The Man in the Window (10 page)

Dolores had been looking at the central EKG monitor, and since she didn’t know how to read heart rhythms, they all looked funny to her. Iris finished reading her chart, then followed Dolores’s gaze.

Iris swore. The rhythm that had caught Dolores’s eye, that would have caught anyone’s eye, was bed 1’s. The other patients’ rhythms beat with regular electric jiggles. Bed 1’s chaotic jags meant only one thing.

“V-fib,” shouted Iris, already running for the room. “Call a code, Dolores.”

Bed 1, Mr. Beck, sat up in bed, his eyes rolled back in his head. He was making the “gh-ghhh” sound. The gh-ghhh sound was not a good sign, Iris knew. Most of the patients who reached that stage didn’t make it. Libby came in with the emergency cart as Iris put the head of the bed down and started CPR. Short Iris always had difficulty getting a good position for CPR; she had to climb in bed and kneel beside the patient so she could do her chest compressions. This always led to a lot of teasing from the docs about how Iris would use any excuse to get in bed with a man.

The code finally came over the hospital address system: “Code ninety-nine, bed 1, ICU.” It seemed to take forever for help to come, and as always, the nurses were on the front line holding things together until it did. Iris continued compressions, while Libby bagged Mr. Beck with 100 percent oxygen. Denise arrived and charged up the defibrillator. Dolores stood in the doorway, mouth open, doing nothing.

“Dolores, go out there and keep your eyes on the other patients, will you?” Iris grunted between compressions.

Despite their efforts, Mr. Beck began to turn a mottled blue. His gh-ghhs grew faint. Respiratory arrived and slid a tube down his throat and into his lungs. The IV team stuck some lines in him, and two docs showed up and started ordering meds. They shocked the patient seven times, administered all the emergency drugs at least once, and hung up all the IV meds you could hang. Still, Mr. Beck turned an eggplant blue and stopped making sounds. His EKG slowly smoothed out from jagged V-fib to flatline. Iris pumped his chest the entire time, pumped even after one of the docs said, “Okay, it’s over. Let’s call it.” She was the last to stop working on the patient.

After the family had come and gone, Iris went in to help Dolores and Libby wrap the body. Iris didn’t mind the look of a
dead body lying in bed. Wrapping the body in the plastic shroud sheet, however, gave her the creeps.

“When I die,” she said, “don’t you dare wrap me in plastic.”

“How about aluminum foil?” said Libby. “You’ll stay fresher longer.”

“You guys!” Dolores frowned. Floor nurses rarely appreciated the humor of the Unit nurses, the darkest and dirtiest in the hospital.

“I’m serious,” said Iris, holding Mr. Beck’s hands together as Libby tied them across his chest. “I’m afraid of suffocating.”

“You’d be dead,” said Libby. “Here, Dolores—put your finger there so I can tie a knot.”

“Even so,” said Iris.

“One of his eyes is open,” said Dolores.

“He’s winking at you,” said Libby.

Iris thought, Yeah, Dolores, you’re so cute even a dead man winks at you. Out loud, she said, “Why don’t you close it if it bothers you?”

“I can’t do eyeballs,” said Dolores softly.

“You know what I can’t do?” said Libby. “Toes. I don’t know. For some reason toes really get to me.” She handed Iris a card with Mr. Beck’s name and related information stamped on it. “Here, Iris. You tie the toe card on for me, pretty please?”

“You guys are such chickens. So I got to do the toe
and
the eyeball?” She reached up and touched her finger to his left eyelid. When she got it down, the right one went up.

Dolores jumped back as Iris and Libby tried not to laugh. “You did that on purpose,” she said.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,
he
did it on purpose.”

“Yeah, Dolores,” said Libby. “Sometimes these guys aren’t as dead as you think. Remember Mr. Harvard?” she said to Iris.

“The only time I thought I was going to lose it.”

“We had him all wrapped up like a mummy—”

“A
plastic
-wrapped mummy,” said Iris. “Ugh.”

“—and just as we were about to slide him from the bed onto the stretcher, he sits up.”

“And I mean up,” said Iris. “Right up, like he was getting out of bed in the morning. I’m telling you, I screamed.”

“Everybody in the room screamed,” said Libby.

“So he wasn’t dead?” whispered Dolores, keeping one eye on Mr. Beck.

“Oh, he was dead,” said Iris. “He was just squeezing the last bit of goody out.”

“Usually they just fart,” said Libby.

“Or jerk an arm or a leg.”

“Or groan. A lot of them groan.”

“Some of them speak outright. How about that guy last year, what was his name?” said Iris.

