May We Be Forgiven

gesture I would use in a restaurant when asking for the check, please. I make the sign of writing, and someone hands me paper and pen.
    “Something is wrong,” I write in large wobbly letters. The effort does me in, I am knocked to the ground, leveled. I hear someone say, “We can water you,” and I wonder if I’ve turned into a plant.
    Ambulance. Too loud. It is all too much, an assault, an insult. Too fast, too slow, nauseating, I have never felt so nauseated, and I wonder, have I been poisoned? Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s something about that spray, maybe it’s the box cave in the living room, maybe it’s off gassing toxic fumes, my previous life is rotting in those boxes and giving off toxic fumes. And as I’m thinking it, I’m worried there’s something about my logic that’s not right.
    An interruption, a clot, a stroke, a little leak in the head. An X-ray, an MRI, some blood work, tissue plasminogen activator, arrhythmia, interventional radiology, cerebral angioplasty, carotid endarterectomy, stent.

    I blame George: George and his desk, George and high-speed Internet. I am blaming what’s happening on everything from sitting at that desk for too many hours each day to the activities I’ve recently engaged in, both the physical exertion of suddenly having so much sex, and also the tension, the trauma. I’m blaming it on George and George’s fucking medicine cabinet. As a “news” man, George believed he needed to know about everything. So his medicine cabinet was stocked with everything from Viagra to Levitra, Cialis, Tadalis, Revatio, etc. The combination of his computer, his medicine cabinet, and the events of the last few weeks—namely, what happened to Jane—caused a kind of mania, a sexual insanity that comes to an abrupt halt with me lying on a gurney in the ER.

    W as this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better—does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?
    A nurse is standing over my gurney. “Mr. Silver. There’s a problem with your insurance. It appears you’ve been canceled. Do you have the actual insurance card?”
    “Tessie.” I try to explain that there is no one to feed and walk Tessie. No one pays attention, no one does anything until I pull out the IV line. “Someone needs to walk the goddamned dog.” They’re trying to get me to lie back down and asking if it’s a real dog and explaining that there is a volunteer pet-minder program.
    “Call my lawyer,” I say.
    I am brought a phone.
    I don’t know why Larry’s number is embossed like caller ID in front of my eyes—Train and Traub, 212-677-3575.
    “Larry,” I say. “Tell Claire that I am having a stroke.” I say it, and I hear myself saying something that sounds like “Tell dare I’m outside having a smoke.”
    “What?” Larry says.
    I try harder: “Can you please tell Claire that I am having a stroke?”
    “Is this you?”
    “Who else would it be?”
    “Are you crank-calling me?”
    “No,” I say. I hear myself talking and it sounds like I’ve got rocks in my mouth.
    “I can’t tell her,” he says. “It’s manipulative. And, further, how do I know you’re really having a stroke and aren’t smashed?”
    “I’m in the Emergency Room, Larry; they’re asking for my insurance card, and I keep saying, ‘Don’t worry, I have insurance.’”
    “You have no insurance,” Larry says. “Claire dropped you. She asked me to drop you.”
    I throw up again, spreading sick over my gurney and across the EKG wires.
    “Because you’re still legally married, you may have some recourse. You can fight it.”
    “I can’t fight anything—I can barely talk.”
    “Maybe they have a patient advocate at the hospital.”
    “Larry, can you please ask Claire to fax me a copy of the insurance card,” I say, and the nurse takes the phone.
    “Mr. Silver really shouldn’t get agitated—he’s had a cerebral incident. Agitation is definitely not a good thing.”
    Larry says something to the nurse and she hands me back the phone. “He wants a final word,” she says.
    “Fine,” Larry says. “I’ll take care of it, I’ll fix this one. Consider it a favor, consider it the last favor I’ll do for you.” Did Nixon have to deal with shit like this, or did he hunker down with a bowl of SpaghettiOs?
    I think of Nixon’s phlebitis; was the first attack in his left leg in 1965 during a trip to Japan? I think of him during the autumn of 1974, just after