The Glass Factory (8 page)

“Please, this is conservative. I could’ve chosen magenta or orchid, but I thought lavender went better with my scrubs. Deep breath.”

He raises the back of my gown and presses the stethoscope to my ribs, so I guess he means me. I oblige, staring blankly ahead.

“Again. Uh-huh. Again.” He moves it over a bit, then down, then he steps back and unplugs his ears. “There’s certainly a lot of wheezing, but not more than any former heavy smoker.”

He asks me about the blood. I tell him it’s happened a few times since I’ve been out here, like when a truck passes me on the road or the wind shifts and I get a lungful of incinerator ash from Kim Tungsten.

“I need to listen in front.”

Maybe I’m just kind of slow today, but it doesn’t really register. So he gently pulls down the front of my gown and places the thing on my chest. “Breathe.” I oblige. He’s in so close I can smell his cologne. Something leathery. Not my favorite. He straightens up.

“Let’s go for the X-ray.” He helps me off the examination table and leads me out into the hall. And suddenly I am very aware of a chill breeze blowing up my back, and I feel pretty silly holding my two hands behind me, one high, one low. I wonder if Judgment Day feels anything like this.

He stands me up behind the big screen and stays close to me, making adjustments. I read his ID badge three times.

“Please
tell me your name is not Alan Wrennch,” I say.

“Well, I’m better off than my brother, Monkey,” he says. “Just kidding. My middle name is Stanislaus. I use Stan.”

“Then it’s okay if I call you Stan?”

“Sure. They shortened it when my grandparents came from Byelorussia in 1916.”

“From what? Wrennchowski?” He’s spelling my name out in lead letters to identify the image.

“Nobody remembers. Could have been Rabinowitz for all we know.”

“That’s ‘A.’”

“I beg your pardon?”

“B-u-s-c-a-r-s-e-l-a.”

“That’s quite a name yourself.”

“I think it’s two names run together. My family comes from a small mountain village in Ecuador. I think a few too many first cousins got married, half the town had the same last name and there was no way to tell anybody apart.”

“Hold still.
Deep
breath and hold it.” I oblige.
Crrzzzap!
“Okay, you can step down.”

“How is that possible?” I ask.

“What?” he says, pulling out the X-ray film and handing it through the door to a lab assistant. “Rush that back to me in Room E-Six.”

“That nobody knows your real name.”

“Oh, my grandmother was only four years old when they came and if she ever knew the old name she took that secret to her grave with her fifteen years ago.”

“Oh, sorry—”

“She had operable cancer, too. But the damn Upper East Side doctor didn’t bother to do what he should’ve until it was too late.”

“You mean, you know that now.”

“Yeah. ‘Oops. Your grandma’s dead and I could’ve prevented it—sorry. And oh by the way here’s your bill for twenty-three hundred dollars.’“

“So that’s when you decided to become a doctor?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Hmm. You see those shadows?”

“Yes.”

“Those are the scars from your exposure several years ago. The lesions don’t seem to have advanced beyond their initial state. But there are some odd shadows here—and here—they look almost tubercular. But it
could
be cancerous. We’d better schedule a biopsy. Can you come back on Friday?”

“Can’t you do it now?”

“Mrs. Petrizzi is eighty-two years old. I can’t keep her waiting.”

“After that?”

“Two more.”

“After that?”

“It’s going to be at least a three-hour wait.”

“I’ll wait.”

I keep insanity at bay for another hour and a half by going through the much-thumbed and smeared waiting room copies of today’s papers. U.S. Marines are in Italy trying to plug up an erupting Mount Etna with seven-ton concrete blocks. And they say
we
believe in witchcraft. A New York City program to buy illegal weapons with no questions asked has brought in 1,246 guns in three weeks, a local library is being closed for lack of funds, and a sharp entrepreneur is cashing in on the “Kill the Imports” craze by charging one dollar a whack for anybody who wants to stop by his Chrysler dealership and swing a sledgehammer at a Honda Civic. He’s made $122 so far. But the human interest item that just brightens my day is a brief on the KKK’s public disavowal of any connection with a group that has claimed responsibility for two bombings that killed a federal judge and a lawyer in Arkansas. The Grand Wizard says he never heard of the group and that it has no connection with the Klan. “I think it is a group trying to make the Klan and the racist groups look bad in front of the public,” he said. I’m not kidding.

I call Colomba to see if everything’s all right, and ask to speak to Antonia. She’s playing happily, and doesn’t want to come to the phone. I guess that’s okay.