“Lauber? Stauber? Something like that,” said Libby.

“What’d he say?” whispered Dolores.

“He was another one we had all wrapped up,” said Iris. “But we heard him clear as day. Really creepy.”

“What’d he say?”

“‘Pepsodent.’”

“Pepsodent? That’s creepy?” said Dolores. “That doesn’t seem creepy to me.”

Iris looked at her. “The word itself wasn’t creepy, Dolores. The creepy thing was that he spoke at all. Since he was dead and everything.”

“Why’d he say Pepsodent?”

“We couldn’t figure it out. You see, the whole time he was in the Unit, he brushed his teeth with Crest,” said Libby.

“I think it was a regret thing,” said Iris. “Like probably all his life he wanted to try Pepsodent, but he never got around to it. He carried the regret to his death. Beyond his death, really. Because he was definitely dead when he spoke.”

“Definitely,” said Libby.

Iris often wondered what word she’d utter beyond her own death. What regret would rise to her dead lips, what longing?
“Beauty,” perhaps? Is that what she’d say? It would have been nice to be beautiful for a day, to try it, to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe “Love”? That’s another one she’d never get close to. She embarrassed herself. She didn’t have time for foolishness. “All right, guys, let’s finish this.”

They got out the white plastic shroud sheet and slid it under Mr. Beck. They taped it around his feet and legs and chest.

Iris said, “You guys don’t do eyeballs and toes. Well, I don’t wrap heads. Dolores, he’s your patient.”

Dolores made a face. “He’s still kind of winking.”

Libby took the tape from her. “I’ll do it.” She pulled the last corner of the plastic shroud over his face and taped it.

Then they all stood there and stared at the mummy that had been Mr. Beck. A minute or so passed. Nope, thought Iris, didn’t look like he was going to sit up or speak or even fart. Looked like winking was it. “Okay. Two more hours and this night is over.”

Time to do right by the Tube Man. Iris had given him maintenance care all shift, performing the essentials while she kept the chaos in the Unit under control. She’d turned him on his left side at 7
P.M.
, two hours ago, and he hadn’t moved a molecule since. The ventilator hissed and puffed in the corner, delivering its twelve automatic breaths per minute. Every other minute it administered a sigh, lifting the Tube Man’s chest an inch or so higher than usual. Three IV pumps clicked and bipped on their poles beside the bed, steadily infusing the Tube Man with fluids. Iris hung two new IV bags. She spoke to him as she worked.

“Hello there. This is Iris again. I’m going to get you straightened up for the night, all right?” She always spoke to the comatose patients, told them what she was doing. If they could still hear, it was the polite thing to do, and if they couldn’t, well, what the hell.

“It’s been really busy tonight, sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. I’m going to suction your breathing tube now, then clean around it a little bit.” Suctioning terrified most patients. They coughed and turned maroon and usually fought it. Because
he was so far gone, the Tube Man didn’t react at all. He turned quietly dusky as Iris suctioned the mucus out, then quietly pink again when she bagged him with 100 percent oxygen.

“I’m going to wash your back and bottom now, and change your sheet.” Iris had no problem turning him, he’d lost so much weight. His skin was pale and papery, and it sometimes tore when the nurses changed his dressing.

“You been here a long time, haven’t you?” she said as she powdered his back. “You must be getting pretty tired of all this, of us coming in here and bothering you, and jabbing you with needles and all. We don’t mean to hurt you, do you know that?”

The Tube Man gave no sign of knowing or not knowing. She turned him on his back again and saw that his eyes were open. But that didn’t mean anything. Sometimes they did that. If they were open too long, the nurse applied artificial tears. Artificial tears, and artificial breaths, and artificial food—she wondered how much of the Tube Man was real anymore. And what was behind those open eyes? Was he in a long coma dream, or was there nothing going on in his brain? She imagined a kind of wind whistling in there, like the wind that might be whistling across a distant planet. Pluto. When she was little, Arnie had told her about the planets. Mercury, the hot one. Venus, the green one. Mars had Martians. All the way to Pluto, which Arnie didn’t describe as cold or dark, but as having an undying wind that blew across its surface. It never changed, never blew harder or softer. “How did it get there?” Iris had asked. Arnie thought a minute, then he said, “Well, God had just about finished creating everything, and He was real tired. And the last thing He created was Pluto, which He let out into the sky with a big sigh. The sigh became the wind that always blows across Pluto.” Maybe that’s what it was like inside the Tube Man’s head. A wind blew there, God’s long, tired sigh.

