A New Installment: Ghost Chapters From The Green Books, #8 - Time to go/Wait for me, May, 2020.
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Read new installment here! Ghost Chapters From The Green Books are the logs I kept after Nick died. They may be included in the book I am writing as a gift for him. When I slip his book into his great grandfathers bookcase the book will be delivered.
Time to go/Wait for me, May, 2020: 5/3/20
“We don’t know that the pandemic has already left Wuhan on February 10th when we are in that crazy first room at Mount Sinai Hospital. It is flu season in New York, and Covid has started arriving on planes. The entire place is an emergency. Nurses and doctors and social workers run back and forth down the hall outside of our door. This floor is just a step down from the Intensive Care Unit, which is a relief until I realize it’s because they’ve run out of ICU beds, and are making do. It is one thing for me to hang onto, that you are not technically in the ICU.
Can you hear the noise of the machines sucking and pinging, whirring, gasping? Alarm bells going off on the ventilator, on the bed, on the IV, and in the hallway outside, each with a slightly different, but terrifying tone? You are at a heavily sedated distance. The noise partly buffered by the rhythmic whooshes of air, in and out of your lungs given through a blue plastic mouthpiece, connected to an long white accordion tube, connected to a machine on a pole in the corner that is not a ventilator. Not a ventilator.
I’m not sure you are even aware of the man behind the curtain next to us. He never shows himself, never speaks. Does he even have a face? He has a constant stream of visitors, teenagers mostly, who walk past us single-file to get to his bed, with heavy looks in their eyes. I get the vibe that he is a Puerto Rican drug dealer or gang guy from the conversations I overhear: - Hey, man, all is forgiven - It doesn’t matter what you did - Just get well - That’s the point now, etc. - But he never replies, and it never sounds re-assuring. More like threats from old B movie scripts.
Periodically nurses rush out shouting and return with mops and buckets, swearing out loud. I learn that our roommate’s visitors are kicking over his urine bottles and bedpans for fun. Throwing the piss and shit on the floor and sometimes at the walls. I don’t know who is doing what behind the curtain just three feet away from us. But it is a declaration of fury. The rebellion of animals in a cage. Periodically liquid runs under my chair and my shoes are sticky when I shift them. I sit with you in the middle of this chaos. This is real life. This is the room where we will be married.
I don’t want to leave you, but I have to go to Chinatown to get our emergency marriage papers. Millions have just traveled to China to celebrate their New Year, but there aren’t any restrictions on flights back into New York. I already understand that this is a catastrophe. In another month most of the world will be closed. No-one is wearing masks yet. It may be why the Chinese marriage clerk sits huddled on his side of the back seat of the taxis. He must come with me and collect your signature in-person. From the hospital uptown on 111th street I travel down the East Side Highway to Center Street at the bottom of the Manhattan Island to collect him and ride back uptown. He also seems afraid. We ride in silence. My eyes are nearly swollen shut from crying. He barely speaks and certainly never looks directly at me. Maybe he is being culturally sensitive. What should he say to a woman who is marrying a man who is dying?
The marriage bureau on Center Street spans a whole city block. After brass revolving doors and security checks I take a number and am sent to the desk at the very end of the building. The lobby is one long Art Deco room, unchanged for a hundred years. A high-backed upholstered bench runs the entire length of the great room, and crystal chandeliers hang from the coffered ceilings. At intervals on the bench, or in alcoves off to the other side, I pass couples in their wedding outfits with shiny shoes, holding flowers and phones to take pictures. When I reach the desk for people whose spouses are about to die I am quickly ushered into a back office by a woman so comforting I am convinced she might solve the conflict in Palestine if given the opportunity. I fall into her arms. She leads me to an ancient bureaucratic leather couch and asks me to wait. When any second might be the last. To wait!
When I return to the hospital exhausted from my trips you can still talk to me, Nick. I marvel at that now. I took that for granted. All those hours when you could still speak, drink sips of coffee from a cup, hold my hand and smile, watch The Office with me on your laptop, call me to ask if I am ever coming back - those are hours where I have to be the carrier of papers in taxi cabs up and down the length of Manhattan. All for the purpose of legally securing me to your house on Pleasant Lane. The last and only Grimshaw possession worth giving a damn about. You want to give it to me. I don’t know if I can ever forgive either of us, but especially myself, for putting that marriage ahead of our last conscious hours together.
