Page 1 of Hanging and Burning

1.

“ARMAN BABYLON, HMM, let’s see. Yes, yes, in room 3122, North Tower,” the stern Black woman in nurses’ white told me.

She was studying the computer screen set up before her on the broad, extraordinarily neat reception desk.

“How do I get there?” I asked.

Only then did she look up through the lenses of her pink-tinted clamshell-framed trifocals. Snorting, she seemed to be peeved at me for wanting… anything.

“Take the hall to your right past the first elevators, and then, at the elevator bank, take a car to the eighth floor. Follow your nose to the nurses’ station there. They’ll tell you where to go.”

To hell, I felt she wanted to add.

She was around my age, mid-forties, handsome and sour. She was also my color—dark chocolate brown.

“Thank you very much, Nurse Abbington,” I said, reading her nameplate, trying to provide the best smile I could. “As many times as I’ve been here, I still get lost.”

My attempt at civility caused Geraldine Abbington to look closer. The bitterness subsided and, I believed, she even considered smiling.

“Oh, you’re welcome, Mr., um, Mr. Oliver.”

When our eyes met, I asked, “Do I have to provide identification at that station too?”

“No,” she assured me. “You’re in the system now.”

The wide hall I passed through was bright and sunny, filled with people, most of whom, I was sure, were not happy to be there at Pilgrim’s, the most advanced hospital in Southern California, one of the best cancer treatment centers in America.

But the better the hospital, the sicker, and the richer, the patient.

I jostled my way to the second bank of elevators and shoved into a spacious lift with old and young, wheelchair-using, limping, medical-record-carrying, and grief-stricken human beings. They represented all the races too, in no hurry for anything but possibly a quick escape from that well-maintained and brightly lit hospice for diseases, infections, stern-faced health providers, failing organs and limbs, and insurance forms, health histories, constant pain, drugs, and a humming in the walls that seemed, at least to me, like ululations calling to the soon to be dead.

When the doors to the fifth floor slid open, a woman called out from the back of the car, “Excuse me. Excuse me. I have to get out here. I have to get out.”

As the voice came from behind, I moved to the side.

“Watch it,” a man complained.

“She’s tryin’ to get out,” I said over my shoulder.

“You stepped on my foot.”

I turned to face the guy. He was exactly what people meant when they said, “It was a white guy,” paleness and pinkish grays defining what was meant by evoking the skin color’s unfounded name. He was medium height, a few inches shorter than I, in his sixties. And there was something wrong with his eyes. They were yellowy, crusted, and maybe a little fearful that I was one of those crazy people who reacted to complaints with their fists. He took a step back, causing someone else to grumble, “Hey.”

The woman who had to get out was small, well past her sixties, dragging a glistening chrome oxygen tank that supplied needed air to the tubes in her nose. To me she was the modern-day reanimation of Sisyphus, lugging that shiny tank back and forth, day after day, for all time.

When I reached the nurses’ station on the eighth floor of the North Tower, I encountered a younger tawny-skinned woman whom I could only think of as hip. Her hair was mostly stark blue with streaks of orange and green here and there. Her light brown eyes were engaging, and there were small shiny gold flecks at their outer corners.

“King of what?” she asked me with a smile.

At just that moment the cell phone in my breast pocket throbbed twice.

“What?” I asked.

“Your middle name. It’s in the file they forwarded from downstairs.”

“Um,” I uttered, “uh, my father loved Louis Armstrong.”

“I thought it was Elvis Presley they called the king.” Her smile was insistent.