She swabbed out the Tube Man’s mouth. There was the usual puddle of thick drool on the pillowcase, so she changed it. She washed his face, which was all hard bone and then suddenly
loose over his caved-in cheeks, because he had no teeth. The Tube Man watched her actions with unmoving eyes. She took his blood pressure and temperature and wrote them on his bedside chart. Then she opened a can of nutritional supplement and poured its creamy gray contents into a bag that hung on a pole above the Tube Man’s head. The bag was connected to a long tube that entered his left nostril and ended in his stomach. The supplement flowed day and night at sixty cc’s an hour, an unending blur of breakfast-lunch-dinner.

The ventilator alarm suddenly buzzed, and the high pressure limit light flashed on. The Tube Man turned dusky. Iris popped open a suction kit, went down his airway, and sucked out a big mucus plug. His color slowly returned to normal. She half smiled: she’d just saved his life for the umpteenth time. He’d been getting a lot of plugs lately. His heart had been slowing over the last few weeks, too, and going into wacky rhythms. He didn’t have much longer; something would finally get him. Then the nurses would pull out all his tubes, tie a toe card on him, and wrap him in his shroud sheet—and that would be that.

The last thing Iris did for him was comb his hair. When he came in five months ago, he’d had a fine full head of gray hair. Hardly any remained. She combed the wispy strands anyway, and restrained herself from saying, “There, now you look nice,” which is what she usually said after fixing a patient’s hair. Nice? You couldn’t make a dying skeleton who was full of tubes look nice. No wonder no one came to visit the Tube Man anymore. Who could bear to look at him? Only the nurses, whose job it was to care for all the abandoned bodies, to touch the untouchables.

Iris straightened up the room and checked the supplies, then she emptied his urine bag and totaled his intake and output on the daily chart. His urine output had tapered to practically nothing over the last couple of days. No, it wouldn’t be long.

“Okay, sir. I’m going out of the room now.” She clicked off the overhead light and turned to walk out the door.

And then behind her, rising above the sound of blips and beeps and sighs from all the machines crowded into the room, a word, a single word:

“Is.”

Iris slowly turned and looked at the Tube Man. He had spoken again. She could see in the dim light that his eyes had closed; otherwise, everything about him was exactly the same. The same, except that he had moved from the depths of his coma and said a word. Was he starting a new sentence? A sentence beginning with “Is”? He’d never get it out—he didn’t have five more months to speak another sentence.

She went over to him, went up on tiptoes, and repeated his word in his ear. “Is? Is?” And then she waited a moment, as if there was some kind of real and actual chance he’d speak again. Despite herself she said, “Give me more, can’t you?” She felt funny in the chest, nervous, and her mouth was dry. The Tube Man lay motionless. She could almost hear the winds of Pluto whistling through his brain.

“You have to finish it, don’t you see?”

She said the word to herself, trying to imagine how he would work it. “
Is
this a hospital?” “
Is
this fair?” “
Is
this it?”

She had a thought then. “Is” wasn’t the start of a new sentence, but a continuation, maybe, of his first one? “The man in the window.” She’d assumed that was all of it. But no, the Tube Man was still working on it. “The man in the window
is
…”

Iris hugged herself as she watched the ventilator puff breaths into the dying figure beneath the white sheet. She knew that someday soon, he would speak the name of the man in the window.

CHAPTER SIX

A
RNIE SAT
on the front porch steps in the late summer dark. Duke wandered around in the yard, trying to eat fireflies. Arnie couldn’t see too well, but even with one deaf ear he could hear Duke snapping at them, and then there’d be a lot of spitting and chewing sounds when he caught one.

“Duke. What the hell you doing out there? What are you eating bugs for?”

Duke snapped and spit again.

“You swallow enough of those fireflies, your balls will light up. What’ll Iris say, she comes home and sees your balls blinking on and off?”

A window slammed closed next door. Guess you aren’t supposed to shout about dog balls in this neighborhood. Arnie smirked, then took another sip from his beer. His hook crunched into the can, and a few drops foamed out of a hole and dripped on his knee. Iris would be getting home pretty soon. He figured he’d wait up for her. What a shitty job, working evenings and getting home after eleven. How’d she stand shift work? He took another sip of beer and watched all the fireflies that had escaped Duke’s jaws of death. LuLu had liked the fireflies. In a summer long ago, they had sat together on a front porch holding hands and kissing, and watching fireflies. Holding hands. He lifted his arm and stared at the dull silver hook on the end of it. The hand that had touched LuLu was gone. They take your hand, they take your wife—Jesus, what a world.