“Yes.”
“Then go back to Patient 630. I’m sure she’d appreciate some more of your company. I know I find it totally stimulating.”
I shook my head. “She’s a little antsy today,” I said. “I think it’s best if I steer clear. Maybe I’ll go visit Philip Danley. He’s a nice kid.”
“We don’t use names here,” she said. “You should know that by now.”
“But he told me his name,” I said. “He said I could call him by it.”
“I don’t care. Anyone could be passing by. Reporters are always looking for families to embarrass by—”
“Fine,” I said, standing up. “I’ll go see Patient 563.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “He died on Tuesday.”
I sat down again, astonished by how she’d broken the news to me. I’d lost patients before, of course, but I’d visited Philip many times and liked him. I understood that she had to keep a distance from the emotion of her job or be unable to survive it but there was such a thing as compassion.
“Was anyone there?” I asked, trying to keep the anger out of my tone. “When he passed away, I mean?”
“I was there.”
“Any of his family?”
She shook her head. “No. And they wouldn’t take the body either. It went to the city crematorium. Well, to the AIDS section. You know they don’t even want the dead bodies of AIDS victims to mix with the dead bodies of other people now?”
“For fuck’s sake,” I said. “That’s ridiculous. What the hell can they do to the dead? And how could the boy’s family stay away when he needed them the most?”
“You think that’s the first time that’s happened?”
“No, I guess not, but it’s just so fucking heartless.”
We said nothing for a few minutes and then she reached for a file from her desk and flicked through it. “You want to go see someone else or not?”
“Sure,” I said. “I might as well.”
“Patient 741,” she said. “Room 703.”
A bell rang in my head. Patient 741. The patient that Bastiaan had told us about that night in the restaurant on 23rd Street. Heterosexual, angry and Irish. Not necessarily a combination I wanted to deal with at that moment.
“Isn’t there someone else I could visit?” I asked. “I’ve heard he’s quite aggressive.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t get to pick and choose. Patient 741, Room 703. Take it or leave it. What the hell’s the matter with you, Cyril? The man’s dying. Show a little compassion.”
I rolled my eyes and gave in, leaving the office to make my way slowly down the corridor. For a moment, I wondered whether I could skip out of this visit entirely and just go down to the cafeteria and wait for Bastiaan there but Shaniqua knew everything that took place on the seventh floor and the chances were she’d never let me back in again if I disappointed her.
I paused outside Room 703 for a few moments, taking a deep breath like I always did when I met a new patient for the first time. I never knew how badly the disease might have affected him or her; they could look frail but unscarred or their appearance could be devastating. And I never wanted my reaction to be too cruelly revealed in my expression. I opened the door slowly and peered inside. The curtains were closed and as evening was drawing in the room was quite dark but I could just about make out the man lying in the bed and hear his heavy and labored breathing.
“Hello?” I said quietly. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” he murmured after a short pause. “Come in.”
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. “I don’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “I’m one of the hospital volunteers. I understand you’ve been on your own and wondered whether you might like a visitor?”
He said nothing for a few moments and then, in an anxious tone, said, “You’re Irish?”
“A long time ago I was,” I said. “I haven’t been back in years, though. You’re Irish too, I’m told?”
“Your voice…” he said as he tried to lift his head a little in the bed, but the effort proved too much for him and he collapsed back with a groan.
“Don’t disturb yourself,” I told him. “Can I open the curtains, though, to let in a little light? Would you mind?”
“Your voice,” he repeated, and I wondered whether the disease had eaten into his brain too much and I would get little sense out of him. Still, I had resolved to sit and talk with him and that is what I would do. He neither offered permission nor withheld it regarding the curtains, so I stepped over to the window and pulled them apart, glancing down onto the New York streets below. The yellow cabs were driving up and down honking their horns and the view between the skyscrapers held me for a minute. I had never fallen in love with this city—even after almost seven years my head was still in Amsterdam and my heart was still in Dublin—but there were moments, like this one, when I understood why others did.
Turning back, I looked toward the patient and our eyes met in a moment of recognition that sent a shiver through my body so deeply that I was forced to reach a hand out to the windowsill to steady myself. He was no older than me but almost completely bald, a few wisps of hair clinging pathetically to the top of his head. His cheeks were sunken, as were his eyes, and a dark oval of purple-red sent a hideous bruise along his chin and down his neckline. A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.
He looked a hundred years old.
He looked like a man who had died several months earlier.
He looked like a soul in pure torment.
But still I knew him. All the changes that the disease had made to his once-beautiful face and body and still I would have known him anywhere.
“Julian,” I said.
Who’s Liam?