The Man in the Next Bed Read online

  The bathroom door opened and closed again. The mother’s voice was quavering. “Oh, Tommy, Tommy, it’s terrible. I don’t like it at all. What did he do to me? I look deformed. What am I going to do? I’ll have to go back, have it redone. Oh, damn, damn!”

  “Mom, don’t cry. Your mascara’s running.”

  “Oh, but you see? You see?”

  A nurse holding an electronic tablet crossed the stage and began pouring questions into the room: When did he start bleeding? Did he feel nauseous? Weak? What had he eaten? Any stomach pain? Headache? Blurred vision? Tingling in hands or feet? Tommy’s answers were succinct and, evidently, normal enough to confuse the medical profession, which seemed to be searching for correlations, Gibson figured, multiple symptoms that could be triangulated to fix a position on a landscape of ailments.

  “Are you feeling drowsy?” asked the nurse. “Relaxed yet? I hope the sedative is kicking in.”

  “A little,” said Tommy.

  “We’ll do some labs soon, then,” said the nurse.

  Tommy let out a small groan of defeat. “I don’t do needles well,” he said, as if the nurse—and the whole floor—didn’t know by now.

  “Oh,” said his mother helpfully, “I remember when they had to stick me five times to get a vein. What a mess.”

  “MOM—!”

  “Well, I’m just saying. You know, it could be worse. I never understood this phobia of yours.”

  “Christ, Mom!”

  “Tommy, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Just because you’re grown up doesn’t give you the license—”

  Gibson could barely follow what came next, it was so infused with anguish, the words so garbled and the sentences disjointed. As far as he could tell, Tommy was dumping years of grievance onto the floor beside his bed, then scooping up shovelfuls and hurling them. Gibson suddenly felt burned by guilt and wished his own mother were here to love him so that he could love her back.

  Tommy’s mother was stricken by silence for the first time since her entry. Then two nurses came back, one holding a steel tray that seemed to contain glassware and instruments.

  “Okay?” a nurse said brightly. Gibson could practically feel the chilly gloom coursing through the curtain.

  “I—I can’t,” said Tommy. “I’ll try. Mom, could you stand back, please?”

  “I feel you don’t want me here.” Her voice was a wounded whine.

  “Right, Mom, I don’t.”

  So the mother crossed Gibson’s stage and, believe it or not (he hardly could), she gave him a very flirtatious glance as she passed.

  “Don’t look at the needle,” he heard Ellie say. “Look at me. Hold my hand.” Tommy uttered a low, miserable sound, then an odd, muffled scream as if from behind a soundproof wall, until the nurse pronounced her effort ended. She would not force him, she said. She would let the doctor know.

  After she left, Gibson heard a man sobbing and a woman’s gentle cooing in comfort. He wanted to say something to Tommy, but he didn’t know quite how to put it. He wanted to say something manly, like “Tough business,” or “We play the hand we’re dealt,” or “You’ll get through it, brother.” What he finally said after the sobbing had ebbed was closer to what he felt. “Hey, Tommy, Gibson over here. Don’t you wonder what they’ll think a hundred years from now about this primitive way of testing people? That they have to actually take their blood? Too bad we don’t live way in the future when they’ll have better ways—less intrusive, painless, noninvasive. Whaddaya think?”

  “Yeah,” said Tommy. “This is hell.” Which made Gibson consider a wisecrack that he kept to himself: Better be good, Tommy, or hell will be a bunch of nurses trying to stick you with needles all the time. Hahahaha! He bit his tongue, literally. At least the oxycodone and the brain tumor hadn’t crushed all his sensible restraint.

  And then Tommy said, “You know, sometimes I think that hell would be a bunch of nurses trying to stick me with needles.” And he laughed. He actually laughed. So Gibson did, too, and pretty soon they were both singing laughter in discordant harmony, like half of an off-key barbershop quartet.

  About an hour after the latest failed attempt to stick Tommy, a young, white-coated doctor swished across the stage. He told Tommy that he wanted to do a rectal exam. Tommy was silent, but Gibson imagined that his face told of his distress, so the doc tried to be reassuring.

  “It wouldn’t be uncomfortable. You’d barely feel it. I wouldn’t go in very far, just enough to see if there is some source of bleeding in your rectum.”

  “Oh—oh, well, do you have to?”

  “We need to find the cause of bleeding. If we don’t see anything there, then we’d do a colonoscopy.”

  There came a flurry of comforting words from Ellie and a strained acquiescence from Tommy, and the doctor apparently set to work. He asked Tommy if he would please roll over on his side and if he would like to hold his own cheeks open. Yes, Tommy said, and in a few moments, when Gibson figured the doctor was beginning, a pleading, gurgling cry boiled up in an eruption of weeping and imploring that sounded like a child’s terror. Again and again, the word “no” shot in a high pitch through the groans, like automatic fire against the cacophony of battle.

  “Okay,” said the doc’s voice, exasperated. And then he crossed Gibson’s stage, shaking his head.

  Gibson was rattled. His tumor must really be acting up, he thought, because he felt the raw friction in his own ass, saw his uncle’s kindly face, heard his soft, confusing words, felt his hand down there and then something bigger than a finger, and remembered a puzzling fear and soundless childhood screams, like those stillborn in a dream. And the nightmares, which he had avoided for decades.

  He wanted to reach out to Tommy and say, “I know, I know.” But he felt gagged, as in a dream when you want to shout and nothing comes but inchoate murmurs. He could not escape from the imprisonment of his silence. Damn tumor, he thought.

  When his rapid breathing slowed and his pulse seemed to quiet, he ventured a crack to Tommy. “A real pain in the ass,” he said. Only a faint laugh came from the other side.

  * * *

  —

  Behind the curtain in the evening, they arranged for Tommy’s colonoscopy, assuring him that he would be under a light sedative, would feel and remember nothing. He had to drink this laxative on this schedule, and the “procedure” would take place tomorrow morning. Even the most radical surgery, Gibson had learned, was called by the euphemism “procedure.”

  Tommy seemed to agree to all this, and Gibson, who had been given his share of routine colonoscopies, did a quick calculation of how often his roommate would be up during the night to race to the bathroom. It was not necessary to think about this in more detail, even for an engineer with a drive for precision in the tiny tolerances of machined components.

  Gibson decided to request a change of room. But before he could do so, Tommy decided to check himself out. “Checking out,” Gibson mused, is done several ways from a hospital. He had a troubling realization that he might be checking out in the worst way and that Tommy was about to check out in that middle ground of irresponsibility. But Tommy was insistent, even after a bevy of nurses came with clipboards to warn him of the peril of his unexplained bleeding, to require his signature on some form releasing the hospital from liability, as they explained, and certifying that he was defying medical advice.

  A doctor arrived to attempt to dissuade him, and when Tommy remained firm, she urged him to seek medical help soon, elsewhere, to be sure he did not have a dangerous, life-threatening condition.

  “Yes, yes,” Tommy kept saying, making it sound like an empty promise. He called his father to tell him he was leaving, evidently heard reprimands, and finally announced the end of the conversation and hung up. His mother, too, must have nagged him to stay, because he finally said to her, “This isn’t helpin
g, Mom,” and that was the end of the call.

  When he was dressed and walked across Gibson’s stage, Tommy paused for a moment, gave Gibson a nod, and said, “Good luck.”

  “You, too,” Gibson answered, knowing somehow that neither of them would have it.

  The next morning, both beds in room 319 were empty.

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