Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

there, right before my eyes, they started. They put the old man in the center, sitting down with his head bowed and his eyes shut—they had to tap him and remind him how to do that—and they squatted in a rough sort of circle round him, facing in and out, in and out, alternately. Then, eyes closed, they started swaying back and forth moaning some words very softly, only not the same words, it sounded as if each one ofthem had got different words, and not in English of course but Swahili or Sanskrit or something. It got louder, gradually it got louder, a pounding singsong, and as it did they rose to their feet, all except the old man who stayed where he was and looked as if he might have gone to sleep, sitting, and they began a shuffling kind of dance where they stood, clapping, not very well in time. They did this for a long while, and the noise they were making, though it was not terribly loud, attracted the nurses from their station and nurses’ aides and orderlies and a few people like me who were waiting, and nobody seemed to know what to do, because it was so unbelievable, so crazy in that ordinary little waiting room. Everybody just stared as if they were asleep and dreaming and expecting to wake up. Then a nurse came out of Intensive Care and said, “We can’t have this disturbance. What do you think you’re doing here?”
    She took hold of one of the young ones and shook him by the shoulder, else she couldn’t have got anybody to stop and pay attention.
    “We’re working to help a woman who’s very sick,” he told her.
    “I don’t know what you call working, but you’re not helping anybody. Now I’m asking you to clear out of here. Excuse me. I’m not asking. I’m telling.”
    “You’re very mistaken if you think the tones of our voices are hurting or disturbing any sick person. This whole ceremony is pitched at a level which will reach and comfort the unconscious mind and draw the demonic influences out of the body. It’s a ceremony that goes back five thousand years.”
    “Good Lord,” said the nurse, looking stupefied as well she might. “Who are these people?”
    I had to go and enlighten her, telling her that it was my brother and what you might call his friends, and I was not in on their ceremony. I asked about Mother, was there any change.
    “No change,” she said. “What do we have to do to get them out of here?”
    “Turn the hose on them,” one of the orderlies said, and all this time, the dance, or ceremony, never stopped, and the one who had stopped and done the explaining went back to dancing too, and I said to the nurse, “I’ll phone in to see how she is, I’m going home for a little while.” I walked out of the hospital and found to my surprise that it was dark. The whole day in there, dark to dark. In the parking lot I started to cry. Cam has turned this into a circus for his own benefit, I said to myself, and said it out loud when I got home.
    Haro made me a drink.
    “It’ll probably get into the papers,” I said. “Cam’s chance for fame.”
    Haro phoned the hospital to see if there was any news and they said there wasn’t. “Did they have—was there any difficulty with some young people in the waiting room this evening? Did they leave quietly?” Haro is ten years older than I am, a cautious man, too patient with everybody. I used to think he was sometimes giving Cam money I didn’t know about.
    “They left quietly,” he said. “Don’t worry about the papers. Get some sleep.”
    I didn’t mean to but I fell asleep on the couch, after the drink and the long day. I woke up with the phone ringing and day lightening the room. I stumbled into the kitchen dragging the blanket Haro had put over me and saw by the clock on the wall it was a quarter to six. She’s gone, I thought.
    It was her own doctor.
    He said he had encouraging news. He said she was much better this morning.
    I dragged over a chair and collapsed in it, both arms and my head too down on the kitchen counter. I came back on the phone to hear him saying she was still in a criticalphase and the next forty-eight hours would tell the story, but without raising my hopes too high he wanted me to know she was responding to treatment. He said that this was especially surprising in view of the fact that she had been late getting to hospital and the things they did to her at first did not seem to have much effect, though of course the fact that she survived the first few hours at all was a good