Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [138]
“Grady?” she said, wondering. “What are you doing, you idiot?”
I opened my mouth, and tried to answer her question, but I couldn’t manage it. The furrow of tenderness in her voice gave me reason to hope, and I felt a sharp pain in my chest at the sudden expansion of the last hopeful muscle in my body.
I ROSE LIKE A KITE, in fits, tethered to the mortal husk of Grady Tripp by a thin pearly string. Below me Pittsburgh lay spread, brick and blacktop and iron bridges, fog in its hollows, half hidden by rain. The wind snapped at the flaps of my jacket and rang in my ears like blood. There were birds in my hair. A jagged beard of ice grew from my chin. I’m not making this up. I heard Sara Gaskell calling my name, and looked down, way down into the fog and rain of my life on earth, and saw her kneeling beside my body, blowing her breath into my lungs. It was hot and sour and frantic with life and tobacco. I swallowed great mouthfuls of it. I grabbed hold of the opalescent thread and reeled myself in.
WHEN I WOKE I FOUND myself in a dim hospital room, lying naked under a powder blue paper gown, taking my evening glucose through a neat little hole in my left arm. It was a nice semiprivate room, with cheerful Bloomsbury print wallpaper, a whisk broom of everlasting in a vase on the windowsill, and a view of an impressive old black stone church across the street. A faint banner of blue sky flew from the steeple and stretched across the top of the evening. The curtain was drawn between us but I could see the foot of my neighbor’s bed and beyond it the cool blue corridor of the ward.
“Hello?” I called out to the other side of the curtain. “Excuse me? Could you tell me what hospital this is?”
There was no immediate reply and I imagined the person in the next bed lying with his jaw wired shut, comatose, aphasic, somehow unable to respond. But I knew the room was simply empty. I watched the last strands of blue fade from the evening sky outside the window with the feeling that a great loneliness was descending upon me.
“Sara?” I said.
I was aware of a vague irritation at my right wrist and I rubbed my arm against the sheets for an idle minute before I looked down and saw the plastic ID bracelet with my name and a legend of numerals that encoded all the particulars of my collapse. Above this in neat black script was printed the name of the hospital. It was a well-known and expensive hospital with a less than spotless local reputation, fifteen minutes by taxi from Thaw Hall. I looked at the clock radio on the table beside my head. It was seven twenty-four. I’d only been out for two hours.
At seven-thirty the attending physician came in. He was a resident, a young man with overlong hair, a pointed nose, and blue eyes as cold and disturbing as Doctor Dee’s. He needed a shave, and he wore the sad, swollen mien of a doctor at the end of a shift, like a traveler walking off an airplane after thirty hours in the air. His name tag said GREENHUT. He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.
“So,” he said.
“I passed out.” I decided not to tell him that I had also, as nearly as I could determine, died.
“You did.”
“I’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I said.
“Uh huh,” he said. “You’ve also been smoking a lot of marijuana, I understand.”
“Kind of a lot. Do you think that’s why I’ve been having these spells?”
“Do you?”
“It’s possible.”
“How long have you been having them?”
“My spells?” I said, sounding a little too much like Blanche DuBois for my own comfort. “About the last month, I guess.”
“See if you can stand up. Just watch your tube, there.”
I tugged myself tender as a dance partner to my feet.
“How’s that feel?”
“Pretty good,” I said. As a matter of fact I felt steadier on my feet and clearer of head than I had in a long time, quite possibly several years.