Page 279 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 249

“Not now.” Ryan lifted up the flat palm of his hand against Jack
Woods. “Later.” He split. He turned and walked deeper down the hospital
corridor, leaving the blond man, famous for his cigars and his chopped
Harley, standing in hulking, sulking, black silhouette against the bright
backlight of sun streaming in the glass entrance. Rising alone in the eleva-
tor up to the intensive care unit, he felt all the panic his father had caused
in him.
He knew the ice-cold rooms of ICU. He knew the Look of dying, of
slow Death, of gaunt bodies pumped and flushed through machines, of
eyes staring blank from faces collapsed with pain, the wild thin hair of
the terminal, the sexless faces of the dying, the gasping for air through
dry lips, the twitching of thin arms taped to boards with needles inserted
through the paper-thin skin into sunken blue veins, the silent drip of
fluids, the thin white hospital gowns crawling up restless thighs exposing
pockets of dead sex, all passion gone, Death’s passage begun, the suffer-
ing, the submission, the end calibrated on beeping machines that with a
decision from the doctors and a lover’s signature can be turned off, the
kiss good-bye, the flipping of the switch, the pulling of the plug, the
countdown, the Death watch, fast sometimes, more often slow agony, the
sighing of the limp body sinking down into cold white sheets, the whim-
pering, the crying, the sobbing, the screaming of the survivors clutching
one another, trembling fingers clawing in for one last touch, feeling some-
thing so warm grow so cold so quickly in the refrigerated white air, when
even Death is taken from the dead one, his Death becoming their Death,
seeing them realize that one less person lies between them and their own
Deaths, pulling themselves finally together, helped by doctors and nurses,
crisp angels of mercy, walking them with backward glances out the double
doors to small rooms where sobs change to quiet murmurs, where life
becomes Death becomes “the arrangements,” the body of the dead one
wrapped and lifted even as they whisper thirty feet away, wrapped and
lifted and placed on a gurney, taken by strangers down the back elevator,
to the cold storage of the hospital morgue, where coal-black eyes, bruised
with rupture, stare up at white acoustical ceilings that muffle noises they
can no longer hear.
“Tony Tavarossi?” Ryan asked.
“Are you friend or family?” The woman’s face was pleasant. A stetho-
scope hung from her neck. Her hands were plunged deep into the big
pockets of her jacket. Her badge read “Dr. Mary Ketterer.”
“A friend.” Ryan knew she knew what kind of friend. At least in San
Francisco that didn’t matter especially at times like this. He knew in the

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