Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

The city stretched on all sides, ripe with my intangible past. Not simply street corners but distinct places, invisible doors into other eras. The spot where I met Gerald, met Jason. The apartments where I have lived, loved, vomited, stuck needles in my arms, passed out and howled. Always malformed buds strangled on wiry bushes, twisted by noise and dust. Always residential side streets pushed up rows of stucco bungalows like sun sores, the world blistered.

The morning had the quality of steam. Gulls screeched in the shallow empty clouds. I realized that if these blocks and cement gouges were the alphabet of the future, then we lived at the edge of history. Los Angeles sits white and half dead, already after the fact, already somehow gasping for breath, slowly strangling.

From Fountain Avenue and Vermont the city was revealed. White gouges like white scars leading to the hills. I realized that Los Angeles is a rented city. It was born fully formed from the day-dreams and wet dreams of greedy little men pushing celluloid fantasies. Los Angeles is a Monopoly board with orange trees. There is danger, too distant to be a factor. Earthquakes last only seconds. It is too much to hope for.

I turned onto Vermont Avenue. I was facing the blank brown backs of the hills. What am I doing? And the voice within me answered, You’re waiting, kid. That’s what you’re doing. Waiting. Don’t you understand yet? Los Angeles is the great waiting room of the world. Wait to get discovered. Wait for your social security check. Wait for the cancer to come back. Wait for the break, the earthquake. Wait for the crisp white words that say the man you call father is dead. Wait with your small life leaking out into a white haze of a hot white afternoon.

I parked my car. Everything seemed to be humming. The traffic on Vermont Avenue hummed. The sun seemed to hum. The slow drugged insects hummed. The air hummed in the cubicles and corridors of the intensive care unit. I suddenly realized that Los Angeles is the terminal ward of the world.

The parking lot attendant smiled at me. He seemed to know me, my dusty car, my face white, parking in the hot sun every day for a week. Nurses smiled at me, still hopeful. Everyone smiled, still hopeful.

I walked into the hospital lobby. Francine was leaning against a cigarette machine. I willed my legs to carry me forward. My steps were wooden, uneven. It seemed the air had finally turned liquid, been transmuted and flowed like a poison, flowed like a creek suddenly erupting its banks and reaching up for the low hills and reaching up farther, reaching up for the pale drained useless sky.

“It’s not healing,” Francine said. “The radiated tissue won’t come together. It keeps opening, toward the artery.”

“What?”

I stopped in the middle of the corridor. I thought of my father lying still in his white bed while his artery burst. It would be a sudden red dream, his last. Perhaps he would imagine himself a young boy again, running fast in a Yankee T-shirt, blinded by a red sun. His ears would fill again with the red wail of childhood, sirens and whistles, slap of bat against ball, the ice cream wagon, children screaming into sun, a special eruption.

“The surgery isn’t healing,” Francine repeated. “He wants to die. He can’t stand the tubes. If it doesn’t heal, they can’t remove the tubes. He’s got no way to eat.”

“The tubes could be permanent?” I asked, gasped. I thought of my father with a red plastic tube positioned securely in his nose, a red tusk, an experiment, part elephant.

“Or worse.”

Francine lit a cigarette. Two orderlies pushed a middle-aged man in a wheelchair. The man was screaming. Blood had collected in a perfect red puddle on his thigh. The emergency room door swung shut.

“He wants to commit suicide. Death with honor, he called it.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, die? How can you die? You want me to bring you sleeping pills for an OD number? You’ll have to get rid of the feeding tubes in your nose first. Maybe that will give you something to live for.”

“What do you think?” someone asked. It couldn’t have been me. I was gone. Something remained behind, white and numb, asking questions as if they mattered, as if explanations mattered, as if the horror could be labeled.

“He’s in a bad depression,” Francine said. “If the tubes don’t come out, do you blame him?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I saw the surgeon twice,” Francine said. “He’s going to try a skin graft. Take skin from his legs and shoulders. Hope the new skin will grow over and close the wound. He called it a patch.”

“Quaint,” I said. I thought of patchwork quilts. I thought of warrior tribes that skinned their enemies alive.

“Patch, my ass,” Francine said. “I told him to get the old man out of bed.”

I thought of something terrible. When my mind touched it, my mind emptied and went blank. It was like waking up and staring at an enormous white iceberg. I felt cold, disoriented and strangely small. I sucked in my breath.

“What if the skin graft doesn’t work? If he doesn’t get the tubes out he can’t commit suicide.”

“I’ve considered that,” Francine said. “Worse comes to worse, we pick the old man up and throw him out the window.”

There was no time in my father’s room. The blinds were drawn. The air seemed a special glistening gray, seasonless, the color of waiting.

AM A LEMON, my father had scrawled on his pad. He picked the pad up and waved it in my mother’s direction. “Stop it,” Francine told him. AM A LOSER. ITS HOPELESS.

Francine walked to the window. “Look,” she screamed, pointing at the windowpane. “A private room with a view. The most technologically advanced conditions. Five hundred forty dollars a day. A day.”

My father closed his eyes. He turned his face away from the window.

“Hold your ticket,” Francine said to my father, her voice softer. “It’s a photo finish. Anything can happen.”

CANT STAND TUBES.

“The tubes are temporary,” Francine said quickly. She began to pace.

WHAT IF????

“If the tubes stay?” Francine stared down at my father. “If the skin graft doesn’t work? If they can’t make a new throat for you? Then we’ll pick you up and throw you out the window.”

Something was struggling near my father’s lips. I think he was trying to smile.

“Are you in pain?” It was the first thing I had said. “I’ll get you morphine.”

NO FRIGGIN DRUGS, my father wrote. He looked at me, his eyes black pits, the gateways of deep tunnels. He seemed to think of something and forget it, all at once. He sank back small and coiled, a white bundle in a white crib.

Francine pulled the blinds open. Overnight the lawn below had erupted with small star-shaped white buds and yellow daisies. There was a sense of dew in the new shoots.

“Can’t you take some joy in spring?” Francine asked.

FUCK SPRING.

“Not in your condition,” Francine assured him.

WANT 2 DIE.

Francine glanced at her watch. “I’ve got a budget conference in Century City. A whole day of wall-to-wall assholes. I’ll come back later.”

She bent down and kissed my father on a small corner of unbandaged skin, just to the side of his red plastic feeding tube. She pointed to me. “Read him the newspaper. Find something grotesque. Mass murders, a 747 collision. Something to give him a sense of perspective.”

My father had closed his eyes. He didn’t open them until Francine left the room.

I searched the front page for something exciting. An earthquake in South America killing twenty or thirty thousand and leaving a million starving and homeless. A train plowing into a stalled school bus. A hurricane, a drought. I found a story about a twenty-one-year-old college football star losing his fight against cancer.