Coma

“Dude, you’re wrong. There’s personal jurisdiction. We had that same example in our book.”

We’re sitting at a dive bar on 3rd St. arguing over the law school finals we’ve just gotten through. The first semester out of the way, law school suddenly doesn’t seem as impossible to conquer as I thought it might be during that orientation at the end of the summer when they sat us down in the auditorium and told us about how we were embarking on a storied profession, the study of the rule of law that has supported the existence of civilization for thousands of years. The little Dean on the stage that day, his Willie Wonka-esque demeanor and pitchy voice gave his words a comical brilliance, except I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. As I looked at the faces of my classmates – several of whom looked well into their 30s and 40s – I felt intimidated, concerned that I’d be one of those who would sink into law school lore – “that guy? Yeah I remember him from class, but I think he dropped out after a couple of months. Couldn’t handle the pressure I guess. I heard he went off to be a filmmaker or something. Living with his parents in Long Island probably.”

But here we are, me and my small cadre of like-minded middle-of-the-roaders who studied enough to get by and, so we believed, managed to place ourselves directly in the center of the bell-shaped curve that grades were charted on. The books were heavy, with their red and black covers, soft packaging to the 1000+ pages in the middle, a gift of knowledge wrapped in the binding. Our highlighters colored rainbows of identification onto the paper as we followed the studying process relayed to us by the many who had gone before. Of course, with our own formative experiences, all the advice melted away into a system that allowed us to work when we needed to and still manage to find plenty of time for late-night drinking and bemoaning the dearth of attractive females that our school happened to admit.

“Can we please not talk about the test?” I offer, the third beer finally bubbling small secret notions into my head, my shoulders feeling that familiar tightness that reminds me I hold all my tension in them. “We just need to drink. More drink, less talk. That’s what I say.”

“Are there going to be any girls tonight or is just going to be the three of us bullshitting until 4am?” asks one of my friends, taking a swig of his Brooklyn Lager.

“I don’t know,” answers the other. He looks at me. “Dude, call Sam. I thought she said she’d come out and she’s supposed to have a couple of friends in town. Maybe they’re cute.”

“Why me?” I ask. “You call her. You have her number.”

“Because she’s in love with you and wants to have your babies so she’ll be more agreeable if you call.”

They nod in agreement.

I get up reluctantly, without a word, and head outside to dial. Taking my phone out of my pocket, I see that I have a message from my dad. I check it and hear his voice, hollow-sounding over the line – “Call me. Please.”

I consider disregarding the message at first, letting it sit there until the next morning, because the last thing I want right now is to be answering mundane questions about my day, about what I’ve eaten and whether I’m dressed warm, while standing outside a bar still holding the drink I should have left inside.

The bouncer eyes me suspiciously.

But instead I grimace, take a deep breath, do a little annoyed dance, and call him back. The number rings a few times and I’m ready for it to kick into his broken-English answering message, but I’m surprised when he picks up and says my name back at me. Then nothing.

“Hello? Dad? What’s up? I’m out with some people.”

“You should come. Your grandmother…”

His mom. She had gone to the hospital the night before for an operation. So wrapped up in finals, I hadn’t allowed myself to focus on it despite the fact that it wasn’t necessarily a routine procedure.

“Is everything alright?

“No.”

He’s not panicked or angry or sad, just his usual matter-of-fact self. I feel like shaking him through the line, to at least make him vary the tenor of his voice enough for me to understand what he’s feeling. Something, anything that’s more than this dry shortness of his.

“So you just want me to jump on the subway? Right now? On a Friday night?” I say it without realizing how ridiculous it sounds, but somewhere in my mind I’m agitated that I have this sudden familial responsibility thrust on me. Here I am, glowing in a post-finals aura, and now I’m supposed to drop everything and trek to Brooklyn.

I just hear him breathing on the line, waiting.

“OK.” I say, and hang up before he has a chance to say anything else.



