The brown, tanned stump of one of his legs is visible beneath his hospital gown, and a small tower of IV’s and various bags of fluid loom over him. It’s a hot, gritty day, and he stares blankly across the street at a Tim Horton’s, indifferent to the people passing by. He doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him. These are almost certainly amongst his last days. He has a large bottle of Jack Daniels he’s taking hits from, and this seems some manner of providence, as if a last wish granted.

He looks at me from beneath the big, bulging sweater he’s wearing.
Frowning.
His brow furrowed.

Each person sitting there was alone, each one with an empty seat on either side of them. They had arranged themselves in such a way as to suggest that human contact, or even just the proximity of another person, was a potential catastrophe, and that they might shatter into a million pieces if a stranger’s eyes, voice or touch happened to fall upon them. And so they all sat there– the respectful, fearful space between them somehow more visible than not– and across from them was a wall-mounted TV broadcasting the news of the day, but nobody was watching. Instead, people were looking down, focused on the phones in their hands and the transportive, less mortal moments it provided.

To what worlds, be they small or large or imaginary, were they journeying?

To whom were they returning?

And then I was called forth to have my test done. Stripped to the waist, I lay on a cot while the technician began an ultrasound of my heart. Music, as if from across a body of water, played faint and mysterious in the background. My eyes closed, I lay there just as still as a prayer. She spoke softly, when she spoke, and her touch was so very tender, so holy. The test proved a little bit challenging, and our ams and torsos were entangled like it was a game of Twister so that we could feel one another’s body rise and fall with each breath. It was so very intimate and so very lonely, and in that strange intersection I wanted her to put down her instruments and just hold me. I wanted her to tell me that Yes, everything was going to be okay, and to see the truth of this in her warm, unblinking eyes, and thus blessed, be released into the beautiful life from which I came. 

As I was waiting in the elevator, a woman suddenly angled through the closing doors and appeared amongst us. Slightly startled and self-conscious, she looked about at the motley crew surrounding her. A handsome man, with whom she had just made eye contact, asked her what floor she wanted.

“Seven,” she said, and then as if it was a word she thought she was saying in her head rather than out loud, softly added, “oncology.”

Nobody said anything, and she looked down. Her blond hair was still shiny and immaculately maintained, and she had one of those artificial tans that stood out, somehow suggesting she had always aspired to be a trophy to someone.

She smiled weakly at me, “ To look at me you wouldn’t even know, “ she began, but then as if seized by a kind of shame, she stopped. None of us felt like we belonged, it wasn’t just her. And then we all rode the elevator up in awkward silence, each one of us getting off at our own particular floor, each one stepping into a world we never dreamed we might belong.

And so I did.

The place, stripped to a skeleton staff and now loosely populated by the permanent residents– most of whom were confined to wheelchairs of varying complication– was pretty empty. The days, now shapeless and free of plot, offered little and so I wandered hallway after hallway. Seeming more memory than music, the theme song to MASH drifted from one room I passed,

while another was antiseptic and empty but for Trump/Pence banners taped defiantly to the wall, and then through a doorway, I caught a glimpse of a nurse changing a patient’s tracheotomy tube– so intimate and tender as to be virtually erotic. Downstairs, scattered like islands, I came upon people who sat anchored and voiceless in wheelchairs, each one stationed near a window, watching.

There was a church service later in the morning that took place in the same space that hosted Bingo, Pub Night and all our other events. It was Catholic, which occasioned a few religious props being removed from a box and placed on a cafeteria table, and somehow this act was achingly beautiful.

A strong, elderly woman dressed all in black walked in, made the sign of the cross, and then nodded warmly to all who made eye contact. She went directly to a middle-aged woman who was frozen and strapped into a wheelchair, and touched her with a tenderness that exceeded language. Gently, she pulled a favourite sweater over her head, and then smiling,  began to brush her hair—a mother’s imperishable, radiant love, holier than a saint.

An impossibly old woman was reclined, almost prone, in a wheelchair. Blankets and knitted things covered virtually every inch of her body, and her skin was so very thin, her body so frail, that it seemed as if a soft gust might be enough to push her through the veil. A couple of hospital staff tended to her, telling her that her brother would be there any moment now. Her eyes flickered open at his mention, and as if surfacing through water she said, “Oh, I hope so,” and then she fell back down and in to sleep.

Ten minutes later a tall, elderly man, clearly ill himself, entered and sat stoically beside her. With a bible open on his lap he mumble-prayed along with the priest. He never touched her, nor did he say anything to her while she slept through the service, but it was clear that he was her brother. He was her tie to this world, the one now disintegrating around her into a living mist. Drifting in and out, all of time swirling around her, what version of her brother might she have hoped to summon, what memory returning in dream, what ghost to see her home?

