Come Out Tonight (32 page)

She shook her head.
 
“Open the top one?” she asked me, pointing unsteadily across the room.
  
I followed her finger and opened the underwear drawer. She’d been disconnected from her tubes and catheter, so she was able to wear regular clothes.

“This?” I said, pulling out a bra and underpants in varying styles and colors.

“No,” she laughed.
 
“Not those.
 
Something that matches.”

I fumbled about in the drawer, pulling out two pieces which might, in an imperfect world, be said to match.
 
“These okay?”

“Okay.”

I brought them over.
 
This was a first: dressing Sherry.
 
I helped her to pull off the top of her pajamas, held out the bra so she could slip into it.
 
Then she couldn’t fasten the hook between her breasts.
 
I managed to get in back of her and loop my arms in front to hook the bra.
 
We swung her legs over the end of the bed; with effort, we managed to pull off her pajama bottoms and to pull up her panties.
 
By the time the aide came in, we were both exhausted, and all that we’d managed was her underwear.
 
I thankfully gave over my role to the aide and went outside for a breath of air.
 
This, I knew, was what it would be like if Sherry lived at my place.

Outside, I moped.
 
Nothing would ever be the way I used to imagine it.
 
Nothing would ever be the same.
 
This person just wasn’t the same.
 
Was it really Sherry?
 

Sherry used to say that there is no little man in our heads, telling us what to do.
 
No self.
 
Selves are constructs made by our brains.
 
Human beings have language, and our words kind of take off on their own and create a story of who we are.
 
All we are is works-in-progress, stories that keep updating and updating themselves throughout our lives, snowballing with new events and jobs, friends, moves, adventures, losses.
 
Each new turn becomes part of the story that tells us and the rest of the world who we are.

I told her once I didn’t believe it.
 
I was sure I was more real than just a story.

“Really? Sherry said. “You’re sure?
 
How?”

“I don’t know.
 
I feel real. I...Isn’t that enough?”

Sherry just laughed like I was an idiot, punishing me with another fifteen minutes on how self is represented by a single cluster of cells in our brain.
  
How those cells don’t have to change because all they are is a name: Me.
 
That the story itself is somewhere else, somewhere in the connections between other cells that hold our features: maleness or tallness or dumbness, where we grew up and the movies we’ve seen.
 
But is there really a Henry in the world?
 
No, Sherry would say.
 
We might see ourselves as real, unchanging, even immortal, but it’s not true.
 
It’s just a story.
 

Well, I hated to think it, but it looked to me like the old Sherry had ended, and this new Sherry was some other story altogether.

I plodded down the hall toward her room and whoever I would find there.
 
I opened the door to find Sherry, dressed in pants and sweater, washed and brushed, and sitting in a chair eating her breakfast.
 
She seemed to be coping slightly better with the oatmeal; I didn’t offer to help.

“So what’s new?” Sherry asked.

“Not much,” I said.
 
“
Iraq
.
 
Afghanistan
.
 
The
Middle East
.
  
Same old.
 
Same old.”

“No,” she said, trying to navigate the spoon back to the tray.
 
“
Your
life.”

I didn’t know what to say.
 
All the interesting parts were off limits.
 
“Not much.
 
Back and forth between the job and the apartment.
 
And here.”

“I miss working,” Sherry said, laying down the spoon.

“You’ll go back.”

“No I won’t,” she said.
 
“They gave away my job.”

“I think the law says that they have to give you a job when you’re ready to go back.”

“Oh, sure.
 
What can they give someone who can’t stay awake?”

I thought of my talk with the doctor.
 
Will she have to take Somnolux for the rest of her life?
 
And the answer:
We can only hope
...
 
This was not what she wanted to hear.
 
“The doctor said he is optimistic,” I said instead, not lying, just taking something out of context.

“Really?” she said.
 
“Optimistic?”

I had put my foot in it.
 
Now how was I going to make shit smell better?
 
I gave her my version of the conversation: We don’t know for sure, only God does, but you’re a miracle! No one ever came out of PVS this way before, so who’s to say you won’t be back to your old self soon, very soon.
 
I left out the black brain scans, long-dormant pathways, and no gamma wave.
 
Sherry seemed happy with what was left.
 
She picked up her spoon in her fist and made another run at her oatmeal.

“You hear from the Institute?” I asked.

“Ryan calls sometimes,” she mumbled through the oatmeal.

“You see him?”

“No,” she said, her eyes on the spoon.

“What about Detective Sirken?” I asked.

“Who?”

“You know, the detective who was following your case.”

“I don’t remember.”

“The woman who came and asked you questions.”

“Yeah.
 
I think I remember her. ”

“Has she come again?”

“Again?”

I decided to drop it.
 
Sherry didn’t even remember she was there.
 
“Turn on the news?” I sighed.

Sherry nodded.

I grabbed the remote from the bed table and clicked it on, forwarding through a series of morning shows, commercials,
Lydia
’s Italian Kitchen, cartoons, until I lit on the local news broadcast.
 