With the alcohol still not fully worn off by the time the subway climbs out of the tunnel to traverse the Manhattan Bridge, I alternate between frustration and guilt. My face feels hot and I get the sensation that it must be completely red. I look out over the water and see the Manhattan lights speeding away as the darker edge of Brooklyn lifts its head to accept me. Traffic tries keeping up with the train but the cars peak and ebb in futility as the uninterrupted rail carries us away on the gritty track, the occasional tilt and metallic shriek not enough to slow us down.

Across from me a young woman sits with a child to her right. Dora the Explorer backpack-clad, the little girl’s arms hang loose, mittens attached by way of elastic strap to the oversized pink and purple winter jacket that swallows her entire neck and juts into the bottom of her chin so that she has to lift her head up slightly to avoid its fabric tickle. The little girl’s body begins folding in half and her eyelids droop every time the train hits a smooth patch of monotonous thumping that reminds of the evenly placed cement patches on the highway. I remember the way they would make me pass off into sleep as soon as my dad pressed down on the accelerator during one of our weekend trips to the far reaches of Eastern Long Island. But then the momentum of the wheels slow and the girl spills in the opposite direction of her sleepy bodily compression, eyes popping to attention for a moment before relaxing back into disregard. The young woman who I assume to be the mother or an older sister takes the opportunity of the train being above ground to send and answer texts on her Sidekick. With the girl’s body pressing against her in response to the movements of the train, she doesn’t seem to notice that there’s a child sprawling herself out alongside.

Further down the aisle, I spot an older couple sitting in one of those two-person, loveseat-style chairs that jut out at ninety degrees from the wall of the train, their legs pressed back tightly so that their knees don’t graze the seats in front of them. They both stare down at their hands, folded across their laps, and don’t say a word to each other. Occasionally the man glances over to the woman, at the plastic bag she holds and then up to her face. The woman turns towards him and smiles, but then drops her eyes back down. Both their faces are illuminated by the streetlights lining the bridge, eyes lit on half the concave surface and dark on the other. Shadows of elongated, angular noses stretch across their faces, all the way out to their cheeks. It’s this image of them that reminds me of my own grandparents, of the grandfather who passed away three years earlier and of the grandmother I’m now heading to visit.

The man traces her profile again, his glance rising once more from her hands to her face and her own turning to meet his. Then the train drops into its descent, disappearing back into the tunnel on the underside of Brooklyn, and the fluorescence of the subway car’s lighting replaces every fine detail with one dull, overhead glow.



I’m convinced that it’s not her lying on the hospital bed. A bloated body, a thick red sponge with catheters and tubes and wires running to squirming machines, rests on the mattress, a plume of pillows and sheets behind it. It’s some amateur effects department for a Hollywood studio that has planted this object here, this thing with its sausage appendages and barrel chest, its stump neck rising to meet a crab-apple-cheeked, round face with sagging lower lip open to accept a taped ventilator hose.

The buzz has long worn off and has been replaced with a hazy sleepiness that the hospital lights are exacerbating. In her room, I only see my dad and his brother standing on opposite ends, mirroring each other, a wordless image of hands behind backs and bowed heads. My dad, dressed in workman’s shirt and jeans, looks at me when I enter, but then returns to his pose. My uncle, a Hassidic Jew now living in Israel and only in town by business-inspired coincidence, stands in button-down and slacks business/religious attire, his black jacket tossed over a chair with his fedora precariously balancing itself on the arm rest. A yarmulke sits atop his crown, covering part of his cropped hair that I notice has become almost completely white since the last time I saw him.

“Where is everybody?” I ask in my default voice, the volume of which is jarring in the room.

“They went home already,” my dad answers without moving, his own voice already adjusted to the atmosphere.

“What happened?” I realize that I don’t actually know what has led to all of this. A couple of hours ago I was just playing my part in some Greenwich Village law school student jaunt and now I’m standing in a Brooklyn hospital with my father and the brother he hardly ever sees or speaks with.

