I wanted to watch the game.
The small room strewn
with magazines was too dark
to read in, lightless
but for the frenzied pulsing
of the muted screen
above the door, and for the
door which a nurse would open
now and again onto
a blazing corridor
that this one’s wife or that
one’s son, when called, would leave for,
or drift back from, dazed
either way, coming
or going, by the light
first, then the dark.
I wanted to watch the game,
I could tell that time
was running out by how
the white team, spreading
the court, touch-passed
the ball from corner to key
to corner so quickly that
the yellow team couldn’t
get close enough to foul,
the ball sailing just
beyond their reach as they lunged
for it, scrambled and dove,
frenetic, hopeless, in a
dumb-show of defeat.
I wanted to watch it, but
the lady next to me,
soon as my brother’s name
was called, was telling me
“the story,”: what we all share,
our bond, our lingua franca.
the before, the after, the signs
now unmistakable
but at the time ignored
until the stroke or seizure.
I wanted to watch the game.
I wanted to tell the lady,
Lady, I don’t know how long
my brother has to live,
my sister’s dead, my parents
are dying, can’t you just let
me watch the game in peace?
But the automatic iron
gears of courtesy
engaged, and I was just
so many different engines
of attention: a nameless friend,
a confessor, an innocent
who can’t have any idea
of what it’s like to live
with someone you’ve spent your life with
and see him this way, unable
to feel emotion, like a
well-trained zombie,
because that’s what the tumor
damaged, where the feelings
come from in the brain.
My goodness, you must think
it’s so selfish of me
to complain like this. I should
feel grateful, shouldn’t I?
I mean, I know he has
no sense of what we’re all
going through for him,
and so he can’t really
love us now, not me, not
even the children. But at least
he isn’t scared of dying
since he can’t feel fear—
It’s a blessing really …
She looked away and
smiled, apologizing
for going on like that,
the way my sister did
in her last days each time
the nurse would decompact
her bowels by hand—I’m
sorry, she’d mumble, barely
conscious, sorry, sorry,
till the nurse was through,
her relief, then, less relief
from pain than from the need
even then, to think of
others (didn’t we all say
it was so like Beth to do that?).
She could just sleep and
no longer fuel the still
inexorable autonomous
machinery of obligations
that displace us even as
they make us who we are.
Now he was back, her husband,
he smiled when she introduced me,
and before they left for the next
test, next waiting room,
he placed his hand on my shoulder
and said, good luck, god speed,
said it as if he meant it,
as if he could feel it, the gesture
performing itself without him,
like a blinking eyelid
with no eye behind it.
Up on the screen, the crowd
stormed the court in silence
as time expired. My brother
was probably by then
inside a long white
tube where he’d doze while
pictures were being taken
of all the hidden places
in his brain. He was sealed off
and all open, he was free
and confined, and I wanted
him to stay there where
he didn’t have to apologize
to anyone for the delay,
the inconvenience, as
he would to me, as always,
when he returned. I wanted
to sit here and keep watching
the nodding, radiantly
bald head of the color
man as he smiled a stiff
smile as he held the mike
up high toward the mouth
of the stooping six-ten player
of the game who (I could tell)
was thanking the good lord
for his god-given this or that.
