Jonathan Dee: The Privileges

She finally found the Kleenex she’d been fishing around for in her bag. Nurses and other personnel moved around them with perfect impassive grace as Irene stood there crying in the middle of the hallway. The fact that you never saw them look the least bit disconcerted or surprised should have been soothing but instead Cynthia felt a little undermined by it.

“Anyway,” Irene went on, “I’m sorry to drop that on you first thing, but when I saw you sitting there beside the bed, I didn’t want you to be too upset if it happened, or if he didn’t know right away who you were. I’m sorry for the circumstances but it really is such a privilege to meet you. I’m really looking forward to us getting to know each other. It’s never too late, right?”

“What have you signed?” Cynthia said. Her sudden curiosity about this surely could have waited, but Cynthia felt a strong, almost fearful impulse to keep things on a certain officious level. “Here at the hospice, I mean. If he’s not sure where he is they must have needed somebody to sign some consent for this or that.”

“Charlie signed everything. He was still perfectly lucid. They only stopped the medication after he was admitted.”

“It’s not that I don’t take your word for all this,” Cynthia said. “But are there any actual doctors here during the day? Or is it all just nurses and priests and whatnot? Because I wouldn’t mind speaking to an actual medical professional at this—”

But then, she saw, or rather felt, that one of the nurses who slid so unobtrusively behind her back had gone into her father’s room. “Good afternoon, Charlie,” Cynthia heard her say. “You have some visitors here. Is it okay if I turn a light on?”

Cynthia spun and hurried back through the door, just as the nurse snapped on the lamp beside the bed. She had implored herself over and over not to let herself be shocked, for her own sake and for his, but it was no use. His face was like a skull. He was wearing some kind of nightshirt, much nicer than the standard-issue hospital gown but antiquated and ridiculous all the same. His neck throbbed perceptibly, like a frog’s, and his mouth still hung open. His eyes seemed almost to protrude from his head, but then Cynthia caught on that, unlike the rest of his face, the eyes were actually expressing something; they were especially wide right now because he was trying to figure out where he was. He was staring right at her but he couldn’t figure it out.

“Your daughter is here,” the nurse said softly to him. She didn’t make it into a question, like she was trying to reorient him; it wasn’t condescending in that way. There was no more progress or recovery, in that sense, to be made. It was just about making him less terrified.

Incrementally, the light came back into his eyes. From that terrible leveling impersonality, he returned to occupy his own face, and where a minute ago he hadn’t really seemed in the room at all, now he dominated it again. He struggled to raise himself up on the pillows, and his hand started vainly toward his hair before falling back on the comforter. He licked his lips. “Hello, Sinbad,” he said hoarsely. “What do you make of all this?”

The nurse was already backing away discreetly from the head of the bed before Cynthia even realized she was moving toward it. She hadn’t heard herself called Sinbad in about thirty-five years.

There was no getting around it: he felt like a total pussy for having been taken out and disoriented so completely by one blow to the head. One’s head, he felt, should be tougher than that. He didn’t see any blunt object around and so was thinking that maybe it was only Novak’s fist after all. And Novak was a figure whom he would have naïvely estimated, as recently as a couple of hours ago, that he could take. Fear and heedlessness were all the guy was really armed with, and it turned out to be enough.

He was still a little in and out, maybe just from the shock of it all. He was sitting on Novak’s rancid couch, at the end of the living room farthest from the door. He had to squint a bit against the blazing lights. He could see that a lot of the furniture in the room had been pushed around so that it was no longer in the configuration he remembered from when he first walked through the door. Most of it was now in front of him, and one wall, the wall directly across from him, was cleared away. Novak wasn’t in the room but Jonas could hear him moving around somewhere — maybe around the corner in the kitchenette. Then he heard something else — a ringing phone — and he recognized the ring as his own, though it was coming not from his pocket where his cell phone belonged but from somewhere else in the apartment.

Novak came around the corner from the kitchenette, holding Jonas’s cell phone in front of him like a compact mirror. “Stop it,” he said. After the fourth ring it stopped. Novak put it back in his own pants pocket and left the room again.

What the fuck is happening? Jonas asked himself. He couldn’t make sense of it. He wasn’t restrained or tied down in any way. It was possible to get up, and yet he couldn’t, and he realized that what was really going on was that he was frightened, almost to the point of paralysis. The series of events that had led to his being here in this room at all was so bizarre and arbitrary that it seemed to him like if he thought about it logically enough, he could actually undo it, like snapping himself out of a dream — prove to himself that he wasn’t here, but somewhere else much more familiar.

He felt like he might throw up, but instead he went to sleep again, and when he woke up, a good portion of that blank white wall in front of him — the upper third of it or so — was covered with a picture. The whole place now smelled like Sharpies, which was sickening but still something of a blessing considering the other smells the Sharpies were masking. The picture itself was fantastically detailed, full of dogs and cats and televisions and those signature open-mouthed faces, like a Brueghel almost but without the technique, an unpatterned riot of primary industrial color, and it might have been beautiful, but Jonas really couldn’t see it.

Cynthia asked Dawn to fax her whatever she could find on the Silverberg Hospice and learned that it was one of the most popular, high-profile charities in the city, well run and financed to the gills. She was secretly hoping for a different answer because she had conceived this fantasy that she would just buy the place. It’s not like there was anything she could have improved about it. She would have given everyone there an immediate raise but she also just wanted to be able to succumb to the illusion that every single professional in the building was working for nobody else but her — the sort of selfish emotional fancy anyone with a sick parent or child might have had, the difference being that Cynthia had the resources to make such fancies real every once in a while. She wondered if her father was in the best-appointed room available and though she could have learned the answer to this question in five minutes just by walking up and down the hall — there were only about eight other rooms, and the apparent custom was for the doors to stand open — who knew what you were liable to see when you poked your head in one of them. She finally got up the nerve to ask one of the nurses; the answer was that the rooms differed only in whether or not they had the lake view. No one there ever looked at her strangely when she had a question like that.

The hospice really only employed one doctor. He made the rounds twice a day, and he did almost nothing, which Cynthia had to keep reminding herself was the goal. She overheard an exchange at the nurses’ station between the doctor and Marilyn that suggested they both belonged to the same church: that explained a lot, she said to herself, though in truth she wasn’t sure what it explained at all.