The Man in the Window (21 page)

Truly, to the hospital personnel gathered around Big Bill’s large and discolored form, choking on a wedding band was not so strange as to be unbelievable. It might not have even seemed so strange to Big Bill, who, at the moment of his death, must have recalled the unfortunate incident of the ice and understood that although his punishment was harsh, it was not unforeseen.

Far stranger for Iris were the whispered words of Harvey Mastuzek, words that had vibrated within her brain throughout the code, as if Harvey had been standing near, his hand cupped to her ear, words that she heard now as she left the code room, made her way past the dark-suited undertakers, and aimed her small thick body toward the room in which Harvey waited. Distracted, therefore, Iris was the only human being in the Emergency Room who didn’t hear the screeching words of the tall, elderly woman who suddenly burst into the ER followed by a veritable parade of people.

“Someone get this boy a doctor!” Francine Koessler’s voice did something electrical and unpleasant to people’s nervous systems. Lab techs, Dotty the ward clerk, the four undertakers, and all of the patients in the waiting area jerked their heads in Francine’s direction and regarded her with open mouths.

“You there,” Francine shouted again, to the one person not paying attention to her. “Nurse, we need you here this instant!” Now Francine entered Iris’s head—that’s what Francine seemed to do, jump right inside Iris’s head. Iris, well past the overload stage, who wouldn’t have been in the mood for someone like Francine on the best of days, and who you certainly did not yell at as if she were a dog, not if you valued your life, whirled around and lowered her head, so that Francine was threatened for the second time in less than twenty minutes by a woman transformed into a bull. Francine realized in an instant that Iris made a far more dangerous bull than had Gracie.

“Easy now, girl.” Dotty tried to calm Iris from the side. “You know how family members get.”

Heedless, Iris advanced toward Francine, accelerating as she moved down the hallway. Francine hurriedly positioned herself behind the only thing capable of stopping Iris, and that was Louis, in his baseball hat and purple scarf, who indeed stopped Iris dead in her tracks. He took a step forward, supported on one side by Carl, and on the other by Bert, and nodded to Iris, because he recognized her. How could he not, for she had been the first woman, aside from Gracie, to whom he had spoken in sixteen years. And Iris recognized him, how could she not, the man in the scarf and hat, who had spoken as if he’d emerged from a coma, rusty and reborn, who had the urgent all-seeing eyes of a paralyzed man. He was here, her Lawrence of Arabia. He had crossed his desert for her.

“Oh, my, my,” said Dotty in a low voice, because she recognized Louis too. She lived in Waverly, as did the undertakers and many of the hospital employees and patients in the waiting area. They all knew of Louis, knew of his scarf and hat, his sixteen hidden years. Their eyes were upon him. They were so intent, so excited and dismayed by his presence, they forgot to breathe. Louis could actually feel it, the oxygen around him that went unused, that entered his own lungs and made him dizzy with its richness. They stared at him. Dotty tried to speak again but could bring no sound to her words, not that she even knew what words she had meant to say. The undertakers momentarily forgot that Big Bill lay dying or dead in the next room. A lab tech who had been shaking a vial of newly drawn blood was shaking it still but didn’t know it, didn’t see as Louis did that her arm going up and down, up and down, was the only thing moving in the Emergency Room. The patients back in the waiting area, with their bruised knees, and their stove burns, and infected ears, and sprained tendons, they stared at Louis, too, unbreathing, and forgot their own injuries, for they either knew in fact from the legend of Louis, or if they’d never heard of Louis, they knew instinctively from his overwhelming presence, that neither their individual pains, nor the collective mass of their pains, were
equal to whatever lay beneath that hat, behind that scarf, and within those frightened eyes.

A short, high-pitched scream broke the spell that Louis had cast over the Emergency Room. It came from behind the closed door of room 3, the code room. Inez, not known for her personal courage or her tact, appeared wide-eyed in the doorway and practically shouted into the faces of Jim Rose and his fellow undertakers:

“He moved!”

“Daddy’s alive?” Jim Rose pressed forward.

