Somehow she finds a leaning opportunity in the dining room, bearing up her tray, and she is attempting to blow a long gray tangle of hair out of her face, away from affected parts, as she sits. With grim determination, she opens the juice and takes the plastic utensils from their plastic sleeve. Women are rare here, but still there is a young woman, no older than her daughter, sitting opposite. And the young woman rips into her unsubstantiated chicken as if this were the first hospital dinner ever consumed. Rosa Elisabetta is impressed with the display. Around the room, the sleepers attempt to eat faster than seawater turns boulders to sand, sometimes successfully.
The girl says, “Hey, can you answer a question?”
Rosa raises an eyebrow.
“Do you think I should tell them that I’m bleeding? I’ve been bleeding for ten days. I never bled like this before. I was living in a squat, so I just didn’t get that much to eat. Know what I mean? Now I’m bleeding. Man, you can’t believe. Like there’s a mouse in me doing flips. Know what I mean?”
“I can’t —” Rosa says. And then, as if the question were a marvel, “Your name?”
Her name is Dee. Rosa whispers the name after hearing it spoken. So simple it might be possible to commit it to memory at some point. Rosa nods, as if by nodding she can get across a spectrum of advice. Run, don’t walk, where the bleeding is concerned. The girl seems to say something. Not like there are a lot of women to talk to. The girl gestures around the room, as if to prove her hypothesis. True, there is Rosa and her roommate, an obese woman who has not yet risen from her bed. This obese woman had something injected and then she slept, and she’s sleeping still. And then there’s the girl, Dee, and apparently Dee doesn’t have a roommate, although she probably will, maybe tonight. People are coming and going. Remarks, which are observations, get condensed down to elemental gestures in her affected parts. Rosa looks at thinking from an angle and then she looks at it from another angle. She seems not to get around to saying much.
“Want to play cards later?”
Unclear. How many transactions in this marketplace of detoxified ideas would be involved in the playing of cards? The idea of
later
is almost impossibly complex, and Rosa cannot commit. In fact, while she’s turning it over in her mind, dinner has come to an end.
“Rosa, try just eating the broccoli.”
The nurses treat her as though she’s never heard of food, as though food has never traversed the boundaries of inside and outside, as though digestion has never before degraded her, as though she has never had a seven-course meal with a pasta course and a meat course. With the resistance to these commands she feels a little more like herself; nevertheless, she does eat the broccoli, which tastes like air. And then, using the chair as a clinging station, she rises up, last to leave, and carries her tray to the cart.
The television has been fired up again, and those who are able are on their way into the common area, where Rosa imagines she can hear the sound of the theme song of one of those programs that does nothing but show police in the midst of making arrests. There is a brownie in Rosa’s hand. How did she come to acquire a brownie? Rosa shoves the entire brownie into her mouth. From nowhere, her daughter appears, having brought her some clothes from home. Her daughter is a hazard coming down the corridor, and her daughter represents the flood of language. This is a corridor of perils. Her daughter comes to rest, as though made inert by her, Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, somewhere not far from the door to her bedroom, the room she shares with the slumbering obese woman who will one day awake.
“How are you feeling?” Vanessa asks.
She has made a provisional decision not to deploy the moisture arguments from her moisture ducts, but she is not in a position to make these tactical decisions, so the best Rosa can do when faced with the ambulatory memories represented by a black raincoat and its contents is to avoid comment on the moisture arguments in the hopes that they will soon abate. Or perhaps she can blame the moisture arguments on environmental insults. Too many days indoors with not enough stimulation and no exercise, and moisture arguments are involuntarily activated in the presence of the possibility of human kindness. She attempts rictus, that simple arrangement of muscle groups, but she is not sure if this offering is transmitted properly. Vanessa looks harried, as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing, and Rosa Elisabetta is perhaps, in some register, prepared for the fact that her daughter might not be able to believe in this place.
“Food any good?” Vanessa asks, and reaches out to touch a spot on Rosa’s face, which is a residual brownie mottling site, and Vanessa harvests the residual brownie accumulation. Vanessa laughs. Rosa believes that the laughing is meant to indicate that it is widely understood that the food in hospitals is not good. This is known as a rhetorical question.
