Good Day to Die
Authors: Stephen Solomita
A Novel
Stephen Solomita
for Paul Goldstein traveling still
L
ORRAINE CHO KNEW IT
was five o’clock when Melissa Williams switched off the radio in the middle of Andy Williams’ version of
Moon River.
Leaving poor Andy to come off sounding like a sick cow.
Moooooooooooooo … click.
Melissa always turned the radio off at five o’clock. Even if the waiting room was crowded with patients who’d been given three o’clock appointments to see one or another of the doctors who owned and staffed the Downtown Brooklyn Medical Center. The clinic’s official hours were 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. and
that,
as Melissa had told Lorraine on more than one occasion, was
that.
Lorraine Cho had always considered Melissa’s abrupt termination of Lite FM’s afternoon programming a clear case of blaming the victim. The doctors allotted twenty-three minutes to each patient. They’d reached that figure after a weekend conference on
The Modern Medical Practice,
given in Vail, Colorado, by a manufacturer of business software systems. The simple fact that they, the doctors, were usually out making rounds in one of the affiliated hospitals until nine-thirty or ten didn’t enter into their calculations. Nor the fact that, two or three times a week, hospital emergencies had the staff scurrying to reschedule appointments. The conference had shown the partners how to maximize their profit by increasing efficiency. To, for instance, have patient number three get undressed in an examining room while patient number two was being asked to cough and patient number one urinated into a plastic cup.
Lorraine paused for a moment. She removed her earphones and let her fingers drop from the typewriter to her lap.
“The natives are restless,” Melissa whispered.
“As usual,” Lorraine replied without raising her head. She could hear the low buzz of the patients in the waiting room, but she couldn’t see them. Nor could she see Melissa Williams. Lorraine Cho was blind.
“You ready to leave?”
Lorraine smiled. Melissa had already pulled on her jacket. “I’ve got a few more reports to do. I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t like you going home by yourself.”
“It’s only a few blocks.”
Lorraine sighed. They went through this little ritual whenever she had to work late, despite the fact that she lived in a group home on Lawrence Street, less than a half mile from the clinic. Once upon a time, Lorraine had tried to explain the meaning of independence. About how easy it was to fall into the habit of
dependence.
How easy it was to surrender. Melissa had replied with a characteristic snort.
“Girl, you have to cross Flatbush Avenue. Are you fool enough to think those fool drivers give a damn about your independence?” Another snort, this one even more contemptuous. “Not to mention the animals out there. Those animals see you comin’, they won’t be thinkin’ about your
independence.
What they’re gonna think is ‘easy pickin’s. Knock you down, snatch your purse in a heartbeat. And it might be they’ll snatch more than
that.
If you take my meaning.”
Lorraine hadn’t bothered to argue. Melissa Williams had as good a heart as anyone Lorraine knew, despite her assertion that, “Being as I’m a black woman in a white man’s world, I can’t afford to be soft.”
For Melissa, not being “soft” meant leaving the Downtown Brooklyn Medical Center at five o’clock on the dot. No matter how many unmailed insurance reports lay on her desk. The medical staff—the nurses and the techs—could stick around until six or seven. They really didn’t have any choice. But the clerical staff was under no such obligation. Melissa had a husband and two children waiting in a condominium on First Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan. Their needs came first.
Lorraine sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to the hum of her IBM Selectric. Remembering Melissa Williams’ patience when faced with the prospect of training a blind typist. Lorraine Cho knew her employment may have been a spontaneous bit of charity on the part of the doctor who decided to “give her a chance,” but for Melissa Williams, Lorraine’s “chance” meant long months of reviewing each report Lorraine typed, of quiet corrections and explanations.
For Lorraine, on the other hand, mastering the unfamiliar jargon that poured through the earphones attached to her mini-recorder was just one more battle in a war that had begun five years earlier when she’d gotten drunk at a friend’s house and plowed her car into a pillar supporting the tracks of the Roosevelt Avenue el.
The pain was the easiest part. In the beginning, the pain kept her from thinking about what her mother described as “your condition.” As long as her face was covered with bandages, she could pretend the bandages were the cause of the darkness. That one day in the future, Dr. Marren would gently unwrap those bandages and her eyes would open to a painfully blue sky filled with soaring doves. Just like in the movies.
The only thing was that she didn’t
have
eyes. (If it weren’t for reconstructive surgery, she later realized, she wouldn’t have a
face.)
