Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Teddy Keane breathed slowly and deeply trying to force control of the pain that tore against his rib cage like slashes of a jagged blade. He moved his hand toward his chest, halting an inch away as if on the verge of a reckless act.

     He lay on his side on the examination table, cheek on forearm. The December wind rattled the window across the long room, fingering his bare back. Below mid-thigh where the hospital gown ended his legs shivered with goosepimples. He couldn’t understand how they had neglected to give him a blanket. Reaching behind, he tried to pull the gown closed, but it was too small. The pillow case was wrinkled and discoloured with rust, or worse. Teddy averted his eyes from its revulsion and swallowed back the pulp in his throat. He wanted to shift his head, but was afraid to move.

     A spasm ripped through his armpit. Furiously blinking back tears, he yearned to be free from the weight of his body. I’m ok, I’m ok, I’m ok: the cry of fright caught in his lungs, pounded at his temples. He clutched the edge of the table and squeezed until his fingers were numb.

     Someone pried his hand free. Teddy howled at the touch. Two young doctors in baggy white jackets stood at the table; they couldn’t have been more than interns.

     Embarrassed by the ridiculous gown and by his helplessness, Teddy forced a manly grin through the pain. Neither intern smiled back. He introduced himself and tried to make small talk. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday.”

     “That’s why we’re on duty,” one said. “There’s a room full of emergencies.”

     “I saw them. Looks like you’re going to have some rough customers. What do you do when they can’t spic English?”

     “What seems to be wrong?” the other said.

     “I woke up about seven with terrible pains around my . . . in my chest. My cat was scratching and hissing. My left arm felt like a lead weight. I couldn’t breathe. It was like being twisted into knots. I managed to get dressed and find a taxi. I’ve never had so much pain.”

     “Is it still severe?”

     “It hits every now and then. I’m freezing in here.”

     “We’ll see about a blanket. How old are you?”

     Teddy looked down at the trim muscles of his blond-haired legs and warmed with new hope. “Thirty-nine. I’ve hardly been sick a day in my life. Christ, I play handball every week.”

     The intern nodded. He snapped the gown away from Teddy’s chest, exposing a smear of lipstick. Teddy coughed a laugh. “No more of that stuff for a while, I guess.”

     “We’ll see.” The intern touched an icy stethoscope to his flesh and Teddy flinched.

     The intern listened intently, adjusting the stethoscope several times and frowning. “Take his blood pressure, Fred,” he said. The other fixed the strap around Teddy’s biceps and pumped the rubber ball. He shook his head at the reading, tried again, and asked his partner to check. “It’s irregular as hell,” the other nodded.

     Teddy recoiled, his mind stunned into clarity by their professional confirmation: the morning had become deadly real. A wave of blackness was smothering him. Clutching the intern’s wrist for defense, he choked out, “How bad is it?”

     The intern shrugged. “Can’t say yet. We’ll have to make more tests and place you under observation for a few days. Guess we’ll put him in Ward 12. Right, Fred?”

     “A ward?” Teddy said. “There’s some mistake. I came to the emergency entrance because I was in pain. I’ve got Blue Cross.”

     “Sorry. The hospital is jammed. Semi-private rooms go to the critical patients.”

     “But this is critical. It’s my life.”

     The interns ignored his plea and walked out to the corridor. The wind seemed fiercer; snow whirled outside the window. His teeth were chattering.

     Teddy closed his eyes and imagined Mother and Ruthie entering the room together, even though the two women were strangers in life, Mother rouged and high-heeled at seventy-two, embracing him loosely with one of her pecking kisses and telling him it would be all right, an edge of impatience to her voice. And Ruthie, his forty-year-old girl friend, bearing a blanket to protect him from the cold. But Mother was stopping somewhere in Las Vegas on a trip to California, and last night with Ruthie had been ugly. A new pain struck, making him long for the stroke of their hands. They must come to him: he needed loved ones.

