Pathetic old Warren looks demented as he climbs up onto a table near the pinball machine, a freshly poured pint of Modelo splashing around in his hand and an IV still connected to his wrist. His eyes are bloodshot and wide, and the crooked Elvis half-smile on his face makes it look like he’s fish-hooked and moments away from getting yanked straight up through the ceiling by some invisible higher power. And yet, everyone in the crowded bar whoops and hollers, not at all bothered by the notion of an ICU patient performing perilous feats in their midst. Nor are they disgusted by the sight of his bare ass peeking through his unfastened hospital gown — or the fact that the gown is crusted with blood as black as crude oil. They all cheer his name over and over in perfect unison until he quiets them with his free hand.
“I had a fever of a hundred and seven for three days straight. Had one foot in the golf cart that carries you off to that final pasture of endless green. Shit you not, friends,” Warren orates, a cigarette suddenly dangling from his mouth. “Think that stopped me from lighting up in the bathroom every chance I got?”
More cheers erupt as a lighter appears in his hand with an impossible flourish and he lights up. The smoking thing is a lie, of course; no one even fills their bedpan in your ward without your permission. The truth is that Warren spent the first three nights of his stay in the ICU screaming senseless obscenities at anyone with ears, terrified of the end and desperate to appear otherwise. It wasn’t until the fourth night that he made peace with you — as if you were God — and begged for you to hold his hand. As you push through the mass of bodies to reach your patient before he says anything more, you can’t quite remember if you obliged him. But if it ever comes up in conversation later on, you’ll know without a doubt that you squeezed his sweaty palm all throughout the night. You might have even hummed him a song or two.
“What can they do? Throw you out on the street?” Abe, another patient of yours, calls out from his place at the bar. The phlegm in his throat sounds like gravel being crushed beneath a tire, and he’s about as fleshless as a man can get without being mistaken for a Halloween prop. The pale skin of his naked chest is mostly obscured by gauze and surgical tape. “I’d just gotten out of open heart surgery myself. Think I ate the food they kept forcing on me? All that pineapple Jell-O and oatmeal and whatnot? Over my dead body. I told my wife to throw it in a sack and dump it out in the parking lot for the seagulls. Whenever meal time came, she brought me McDonald’s. Nurse would just watch me eat from the doorway. Razor blade eyes and all that. Like she’s the one who slapped together that pathetic hospital spread.”
Everyone around you laughs in a way that reminds you of the unkindness of high school. Or maybe of Hell. The din of it temporarily drowns out the distant sound of trumpets blaring “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” out on Royal Street. Abe, too, is lying. You would never have let him stuff Big Macs into his face directly after surgery. And you’re pretty sure the guy doesn’t even have a wife. He might not have anybody, actually; you have a faint memory of trying to call his emergency contact only to hear the disconnect tone on the other end. It might have made you cry, but maybe not; you also have a faint and much older memory of a therapist scribbling a lot in her notebook after you told her that you’d calmly watched Roxie — the family cocker spaniel — choke to death on rawhide while your folks were having an argument in the other room.
“Must’ve had the same nurse, you and I,” Warren says. “Tiny gal with horn-rimmed glasses? Voice like a rat with its tail caught in a trap?”
“That’d be the one,” Abe replies before taking a sip of his Negroni.
“Would you believe me if I told you she’s in love with me?” Warren asks, which causes the crowd to gasp as one as if they’re a live sitcom audience.
Abe scoffs. “Besides a starving dog or maybe your mama, I’d say no one else would dare, kemosabe.” Everyone laughs.
“Shit you not, I made her scream so hard that a handful of docs came running in the room, thinkin’ they had another burn victim to deal with,” Warren says, thrusting his hips into the air, pretending you’re bent over in front of him. “In fact, she screamed my name so many times that it eventually lost all meaning. Sounded like gibberish by the time we were through. Semantic satiation, they call it. Look it up.”
There are numerous ways you could kill him once you wrestle him back into the ICU ward. Inject air into his IV line. Administer a lethal dose of potassium. Tie him down and smother him with a pillow. Whatever you desire. Out of all the things they never told you about what it’s really like to be a nurse, the ability to so easily take a life is the one you’ve never really gotten used to. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you’ve never been able to tell the difference between the fear of it and the thrill of it. Maybe they’re one in the same. You drunkenly confessed this to your husband one night a while back. Sometimes, you can remember him slapping you so hard that you stumbled backwards and tripped over a chair in the kitchen. Other times, you can remember him driving off to his parents’ house in Connecticut without saying a single word.
“Well, I was told by a trusted source that she’s not what you’d call the settling down type,” another voice calls out from somewhere beyond your field of vision. You recognize it, but you can’t imagine their face — although you’re fairly certain they’d stayed in a coma for a number of weeks before they finally regained consciousness. Or maybe they died. Whatever the case, it was sometime during the winter months last year — around the time all of those cows froze to death in the Midwest. “Word has it, that little number has made her mark in damn near every county this side of the Mississippi. And this one probably ain’t her last.”
