Read Online The Best American Essays 2014 by Robert Atwan, John Jeremiah Sullivan - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Atwan, John Jeremiah Sullivan
Tags: Writing
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Italian aired across the gulf of the wide room. The ceiling was a good fifty feet above us. You could play field hockey in this place if you removed the chairs. The tile floor was grooved from foot traffic.
Ten hours earlier we had been on a tour bus seeing the sights. We had listened to the recorded dialogue in Spanish, French, English, and German announcing the various historic buildings we passed. The bus slowed at these but didnât stop. Rome was easing into its hot summer period, and I imagined how stifling the city would be if the temperatures were fifteen degrees warmer and there was no breeze to stir the air. Now I was standing in the emergency room wondering if she would live or die.
I alternated between scribbling notes on my small pad of paper and pacing the enormous room. I felt the need to record things, since my mind was not holding on to facts or the sequence of events that had brought me to a hospital in Rome at the end of what had been a glorious day. Occasionally I would glance at the TV screen to see a suspicious Jack Klugman in the autopsy room about to cut into a corpse. Before his scalpel touched flesh, he would say something that seemed to be of major importance, even dubbed in Italian. I never saw this show back home, but the Italian language made the scenes appear interesting.
Starsky & Hutch
was a chase-and-crash cop show, an insult in any language.
Across from me, a petite woman with the complexion and bone structure of someone from the Balkans sat quietly with her Italian partner. There was no indication of what they were doing in the medical facility. Neither of them had visible wounds or bandages, nor was there any blood on their clothes. They never approached the desk where several attendants recorded business. The woman, who was so small and delicate it seemed I could hold her in my hand, would periodically get up and go to both the menâs and womenâs bathrooms and emerge with thick skeins of toilet paper wrapped around her hands. She would then patiently unwrap and rewrap the paper. The man never said a word, but every thirty minutes or so he would walk outside for a smoke. Everyone seemed to light upânurses, patients, familyâwhich left the outside patio carpeted with cigarette butts.
The ER was in Romeâs largest hospital, which was also a teaching hospital. Ambulances, dented and scraped from numerous encounters with other vehicles, wailed into the bays at regular intervals, their service increasing as afternoon wore into evening in response to rush-hour incidents. The hospital was built in the postwar years, and different wings had been appended at various times over the decades. White-clad staff came and went, the waiting room a central passage point to the other medical areas. The tiny woman unraveled her toilet paper. An ancient man with a cleaning cart mopped around the chairs and the surrounding areas by the walls with regularity, tingeing the air with a whiff of disinfectant. After he did the bathrooms, the woman retrieved the replenished supply of toilet paper. We veterans of the ER were amused by newcomers who entered the respective bathrooms and emerged with quizzical looks on their faces; it had taken me two hours to realize that only the bathroom reserved for the handicapped contained toilet paper, something they would deduce for themselves if they remained in the ER long enough. Every now and then the loudspeaker would broadcast a message or request in rapid-fire Italian that would have been incomprehensible in any language; every hospital in the world has the same garbled public address system.
There was an orderly chaos to everything. No one was frantic. Doctors and nurses hurried by; some stopped briefly at the time clock to punch in or out; others opened doors and quickly disappeared behind them. Periodically the main ER portal opened, and someone would call out the name of a waiting family and ask them to come inside or beckon someone waiting
Ten hours earlier we had been on a tour bus seeing the sights. We had listened to the recorded dialogue in Spanish, French, English, and German announcing the various historic buildings we passed. The bus slowed at these but didnât stop. Rome was easing into its hot summer period, and I imagined how stifling the city would be if the temperatures were fifteen degrees warmer and there was no breeze to stir the air. Now I was standing in the emergency room wondering if she would live or die.
I alternated between scribbling notes on my small pad of paper and pacing the enormous room. I felt the need to record things, since my mind was not holding on to facts or the sequence of events that had brought me to a hospital in Rome at the end of what had been a glorious day. Occasionally I would glance at the TV screen to see a suspicious Jack Klugman in the autopsy room about to cut into a corpse. Before his scalpel touched flesh, he would say something that seemed to be of major importance, even dubbed in Italian. I never saw this show back home, but the Italian language made the scenes appear interesting.
Starsky & Hutch
was a chase-and-crash cop show, an insult in any language.
Across from me, a petite woman with the complexion and bone structure of someone from the Balkans sat quietly with her Italian partner. There was no indication of what they were doing in the medical facility. Neither of them had visible wounds or bandages, nor was there any blood on their clothes. They never approached the desk where several attendants recorded business. The woman, who was so small and delicate it seemed I could hold her in my hand, would periodically get up and go to both the menâs and womenâs bathrooms and emerge with thick skeins of toilet paper wrapped around her hands. She would then patiently unwrap and rewrap the paper. The man never said a word, but every thirty minutes or so he would walk outside for a smoke. Everyone seemed to light upânurses, patients, familyâwhich left the outside patio carpeted with cigarette butts.
The ER was in Romeâs largest hospital, which was also a teaching hospital. Ambulances, dented and scraped from numerous encounters with other vehicles, wailed into the bays at regular intervals, their service increasing as afternoon wore into evening in response to rush-hour incidents. The hospital was built in the postwar years, and different wings had been appended at various times over the decades. White-clad staff came and went, the waiting room a central passage point to the other medical areas. The tiny woman unraveled her toilet paper. An ancient man with a cleaning cart mopped around the chairs and the surrounding areas by the walls with regularity, tingeing the air with a whiff of disinfectant. After he did the bathrooms, the woman retrieved the replenished supply of toilet paper. We veterans of the ER were amused by newcomers who entered the respective bathrooms and emerged with quizzical looks on their faces; it had taken me two hours to realize that only the bathroom reserved for the handicapped contained toilet paper, something they would deduce for themselves if they remained in the ER long enough. Every now and then the loudspeaker would broadcast a message or request in rapid-fire Italian that would have been incomprehensible in any language; every hospital in the world has the same garbled public address system.
There was an orderly chaos to everything. No one was frantic. Doctors and nurses hurried by; some stopped briefly at the time clock to punch in or out; others opened doors and quickly disappeared behind them. Periodically the main ER portal opened, and someone would call out the name of a waiting family and ask them to come inside or beckon someone waiting
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