The Man in the Window (16 page)

She had walked into Barnum Memorial Hospital feeling almost good, the warmth of the May afternoon still in her when she approached Herb, the security guard, and punched in to work. In fact, she felt so good she made the mistake of smiling at him.

Herb’s wrinkled face lit up, and he smiled back at her, which put a severe strain on his dentures. His uppers popped forward, which threw his alignment out and caused his lowers to list to the right, which shifted his tongue up and to the left, which forced his uppers to be pushed even further forward until at last they shot out of his mouth altogether, and unfortunately for Iris, her natural reaction was to reach out and catch them before they hit the linoleum and shattered.

“Atta irl,” Herb shouted, meaning “Thatta girl,” reaching out to claim his teeth.

Iris made a face as he took them and began, with a great many juicy sounds, to force them back into his mouth. “Herb,” she said, “I’ve handled some pretty disgusting dentures in my time, but those things take the cake.”

“A little fuzz on the molars never hurt a man,” he said. “Iris, girl, that was quite a catch. You’re a marvelous woman, you’re my Georgia peach.” He smiled at her again, but more cautiously. “Quite a catch. You sure do know how to use your hands.” His smile became a leer and he gave his eyebrows a wiggle.

“You got a twitch, Herb? You got a problem with your eyebrows?”

He leaned his face toward her. “Think I do, Iris. How about taking a closer look?”

Iris stepped back and stared at him for several moments. “Herb, practically every female employee of this hospital is better looking than me. I don’t get it. Not once, never have I seen you come on to any one of them. Only me. Why is that? Because I’m such a joke, you think you might actually have a chance?”

It was Herb’s turn to stare back at her. He shook his head, then spoke to her in his wheezy asthmatic voice. “You think I’m
a crazy old fart, don’t you? Don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something, I know a thing or two. I got no teeth, and I got hardly no wind left in my lungs, and I got the arthritis bad—hell, there’s something wrong with practically everything I do got. But my brain works, Iris girl, and my eyes are cloudy, but they can still see. I watch you coming here to this time clock every day, and I see something I don’t see in any other of those female employees you was talking about.” He stopped to catch his breath, placed a gnarled hand on the wall to brace himself.

Iris whispered, “What? What is it you see?”

Herb took a white handkerchief from his back pocket, lifted his hat, and wiped his brow. At last he said, “I see love. I see pure, one hundred percent untapped love. You call yourself ugly. Well, you’re just looking
at
the package, girl, and me, I’m looking
in
the package. So there. That’s what causes old Herb to kick up a fuss every time he sees his Iris. He gets all excited ’cause it’s Christmas Eve, and he knows what’s in the package.”

They stood there in the hall, eyeing each other as several nurses walked past them, punching in for evening shift. Iris turned to go and started off down the hall.

Herb’s voice reached her just before she disappeared. “Hey. You’re a peach.”

She stopped, and shouted back at him. “Don’t be thinking about taking no bites out of this peach until you get those dentures fixed.”

He laughed. “So long, bye-bye, I’m off to the dentist now.”

So when she walked into the Unit, Iris was thinking about Herb’s words, or rather, she didn’t know what to think about his words, so that when her head nurse, Gloria, said, “Iris, sorry, but you’re pulled to the ER tonight,” Iris only half heard her. After Gloria repeated herself, “Earth to Iris, you’re working in the ER tonight,” Iris came to and heard twice, which was two more times than she wanted to hear that she’d be working in ER.

“Shit,” said Iris. “Pardon my French, please.”

“Oh, come on,” said Gloria, with the eternal pep that so grated on her staff’s nerves, “ER’s not so bad. It’ll be a break from this place.”

Iris looked at her. “All them damn fingers. Who needs it?”

“Fingers?”

“You know, people coming in with broken fingers, jammed fingers, lacerated fingers, infected fingers. I had a shift there once where all I did was fingers, I’m telling you. I even had a lady who managed to put a crochet hook through one of her fingers.”

“Ouch,” said Gloria.

“Tell me about it,” said Iris. She rooted around in her locker, found her stethoscope and scissors, and headed off down the back way to the ER.

“Maybe it’ll be toes instead tonight,” Gloria called cheerfully after her.

