May We Be Forgiven

the call button and ask for paper and pencil.
    “It’ll be a while,” the nurse says.
    “I’ve got a dying man who wants to confess.”
    “We all have needs,” she says.
    I nap. In my sleep I hear gunshots. I wake up thinking my brother is trying to kill me.
    “It’s not you,” the guy in the bed next to me says. “It’s on TV. While you were sleeping, a cop came to see you. He said he’ll be back later.”
    I don’t say anything.
    “Can I ask you a question? Are you the guy who killed his wife?”
    “What makes you ask?”
    “I overheard someone talking about a guy who killed his wife.”
    I shrug. “My wife is divorcing me. She canceled my health insurance.”

    S omeone comes in and says, “Which one of you asked for a priest?”
    “We asked for paper.”
    “Oh,” the guy says. He goes out and comes back with a yellow legal pad and a pen.
    “Where to begin?” the dying man says. “For certain, there are questions that will go unanswered. The difficulty is that there is not an answer for everything—some things cannot be known.”
    He begins to spin a story, a complicated narrative about a woman—how they came together and then apart.
    His story is beautiful and eloquent, Salingeresque; they didn’t speak the same language, she wore a beautiful red scarf, and she got pregnant.
    I try to get it down. As I’m looking at what I’m writing, I see that it’s not making sense. I’m not writing in English. Whatever marks I’m making on this paper are not anything that another person could read. I focus on catchphrases, I draw pictures, I try to make a map—I am all over the page, hoping I can clean it up later. He’s going on and on, and right when we get to what I think would be the end, the dénouement, the guy sits bolt upright. “I’m not breathing,” he says.
    I push the call button. “He’s not breathing,” I shout. “He’s going from pale pink to deep red, kind of purple.”
    Soon the room is filled with people. “We were in the middle of a conversation, he was coming to the punch line, and then, suddenly, he sat up and said, ‘I’m not breathing.’”
    Now he’s sputtering, choking, in trouble, and more people come, and it’s like an audience. They’re all standing there watching the guy.
    “Are you going to just watch or are you going to do something?” I ask.
    “There’s nothing we can do,” the nurses say.
    “Of course there is,” I say.
    “He’s DNR. Do Not Resuscitate.”
    He wanted to die a good death. But look at him. He’s struggling like he’s choking to death.
    “We know not when or how we will be called home,” one of them says, and then they whip the curtain between the beds closed.
    “That is not okay,” I say, hauling my damaged self out of the goddamned bed and peeling the curtain open.
    He’s bucking and heaving and seems to be begging for someone to do something. Despite the tangle of EKG wires hanging off my chest and my double IVs, I get close to him, my exposed ass edging the nurses out of the way. And in my mind he’s telling me to sock it to him, so I do. I give him one hell of an uppercut, slamming him in the gut with all I’ve got.
    His mouth drops open, his teeth come flying out, and he gasps for breath. “Fucking dentures almost killed me,” he says.
    “You said you didn’t want to be resuscitated,” the nurse says, indignantly.
    “I didn’t say I wanted to choke on my own goddamned teeth.”
    “I thought it was an embolism. Did you think it was an embolism?” one nurse says to another.
    “Do me a favor, send me home, where at least I can shoot myself when I’m ready.”
    “Would you like me to call someone?” the nurse asks.
    “Like who?”
    “A representative of the hospital? Case-management personnel, the patient advocates? A doctor? You tell me.”
    “Start at the top and work your way down,” he says. “And change my forms immediately. Clearly you don’t know the meaning of DNR.”
    Half an hour later, a woman comes with the forms rescinding the DNR order. “It can take a while before the change makes its way into the system, so how about I put a sign on your door.”
    “Do what’s necessary,” the man says.
    “PLEASE SAVE THIS MAN,” the woman writes on the dry-erase board mounted on the door that already lists our names and that we’re IN DANGER OF FALLING/USE PRECAUTIONS.
    In the middle of the afternoon, the pet person comes back, with photos of Tessie and the cat sitting on George and