Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (15 page)

I shouldn’t have.

A woman answered, “Hello,” in a meek, barely audible voice.

“Hello, this is Eleanor Druse calling, Sally Druse. I was a very good friend of Madeline Kruger. With whom am I speaking?”

“This is Peggy,” she said. “Peggy Kruger. I’m Madeline’s daughter.”

“Hello, Peggy. I don’t believe we’ve met, but I knew your mother very well when we were little girls, and she tried to reach me the night she…passed away. In fact I went to the hospital to see her that night.”

“You did?”

Peggy sounded as if maybe she didn’t have all her chairs around the table, if you know what I mean. She was agreeable, but clueless about me or any papers left by her mum. As I tried several different tacks to ask after documents, papers, and notes, Peggy let slip that Hilda was in New York for the rest of the week.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, is there a chance that
you
could check for any documents or
notes
mentioning Sally Druse or Eleanor Druse? Your mom asked for my help in another note she wrote to me, and I want to be certain I know just what she wanted me to do. Could you maybe just look through her more important papers for any with Sally Druse or Eleanor Druse on them?”

“Sure,” said Peggy, but she sounded hollow, like a gourd with the seeds removed. “Sure, I could look through her papers, for anything with Sally in it. Right?”

“Sally Druse,” I said, “or Eleanor Druse. I would so much appreciate it. ”

I left my phone number at the hospital and asked Peggy to let me know right away if she found anything. I could have Bobby hustle right over and pick it up before—well, I didn’t say it, but before Hilda got back from New York.

Next I summoned Bobby. Sweetly. I didn’t dress him down for not telling me about the fate of Dr. Egas, or how Ollie had also seen a mysterious old doctor lurking in the corridors of Kingdom Hospital. I could have, but I didn’t. Instead, I graciously asked him if he could please check with the Kingdom’s medical librarian, Mr. Bates, and see if there were any records or documents predating the fire, news stories about the fire, monographs or histories done about the old hospital on or before the time of the fire. It was a long shot, but I’d met Bates before, he was almost my age, so he probably knew where to find out about the fire, even if he didn’t have the goods himself. Anything I could use to unravel Madeline’s curious reference to the date of the fire and a girl being lost and not dying in the fire. Even old medical records.

Bobby cut me off with a pained sigh.

“Now that one I happen to know, Mum. They keep medical records for seven years. Ten at the most. After that they burn them, unless they were part of a research study. Plus you’re talking about medical records from before the old hospital burned down? That’s sixty-four, sixty-five years ago. They don’t keep records that long, even if by some miracle the records survived the fire in 1939.”

“Never mind medical records, Bobby. How about a list of doctors on staff, doctors who were working here at the time of the fire? There might be a history of the old hospital somewhere. You’ve got to help me, Bobby.”

“I’ll try, Mum. I’ll go see Mr. Bates. I’ll also go rummage around Faust College and see what they drag out of the dustbin over there.”

“You tell them I sent you, Bobby. I’m still emeritus there, you know. They took away my office and gave it to some flatlander who teaches statistics, but if anybody gives you any grief you tell them that Eleanor Druse, emeritus professor of esoteric psychology and noetic sciences, sent you.”

“Yes, Mum,” he said, even though I know for a fact that he couldn’t remember my title if it was the last question on St. Peter’s judgment day final exam.

The next day I woke up early and selected my namesake—a druse rainbow crystal—to wear around my neck while I meditated and purged Western pharmaceutical contamination from my kundalini and chakras. Spiritual plumbing, I guess you might call it. I bundled up in my robe, felt refreshed and alert. Mindful, as we introspective types like to say, porous and atremble with the energy fields that govern my little corner of the universe. I set out to take a walk and go visit my old friend Lenny Stillmach, who was upstairs on the sunshine ward with end-stage pancreatic cancer, making ready for his final journey.

