Stuart Kaminsky: Midnight Pass

Through the partially open door in a treatment room in the E.R. of Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I look out at the cluttered counter of a nursing station.

Small colored sheets of paper are skewered on an upright thin spike. Wire baskets flow over with charts and graphs. A single thin brown folder totters at the edge of the counter, threatening to fall whenever a blue-clad nurse or aide shuffles or hurries by.

On my right in the small, darkened room, the machine next to me gives out a steady, slow series of beeps and a simultaneous series of blips, black dots of sound. The fluorescent lights in the corridor beyond the open door hum. Blips, beeps, and hums. A little night music complete with vocal accompaniment.

“Ron”-a woman’s voice, calm, weary-“glucose was two-five-two.”

A young man in short-sleeved whites wheels a gurney past the cubicle I’m in. Covered by a thin white blanket, an old man with eyes closed pauses just outside the room for an instant and then is pushed out of sight.

There is a low, calm chatter of voices, and then a heavy white nurse with glasses and close-cropped hair pushes a wheelchair past the door. A pretty young black woman sits in the chair, holding an infant.

“Four months old,” the young mother says. “She’s got asthma and something wrong with her heart.”

The heavy white nurse with glasses and close-cropped hair touches the young woman gently on the shoulder, and they roll by.

The passing parade pauses.

I look around the room. In the band of cold white light that comes through the open door, I see a gray stool and an overflowing ivory-colored trash can with the fingers of a blue rubber glove dangling out, as if someone or something is trying to escape.

There is a box on the wall, a see-through rectangular box with a plastic slot. The word “Danger” is printed in black letters on an orange square on the box and under it, also in black, “Used Needles.”

There is a pink plastic tray to vomit in on the small, shining steel table next to the bed. All the discomforts of home.

A new voice, female, beyond the curtain.

“What’d I do with my pen? I’ve lost two today.”

A man in hospital blues, dark haircut almost scalp short, clipboard in his hand, walks slowly by, talking to an older woman in blues with washed-out blond hair.

They glance at me through the parted curtain and walk on. I hear him say, “Dr. Greenspan wants him in op in ten minutes.”

The woman says, “Okay.”

“Saturday morning,” the man’s voice comes back.

“Saturday morning,” the woman repeats.

I listen to more blips and bleeps. A man moans from somewhere; two female voices giggle. Is there going to be a third? Does Dr. Greenspan know what he is doing or looking for? Who is this Dr. Greenspan?

My back aches. I have a headache.

I wait, listening for the wheels of a gurney moving to the room I am in. I wait to look up at whoever will be pushing it. I imagine a thin-haired, short, well-muscled orderly in blue, his hairy arms, and a wide-band metal wristwatch. I wait for him to cheerfully say, “It’s time.”

The road from a cold Dairy Queen Blizzard to the hospital emergency room began five days earlier.

Three people had died in those five days. There was a good chance there would be a fourth soon, a fourth who lay in a small triage room, a fourth whose odds were not looking too good.

Sally Porovsky steps into the room and looks down at me.

“How does it look, Lew?” she asks.

I don’t have a good answer. I try a smile. It doesn’t work. She takes my right hand in both of hers.

It had been bright and sunny and humid and definitely Florida when I got up healthy on Monday. Time generally seems to move slowly for me, but on Monday the clock began to spin.

Here’s how it went.

“No amount of sunscreen will save her,” Dave said, shaking his head.

I nodded and looked up at the jogger passing in front of the DQ, headed downtown. She wore shorts and a tank top, a Walkman singing in her ear, a serious look on her pretty face, her sun-bleached blond hair bouncing against her back in a long ponytail.

She made a left turn and headed out of sight toward Towles Court, a collection of small shops and homes owned by painters, sculptors, jewelry makers…people who had once been successful in business or raising a family and now were retired and wanted to change the label they wore from no one in particular to Artist. Few of the community in Towles Court, mostly women, had illusions about breaking out and getting famous and wealthy. They enjoyed what they now were and what they were doing. They had peace, time, and identity.

I cannot paint, sketch, sculpt, or draw, and I have no urge to try. Unlike the artists of Towles Court in their brightly painted houses, I have as little identity as possible.

Dave owns the Dairy Queen franchise across the parking lot from where I live and work in a walk-up office building with peeling paint and crumbling corners of concrete. The building had begun life as a two-story, 1950s motel and had gradually gone downhill till it was ready for me. I’m not supposed to live in the back room of my office, but the landlord doesn’t care as long as I pay my rent on time and don’t complain. I don’t complain.

Dave looks like a dark, deeply weathered mariner, which he is when he’s not handing out Dilly Bars, Blizzards, and burgers. He owns a boat and is out in Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico whenever possible. The sun has leathered him. The boat has given him muscles and kept him trim.

Dave is about my age, early forties. I like to think that with his face and bleached-out hair he looks older than I do, but I’m dark with a rapidly receding hairline that makes me look every minute of my age.

My name is Lew Fonesca. I live in Sarasota, Florida, where I drove a little over three years ago when my wife was killed in a hit-and-run “accident.” “Accident” is in quotes because the police couldn’t find out who the driver was. My wife was a lawyer in the Cook County State Attorney’s office, where I worked as the head of legal research. She had prosecuted a lot of people, made a lot of them and their relatives angry. Maybe it wasn’t an accident, a drunken driver, a panicked kid who had just gotten his or her license, someone on a cell phone not paying attention.

When the funeral was over and I had nothing left to weep, I got in my 1989 Toyota in the cemetery parking lot and started to drive. I headed south, in the general direction of oblivion and the tip of Florida. I had no idea of what I would do when I got there. I wasn’t sure where “there” was. In those four days, I listened to the voices of conservative talk-show hosts, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage, and the advocates of the unknown like Art Bell and Whitley Streiber, anybody who was talking. I didn’t want music. I wanted company, a voice, anyone speaking whom I didn’t have to answer. I listened but I heard nothing.

My car had given out in the DQ parking lot in Sarasota. There was an “Office For Rent” sign on the office building. I sold the car for twenty-five dollars to a couple of kids eating hot dogs and drinking Blizzards and made the first month’s rent on the office overlooking the DQ parking lot and heavily traveled Route 301, which was named Washington Street for the stretch through Sarasota.

Now I sat at the white, chipped enamel table with the sun umbrella with Dave talking about the sun and pretty women joggers. Dave was drinking water. I was working on a cheeseburger and a chocolate-cherry Blizzard, my copy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune folded on the table in front of me.