Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

She looks like hell.

I look at the bags in her IV stand. Straight fluids in one. And a morphine drip. She must have cramped badly after the chemo. She must have dry heaved for a couple hours and been unable to sleep. A trache tube juts from her throat. That’s new.

I think about the night we met.

I think about putting a hand over the end of the tube.

I touch the scabs that have grown over the part of my ear the Count didn’t rip off my head and think about peeling them away and leaning over the bed and pressing the wound to Evie’s lips and finding out what kind of girl she really is.

What kind of man I am.

I take the chart from the foot of her bed and look at it. It means nothing to me. I put it back. I put a hand in my jacket pocket and take out the candy necklace from Solomon’s store. I put it on the bedside table and leave, not having the guts to do anything that might help her.

The night nurse is at her station. I stop in front of her. She smells like a different brand of disinfectant than the one they use to clean everything in here.

– Why the trache tube?

She doesn’t take her eyes from the screen of her computer, just raises her hand and rubs her fingers against her thumb. I grab her wrist. With a squeeze and a twist and a pull I could mash her radius and ulna and tear her hand from her arm and drop it in her lap and walk out with her screams as a sound track.

She looks at my fingers wrapped around her wrist.

– You’ll have to let go of me, sir.

This isn’t her fault. Evie being sick has nothing to do with her. She’s just trying to get by.

I squeeze.

She gasps.

I haul her up out of her chair.

– The fucking hole in her neck, why’s it there?

She puts her hand over mine, plucks at my fingers, stops, pats my wrist as if to calm me.

– The herpes lesions have spread into her throat. There was severe esophagitis and swelling.

I let her go and she drops into her chair, cradling her left wrist, staring at the dark ring of bruises around it.

I drop a fifty on her desk. Think about it. Pick it up and put it back in my pocket and leave.

Lydia looks up from the map she’s spread over the dashboard as I climb in the van.

I point at it.

– I want to get there fast.

She traces a line with her fingernail.

– FDR to the BQE.

I grind the ignition and the engine catches.

She raps a knuckle on the plywood wall that seals off the windowless rear of the van.

– If there’s an emergency, don’t try to race back for me. Just park and wait out the sun in the back.

I look out the windshield up at the hospital, and turn in my seat and punch a hole in the plywood and heave and it crashes into the back of the van, leaving it wide open to any light that might pour in through the windshield.

Lydia picks up a scrap of wood, looks at it, sticks it in my face.

– What the fuck, Pitt? What the fuck?

I put the van in gear.

– Incentive to get this shit done before sunrise.

I pull from the curb, running a red light, speeding toward the FDR.

– What are you looking for?

We’ve cleared the eastern end of the Manhattan Bridge and I’m taking us through the insane series of ramps and loops that will put us on the BQE.

– I’m looking for signs.

Lydia takes her foot off the dash, leans over and looks at my face.

– No you’re not.

I point out the windshield.

– The assholes that designed this shit wanted to kill us. I’m trying to find the signs that’ll keep us from plowing into something made of concrete.

She leans back and puts her feet up.

– You’re looking for an ambush.

I tighten my fingers on the wheel.

– No, I’m not.

She crosses her ankles.

– You’re looking for a bunch of savage infecteds in loincloths. You’re looking for zombie parachutists. You’re looking for dragons. You’re in the wilderness and you’re scared the lions, tigers and bears are going to eat you.

I stop scanning the edges of the road and overhanging tree branches and overpasses and cars that pull up alongside us. I stop looking at any of the places I’ve been looking at, searching for ambushes.

– I’m just driving.

She taps the toe of her Doc Martens on the windshield.

– You ever been off of the Island? Before, I mean.

– I was born in the Bronx.

– You’re such a New Yorker, never been anywhere. I traveled. I did a semester in Europe, in Italy. Went everywhere. And I’m from the West Coast. When I came out here I took a whole month to drive crosscountry. Been to Canada. Costa Rica. Mexico. Hawaii when I was a kid. Been to fucking Disney World. Most disgusting place on earth. Consumerism at its worst.

I chain another smoke.

– That radio work?

– Sure.

I toss the spent butt out the window.

– Mind playing something on it?

– What do you want to hear?

– Something that isn’t you.

She flips the bird at me and clicks the radio and settles the dial on some college station that’s playing some chick with an acoustic guitar.

Pet the Cat music, Evie calls it.

– This OK?

– If it includes you shutting up, it’s OK.

She nods, draws a little spiral in the dust on the dash.

– How’s she doing, your friend?

I reach over and spin the dial and put it on a jazz station and turn it up. Coltrane plays “Stardust.”

Lydia ruffles her short hair.

– Just that you never asked about HIV again after that one time and I didn’t know if you’d been able to get her some new meds. And stopping at the hospital just made me wonder?

– She’s fine.

– If she’s in the hospital, she isn’t fine. I told you before, I know people in the treatment community. One of the Lesbian Gay and Other Gendered Alliance members was a hospice worker. If she needs care, we could arrange something.

– She doesn’t need care.

– Hospital’s not the place for someone who’s really sick. They don’t give a shit. Fucking HMOs, it’s all about the bottom line. Get them in and get them out. Free up the beds for another pile of dollars. She could be at home, if she’s that bad.

We grind into traffic merging from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and start crawling through Red Hook.

– She’s not staying in the hospital. She’s gonna be fine.

Lydia tugs on her rainbow-enameled ear cuff.

– You’re not thinking about doing something to make her fine, are you, Joe?

I lean on the horn, cut the wheel and drive up on the shoulder, peel around a line of cars and jump back in the lane beyond the jam and put the pedal down.

Lydia adjusts the strap of her seat belt.

– Just as a reminder, infecting someone, on purpose, that’s a severe abuse of the Society charter. An execution offense. You get the sun for that.

Greenwood Cemetery appears on our left. I know its name the same way I know the names of anything off the Island; I’ve read about it. It’s a hell of a lot bigger than on the map.

Lydia looks at it as we drive past.

– And there’s the moral issue. Do you have the right to infect anyone? Even if you think it might save their life, do you have the right to make that choice for them? Personally, I don’t think anyone has the right to make any decision for anyone.

The cemetery disappears behind us. The road is open. We bend right onto the Belt Parkway toward the bay, the decommissioned docks on one side, Owl’s Head Park on the other.

– And, of course, you never even know if it will work. I mean, I’ve never tried to infect anyone, but I know the survival rate is below fifty percent. And it’s a horrible death.

On the POW/MIA Memorial Parkway, long span and towers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge ahead, a right turn and we’d be heading west.