You never want to end up in a hospital.
Not if you can help it.
You most definitely don’t want to end up in a VA hospital.
The army and navy and air force and marines pour most of their funds into trying to kill people, not heal them.
VA hospitals stink of neglect.
The one in Tellings was no exception.
There was a man in a wheelchair yelling in the visitor’s lobby. His waste bag had broken and no one was fixing it. He’d been yelling for two hours, he said.
The admitting nurse seemed oblivious to his ranting, as if she were hooked up to an invisible iPod and grooving on R amp;B.
She was only half-oblivious to us.
“Yeah?” she asked, a few minutes after we presented ourselves at the front desk.
We’d already skirted the grounds, walked the pathway circling the three innocuous-looking buildings that made up the complex. I asked Dennis if he remembered the place.
“Was this it, Dennis? Was this where you were?”
He didn’t have a good answer. He looked like a tourist contemplating something he’d read about in guidebooks-things half-familiar and half not.
There was an easy way to find out.
“Have you worked here a long time?” I asked the admitting nurse.
“What?”
“Have you worked here for more than a week?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. “You making some kind of comment on my abilities?”
“Have you seen either one of us before?”
“What exactly do you gentlemen want?” she said, in a tone of voice that said she’d seen enough of Dennis to know he wasn’t gentleman material. Me either. Spend enough time in a car and you start looking as if you live in one.
“We have a prescription,” I said. “Any chance you could fill it?”
“You see the word pharmacy written anywhere?”
“No.”
“Then why you asking me to fill a script?”
“Okay, fine.”
“Is he a vet?” she asked, motioning toward Dennis. She could’ve asked Dennis directly, of course, but she’d obviously been around enough psych patients to know one when she saw one.
“Saddam’s pumped me full of petros,” Dennis answered her anyway.
“That so?”
“I’ve got petroleum in my veins. I need a lube job.”
“Are you in charge of him or something?” she asked me.
“Or something.”
“You here to commit him?”
“No. Just looking for a refill.”
“You might want to rethink that. He doesn’t seem so good.”
“No, he’s okay. He just needs his meds.”
“Well, then. I’ve got a hospital to take care of.”
“Okay, sure. And you’ve never seen him before-right?”
“Right.”
We walked back outside, where a Support Our Troops sign was hanging off the front archway.
I did what I always did when we walked outside now-when we walked anywhere. I looked for a blue pickup truck.
“How many pills I got left?” Dennis asked.
“Not that many. By the way, you know they’re all different colors?” Dennis’s mom had anointed me keeper of the meds-put them in an old Band-Aid box and stuffed them in my pocket. I couldn’t help thinking there was something metaphoric about that-futilely sticking Band-Aids on a terminal wound.
“I’m hungry,” Dennis said.
“Okay, we’ll get something on the road.”
I’d been trying to conserve my cash because I was loath to hit the ATM again. Not that it mattered-I’d already filled the tank just before we hit the hospital, slipping my credit card into the reader like the notes UPS delivery personnel slip through the mail slot of your front door:
I was here.
THE NEXT HOSPITAL WAS A HUNDRED MILES AWAY IN OREGON.
Eisenhower Memorial.
Up till recently, I’d never been close to Oregon in my life. Now twice in two weeks.
“Dennis, if you see that license plate again, you’ll tell me, okay?”
“Sure,” he nodded. “What license plate?”
“MH92TV.”
“Oh, right.”
It was almost midnight. I’d decided there was safety in motion-no roadside motels where I’d need a credit card or cash withdrawal. Where someone in a blue pickup truck might creep up on us in the dark.
We reached Eisenhower Memorial at about 1 a.m.
It looked a bit like the elementary school I went to as a kid-only triple the size. A squat, red brick building with the requisite flagpole out front, the Stars and Stripes dishrag-limp in the sticky summer heat.
“What’s this?” Dennis asked when I pulled into the parking lot. “Where are we?”
That didn’t bode well.
When we walked up to the front desk, we suffered through a repeat of Tellings. This time the admitting nurse was a pale, owlish-looking man who asked us what we wanted, claimed to have never seen Dennis before in his life, then inquired about Dennis’s sanity when he swatted a bug that wasn’t there.
We took a little walk around the place anyway, just as we had in Tellings. It was a washout; Dennis had never been there.
We went back to the car, drove through the front gates.
I steeled myself for a long ride; the next VA hospital was more than three hundred miles away.
Dennis was acting fidgety.
I put him on license-plate duty. It gave him something to do. It gave me a semireliable sentry-scouring the passing jumble of numbers and letters for the ones we needed to fear.
Somewhere around 3 in the morning, I felt the kind of tiredness you just can’t shake. Dennis had already fallen asleep on the job and was snoozing noisily against the side window. I was perilously close to following him, the highway’s broken yellow lines like individual Sleep-ezes I was ingesting one at a time on the way to bed.
When I realized I’d drifted into the next lane-had literally been sleeping at the wheel-I searched for the next exit. Three miles later, I turned off the highway, looking for someplace we could grab a few hours’ rest.
I found a twenty-four-hour gas station.
I pulled in-past the lit window where I could see the Indian proprietor, all the way to the back so we couldn’t be seen from the road. I turned off the engine and promptly fell asleep.
Dennis woke me when there was just the faintest pink corona on the horizon.
I looked down at my watch: 5:30.
We were surrounded by low brush just beginning to emerge out of the morning gloom. I could hear the crackling of two massive power lines strung right over the station, the occasional ghostly whoosh of a passing car.
“I gotta make,” Dennis said. “My stomach hurts.”
“Okay, Dennis. Over there,” pointing out the restroom door at the back of the station.
Dennis opened the car door and sat there for a moment, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Then he pulled himself out in sections, first his feet, then both arms, finally the rest of his body. He stumbled off to the bathroom and went inside.
I was dead tired; I must’ve gone back to sleep. When I woke up again, I wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been a dream-Dennis waking me to go the bathroom. My ex-wife had been like that-holding conversations with me at 2 in the morning, then accusing me of making it up.
But Dennis wasn’t in the car. The pink light had morphed into pale yellow.
It was 5:40.
I got out, walked to the bathroom door, and knocked.
“Dennis, you okay in there?”
I heard an answering grunt.
I walked around to the front of the station in search of food.
When I entered bleary-eyed through the front door, the Indian-he was probably a Sikh since he wore one of those red turbans-didn’t even acknowledge me. He was hunched across the front desk, reading a newspaper.
I walked down the aisle looking for something to eat. Gas stations were evidently oblivious to the latest nutritional guidelines. This one was pretty much restricted to the food group ending in -os.
Cheetos. Doritos. Tostitos. Rolos.
It was quiet enough that when I pulled two bags of Doritos off the shelf, the resultant crackle seemed as jarring as a gunshot.
Not to the Sikh-he remained buried in the newspaper.
“Do you have any salsa?” I called out to him.
He ignored me.
“Salsa,” I said. “Where is it?”
No answer.
“Hey!” I said.
The air conditioner began rattling. A car drove by.
An alley cat screeched outside the window.
The power lines snapped and crackled.
Sometimes bits of knowledge come all at once-several distinct and awful realizations flooding your brain at the same moment in time, and suddenly, just like that, you can’t breathe.
You’re drowning.
I raced out of the store; the Doritos fell to the floor.
I screamed his name out loud.
“Dennis!” Flinging open the bathroom door and saying, “Oh my God, oh my God, Dennis, oh my God, Dennis…”
Me, who generally avoided God’s name since he’d never done all that much for me, invoking it three times, like some sacred cant. Like the proscribed penance for committing a sin.
I had committed a sin.
I’d fallen asleep.