n the delirium of fever I always try to summon angels.
But it’s not working.
I see colours and textures. Earth tones. Curved, like the interior of a cave. The sensation of rock, earth and clay. The mineral walls breathing. It feels primal, maybe pre-human. Ancient beyond numeration. And then it shifts, becomes a flamed coral pulsing. It’s interior biology, now, and I know that I am looking at my lung as it burns with infection.
I open my eyes.
I am in a downtown ER at a hospital in a major metropolitan city on a Saturday night.
It is pandemonium.
The noise here, like waves pitching a boat.
A man is wheeled past, his wife clutching the rails of his cot. Her face red, streaked with tears, her grief wild and open, a force sprung loose from nature and now alive everywhere. A cacophony of beeps and flashes, intercoms crackling and spitting, shouts and cries. So many languages and voices, all saying the same thing. A man doesn’t want to be touched. He prowls the perimeter of the ER threatening violence upon whomever gets in his way. This tension, a nightmare unfettered and mobile. An elderly man, desiccated and bug–eyed on some forgotten gurney looks up at him, “Vater, I vant vater! Vater, I vant vater! Vater, I vant vater!” A drunk man, his shirt barely on, comes spinning into the chaos. He’s trying to evade capture, too, and his arm swings out scattering supplies to the floor—his face lost, self-pitying.
The furious white noise of our suffering inescapable. The staff is inured to it. They have to be. They move through us like we’re bad weather. Grow dim in the distance, and then vanish.
I flip on my cot. Move my surgical mask up over my eyes, try to block everything out. It is hard to distinguish between the real and unreal. My phone, which I am holding like a rung on a ladder, pings. A photo of Jones just after Rachelle tucked him in for the night.
And suddenly he is right there lying beside me. We’re holding hands, his eyes looking deeply into mine.
As if having come from the sky.
As if summoned.