Victor LaValle - Ecstatic

She told me, — I am fine.

This left the basement or my mother’s locked room for my first sleep since Lumpkin. But I refused either.

I crept to Ledric’s side and listened to him wheeze.

He slept for three hours while I never closed my eyes. I should have been exhausted.

At six I poked his ribs. — Get up, I said.

— Where?

— I guess we’re going to Queens General, I said. If you’re that sick.

Ledric whispered, — I’m not going to no hospital. His arms were above the covers, but he couldn’t lift them. Only his puffy hands shifting proved his agitation.

— Listen to you. You can’t inhale.

— No hospital.

— You still seeing double?

— I just won’t open my eyes. To prove it he closed them, but couldn’t even rally the energy to squeeze them theatrically. His big cheeks puffed out and he exhaled.

— My sister can’t take care of you with aspirin and soup.

— No hospital, he stressed. They’ll give me a disease.

His sentences were coming out between wheezes, murmurs really. I had to lean down close while on my knees. — I think you’ve got one already, I said.

He opened one eye to look at me. — Last year, this man went into Queens General to remove some warts and they took off both his legs. I’m telling you. I believe that shit.

I touched the top of Ledric’s head, but that only made it slide backward until he was looking at the ceiling. The boy had very little muscle control.

— Okay Ledric. At nine we’ll go over to the clinic on Brookville Boulevard.

The green-tiled one-story building at the southwest corner of 147th Avenue and Brookville Boulevard had been a Sons of Italy Lodge (Per Sempre) then changed to a cash-only medical clinic housing doctors from four continents, none of them North America.

It was shaped like a Cambodian pagoda, with a fenced lot next to it; I parked the Oldsmobile Firenza there. When I’d returned the Dodge Neon to the rental office I glued the trunk shut at the lock, hoping the people at National wouldn’t notice— they hadn’t.

I went into the clinic to borrow a wheelchair, but Ledric wouldn’t fit so I came back with one of the carts used for unloading medical equipment. Just a wide flat tray on wheels. Ledric slid out of the Oldsmobile’s backseat and flopped face-first on top of the cart. I had to push him through the delivery entrance.

We would have been in the waiting room three hours if Ledric hadn’t started gasping. Once that happened an angry elf-owl of a nurse let me roll my brother to a small room where a stubble-necked Russian doctor asked a few questions, moved Ledric’s head around. The doctor diagnosed this easily.

— Botulism, he said.

A condition that demands hospitalization.

The real torture to the Russian physician was that he’d have to release us from his highly profitable care there. He didn’t have the equipment in this tiny clinic on the tri-corner hat border of Laurelton, Rosedale and Far Rockaway.

Though Ledric tried to protest again he was making no sense because he couldn’t shape words; he might as well have been a manatee booing.

I wanted to take him to the hospital in the Oldsmobile, but the Russian doctor wouldn’t let me. He was afraid I’d ignore his diagnosis and take Ledric home hoping he’d pull through. The Russian was already well acquainted with the rational paranoia of people without health insurance. — Botulism is not like a fever, he said.

— How am I going to pay for an ambulance?

— Your brother will die without it.

— Can you get them to come down on the price?

The Doctor huffed, but only a little; I doubt he’d been well off when practicing in St. Petersburg. He touched my shoulder. — Your brother goes to Queens General. It is reasonable and his care is precise.

Queens General hospital in north Jamaica is a choir of gray buildings taller than most in Southern Queens. I could say that it’s run down but that would give the wrong impression, make you think the place was a quagmire. It was a decent operation and if money came into the coffers they spent it on equipment.

I followed the ambulance to the hospital the whole time wondering how I’d missed another day shift in the sticky mess of Ledric’s life. I parked and walked the overpass of the Grand Central Parkway then down 163rd Road. Made a left on the slight incline that leads into the emergency room. The place was pretty empty because it was only 11 AM. There were two hundred grievously wounded people waiting to get medical attention instead of the usual twelve hundred of most evenings.

I had the good fortune of having a family member who’d been brought by ambulance and diagnosed with an illness rarely seen in America anymore. When I told the nurse at the front desk his name (she was behind Plexiglas so I had to shout) I was sent up to Ledric’s room immediately. In the elevator I wondered how much a private room cost. I hoped they had him bunking with other people.

He might as well have had a Barcalounger near his bed for the excess space they’d given. How about a wide-screen television with a host of private movies and a masseur on call, since we’re spending Anthony’s money? I would’ve felt better, maybe nonchalant, if I believed that Ledric had even collected loose change in a jar. The penniless creep. He couldn’t have asked for the room, too weak to say it, so some clerk had assigned this manse.

I left when the doctors finally came. They asked me to leave. There were two of them. When I returned in twenty minutes they’d written down Ledric’s many symptoms but had done nothing to repair his health.

— What are you going to do for him?

The physicians nodded, but without looking up from their papers. They didn’t seem wealthy, either one. For instance, their watches were cheap. Digital faces with plastic bands. One wore black while the flashy one’s was orange.

— It’s not botulism, said the first one. He told me like he was solving an illusionist’s trick.

The second one agreed and laughed to prove it. — It is not botulism.

— But the Russian doctor was so sure, I said.

The first put his hand up. — There’s a good chance your friend over there spent too long in a gulag.

— You should take his diagnosis with a tranquilizer.

— We’ll probably end up giving Mr. Mayo a purgative, that’s all.

— Oh that’s good, I said.

— He’ll get the runs, the doctor with an orange watch clarified. He pointed at things a lot just to show that gaudy colorful band. We’re going to let Mr. Mayo sleep a while and check on him tomorrow.

— But he’s not asleep. I don’t even think he’s breathing, I said.

— He’s breathing under his own power.

— The next time you want to get well, come to us. I’ll bet this Russian would amputate your foot if you came in with whooping cough. They laughed at the doctor and it seemed, in his absence, at me.

I thanked them anyway as they left. Sitting next to Ledric in a chair I kicked my feet. Hospitals are quiet when you need them to be.

I couldn’t sleep, but I was exhausted. I took off my shoes, so that helped. Ledric was as big as the bed. The nurses had dropped the metal guards from the sides of the mattress because he wouldn’t have fit on it otherwise.

I walked around the room in my socks to see him from all angles. Even crouching at the foot of the bed, staring up from his feet to the rise of his belly. I pulled the sheets above his ankles while I was down there just to see those five-pound potatoes he called feet.

It was like I had an audience with my own body; a chance to see how I’d look laid out on a bed. Except for his face we were enough alike. I walked to the window, blocking daylight, and Ledric’s figure worried me. I don’t mean his weight; the lonesomeness. Other than myself no one else was going to visit.