“I have to go! I have to go and get all of the papers!” I cry out helplessly to you and our friend Maggie each day. I can see the look in both of your eyes. You must have told her by then that you had to go, and that you didn’t know how to tell me. Maggie is a kind of sprite. Tiny, fragile, with beautiful sparkling eyes, and a well-kept mystery about her. She arrives silently, and I find her sitting by your side just when you need her, holding your hand. Her husband died in the same hospital fifteen years ago, and she decided to become a chaplain so she would never have to leave. What a blessing to have an AA friend who is also a chaplain at the very hospital you are dying in. You and I have some tremendous luck, Nicholas.
Maggie takes me to that awful little lounge down the hall with no place to lie down and rest. Just more bureaucratic vinyl couches with hard wood arms, made expressly to prevent resting. Only a soda machine, and a TV hung very high up on a wall, to comfort a series of exhausted nurses and stunned relatives who stare at smart phones or try to sleep. Why is America like this? The betrayal is so brutal. There are huge modern atriums with ceilings of glass in this hospital. Open space rises in the middle of large balconies that look down on climbing greenery and smooth marble floors. All that empty space is just propaganda when the “lounge” is so small. The room for rest seems to have been cut off at a strange angle, dismembered from a larger room, so that it is not even a real room. You are the only real thing in the whole place, Nicholas. Maggie tells me in this room that you don’t know how to tell me. It is time for you to go.
I still don’t understand. I still have the piece of paper on the clipboard where you wrote it out in the hospital: “I want to die - Now.” As if you could command it. In a ragged hand. The black at the end of the film. Curtain closes. Fin. How could it have been that excruciating? How did you make that decision in the condition you were in? How did we let you? Did you know it would take four more days to accomplish? When did you know, and why couldn’t you tell me sooner? Thinking about this makes my belly burn even now, and I want to vomit.
Now I’m hanging in my basket chair from Cousin Judy’s Katsura tree, which is halfway through making its leaves of lace. All is turning green in the garden out back. The first Hellebore is up! The neighbors have opened their pool and their neurotic dogs bark at themselves on their meticulous chemical lawn. Every day I loathe the neighbors a little bit more. I’m not sure exactly how or why, but I know they killed you with their toxic yard spraying.
East Hampton hasn’t stopped, it’s still one of the noisiest places, even in lockdown. The army of leaf blowers has started their campaign to rid each plot of green of every trace of brown decay. I can still hear the rush of cars on Main Street that sound like the ocean. The automatic bells of the Presby church on Main street chime. The sidewalks are littered with cast-off rubber Covid gloves. The internet is so slow my phone gets no reception in the house anymore. It’s the beginning of May, and now everything must be accomplished in less than a month for our 100,000 summer visitors.
My days are entirely filled with numbers and papers, as I walk through the slim options of trying to either save the house from foreclosure, or leave your house, and not yet knowing which it will be. I wait for a sign. Every week a small notice is scotch- taped to the front door. Am I still in residence at the property? Such a nice way for the reverse mortgage company to keep in touch. I yell at a scotch-taper who is slithering away one day. - Hey! Do you think you could stop doing this? - I ask. Especially during lockdown. It is scaring me. They yell they are sorry, it’s their job, before driving away.
I am so afraid to leave the house on Pleasant Lane. To forget, to move even an inch further away from you. I am afraid that I will return to my old self, the person I was before I knew you and you loved me. Unformed, unloved, un-blessed. I’m not sure I will have a book at all when I have written all of this down, or whether it will just be a series of love letters.
I sit with you in your office today, three months later, as I do most days. I ring the black Zen chime that Dortothy gave us. I open the God box you made me before you knew you loved me — but really you knew anyway — and I take your Persephone coin from her red velvet bed inside. I kiss it. I sit with you in time and hope to meet halfway. Boy, am I going to be mad at you if you aren’t waiting for me at the end of time. Or, when I am porous enough to travel on the same frequency you are. That is an actual real threat. From me to you.”
This is tremendous, Kara. The movement here in details, emotions and time are done so, so well. There is angst here but it transforms from frustration, impending doom, anger, anticipation, loss. The time collapse in the last paragraphs, going from urgent to sitting with memory is exquisite. Thank you so much for this, Kara.
“ Every day I loathe the neighbors a little bit more. I’m not sure exactly how or why, but I know they killed you with their toxic yard spraying.” I am with you every breathless step of the way through this devastating journey — what a story of love - it must be told ! And the way you tell it takes us with you……