Poe Read online

  “Mr. Petrov, can you hear me?” asks Village People doctor.

  Why are they talking to my dad? Oh, that’s right, I’m Mr. Petrov these days.

  A woman now comes into view, all angles and loose skin, as if she stopped eating years ago. She’s very corporate in a prim black suit with small glasses perched on her pinched nose.

  “Mr. Petrov, if you can hear me, I want to let you know that Grace Memorial is going to do everything necessary to make sure you enjoy a speedy recovery.” Her voice is smooth and practiced.

  “I’ve got you a private room on the top floor. I’m putting my personal assistant Jessica at your complete disposal, so if you need anything—and I do mean anything—she’ll see to it personally. If there’s anyone you want to have visit, we’ll be more than happy to fly them out and put them up in the finest nearby hotel.”

  There’s a fine hotel nearby? Where, Boston?

  “Do you mind,” J. Crew doctor says curtly. He has one of those testosterone-square jaws and is probably sleeping with a few nurses, damn him. “He’s still a patient and not a litigant yet.”

  “My card,” she says, studiously ignoring him. She slips it in my pocket (apparently I have a pocket now) and pats it firmly, as if she wants to make sure it doesn’t escape.

  Then, whoosh, she disappears as I’m pushed into an elevator. There’s a mirror on the ceiling, so I get a good look at myself.

  I look like shit.

  There’s no, and I mean no, color in my normally pale skin. I am freakishly white, blindingly arctic-tundra white—in fact an albino who’d spent his entire life in a cave would look positively tan next to me. Ditto my lips, which have a cadaver-quality blue tint, and—hold on—even the irises of my eyes have gone from a deep, earthy brown to something approaching a wintry dull gray. I’m sure I could easily terrify everyone in the confines of the elevator by holding my breath and not blinking, because damn if I don’t resemble a newly resuscitated zombie. I try a grin. Impressively creepy. In fact, the overall effect would make Stephen King fall over and have a heart attack from fright.

  I glance over at Village People doctor, and his eyes nervously flick to mine. Is that a tremor in his hand? Muzak plays in the background, a symphonic version of “Dancing Queen.” Irritating. I stare at Village People doctor and bare my teeth, try a frightening hiss. Instantly his back is against the stainless steel elevator wall, and he holds up his hands defensively.

  J. Crew doctor tries, and fails, to contain a laugh. “Good one.”

  “Thanks,” I croak.

  Hey, my voice works.

  Now the elevator doors open, and I’m pushed onto a floor that I never knew existed in hospitals. The music changes to something classical, Bach maybe, and the walls have gone from industrial beige cement bricks to expensive shiny oak paneling. Swank. An extraordinarily, and I do mean extraordinarily, hot nurse with light blond hair, Barbie doll figure, the works, joins my gurney procession, and I decide that my speedy recovery will be as slow as I can possibly make it. In fact, I may never get better.

  “This way,” she says perkily to J. Crew doctor, and suddenly I’m in a private room that has a wide expanse of tall windows overlooking the deep chasm of the Goshen River. Very pretty from this distance—you could almost forget that a quick dip in that industrial sewage trough would immediately burn all the flesh off your body. There are also a variety of machines, which I’m immediately plugged into, and while hot nurse tapes electrodes to my chest (her hands are warm, and there’s a waft of floral perfume), something sharp pricks my arm—damn!—J. Crew doctor hooks me into an IV, and then, holy fuck, Village People doctor is inserting a tube into my penis, which is so not right on any number of levels.

  “It’s just a catheter,” says J. Crew doctor, reading my pained expression. “We’re going to be flushing your system with an intense amount of thiamine and glucose.”

  I try to say “Couldn’t you give a guy some warning?” but the only thing that comes out is “Warning?”

  “Sorry.” J. Crew doctor scribbles something onto a chart. Nurse Barbie is now hooking up the catheter to a clear bag that hangs from the end of the hospital bed. Embarrassingly bright yellow piss starts to gush.

