Down Passages
photo by Kan Pothipan
The hospital lights were as bright and bleach-white as the hallways we weren’t supposed to be walking. What was that smell, like life and life fading and death all at once all around us? What sort of people were these, in their wheelchairs and bathrobes, in their windowless rooms, in their beds, tubes sprouting out from their arms?
“To the cafeteria and back,” our father had said, passing us the worn, crumpled bills. “Nowhere else. I mean it. Don’t wander.” But we wandered.
In silence, in the passageway, we paused for a moment. We gazed at a bed, at the woman sat up within it like a prop. Machines at her side in a bleak, humming chorus, hooked at different points to her body. Her flesh like the tattered folds in a map. The scent from her room an animate force, somehow sour and hot all at once. She turned her small head back and forth as if hinged on a swivel, weighed down in her covers by more wires and cords than I knew how to count.
“Oh, my children!” she said. She saw us then, two nosy boys, inches and feet and too far away, beyond her bed, her room, and her reach.
“My children, my children!” Again and again she said it, as if time was snapping her back in a loop. And then, all at once, she exploded in tears.
“Take me home!” she shouted. She tried to fling out her arms, to grab us, to reach us, but the cables in her body held her hostage. “Take me home! Take me home!”
A tug, and my brother yanked me through those long, narrow passages. Away from the doctors. Away from the nurses, away from all these colors of people in their rooms, in their lives, in their deaths. Away from the bright and the bleach and the white.
He led me back to a room, and there, another woman inside. Upright in her bed. A child in her arms, our father beside them. The child, our new sister, was crying. The woman too, our mother, was crying. Life and life fading and death just beyond us, but life and new life embraced by our mother, so easily within reach for me at that moment. For us all.
But all I could think of was her, all I could feel was the weight of her reach, the pain of her shouting, and whose tears are these rushing out from my eyes? Hers, or my own?