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In the early morning, Eddie drove to the hospital to sit with Wylie Johnson in the ICU. Fog gathered in streaks in the canyon. Through the thwap of the windshield wipers, the hills glowed pale green. Then two birds flew low across the road and one collided with the windshield, a hard thump of soft flesh and feathers. Its partner flew on.

The rain stopped by 8:30. In the hospital staffroom, he hung up his coat and stared out into the overcast sky. A shower of white paper fluttered from the Perilla Tower. Like walking downtown the day after New Years, he thought; office workers casting their expired page-a-day calendars out of the skyscraper windows.

Wafting white paper, followed by a woman.

It was no graceful swan dive. Only a flash against the windows of the tower, something wrong and out of place, a flexing fish. Later, his brain created a human body from that movement. Caged behind the window, he didn't hear her land, only a choking noise from behind him. He'd thought he was alone. A red-haired woman stumbled against his back and, at the same time, covered her eyes with her hands and made the sound again.

He looked down out of the window, and he could see the body, a woman half on a car, a red car. She wasn't moving, her head down on the curb, her legs wrong. He stood there, unable to rewind time and fly her upwards. "Is she dead?" he said.
The woman clutched his shoulders. "Fuck," she said. She released him and backed away. "Okay. Are you okay?"

"I don't know."

"Fuck, you saw that. I just looked up, and out she went. Out of that window. That one. Did you see it?"

"I saw it. Not all of it." He paused. "I'm Eddie."

"Laura Roszenith." She looked him straight in the eyes. They were the same height.

"I'm an aide here," he said. "I hold hands."

"Forgive my profanity. MFCC and LCSW specializing in trauma grief. Grief counselor," she said, looking out the window. "I have to get down there." She walked to the coat closet and pulled out a dark green raincoat.

"It's fucking okay," he said.

She smiled. "I have to get down there, Eddie. All those people."

He heard sirens. People on the sidewalks coming to work clutching lattés and wearing overcoats, people in cars frustrated by the traffic, early birds already at work in the Perilla Tower and here at General. Then Laura left, and he watched the crowds swirl and coagulate around the body. His back retained the imprint of her breasts.

He couldn't forget the irrevocable nature of the woman's fall. He knew what it had sounded like when she landed; the thud of the bird against his windshield magnified a thousand times. He thought of Wylie, half a floor away, in his room with the dimmed lights and white noise whoosh of the oxygen machine. So he went and sat with him.

~

It was on the news, briefly. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Roselia Rodriguez threw two hundred copies of a suicide note out the window after an insurance company denied her six hundred dollar claim, and then jumped herself. Grief counselors were working with the insurance agency staff and the pedestrians who had seen her jump.

That afternoon, he drove straight home. The rain would return in a few hours. He knew what the woman had been feeling, the world out of joint like a shoulder and nothing to snap it back into place. But he was off duty, going home to sleep.

~

His mother over at Happy Valley had left three messages. The activity director she liked was quitting. "What am I supposed to do?" his mother's voice said. "Eddie, what should I do?" as if there was anything for her to do except, as Stephen Levine wrote about, to learn to die. He called Happy Valley. The activity director had only left for the day. His mother had misheard her.

~

Eddie met Laura again at Good Grains Organic a week later.

"Hey. What happened with that woman?"

"Splat," she said.

He winced. "Sweet Jesus." She had beautiful brown eyes and delicate skin with faint vertical lines in her cheeks.

"You seem really familiar to me," she said.

"In real life, I'm a sixth grade teacher. But I was laid off last fall."

She shrugged. "Look," she said. "I know it's the middle of the day, but do you want to join me for a Bloody Mary at the Park Lounge?"

"Um. Yeah." He didn't really drink so it felt illicit and adventurous to sit on the bar stool in the dark, sour space.

 Laura said, "I have many things I do. I used to volunteer at the zoo. I was a museum docent. I answered phones at the suicide hotline. Taught CPR at the Red Cross. Now I work for the city--on-site grief counseling. Roving non-secular chaplain. I know a lot about helping people navigate their grief."

He nodded. She sipped her drink.

She lived on the slopes of the fault canyon, Laura said, on the hill across from the double landslide. Her daughter had been there when it fell. "I collect these stories," she said. "Here's one. Stanley Brewer holed up in a hostage situation down on Abraham Lincoln on the edge of Southshore, he's on the phone crying to the police officer, "What the fuck is wrong with me?" just then BLAM! he blows away his kidnapped son, then shoots himself in the roof of the mouth. Here's another. Charlie Ray. Beat his son to death because he wasn't toilet trained. A two-year-old. Beat him because he pooped his pants. The boy cries, the neighbors hear Charlie Ray screaming to the mom, 'I'm going to fuck Ray Ray up!' Slammed the kid into the wall by the heels."

It hurt him to hear her talk.

"You think I'm crazy," she said.

"No. That woman who jumped," he said. "I'm collecting her story."

"Tell me."