Morning or not, all it seemed to contain was bad news.
 
Hold-up in a
Brooklyn
liquor store, owner shot to death when he wouldn’t open the register.
 
Fight to the death of rival gangs in the
Bronx
, two killed, eight wounded.
 
Local drought continuing; don’t flush your toilet.
 
Then, shooting in
Queens
.
 
More after this.
 
A commercial followed for some medicine to prevent strokes.
 
Do not use if you are pregnant, thinking of becoming pregnant, have heart disease, thinking of having heart disease.
 
Might cause glaucoma, migraines, kidney failure.
 
Hi, we’re back.
 
There was a shooting last night in
Queens
.
 
Diego Jimenez,
 
the anchor said, the screen filling with a picture of a large beefy guy with curly dark hair...WAIT I THOUGHT...
was found shot dead in his home
...WASN’T THAT?... Here the picture morphed to a little white house with green shutters...OH MY...
at
78-22 160
^th
Street
...GOD.

*
   
*
   
*

Then there’s a blank spot in my memory.
 
The next thing I remember is being on the F train on its way to
Queens
.
 
My watch showed two hours later.
 
I pulled out my cell and called Sherry to find out what happened.
 
It rang for six times before she picked up.
 
I could picture her fumbling for the phone, trying to pick it up with misbehaving hands.

“Hi, Sherry,” was all I said, before the line cut off.

I pushed redial, figuring maybe she had pushed the wrong button.
 
Five rings until she picked up this time. “Hi, Sherry,” I said again.
  
I could hear angry bursts of crying on the other end.

“I wouldn’t live with you...if you were...the last person on earth!” I heard between sobs.
 

“What?” I said.

“Don’t bother...selling my apartment or...bringing my clothes someplace!
 
Don’t bother...doing anything for me!” she sobbed.
 
“...Don’t have to tell me what a weight I am on your...back.
 
I know I am.
 
And I’m sorry, but...you think...I want this? You think...I want to be a...cripple?”

I tried to say that she wasn’t a cripple, that she’d be okay, not to worry so much, she was just depressed, but she blew me off.
 
“Don’t give me that bull...dog. After you just told me I am.
  
But it’s your fault! You called the ambu...ambulance.
 
I didn’t ask you to.
 
You should have let me die!”

“But what happened?” I asked.
 
“I didn’t say those things.”

There was a long pause before she said anything.
 
Then, “I don’t want to see you again,” and click.

Meanwhile the doors were opening at the
Forest Hills
station.
 
I didn’t want to go to
Queens
. Why was I going to
Queens
?
  
But I was in a daze: paralyzed, weak.
 
I sat in my seat four more stops till I could summon up enough will to get off the train.
 
Then I walked down one long flight of stairs and up another, and boarded the train going the other way.

The train was packed: students in lumpy backpacks; a coffee klatch of gray-haired women chatting in a corner, their seats facing each other; a group of teenaged ballerinas, their hair in buns, carrying duffle bags; a herd of rowdy schoolchildren being corralled by their teachers.
 
I made my way down the car.
 
Grabbing an overhead strap, I saw the time on my watch: almost two.
 
I was due back at work an hour and a half ago.
 
Could it get any worse?

The shadow of a person grabbed the strap to my left.
 
“Late for work?” a familiar voice said.
 
I turned around to see Detective Donna Sirken.
  
Worse.

“Have a nice trip to
Queens
?” she asked.

“You been following me?”

“All the way from the
Bronx
,” she answered.

“Well, then, you’d have noticed that I never made it to
Queens
.”

“True,” she said.
 
“I just figured you caught sight of me and decided not to complete your trip.”

“I never noticed you till you came up beside me.”

“Right.
 
Then why would you get all the way to
Queens
and then turn around?”

“I guess I just like riding the subway,” I said, turning away to look out the dirty window at the tunnel flying past.
 
Maybe she’d go away.
 

No such luck.
 
“How did you know Diego Jimenez?” I heard from my left.

“Never heard of him,” I said, trying to keep my cool.

“C’mon, Henry,” Sirken said.
 
“You think we’re stupid?
 
All we had to do is check out your cell phone statement from last month.
 
There’s one call from Diego to your cell. Then a minute later, a call from your cell to his.”

“It was a wrong number,” I say.
 

“Then why’d you call him back?”

“I didn’t even know who it was. The guy started threatening me on the phone.
 
Then he hung up. So I called him back to tell him to never threaten me again.”

“Why was he threatening you?” Sirken asked.

I could have refused to answer, but really, I didn’t have anything to hide.
 
“Something about Alicia.”

“Alicia is...was Diego’s girlfriend,” Sirken offered.

I didn’t say anything.
 

“Well,” Sirken said.
 
“I’ll just tell you that we asked Alicia whether she knew a Henry Jackman.
 
She said ‘no.’” She waited a beat.
 
“But she said she knew an Eduardo Jackman.
 
Who is Eduardo Jackman?” Sirken asked.