Where I'm Calling From

pulse is. She goes on holding my wrist like this.
    “I never told you because I didn’t want to scare you,” I say. “But it happens sometimes. It happened as recently as a week ago. I don’t have to be doing anything in particular when it happens, either. I can be sitting in a chair with the paper. Or else driving the car, or pushing a grocery basket. It doesn’t matter if I’m exerting myself or not. It just starts—boom, boom, boom. Like that. I’m surprised people can’t hear it.
    It’s that loud, I think. I can hear it, anyway, and I don’t mind telling you it scares me,” I say. “So if emphysema doesn’t get me, or lung cancer, or maybe a stroke like what you’re talking about, then it’s going to be a heart attack probably.”
    I reach for the cigarettes. I give her one. We’re through with sleep for the night. Did we sleep? For a minute, I can’t remember.
    “Who knows what we’ll die of?” Iris says. “It could be anything. If we live long enough, maybe it’ll be kidney failure, or something like that. A friend of mine at work, her father just died of kidney failure.
    That’s what can happen to you sometimes if you’re lucky enough to get really old. When your kidneys fail, the body starts filling up with uric acid then. You finally turn a whole different color before you die.”
    “Great. That sounds wonderful,” I say. “Maybe we should get off this subject. How’d we get onto this stuff, anyway?”
    She doesn’t answer. She leans forward, away from her pillow, arms clasping her legs. She closes her eyes and lays her head on her knees. Then she begins to rock back and forth, slowly. It’s as if she were listening to music. But there isn’t any music. None that I can hear, anyway.
    “You know what I’d like?” she says. She stops moving, opens her eyes, and tilts her head at me. Then she grins, so I’ll know she’s all right.
    “What would you like, honey?” I’ve got my leg hooked over her leg, at the ankle.
    She says, “I’d like some coffee, that’s what. I could go for a nice strong cup of black coffee. We’re awake, aren’t we? Who’s going back to sleep? Let’s have some coffee.”
    “We drink too much coffee,” I say. “All that coffee isn’t good for us, either. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any, I’m just saying we drink too much of it. It’s just an observation,” I add. “Actually, I could drink some coffee myself.”
    “Good,” she says.
    But neither of us makes a move.
    She shakes out her hair and then lights another cigarette. Smoke drifts slowly in the room. Some of it drifts toward the open window. A little rain begins to fall on the patio outside the window. The alarm comes on, and I reach over and shut it off. Then I take the pillow and put it under my head again. I lie back and stare at the ceiling some more. “What happened to that bright idea we had about a girl who could bring us our coffee in bed?” I say.
    “I wish somebody would bring us coffee,” she says. “A girl or a boy, one or the other. I could really go for some coffee right now.”
    She moves the ashtray to the nightstand, and I think she’s going to get up. Somebody has to get up and start the coffee and put a can of frozen juice in the blender. One of us has to make a move. But what she does instead is slide down in the bed until she’s sitting somewhere in the middle. The covers are all over the place. She picks at something on the quilt, and then rubs her palm across whatever it is before she looks up. “Did you see in the paper where that guy took a shotgun into an intensive care unit and made the nurses take his father off the life-support machine? Did you read about that?” Iris says.
    “I saw something about it on the news,” I say. “But mostly they were talking about this nurse who unplugged six or eight people from their machines. At this point they don’t know exactly how many she unplugged. She started off by unplugging her mother, and then she went on from there. It was like a spree, I guess. She said she thought she was doing everybody a favor. She said she hoped somebody’d do it for her, if they cared about her.”
    Iris decides to move on down to the foot of the bed. She positions herself so that she is facing me. Her legs are still under the covers. She puts her legs between my legs and says, “What about that quadriplegic woman on the news who says she wants to die, wants to starve herself to death? Now she’s suing her