The Naked Detective(9)

I closed my eyes and sought to calm myself by picturing the trajectories of tennis balls—the exquisite parabolas of topspin, the floating rise and steep drop of a slice. Instead I saw Kenny Lukens with his wig flung off, brow furrowed above his made-up lashes. I rested my elbow on the lip of the tub, and at some point my fingers blundered against a vinyl boob. It was hot from the sun, the nipple just melted enough to feel tacky to the touch. I yanked my hand away. And at some point I understood that I'd be going to the hospital that afternoon. Visiting Lefty Ortega. I didn't want to do it. It wouldn't make me happy. I was being had, and I knew that I was being had, getting sucked in deeper to the story of this poor dead dreamer, and acting as if perhaps his story mattered, and wondering at every moment if I believed it really did.

———

I wouldn't go to Key West General with the idea of getting well, but as a place to die it's probably as good as any. Better than most, in fact, because all the rooms have views. One wing, it's true, looks out at the garbage dump, but another faces toward the community college. From the third floor you can gaze across the tops of palms all the way to the green shimmer of the Gulf. Above the trees, pelicans swoop; they seem to be bundling up the world like storks wrap babies, but now they're carrying it away from you, leaving you behind as they glide on silent wings.

Lefty Ortega was in Intensive Care. At least that's what I was told. But when I showed up at the unit, it seemed they'd lost him. I don't mean he died; I mean they couldn't find him. Vintage Key West General.

"How do you lose a person in Intensive Care?" I asked the duty nurse.

He squirmed a little in his turquoise scrubs, then picked up the phone. Lefty had been moved to Critical.

At Critical, the nurse just shook her head.

"He died?"

She looked at me a little funny. I guess she could tell I was hoping that he had. I'd be off the hook then.

"He's been moved to Hospice," she informed me. "Nothing more to be done but keep him comfortable."

So I trudged to yet another wing. By then the stench of the place had gone all through me; I'd forgotten what air smelled like without the adornments of blood and disinfectant.

I found Ortega's room and remembered I was supposed to be a private eye. So I strolled discreetly past, observing. It was a big room, full of flowers; the arrangements were showy, garish, the kind of thing people send when they don't really give a shit, just feel they should be represented. There was a woman at the bedside. I couldn't see her face. She was wearing a scarf; rich, thick hair spilled out beneath it and darkly curled against her slightly downy neck. Her posture was youthful and her legs seemed nervous in shadowy stockings. She was stroking Lefty's forehead.

I moved on to the end of the hallway, biding my time, watching the horribly familiar hospital routines. Where my father died, where my mother died—it was always the same. There was always a guy with a mop, and he was always whistling. There was the woman with the cart of magazines and candy. She was always Filipino, always smiling, always kind. Ah, you're dying? How about an Entertainment Weekly and a Snickers bar?

After maybe twenty minutes the woman emerged from Lefty's room. I tried to figure out if she looked devastated, but was distracted by noticing that, all in all, she looked damn good. White blouse tucked snug enough into a straight black skirt to show the salient features of her torso. High Cuban hips that seemed somehow to wiggle when she was standing still. She paused a moment and looked my way; our eyes met for some fraction of a second. Hers were wide-set with a peculiar upturn at the outside edges. As she turned to go I saw a soft and somewhat sallow cheek around the corner from lips that were full and red and bowed. She pivoted on midheel shoes and clicked away.

I watched a little then breathed deep and took my turn at Lefty's bedside.

For a guy whose only care was palliative, he was hooked up to a lot of gizmos. Sensors on his sunken chest led up to a beeping monitor where the weary race of his pulse was run out on a graph. He had a harness like a feed bag on his nose; it squirted oxygen up his nostrils. A chandelier of IV bottles was clustered above him, feeding saline and painkillers through different tubes to various needles taped into his arms and neck.

His cancerous abdomen was huge, bizarrely pregnant-looking; it made a steep egg-shaped hump in the sheet. Like a spider sucking out the innards of a fly, the tumor had drained all the rest of him to feed itself. His cheekbones showed and his collarbones stuck out. The once fearsome shoulders were stringy and pathetic, the arms knobby at the wrists and elbows. The suspicious eyes still darted, just as Kenny Lukens had described, though the whites were yellow now, and it was hard to know what they were seeing. Morphine. My parents had both been on morphine near the ends of their separate lives. My mother had seen square men pouring from the television and dancing down the walls. My father always fastidious, became deeply troubled by the geometry of the ceiling tiles, and had made me wheel his bed around and around the room until he felt properly aligned.