Dead is Better (15 page)

“You’re in the Memorial Medical Center ICU,” Diane says cheerfully. “You had a little problem during your angiogram, but you’re fine now. The doctors just want to keep a close watch on you for the next 12 or 14 hours.”

Peace frowns and shakes his head. “Is it still raining? Or did I dream that?”

“Oh, it’s raining all right,” Diane says. “Some of the 405 is flooded now. And it’s freezing. Absolutely freezing.”

Peace strains to sit up, but Diane gently stops him. “Take it easy, Mr. Peace. We don’t want you to pull out your IV or get dizzy. You’ve been through a lot.”

“I died.” Peace says flatly, as if he’s only now remembering. “I was dead.”

Diane tilts her head and smiles. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly, but for a few minutes, yes, you came awfully close.” Diane changes the subject, “Are you thirsty? Would you like some water or some ice chips? The doctor wants to start you on liquids first. “

Peace frowns, as if he’s making a difficult calculation in his head. “I need to talk to a policeman.”

Diane’s slender brows furrow. “Well, right now, Mr. Peace, the best thing for you is to close your eyes and rest.”

“No.” Peace says, his voice clearer now, and stronger. “I need to talk to the police. Right now. Right here. Please, can you call them for me? Or is there a phone in here so I can dial 9-1-1 myself?”

Diane keeps smiling but pushes a small button on the monitor, then nods to a nurse in the station beyond through the glass. “I think you had a nightmare, Mr. Peace,” she says. “You’re safe now. There’s no need to call the police.”

Peace looks directly at Diane, “I’m sober. I saw a policeman when I was in the ER. Can you call him? I need to talk to him. There’s a life at stake!”

The other nurse has entered the small cubicle and exchanges a look with Diane. She leans over Peace and says, “How are you doing, Mr. Peace?” I’m Joy, the head ICU nurse.”

Leave him the fuck alone, I think. Listen to him. Listen!

“Call the police!” Peace shouts, agitated now and trying to get out of the narrow bed.

Diane talks quietly to Joy, “I think Mr. Peace is hallucinating from the drug cocktail he got in the Cath Lab.”

“I’m cold sober.” Peace asserts. “I’m not seeing things. I need to talk to the police about a crime. A crime in progress. Will you help me do that? Please!”

“I’m sorry,” Joy scolds. “We can’t do that. And you’ll have to calm down. If you cause a disturbance, there will be consequences.”

Peace looks wildly around the little cubicle, then rips the IV out of his arm. Droplets of his blood trickle on the white sheet as he pushes over the IV pole and hoists himself over the side rails of the high hospital bed.

“Stop!” Joy yells.

“Don’t do this, Mr. Peace,” Diane entreats.

Peace pushes the women aside and bounds out of the small cubicle, then barefoot and naked under his hospital gown, scans the hallway.

Rose and I are with him when he runs a to a glass fire alarm box near the elevators. Peace makes a fist and breaks the glass, cutting his hand.

Peace pulls the red FIRE lever with his bloody hand just before two uniformed police officers grab him and roughly throw him down.

“Death’s truer name

Is ‘Onward’ . . .”

—Tennyson

***

The hospital’s electronic fire alarm is so deafening and powerful that the walls seem to pulsate with the sound. Frightened and angry patients in bathrobes and fuzzy socks stand outside their rooms or struggle toward the stairs. Janitors, orderlies, and men and women in scrubs, along with two security guards, rush back and forth.

Rose hovers close to what we can see of Peace, just the pink undersides of his bare feet, sticking out from below a tangle of police officers. Joy and Diane wave at a man in dress slacks and a dress shirt who emerges breathless from the stairwell and who carries a serious looking ring of keys. He pushes past the knot of people and inserts one of the keys into a slot inside the alarm box, restoring silence.

Then, just when my dead ears are adjusting to the quiet, a male voice booms from PA system: “FALSE ALARM! FALSE ALARM! THERE IS NO FIRE. REPEAT. FALSE ALARM. Ambulatory patients, please return immediately to your rooms. If you need assistance, please stay where you are. Hospital staff, return to your workstations.”

