Madeleine's Ghost (44 page)

I nod, puzzled. “I guess that I was pretty sick?”

“Sick?” All of a sudden, Dr. Abrahamson's doctorly demeanor crumbles from the chin up, and he begins to laugh. He covers his face with his hands and laughs a good hard minute till his ears are red. Then, suddenly, he is serious.

“We only had you on life support till we could notify your next of kin. In layman's terms, Mr. Conti, you were dead.”

S
EPTEMBER
. The sea is high today, the sky azure blue at the horizons with a faint brownish layer of smog halfway up. A stiff wind full of sand and litter blows at our backs, blows the dirt of the city out to the open ocean, where it will be dispersed amid the swells. Fall is in the air. The lifeguard chairs are empty. Two odd creatures in windbreakers lunch among the dunes. Behind us, St. Luke's Geriatric Hospital towers over the boardwalk, the first of the long row of twenty-story towers—cheap condominiums, low-income housing, old people's homes—planted up the beachfront like tombstones.

Rust is visiting. He kicks the flaking metal railing of the boardwalk with his scuffed cowboy boots, then flips around and leans back on his elbows. I can see the stitched-up bullet hole in his left boot. jacket collar up, wind blowing his hair into a pompadour, he looks like an older James Dean who has lived through his sports car crash and the turmoil of youth to attain wisdom. I am sitting a few feet away on the concrete bench, eating a funnel cake covered with powdered sugar. Since my sickness I've been very hungry, haven't stopped eating. The hospital doesn't feed me enough, just Jell-O and a bit of boiled chicken for dinner, so I sneak out and gorge on fried food.

They're still doing tests on me and have had a hard time figuring things out. Dr. Abrahamson cannot reconcile himself with the fact that I am alive. His current theory is that I contracted an unusual strain of hepatitis that goes acute rapidly, then vanishes, leaving no trace. When all the tests are done, he plans to write up an article on my case for the
New England Journal of Medicine.

Rust squints up at the ugly brick monolith of St. Luke's Geriatric. A five-story neon cross decorates the facade. Its steel mountings catch the light, flashing signals in the afternoon sun. This hospital was the only one that would take me as a charity case with no health insurance. Father
Rose has a connection on the board and arranged the whole thing, though I must be the only patient here under seventy-five.

“That priest fellow came down looking for you,” Rust says now. “Lucky for you. He said you hadn't been to work in a week. I said, ‘Let's break the door down.' Otherwise we wouldn't have found you upstairs till you started to bloat and stink.”

The last lump of funnel cake sticks in my throat. The image of myself as a rotting corpse is not good for the digestion.

“Sorry, buddy,” Rust says. “But are you sure this is O.K., you eating this shit? What do the people in the hospital say?”

“To hell with the people in the hospital,” I say. “I'm fine. I'm only sticking around as a favor to Dr. Abrahamson. In fact, I'm still hungry.”

We walk back up the boardwalk to Rockaway Boulevard, the main drag, a dilapidated street of bars and retirement hotels, divided by a burned grass median. It's hard to imagine a time when Far Rockaway was new, when the restaurants served good food and the hotels, just built, were full of clean rooms and good cheer. Hard to imagine it as anything but what it is now—a last-chance greasy beach resort at the end of the line, the distant suburb where the suburbs end, blighted with working-class ennui and endless side streets of sand-blasted salt-box houses. There is nothing more melancholy than a low-class beach at the end of the season. The smell of three-month-old grease in the fryers and empty bottles of suntan lotion in the sand, the long shadows of the parking meters on the cracking blacktop, a lone broken thong sandal left stranded on the dirty median.

Even Rust feels it. He shivers and rubs his hands together as I munch a chili dog, extra onion at the last stand left open on the boardwalk. Then I follow him up the street into an Irish bar, marked by a fritzing neon harp. Inside, it's a cavernous room with pictures of long-dead boxers on the walls and a jukebox full of Irish sentimental favorites, including, as always, that damn song about the unicorn. Halfway down, through a swinging door, is the lobby of a residential hotel for old men. As Rust gets his Guinness from the bar, I take a look back there: dusty couches, a rubber tree, an old front desk of dark wood, a yellowed photograph
of Myrna Loy on the wall. It could be the set of a 1940s era detective movie.