     Furtively, his eyes searched the stark room for objects of comfort and fell on the end of his tie, silk foulard, dangling onto the muddied floor, beyond his reach. His clothes were piled on a chipped enameled chair beside the table. The crumpled suit frustrated him, taunted his immobility. Mother had chosen it at Rogers Peet, and paid for it, two hundred dollars, during her last quick visit to the city, for his birthday.

     Ruthie said he was compulsive; she had laughed at him last night for hanging up his clothes before getting into bed with her. “My jungle beast,” she had called him and growled. Annoyed, he lost interest. Panther had watched their sullen lovemaking from the dresser, his torn cat eyes flashing green in the moonlight, the only fire of passion in that room.

     Ruthie was a tall broad-boned woman with feathercut hair, very attractive in tailored suits; in bed her skin seemed thick and dry. He felt much younger, a boy beside her. She was a career woman, an executive for a cosmetics firm, earning more money than he did, he was sure, although he’d never had the nerve to ask.

     At two a. m. he had put Ruthie into a cab, unkissed, and five hours later awoke with the pain, Panther turning frantic circles on the blanket.

     His watch vibrated in his ear with a precise ticking, an Omega that never lost a second. He caught the time at the corner of his glance; ten minutes since the interns had left. Teddy heard nurses talking in the hall, occasional laughter. Why won’t anyone help me? he cried silently.

     When he had told the woman at the emergency desk what was wrong, he was rushed in ahead of a waiting room full of people. One man clutched a bleeding hand, a baby was screaming. Filthy with poverty, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, they all had stared at him with grim accusation. He was glad he had struggled into his suit, despite the pain, and remembered to bring his Blue Cross card. Teddy wished the people had heard what he whispered to the receptionist; then they would have understood and sympathized. Lying alone in the grim room, Teddy felt strangely unlike these people: they existed with disease and danger; his life had always been safe.

     Finally, a tight-lipped orderly, adolescent, pimpled on the neck, came in and wheeled his table into an elevator. In an examination room a technician set him up for an electrocardiogram, smearing a salve on his wrists and ankles, strapping down probes. The mechanism of wires and dials and gauges terrified him with its mechanical inhumanity. The technician counted Teddy’s ribs with his fingertips and applied the chest probe. While the machine charted the beat of his life, he averted his eyes from the graph and realized that to the hospital he was nothing but a physical malfunction. He wanted desperately for someone to promise he would be alive and free.

     Bound by the straps, Teddy tried to pray, but could find no words to plea his despair, muttering the strange sound “God, God, God” again and again.

     The orderly moved him to Ward 12, at the end of a corridor lined with wheel chairs, and roughly shifted him from the table into the bed. The nurse, a blank eyed, dumpy blonde, lifted the back of his skull and slipped under a thin pillow. Without looking at his face, she probed for a vein in his arm and drew a plastic vial of blood; then she made him swallow a sedative. Exhausted, fighting the need, he fell asleep.

     In late afternoon he awoke, uttering a short whimper of panic when he opened his eyes to the strange room. He shut them tight. Someone touched his arm. He looked up into a parched old face grimacing at him with a toothless smile.

     “Max Lokey,” the old man said. “They slipped you a mickey.” He sat on the edge of his bed, leaning over toward Teddy, his bald scalp scaly with red scabs. Shocks of grey hair stuck out straight at his temples. Beneath the hospital gown pushed up to his waist, his legs were swollen, purple with veins.

     Teddy turned away from him and looked down to the far end of the ward, at the rows of beds, humps of sick men under white sheets. He heard moans and the constant hack of a fluid cough. In the corner against the back wall a cloth screen closed off one bed. He sensed a grotesque sickness behind it.

     “Funny thing,” the old man said. “This place is like an assembly line. About seven this morning the guy in your bed kicked off, and as soon as they change the sheets, they bring you in. What’s wrong with you?”

     Teddy pointed to his chest.

