and blue-coated nurses idled and walked and sprinted back and forth between their respective responsibilities. Now and then someone who he figured was a doctor by the stethoscope hanging from his pocket would maneuver through. Wheelchairs with flu-ridden kids and infirm adults crowded the hall, making movement a difficult talent, part pushing, part cussing, and many acts of agility. The wheelchairs, piloted by medical professionals, family and friends and by the patients themselves, spun this way and that, dashed up and down, came and went. Two gurneys were parked at the very end of the hall. Each was a mantelpiece outfitted with a fallen flag: blankets covered what Touissant thought might be dead people. He could see what looked like the outline of a long nose, open lips and two bony knees underneath one of the white hospital sheets. The second stretcher was a little more obvious: Touissant could see where the blanket sagged back into what looked like a man’s large round head. A faint patch of red was visible where the blanket sagged. The dead man had a hole in his head.
He remembered how his granny’s story had ended: the hospital hallway scared his dad so deeply, she said, he actually digested the coin and cured his own self. By the time her husband and his Thunderbird got to the hospital, the crisis had concluded. But when Emmett Till was murdered not too long after and the body was brought back North to Chicago and lain in state at the Southside church for public viewings, he refused to go. Lines stretched for blocks on end, black folks come to see the symbol of white man’s evil. But her boy thought the body had a ghost in it and might start moving, like the bodies on the stretchers in the hospital when people got too close.
Whether he had wanted to or not, his dad had seen something important in Cook County Hospital, Touissant knew. What he had seen was scary. It had made him hate death forever. But it was important as knowledge. And now the boy realized that he had seen and learned something, too: a few days from now, in Fresno, at the funeral, his granny’s corpse, lain in her casket, would not be the first dead body his eyes would know. He had seen death already, a few days before he was supposed to, in a random way that had nothing to do with funerals or churches or family or love. He had seen two corpses and there was no going back from this. He imagined his granny’s body, how the preparers would have the make-up imperfectly done on her face, one side smudged and darker than the other. A Sunday church hat with roses but no marigolds crowning her head, sprigs of her white hair falling like unmowed blades of grass from beneath the Sunday hat. And an old frayed familiar dress to lay her to rest in. It would be a different way of dying than this under-a-sheet, mouth-open, hole-in-the-head hospital stuff. Her skin would not be a discolored shade of green as he imagined was the fate of the corpses in the hallway. Her temple would not be caked with blood that seeped into the sheet set over it. Her death scene would be a world away from what he was seeing now, but not because it would be perfectly planned and brought off. It would be different because the proper hat and flowers and things placed upon her would be put there with love and memorial knowing. These corpses didn’t have luxury like that. They were simple corpses. The boy’s young mind wrapped itself around death and the different deaths of loved and unloved people.
Now Touissant knew he would never die. Not only had he seen the hidden dead, he had had a virus steal into his body and try to kill him from the inside out. The virus had become a fever and the fever a seizure and the shape shifter had fought deep within him the way diseases and bullets got inside and killed people every day. But his body was not dying. His mind and imagination were not dying. They were fully alive. He felt more sensitive to every moment, every smallest piece of his life, every beat of his heart.
The fat black nurse, who had skin the color of new pennies, returned with two hospital-white blankets, which he laid carefully over the two gurneys at the back of the hallway. Now neither corpse could be seen. Their subtle outlines were perfectly hidden. Satisfied with that, the nurse wheeled the boy who knew that he would never die into the examination room.
Riding home in the backseat of his dad’s new car, Touissant said nothing. His dad was driving and his mother was talking. He could tell that his dad was gearing the car up and down, testing its braking and acceleration and the basic precision of its design to trick his mind into thinking about something other than Granny’s death. Meanwhile, his mother was talking in that way that meant she was absolutely sure that the things she was saying about the twins’ day-camp schedule and about the doctor’s orders for monitoring a child after a febrile seizure were of great importance.
Touissant didn’t know what to think about. His granny was dead, he knew that. His memory of her rested peacefully amid his many thoughts. He remembered that in the examination room the doctor had told his parents that it was probably the extreme summer heat of the Inland Empire, as compared to the milder summers that Touissant had experienced closer to Los Angeles and the coast when they were still in college, that had caused the seizure. The doctor’s advice was not complicated. Too much heat was bad for children, keep cool.
Touissant looked up at the sun above the San Bernardino Mountains. The sun controlled everything. It was God and the Devil. It brought seizures and killed children, as well as all the other weak things in the desert. Afternoon now: the sunscape was retreating a little at a time, dying over the mountains, allowing for evening and nightfall. Then the temperature would drop like a shot bird. And the desert would become unpredictable under that darkness, a mixing of summer and winter, everything roasted and dry but simultaneously stiffening up with the sudden wind and sunless air. Even in absence, the sun was everything; its absence as powerful as its presence, bringing cold and flu even as it scorched the earth and left the land dead and fallow.
Touissant saw a lizard perched atop a stop sign. It was a gray mannequin, the most still of all living things. Further up the way, he could see prairie dogs moving as fast as his dad’s car between their dug holes and the tree-tall tornados of dust spontaneously born of the pressing heat and hard low winds. Touissant wondered what the prairie dogs were running from; he wanted to believe that they were running for the same reasons that people do, the way his great-granddad maybe had done all those many years ago with the government coming for him to take him to the War. Maybe the prairie dogs were full of pride and anger and imagination just like Major Freeman. Maybe they were trying to outrun the sun, just like the old man had tried to outrun whatever it was he was really running from, whether war, or white people, or marriage. Those absolutes stood alongside the sun and the world the sun had made: this desert. So big, the desert stretched with the sun, on and on and on. From greater San Diego, up to the Los Angeles Basin, up to Northern California and burning out to Arizona, Nevada, Utah. The desert went on forever, an infinity of dirt and rock and low scrub and small, hard defiant life. The desert was so vast, so vast. Vaster than the pages torn from every school book lain end to end, so vast. Maybe ants living in tract home walls and roadrunners chased from newly driven fence posts and coyotes exiled to the dry gulches and prairie dogs and lizards and woodpeckers and skunks and rattlesnakes and bullfrogs were as prideful and bold as all the black folks with their money right, who had come to this hot, raw place. Maybe everything alive in this forever endless desert lived in defiance of it. Survival. Maybe that was the secret of what his life would be, something about survival.
They passed the Buddhist temple, with its always-lit lanterns rowing either side of the long walkway leading toward mysterious elaborately engraved doors, and turned toward their just-bought home. The car rolled into its new driveway. The house was their little temple; its simple three-quarters square, one-quarter pyramid design rose from the earth into dangerous light. Touissant felt absolutely blessed. His sisters were waiting in the driveway. He wasn’t sure how they had gotten back from day camp so early or why they were waiting in the driveway. He didn’t care how or why, he was happier than ever just to see them, his family. The car pulled forward and the twins stepped aside in unison. The garage door rose electronically. Dea and Kia were smiling sad smiles, the sunshine living on their perfect teeth and penny-colored skin.
In her dream, turning eight was wonderful past wonderful. The dream was a large dream and it came to her in such detail in the September night that she felt like it had belonged to her all along. She saw her parents taking her to the circus right down the street from their apartment. But when they parked the car and got out and held
