Scott R. Tucker

Where I Wake Up, a Hospital Has Been Built Around Me

She will call me tonight, or tomorrow night, God willing.

We will start over. Those are the words she used.

After leaving our Political Science class, I followed her to the Indian restaurant on University Way, in Seattle near campus, and she ordered masala palak and later I followed her home. Our eyes met once across the restaurant as we ate, as you see it happen sometimes in U.S. movies. However. At that moment she stood up to leave and she took her purse with her as she went. One of her white arms is tattooed from the shoulder to the wrist in green, and her other arm is bare. I am eating masala palak also, made with spinach and aloo. Aloo only means potato. I have a special condition. If I eat too quickly, or I’m nervous, my throat closes around my food like a fist. Like a mother’s hand holding tight to her child’s hand. I can still breathe but I can’t eat more food, because of my mother’s love for the food in my throat. The waiter runs for help when he sees me having this trouble and I leave the restaurant without paying him, to follow Lydia, so he believes I have lied about my throat.

At this point, I am in some trouble. The waiter is following me and I am following Lydia. She and I might have moved to the same table and had a nice talk at the restaurant if we had both stayed. However. She has also left without paying.

Do you believe that God’s plan for you sometimes falls into hopeless disrepair?

“Lunatic!” Lydia yells at me. She has whirled around on the sidewalk and stopped. The twirl of a cotton skirt is a dance to me. I smile my safest smile.

“No, I am not a lunatic, I have wanted only to say hello.”

“This is, like, five times you’ve followed me home. Stop it!”

“Yes, I’m very, very sorry. I’m saying hello now.”

She throws down her arms in frustration. Her arms are also a dance to me. One arm is encumbered, the other arm is free. Her purse. Her tattoo.

“My U.S. name is Yankadi,” I tell her. “I am no stranger.” I fold my hands in prayer and I tip forward from the waist.

“What do you want?” she yells at me.

“I like your yelling,” I tell her. “You have so, so much energy.” I smile my safest smile again.

Traffic is passing us by on the street. Cars interrupt our thoughts. A rattle of pistons, a weight on the road. The garbage trucks are so clean in this city. Outside, the weather has been very hot today. “It’s becoming very hot,” I tell Lydia. “Summer is almost here, and I am running out of days to say hello to you.”

Something in her eye softens for a moment. The heat softens everything in the end.

“Hello, then,” she says. “Hello. Is that enough?”

“I would like to meet you properly in a restaurant. God willing.”

I do not hear her response because the waiter has arrived and hooks his arm under my throat from behind and rides me to the ground, where my face collides with darkness.

* * *

Where I wake up, a hospital has been built around me, with dogwood trees planted outside the windows, and the wind is causing the spent blossoms to fly like young birds out of their nests. Some birds make a good first flight and some fall sadly and quickly to the earth. The room has a washed-too-well odor from my gown, or the bedding, or the nurse.

“Lasana Kanté,” the nurse says.

“Yes. Myself.”

“You’ve missed quite a lot,” she says.

“What have I missed?”

One day of living I have missed, she tells me. Who can know—how good a day God had planned for me? The hot weather has gone away. The wind is blowing hard now to make room in the world for rain.

“I can’t see you very well,” I tell her.

“There’s a bandage over your eye. I’ll call the doctor.”

She leaves the room then without saying goodbye. People behave differently in hospitals. They forget how to be people.

Because she leaves, I fall asleep again. I can use this time to tell you how we all looked the day before I missed my day of living. Lydia, first, is very tall and long-armed. Her arms are the color of coffee with a teaspoon of cream stirred into it, and a sharp green tattoo has wrapped itself around her left arm without knowing its own meaning. One might see a thousand faces like hers in the city, but I would know her two arms anywhere. Her shoulders are squared off in that modern way, from lifting weights at a gym. Her hands I imagine can play a musical instrument. Her fingers have reach—a long, narrow kind of strength—and the soft inner part of her elbow glistens on a warm day.

The waiter is a computer engineering major, who therefore expects life to follow code and not instinct. He is larger and stronger than you might expect, for a waiter or a student. He uses his body during the week to play lacrosse. He suspects all foreign men like myself are thieves. Because he plays lacrosse, wearing a helmet and shoulder pads, he does not remember how easy it is to injure a person.

Myself, my skin is very black. I am from Guinea, a country in West Africa next to Senegal, where my passport is from. People can see for themselves, I have two eyes, I am a person, but my clothing is so different from theirs. Why do you wear pajamas to class? they ask me. These are African clothes, I tell them. Even one American shirt would cost me more than a week of buying food. And I must save all the money I can, to take home to my mother at the end of my time in America. But I am so happy to be here. I am very, very happy to be here, I tell them.

