Pediatrics

When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall— though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks. Cranked up, then down in my bed— I told the nurses jokes, newly precocious, but too old at twelve to be anything but a patient. I slouched in my robe among the other child-guests of St. Joseph, the parrot-eyed scald masks, the waterheads and harelips, the fat girl with the plastic shunt. The old crippled nun on her wheeled platform dispensed her half-witted blessings, then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys sliding by my numbered door.Gone told me I'd go away too— orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard: the blank windows curtained one by one. I could not abide that yearning face calling me home. Like the Gauls, in my penciled translations: I saw Caesar was my home. Through the streets of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable. In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator— I imagined pain not as pain but the flickering light embedded in the headboard, the end of the snake-wire uncoiling from the nurses' station. The painkiller winked in its paper cup, its bleak chirp meant respect should be paid for the way I too wielded oblivion, staring at the wall till six, gifts unopened in her lap, the early dark deepening between us.