“Hey now,” Warren says, holding up his hand in protest. “When did I say that I was in love with her?”
Your eardrums nearly burst as the crowded bar roars like the home team just won in overtime. Still, it’s not enough to drown out the cacophony of sounds blaring through the walls from outside — “Just a Little While to Stay Here” in its final refrain, sporadic gunfire, police sirens, hurricane sirens, and maybe the roar of an all-out firestorm.
This is when your mother’s arms suddenly fall on your shoulders. Except “suddenly” isn’t really true; she’s always been there, directly behind you and ready to whisper in your ear as if she’s your own subconscious. Or a ghost. And even though your nostrils are filled with the suffocating stench of alcohol, sweat, and bad breath, the scent of her perfume — a maddening cross between that of a gift shop and a rotting garden — wafts in regardless and tickles the back of your throat. The thought of her in a place like this almost makes you laugh, but you know better than to prod her into shifting into her final form. Hooves and all.
“He reminds me of your father near the end,” she says, her voice vibrating with a forced tremolo as she points a long, thin finger at Warren. “He was the only man I ever loved. And the only man who ever tried to kill me. Kill us all, more like. You’ll never know how terrifying it was to hear the scream of our Saab’s engine as he smashed the pedal to the floor and steered us towards the most solid brick wall he could find on the east side. How he held my hand and sang to me as we closed the distance at eighty miles per hour. You were too young to remember, thankfully. If it wasn’t for some prick in a Tahoe who ran a red light and swiped the front end of the car, that would have been it for us.” You don’t turn around, but you can feel her smiling at the back of your head. “You’ve never appreciated how lucky you really are.”
She always tells you this like it’s the first time, but really she’s been repeating this lie at least once a month since the beginning of time — as if you don’t have the capacity to remember on your own that your mother is the one who reached over and jerked the wheel and sent the three of you careening towards a wall when you were on the way to the grocery store. That she avoided blame by claiming that her sudden suicidal urge was the result of a volatile interaction between two of her numerous medications. That nothing is ever truly her fault. That this was the first time you looked at her and realized that she isn’t really your mother.
“Still, I know more about her than anyone now probably,” Warren says, taking a long drag from his cigarette. A heap of ash plummets into his beer and slowly sinks to the bottom of the glass. “To say she’s an open book would almost be a sarcastic understatement. I’d say I deserve to be ordained as a priest after listening to all the gal had to say about her charmed life.”
As the crowd laughs yet again, you keep pushing forward. It hasn’t yet occurred to you to speak up for yourself. The thought of it almost seems as silly to you as arguing with one of the characters in a movie or a novel. What would you say anyway? Who would believe you?
“And if you really want to know the truth, I don’t think she’s actually a nurse,” Warren says, looking thoughtfully towards what you assume to be the front door of the place. For some reason, you don’t remember actually walking in. “Yeah, she’s got the title, the scrubs, the keycard. Won’t argue with you there. But hey — you could say the same for George W. Bush, and pretty much everyone’ll agree that it was ol’ Dick who really ran things. Am I right?”
“So what are you saying?” Abe asks, visibly fatigued all of a sudden and grasping at the bandage on his chest. The more you look at his unfinished Negroni, the more it looks like blood instead of the perfect mixture of gin, Campari, and vermouth. “If she ain’t a nurse, then what is she? Who’s pulling her strings?”
Warren shrugs. “If I told you, she’d probably have to kill you.” Then he screams before tumbling backwards off of the table, “Next round’s on me!”
Now’s your chance.
As you nudge yourself through the final layers of bodies, you realize that most everyone in the bar is a wayward patient. The entire ICU must be empty. There are other nurses too, but none of them seem to care that their patients are running amok; if anything, they’re the ones who have truly lost themselves in the spirit of the evening. The new girl Sydney is over there with her arms wrapped around Brad — a five-car pile-up victim who suffered a major stroke the day after he was wheeled in; your shift manager Edna is completely naked and dancing with herself off by the dart board, her scrubs haphazardly flung over a chair; Bill is downing the rest of his very own bottle of Johnny Walker, a rusty Colt .45 sitting on the table in front of him. By the time you reach the table Warren had been standing on, he’s not laying on the floor nearby — only his IV drip and bloody gown remain. As you bend down to pick up the gown, Abe limps over, wheezing something awful. Fresh blood is bubbling from both corners of his lips.
“He went that way,” he rasps, pointing to an inconspicuous black door fixed with an “Employees Only” sign that’s handwritten in red Sharpie.
You push through without hesitation. A dark, narrow hallway leads to an iron staircase that spirals down into a basement. Once you reach the bottom, the silence is total — the kind that usually only prevails in caves. Warren is still nowhere to be found; the only thing you can see is a washer and dryer set up in the corner alongside a freshly folded stack of bar towels. But it’s fine, because it’s all you really need anyway — a way to try and rid the gown of blood once again and prepare it for the next liar.