When I join him at a table near the front, Rust is half done with his pint. It is the good stuff, shipped direct, nonpasteurized, from Ireland, and leaves telltale rings on the side of the glass with each sip.

“You were a goddamned sight, Ned,” he says, wiping the froth off his mouth with the back of his hand. “When the priest and I busted in, we heard these weird panting noises coming from your bedroom. And there you were, sprawled half off the mattress—hot as a poker, buck naked, your dick sticking straight up into the air, and moaning and squirming around like you were getting the lay of your life.”

I pick some lint off the sleeve of my sweater, embarrassed. “I had a fever of one hundred six; that's what Dr. Abrahamson said,” I mumble.

“So we dragged you into the bathroom and threw you into a tub of cold water and ice cubes. That's probably what saved your ass.”

“No,” I say. “That wasn't it at all.”

“O.K., so what was it?”

“A miracle.”

He puts the empty pint glass down on the table with a firm click and restrains himself from comment. Like the rest of them, he thinks I'm still sick, that the fever has affected my reason.

“O.K., whatever you say.” He pushes up from the table and pulls on his jacket. “But right now we need to get you back to the hospital before the doc knows you're gone.”

Rust doesn't believe in miracles. Nor does he believe in God, whom he sees as a big fat lie invented to help people sleep better at night. And while he accepts the existence of ghosts, he believes they are a natural phenomenon, a sort of photographic imprint of past traumatic events on the magnetic field, which will someday be quantified by science. I heard the story of his early disillusionment one night over too many beers at the Horseshoe. Some people get goofy, some violent; when drunk, Rust gets philosophic.

“I was a kid,” he told me, “this is Carswell, Nevada, 1956. My oldest brother, Cyrus, was in the hospital with leukemia brought on by one of
the nuclear tests they were always doing in the desert in those days. It was this rinky-dink hospital, primitive, you know. I got bored with watching the kid die, which didn't happen fast like in the movies, and I wandered away while my parents were talking to the doctor. Well, I ended up down at the morgue just in time to see them dump a barrel full of fetuses into the trash. That was it for me. How could God sit still and watch them dump a barrel of fetuses into the trash? Was life worth about as much as a rotten old orange peel and some coffee grinds? The whole thing didn't make sense. Then in a second I knew there was no God at all. Just an emptiness filled up by people's fears.”

I can't argue with him now because I'm not prepared to examine the consequences of belief myself. Does this mean that I'll have to start going to mass on Sundays and holy days, take communion and confession with the old ladies, stop using profanity as casual punctuation for my sentences, and make use of sex only for the purpose of procreation? And worst of all, will I have to drop my cynicism and cultivate a positive attitude? People live in darkness because they want to, the poet Dante tells us, because they love their sins. For so long the malaise has been my constant companion in life. Can it be that men and women are meant to be happy in the world? It seems unthinkable.

T
HESE CONSIDERATIONS
are far too metaphysical for Dr. Abrahamson. He comes into my room twice a day to draw blood, ask a few questions, record a cool scientific observation on the pad clipped to his steel-backed medical clipboard. But this afternoon the doctor has his hands behind his back, his clipboard under his arm, and a pensive look on his face, as if he's trying to get to the bottom of something big.

“And how do we feel today?” he says.

“We feel fine,” I say. “Just like yesterday and this morning.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot …” His voice trails off.

I have managed to get the aluminum-frame window open and sit on the bed in a breeze from the sea, reading a copy of Eugène Sue's
The Wandering Jew
, checked out from the hospital library. It's an unwieldy tome of some twenty-five hundred pages written by a man who for a time during the nineteenth century was the most popular writer in the world. Dr. Abrahamson leans against the windowsill now, blocking my light and air.

“What are you reading?” he says absently.

“The Wandering Jew,”
I say.