“Can we sit in there?” And without waiting to hear if that is an acceptable place for maximal cushioning, Vanessa takes her mother’s arm, and they are heading back toward the dining room, even though there are residual smells. Time has shellacked the walls of the dining room with the debased categories of hospital food. Even during those hours when you are not eating, there is the smell of what you have eaten, as though it is part of the history of the place, a history of smells. The conversation is under way once Rosa is conscious of its being under way, which is after it has already begun. Vanessa is talking quickly and introducing many practical issues and much repetition of key concepts, but Rosa doesn’t follow ideas easily, and by the time she comprehends one, Vanessa is already well onto the next, like she hears something about the idea of
aftercare
and something about
long-term rehabilitation,
and these things make her want to spill out of her pouch, and her pouch is still churning when Vanessa is telling Rosa what the doctor told her, a sequence of words connoting lengths of incarceration that she cannot fathom at the moment, and this is when she misses the part about the physical, Vanessa saying that the physical, something something, something, like a song Rosa can’t remember, and colitis as an expression of alcohol abuse, and Rosa just winces at all of it, she just begins to fold into a wincing interval.
“You’ve got a few more days, that’s what they think, and then we have to find somewhere else to put you. Because I can’t keep bringing you here. They don’t want you here anymore unless you’re going to agree to go somewhere else. Do you understand what I’m saying? So we’re going to have to find some rehabilitation place.”
With a lecturer, there is some kind of critical layering of key concepts, so that they began to mulch and fertilize, but with her daughter, there’s no layering, which means that the critical concepts are unjustified, or perhaps imported from a safe zone, which brings about further involuntary moisture arguments, and these are accompanied by a resignation in the mucous musculature, and this prompts Vanessa to take the name of the Lord in vain and to go rooting through her combination bag and sack.
“What do you expect? You’re sick. What do you expect me to do? Because I leave you at home, and then you start barricading the door and you’re not eating. And you practically kill the cat. And I have a job, and it’s really hard for me to do my job and to make enough money to make sure that the mortgage is paid on the building, and then I have to come back home and worry about whether you’re dead. And I know that you don’t exactly feel like you understand me, Ma, but I love you just the same. Haven’t I stayed to keep an eye on you? I have. I stayed. And I’m willing to look after you and make sure you have somewhere decent to live because I love you. But you have to make it easier on me. You aren’t making it easy on me at all. I don’t know whether you start drinking at nine in the morning or you drink at night, and no one else knows, either. And then you go out, and you’re drunk, and people from up the block, they come and tell me you’re totally drunk, walking around in the neighborhood. People leave me notes, ‘Vanessa, please call,’ and then I call, and people say that you’ve said the most awful stuff to them, Ma, and I want to let you go your own way, because you always went your own way, and that’s what makes you lovable, but not if you’re killing yourself, right? Do you really want to do that? I talked to the doctor. Ma, are you listening to what I’m saying? Here, use this. And what the doctor said is that your liver is really enlarged and it’s probably not going to last. You could get cirrhosis. Or you could get liver failure. And that’s when dementia starts to set in, you know. That might be what’s causing the disorientation. And you keep drinking with pancreatitis, that’s what all the bleeding is. That’s the course of the illness, Ma. You’re sick and you have an illness. And I have people calling saying you’re disoriented and confused wandering around the neighborhood, and the doctor says you have liver damage, but no one is going to replace your liver while you are drinking. So what am I supposed to do? Do you see me going out every night to clubs? I’m not going to clubs. Do you see me going on any dates? I’m not going out on any dates. If anyone even asked me out on a date, I’d turn them down, unless it’s a business thing. I’m not doing any of that. What I’m doing is coming back to the house to make sure you’re still alive. That’s what I think about at the office. I wonder if Ma will still be alive when I get home. It’s not even, oh, I wonder what horrible thing she’s got to say to me today. That’s what it’s like. So now you have a few days to cool it in here, and we’ll see what we can do about finding a rehab, and when you’re done here, I want you to tell me that you’re willing to go to the rehab, okay? I don’t want to hear anything out of your mouth, I just want to hear that you understand what’s going on and that you’re going to a rehab. Got it?”
