A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“Walking the dog,” I say.

“Where do you live?”

“Over there,” I say.

He escorts me home and seems unhappy when I take the spare key from under the fake rock to let myself in.

“Most people don’t use the spare key,” he says.

I shrug and open the door. There is a note on the floor. “You suck, cheapskate. You need pay more.”

I show the officer the white box installation of “My Life,” I take him on a tour of the house, the upstairs bedroom, and explain why there are no bedside lamps. I point in the direction of George’s office, where there are lots of family photos, from when “times were better,” whatever that means.

“Looks like you’re in the right place,” the cop says as he’s leaving. “Stay safe.”

It happens a little while later, when I’m brushing my teeth, a creeping sensation, like water is rushing in, like I’m going under. I brush, I rinse, I look at myself in the mirror. There is a pain in my head, in my eye, and as I’m looking, my face divides, half of it falls, as if about to cry. It just drops. I try to make a face, I grin, a sloppy half-smile. It’s as though I am mocking myself, as though I have been hit with novocaine. Using the butt of my toothbrush, I poke at my face, almost stabbing, and feel nothing. As I am standing there, I realize I am sort of slouching, like a tipped marionette. I am using only one arm. I walk out of the room, stumble. There is the sensation of plastic wrapping around my head, not exactly pain but a kind of liquefaction, as though I am melting and trickling down my own neck. I’m watching as my face continues to fall; it goes entirely slack — I have aged a hundred years. I want to change my expression but can’t.

I assume it will pass. I assume I’ve got something in my eye, soap, and it will wash itself out. I come out of the bathroom and finish dressing — it seems to take hours. I’m exhausted. I don’t know whether to lie down or to keep moving. It occurs to me that I need help. The dog is looking at me strangely. “Did something happen?” I ask. “I can’t understand what I’m saying, can you?”

My right leg is like a rubber band, springing, firing unsteadily under me. I want to call my doctor, but besides the fact that I can’t remember his number, I can’t seem to work the phone. Fine, I think, I’ll drive myself to the hospital.

I make my way out of the house and into the car. I put the car into reverse, and then realize that I don’t have the key and the engine is not running. I take my foot off the brake and get out.

The car rolls down the driveway.

I vomit where I am standing.

The car rolls into the street and into the path of an oncoming car. An accident happens.

Somehow I am still standing in the driveway, next to the puddle of sick.

The cop who arrives is the same one who knows me from the park. “How can you be drinking so early?” he asks.

I can’t answer.

“He wasn’t in the car,” the woman from next door says. “He was just standing there.”

I try and say the word “hospital” but can’t; I try “ambulance,” but it is long and soupy; finally, “MORON” comes spurting out, perfectly clear.

I make a gesture, the same gesture I would use in a restaurant when asking for the check, please. I make the sign of writing, and someone hands me paper and pen.

“Something is wrong,” I write in large wobbly letters. The effort does me in, I am knocked to the ground, leveled. I hear someone say, “We can water you,” and I wonder if I’ve turned into a plant.

Ambulance. Too loud. It is all too much, an assault, an insult. Too fast, too slow, nauseating, I have never felt so nauseated, and I wonder, have I been poisoned? Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s something about that spray, maybe it’s the box cave in the living room, maybe it’s off gassing toxic fumes, my previous life is rotting in those boxes and giving off toxic fumes. And as I’m thinking it, I’m worried there’s something about my logic that’s not right.

An interruption, a clot, a stroke, a little leak in the head. An X-ray, an MRI, some blood work, tissue plasminogen activator, arrhythmia, interventional radiology, cerebral angioplasty, carotid endarterectomy, stent.

I blame George: George and his desk, George and high-speed Internet. I am blaming what’s happening on everything from sitting at that desk for too many hours each day to the activities I’ve recently engaged in, both the physical exertion of suddenly having so much sex, and also the tension, the trauma. I’m blaming it on George and George’s fucking medicine cabinet. As a “news” man, George believed he needed to know about everything. So his medicine cabinet was stocked with everything from Viagra to Levitra, Cialis, Tadalis, Revatio, etc. The combination of his computer, his medicine cabinet, and the events of the last few weeks — namely, what happened to Jane — caused a kind of mania, a sexual insanity that comes to an abrupt halt with me lying on a gurney in the ER.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better — does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

A nurse is standing over my gurney. “Mr. Silver. There’s a problem with your insurance. It appears you’ve been canceled. Do you have the actual insurance card?”

“Tessie.” I try to explain that there is no one to feed and walk Tessie. No one pays attention, no one does anything until I pull out the IV line. “Someone needs to walk the goddamned dog.” They’re trying to get me to lie back down and asking if it’s a real dog and explaining that there is a volunteer pet-minder program.

“Call my lawyer,” I say.

I am brought a phone.

I don’t know why Larry’s number is embossed like caller ID in front of my eyes — Train and Traub, 212-677-3575.

“Larry,” I say. “Tell Claire that I am having a stroke.” I say it, and I hear myself saying something that sounds like “Tell dare I’m outside having a smoke.”

“What?” Larry says.

I try harder: “Can you please tell Claire that I am having a stroke?”

“Is this you?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Are you crank-calling me?”

“No,” I say. I hear myself talking and it sounds like I’ve got rocks in my mouth.

“I can’t tell her,” he says. “It’s manipulative. And, further, how do I know you’re really having a stroke and aren’t smashed?”

“I’m in the Emergency Room, Larry; they’re asking for my insurance card, and I keep saying, ‘Don’t worry, I have insurance.’”

“You have no insurance,” Larry says. “Claire dropped you. She asked me to drop you.”

I throw up again, spreading sick over my gurney and across the EKG wires.

“Because you’re still legally married, you may have some recourse. You can fight it.”

“I can’t fight anything — I can barely talk.”

“Maybe they have a patient advocate at the hospital.”

“Larry, can you please ask Claire to fax me a copy of the insurance card,” I say, and the nurse takes the phone.

“Mr. Silver really shouldn’t get agitated — he’s had a cerebral incident. Agitation is definitely not a good thing.”

Larry says something to the nurse and she hands me back the phone. “He wants a final word,” she says.

“Fine,” Larry says. “I’ll take care of it, I’ll fix this one. Consider it a favor, consider it the last favor I’ll do for you.” Did Nixon have to deal with shit like this, or did he hunker down with a bowl of SpaghettiOs?

I think of Nixon’s phlebitis; was the first attack in his left leg in 1965 during a trip to Japan? I think of him during the autumn of 1974, just after his resignation, when again his left leg swelled and he also had a clot in his right lung. He had surgery in October, then a bleed, and remained hospitalized until mid-November, and when Judge John Sirica subpoenaed the former President, he was medically unable to testify.