Two hours later Dora gives me a shot of local anesthetic in my butt (for my
throat?)
followed by a squirt of dark brown goo that I’m supposed to keep on my tongue as long as possible. As it slowly seeps down, I lose some feeling in my gullet. Dr. Stanley Wrennch returns, wheeling in what I learn is a bronchoscope. He’s planning to send this fiber optic tube down my trachea to my lungs, hack a bit off, and come out again. Dora rubs my shoulders a bit to relax me so I don’t bite down on $30,000 worth of fiber optics, and Dr. Stan gets to work.

“Are you taking any medication?” he asks. Why do they always ask you questions when your mouth is full of medical equipment?

“Just birth control pills,” I manage to answer. Don’t know why, since I haven’t had sex in three months. At least he doesn’t ask me that.

Okay, here goes. This one-centimeter-wide tube goes sliding past my tongue, down my throat until I lose contact with it. Thank God for anesthesia. I guess I’d be throwing up by now, normally. Some of my mucus gets on the ocular, and he has to activate a fine spray, which makes me cough furiously and fogs up the lens even more. When I’ve stopped coughing, he risks a little more spray to clear the tip, and the tickle almost makes me cough. I suppress it.

“That’s it, Filomena,” he says. “Hold it. Just a little bit more.”

“You’re doing good,” says the nurse.

Isn’t this what everybody kept saying to me when I was giving birth? They haven’t changed their material in four years? Inexcusable.

Finally it’s over. Dr. Stan retracts the bronchoscope, bottles the sample and peels off his rubber gloves.

“Okay, we’ll have the results in a couple of days.” He scribbles a few lines in my file, checks off half a dozen boxes on the billing log, and tells me to take it to the receptionist who’ll schedule me for a follow-up.

“In the meantime?” I ask him.

I can see that he doesn’t have an answer. He’s newer than I thought.

“Thanks, doc,” I tell him. He nods and is gone out the door.

I take the papers up to the desk, get it all processed, then take the bill to a small office down the hall. By some miracle I have brought all the right papers proving who I am and that I have been rejected by Medicaid. The woman’s fingers fly across a calculator keypad and she tells me I will definitely qualify for the hospital’s financial assistance program. The federal government may be in debt until the year two million, but at least the state’s keeping aboveboard. I mean, if an unemployed mother and child aren’t eligible for Medicaid, then who is?

“Please,” says the woman, “we’ve got a guy here with multiple sclerosis. He’s thirty years old. Hasn’t gotten out of bed since January, but because he’s under sixty-five he doesn’t qualify for Medicaid because under the current guidelines he’s considered ‘able to work.’ Reagan raised the cutoff, Bush raised it some more, and Clinton’s done nothing to change things. It was better under Reagan.”

Better under Reagan.

“You need your parking validated?” she asks, tearing a blue-green stamp out of a booklet.

“Sure.”

“Here, I’ll staple it.”

“Oh, I was going to lick it.”

“Girl, let me tell you something: Don’t you ever lick
anything
in this building.”

I drive south. Did you know you can’t qualify for a driver’s license on Long Island without taking a three-hour class in mind reading? Because that’s the only way to predict what some of these crazies are going to do next. “Signal? I don’t need to signal—I know where I’m going!”

Trapped at an eternally red light, I think about the alien living inside my chest. And how it got there. Leaving no obvious bruises on me. The folks who put the Bible together knew a thing or two about people. We’ve all heard about the commandments against inflicting physical harm, you know, “If a man shall smite his neighbor’s eye,” and all that, but it also commands against inflicting
psychological
harm. What, after all, are the
tangible
results of lying, dishonoring, coveting, and screwing around? Those crimes produce
emotional
suffering, which the Bible seems to take quite seriously (four out of ten commandments, at last count). Extortion laws criminalize the perceived threat of physical harm, but there is generally no legal recourse for the crippling mental anguish caused by, say, being given a disease that takes ten or twenty years to kill you. If Morse had just shot me in the back of the head a few years ago he’d be in jail. But cancer? Anything could have caused that.

I get home, make dinner for Antonia. I don’t eat anything myself because I’ve got to get ready for my “date” with Jim Stella. Not that I could keep anything down after that bronchoscopy. I take her upstairs to read, and rearrange the framed photos in what has become my altar to Antonia. I take her hands in mine and pray, God, please, don’t let my shrine become a memorial.

It’s interesting. Unexpected. To feel your priorities shift from self-preservation to species preservation. I’m much more concerned that the kid should carry on than I am about myself at this point. Is that instinct? Parental hormones? Or am I just going nuts?

I’ve got to stay focused here. I can’t let anger blind me this time, but I can’t let myself go soft either. What should I do?

What do I say to you?

Lord—why am I dying?