A doctor wakes me up to check on my injuries. He seems to be no one in particular. The nurse is with him, and she seems to be no one in particular as well. He tells me it will seem this way for awhile, because of the pain medication. He tells me the bone that makes a circle for my left eye to live in has been broken in two places. He tells me to imagine a skeleton and I imagine my grandfather’s skeleton dug up and moved away to a new place and buried again so the miners can look for bauxite in the mountains. They take his grave away with them in their trucks and I don’t know where his bones are living now.

“Things will be clearer tomorrow,” the doctor says. These words have great meaning for me. God is back at work.

“Thank you very much for that,” I tell him, and I fall asleep again.

* * *

I dream of dogwood blossoms falling at Lydia’s feet, her bare arms outstretched in grief as if she were the mother of these poor birds, and a policeman is arresting me. The policeman is real. He is standing in the hospital room when the doctor wakes me up. They tell me when I leave the hospital I will be taken into custody along with the others.

“Who are the others?” I ask them.

Here is what happened, they tell me. Lydia fought with the waiter on the sidewalk after he tackled me, and he caught a hold of her ankle and twisted it until it broke, and she pepper-sprayed his eyes, but also his open mouth and his lungs. So we are all in the University Hospital, and we will all be taken to the North Precinct for booking after our release. We have committed criminal assault on each other’s bodies. And stealing food from a waiter.

The policeman wears yellow-tinted eyeglasses indoors. He looks at me the way policemen do, with no whites to their eyes. His ears are sharply-folded triangles of skin hanging from the sides of his head, like dried fruit. He keeps his hands on his belt near his gun. It would be a good place to be shot—in a hospital. You could hardly die.

“Where is Lydia?” I ask him.

“Don’t let them talk to each other,” the policeman tells the doctor. Then they both leave without saying anything more to me. People forget how to be people in a hospital. I fall asleep again.

* * *

My mother was born in Guinea, and her mother. Guinea means “woman” in Susu, my first language. My U.S. name is “Yankadi,” which means “good here.” It’s only a nickname, because of the word Yankee. “Yankadi,” in Guinea, is the name of a flirtation dance. It started, a long time ago, as a dance to convince new people to settle in a region, “it’s good here,” and now the dance is about settling with one person. “It’s good here, with me.” My grandfather was buried in the hills in Guinea, my mother told me, but they took his grave away from her, searching for bauxite ore to make aluminum cans for the world. My mother took me to live in Conakry then, the capital city, and my only father died there. I don’t remember how. People get sick. I lived in Senegal alone for a year trying to buy a passport there and then I came to America looking for Jim, a man who would send me to college.

“Hey!”

The voice of a woman is whispering very closely in my ear. Her hand is sitting on my shoulder. It starts to dance with me. “Yang-giddy!” the voice says.

“Yankadi,” I tell her.

“Can you see me? It’s Lydia.”

I look with my one good eye and I can see Lydia. Her legs are missing. She is kneeling beside the bed. I smile my safest smile. “I am very, very happy to see you,” I say.

“Listen!” She is urgent. She whispers loudly. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.” I have walked up and down the hall with the nurse. Then I remember. “Your ankle is broken,” I say.

“No. My elbow.” She lifts her right arm to show me, casted from her wrist to her shoulder. One of her beautiful arms is broken. The arm with the tattoo.

“They said your ankle,” I insist, as if I can change the truth in front of me. Elbow. Ankle. I’ve confused the words. “Your beautiful arm,” I tell her.

“Come with me,” she says.

As a Muslim, I believe, each day, what happens to me is exactly what Allah has planned for me. This is why—when I talk about the future—I say, “God willing.” It is up to Allah. It is His code running. In that way, I am more like the computer engineering major than I believed at first.

A bee that enters a house through an open door will spend its afternoon beating against the window pane to exit again, when the door remains open all day long. I think of this as Lydia walks me down the hall to an empty hospital room with two beds and we close the door behind us. She makes me lie down on one of the beds because of my injuries, and she turns out the light and lies down on the other bed. We whisper to each other in the washed-too-well darkness of the room. A dogwood blossom, I think. When there is no wind, it will fall in a twirl from its tree to the ground like a carousel of painted ponies turning. I imagine a bee riding this carousel to the lawn and stepping off to fly back again and stand in line.

“I’ve decided I want to know you,” Lydia whispers in the dark. “Now that we’re in trouble together. We might as well be friends.”

“How bad is the trouble we’re in?”

“The waiter has an infection in his lungs. His lacrosse team came to visit him. All of them. In the hall. I hate them. But there’s a chance he could die.”

“I’m very sorry I put you in this trouble,” I say.

“I know you are,” she says.

We lie still in the darkness. I can see nothing with my good eye except the glow of two small lights on the medical machine in the room—one red light and one green light.

