Nonfiction
It’s 1:00 a.m. and the emergency department is cold. The bright overhead lights illuminate the rows of empty desk chairs. I hear the tap-tap of rubber clogs shuffling in a far corner. There are only two patients here— the man in Room 18 with abdominal pain, and you.
Our hospital in Jerusalem feels haunted. Not, as one might think, by the ghosts of former patients, but rather by the living…
I am a figment of your imagination. You may laugh skeptically, and I admit there is much that would seem to prove I am anything but…
We tell our kids to give it their best shot before their big exams—calculus, say, or French—or before the championship game on a crisp autumn night, the stands filled with fans in the school colors, the stadium lights bright.
Probes puncture my scalp, surveying my mind. Temporal lobe, occipital lobe, you name it; there’s a probe for the lobe.
It was a chilly November afternoon in a southern town so small it never made it to a map. I was in the bedroom typing when I heard the noise and then my mother’s scream. She somehow appeared at the door with her hand over her bloody abdomen and whispered, “Get the doctor, she shot me.”
It is eleven o’clock at night, and I am stomping around with half a skull in
my hand. “Where are all the goddamn pipe cleaners?” I ask the room.
Throughout the evening, I hear explanations of why people can’t talk when I call. “I’m cooking dinner for my kids,” women tell me, harried. “You know how it is.”
“My husband will be home soon,” one woman says. “Dinner is our time together.”
This must be the first harvest from our acreage: our young vineyard singing, the plastic, ribbed grow tubes that make little greenhouses for each of the young grape plants catching wind and, like a throat and its vocal chords, producing a note.