all of them as similar as his twin sisters were to each other, a universal feminine. He was starting to see past that now.
She heard him shifting around and ordered him to be still. “Your stomach idn’t settled, idn’t close to settled. You gotta let it settle. Sit back down.”
Touissant obeyed and after a moment accepted his stillness. She was right, too: the longer he sat in place and the more fixed and motionless his body, from his toes to his intestines to his closed eyelids, the calmer was his stomach. He wasn’t even aware that his eyes were closed until a drawer jarred open and the metal of knives and kitchen utensils sounded against each other. Then the door shut hard, wood blasted against wood. Then he knew his eyes were closed because he didn’t know which kitchen drawer had been opened and closed, or who had opened and closed it. He tried to look around and saw only heat waves streaming without progress or recess, thick fluid fever lines where his sight should have been. Then there were shadows the color of faint ink blots that came and sat atop the waves. There were faint shadows where the kitchen table and the center island and the living room clock and the couch that he sat upon should have been. He wondered where his dad was.
“I’m tellin you the situation right now. My son, the fever, the unresponsiveness, the convulsions. I’m tryin my best to help my son. We’re tryin our best. My husband’s mother died this morning. He’s not himself. He’s not slept, hasn’t had any water or food. We’re tired. And now my son—.” Touissant’s eyes came open and he saw his mother’s sculpture-hard face. He could hear her speaking fast and panicked. He saw her intent eyes, eyes harder than her face. Everything about her fixed on the problem that Touissant had become. “Goddamn. Is his chest rising and falling? Yes! He’s convulsing. Why are you asking me that question? If his chest wasn’t rising he’d be dead. He’s obviously alive! Do I want an ambulance? What do you think? My son is writhing on the floor like an epileptic. My husband, a full grown man, cain’t keep him still. Is anything coming from his mouth? Do you mean, is he expectorating? Foaming at the mouth? Lady, what kind of question is that? No!” She yelled at the woman on the other end of the line. “He is not foaming at the mouth! What kind of crazy question—my son does not have rabies. This is the situation: he’s convulsing, his muscles are seizing, his eyes are open but he’s not responding when we try to talk to him. He may or may not really be conscious and aware right now.”
Touissant’s heart turned into a kicking fetus. His chest was the heartchild’s womb, demanding out with all the beating violence it could bring. His heart went faster and faster. “Shit,” he heard himself say from some point distant from his uncontrollable body.
His dad’s strong but soft-palmed hands gripped him and stilled his writhing. “You hear that, Lilly? You hear that?”
“What, Bobby?”
“He talked. He responded.”
“He’s talkin,” she said into the phone. Then to her husband: “Rub his chest.”
His dad pulled Touissant’s shirt up and his soft palms went along his narrow chest, kneading his tensed torso and abdomen. Touissant’s heart rate slowed, but sweat rafted down his skin in hot forceful currents.
“They say,” his mother knelt next to father and son, “it’s probably some sort of febrile seizure.”
Touissant jerked out of their grasp and coughed up a chunk of phlegm and stomach waste that hit the carpet and did not move. Everyone gazed at the clear block of vomit.
“God-damn,” his mother said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
The voice on the other end of the phone blared incoherently.
“He coughed up somethin,” his mother began. “He coughed up somethin clear as day and solid as a brick. We need an ambulance.”
Touissant was still now. His seizure having subsided and the vomiting having emptied him, there was nothing left but to be still. His insides were hollow. He wanted the ambulance.
“You are telling me,” his mother challenged in terse, measured words, “that there is no ambulance? Am I understanding you correctly? Then why did you ask me if we needed an ambulance just two minutes ago? What was the purpose of that question?” Her hands went into a brief seizure and she dropped the phone. The answer at the other end of the line resonated throughout the living room: the question about the ambulance had been procedural. Its purpose was to assess degree of urgency. That no ambulances, paramedics, or emergency responders of any kind were available did not preclude procedure. Procedure had to be followed to assess risk. When she picked the phone up again, Touissant’s mother laced into the woman: “You tryina tell me ain’t no ambulance, no paramedics, no emergency responders whatsoever? Because the state closed down the gotdamn fire station?” She dropped the phone again, this time purposely.
“Recession,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.
Touissant didn’t know what a recession was except that it seemed to shut down fire stations, lay off paramedics and ground ambulances. He wondered what recessions did to hospitals, doctors and nurses. In a city an hour east of a city that actually mattered, he figured the recession might kill a whole medical system.
For reasons having to do with their jobs and collective bargaining agreements and the economy, which he didn’t understand, his parents could get medication and have their teeth fixed through Kaiser Hospital, but had to go to County Hospital in emergency situations. The family drove to the County Emergency Room, where a fat male nurse whose breathing Touissant could hear from up the hall placed him in a wheelchair, told his parents to bide their time in the waiting room and pushed Touissant a few feet before leaving him in the chaotic hospital hallway. He could hear his parents complaining just over his shoulder and knew that they hadn’t followed the nurse’s orders. Touissant watched the fat man wobble out of view. He remembered his granny all of a sudden. Not that she was dead, that he hadn’t forgotten. What returned to him was the memory of a story she had told about his dad swallowing a coin. She was still a young woman then and his dad was just a child. He had been to a downtown fair and had brought home the bronze token he found in the dirt below a row of rickety bleachers. Somehow the token got into his throat.
She took him to the Cook County Hospital Emergency Room. (Had to hitch a ride with a neighborhood man because her husband was outside the city somewhere breaking in the new Thunderbird that would soon carry his restless ass and his whole family to California.) At the hospital, the assigned nurse left the boy and his mother in the first available hallway, much as Touissant had been left by the vividly unhealthy county hospital nurse. His granny told Touissant how that was the first and last time she had seen men chained to a wall and examined orally and rectally with flashlights. These were prisoners from Cook County Prison, trucked in after nightfall for their check-ups. It was the first and last time she saw a man stabbed through the neck yet still alive enough that he was explaining the basics of football and the Bears defense to a young, innocent-looking female nurse as she wheeled him down the hallway. She had seen many other things, of course, that were just as shocking, the Southern marigolds in bloom before springtime and black soldiers arriving back from the War with their backs straight and human rights on their lips, and union strikers in Chicago and Mexicans in Fresno beat near as low as any Mississippi Negro. And it was not the first time that she had seen newly dead corpses. But it was the first time her son had seen anything so frightening. Elderly folks expired in their wheelchairs, young men dead on their stretchers with body parts only half-hidden from view, their limbs still trembling slightly when a nurse or doctor would rush past. It was the first time he had seen dead men.
Touissant didn’t like the idea of trembling corpses in Cook County Hospital. He looked around the San Bernardino County Emergency Room: Up and down the hallway where
