The Man in the Next Bed Read online

  David K. Shipler

  The Man in the Next Bed

  David K. Shipler reported for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 in New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C. He is the author of seven books, including the bestsellers Russia and The Working Poor, as well as Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he has taught at Princeton, American University, and Dartmouth. He writes online at The Shipler Report.

  ALSO BY DAVID K. SHIPLER

  Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword

  Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America

  The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties

  The Working Poor: Invisible in America

  A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America

  Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land

  Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams

  The Man in the Next Bed

  David K. Shipler

  A Vintage Short

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

  New York

  Copyright © 2019 by David K. Shipler Living Trust

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Vintage Books eShort ISBN 9781984899644

  Series cover design by Megan Wilson

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by David K. Shipler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Man in the Next Bed

  Gibson, in the gray haze of hospital sleep, was nudged by an unfamiliar sound that made his eyelids squint open. Heavy from oxycodone. On his right, the blurry, billowing curtain between the beds was being drawn closed. It made a whirring swish. Ah, little wheels racing along the curved track on the ceiling. So that was it. He closed his eyes.

  Then the cursed lights went on. They were bringing in someone else, past his bed near the door to the empty one beside the window. His night of privacy was over.

  There were things Gibson actually loved about being in the hospital: the gadgets, all the electronic whistles and toys that surrounded him, that were attached to him by wires and tubes or were carried about by staff. Like Star Trek’s hologram doctor, nurses probed him with little devices just bigger than cell phones to measure his temperature, his creatinine, his blood’s oxygen level, his blood pressure and heart rate, scan the bar code on his wristband, and then scan a new bag of intravenous fluid to confirm a match.

  Gibson didn’t let a gizmo go by without asking about it. He was a shiny-bald, cheerfully moonfaced, nerdy engineer, recently retired from his job but not from his passion to know what made things tick. He peppered the nurses with questions that delayed their rounds but pleased them, and as they lingered for conversation, he asked about their work and training and families. He liked to know what made people tick, too. He brightened their shifts with sassy little jokes.

  “What’s this for?” he asked Sally, an ample night nurse who handed him a little paper cup with two white pills.

  “It’s for pain,” she said.

  “What if I don’t want pain?” he asked. And after a beat of confusion in her eyes, she gave a big guffaw, and they laughed together past his throbbing soreness, her fatigue, and the uncertain futures of all the patients on the oncology floor.

  When his distinguished surgeon came in with a somber expression to tell him the results of his brain scan, Gibson tensed. “Not good news,” the doctor said. “There’s a tumor, about three centimeters, in a place we can’t operate on, I’m afraid.”

  Gibson waved his hand dismissively. “Well, cancel my appointment at Burberry’s.” The doctor failed to smile, even a little, so Gibson looked hard at the doc’s controlled face and said, “I’d hate to play poker with you.” The surgeon cleared his throat, gave Gibson a coldly sympathetic gaze, and said he’d be back with some thoughts about how to proceed with chemo and perhaps radiation. Then he glided quickly out of the room.

  Gibson had only his brother to tell. No wife, no children, only a few friends close enough. He left voice mails that August afternoon, but people were probably on vacation somewhere. His cell phone didn’t ring, and after his evening meal was delivered, he resolved to find interludes of sleep between the intrusions of hospital routine—although he had written a little sign on a piece of paper and had a nurse tape it to the door: “If I’m asleep, please wake me up. I’d like to talk.”

  When the lights glared on that night, he had a quick glimpse of the man they were bringing to the next bed. The curtain, a blue-and-white paisley design more fitting for a shower, had been pulled from between the heads of the beds past the feet until it reached close to the far wall and turned to the right. Another curtain, to his left, blocked the door from his sight. His view was limited to an opening straight down past the foot of his bed, between the two curtains, where he caught a fleeting vignette of his new roommate as he passed.

  He seemed younger than anyone else in the oncology wing, and he walked on his own, followed closely by two men in pale green uniforms with small patches high on their sleeves. From then on, the narrow line of sight seemed like a tiny stage on which actors moved rapidly from the wings in both directions, as the drama played quite audibly from stage left. For the curtain provided only privacy of image, not of sound, and even Gibson, whose poor hearing gave him trouble eavesdropping in restaurants, had no difficulty following every word of conversation in this acoustically perfect room.

  “Date of birth?” asked an orderly who had whisked across the stage. The standard question of identity; Gibson had answered it so many times that he’d begun to doubt his own accuracy, not to mention the question’s relevance. It sought only the fact of when, not why, who, how, or whether. But while he toyed with the impish thought of changing his birth date every time someone asked, he suppressed the prank beneath a worry of losing his truth and seeing his identity escape unmoored in a drift of hospital errors.