It would sure be something. Maybe ears. Or eyes. ER always seemed to be having a special: knee night, “sprain two and we’ll wrap the second one for free.” Sometimes, though, the ER was a variety store: In room 1, there’d be an OD; in room 2, an allergic reaction to a bee sting; in 3, pulmonary edema; in 4, a psych case; in 5, a laceration of the chin; and in 6, an MI. Mix and match. Some of this, some of that. It got on Iris’s nerves waiting to see what was going to walk through the ER doors. Or crawl. Or come in on a stretcher. The news was overwhelming and it depressed her: Human beings just did not have the slightest idea how to take care of themselves. The things they do—take the wrong medication, or the right one but too much of it, or too little. Cut off the tip of a finger with a steak knife or a carrot peeler. Break a hand in a baseball game, or by dropping a log on it, or in a fight with a goldfish. Yes, Iris once had a patient who got mad at his pet goldfish and smacked the side of the aquarium hard enough to break his index finger and dislocate his thumb.

Iris had another feeling about ER. The people who came in with all their cuts and dog bites and broken ankles and sudden fevers and unusual discharges were practicing for death. This,
of course, didn’t include the people who were delivered to the ER dead, or dying—people who had already passed the final exam. Iris believed that, every so often, a person just had to taste mortality, just a nibble and a lick, succumb to a few stitches, or a strain requiring an Ace bandage and a trip down the hall to X-ray, but not all the way down the hall, not down there to the white door at the end, the unmarked door to the morgue, not yet. Maybe they thought by practicing, by their slow accumulations of little wounds and illnesses, they’d acquire a knowledge and a readiness, so that when the time came, they’d know how to open the door. But Iris was a nurse. She understood about the door, how it was loose on its hinges, liable to swing open at any time, sometimes with a terrible suddenness and force. Or ease open, creaking, which was just as terrible, like with the Tube Man, for whom the door remained ajar for months before it finally closed behind him.

Oh great, Iris said to herself, rounding the corner to ER, Inez and Winnie. Looks like I’ll be working my ass off tonight. Inez and Winnie, two of the regular ER staff nurses, stood over by the narcotics box giggling and talking in low whispers. When crunch time came, usually from 5 to 8
P.M
., they’d still be standing there, giggling and gossiping. Then Dr. Gunther walked out of room 3, and Iris’s night, which hadn’t even started yet, went from bad to worse. Dr. Gunther admitted practically every patient who came into the ER. Admissions, with all the paperwork and tests, tripled the work of a nurse. Iris had been hoping Dr. Lords would be on. Dr. Lords’s motto was “Patch ’em and pitch ’em.” He knew how to clear out an ER, how to keep the traffic flowing. With Dr. Gunther, the traffic backed up for hours.

Iris walked over to Inez and Winnie. Inez looked up and snapped her bubble gum by way of greeting. Iris had once seen Inez blow a large pink bubble during a code, a telling example of Inez’s reverence for human life. Winnie was even worse. During a code, at least Inez and her bubble gum would show up, while Winnie would simply disappear to that mysterious place where
coworkers always seem to hide when you need them. Home in bed? Iris wondered. Shopping at the mall?

“So they pulled you here,” said Winnie.

“Looks like it,” said Iris.

“You pissed?”

“No more than you’d be if you got pulled to Intensive Care.”

“Then you must be really pissed,” said Winnie with a pleased smile.

“Work is work,” said Iris.

“Yeah,” said Winnie, as if she had any idea in hell what Iris was talking about.

Iris checked out the patient information clipboards, numbered one through six, to correspond to each of the ER examination rooms. All the clipboards were in use, so all the rooms were full. Three rooms had lacerations in them: Two fingers and a nose. A nose? Iris read the clipboard. The Accident/Illness Description box read, “Patient states was feeding pet cockatoo, ran out of peanuts, cockatoo bit nose. Laceration two cm’s, on right nostril. No active bleeding at present.” So, Iris thought, looks like the ER will be having a special on lacerations tonight. Oh well, at least Gunther couldn’t admit those.

Inez said, “Yeah, ain’t that a bitch. We’re full already. You want to take whatever’s in rooms 1 and 2, I’ll take 3 and 4, and Winnie’ll take 5 and 6.”

Iris gave her a look and picked up her clipboards without a word. “Whatever’s in 1 and 2,” as if Inez didn’t damn well know. The patients were either going to be real sick, so Gunther would admit them, or so repugnant, like an alcoholic in DTs or a GI bleed, that nobody would want to take care of them. Sure enough, Iris read her clipboards, a patient from a nursing home in room 1. That almost definitely meant a Code Brown, nursing lingo for a patient covered in shit, which nursing home patients usually were. This one suffered from dehydration and syncope, fainting spells. In room 2 there was an asthmatic, a Pink Puffer. Another admission, but no big deal. Give her some IV aminophylline and
clear her right up. Iris eyed the waiting room as she went into room 1. Half-full, with the usual mothers yelling at kids, people holding homemade bandages to their small injuries, some lady in the corner mumbling earnestly to herself—people practicing for death. Iris sighed and went in to check her first patient.