The woman who mops the floor of my room is so fair and blonde as to be practically transparent. I am somehow embarrassed whenever she comes in and has to clean around me, and I hope to compensate for this weird power imbalance by being excessively friendly, and she’s kind enough to indulge my need for small talk. She has a thick eastern European accent and far away, sad eyes hidden behind blocky glasses. As she wipes down the plastic casings of the rails on my bed, she says, “Look, you see?” I don’t, and have to look closer. “My superior leaves little marks with a pen so she knows if I have cleaned properly or not. You see it now?” I nod as she wipes it away and say something I think is funny and disparaging about her superior. “No, it is her job, the cleaning must get completed and she must make sure it is so. We all must do our jobs.”

I feel like a child in the face of those words. This middle-aged woman who used to be a professor of accounting in the former Yugoslavia, now in a scratchy blue uniform cleaning floors in a hospital a million miles from all that she had known and loved and earned. My heart could break for her– her country vanished, her life now so improbable and alien. And she looks at me. She knows what I’m thinking, or at least she thinks she might know. She pauses for a moment, “It is true that life is hard, but we must live it, no? We must live it,” she says, as if we had both been forced to leave our native land.

He has a piece of gauze over his left eye and sits there wordlessly, his face giving nothing away. His mother looks so warm and concerned, so ready to help. She keeps looking over at him, searching for ways to make him feel better, but he offers no clues as to what she might be able to do. There is such yearning in her eyes–she wants to climb into him and fill him with strength, she wants to absorb all of his pain, she wants to take him to that lake he loved as a child and watch him return to being her limitless and beautiful boy.

Everybody in the waiting room appears weary and drained of confidence on this day. A man of about 60, somebody who looked like he had lived well and confidently in his body for decades, groans when he shifts his weight and tries to cross his legs. As if avoiding one another, even ourselves, all eyes drift to the TV set where a news station, crammed with all manner of banners and crawls, is on. So much news, so many things of the world competing for our attention. And along the bottom of the screen, as random as a dream fragment, “ Prince Harry regrets not talking more to Prince William about his mother’s death.” And suddenly I’m traveling in time and back on Elgin Street in Ottawa 20 years ago. There were perhaps ten of us, huddled together on the sidewalk watching a TV through a window, all staring at a shot of a crumpled, black car in the middle of a tunnel.

Some people were crying, and I remember thinking that was a display of sentiment, and that we couldn’t possibly feel sincere emotion for celebrities who had been so one-dimensionally assembled for our consumption.

And I was wrong in the ways that only a young, single man could be, I was so very, very wrong.

A dead calm.

Existing just outside of time, lives hang suspended there as people wait to discover the toll they must pay to continue their passage.

Sitting across from me an older, Indian woman reclined in her chair, drifting. Beautiful in sleep, her third eye combed unknown realms before she returned to her mortal body and woke into the hospital lights, tired and disappointed.

A man, his eyes closed, breathed carefully while listening to his iPhone. He was so concentrated, so brittle and alone, and his lips moved almost imperceptibly as he repeated the words he was listening to.

An incantation.

A mantra.

A prayer.

And as if in response, a tired nurse coming off shift– her jacket already on– approached him and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. His eyes flashed open in alarm, and she smiled, asking if there was anything she could do for him. He quickly, reflexively, shook his head no, but she stayed, and growing more beautiful by the word, she spoke with him until something inside the man softly dissolved and the rigidity passed from his body.

Later, a cab pulled up at one of the hospital’s entranceways and a man on oxygen support and his wife got out of the car. They were excited, moving quickly, as if on a game show or late for their vacation cruise of a lifetime. I got inside the car they just left and the cabbie was a happy and talkative. He told me that the guy who just got out, after years of waiting, after countless false starts and failed matches, had just received the phone call that he was going to get a lung transplant and to come in NOW! The man, the driver said, was going to be able to breath again, he was going to be able to go to the family cottage and once again, just like when he was a boy, go swimming in the lake at night.

And as we pulled away from the hospital we passed by a couple of petite Asian women in vividly coloured bubble jackets waiting at the crosswalk. Smiling, they leaned in toward the traffic, swaying slightly, like brightly-lit balloons just about to lift off into the sky.

It’s was her son, I think.

They had the same eyes.

He was staring through things, his eyes fixed on some invisible, stabilizing horizon off in the distance. His knees were trembling, and it seemed like it was taking all his energy and concentration just to be out of bed and sitting in a chair. He wore tiger-striped pajama bottoms that looked like they were bought by somebody who loved him, somebody who wanted to add a little spark to his long hospital stay. And as the woman pushed him by the assembled strangers who cluttered the hospital, she reached out and touched his hair, letting her hand fall to his face where she caressed, and then cupped his cheek. I’m not sure that he noticed, or even if he was able to respond if he had, but it didn’t matter. She loved him for eternity, through all fires. He belonged to her, he would always belong to her, and she touched him with such tenderness and heartbreak, such solitude, that this small, personal moment became something transcendent. As if phosphorescent, it hung there, suspended for a moment or two before receding and returning us to the day.