  “June 15, 1985,” said a man behind the curtain.

  “Name?”

  “Thomas Sanguino.”

  Then another man’s voice: “Could you please sign here? It shows we brought you from Northern Medical.”

  “Nice ride in the ambulance,” said Thomas Sanguino.

  The uniformed actors passed quickly across Gibson’s stage, and he closed his eyes again, hoping to sink, sink, sink into sleep.

  “Are you comfortable, Tommy?” It was a woman’s voice. “Do you want this pillow?”

  “No, I’m okay.” A pause. “I’m thirsty, though.”

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  Gibson opened his eyes in time to see a plump young woman move calmly across his stage and out the door.

  “What are ya in for?” Gibson asked, the way prisoners ask new inmates. No answer from beyond the curtain. “Hey, Tommy? I’m Gibson. What ailment brings you to this tem
ple of medical brilliance?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ve got a brain tumor, if you’re curious, and had a piece of my lung taken out.”

  Silence. Then, “Sorry to hear that.”

  The plump woman made another cameo appearance as she returned holding a large cup. From the lid, Gibson could see, there protruded one of those cool bendable straws. He suppressed a wisecrack about regression into childhood, which Tommy would probably appreciate only after he’d been here awhile.

  “Thanks, Ellie.”

  “The nurses said a doctor would be coming in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Gibson dozed off. He was pulled up rudely by the matter-of-fact, professional voice of a medical inquisitor who was drawing out the disjointed pieces of the new patient’s puzzle beyond the curtain.

  “No,” Tommy said. “Just blood.”

  “No stool?”

  “No, just blood.”

  “And was there blood in your previous bowel movement?”

  “No.”

  “We’re going to take some blood for labs to see what’s going on.”

  A whimpering groan from behind the curtain. “I—I don’t want a needle,” Tommy said. “I don’t do well with needles.”

  “He has a needle phobia.” It was Ellie’s voice.

  “This is my fiancée,” Tommy explained. “She’s a nursing student.”

  The doctor, with a touch of impatience: “We need to find out whether you have internal bleeding. The nurse who will take this is excellent. You won’t feel anything more than a tiny prick, if that.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “It will be okay,” said Ellie gently. “Just hold my hand. Squeeze it if you need to. You can look away, at me.”

  Loud breathing. “I’ll try.”

  Across the narrow stage went the doctor, rolling his eyes in Gibson’s direction. Then back the other way came Sally, carrying a tray of tubes and paraphernalia. She gave Gibson a quick grin.

  “You’re going to stick me?”

  “Yes, dear, nothing painful, just a little prick, over before you know it.”

  “I can’t take needles.”

  Ellie tried soothing him, coaxed him to hold her hand and look away. “Don’t watch. You’re looking at the needle. Look at me.”

  “Aaagh! NAW! NAW!” It was a primal sound, so elemental that Gibson felt it reverberating inside his own memory, as a haunting plea on an infinite trajectory, he mused, looping in from somewhere distant, hesitating momentarily in the present, then continuing on. The echoes of woe danced gawkily through his recollections, leaving him exhausted. It must be the tumor, he thought. Its presence had been suspected when he slurred his speech for a time and combined his words senselessly.

  Sally apparently pulled the needle back. “I’ll get help,” she said, and dashed across Gibson’s narrow view between the curtains, out the door. Soon she returned with an aide who seemed, from the comments coming from behind the curtain, to be assigned to hold Tommy’s arm still. Again his fiancée spoke soft encouragements to him, but again the yowls of panic careened around the room. The needle, it seemed, had not yet touched his skin.

  “Perhaps a sedative?” said Sally. “Something to help you relax?” Ellie said that would be a good idea, and Tommy agreed to give it a try. “So, I need to get a list of the meds you’re taking,” said Sally.

  Tommy knew them by heart. “In the morning I take Cymbalta, Xanax, Depakote, and lisdexamfetamine. At night I take losartan and zaleplon. The zaleplon is to help me sleep. I have trouble sleeping. It could be the Cymbalta—or my anxiety disorder.”

  Gibson imagined the nurse scribbling the names down as fast as she could.

  When Sally and the aide left, a long quiet followed, and Gibson slept. When he was awakened for the next round of his meds, it was breakfast time. Daylight from the window meandered through the paisley curtain, as if searching for his deteriorating body. He could hear Tommy snoring gently.

  * * *

  —

  “You should call your mother,” Gibson heard Ellie say.

  “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t look forward to it.” The room was coming awake with breakfast trays and the takers of vital signs.

  “I know, but you have to.”

  “Can you hand me your phone?”

