Future Home of the Living God(43)

“Just wait until you flush your happy pill,” says Agnes. “Reality’s a bitch. A heavy bitch. Fuck. I’ll be outta here though.”

And she is, though not the way she hopes.

The drug knocks me out around eight p.m. so I don’t know it when she tries to leave that night. She doesn’t make it. When I wake this morning she is tied into the bed next to me, her wrists and ankles bound in hospital restraints. Her face is swollen and pasty pale. Her eyes are shut. She’s deeply asleep, snoring lightly. Breakfast comes, but she doesn’t stir. I only pretend to swallow the vitamin I’m given in a tiny paper cup, and by the time the nurse leaves the room it has begun to dissolve against my back tooth—bitter, metallic, sickening. I spit it out into the toilet and flush it away, then wait.

Around noon, Agnes starts coughing.

“Pillow!”

I bring my pillow over and prop up her head.

“Thanks.” Her voice is hoarse, her eyes loll backward. Trying to stay awake, she frowns, screws up her face, shakes her head to shed the drug.

“What happened?”

“Water, washcloth.”

I bring her a glass of water, she gulps it down, then I sponge off her face with a cold, wet cloth.

“Yeah, that’s better.”

“How did you get out?”

“Down the hall . . . the other outlaw.” Her eyes droop shut. I shake her.

“Tell me! How?”

She tries to keep her eyes open, blinking furiously, staring. She gasps out a few words.

“Had it worked out . . . she got the guard back over to the nurse’s station for coffee. Those guys talk while I take the stairs down to the lobby. On my own, then.”

“How come they didn’t see you?”

Agnes’s eyes shut, her mouth drops open, and she’s out again, snoring. I go into the bathroom, get the washcloth wet, bring it out, and wipe her face, her throat, wrists, arms. I shake her.

“Uh-oh.” She grins slightly, rousing herself. “I had on this paira extra-large blue scrubs, lab coat. Actually, actually . . . oh, uh, I made it out the side doors to a Dumpster. Alla way down there. I was sposed to pretend to have a smoke, then this frienda mine, watching, she’d get me.”

“How? Who?”

I shake Agnes harder, desperately, but she’s gone again.

“How did you contact your friend?” I ask her sleeping face, over and over, but I can’t rouse her this time. I sit on my bed watching her sleep. It’s funny, watching someone sleep—how it tells you things about them you’d never know when they were awake. Agnes looks so sad in her sleep, for instance, not angry at all. Her sorrow is so naked. It is like the sorrow of the Virgin Mary, her knowingness, her foresight. And I’m helpless to change things. All I can do is untie her restraints. I do that, and then I watch over her, knowing I’m no protection.

One hour later, two nurses enter the room and draw the curtains around Agnes.

“Wake up,” I cry. I swing my legs over the sides of my bed and struggle through the curtains. “What are you doing with her!”

“Just prepping her,” says one of the rosy, chubby nurses, a woman Agnes calls the Cheesehead. Her voice is sweet, cheerful, even kindly. “Don’t worry. It’s a happy day, Cedar, it’s time for Agnes to have her baby!”

“You’ll see your friend in a couple, three hours,” says the other, a skinny black-eyed brunette with long yellow teeth, as they pull aside the curtains. But just as they are getting ready to wheel her out, Agnes comes to. She wakes in absolute silence, no warning, and flips out of the bed. One minute she’s totally limp, faking, and the next she’s got a fist and a foot out and she’s ripped the IV out of her hand. She springs up, uses the light aluminum IV stand like a kung fu fighting pole. She slams rosy Cheesehead on the side of the skull and cracks the skinny nurse across the throat so that suddenly they are both bent over, gagging.

“Help me!”

A thin orderly in blue scrubs darts in and seizes Agnes from behind. He crashes down, his nose spouting blood, when she cracks him with a back head-butt of her skull. I run over and sit down on him—oddly, he stays still. He could throw me off, but he doesn’t. He whispers, “Keep sitting on me.” Either he’s a pervert, I think, or he’s on our side and wants to stay out of the way, giving Agnes a chance. So I keep sitting on the man, who struggles beneath me in a halfhearted way. Agnes whirls, grinning at me, her white ass glowing through the wings of the hospital gown. Then she flies out the door, down the hall. I jump up and get to the door in time to see her bowl right over a chubby, short male doctor, who sprawls, groping for his glasses. I run out after her, into the hall, and see that with incredible quickness she’s got to the emergency stairway. I take two steps. The last I see of Agnes is the black vigor of her bleached hair roots and the abrupt yellow of the ends as her hair flags out, flying through the staircase door.

The OB doctor bumbles to his feet and yells for help, but it’s too late.

After that, I ask every nurse who comes in where Agnes went, if she got out, if she’s all right. Every one of them gives me a pleasant smile, a little laugh, a cheery wink.

“Oh, Agnes? She’s fine. She went home.”



October 5

They replace her with a young Asian woman who radiates intensity. She’s both demure and severe. Intimidating. She has either stopped speaking or speaks no English, and she might be insane. She stares into space, humming off-key monotonous tunes. She plucks at the weave of her blanket, removing long strings which she begins to wind into a ball, tiny the first day, much bigger the next. She has apparently unraveled her blanket all night. She hides the ball when the nurse comes in. The blanket is halfway gone. The woman reminds me of a perfect industrious spider, so quiet, fingers moving, moving, moving. She gets on my nerves and the food tastes horrible now. Lunch is a tan piece of seared flesh-substance, with canned beans and a quarter of a rotted tomato, a plastic bowl of cold, white pudding. I can’t believe I ate this food and liked it—that drug was awesome. The room is drab, the paint stained and peeling, and the photographs are tattered and saccharine. One is a big daisy with nineteen petals and three out-of-focus leaves. Another is a picture of a cozy Cape Cod with light flooding out the windows onto a bank of ratty snow. I hear the other women’s voices, whining or furious, and smell rank smells—shit, fear, chemical exhalations, isopropyl alcohol, and the food, always the spoiling food. Oh, the drugs have worn off, for sure, with a vengeance. It is very difficult to flush the next morning’s vitamin. I want my happy hospital back again. I want to sit here and contemplate how big you’re getting, how healthy, your little lungs continuing to strengthen. Your brain building configurations in rapid waves. Thoughts occurring, perhaps. I want to marvel at even the sharpest of your kicks and punches. So active! But I’m sick knowing what happened to Agnes. I think they killed her during her C-section. I think they have cremated her. I think there are full-time full-capacity crematoriums going night and day in the exurbs. And I also cannot stop my mind from weaving scenarios of dread and terror about my parents, both sets, about Little Mary, and especially about Phil.