

“Did anyone die?”

“Four people. Harborview saved two by the skin of their teeth. You lucky to be alive your ownself. You have a serious concussion. Made the national news. I saw your boss on Jim Lehrer. Some real heroics that night. And you were right at the center of it.”

Heroics? What was she talking about? Was I a hero? The only thing I remembered was the bomb's destruction around me. I'd been nailed to a wall, as I recalled.

“Tell you what. Now that you're beginning to make sense, I'll send doctor in to take a look.”

“Sure.”

“You're healing up real fine everywhere else. Just that head injury they were worried about.”

“Did I …” She'd already finished whatever she was doing under the blankets and was wheeling a cart out of the room. “I have any visitors?”

“Oh, honey, you been having a whole bundle of visitors. I don't think anybody's out there just now, but they been in and out all week.”

The room is overflowing with flowers. I smell lilies, roses, and oleander. “Was one of my visitors … a redhead?”

“She been here a number of times.”

“Was she just here?”

“Oh, no, honey. She hasn't been here in a while.”

“Is she pretty?”

“All the men around here seem to think so. Don't ask me why. If I was a man, I'd be chasing the sister with the great big ol' booty.” She slaps her behind and laughs uproariously.

“What's her name?”

“I haven't been introduced, but you know they wouldn't be letting her in unless you two were kin or something.”

As the nurse exits, I think of another question and blurt out, “Where's my wife?” The nurse is already out of earshot and she doesn't reply. There are so many things that need clearing up. What I need is for somebody to sit beside me and tell me why I feel this need to be out of bed and walking the streets. I have a sense that there are things out there that only I can fix. I wish I knew what they were.

IT WAS A MILD,
sunny, autumn afternoon, a day that ordinarily would have pleased me to no end, yet I was in a particularly foul mood and had been for some time. I'd fallen into the tropical hurricane of bad moods so it was really no surprise when I went berserk.

Have you ever done it?

I'm talking about when you go stark raving mad, the kind of blind rage that doesn't do anybody any good, the kind that if it lasted for more than a few minutes, would put you in the loony bin or prison.

You know what I'm talking about. You're on a two-lane highway with tons of oncoming traffic; the speed limit is sixty, which you're doing, when some dunderhead looms up from a side road, gives you a careless glance, sees that he has no chance of avoiding a collision if he pulls out, but pulls out anyway and begins to accelerate with agonizing slowness, as if he wants you to hit him. You are forced to slam on your brakes to keep from rear-ending him and killing yourself; your tires squeal and your vehicle slews out into oncoming traffic and you escape death by inches, while he cruises blithely on as if it never happened. You curse and shout and honk, and if you could somehow get him to pull over and step out of his vehicle … well, you're not quite sure what would happen, but it wouldn't be pretty. The newspapers call it “road rage,” but it can occur anywhere. Educated people like to think they're immune to momentary insanity, but in reality few really are.

The last time I went berserk, I was driving Kathy's car through the U-district, coasting down Brooklyn Avenue past a grocery store only blocks from our house. I'd shopped at that store for eons, so what happened was particularly appalling because the people who worked there would no longer remember me as the genial man who always had a pleasant smile and a comment he thought was witty but usually wasn't, but as the maniac who terrorized the staff and customers in a freakish encounter none of them could explain or forget.

When I spotted him, he was walking along the sidewalk, behind him a group of high school kids, probably cutting school so they could stand in cold doorways in the U-district for hours and be hip. He was a short, spindly man, slightly bowlegged, wearing shabby suit trousers, scuffed dress shoes, a loose jacket, and a fedora of the type that hadn't been popular in sixty years. In short, he was dressed as if visiting from a second-world country, Estonia maybe. I slowed the car to a crawl and watched him traipse along the sidewalk, his head glued to the store windows; it was an old detective's trick, following the action on the street in the reflections. It was in the reflection on the grocery store window that he spotted me. Without turning around, he ducked into the store as if that was his destination all along. We'd never been on good terms, but the last few days had sealed it.

“You bastard,” I said under my breath.

As luck would have it, a parking spot opened on the street and I swung into it, effectively swiping it from a young woman in a red Corolla, who'd been waiting patiently. As I jogged across the street through traffic, she rolled her window down and berated me with a polite rectitude that tugged at my heart for a moment because it was so like Kathy. In no mood for social amenities, I disappeared into the store without answering.

I'd half expected him to go shooting out the back door and onto the loading dock, but he was loitering inside the store pretending to read the ingredients on a can of refried beans. When he looked up, I was closing in fast, my hands balled into fists. He saw me coming and said, “I'm not him, see?” and then spat a full plate of dentures into his palm and held them up for appraisal. When his dentures didn't slow me down, he pitched the can of beans at me in a kind of atavistic reflex, then hurled another, cans bouncing off my shoulders and careening
down the aisle behind me. The third can struck me on the forehead and produced a fair amount of blood that ran into my eyes. It hurt. He was running away by the time I grabbed his arm and swung him around, hitting him behind the ear as hard as I could. The blow knocked him out of my grip and across the aisle, where he skidded across the floor on his belly, coming to a halt near a rack of corn chips, his head buried in the packages. Two nearby shoppers backed away in alarm. Several others who felt they were already at a safe distance froze in place and gaped. At least one student couple fled in panic, as if I might attack any stranger I could lay my hands on. That's certainly what it must have looked like. One woman who was either blind or obtuse continued inspecting melons as if nothing unusual was taking place.

He started crawling into the rack of chips, trying to worm his way through to the next aisle. He was buried up to his belt when I grabbed one of his legs and dragged him back. He held on to the rack and we played a game of tug-of-war. I yanked on him and he yanked on the rack, which began to teeter and finally toppled, burying him in Kettle brand tortilla chips.

When his head finally popped up through the chips, I kicked it. I was wearing running shoes, so I didn't do as much damage as I wanted, but a foot to the head gets your attention. I grabbed the metal rack and pulled it toward me, reeling him in. As soon as he was close enough, I grabbed him by the back of the jacket, hauled him free of the debris, and swung again. My knuckles connected with the top of his skull. He rammed me in the stomach with his shoulder, thinking to force me backward, but he didn't have the strength or body weight to counter my fury. As he pushed into me, I grabbed him around his torso and upended him so that his head was down and his flailing feet in the air.