Britney

There is a groan from the other side of the curtain, a silvery blue sheet separating worlds. I try to imagine the body it is emerging from; how it has collapsed, how it is bruised. My cousin tells me that the man I have been hearing for the past four hours has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. My mother had non-Hodgkin’s. After almost three years I still do not know the difference.

The doctors yell at this man: “We need to put a very large IV in you! Do you know what year it is, Phillip? Do you know what month it is? Don’t panic, let us breathe for you. Open your eyes, Phillip! Phillip! Yes or no?”

I am in a land of soiled linens and folded skin, plaid gowns, and latex strewn across the floor. I feel as if I have never been surrounded by such panicked air, from the crowding of the well and unwell bodies in this strange in-between, to the beeping that I cannot understand, to the disarray of white sheets and translucent wires.

There are four of us surrounding my great-aunt. There is a woman next to her, lying with clasped hands, surveying the area in a quiet, anxious way that I recognize because of the weight of my own gaze. Her eyes rest on bags upon bags. A man came here with her, but he is nowhere to be found, and I feel guilty. I feel guilty because there are so many of us here for my aunt when so many others have no one, and because I fear that one day this will be me, lone onlooker in an emergency room.

Somewhere a song plays, something ripped from the 8-bit games I buried myself beneath years ago. It stops for a few minutes, then plays again. Here, a ringtone becomes siren speak. I want to go to it…

A nurse smiles at me as she closes Phillip’s curtain. ♦