Inez shook her head. “No, he’s dead. But he still moved.” She rushed past the undertakers and into the locker room to find a piece of bubble gum to calm her nerves. Big Bill had not just twitched a little, as many corpses do, which probably wouldn’t have sent Inez skittering out of the room; no, Big Bill had momentarily emerged from the realm of the dead and moved as purposefully, it had appeared to the code team, as a living man. He had suddenly reached his big hand, the fingernails purple in death, out from under the sheet which Winnie had just pulled over him, and slapped it stiffly down on top of the instrument tray that lay on the rolling table beside his stretcher, the instrument tray that held scalpels, hemostats, syringes, and, of course, Norman Keeston’s ring. As if the condition of rigor mortis were occurring before their eyes, Big Bill’s fingers curled and closed around the ring. Even in death, it seemed, Big Bill sensed the nearness of gold, and sought to acquire it.

Inez’s performance took the focus temporarily off of Louis, and everyone in the room breathed again. The lab tech stopped shaking her vial, the patients remembered their injuries and cradled them, and Dotty the ward clerk was able to speak.

She shook her head and said to no one in particular, “Somebody please tell me what in hell is going on in my ER this afternoon?” Then she called over to Iris. “Supposed to be a full moon tonight? Must be an extra full moon coming tonight.”

Gracie emerged from the group that surrounded Louis and took a tentative step or two toward Iris, hesitated, then continued forward.

“Excuse me,” Gracie said, looking down at Iris.

Iris looked back up at her, somewhat vaguely, and then she slowly cleared. She glanced again at Louis, then returned to Gracie. “He’s hurt?” Iris said. Then she realized that was a foolish question. “I mean, of course he is, or you wouldn’t have brought him here, right?”

“That’s right,” Gracie said. “He had an accident.”

Iris peered around Gracie again. “His arm, huh?”

“Yes we think”—Gracie gestured at her neighbors—“that it’s probably broken.”

“That’s a lot of people come with him. You’re his mom?”

Gracie nodded.

“And all those people… relatives?”

“No,” said Gracie. “Neighbors. Involved in his rescue. Who felt they should accompany him.”

“Jeez, that’s a lot of people.”

Francine had broken off from the group and was already relating, in excited detail, the story of Louis to a friend she had spotted in the waiting area. Her arms flapped as she spoke.

Iris, with Gracie at her side, approached Louis. She was unable to look at him from so close a distance. She looked instead at his arm. “I’m Iris Shula,” she said softly. She gently lifted Louis’s shirtsleeve.

“I’m Louis Malone,” Louis managed through his teeth. Even her whisper touch caused crackles of pain.

“Definitely broken. Definitely,” Iris said. “Okay, you want to come back with me to room 4?”

“But these other patients, in the waiting room, aren’t they before me?”

“We treat you according to the severity of your injury. Mostly that room’s full of bug bites and little cuts. You got a good-size break, and you’re trembling and your skin’s kind of
cool, all symptoms of early shock. You need to be seen.” It was easier for Iris to talk to him when she adopted her no-nonsense nurse tone.

Carl and Bert, on either side of Louis, and Gracie, Bev, Donna, and Kitty took a step or two forward. Francine saw them and hurried over. Iris put her hand out. “No, no. I’m afraid you people will have to wait here.”

That was it? You mean we have to hand him over? Disappointment swept through the group. Francine said in a little voice, not wanting to rile Iris, “But, you know, we were the ones rescued him.”

Iris hesitated, then said, “I’m sure you did, ma’am. But you see, he’s here now. You’ve done your part, and now we have to do our part.” She waited, as if for a group of children to relinquish the treasure they deeply desired but knew they could not keep.

Carl, whose lead the others had followed since Louis had landed in the tulip bed, took the first step away from Louis, slowly released his arm. Louis felt the sudden absence of Carl’s touch and missed it terribly. On his other side, Bert let go. For a brief instant, Louis felt lighter than air, adrift, as he had been at the moment he left his window and gravity had not yet found him, so that he was unsure whether he would fall or rise. Gravity found him now in the form of Iris, solid and low to the ground. She reached up and took hold of him. When she touched him, Louis knew at once that he was earthbound, that in her grasp he would not be allowed to drift.

“I got you,” she said. “You hold on to me, and I’ll hold on to you.”

Everyone in the Emergency Room watched. They had never seen anything like it, such a fit. A pair mismatched to all but each other. That’s what Louis and Iris looked like, briefly, as they moved slowly down the hall together toward room 4—a pair, a couple enwrapped in one another’s arms, on a stroll. What a couple. Iris, whose physical limitations were utterly apparent, low and slightly stooped Iris. And at her side, looming above
her, Louis, his misfortunes unapparent, and therefore dreadful because of what was not revealed but only hinted at by the scarf that adhered to the misshapen contours of his hidden face.