     “Nothing. You’re lucky. It’s a favor to die from a heart attack. Me, I ain’t got much of my kidneys left. They tell me I’m going to die in a few weeks. Shit. The pain I got alone would kill most men. That guy in your bed yelled from the minute they brought him in.”

     “But you’re sitting up.” Teddy said. “Are you sure? Have the doctors told you?’

     “Goddamn right I’m sick. I’m going to die.” The man was offended at Teddy’s doubts. “How about that? Max Lokey dead. You want to know something? Nobody cares. There’s nobody left. I bet you’ve got a wife and kids.”

     Teddy shook his head. “Just a girl friend.”

     “Ah ha. No wonder you’re here. Too much of that stuff.” Lokey pounded fist into palm.

     “Will you shut the hell up, you old bastard.”

     Teddy turned to the strained voice behind him and saw a face deep with creases and dark with whiskers buried in a pillow. The blanket was pulled up to the man’s chin.

     “That’s my friend, Michael Vetucci,” the old man said. “Don’t let Michael bother you. He’s rotting away inside. Shits black lumps of himself into the bed pan.”

     “Why don’t you hurry up and die.” Vetucci closed his eyes.

     “Michael is unhappy. He has so much to live for. Wait till you see his wife. You’ll love her too. She looks like a crowbar. I don’t see how he can stick it inside her. I’d be afraid she’d snap it off.”

     “I hope you burn in hell.” Vetucci spat the words.

     Teddy peered out the window behind his bed. Grey snow coated the roofs of the factory buildings across from the hospital. The street was bleak. A thick night fog was settling in from the river over the city. He felt no pain now; he wondered why he was here. He wasn’t like all these other men. Mother would make a fuss and they would release him. Then he realized she would be ashamed of him for being there.

     He had no place to look. Vetucci frightened him; the old man swung his legs, exposing shrivelled genitals. A cry of pain cut through the ward. For a moment there was a stunned quiet. Teddy shut his eyes. The old man laughed until he coughed up phlegm. “They’re all afraid of dying.”

     For an hour Teddy was tortured by the sounds of the ward. He would not open his eyes. Dizzy circles of light swarmed on the backs of the lids. He longed to get up and run, but his legs had no strength.

     While the others were served dinner, Teddy received a glass of special liquid. He fclt hollow with hunger, forcing his hands down on his stomach.

     The doctor came after six when it was night outside and the ceiling lights cast dim shadows around the edges of the room. Teddy threw quick glances at Vetucci and the old man and whispered that he would pay anything to get out of the ward. The doctor answered, too loudly, that it was not a matter of money; the rooms were filled. Lokey whooped with laughter.

     “But I’m all right now,” Teddy said. “I’d like to be released. This whole thing has been a mistake. You can’t hold me here against my will.”

     The doctor shook his head. ‘The hospital is responsible for you now, Mr. Keane.”

     “I must make a phone call. No one knows I’m here.”

     “I can’t allow you out of bed. If you give me the number of your next of kin, I’ll ask one of the nurses to call.”

     Teddy wanted to envision the shocked expression Ruthie would have on her face, but could picture only last night’s scorn. “Never mind. I don’t want anyone to know.”

     While an orderly drew another vial of Teddy’s blood, Vetucci’s wife entered the ward, hesitant, almost ashamed, to visit at her husband’s bedside, a stick of a woman with a lantern jaw who looked as if she belonged in a hospital herself. Their faces were close together and they spoke softly.

     The old man gestured and grimaced at Teddy. “Ain’t you got visitors? What happened to your girl friend. She two-timing you?”

     “I haven’t told her I’m here.”

     “So when you do, your whore will come wiggling her ass in a mink coat. It grabs me right here that a rich man like you should have to sleep in a ward.”

     Teddy began to protest, but stopped. “You’re goddamn right,” he said. “I’m not like you. I’m ok.”

     “I’ll help them dig your grave,” the old man said. Teddy tried to make out what Vetucci and his wife were discussing, what a wife says to a dying man; but he caught only occasional words that meant nothing to him.

