Small Changes (23 page)

She felt like screaming, Come off it, Phil, this is no time to play games! But she realized, staring into the chips of glass that were his eyes, that he was too far into his trip to understand. A queasy horror settled on her. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to turn to the wall and close her eyes. If only the phone had not worked. If only Allegra had lost the number.

“Phil, listen to me. Sweetheart, listen. I didn’t go away because I wanted to. My sister called. My mother is very, very sick now. I have to go to the hospital where she is.”

“Why?”

“She’s dying.”

“She’s been dying all summer. Let them all die. Do you think they care about us?”

“Phil, she’s my
mother.
I have to go. She’s in a coma.”

“Unconscious. But I’m conscious … That’s the sharpest pain … Time is static and I’m stuck … like a fly in honey.… Petrified. Time … is glass. If you leave me stuck here, I’ll be stuck forever, forever stuck, forever and ever and ever stuck.” He was breathing heavily, kneading the folds of his belly.

“Are you in pain?”

“Yes. Pain. Terrible cramps. Inside the tunnel in waves.”

She could not tell if he was in physical pain or frightened into pain: but that was a meaningless distinction.

“I think … I’m dying. I’m very sick, Miriam. Something terrible is happening to me. I’m being carried along. Something terrible like a storm is carrying me. I’m afraid, listen! Something’s gone wrong! I can’t get back.”

“Sha, Phil, shhh.” She cradled him against her, kneeling, facing him. He was hurling himself to and fro and she had to hold on with all her might. Fear came off him pungent as ammonia. She tried to control her own rising panic. What could be wrong? Sometimes the acid was cut with other drugs, bad drugs, sometimes with strychnine. Perhaps he was poisoned. Perhaps the pains in his belly were from poison and not from bad vibrations or bad visions or tensions. She did not know what to do. She wanted to run out of the room and get help, but she had no idea where to turn. She could not leave him like this: she could not stay. Should she take him to the hospital with her? “Phil, maybe we should get dressed.”

“Clothes bind the body. No clothes. Close the body’s eyes.
Keep-out signs. Can’t get into you, can’t touch you. No more clothes.”

The hospital would not do. He might start to freak out there. She would not be able to protect him. She could not take him with her. She was briefly furious with herself for considering the possibility: false hope that she could meet all obligations, satisfy everyone, make it all come out well. Do every duty. It was now forty-five minutes since Allegra had called and she was not out the door. She remembered a piece of folklore to the effect that vitamin pills would bring somebody down from a bad trip. She disentangled herself long enough to search the medicine cabinet and the kitchen. She found only vitamin C against colds. She fed that to him and he took it placidly enough with a glass of water, but nothing happened.

Seven twenty-four. She was sitting cross-legged on the mattress and he was lying with his head on her thigh, weeping occasional fat tears and blowing his nose copiously. “I see it now. Yes. For both of us. How we have to open. Give birth to ourselves, to each other. Then we can love all the way open. Trusting, that’s been hard. Because of my old man. Because of her going and turning into some damn bourgeois housewife after all we went through together. Jackson running off after he promised me. Now you want to leave me. Everybody wants to leave me.”

If only she could know how far into self-pity he was, how objective the need, how violent the pains. To measure people against each other was distasteful. But there was only one of her, feeling guiltier every minute. Her body made goose pimples when he stroked it. Suppose Sonia was dying right now. Suppose Sonia was already dead. Suppose Sonia was calling for her. Suppose she got dressed and he ran after her naked into East Tenth Street and got hit by a truck. Suppose she never saw him again because he could not forgive her for deserting him on a bad trip.

He had dropped the acid about two-thirty, three. He could be up for hours. He could be up for the rest of the night. She could not wait. If only she could step outside the time stream and see what would happen and make the wise decision. Each would weigh her decision as weighing her love, but she was only trying to judge their needs. She did not think she actively loved Sonia any longer, but she could remember loving
her. She could remember Sonia as the sun that warmed her world from the center, the milky heart, the lap of roundness and comfort. There was still in her the little girl who could not lie to her mommy.

“Phil, I’ll be right back. Five minutes. I’m only going upstairs. Phil, I’ll be right back.” She got dressed and ran up the dim steps, past the charred railing from the fire the janitor before Jackson had started while drunk, up to 4B.