I followed an exit sign and took the stairs up one flight to a different floor, where the nurses didn’t know me (well, not quite true,
everybody
knows me by now; but on another floor they probably wouldn’t question me about traveling alone). Because of my recent episodes of vertigo, I didn’t technically have ambulatory privileges, and I had forgotten to ask Dr. Massingale about obtaining permission to go up and see Lenny on my own. I reasonably assumed that I was entitled to a little leeway when it came to rules and restrictions governing ambulation and patient transport. After all, I was practically a Kingdom employee. I knew my way around and knew what to do if I had any bouts of dizziness.

I went to the elevator bank and pushed the Up button. The numbers overhead showed that car 1 was in the lobby. Car 3 was on the roof. And car
2
was three floors down and coming my way. The chime sounded, the doors to car 2 parted, and the same plain old empty elevator car waited: the same faux walnut veneer wainscoting, the same mirrored walls and brushed steel handrails.

I stepped onto the elevator without hesitation and pressed R for the top floor—the roof, which on one side gives out into the sunshine ward, and on the other side once gave out onto an open sundeck. Unfortunately, the open-air deck had been covered with steel mesh enclosures in 1999, because in April of that year one of the Traff boys, Edgar—a first-year surgery resident—threw himself off the roof twelve stories to his death during his second night on call. Ollie and Danny were in the ER at the time and were able to diagnose Traff’s injuries as another Gravity-Assisted Concrete Poisoning, resulting in a sidewalk soufflé. Time of death: three A.M., dark-night-of-the-soul hour. The father, Louis Traff, is still a staff surgeon at KH; he never quite recovered from Edgar’s suicide or from the note his son left, which said simply: “I hereby acquiesce to my father’s opinion of me.” Traff senior glumly took his place in that sad unnatural society of parents who have buried their own children.

Edgar Traff’s younger brother, Elmer, is now a medical resident at KH, and I shudder because Elmer’s eyes sometimes sparkle with that same deranged energy that shone in his brother’s eyes.

The doors closed, and I was alone, on my way to the roof.

I heard the cables hissing and racing through the pulleys, the soft whir of the motor overhead as the car ascended. Suddenly it lurched to a stop so violently I heard the drop panels in the ceiling rattle, and I almost bit my tongue. The fluorescent lights hummed, then crackled and went out, leaving me in total darkness, suspended ten or more floors above the earth in an elevator shaft.

Silence. Then, I heard a feeble cry, so faint I had to hold my breath to hear it, a tiny whispering sound. A child’s voice again, but this time I was nowhere near pediatrics. I strained to hear it over the hiss of the cables and the purr of the motors in the neighboring cars. The mechanical noises seemed inordinately harsh and immediate, and when I looked up I saw why: A ceiling panel was ajar, either because repairmen had recently been up there and not closed up afterwards, or because the sudden halting of the car had dislodged the panel and opened a triangular aperture into the dark elevator shaft. I could see steel cables glistening with oil, and shadows scrolling by on the concrete walls as car 1 swooshed by in the adjoining shaft.

The little girl’s voice distinguished itself from the echoing noises, and I recognized the same haunting threnody, the same suffering and eternal loneliness I’d heard in my nightmare or seizure or out-of-body journey to the brink of death—whatever had happened to me the night we found Madeline’s infested corpse. The child’s wordless misery seemed to make that ancient argument against God’s existence—namely, that no loving creator would fashion a universe where children suffered. In plaintive, heartrending tones, the voice seemed to ask the unendurably poignant question:
Why must I, an innocent child, suffer so horribly?

A blast of static made my old heart shudder in my chest.

“Otto in security to elevator two. Are there any passengers in elevator two?”

The fluorescent lights hummed and crackled again, and about half of them struggled back on and relumed the interior with a sickly greenish hue.

Otto’s voice squawked from a speaker next to a handset at about knee level.

“Yes, Otto. It’s Sally Druse. I was on my way up to the sunshine ward. And, well, I don’t know what happened exactly. The elevator just stopped.”

“Always two,” he muttered. “Always two on the fritz,” followed by another burst of static.

“Flip that red reset switch down there near the phone, Sally,” said Otto. “That should get it going again.”

I found the switch, turned it off, and gave myself a fright when the lights went out again.

“That’s it, Sally. Now just flip it back on.”

I did. The lights came on and the elevator lurched, swayed, and resumed its ascent.

