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as the nurse moved across the parking lot and away.

PART TWO
    THE MAN IN THE WINDOW

CHAPTER ONE
    W HEN IRIS Shula, the nurse, said there were worse things than death, she knew what she was talking about. She looked over her shoulder at the funeral just ending and the mourners heading for their cars and thought, Death—now, that’s the good news. The bad news was Mr. Brenner in bed 12 of the Intensive Care Unit of Barnum Memorial Hospital. Mr. Brenner, or the Tube Man, as the nurses called him, had been in a coma for five months, or as the nurses put it, he’d been dead for five months but didn’t know it yet. The nurses, Iris included, were not a mean lot—they just called them as they saw them, and over the years they’d seen a lot of them. The Tube Man looked dead, felt dead, and smelled dead, but despite all that accumulated deadness, once a month on the full moon, the night-shift nurses swore the Tube Man spoke. Iris raised a silent eyebrow because everyone knew that the night shift, due to sleep deprivation or boredom, often stretched the facts. A sigh, maybe, or a groan—comatose patients did that—but a word, from someone with a tracheotomy who was on a ventilator? The first word, according to the night shift, was
the. The
what? said Iris, who didn’t believe it was
the
, but maybe
thhh
or
uhhh
, some kind of neutral mouthy sort of sound. The next month the night shift reported another word.
Man
, they said. The following full moon, the Tube Man spoke again.
In
. The nurses put all the words together, made a sentence out of them, or the beginning of a sentence, because they figured the Tube Man was making a sentence at the rate of one word a month, which was damn good for a comatose patient. Even Iris was hooked. The next month she said, Well? to the night nurses, when she came in for her morning shift, what did he say?
The
, he said
the
again. That made it “The man in the.”
    Iris watched the mourners start to pull out of the cemetery parking lot. She walked on. Last month the Tube Man completed his sentence: “The man in the window.” Whatever that meant. She knew it meant something, though, because every time she said it, she got a nervous, excited feeling, a strange sense of anticipation. Over the years she’d heard many odd words from her patients: delirious cries, jumbled utterances, fragments from drug dreams, mumblings from the dying. Just one week ago, she’d taken care of a man with a stroke who, when you asked him if he needed a urinal or if he was hungry, always replied, “The cat in the hat? The cat in the hat?” He said it so that it came out a question. And the old Italian lady last year, Mrs. Mellace, who did not speak a word of English until the moment of her death, which Iris witnessed. Mrs. Mellace, who hadn’t moved in three days, suddenly sat bolt upright, her eyes huge and white-rimmed, and said, “I feel a certain clarity.” Then she died, still sitting, her eyes unblinking. Iris had heard plenty over the years, but she’d never carried anything with her, or pondered a set of words as she had the Tube Man’s “The man in the window.”
    The poor Tube Man, Iris thought, he doesn’t have much longer. The poor part wasn’t that he’d die soon, the poor part was that he’d lived so long in such discomfort. Iris believed, even though she knew that it couldn’t really be true, that a comatose person still felt things in a kind of way. Felt the
presence
of the tubes, the humiliation of all the wiping, and the suctioning, and the bed baths, felt the pain of constant exposure and the endless days in bed. The Tube Man had tubes in all his orifices, and in some places two or three. When he ran out of orifices, the surgeons made some more, one in his belly and another in his chest wall. He had IV tubes in three different veins through which he received, according to the time of day or night, three different fluids—clear, yellow, and thick white. Yes, there were worse things