But he couldn't say that he knew about her coat of prickles, how her brain never stopped circling itself like a vulture. That jumping was Plan B if Plan A, getting justice served on her claim, went wrong. That she'd gone to Kinko's with the note and spent too much money to have it copied, the flash of light each time it rolled over the copier drum like the moment of her death pre-visited. And then the copy job was done, and nothing left but to go through with it because at 6¢ a copy who was she going to be, a loser who couldn't even follow through? And what would she do with the notes then? Riding the elevator to the fifteenth floor with a sense of peace and purpose. Carrying the bulky secret. A 200-page manuscript of death wish. A novel of her life. What was the purpose.

Laura was looking at him. "That woman who jumped…?"

"What was in the note?" he asked.

"She talked about the injustice of the situation."

"The insurance?"

She nodded. "For six hundred dollars."

"Shit."

"No. Fuck."

He laughed.

"It was more than that," she said.

"Of course," he said.

His ex-girlfriend Sandy had healed with her hands. She'd helped him when he'd wrenched his back, just by touching the spot. "It's like a battery," she'd said. "It's just like feeling the energy where it's all clustered together and dissipating it." Her hands got hot. Her face got sweaty. She was not exerting herself. And he felt tingling and releasing. And the pain relinquished itself. He wanted to do this for the patients and the people in Laura's stories.

"Do you want another drink?" he asked. He wanted to order another drink so they could talk and talk all night and it would be as if all this life was already over, and now they were doing the big postmortem: "Good show, good show, Folks," and

"Jeez, did you see that part in the third act where that woman jumped off the Perilla Tower?" "And the way we used to all get so freaked about drugs and terrorists?" Like reliving an exciting video game: "You sure wiped out in that car accident, Man."

"I probably have to go," she said. "Thank you, though. That was nice."

"I would like to be your friend," he said. It sounded like a formal marriage proposal, like they lived in chivalrous times and he'd dropped on bended knee.

She stared at him. "Why?"

"Because there's no…" he paused. "There's no bullshit here."

"I'm flattered," she said. "But I have a full dance card. Got any references?"

He felt the wind leave him. "Seriously? References?"

She nodded. "I don't tolerate vampires or crazy makers or emotionally unavailable men."

"I'll get you a reference," he said. "I have good friends who will recommend me. I'm a good friend." He wondered if he was lying.

She stared, her eyes fierce. "If I'm your friend, I'm not your therapist. I don't need a friend to bitch to. I don't need a surrogate son. You're pretty young. What would we talk about? I'm not trying to be cruel. I just need to know."

"I can take you dancing. We can hang out and play Scrabble." I can be your lover, your partner, he thought.

"Why me?"

"Because our radios play the same station. Because you're beautiful. You know that, don't you. You have to know that."

"We'll see."

Laura gave him her card.

~

His mother called twice a day. She needed dental floss and to get out of there, maybe get a car, just a small one. He was not a bad son. He visited his mother at least once a week, his two sisters took turns, too. His mother was a giant maw; with her, he felt eaten. He couldn't do it. He could hold other people's hands, and other people could hold her hand, he thought. It was one big web of love--but he could not hold her hand directly.

~

He was back at the hospital. As usual, it was good to be there, holding the hand of a woman named Karen, a woman in her early forties about to go in for a mastectomy. She was frightened but bearing up, quoting success statistics at him. She planned a two-pronged approach: Western medicine to cut and zap the shit out of it, Eastern medicine and philosophy to heal that which had been cut and zapped. He held her left hand near where the IV was attached to her forearm and looked at the shunt sinking below the flesh, a submarine in mid-dive. When he held a patient's hand, he was also studying, wanting to know the meaning of each tube and procedure. He liked to look at the patches of shaved skin where the devices attached. Sutures had their terrifying beauty.

"Squeeze my hand as tight as you want," he told Karen. You can't hurt me."

Later that afternoon, Eddie visited Wylie Johnson in transitional care and asked him for a letter of recommendation for Laura. Wylie with a shunt in his liver and a prescription for two ounces of lactulose three times a day. Because of the encephalopathy, it took Wylie a long time to get the words out. "She's… nervy."

"I'm in love."

"Harold and Maude."

"Harold was twenty and Maude was eighty. Laura's probably only ten years older than me."

"Make it up."

"Not a good way to start out a friendship."

"Yeah. Does it have to be… formal?"

"Nah. And not long."

Wylie nodded.

Eddie didn't sleep the night before he delivered the letter to her office on the first floor.

~

They met at a café on Ulysses S. Grant, the Kafka.

"I taught sixth grade English and Social Studies," he said. "I did a lot of creative writing with them."

"I write," Laura said, "I do. But it keeps coming out as these bad allegorical bits of triteness that belong calligraphied and hung on a massage therapist's walls."

"I was gay for a while," he said.

"Of course."

"How did you know?"

"A totally straight man would never have asked to be my friend like that. Would never have gotten references. Actually gotten them! I'm so moved!"

"You were kidding?" He felt like an asshole.

Her hands clasped each other in prayer position, the right hand holding the left, and the left hand holding the right. That was part of being a longtime married couple, he thought, wanting that ease with her; she's your other hand when you pray.

"It's all just flesh, innies and outies," he said. "Doesn't matter to me anymore. I haven't had a girlfriend for close to a year," he said.

"In the seventies, I was a lesbian. For a while."