“Who is it?” Woman’s voice close to the door, suspicious.

“I’m a friend of Phil’s. You know, the janitor. He’s sick downstairs. Please come.”

With a clanking of bolts and turning over of locks the door at last opened on its chain wide enough for an eye at the crack. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

“I’m a friend of Phil’s. He’s sick downstairs. I have to leave now. Please come down.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He took a pill that’s made him sick. He’s upset.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a friend. I’m Miriam.”

“Oh, the collegiate princess from Flatbush, how do you do?” The woman pulled out the steel rod of the police lock and swung the door open. Miriam had expected her to be middle-aged, the way they talked about her, but she was at the most in her late twenties, probably not even as old as Jackson and three or four years older than Phil. She had been sitting on the fire escape eating peanuts and she still carried the bag, wearing faded shorts on good tanned legs and a white T-shirt. Bleached hair and soft brown eyes and brows plucked thin, her face was anxious with suspicion. A slight limp showed as she followed Miriam down. Phil was lying awry against one wall, his eyes clenched shut and his hand scrabbling at the sheets.

“Naked as a jaybird.” With that limp she minced across the mattress on high-heeled sandals to poke him with a foot. “What’s wrong with you? Anything real? Come off it.”

He sprawled on his back holding the side she had kicked. He stared at her blankly, then cowered. “Kill me. Eat my guts out. Suck my body dry.”

“Whats’ wrong with him? Some pill he took! Are you sure he isn’t drunk? Sounds like the D.T.s.”

“He took acid.” When the woman went on looking at her, she continued. “L.S.D., you know.”

“Oh well, no wonder. That stuff’s illegal. They’re always peddling that crap down on the street. Well, what are we supposed to do with him?”

“My mother’s in the hospital. I got a phone call. I have to go there—”

“I’ll bet.” The plucked eyebrows raised. “How many times do you think you can get away with that one? Who gave him this L.S.D.?”

“Look, she’s been in the hospital all summer. She’s got cancer. My sister called me here an hour and a half ago. I promised I’d leave immediately, but he won’t let me go. I’m scared to leave him alone. Please, just sit with him. Don’t let him harm himself. I’ll come back as soon as I can. I don’t even know if she’s still alive—but if I don’t go now she’ll never forgive me and I’ll hate myself.”

4B reluctantly agreed, though she kept her face screwed up to indicate she wasn’t taken in by any such stories, and Miriam ran toward Second Avenue to get a cab. The first one that stopped pushed her out, telling her to fuck off when she asked him to go to Brooklyn. The second wouldn’t let her in till he found out where she was going, and when he heard he gunned the motor and charged off, leaving her to catch her balance. The third she jumped in and started screaming hysterically that her mother was dying! The cabbie was furious but he was young and not as experienced at the game as the others, so he agreed to take her to the hospital for an extra two bucks over the meter.

Everybody was sitting in the hall waiting: her father, Allegra, Mark still in his ball-playing clothes, and even her mother’s friend Judy, who had been there since late afternoon.

“So you finally got here,” Lionel said. “Well, well. We couldn’t expect you to hurry, of course.”

“I couldn’t get a cab to take me. I had to come on the subway. How is she?”

“Bad. Very bad. Who knows? They don’t tell you a thing.”

About three in the morning the night nurse came by to say that they might as well go home, because Sonia’s condition was not likely to change. She promised they would be
called. Early in the morning Sonia regained consciousness briefly. At least the woman in the next bed thought so, although the nurse doubted her. By the time they arrived again she was back under. Miriam went to a pay phone in the lobby to call Philip.

No answer. But there had to be an answer. Phil had to be there. It was early. She dialed again. Again. Still no answer. Probably the stupid phone wasn’t working. He had to be there. But she believed he had run off. She believed he had disappeared. Something terrible had happened. He had run into the street and been hit by one of the cabs that would not stop for her. The woman from 4B had called the police. He was in jail. He had hitchhiked off to Mexico to join Jackson in myth.

She had not even the satisfaction of crisis. Sonia had not died, or, if she had, not technically. It was becoming evident that Sonia might never regain consciousness. She was being kept somewhat alive by machines that had taken over the duties of her failing organs. They digested for her and excreted for her and cleansed her body of its wastes. The nurses tended her vacant body. Sonia might wake up at any moment remembering nothing. Or she might come to and call for her family. Or nothing at all might happen but that the machines would go on changing her fluids and what had been her mother would lie there in the rented bed.