“Hello, Mr. Toofer,” said Iris to a long wad of sheets and blankets that covered a stretcher that was pushed against the wall. Presumably, somewhere underneath those sheets and blankets, there was a Mr. Toofer. Nursing home patients often completely hid themselves deep within their bed linens, for reasons Iris did not wish to contemplate.

“Mr. Toofer, you in there, sir?” said Iris again, lightly touching the sheets. She also sniffed the air around the stretcher, a reflex of nurses with potentially incontinent patients. Hmm, maybe no Code Brown after all. Things were looking up. Now if she could just find Mr. Toofer.

A slight rustling sound from the stretcher. Iris realized the sound was Mr. Toofer speaking.

“What’s that, sir?” Iris said, going up on her toes and leaning close.

“You’re mighty tiny,” came the voice of Mr. Toofer from beneath the sheets.

“How do you know that? You can’t even see me from under there.”

Mr. Toofer’s head popped up from the other end of the stretcher. Iris had been conversing with his feet. Mr. Toofer, for all his dehydration and syncope, had managed to turn himself around on the stretcher when no one was in the room.

“What are you, a foot doctor?” Mr. Toofer let out a few raspy heh-heh-hehs. Then his head dropped back down on the stretcher. Iris moved down to address the head, which he hid again beneath the sheets.

“Mr. Toofer, why’d you turn around on the stretcher?” said Iris, who, in spite of her negative feelings about ER, felt a growing fondness for this particular patient.

“To face the door, young lady. Why else?”

“Why do you have to face the door?”

“Them what don’t face the door get shot in the back. Don’t you know nothing about the Wild West? I just told you rule one. Want to know rule two?”

“What’s rule two?”

“Don’t trust nurses whose noses don’t come up to the stretcher.”

Iris slowly peeled the sheet back from Mr. Toofer’s face. “I’m short, Mr. Toofer, but you can trust me.”

“Well, if you ever do tell a lie, at least it won’t be a big one,” he said, letting loose with another string of heh-hehs.

Mr. Toofer was one wrinkly old man. When they got some fluids in him, though, some of those wrinkles would disappear.

“Sir, you got a face that tells me you’ve done some living. How old are you?”

“In dog years or people years? In dog years, I’ve been dead since 1950. In people years, I’m ninety-three.” Mr. Toofer lifted his white head a little higher off the stretcher and looked around. “Say. Say. I’m not in my room, am I?”

Mr. Toofer was not as with it as he’d sounded. Iris touched his arm. “No, you’re at the hospital. You’re in the Emergency Room of Barnum Memorial Hospital.”

“Did I do something wrong?” He tried to pull the sheet back over his head. Iris stopped him. He looked at her vaguely. “Say. Do I know you? Weren’t you just in here?”

“I’m Iris, Mr. Toofer, your nurse. And you’re in the hospital because you’re sick.”

Mr. Toofer brightened. “Oh yeah? Sick? Is it fatal, what I got? I’m waiting for something fatal. At ninety-three, you’d think I wouldn’t have so long to wait.”

“Nothing fatal. You just need some fluids and a little medicine.”

Mr. Toofer lifted a thin white arm off the stretcher and crooked his finger at her. “Come a little closer. That’s it. Say,” he
whispered, “how about we forget about all this? Why don’t you take me out to my Oldsmobile, and I’ll just kind of slip out of the parking lot. That sound reasonable to you?”

It sounded very reasonable to Iris. She could almost picture it, Mr. Toofer looking natty in a white suit, behind the wheel of the Oldsmobile of his dreams, driving off into whatever sunset was waiting for him.

“I can’t,” Iris whispered back to him. “I can’t, I’m sorry.”

“Well,” Mr. Toofer sighed. “You looked like a sensible young woman, so I thought I’d ask. Here’s an easier one. How about finding me a urinal? I got to piss so bad, I could fill a bathtub.”

When Iris went in to check on Mrs. Horner, the acute asthmatic in room 2, she was sitting bolt upright on the stretcher, puffing into an oxygen mask. Like many chronic lungers, her personality was on the low end of pleasant, which Iris immediately discovered when Mrs. Horner whipped off her mask and snapped, “It’s about goddamn time. I coulda died in here.” She pushed her mask back onto her face and took three or four dramatic breaths.