The police officers are upright now and one of them roughly handcuffs Peace. I think his nose is broken from having been pushed flat on his face. Blood runs from his arm and from his mouth—did he bite his tongue or break a tooth? Rose is barking, whining, crying.

“You are under arrest,” a heavy woman officer says and pushes Peace roughly back toward the ICU. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

I want to hold my breath, but don’t have any.

“Yes. Yes. I want to speak with you.” Peace says thickly. “I want to speak with you right now.”

“Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

—Walt Whitman

***

Joy and Diane secure Peace to his ICU bed with wide black Velcro restraints, reinsert his IV, and put a latex glove filled with ice cubes on his swollen nose. His teeth are intact, they say, he’s only bitten the inside of his cheek. They seem disappointed at this news, but cheer up when they inform Peace that as soon as they get his discharge from the ICU, he will be transferred to the jail ward over at County.

Rose and I silently urge him on—and float—like those faint galaxies in deep space—over Peace as he gives his statement to the police, one officer standing at the foot of his bed, the other sitting to the side. What Peace tells them is strange and sad, but despite his swollen mouth, he speaks with conviction and with clarity—about a suffering dog forced to stand guard over a plastic box of money—about Wings of Hope and a man named Sims, and about his friend Brian, who shouldn’t have died.

Peace stops speaking, then waits expectantly, looking first at the male policeman by the bed, then to the other, the woman. “Make the call now,” he says simply. “Please.”

The female officer looks questioningly at her partner. He shrugs, then nods. She removes the portable radio from her belt and quickly punches in a number. “Animal Control? This is LAPD Officer Brown over at MMC hospital. Yes, I have an emergency, a dog in extreme distress at 22282 Circle Drive, Carthay Circle. I repeat, extreme distress. The owner of the residence, a Mr. Nilsson, may be a case of felony animal abuse.”

“I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.”

—The Bhagavad Gita

***

It is still dark when the white Animal Control truck pulls up on Circle Drive. The rain comes down in heavy swirling sheets. Two animal control officers get out of the vehicle, both wearing long, plastic ponchos over their dark uniforms. One carries a powerful flashlight, the other a white pole with some kind of leash attached.

One of them knocks on Nilsson’s front door sharply, then rings the bell and waits. Nothing. They turn and walk carefully through the slippery mud to the iron gate—it’s locked. The tall officer kneels, then the other one, a woman, steps onto his cupped hands so he can hoist her over.

Once on the other side, the woman reaches for the long pole. The tall man stays outside the gate sweeping the backyard behind it with his flashlight’s beam. Rose and I and the woman follow the light to the low fence in the back.

Will she keep going? Will she even look? Or will she stop now and turn back?

Her head down, the female officer moves to the low brown fence and then behind it, pointing the white pole in front of her like a weapon. But when she sees the dog, lying on its side now in the mud and water, she lets the pole go and drops down to her knees beside it.

“Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.”

—Frank Zappa

***

What Rose and I saw afterwards:

The rope was cut and the dog rescued. The pair of Animal Control officers rushed it to a 24-hour vet over on Olympic Blvd. There it received IV fluids and nourishment, was wrapped in blankets and was placed on a heating pad.

The dog is male, approximately 6 months old, a lab and Spaniel mix. A mutt.

Soon two police cars arrived on Circle Drive. One of the officers took two shovels out of his car’s trunk. The other had a camera. The officers from the other car went to the front door with a search warrant.

The heavy rain had loosened the hard topsoil, but it still took two hours of digging to unearth the shrink-wrapped plastic box. Inside, the officers estimated, was almost 7 million dollars, some in cash and some in certificates of deposit in Nilsson’s name.

Outside Wings of Hope, two police officers led a handcuffed Sims, his leather jacket covering his head, into a black and white.