My dad proceeds to explain to me, as best as he can and with as much information as he has reprocessed in his own head, how she went in for bypass surgery, a few clots that needed to be opened. But by way of some unexpected reaction to the blood-thinning drugs, the clots opened by the surgery managed to close up and had to be reopened several times. When it was all finally over, she had something that amounted to an octal bypass.

“She just didn’t wake up afterward,” he concludes, his face focused on his mother lying in the bed.

In trying to decipher his emotions, I recall the visit several weeks earlier, when my grandmother stayed overnight at a hospital on Long Island because of chest pains she had experienced. It was then that the doctors reported the need for a bypass and, in fairness, told us that although they highly recommended it, she could choose not to have it if she didn’t want to.

My grandmother, always a stubborn woman known for her fits of bipolar extremes, flatly stated that she had no interest in the surgery and would just take her chances with whatever dwelled in the recesses of her arteries. To the rest of us, this response seemed crazy; the idea of someone living with the expectation that sooner or later they would simply collapse from a massive heart attack didn’t seem like an obvious status quo. It took everyone’s energies to convince her that she should come in for the surgery. She dropped her head and grudgingly agreed.

An ironic smirk forms on the edge of my father’s mouth. “I told her I would speak with her when it was all over,” he says.



I drop into an orange faux-leather chair in the hallway and let out a breath. Throwing my head back I stare up at the ceiling lights until they singe my eyes and I clench them shut. When I open them again, pale-colored bubbles float in my field of vision, dancing along the stone walls and dipping down towards the acrylic tiled floor.

After a few moments my father comes out of the room and looks at me.

“You can go home you know. There’s really no reason to stay here. Nothing is happening.”

“What are they saying?”

“Who?”

“The doctors.”

“They don’t know.” He shakes his head. “They say nothing.”

I think for a moment. “What are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do?” he repeats my question flippantly. “I’m going to stay. With Zev.”

Tilting my head back towards the room, I see my uncle pacing inside, one hand behind his back and the other rising to his chin, scratching at his beard.

“I’ll stay,” I tell him, trying to make my eyes swim, trying to pull together an emotion to show him that I’m as invested in this as I imagine he is. But nothing comes to me, and as I look at him I can’t help but think that the ordinary, rational expression on my face exposes me as a fraud who’s just sticking around because it’s the right, the good thing to do. The following of a duty to my father, a responsibility, something I owe him, and nothing more.

At the same time, somewhere in my head, I want to be back in the dark warmth of the bar, not playing any part in this drama. I wish he hadn’t called.

He acknowledges me with a silent look and walks away. I wonder if he knows.



The fondest memory I have of my grandmother comes from a random visit to her and my grandfather’s apartment in Brooklyn. On an otherwise regular winter day, without prompting or occasion, she decides that she wants to buy my brother and me a new videogame system. The subsequent visit to Toys R’ Us and sleepless night I spend running Mario through a dangerous world of man-eating plants and killer tortoises solidifies the childish and ephemeral notion, purchased at the cost of a videogame system, that I absolutely adore my grandmother.

We see her and my grandfather rarely, even though they live a relatively short distance from where my family moves to after Queens fails to properly reinforce our upward social mobility. When the visits do happen, they are brief, just quick stop-ins before the boredom of a cable-less apartment and the suffocating smell of Russian cooking and old people in a poorly ventilated space cause my brother and me to complain enough that my father pulls us back into the salt water air of Brighton Beach. But outside, even he exhales loudly, racing ahead of us to the car.

My mom doesn’t have a particularly fond impression of my grandmother, although I can’t understand why. Something about female rivalry, about never letting go of her little boy and maybe she should just let him be a man who makes his own decisions and doesn’t always do what his mother wants or approves of, and maybe she has to get used to the idea that he has a responsibility to listen to his wife first and foremost. I can’t really make sense of most of it. Of course none of this keeps my mom from agreeing to have my grandmother watch my brother and I when my parents decide to take their first vacation in years.