“That did it, Otto,” I said. “It’s moving.”

“Good.”

“Otto, when the elevator stopped I heard a child crying, a little girl. Has anybody else reported hearing a little girl crying in the elevator?”

Long pause, followed by more static.

“No,” said Otto, “no reports of little girls crying. I thought I
saw
a little girl on one of the security monitors the other day. But Dr. Hook came down the same hallway right after and said he didn’t see a little girl.”

I was ready to get excited about this sighting, but then I had a sudden premonition of what would happen if I took my evidence in its present form to the powers that be and tried to convince them that a sensed presence or ghost seemed to be lurking at Kingdom Hospital. They’d examine Otto, who supposedly saw the little girl, and determine that he was legally blind; then they’d examine me, who supposedly heard her, and discover that I was hard of hearing, with a history of tinnitus. Next case.

The elevator continued its ascent, each floor winking in turn along the row of lighted numbers at the top.

I turned and looked into the huge mirror of the car, looked deep into my own old eyes. Seizure? My ancient lights stared back at me. Was the child’s voice inside me or outside me?

“Otto,” I said, “are you still there?”

“Still here, Mrs. D.”

“Otto, when you see Bobby would you tell him that I urgently need a small handheld tape recorder. Nothing fancy. Just a tape recorder I can carry around with me, for dictation and whatnot?”

“Will do, Mrs. D. I’m writing him a note as we speak.”

“Thank you, Otto.”

The sunshine ward was not a place where I would choose to say my good-byes and take my leave, but it was far better than making a pitched battle of it in an intensive care unit. It was called the sunshine ward because it was on the roof with solaria everywhere, but also because it was designed by hospital administrators and psychologists who had no first-hand experience of death or dying—it goes without saying. Only the spiritually tone-deaf would decorate the walls and bulletin boards of a hospice with yellow, have-a-nice-day smiley faces and with motivational posters and slogans featuring cute kittens hanging from clotheslines over
HANG IN THERE, BABY
, or sweating pitchers of lemonade next to bouquets of flowers over
WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE.

Several renditions of Operation Morning Air stickers (old and new) festooned the doors, windows, computer monitors, and fabric patches in the cubicle dividers. Operation Morning Air, or OMA as its hyper-indoctrinated graduates like to call it, is the newest public relations and corporate wellness and motivational program wrought by Kingdom Hospital’s administrator, Dr. Jesse James (“We never make fun of his name,” says Bobby). Like all “new” PR and corporate culture policies and strategies, OMA was supposed to wreak important fundamental structural organizational motivational and everything-ational transformations by changing the name of everything, especially job titles. Patients were no longer referred to as patients, or as gorks, gomers, “the liver in bed six,” or “the open-heart in bed five,” as they had been called in the wards and ICUs in years gone by. Nor were they to be called “revenue bodies,” as they were in the executive offices. No. Under Operation Morning Air, patients were to be called “morning air clients.”

Only a Dilbert or a Kafka could describe the inanity of Operation Morning Air, and the likes of Dr. Hook and Dr. Massingale found the blithe, pointless optimism of the program to be tedious and demoralizing. The middle managers who pretended to love OMA brainwashed the volunteers and the hourly employees with stickers and slogans until we all walked around like denizens of Camp Happy, smiling and reminding each other to take deep, cleansing breaths of morning air.

Lenny even had an OMA sticker on the back of Casino Queen, a little handheld video blackjack game one of his grandkids had given him. Whenever Lenny was awake, he played Casino Queen with a manic intensity. Beating the thing brought him a rush of ecstasy almost unseemly in a dying person, and losing to it made a storm-swept desolation of his final days.

It was hard for me to prepare him for his journey in such a place. Then again, anybody who insisted on playing Casino Queen as the clock ran out on eighty-three years of life that had taken him through forty some countries and two wars probably didn’t much care what the cat posters on the wall said.

It was no chore for me to see the virile young Lenny in the wasted flesh propped up in bed before me. The total self is
all
selves, one for each moment of earthly life, reunited at death.

“Sally,” he said, and those blue eyes lit up like a May morning.

“Lenny,” I said, and that was all that needed to be said.