Page 9

9

Ernie’s Moment

Room 340 in County Memorial was similar to countless rooms in hospitals all over America. Speckled gray-and-blue vinyl flooring. Two white walls. Two pale-blue walls. A window offered a view of a world full of promise to those who would be healed and released, though it provided little of value to those who would die here.

Ernie was lying on his back with the head of the bed slightly raised, trailing a supplemental oxygen line that led to a clip on his nose, an intravenous drip line that connected a suspended bag of glucose to a catheter in one arm, and various leads conveying information about his heartbeat, lung function, blood pressure, and blood-oxygen level to a monitor with a big screen. From the screen issued periodic beeps, short-lived but ominous tones, and a musical trilling sound as if the primary purpose of this complex machine was to lure small birds to it. Ernie did not look good.

Spencer, Bobby, and Rebecca hugged one another, but they didn’t at first speak, so intense were their feelings.

Bobby Shamrock was weak-kneed with shock at the paleness of Ernie’s face, with concern that his amigo might be in pain or afraid. At the same time, he was overcome by a bitter sense of the unfairness that a gentle soul like Ernie should suffer. Bobby was also oppressed by the particular distress that was a forerunner to grief when one couldn’t quite yet admit that the worst might happen.

No doubt Rebecca and Spencer felt similar things. But every person was different and experienced his or her unique salmagundi of competing emotions. Bobby could have tried to imagine what else his amigos were feeling. However, as a writer, that was something he did with too much of his time, puzzling through the emotions of people in his stories, trying to understand them, to figure out what the hell they were going to do next and why. Enough was enough. He knew what he felt, and he would have to be satisfied with that.

He for sure wasn’t going to ask Rebecca and Spencer how they felt. Although that had once been a caring question, it had been made illegitimate by an infinite gaggle of clueless reporters who had thrust their microphones toward hapless witnesses to ask, How did you feel when you saw the bridge collapse and carry the train with all its passengers into the abyss? How did you feel when the terrorist cut your brother’s tongue out with a dull knife? How did you feel when you saw your wife and baby swept up into the tornado as if they were just more lifeless debris? Most of the time, you didn’t need to know the finer details of anyone’s raw emotions; a general impression of what they must be feeling was enough to allow you to communicate without triggering a psychotic breakdown in one of them. Besides, if a guy was thinking something inappropriate, he wasn’t going to answer your tornado question by blurting out, That was the best damn day of my life! Now I don’t have to burn the house down with them in it to collect on the life insurance.

The room had been furnished with two straight-backed chairs for visitors. A nurse brought a third. She smiled at Bobby and winked, as if the third chair had a special meaning for her and him.

Women were always winking and smiling at him, touching his arm or shoulder for no reason. When the amigos were fourteen years old, in ninth grade, and just becoming amigos, Rebecca had declared that Bobby the Sham possessed charisma. He had been upset when she said it. She hadn’t been coming on to him. The four of them were equally terrified of sexuality and scornful of kissy-face starry-eyed hold-my-hand chocolate-and-flowers romance. More than scornful. Scathing. Contemptuous. Rebecca’s statement was shocking because she hadn’t even been pretty in those days. She’d hardly been presentable. She cut her own hair as though in a fit of anger at herself, wore no makeup except mascara that made her look tubercular, wore shapeless clothing, and in general looked as if she lived in a dumpster. Who could have imagined that she was capable of perceiving charisma or accusing a boy of it? Even if she had been as gorgeous as she was now, fourteen-year-old Bobby would have taken no less offense at the slander. He did not want charisma; he did not have it; he would not accept it even at gunpoint. He insisted on being as big a nerd as the rest of them, no less a loser than they were. For a week, he proved his true nature by producing fragrant farts until the unfair accusation of charisma was withdrawn.

If the smiling, winking nurse hadn’t brought the third chair, if instead she had taken away the two that were already in Ernie’s room, Bobby and Rebecca and Spencer wouldn’t have noticed. They were still in the initial period of reverent distress about Ernie, when it felt wrong to sit down or speak more than a few whispered words or consult a phone for email or texts that might have come in during the walk from the parking lot. In this adjustment phase, it seemed they ought to look at only Ernie and the screen that reported his vital signs, while brooding on the fragile nature of life.

They had been doing that for less than two minutes when the pulsing and spiking lines on the monitor stopped pulsing and spiking, the numerical readouts went to zero, and the monitor alarm sounded. Ernie had flatlined.