But the funny part was that the fantasy persisted, even after the bandages were removed, even after they weaned her off the Demerol, even after she went home to her parents’ apartment in Kew Gardens.
Organize and memorize. A place for everything and everything in its place. It took months to get it right. Until she could move from the kitchen to the bedroom without cracking her shins against the corner of an end table. Or brush her teeth without sending the toothpaste and the plastic cup on the sink crashing to the floor.
The effort to learn that tiny piece of the world represented by the six rooms of her parents’ apartment was enormous. But once the effort had been made, Lorraine was content to rest, to revel in the safety after so much insecurity and physical pain.
And why shouldn’t she? Her parents were invariably supportive. Supportive and protective. “We’ll always be there for you,” they told her again and again. “Don’t worry about
anything.
”
The Library for the Blind sent her books on tape—sent them free of charge along with a sighted braille tutor. If she wanted fresh air, all she had to do was step onto the balcony and take a deep breath. True, television meant nothing, but the New York radio bands, AM and FM, were crowded with stations offering every kind of music along with call-in shows, public radio stations, religious broadcasting, twenty-four-hour news …
Why should she leave? Ever? What was the point? Sure, if you didn’t have anyone to care for you, to go out and buy the groceries, cook the food, clean the house, do the laundry … then you’d have to venture out into the dark and dangerous world. The world that had taken your sight in the first place. But she wasn’t in that position. Her father was an electrical engineer with a doctorate from MIT. Money would never be a problem for Lorraine Cho.
What I did, she decided much later, was drift, a puffball in a gentle stream. Still expecting my sight to be restored. Still waiting for the cure.
The event that changed her life took place ten months after she left the hospital. With her father at work and her mother out shopping, she reached into the refrigerator for a can of Coke and sent a bottle of grapefruit juice crashing to the floor. Her first reaction was anger. Juice bottles were supposed to be on the left side of the top shelf, not stuck in the middle. How could they be so stupid? Didn’t they know she was blind?
It took Lorraine a full minute to realize that she was standing barefoot on a floor littered with broken glass and her mother wouldn’t be back for hours and she couldn’t call a neighbor because she couldn’t get to the telephone. She would have to deal with it herself.
The first thing she did was squat on her heels and brush shards of glass off her feet. It was the obvious place to begin and the last thing she expected, as she fought the anger and panic, was to find herself transformed. Nevertheless, as her fingertips slid across the linoleum floor, she awoke to a sensitivity beyond anything she’d ever dreamed. Her fingers were alive, searching the floor as if they had eyes. As if
she
had eyes. She could handle the sharpest piece of glass with no concern for her safety; the jagged shards might have been spilled marshmallows for all the danger they posed.
She cleared a small space around her feet, then dropped to her knees and made her way across the kitchen to the broom closet. Removing a plastic dustpan, she began to systematically clean the floor, brushing glass chips into the dustpan with the sensitivity of a lover caressing the flesh of her beloved. The force of her concentration, as she read the sensations traveling through her fingertips, drove every other consideration from her mind.
When she finished, when she’d emptied the dustpan into the small garbage pail by the stove, she became aware of a mix of emotions radiating just outside her body like the halo surrounding the head of a medieval saint. Overwhelmed, she continued to sit on the floor for a moment, then got up and made her way into the bathroom.
Still bemused, she disrobed, turned on the water, adjusted the temperature, and stepped into the shower. When the water hit her face and chest, it was as if the sensitivity in her fingers had been transferred to every cell in her body. She was aware of individual streams cascading off her flesh, of trickles running along her ribs and down her thighs, of steam rising to envelop her body. She could hear droplets strike the surface of the tub, hear them over the intense hissing of the showerhead.
It was miraculous. And impossible, too. Of course, she’d heard that blind people enjoyed heightened sensitivity as a kind of compensation. But if that was the case, where had that sensitivity been hiding all this time? And, more important, what would she do if it suddenly vanished?
But it didn’t vanish. True, over time, the excitement and emotion diminished. She began to take her abilities for granted, even as they expanded. Within a month, she could identify people she knew by the sound and rhythm of their breathing. Within two months, she could enter a room and know someone else was there, even if they were completely silent. Five months later, she left her parents’ Kew Gardens apartment, entered a group home for the blind, and began to train for the rest of her life.