  I have died and gone to hell.

  “Now Mr. Petrov—”

  “Dimitri.”

  “Dimitri,” replies J. Crew doctor with a tense smile. “I’m Dr. Conway. Do you have any allergies to medications, or are you currently taking any medication?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Now, and this is important to answer honestly—I’m not here to judge—but are you doing any drugs?”

  I shake my head no again. Village People doctor raises his eyebrows.

  “Nothing? Not even pot?”

  At this they all look at me seriously, and I can tell that there’s more to this question than they’re able or willing to tell me. I try to raise my hand and find that my wrists are tied to the sides of the gurney with loops of hard plastic. Son of a bitch.

  “Just a precaution,” says Dr. Conway. “When you regained consciousness you experienced grand mal seizures, and we need to make sure those are over, since you’re now hooked up to the IV.”

  Seizures I understand, “grand mal” not so much. Sounds like an excessively large size of espresso. Which reminds me, caffeine could be considered a drug, although I like to consider it my little friend.

  “Coffee.” My throat is on fire—why the hell has no one thought to get me some water?

  Dr. Conway tilts his head. “Coffee really isn’t the best idea right now; we’re administering some sedatives.”

  “No,” I croak. Thank God Nurse Barbie is on the scene, because she connects the dots and finally picks up a sippy cup with a bent straw from the hospital nightstand, settling the straw in my mouth. I take a few grateful sips.

  My head clears, and I suddenly feel surprisingly lucid. I try a complete sentence. “I drink a lot of coffee.”

  Success. I’ll be out of here in no time.

  “Define a lot,” says Dr. Conway.

  “Seriously intense Colombian coffee. Even the water I make it with is caffeinated.”

  “I take it you don’t care for sleep?”

  I shrug. “Overrated.” I take a moment before I ask the real question. “Was it just my imagination or did I come to in some kind of morgue?”

  Dr. Conway gives Nurse Barbie and Village People doctor a meaningful glance, and they quickly exit the room. Not a good sign.

  “Yes,” he says quietly. “You were pronounced DOA by the ambulance technicians.”

  He gives me a minute to take this in. The sky is turning a deeper shade of gray; the sun must be setting somewhere beyond the bank of clouds. I wonder what day it is.

  “You’d been underwater for at least two hours before the firefighters were able to pull you out of the well.”

  “A well.” Such a small word for such a terrifying abyss.

  “An improperly sealed well in the basement, yes. You fell through the plywood covering into about thirty feet of water. They tried to resuscitate you…”

  Tried?

  “But you didn’t have a pulse; you weren’t breathing and your body was stiff. So you were brought to the morgue. Prematurely, I guess we can say.”

  Understatement of the century. “That’s what you meant by litigant. The hospital is afraid I’m going to sue.”

  “Well, yes.” Dr. Conway slips his pen in his pocket and grabs a small metal stool on wheels. He sits on it, looking at the polished linoleum floor for a few moments, obviously thinking through what to say next.

  “To be honest, we don’t know for sure what happened. There are cases of hypothermia where children who’ve been underwater in extremely cold temperatures have been revived after an hour. But never an adult. And never after such an extended period of time. You didn’t regain consciousness for almost twenty-four hours. It’s a good thing that the coroner called in sick…”

  I’m not sure I
want to know the reason why, but I can guess. For a moment neither one of us says anything. I listen to the blip, blip, blip of the heart monitor.

  “Is there anyone you want us to call?”

  Is there? Aunt Lucy, who I don’t know very well outside of our lovely time together preparing for my parents’ funeral, or my neighbor Doug, who could at least tell my landlord to not throw my stuff out just yet. Nate’s probably busy getting my obituary prepped for the next day’s paper (Mac got his headline, the little fucker). But no, I have no one really in my life, which makes an entirely depressing situation even worse, so that it’s hard to appreciate the fact that I did wake up before two inexperienced residents dissected my still living body.