"May I meet your daughter?"

"Shouldn't we sleep together first?"

He was the one who balked. "Let's give it a few weeks."

~

That week he held the hand of a woman having an emergency D&C in the ER. The woman was in her twenties. She hadn't wanted the pregnancy, she told Eddie. She'd been in the clinic down the block scheduling an abortion. She'd had her exam, she been waiting for the scheduling nurse to call her, and she was sick, nauseous, and stood up to go to the bathroom to throw up again, and hemorrhaged.

"Tie a sweater around your waist," the nurse had said. But at least she'd called the ER to tell them she was walking over from the clinic.

"It's okay. Squeeze my hand, you can't hurt me," he said.

"They made me walk here alone. I asked if there was a wheelchair but they said I had to walk."

"That's so wrong," he said.

"I don't want this pregnancy, but I'm still scared," she said. Her blond hair stuck to her face with sweat. "I have to throw up again."

The nurse helped her. Eddie held her hand. "It's okay. Your body's doing a natural thing," he said. "The D&C will just speed it along, make sure it all comes out."

"Thank you, Eddie." She was crying, and he was, too.

The D&C hurt a lot, she cried out. He held on tight. She was a kite in a gale storm, he thought. He hung tight to the string.

"You're doing great, Lily," he told her. "I'm here."

After it was over, "thank you," Lily said. Her face was drained. "I'll never forget you."

He kissed her forehead.

~

Monday night, Wylie's blood pressure rose and his face melted. Eddie held his hand as he fought his way through the hepatic coma and the next morning Wylie's eyes opened--vague still--and he wanted ice. The blanket of coma-love still rose from him in a thick cloud, filling the room. Eddie swam in it, the ICU high. There was no weather in a hospital, no wind to blow away the foggy build-up of emotion. In the longer term wards: boredom, despair, fear. But so often in the Intensive Care Unit, at the edge of life, the binding fog of love so thick he could see it.

"Take a break," Pamela, the attending nurse, said. "I'll do it." Spooning small clumps of ice into Wylie's slow lips.

Eddie went to the break room to get his coat. The sky was gray with a high overcast except in the east where clumps of cumulous clouds rode high in clear blue, and all of it was God. When it was like this, he liked to listen to the radio on the way home. Every song, no matter how hokey or produced, rang with the full beauty of human expression. The curve of the TRAN train on the trestle above him so perfect in its curvature; this high that came from touching the most extreme moments of existence. Even when the patient died, in that sorrow, such beauty and reverence. And everything outside, the trees, the sky, glistening.

~

His mother mentioned bleeding. His sister Sharon took her for her colonoscopy. Small fissures, but also some colon blockage. He stopped by Happy Valley a few hours after she was released from the hospital; it had been an out-patient procedure but she was still in some discomfort. But he couldn't stay long.

Laura had him over for dinner. Her daughter Ruby was a quiet young woman who took care of an autistic boy and left early to go study in the library. They played Scrabble. He won with Quiddity: The essential quality of the thing. They made love in Laura's king-sized bed among her Indian throws and pillows. There were these two birds-- he wanted to tell her or ask her, his hand at home now on her thigh. Swooping low over the highways in the thin, blowy rain.

~

He brought Laura with him on Thursday to see Wylie in his new room on the third floor.

"Did you have any visions while you were in the coma?" she asked.

"A lot of the time."

The encephalopathy was better, Wylie spoke faster, found the words. "When I was in it, I was just this sparkling glob." Wylie was aware of other people in the room that way, too, he told them. And how important human sounds and touches were; don't ever think somebody is out of it, even when they're in a coma, he said. He'd seen shifting forms like brilliantly colored TV weather maps.

"Were they inside you or out of you?" Eddie asked.

"If my eyes were closed, all around me. When I opened them, up in the ceiling, like a telescope. Moving forms, lights."

"Wylie, do you know what you were seeing?" Laura said. Eddie could tell she was impressed. ("Stick with me, Sweetheart, I'll show you things the likes of which you've rarely imagined," he wanted to say.)

"Yeah, I guess I wasn't ready to go up there."

"We almost lost you, Buddy," Eddie said.

Wylie nodded and nodded his head. "Wow."

~

They walked down the block into a cold, chill wind that whirled the oak leaves against the houses in the hills and forced the grit from the sidewalks into the faces of the day laborers who waited on busy corners in Southshore. Employees who worked in the Perilla Tower were gathering in a cluster on the corner for a memorial service for Roselia Rodriguez, the woman who'd jumped, the flames on their candles thin in the dusk and the wind. Eddie thought about all the words for things he wanted to do: winging, soaring, fluttering, gliding, drifting, hovering.

"Do you ever have flying dreams?" he asked.

"I figured it out when I was a kid," Laura said. "If you face into the wind, the sky will swoop your legs backwards and you'll fly a few yards. It's the best way to learn to fly--backwards--because you can control the buoyancy. If you turn your back to the wind, it's too easy to lose control and land on your head."

The wind blew her hair away from her face. She looked so certain.

"Come on," she said. They stood facing into the wind. "Spread out your arms. Hold my hand."

 

-END-