  Gibson thought that if his own mother were still alive, he might understand the reluctance to worry her, hear her advice, agree to report to her every five minutes, explain medical procedures he didn’t understand, and finally reassure her falsely that all would be well. Today, though, Gibson thought, he could use her limitless concern, her irrational caring, even her gentle tears that embarrassed him so when he was a kid with his friends. She would get so emotional about any little thing, he wouldn’t know what. That was after his father had died. Gibson never figured out his mother, never quite understood what made her tick. She never figured him out either, never got his infatuation with gadgets he made in the garage; his crystal set with the long wire antenna, which he stretched from his bedroom window to the clothesline pole outside; the speaker system and microphone so he could “broadcast” made-up radio shows from his room to the living room. She fussed about the messy ’52 Chevy he worked on in the driveway, the timer he rigged for the outdoor Christmas lights, the leaky electric pump he jury-rigged to get the water sloppily out of the basement when it flooded. “If your father were here, he could help you,” she said, a sob always cutting into her last few words.

  “Hi, Mom?” Tommy paused, as if listening to a long soliloquy at the other end of the line. “Mom, Mom, look, I just wanted to let you know that they transferred me last night. I’m in GW Hospital. They’re checking me out….I know, I know, Mom. How’d it go? How are you feeling?…No, no need to come visit….Yes, I’ll call Dad and let him know. Where is he?…Well, I’ll find him….If you have to, okay, but it’s not necessary, really….Room 319, maybe for just a short time….Okay, see you then.”

  A big sigh was heard from behind the curtain. “What I was afraid of,” Tommy said. “She’s coming.”

  “Okay, okay, Tommy. It will be fine. When?”

  “Today, maybe this morning.”

  “How is she after the treatment?”

  “She says she isn’t sure it came out very well.”

  “She cares a lot about her looks for a sixty-four-year-old.”

  “She never grows up.”

  “Oh, Tommy. Harsh! She must be worried about you.”

  “Yeah. She might be. I’m worried about me, too, bleeding like that. I wish I knew why.”

  “Well, you have to let them find out.”

  The day nurse walked briskly across Gibson’s stage and announced (after checking Tommy’s birth date) that she was bearing a pill, a sedative that would relax the patient and hopefully allow a sample of blood to be drawn. “It will take a couple of hours to have a good effect,” she said, and left.

  “Hey, Tommy? It’s Gibson over here.” He was beginning to feel for his tormented neighbor. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be snooping, but I can’t help overhearing everything. I guess we all have mother problems in one form or another, eh?”

  Silence.

  “Tommy, sorry, was I intruding?”

  “No worries. I was just thinking. There you are, Gibson, probably dying. And here I am, just inconvenienced by some unexplained bleeding. And we’re sharing this room, these nurses, this hospital, and we can’t even have a real conversation. Because you can’t have a real conversation without looking at each other, you know? Don’t you need to see the face? I mean, how do blind people do it? I never understood.”

  Ellie spoke: “I think their other senses get tuned more acutely.” Then, “Shall I open the curtain?”

  “No, no, I n
eed privacy,” said Tommy.

  “You know, Tommy,” Gibson put in, “some people talk more freely when they’re not face-to-face. Like on the phone. Or by email. I had the most productive work sessions with colleagues when we couldn’t see each other. With one guy, especially, out in Santa Monica on the phone, sometimes it was almost as if we were two parts of the same brain, working in tandem, accessing different ideas from within ourselves. We sort of melded together.”

  A beat of quiet. Finally Tommy spoke, but so softly that Gibson could barely hear him. “I’d be afraid of that.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’d be afraid of mixing myself into another person and losing who I am. I don’t even know who I am yet, and losing myself now, too early in life, like bleeding into the toilet.”

  Good grief, Gibson thought. He said nothing more just then, and neither did Tommy. Gibson tried to read his Popular Mechanics but kept getting hung up on one sentence: “Equal parts impressive and impractical, this blaster fires by trapping expanding liquid nitrogen in a chamber where its only way out is a DIY burst disk made of a potato chip bag.” Must be the tumor acting up again.

  Late in the morning, an older woman dressed to the teeth drifted alluringly across Gibson’s stage, swinging her hips and disappearing behind the curtain.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Sanguino.”

  “Oh, Tommy, Tommy,” his mother panted. “How’s my Botox look?”

  This would have been an occasion to see his neighbor’s face, Gibson thought. And the mother’s, too.

  “Uh, ah, the corner of your mouth looks a little funny,” Tommy said.

  “What? No, really? Oh, I was afraid of that. Where’s a mirror?” Gibson heard the bathroom door open and close.

  “Jeeesus,” Tommy said, in little more than a whisper.

  Gibson wondered if Ellie was putting her hand on his arm to calm him, or touching his cheek, or embracing him with a loving gaze.