  “There was a girl in the ambulance,” says Dr. Conway, who is starting to sound distant, but in a pleasant way.

  “Lisa,” I manage to say as my eyelids begin to droop. I struggle but can’t manage to remember her last name. The darkness is softly edging into my consciousness again, and I feel like my body is slowly stretching out, like I’m as long as the hospital room—no, make that as long as the New Goshen River. Me like these drugs.

  “Crosslands,” I say, wanting to add more, but then I drift to a place where I can’t say or do anything else, and I listen as the door quietly clicks shut behind the doctor. I am left partly awake, partly asleep and completely prey to the cold, dark thoughts that creep in through the windowsill, past the door.

  My parents’ obituary gnaws at me. If I’m honest with myself—an act I try to avoid as much as possible—the painful truth is I wouldn’t have been able to add much more.

  My mother had a near-obsessive dedication to the domestic arts, which in the age of feminism are not arts at all—they’re conceptual chains of bondage imposed by a patriarchal society that serves to demean women. This translates in my generation to pulling out one’s laundry from the dryer, giving it a good shake, and assigning a kind of retro-chic factor to wrinkled and worn clothes. But if you had entered our ranch house on any given day during my childhood, you would have had to admit that there was an artist at work, or maybe even a domestic dominatrix. For one thing, every article of cloth, including washrags, dinner linens, and my underwear, was steamed, pressed and ironed into submission with a lavender scent. Then there was the food. If it wasn’t rich, decadent, and with a calorific load that should have caused us all to die of heart failure from congested arteries, then it wasn’t fit to be served at our house.

  But while every dust-free and lemon-scented corner of the house was imbued with my mother’s passion, my father’s passion was—and remains—a mystery. In fact, the more I try to pin down his “thing,” the further I feel from knowing him, unless you count knowing something by its absence—like making a mold of a footprint to determine the curve of the heel that created it. Here’s what I can say for sure about my father. Every day he left in the morning at eight o’clock sharp, coming home a little before or after six thirty. Sometimes he’d go on trips for weeks at a time, returning weary, worn, and pale. He did not work, my mother explained once, because our income had been kindly provided by a deceased and wealthy aunt on my father’s side of the family in Russia. But when I asked where he was during the day or why, if we were loaded, he had to travel, my mother quickly changed the subject and asked if I wanted to taste the cake batter to make sure there wasn’t too much vanilla. Her tone let me know that there was no point in asking again. Some things were just not to be spoken of—like the burn scars that twisted around the entire length of her right arm and up to the base of her long and lovely neck. I asked only once why she wore long-sleeved shirts on even the hottest days of summer and was offered an impromptu trip to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor.

  My father was ethereally quiet and completely inscrutable. It was hard for me not to jump when I’d unexpectedly find him in the same room with me. One time I thought I was completely alone in the house only to discover him right behind me, reaching past my ear to open the kitchen cabinet. My dad could probably pick your pocket, lift your watch, and knot your shoelaces together in five seconds flat. When I was younger, I often wondered if we were in the witness protection program, because no one would make a better spy than my father—plus he had that soft Russian accent that gave him an international, mysterious edge.

  He was such a nonentity that I never gave his life much thought until he was dead, until I was looking through his drawers, feeling part thief, part pervert. I found nothing that could add to my understanding. There were no yearbooks or mementos in the attic, not even a file with a birth certificate or copy of his immigration papers. I’d felt a queasy churning in my stomach. Who the hell was this guy, my father? I dove into the metal trunk used to store our family photos. There were hundreds of me, of course, only child that I was. Me as a baby, toddling precariously down the steps holding my mother’s hand; me on my red tricycle, gap-toothed with a bad haircut; and there were a series of Polaroids I’d taken of my doomed goldfish (I was the angel of death to fish—none lasted more than a day or two). But none that I could find of my father.