Someone, it didn’t matter who because it might have come from any one of the watchers, let out a high, sharp laugh, like the bark of a seal. Several people put their hands to their mouths, thinking the sound had come from them. Iris and Louis kept moving; they had not heard, or heard and knew, as only such a pair of people would know, that in that laughter there was no joy or approval. That laughter was like a dog’s smile that is not a smile at all, but a frightened show of teeth. Gracie turned and looked at the watchers in the waiting room, and they all wore dog smiles. Then she turned again and opened her mouth as if to call out a warning to Louis and Iris, but they had disappeared into room 4.

Someone touched Gracie’s elbow and said, “They’ll be all right. You take it from ol’ Herb, they’ll be just fine.”

Gracie stared at the old security guard smiling up at her with his gappy dentures. There was nothing dangerous in his smile, and she felt comforted for a brief moment. She was about to thank him, but he was suddenly off, tipping his hat to her before he stepped through a door beside the Coke machine and vanished.

Iris helped Louis up onto the stretcher in room 4. She stepped back and hesitated before she spoke. She glanced at him, and he glanced at her, then they both stared down at the linoleum floor.

“I’m going to have to take a look now,” she said.

When he lifted his good arm and pressed his hand against the scarf that hid his face, she shook her head and said, “No, no, I didn’t mean that. Not there. Your arm. I’m going to have to get a good look at your arm. I’ll have to cut off part of your shirt. Okay? So I don’t have to move your arm around. Okay?”

Louis slowly nodded. “Okay.”

Iris worked carefully with a pair of bandage scissors, cutting the shirtsleeve well above the break in Louis’s forearm. He
watched her, sitting erect and still on the edge of the stretcher as she worked on him.

He said, “Were you here sixteen years ago?”

She finished with his sleeve and bent close to look at his arm. “Seems to be a clean break. Big bump, but clean. I’ll have to get Dr. Gunther to look at it, and we’ll have to get you to X-ray for some films.” She wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his good arm. “Sixteen years ago? No. I just been here a couple years. What was sixteen years ago?”

“Just wondering,” Louis said.

“Oh,” said Iris. “Well, no, I wasn’t here then.”

“But it was you I saw?”

“Sixteen years ago?” said Iris.

“No, at the end of last summer. In the parking lot. The cemetery.”

“That was me, yeah. You remember that?”

“I remember everything. Most everything, anyway. I don’t get out much, you see, so it’s important I remember.” Louis shifted on the stretcher and felt a warmth growing on the part of his face that was not numb. What was he saying?

Iris said, “Why don’t you get out much?”

“Because,” Louis said after a minute, “because I stay inside a lot.” Then he added, “More than most people, I guess.”

“Oh.” She inflated the blood pressure cuff. “You keep to yourself, then, is what you’re saying.”

“Yes,” said Louis. “That’s it exactly. I keep to myself.” For sixteen years. But he didn’t say it.

“Sometimes that’s best,” Iris said, writing his pressure on the ER sheet. Her hand was trembling slightly, and she had trouble fitting the numbers in the correct column.

Neither of them spoke. Iris pretended to write more numbers in columns. Louis crossed, then uncrossed his legs. Iris heard herself suddenly say, “I don’t get out all that much either, really.”

Louis watched his legs crossing and uncrossing. “So that when you do,” he said, “when you finally do, it becomes… it
becomes…” He stopped. Unbearable, he did not say. It becomes almost unbearable to be amidst what you have gazed upon season after season, to touch what you have only seen for sixteen years, to speak not sentences in a dream where the words have always been from me to me, but in ordinary tones, in sounds that rise from my chest and pass between what is left of my scarred lips and reach you, you there inches before my face, you there in pure white whom I must not mistake for a white vision, another vision in the endless visions that have filled my hours.

Iris looked at him and frowned. She was not having any of this. This… this what, she didn’t understand, but whatever this feeling was, she wasn’t having any of it, not about this patient, one of the endless patients who filled her hours. Iris, so firmly of the world, who slept dreamlessly, had no time to wonder about this patient, who would pass before her and be healed, or not be healed, but either way would be gone.