     He decided to write Mother special delivery. She would fly east and help him recuperate. When he tried to imagine her visit, he could recall only the illnesses of his childhood: Mother fixing a smile from his doorway, dressed to go out; the doctor gripping his shoulders and urging him to be a little man. When the lights were turned off, he hadn’t written on the letter paper. Teddy could find no words that would make her believe what was happening to her thirty-nine-year-old son.

     The night nurse was annoyed at his buzzing her. She would not give him a sleeping pill. “Your doctor didn’t order one,” she scolded. The darkened ward was filled with snoring and coughing and gasping; Vetucci seemed to be weeping. Teddy covered his head with the pillow, trembling at his aloneness in the hospital.

     In the middle of the night a wild scream shocked a knife of pain through his chest; he clung to the runs of the bed and pulled himself up to the sounds of a struggle. The lights snapped on. Two women cried frantically beside an empty stretcher table. A nurse and two orderlies chased their patient to the door, locking his arms and half-dragging him hack to the bed. He was a young Puerto Rican with snakes of black twisted hair and frenetic eyes that flashed terror like Panther’s eyes when Teddy had awaken in pain. He shouted in Spanish while one of the women, an old lady, muttered and crossed herself again and again. The orderlies wrestled him into bed and strapped him down. He twisted furiously, shrieking animal cries.

     The old lady must have been his mother. Her brown skin was dry with wrinkles; she wore several layers of black garments that hung like tatters down to her ankles. A large crucifix glittered golden on her chest. The other woman, no more than a girl, was probably his wife or sister. She watched his struggles helplessly, large brown eyes wide on an olive face. Her body was angularly adolescent; yet large liquid breasts moved under her blouse. Teddy felt sure she wore no brassiere.

     He shifted in his bed and she glanced toward the sound. Teddy gave her a soft smile. She turned away and wiped her eyes; the hand showed a wide silver wedding band.

     The old man, Lokey, yelled to an orderly. “What’s wrong with the Spic?” The orderly tapped his temple. “Brain tumor, his chart says. Don’t worry. We’ll knock him out with a shot.”

     Lokey whispered to Teddy. “I bet you’d like to have that young one in your bed tonight. With those tits, she’d kill you.”

     Teddy watched the nurse inject a needle into the Puerto Rican’s buttock while the orderlies forced him still. In seconds tie became quiet. The nurse turned out the light, and she and the orderlies left the ward. The women remained at the bedside. Teddy felt indignation at the looseness of the hospital’s rules, at a disorder which denied him his insured privilege and placed him across from swarthy strangers.

     Old Lokey was mumbling to himself and Vetucci’ s eyes were wide open on the pillow. With the mouth and eye sockets deep in shadow, the head of the Puerto Rican looked like a skull. Last night Teddy had been in bed with a living woman; tonight he was alone with the breath of the dying, one of them.

     He tried to imagine oblivion, cold wastes of total silent blackness. Death would be a falling, the plunging of an elevator. But each time he closed his eyes he pictured only the city in the grey dawning to come his bed unslept in, his cat unfed, his desk unoccupied. The final fleeting traces of Teddy Keane.

     Teddy grieved that he had not clung to Ruthie’s warm flesh, tormented by the irrational intuition that his inability to love her was the reason he was here now.

     Across from him the old woman stood before a window, outlined into a black spectre. The girl waited on the other side of the bed, lost in darkness except for the shaft of moonlight that fell on her gay blouse. Its colors were vibrantly alive, like the plumage of exotic birds.

     Teddy had a vision. Mother and Ruthie were leaning over him, each clasping, kissing one of his hands, their tears falling Onto his cheeks, the pain of dying overcome by their love. And he, loving, watched their faces dissolve into light, merging, expanding, until it became the light of eternity.

     He clung to his dream, savored it, but slowly lost his hold on it and returned to the reality of the ward, to the abrupt shadows of the night. The presence of the girl comforted him; a warmth for her loving grew within him, hopeful and soothing.