  Finally, at the very bottom I discovered one: it was of the two of us, my father and me, taken by my mother. We stood in front of one of her grand Thanksgiving turkeys, an impressive spread on the linen-clad table. We did not look comfortable with each other; there was an awkward distance between us. I was squinting and forcing an impossibly wide grin, and he was looking down at his shoes, brow furrowed, as if he were worried.

  None of this, of course, made its way into their obituary, a copy of which I keep in my Roget’s Thesaurus. I’m the only record of who they were, or weren’t. And what stops my heart at four in the morning is the idea that in time I’ll lose what little I remember, and then they will truly, and irrevocably, be gone.

  It’s a massive crack of thunder that wakes me up. I open my eyes, and lightning flashes across the night sky. A shattering rain pounds at the windows, blowing sideways. Or maybe it’s sleet. If I were outside, it would sting; sleet has a slashing quality I’ve never been able to appreciate. It makes me wonder why I don’t move to Florida, where I could eat grapefruit from a backyard tree—what keeps me here.

  I try to move an arm, but it looks like I’m still tied up. Well, that’s one thing keeping me here.

  Something in the room rustles and I see a shadowy figure sitting in a low chair by the door.

  “You are so dead.”

  My favorite smoky voice.

  A floor lamp clicks on, and I see Lisa, glorious Lisa, sitting in a very plush, dark purple chair, which almost exactly matches the deep purple bags under her eyes.

  “Well, not anymore,” I say, flashing a grin. She’s clearly not amused.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?” Her eyes narrow into slits as she speaks. She’s trying to look stern but all I can think is, Damn, that’s sexy.

  “Hey, I’m the one who’s plugged into a heart monitor.” My voice is dry and crackly again. “Water?”

  She blows through her nose hard, like she’s debating whether or not to take advantage of my incapacitated status and kill me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so upset on my account before. I’m flattered. She stands slowly and picks up the glass of water that Nurse Barbie has thoughtfully left for me, complete with its bent sippy straw. Way to add to my emasculation.

  Lisa stands and holds it out to me, and I shrug, pull at the ties binding my wrists. “Need a little help here.”

  She gives an exorbitant sigh and then holds it to my lips. I take small sips; there is an oddly sensual dimension to this small and quiet act. When my throat feels like it isn’t made of emery board, I nod.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  She places the cup on a writing desk—for critical care patients who apparently need to keep up with their correspondence—and then pleasantly settles onto the foot of my bed. Her shoulders sag. “I’m so damn tired.”

  There’s a nice little quiet between us, and I say nothing, because for the
first time since I woke up on a slab in the morgue, I feel peaceful. Blip, blip, blip goes the heart monitor, regular little peaks and valleys on the screen. It has a mesmerizing quality—it’s like watching fish in a tank or a burning log in a fire. It’s so here and now, a touchstone that’s ambient and reassuring. I wonder if the hospital will let me take it home. Maybe Jessica can pull some strings.

  “Thanks,” I say again, speaking without thinking.

  She turns to me, eyebrows furrowed. “You realize I haven’t slept since someone gave me ‘decaf,’ which actually contained the caffeine equivalent of a controlled substance, and then that someone went and died right in front of me.”

  “My bad,” I say. “But I thought you didn’t want a regular-people kind of date.”

  “I’m reconsidering my position.”

  I want to reach out to her but can’t. Still tied up. “You got any scissors or sharp objects?” I ask.

  She smiles. “A smart girl always has sharp objects. But I think I like you better this way.”

  “So do I have to beg?”

  “Kinky thought, but no, I’ll take pity on you this time.”

  I watch her reach down for her large brown leather purse, and her hair falls to the side, revealing a delicate, arching neck and pale skin with a paler, but very thick and obvious, scar. I want to ask but don’t. She starts to empty the amazingly lethal contents of her purse on the white hospital bed. There’s a good-sized bottle of mace, a couple of drum sticks, a Swiss army knife, another knife, larger and sheathed in some kind of leather casing, and to round it all off, a Taser.