“When they find we’re gone from our rooms, all hell will break loose,” she says.

I have never heard this phrase. It’s a frightening prediction to me.

“All hell will break loose,” I repeat.

“Yes. And I don’t care. I’m tired of caring. Do you know something else?”

“Yes.”

“No, I mean, do you know what I’m going to say?”

“No.”

“I’m tired of being afraid of men. I shouldn’t be afraid of you.”

“No. But the waiter, yes.”

“That’s just it. You never know.”

“Sometimes you never know. Yes.”

She waits a long time to say something else.

“I’m sure we can be friends,” she says.

“I’m very, very happy about that,” I say.

“When this trouble is over, we will meet in a proper restaurant. And spend the summer on the road. And hang everything else. You know?”

I don’t know these phrases, so I smile, but we’re in the dark.

“You’re smiling, aren’t you?” she says.

“How did you know that?”

“I knew it.”

Then I hear her smiling, too.

“My real name is Lasana Kanté,” I tell her.

“Lasana Kanté. I like that name.”

“What does your tattoo mean, on your arm?” I ask her. I hear her smiling stop suddenly.

“It means my father died,” she says.

“Oh. I’m very, very sorry for that. My father died also.”

We are silent, in the dark.

“Do you see?” I ask her. “That is how we are connected.”

Silence then.

“Yes. I see.”

I feel her holding her tattoo. She can’t be, though, with her tattooed arm in a cast. I feel the cast is flying away like a young bird from its tree, as her bare limbs rise. Then—all hell breaks loose, and rain.

* * *

“There is good reason to deport you to Senegal, young man,” the judge tells me.

“Good reason,” I nod. But he gives no reason. This is only his way of talking. Is it because? I am a thief. I am Muslim. My skin is very black. He gives no reason.

“There is good reason to deport you to Senegal,” he says. “However.”

I have learned from many people living in America. However is an important word to know, because it cancels everything before it. You must listen for the word, and then remember what came before it. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Canceled.

“You have paid for your small crime with a serious injury,” he says, “and that will be enough punishment in this case. Your vision is half what it used to be in your left eye. You can’t be licensed to drive. You have one year remaining on your student visa to finish your studies. I suggest you give up your thieving ways during that time.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. God willing, I will, sir.”

“What is that you’re holding in your hand?” he then says loudly.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“Open your hand! What is that?” He points at me with a gavel in his hand. Something else I have stolen?

I’ve been holding my fist closed during this meeting in court and the judge has finally noticed. Now I open my hand to show him.

“What is that?” he asks me again.

“It’s a lime,” I tell him. “The rind of a fruit, drained of its juice.” I lift my arm to my nose. I can still smell the juice I have rubbed onto myself to protect me during this meeting with my enemy.

“A lime brings good luck,” I tell him.

“Well, your luck is about gone,” he tells me. “Now—“ He lifts his gavel higher in the air.

“And what about Lydia Johnson?” I ask him.

“Lydia Johnson,” he says. He glares at me and narrows his eyes, holding the gavel near his head. “Lydia Johnson is a different matter.”

With that, he brings his gavel down hard on its wooden pad and stands up and leaves the courtroom, as people in hospitals do.

Lydia Johnson is a different matter because the waiter has died from his lung infection and she will now be put on trial for second degree manslaughter. The problem, she explains to me, is when she sprayed the waiter in the face with pepper spray, while his mouth was open she sprayed him again, directly inside, because she hated him, or someone like him, or because he was attacking her new friend whose name was Yang-giddy.

No one understands her story, only I understand it.

One thief will go free, she tells me, and one will be condemned, because the lacrosse player has died.

* * *

A long trial follows. There is no hurry. We talk about what happened to each other. We are asked many times to tell the same story. I hold a small key lime in my fist every day. However. The jury does not understand why the waiter ran after us so angry at me but not at her. They do not understand how I came to know Lydia so well because of her arms. They do not understand her fear of men or why she would spray the waiter twice.

Not understanding anything, they don’t know what to do. So they set her free. Like a blossom falling from a dogwood. I tell them afterward, in the hallway, they have done a wise thing, a very wise thing, but they don’t want to talk to me. One of them tells me, “This was your fault, we didn’t want to punish her.” One of them tells me, “Go back to Senegal.”

Lydia says, “Don’t worry about any of that. I’ll call you tonight, or tomorrow night. We’ll talk about it. We’ll start over.” She is so happy to be free.

I touch her right arm, at the elbow, where the bone did not heal smoothly, and then my face under my left eye, where the bone also did not heal smoothly. She smiles very widely then, knowing what I mean. Every day, what happens to us is what Allah has planned. Even how the body heals and disrepairs itself. We will start over. God willing.

 

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