09 January 2005

Black Cat

It was black as the inside of a cat when I got up, and cold and raining. I had a date with destiny, or something. I had been commanded to be in the Emergency Room at Bethesda before 0700 for evaluation. I was told to bring a bag, just in case they had to admit me.

The admonition got my attention. If I didn't need a reminder that life can be a frail reed, the death count in the Indian Ocean was over 150,000. Lives just snuffed out. The State Department said there were 1,800 US citizens missing.

That included trekkers out in the wild, of course, and perhaps a few who found this an unexpected opportunity to disappear from their other troubles at home. I am sure there is at least one person who walked away from the Trade Towers and just kept walking.

But equally sure were people who had been bulldozed into mass graves, or little ones who were grabbed by traffickers in human life and would never be heard from again. The whiff of corruption from the bandage was a hint of the bouquet of the tomb, and I followed the directions to take the medication, and even dosed myself a little higher to get the level of antibiotic in my blood up.

I had absolutely no interest in spending the weekend in the hospital made the coffee I would not have time to drink, and threw my cell phone and charger into a back. And my iPod and a book. And all the magazines I haven't read. And wistfully, I threw in a pack of smokes.

If I found myself in the hands of the medical staff I would be attached to some contrivance, and it would be a long walk to the air where I could burn them with impunity.

I wheeled out onto Route 50 with caution. Dawn would not be along for an hour or more, and the low clouds effectively hid any prospect that the light would come again, ever. At least there were streetlights on 50. As I took the exit into Rosslyn, the stoplight gave off an eerie green glow, refracted through the droplets on the windshield.

The only entrance to the GW Parkway between Arlington Cemetary and Route 123, eight miles away, is at the foot of the Key Bridge to Georgetown. That is why way the limited-access parkway is the fastest way to get to Northern DC, even if it takes you up the bluffs above the Potomac to connect to the Beltway to the northwest.

There are no lights on the Parkway. It is supposed to be scenic and natural. When the dawn is up, rosy, the view of the broad river is pastoral. Passing the islands of the Three Sisters, it is possible to imagine you are not in the heart of a vast city. But in the dark, in the rain, it is just black. Black river, black trees, black asphalt. Black as the inside of a black cat.

I had to peer hard at the verge as I drove up the hill. The white reflective paint is faded, and that was the only marker to keep me on the road. I listened to the radio as I went, sipping coffee, leaning forward in concentration like an old man.

The radio informed me that other things moved in mornings this black. Trains laboring across the countryside. Pressurized tank cars filled with all manner of things. Liquefied ammonia, chlorine, propane and vinyl chloride.

Sixty thousand rail cars of that type, half of them built with brittle steel that does not meet current standards. Like the ones that released chlorine into the air of a little hamlet in South Carolina, the same day I drove to the Emergency Room, with the vague smell of the tomb in the car.

The radio told me they found another body down south. That made it nine dead, and fifty-eight hospitalized.

The rail cars are built to last, or at least to roll for a long time. They can remain in service for a half century, which means they could still be rolling through the black night filled with poison until 2039, when my earthly remains, moving or not, will be eighty-eight.

I passed the exit to Fort Marcy, where Presidential Counsel Vince Foster might have shot himself, and CIA and the Highway Safety Administration. After Turkey Run there was nothing but black and the rain fell more heavily. The lights of the oncoming traffic across the median made the drops sparkle, distracting. The lines on the road were obscure, and I clicked on the high beams to try to pick them out.

In time, I made the exit to Maryland and the Beltway, and crossing the American Legion Bridge there were halogen lamps on the road. I sighed, and lurched onto the campus at Bethesda well before seven. The contract guards at the gate wore plastic covers on their police-model gray fedoras. They looked miserable. There was a place to park in the ER lot, and only one couple seated in the waiting area when I walked in.

I knew the guy, of course.

He was the man who had played the bagpipes at the last twenty-odd years of the Naval Intelligence annual formal banquet, the Dining In. I recognized him immediately, even if there were no kilts, no jaunty bonnet and no plaid octopus of an instrument under his arm. It took him a second to remember me, since I was not festooned in medals and mess dress. He had sciatica of some sort, was in pain, and hadn't slept in four days.

I suggested he stop keeping his billfold in his back pocket and see if it re-aligned his spine. He grunted, and then introduced me to his new wife. She was a widow, he explained, who once had been married to a squadron mate. The first husband had been a big guy, six-foot six and maybe three or four hundred pounds.

She nodded gravely as the Bagpiper took me through two degrees of seperation. He told me how the man died, and my mind wandered off the way it does, thinking of that enormous man having intimate relations with the slight Grandmother next to him. It was better than listening to the health stuff.

I know why people talk about their illnesses, particularly in a hospital, but I thought it was unseemly to learn about the colon cancer and the biopsy and the recurrence, and whether he could wipe his nose at the end of it, much less that her son was having surgery at nine that morning for a calcified disc in the neck, and that they were going to have to go in through the anterior neck to get at it and he might be hoarse permanently.

"Dog bite," I said, pointing to my left hand, hoping the volunteer at the desk didn't hear me.

Eventually they took my vitals and I was exiled to one of those treatment rooms in the back.

There wasn't much going on except shift change, and I got through a Newsweek and part of the latest New Yorker as I listened to it.

Eventually the Duty Doc showed up, a civilian with a slightly sour and distant look. I un-bandaged the wound. It is an angry triangle the size of a quarter and there is red muscle and white fat showing inside an angry purple perimeter. He looked at it and squeezed it for signs of infection or cellulitis. He grunted and said someone would be along to re-dress the wound.

I read the movie reviews in the New Yorker. Apparently Jim Carey is too over the top in Lemony Snickert, and Barbara Striesand and Dustin Hoffman are brilliant in Meet the Fockers. I don't think I'll see either.

Presently, somebody did appear, in the person of a young Lieutenant Commander in khakis accompanied by a junior Lieutenant in a lab coat. It took me a minute to realize he was a nurse. He had been a corpsman before he went to nursing school, assigned to a SEAL Team.

He had to cross-train with the warriors on the platoon, so that if anyone was killed, he could pick up a weapon and take their place. So this cheery nurse was a consummate killer-healer. It rankled him that the sour Doctor had to approve everything he did. He told me he was studying to be certified as a nurse praticioner, so he could do his own diagnosis. I'm sure he would have preferred independent duty, even if it was in Falluja.

He wrapped the bandage on my hand too tightly in his exuberance. It wasn't a problem. I could rewrap it when I got home. And that was the good news. I was going to have a weekend after all.

When I walked out of the ER the sun apparently had risen, right on schedule. The sky under the clouds was the color of a Seal Point Siamese cat.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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