The time Peace spent in the County hospital jail ward was brief and not too bad. The story of the dog and the medical billing scam—how Nilsson paid Sims to provide fake patients, who then received unnecessary and expensive tests that brought in millions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid—was big news. A lawyer from the D.A.’s office visited Peace and offered him a deal—all charges against him dropped in exchange for his testimony against Sims.

The money in the buried box? Cash that Nilsson, the hospital CFO, had skimmed from Medicare payments for padded billings for the fake patients Sims had sent him.

“We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

—Mark Twain

***

Rose glides along the grassy slope—well, not actually on it, but she skims its gentle contour, an inch or so above the tips of the sharp, bright blades. Down. Then up. Then down. It’s a weird game, but for Rose this place offers grass uninterrupted, therefore grass perfected, as close to a heavenly meadow as she will ever come. Since her paws can’t touch or feel the surface, the curving rows of rectangular bronze markers pressed into the earth cannot impede her graceful progress. Nor can she know that each bears one name among the infinity of names belonging to the dead.

Today is the unveiling, the coming out party for the marker on my grave. It’s been almost a year since I died on Gower Street, almost a year since Rose and I have visited this place. I was reluctant to return, but the grass sold me.

On the only other occasion we’ve had for visiting the living world there was grass, too—a front lawn in Pasadena bordered by mature jacaranda trees. Maybe it was May. The tree’s blossoms clustered in thick clouds of purple. A black dog ran back and forth chasing a red ball in the grass below, a few bright petals stuck to his gleaming fur.

Rose did not do what I thought she would—fly to the dog, then prance with joy in the air around him and try to lick his face. She held back and studied the scene before her, her eyes intense as they followed the dog’s movements.

The dog was much bigger—his forehead wide and his body filled out and muscular. He wore a green, red and black plaid collar, and his eyes were bright. A little girl, twelve maybe, stroked his head when he dropped the ball at her feet. The dog licked her face.

“Good job, Jimmy!” the girl said. “Good job!”

Rose looked away.

Then she turned to me as if to say, I’m finished here. It took a moment, but I think I understood then what Rose had seen—not just the dog—safe now, healthy, loved—but how much she had been denied in life and how great her suffering had been.

Rose keeps up her solitary game above the hill. I drift slowly to my burial site. A blue velvet cloth covers the memorial plaque, and a dozen or so white chairs, the kind caterers use, have been arranged in rows. There’s also a microphone connected to a portable generator, as well as lights and reflectors. Now I see a red and white KNWS van parked at the bottom of the hill, right next to my shit brother Mark’s Ferrari.

Mark is thinner and, if this is even possible, his step seems more buoyant. He wears a black suit that shines a little in the sunlight, and under the jacket I see a black t-shirt. Now he’s a fucking hipster? Some of the others who were here to see me buried have returned.

My shit brother Mark I already mentioned. Helen, his wife and decorator, looks almost too good. Did she get her nose done? Her ass? Her chin? Margarita, my cleaning lady, is here with her son. He’s grown tall and angular and has the beginning of a beard.

Absent are my cousin Sheila, my former wives, their boyfriends, and the parasites; also my accountant, my barber, Tony, the office manager, Lena, and my neighbor from my shit apartment on Cahuenga. Julia, Mark says to someone, is unfortunately in Europe on a wine-tasting trip.

I thought I saw two lean canine shadows darting across the road at the bottom of the hill. Were these the two coyotes? I’m not sure.

Mark and Helen, whose high heels sink into the porous surface with each step, talks with an overly-made up woman who must be a television reporter. Then I recognize her. What is she doing here? When I died she was just the weather girl, popular for her too-tight sweaters and Valley Girl diction. Now she wears a brown business suit and flats.

The rabbi appears, the same dumpy woman as before—she must be part of some package deal—and a short schmooze with Mark. Then the living sit down and she recites, in English, the 23rd Psalm.

I remain vertical, ambivalent, not wanting to be present—or to hear these living voices or to see these faces.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.