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By Root 2391 0

the way. She may have said something about how she worked here as a nurse on the night shift and slept in the daytime, which was why she knew what to do and where to go. But maybe not. My mind was already in a nauseous dream-state of panic, a panic that poured oil all over my brain for the whole day and made it difficult for things to stick in it properly, and so my memories are jumbled and unclear of going to the hospital—of our shoes clopping across the parking lot—of somebody speaking with somebody else at a desk—yes, definitely a big pink desk—of a clipboard of complicated paperwork that had to be filled out—were there forms to be filled in, Lydia?—how did you fill them in?—what could you have possibly written down to satisfy them? There was paperwork, there was a vast waiting room, there was a big pink desk. There were antiseptic and sharply ammoniac odors, there were shiny sleek-waxed floors that caused our shoes to crunch and squawk, there was a fish tank full of tropical fish, on the floor of which a ceramic man in a diving suit seemed to have just discovered a tiny chest of ceramic treasure half-buried in a bed of gravel made pink by a colored fluorescent tube overhead. Wait a moment—where did the woman who lived upstairs go, the woman who had driven us to the hospital? Did she vanish from our company at some point in that long, hellish day of fear and sorrow? She must have, because I remember we took a cab home after everything at the hospital. Did we ever thank her properly? Did we ever see her again?

Here is what I remember from that day. I remember a room with some sort of giant machine in it. The machine was straight out of a science fiction movie set aboard a spaceship a thousand years in the future. It was a huge shiny white metal donut, standing up on its side, with a bed in it. Lydia was made to lie down with towels bunched around her body and a pillow beneath her knees, and she was told to put her head inside this cylinder of white metal. Then the bed was raised up by a robot and slid with buzzing motor into the yawning hole in the middle of the machine. For some reason there was music, melancholy opera music, playing from a stereo in the room. Why? I was not allowed to go into the room with her. I had to sit and watch it through a window in the wall of an adjoining room. Whatever this machine was doing to her, it took a really long time doing it, and as it did what it was doing the machine made chattering, bleeping, warbling, and gnashing noises that sounded exactly like noises a flying saucer would make as it hovers slowly to earth before a wonderstruck and fearful crowd, all points and murmurs and oohs and aahs, and do they come in peace? Why was there opera music blaring in that room? After they took Lydia out of this machine, we were made to wait again. Long bouts of waiting and uncertainty—that’s what I remember most about that day. Waiting. Back in the waiting room. Was it the same waiting room, or another one? I remember a room filled with uncomfortable chairs upholstered in an ugly tongue-colored cloth, I remember coffee tables littered with bright shiny magazines, pages that crinkled between the fingers, I remember a TV with the news on and the sound off. I remember that Lydia had to lie down across several of the pushed-together seats in the waiting room and take a nap, a long nap. I remember small Styrofoam cups of coffee and thin red plastic wands for stirring in the sugar and milk. I remember a water cooler whose blue plastic tank was flanked by a tall cylinder, from the bottom of which one could pull a conical paper cup to fill with the tepid water that trickled from a spigot; when one depressed the spigot’s lever the water tank would belch up a cluster of bubbles, and the conical paper cup in your hand would quickly become floppy with dampness. And then there was the aquarium with the ceramic treasure-hunting diver in it: I whiled away some of those sluggish, agonizing hours watching the angelfish dumbly swishing their flat, triangular, translucent bodies from one end of their ten-gallon