     Struck with a notion that his own life had no future, Teddy felt a great need to tcll her that her husband would go to heaven. “Miss,” he whispered, “Senorita,” so softly that even the men beside him could not have heard. The ward was so still. Awed by the strength of his message, he was unable to bring himself to speech.

     The Puerto Rican turned his face into the moonlight. Freed from the shadows, his skin glowed. He seemed to he sleeping peacefully, the only one in the ward who was at rest. Teddy envied him his dying until he realized that this man was the one among them who most deserved life. Choking back sobs, he prayed that God would spare this man; he fixed his gaze on the girl’s blouse and prayed.

     Vetucci and the old man were finally asleep. Teddy, the last one awake, listened to the quiet breathing of the ward and realized that he must pray for them all.

     Toward morning, he shot bolt upright from his dozing, shivering with chill.

     In the bed across from him the Puerto Rican was also sitting up, staring straight back at him with horrified unseeing eyes, shrilling an endless siren wail. He had ripped free from his straps. The mother crossed herself furiously; the wife clung to his shoulders. Toddy squeezed the buzzer for the nurse until the plastic cracked in his grip.

     He climbed out of his bed, suffocating at the knot of agony in his chest, took two steps toward the man, and toppled forward as his legs gave way.

     The nurse ran into the ward just as the Puerto Rican died crushing his hands down against his skull, as if trying to stop a bomb from exploding.

     The girl collapsed with weeping. The mother moaned her anguish. Nurses and orderlies led them from the ward, gentle with their bewildered struggles. Teddy yearned for the girl’s tears, the chance that she would run to him in need of an embrace.

     He lay helpless beside his bed until the nurse returned and dragged him up, hissing in his ear that he could kill himself if he got up again.

     The body was examined by a doctor who dropped the lifeless pulse and covered the face. When it was taken away, Teddy mourned his loss. For the next hour he watched the orderlies scrub the bed and the cabinet and the walls sterile. Outside the first glow of sunrise was smothered by fog.

     Only the orderlies spoke. When one laughed abruptly, Teddy glared his outrage, joining the mute protest that animated the ward, feeling a painful joy to be bound within the comraderie of dying.

     “Bastards,” the old man said. “Someday it’ll be their turn.” For a second Teddy wanted to reach out and touch him.

     He ate a breakfast of soggy oatmeal. Afterwards, the doctor approached his bed, expressionless. “False alarm, Mr. Keane.”

     “What?”

     “You didn’t have a heart attack.”

     Teddy froze in disbelief. The whole ward was staring at him, the one among them reprieved. He felt them cursing his life.

     “But I had terrible pains. In my chest.”

     The doctor shook his head. “What you have is a form of bronchial pneumonia that has symptoms similar to a coronary. It showed up in both blood tests. Just something that’s going around these days. You can go home as soon as the nurse checks you out. Some antibiotics and a week or two in bed should be a sufficient cure.”

     Teddy grasped at the doctor’s hand. “I live alone. I want to stay here.”

     The doctor patted Teddy on time shoulder. “Your pneumonia isn’t severe, Mr. Keane. Certainly nothing to be alarmed about. If you’d like, I’ll call your family physician to make arrangements.”

     “I’m very ill and I have no one to help me.”

     “I’m sorry. The hospital is overcrowded with critical cases.”

     The doctor, professionally detached, left him. Teddy stretched out flat on the bed and clutched the sides of the mattress. A new pain struck like the blow of a fist, fingers piercing inside him and twisting greedily, all through his body, into his stomach, into his brain, into his chest. In the crowded ward he was alone with the frantic gasps of his own breathing.

     Old Lokey’s voice exploded in his ear. “You heard the doctor. You don’t belong here.”

     Teddy felt tears gathering. When his pain passed into a dull, steady aching, he lay still and looked out at the grim morning that stirred the city, prolonging the moments before he must dress to confront his life again.