Why did this medevac duty keep being mine? Why didn’t others take off from their jobs? Why did I always feel so pulingly obliged? I had sacrificed the writing of six books, or seven—all that energy fed into the fire of this disaster.

Why me?     Why not me?

IV.

or betterer or worser, I’d adapted. Holding the subway’s upright pole, I promised myself I’d someday get back to writing fiction. Once my dears were free of needing me, I’d leave New York. And I would not depart in a box; I’d find some way to make Comedy of this shuffle toward the crypt. By now, I’d ordered so many helium balloons and bouquets, I had memorized shops’ phone numbers, “Wanda, Hartley. The usual. Room 198. Plain white card, no ‘Get Well’ on it. —Today’s name: ‘Robert.’ Bye.”

I knew St. Vincent’s Hospital as intimately as my childhood home. I filched clean linen for my patients, sparing the nurses so long-suffering and short-fused. Lourdes Amy Llamos, mother of six, daily Mass-goer, kept slipping me laminated bookmarks, prayers.

She’d pierce their edges (between phone calls and bloody ER arrivals). She would then whipstitch these holes with red satin ribbon. Do not ask me why. Bookmarks showed rouged low-expectations martyrs. They grinned as they held a dish supporting their own breasts, pudding servings suitable for one, and smiling! The markers had good edges, perfect—during endless bedside hours—for cleaning your nails, freeing a pesky piece of corn from back teeth. Occasionally, in the long sleep of sick ones’ tidal drift and return and drift toward perfect stillness—I would, thanks only to boredom, scan today’s Prayer for Sufferers:

“Lord, give me the patience to endure what I must, and the wisdom to trust God’s hard yet beautiful blueprint for me. Give me large strength equal to my little time. May I feel that, as says Dame Julian of Norwich, ‘All will be well, all will be well, all will be wonderfully well.’ Make me humble enough to….”

blah blah blah.

Humble, I didn’t need. But shoot me an overdose of “wonderfully well.” If my health was betterer than friends’, my looks were often even worserer. I had narrowed my routes to a sleepwalker’s Forward and Reverse. That was all that kept me vertical, still strong enough to be left holding the bag(s) of Robert’s pleasure, jostling uptown before needing to rush back down.

—Even so, I would arrive only just in time to let in the poor Gustafsons.

v.