This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death by Harold Brodkey

Author:Harold Brodkey [Brodkey, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Autobiography, Literary Figures, AIDS, Death
ISBN: 9780007401741
Google: mBahAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0805055118
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Published: 1997-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

Ellen went around the hospital floor saying good-bye to some of the nurses and nurses’ aides. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone; I sat up in bed, shoeless but otherwise dressed, utterly silent, not moving. Ellen returned, and I stood up without much breath—there was a good deal of gasping, as if the room were filled with startled crows.

I was dimly aware of the horror and unease Ellen felt at my state, but I couldn’t afford to recognize it for what it was. I would have foundered. I was upright and in motion with only a small margin between me and fainting. She helped me into a wheelchair. I joked about always having wanted a wheelchair of my own, but that upset her. She doesn’t snap at people, but she spoke a bit sharply to me now. I didn’t want to know that she was worried about pushing her husband in a wheelchair out of the hospital. I told her, not seriously, that she pushed it too pathetically. The nurses had arranged for an orderly, and he showed up then and whirled the chair along with vast energy and youth. Tired as I was, wiped out and skewed, I felt that terrible amusement again, this time at being whirled along.

Outside the hospital, the light had a perceptible weight, and I blinked and flinched. The outdoor noises, city noises, flew and scratched. I struggled to control my breathing so that Ellen would not sense my panic at being overcome by noise and light. And it was as Barry had said: I had not really known how sick I was—dying, yes, but not how sick.

I felt myself dissolve into the space spreading around me. In the taxicab, in the streets, I was so crippled by filmy fluctuations of consciousness—on East Seventy-second, on Madison, on West Eighty-sixth, where the walls of brownstones seemed watery and then gauzy—that I was far more imprisoned by weakness than I had been by the hospital and its routines. I knew right away I had made a mistake in forcing Barry to let me leave the hospital a few days early, but I also knew it was possible to be mistaken and to be right. I was maddened by my silent passing out and coming to in the city stink as the taxi bounded and bounced. I stayed upright. Ellen was stiff-faced and brightly talkative beside me. “I can’t respond,” I whispered. She held my hand. Halfway home, I was so ill with exhaustion that tears of pain came to my eyes. I had no intention of acknowledging my mistake. I said, at least half a dozen times, “Boy, is it wonderful to be out of the hospital.” Then I gave that up and asked Ellen if she was managing, or if this was too much for her. If she had said yes, I would have turned back. She said she was OK.

We, I, made it to the apartment, and I climbed into my bed in my clothes.

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