18. Elias #2
I don’t have to stay. My consult is done; I gave the attending the history; there is no medical reason for the prescribing physician to occupy a chair outside the unit until dawn, and there is every reason for him not to.
But I stay. I sit in the row of bolted plastic chairs under the fluorescent hum with my coat folded over my knees, and I do not know why I stay, which is itself remarkable, because I always know why I do things.
I have an answer for every act, and for this one I have nothing but the fact of the staying.
The night goes on around me, the gurneys, the soft codes, the families, and I sit in it not praying, because I don’t, not bargaining, because I have nothing to bargain with and no one to bargain to, just sitting, present, a cold man in a plastic chair keeping a vigil he can’t account for over a boy he nearly killed.
I sat in a corridor like this for Sam too.
Different city, worse chairs, the same fluorescent hum, the same coat over the same knees, and I sat it out then exactly as I’m sitting it out now, and when the doors opened that time the word the nurse used was not stable.
I have carried that word’s absence in the cold drawer for two years and felt nothing I could point to.
I had decided, somewhere I never looked at directly, that I was simply a man without the feeling apparatus the others have, defective in that one place, adapted around it, like a person born without smell stops missing what they can’t conceive of.
That was the story. Tonight the story is failing.
Because something is happening in the plastic chair that has no name in my vocabulary—a pressure, a wrongness, a furnace I can’t see that I’m sitting too close to—and I keep running the diagnostic on myself and coming back with nothing, no grief in the shape I’d recognize it, no remorse with edges I could hold, just this unaccountable refusal to leave a corridor I have no reason to occupy.
I don’t know what it is. I have never not known what something in me is.
And I sit with the not-knowing the same as I sit with everything, except this one won’t be filed, it won’t go in the drawer, it stays out in the room with me hour after hour, humming under the lights, the first thing in twenty years that won’t do what I tell it.
I read the file to the end three days ago.
I knew the ending. I walked back into it with my eyes open and my hand steady.
Tonight the ending arrived. The only difference between this corridor and the one at Bellwood is that this time the boy is, a nurse tells me near five a.m., stable.
She says it in passing, kind, thinking I’m staff.
He’s stable. They think he’ll be okay. And I stand up.
I stand up. I pick up my coat off my knees, put it on, and I leave.
I don’t go in. The doors are right there, and he’s behind them, stable, alive, the ruined beautiful thing that is the only warmth in my cold life.
I could go in. I turn and walk the other way, down the corridor, out through the sliding doors into the blue dark of almost-morning, and I leave without seeing him.
I tell myself nothing about why. I don’t have a why.
But I think, walking to the car in the cold, that it is the first thing I have done all winter that wasn’t appetite, that for once I took myself away from the thing I want instead of toward it, and that I don’t know if that’s the beginning of mercy or just the cleanest version of running, and that I am not, it turns out, equipped to tell the difference.
Sam never got stable. I drive home in the dawn.
I do not feel relief. I do not feel grief.
I sit with the absence where both of those should be, and the absence, tonight, for the first time, feels like a wound and not a feature.
—
Blake comes in the morning, and she brings the folder.
I’ve gone home, showered, come back, because there are things a team physician does after a player is hospitalized and I am still, on paper, that, for a few more hours.
I’m in the corridor outside the attending’s office when Blake comes through the doors at the end of it, and she’s got the folder under her arm, the thick one, the pharmacy logs, the highlighted climb, all of it, the record she told me she was keeping, and she walks the length of the corridor toward me with it.
She stops in front of me. She looks at me, once, full in the face.
There’s no triumph in it, no fear in it, none of the things there used to be, just a flat finished assessment, the look of a person confirming a fact she’d hoped to be wrong about and isn’t.
She doesn’t say anything to me. There’s nothing she needs from me anymore; I’m not a person she’s trying to reach or a senior she’s trying to move, I’m the subject of a file, and you don’t talk to the file.
She holds my eyes for one second longer.
Then she steps around me. She knocks on the attending’s door, goes in with her folder, shuts the door behind her.
Through the frosted glass I watch the two of them sit down together.
I stand alone in the corridor on the wrong side of a door for the second time in mere hours.
I understand that the managing is over, all of it, that there is no version of the reasonable man who walks out of this building still holding the instruments.
And I find that the thing I feel, standing there, is not fear of the ending.
It’s that I won’t be the one writing his scripts anymore. And under the cold, where nothing has reached in twenty years, that lands like loss.