The cranium of Rosa Elisabetta has found that the table is the best resting area. A long silence does not diminish the need for resting, nor moisture.
“Listen, do you want to hear what else is going on? You won’t believe the story that came into the office. You won’t believe it. Do you want to hear this? This treatment came through.”
Even in her diminished capacity, even with the medication coursing in her, Rosa can manage some guess as to the nature of the story, because all of the stories from the films that her daughter makes, they’re all about drugs, prostitution,
travesti,
families torn apart, people from history who try to kill other people from history, and young people who don’t respect their parents. So it must be one of those, probably the story about young people not respecting their parents. She can’t possibly get all of this out, especially with her head resting on the table, but she’s not diminished enough to forget what she thinks about her daughter’s films, which is that she won’t go to another movie opening unless her daughter stands up and thanks her personally in front of the audience. But just as she’s thinking this relatively straightforward and unfaithful thought, something numinous happens to her. She is suddenly a creek feeding into some larger stream, and in this continuum of the aquatic, she is aware of the very answer to this question, as if she has been submerged into it, and she knows the answer, so she whispers, “Diviners.”
Vanessa is stunned. Vanessa, who is ripple-shuffling a pack of playing cards sitting on the table in the dining room, stops everything to gaze at her mother. Deeply skeptical.
“Did Annabel tell you? Did you talk to Annabel?”
“Diviners.”
“How did you know?”
That’s when Rosa Elisabetta makes her first attempt to tell what happened after the seizure. She doesn’t know if she should tell, because it may be that telling anyone will create dosage-escalation criteria. During visiting hours there are always people around listening. You never know. There are two men on the far side of the room now and they are playing dominoes, although it’s unclear if they are actually playing the game or if they are just using the domino tiles for a construction operation that keeps their hands from fist formation. One of these men is saying, Yeah, thirteen times there and they just got tired of seeing him, couldn’t get no bed,
nowhere nohow.
These men could easily be listening.
“I heard certain things.”
“You what?”
“I heard certain things.”
“Sit up.”
“I was hearing certain conversations.”
“What do you mean?”
They took the phone privileges away from her, that was the first thing they did, because after they gave her the exam and remanded her to this ward, she got right on the phone, and she would not let anyone else use the phone, and she was belittling them, because this seemed pragmatic, but then she started to feel as if there were vermin around, a bad sign. She got up out of bed to demand that something be done about this vermin. If this was a respectable hospital in a respectable neighborhood in Brooklyn, at least they could ensure that there wouldn’t be hundreds of cockroaches in her room. And this was certainly criterion for dosage escalation, after which there is a gap in the story, and she is waking up on the floor of her room and they are telling her that she has had a seizure, and she feels as though a factory of aeronautics has opened in her vocabulary, and ideas appear like mobiles, but the best she can do is watch them circle. They prescribe some other thing, some other medication, an anticonvulsive, and when they give her the anticonvulsive it becomes clear that they have taken care of the vermin infestation. There are still moments she is unclear on. When exactly did the obese woman arrive in the room? No one will talk to her about the obese woman.
And in the middle of the night she began overhearing conversations, and it turns out that she recognizes some of the voices of the conversations, and these are people in her daughter’s office. First she recognizes the voice of the black girl, which is a voice she always liked, and maybe she just hears a voice because she admires a voice, and a voice is a thing of comfort. As when you are falling into sleep, fretting. Not the particular words of the voice but the sound of it, like it’s a melody of a song. And she always liked Annabel, called the office just to talk to Annabel sometimes, because Annabel reminded her of the children from the neighborhood. But she hears a particular conversation and then she hears Annabel talking to another person, who was a man. And the conversation is
fishy,
to be sure, not a good conversation, there are things going on there, with the man, who is, Rosa believes, the man in the office, the man from the mindless action films, and there is something going on between them. Even though he is a married man. She has an idea, in her bed, in the slipstream of detoxification, that there is something going on between Annabel and this married man, but out of this comes this idea, and that idea is —