The Garden
When it was clear he was never going to wake up again, I left the room. No one noticed me leaving. How could they have? My father was hovering over his father, who was dying, while my mother was hovering over my father. My brothers and I, embarrassed in the presence of death, were hovering over each another. But I was also hovering over everything, even back then, thinking about how to write about it all. In the hallway, ambulatory patients shuffled single file along the rail that ran brightly along the wall like mountaineers following a rope that leads them one by one into a chasm. Most seemed not to see me. Those that did simply stared, their mouths moving like how my grandmother’s mouth moved the whole time others were talking, as if only by repeating what they were saying could she hear them. But one woman fixed her eyes on me. Reaching toward me, she moaned, “Oscar, Oscar, oh Oscar, Oscar.” I ignored her, not wanting to encourage her in her confusion. More out of a desire to get out of the hallway than a desire to enter the courtyard, I opened a glass door that led into an interior garden. Hearing the lock click behind me, I tried the door. I was locked in. I could still see into the hallway through the wire-webbed window that ran the length of the wall. The other walls were of high brick covered in climbing ivy. It was a beautiful garden, tended, I assumed, by the nuns I’d been told lived in the other wing. I imagined that the building, viewed from above, was built in the shape of an angel. In one wing lived the nuns. In the other lived my grandfather and those who walked the hall. The garden, I thought, must be the angel’s heart. I walked deeper into it, heart and garden, along the steppingstone path. Everything was so still in that windless place. The only sound was the babbling of a fountain, at the bottom of which glimmered pennies and dimes, wishes the dying or the loved ones of the dying had made. Past the fountain, in a corner of the courtyard, at the end of the steppingstone path so that she seemed its purpose and destination, stood a statue of the Virgin, in the classic pose. Her eyes and hands were raised to Heaven, while on her face I saw the same abject look that the woman who thought I was Oscar had given me. Mildew had grown in the creases of her shawl. Green and white, she stood, a flower amongst flowers. Behind her, a gnarled old crabapple was giving difficult birth to a dozen blighted, worm-eaten fruit, its branches propped up on angled crutches. The apples hung around her like some model cosmology. One seemed to be hovering over each of her hands, as if she’d been in the act of juggling them and my appearance in the courtyard had made them and her freeze. I looked up, as if to see what she was looking at, and saw the contrails of planes, and knew that they weren’t what she was looking at, that she was looking at nothing. She wasn’t looking at all, or praying, or juggling. She was a statue. Her eyes were made of the same thing her toes were made of. I was aware of her bare toes looking up at me. All of a sudden I really wanted out of that garden. I went back to the door and, though I knew it was locked, tried to pull it open. A nurse happened to be passing by, carrying a plastic tray, pills of various shapes and sizes and colors trembling in the cuplike compartments. By the brusque way in which she opened the door for me, I knew that visitors and patients must get locked in there all the time. It made me wonder why they didn’t lock it from the other side, so you couldn’t get in, rather than not being able to get out. The woman who’d called me Oscar was coming the other way down the hall. Having reached the end of the railing, she’d had no choice but to turn around. In that moment I was prepared to be whoever she needed me to be, even if I had to be Oscar, but when she walked by, she didn’t call me Oscar, as if being in the garden had changed me beyond recognition. She didn’t call me anything. She said, brightly, like how you’d say it to a child: “Goodbye.”