“Yes, that's exactly how I've felt these last few days,” he says. “I've been wandering this hospital, chasing down your tests, trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

“The book's not what you think,” I say. “It's a ridiculous nineteenth-century romance in which the lovers get separated and circle the world in opposite directions, only to catch one last glimpse of each other across the Bering Straits—” But he's not listening.

“I just can't figure it out,” he says.

“The nun,” I say, and put the book aside.

He waves his hand. “A hallucination, a particularly vivid hallucination caused by the fever.”

“And the machine and the tubes and the bracelets?”

“One of the nurses must have thought you were dead and disconnected you. She's just afraid to come forward.”

“Come on, Doctor. That's pretty negligent. Sounds like lawsuit material to me. Malpractice.”

He winces at this comment.

“Just kidding,” I say.

“Another thing,” he continues. “We can't quite pinpoint the strain of the virus, which depends on successive tests. Your blood was black with the stuff; now it's—”

“Perfect?”

“—normal. You were down South recently, am I right?”

“New Orleans.”

“I'll get in touch with public health officials down there. Maybe
they can help out with identifying the strain. New Orleans is a port. It could have come from anywhere. A new strain, or mutated. Hepatitis M, hepatitis Z!” He is excited at the prospect. “Did you drink any polluted water on your trip?”

I shrug.

“Eat any raw shellfish?”

I feel a sinking in my stomach. “Shellfish?”

“Yeah, you know. Oysters, clams, mussels, et cetera.”

“Yes. An oyster bar.”

For a moment he seems disappointed. “O.K., that could explain where you picked up the virus, but it's how you got well that worries me.” Then he leaves the room abruptly, still pensive, hands behind his back.

The next day I am released. Dr. Abrahamson walks me downstairs and out into the hospital parking lot, where Rust is waiting with his new-used pickup truck, bought from an artist friend who has just moved to Williamsburg from Austin, Texas. It's a dented 1959 Ford F-100, dusty red and still wearing its Texas truck tags.

Dr. Abrahamson is a good sport. I've stumped medical science, but he shakes my hand anyway.

“Thanks for your patience, Mr. Conti,” he says, “and good luck.”

When I am halfway to the truck, he calls me back for a moment. This is difficult for him. He looks up at the neon cross on the facade, looks out at the ocean, then looks back at me.

“Ned,” he says, “I am a man educated in the scientific method, I went to Columbia, graduated top of the class in geriatric medicine, I'm a skeptic, a nonpracticing Reform Jew, and I do not believe in miracles. But humor me.”

“O.K.”

“This nun, did she wear a white and blue outfit and was her skin very, very white?”

“Yes,” I say, surprised.

“It's just that a few of the older patients reported seeing her that
same night. This woman on the sixth floor, Mrs. Castafiori, says a nun visited her room and helped her get out of bed. Only thing is, the woman's ninety-three, on intravenous and hasn't walked in six months because of a disintegrating hip joint. Now she's walking up and down the terrace under her own steam, eating solid foods. Says she wants to live to see her great-grandson born, and her granddaughter isn't even pregnant. What do you make of that?”

“I don't know,” I say, and shrug. It's almost too ridiculous.

“What is this nun, the Virgin Mary or something? Who was, I might add, a nice Jewish girl.”

“No,” I say. “I'm not sure. A saint.”

“Which one?”

“She's new,” I say. “An unknown.”

“There are new saints?”

“Yes. They're coming up all the time.”

Dr. Abrahamson and I shake hands again, and I climb into the truck. Rust nods, and we pull out of the parking lot and head back toward town, the beach sky bleached out and mysterious with haze behind.

L
OOP
up the Long Island Expressway, the sun setting red behind Manhattan's daunting profile in the distance.

Rust is silent for a while. Then he takes a pair of sunglasses out of a cubbyhole beneath the dash as if they've always been there. This gesture is like a whole conversation. The truck smells of gasoline and brake lining and old truck, is very loud, and vibrates as if it's got a loose engine mount, but just now there isn't any place I'd rather be. I settle happily into the cracked old vinyl as we rattle over the Kosciusko Bridge and Brooklyn lowers just ahead.

“You know, I've been chewing over some of the things you said,” Rust says, breaking the loud silence.