Lionel had a social engagement in the Bronx that night. He went home first to change. As soon as he was gone, she ran to the subway to go into town. She had to find out what was happening. Probably Phil was too angry at her to answer his phone. She would appear there. She would make him love her again. She would make it all right, somehow, somehow!

When she buzzed him there was no response. She let herself in with her key. Boxes tied up on the kitchen table, “Phil! Phil!”

A man came out of the John zipping up his pants. “Who the hell are you?”

“I could say the same, but I won’t. You’re Jackson.”

He was taller than Phil and thin but more solidly built, darker and grizzled. He was homely and glaring at her, doing up his belt. A loose washed-out blue work shirt hung open. “I suppose you’re his girl. That was a hell of a trick, running out on him in the middle of a bad trip.”

“You make a lot of assumptions. Where is he?”

“What do you care?” He rubbed his head vacantly. He seemed idiotic, drawling his words and scratching himself all over his hairy chest while he gaped at her.

“What I care is nothing to you. Where is Phil?”

“Where did you expect him to go?”

“Do you always play stupid games?”

“He thought a lot of you. You let him down.”

“Go fuck yourself, you stupid prig! What do you know what happened, you creep! Were you here? No, you were farting around Mexico, leaving me to take care of him alone on a bad trip—caused by his anxiety over going to Boston and his so-called friend who didn’t get back when he promised to! My mother is in the hospital dying of cancer and I had to go there, you creepy, self-righteous, tight-assed schmuck!”

“Your mother?”

“Why do you suppose I had to leave? I left him with that woman in 4B you fuck. She was supposed to stay with him. Now I want to know where is he and what happened.”

“He’s in Bellevue.”

“Oh, no. What’s he doing there?”

“Under psychiatric observation. Your friend—”

“Yours, if you mean 4B, you—”

“I wouldn’t leave a sick kitten with her. Anyhow, she freaked when he started running around. He tried to slash his wrists, though I don’t think he tried hard.”

“Why didn’t you get back on time?”

“Who said it was like catching a plane? School doesn’t start for two weeks. Anyhow, I’m fired. I’m out of a job and Phil’s in the hospital, and if it isn’t your fault, who can I blame? In situations of this sort, someone is traditionally a scapegoat. We could use Wendy—that’s 4B.”

“I’m sure she did what she could—how was she supposed to know what to do? Did you ever give her lessons?”

“Why didn’t you give him some B vitamins?”

“Why didn’t you fly a kite? What are you being so smartassed about, with him in the hospital now too?”

“It’s not the first time nor, I expect, the last. I was growing tired of being a janitor anyhow. I’m too tall for basement work, and the damp was starting to mold my books. And maybe me. It’s as well to clear out”

“How can you stand around here scratching yourself like a senile monkey? How do we get him out?”

He began to laugh. “Maybe you are something else. Maybe.”

“Just shut your face about me. I have enough troubles. Now take me where he is.”

“We can’t get in to see him today. However, tomorrow. How would you like to take a senile monkey home with you?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Never saner. I’m kicked out. I’m fired as of two days ago. Looking for a place to sleep.”

“Not with my family. You wouldn’t appreciate, they wouldn’t appreciate. Enough trouble. What happened to that guy Phil used to live with, Donald Duck?”

Jackson shrugged. “Possible. Let me call. If I end up there, we can go see Phil tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to hang around. I’m going back to the hospital. Here, this is my home number. I’ll go in with you tomorrow.”

He took the slip of paper and tried to hold her gaze, seeming about to speak, but she did not wait to hear. She left at once for the subway. It was a hot day, like summer again, in the nineties. The streets were crowded, people jammed on the sidewalks, men lounging at the corners and in the doorways and on the stoops. Every five steps some guy tried to pinch her, invited her to suck his prick, made loud wet noises with his lips, talked about her as pussy and tried to block her way. She had to walk faster and faster and by the time she dived hostile and jittery into the smarmy murk of the subway she had broken into a heavy sweat. She could not decide whether she should go back home or to the hospital, but having a reservoir of guilt that never seemed to run dry, she decided on the hospital.