While they’re in Europe, my brother and I live in much the same way as when they’re there – a little roller hockey outside, a bit of bike riding, Prodigy-era Internet surfing, the requisite shouting and yelling. We rarely have a real fight, and I take pride in being the older, bigger brother, who never beats on him even though I possess the power to. For the most part, we’re very obedient children, and yet when my parents return my grandmother, fanning herself with her hand, breathlessly showers them with stories of her misery, with claims that we starved her by physically preventing her from going to the supermarket to buy the food she wanted to eat. My brother and I stare at each other perplexed, wondering how she really interpreted those trips for groceries that we made on her behalf because we thought we were being helpful.

After my grandfather dies, we see her even less. I assume that she tries to compensate for the absence of a constant companion (albeit one who, even in life, had little to say and seemed a relatively listless match to her gregarious and moody presence, her stock and sturdy build) by spending most of her time with other people her age, at some senior citizen center. Its there that they let them play dominoes and sit in comfortable chairs placed near windows, just slightly ajar, so that a breeze can carry the smell of green from outside. Some more of her close friends die. I get older and go off to college. Coming home is hard enough, let alone making the visit all the way out to the edge of Brooklyn. She becomes a fading, spectral figure in my life, a close relation I know to exist but one I don’t quite understand or particularly connect to. There is never really much in the way of contact between us, little communication beyond the birthday wishes and occasional holiday greeting.

Even when the prospect of her going into the hospital for an otherwise serious operation arises, it doesn’t resonate with me perhaps the way that it should. It all seems very simple, straight-forwardly medical. That last time, her legs dangling over the edge of her bed after the diagnosis, when she’s still leaning towards not doing anything about her condition, I remember joining in the chorus of reasoning that tries to convince her of the worth of the operation and the danger of ignoring it.

She stares out ahead as I speak. I sit down next to her, a small distance between us, and can feel her depression in the mattress, the pressure of her weight tilting me towards her. I can’t tell if she’s listening to me, it’s just some of my words and her darting eyes, then silence met with the saliva-laced sound of her licking her lips from the mild hospital dehydration.

“They put on a show for me,” she says suddenly.

“Who?”

“Last night, there was a whole carnival in here, a circus.”

I look up at my mom sitting in a chair across from us, at the other end of the room.

“Hallucinations from the medicine,” she says nonchalantly, her own medical experience underlined by her status as a Registered Nurse.

My grandmother continues, a glassy look in her eyes telling me she either hasn’t heard my mom or doesn’t care for her analysis. “It was fantastic. You should have seen it. A whole tent they put up. So many animals and acrobats and jugglers. But I didn’t like the clowns. Some were fine but there were some strange ones, scary even, black and white and red make-up. I looked away when they came. I asked them to leave but they wouldn’t.”

I don’t know how to respond so I don’t say anything, I just glance back at my mom who’s pulling at some lint that has clung to her sweater. She holds it between her fingers and flicks it into the air.

“I’ve always liked the circus,” my grandmother tells me with a smile, “but I’ve never liked the clowns.”



The next few hours at the hospital drag indifferently, one stagnant pool of time. Me, my father, and my uncle, each of us rising and sitting down, removing an article of clothing or tossing it back on, adjusting belts and loosening ties and re-lacing shoes. We take turns standing around aimlessly in the room with the mannequin and the machines as doctors and nurses ricochet around in the hallway with clipboards and rolling trolleys of medical supplies. At some point it is communicated to us by one of these doctors, the one who performed the surgery that led to the current state of affairs, that we should begin making some decisions in the event that my grandmother doesn’t recover.

“Eventually,” he says, “we’ll need to know if we’re going to turn everything off.”

He says “we” as if he’s tied to us in this whole saga, and in some ways he is. I watch my father’s and uncle’s helpless expressions as they try to balance thoughts of this man as responsible for it all with the idea that he’s also the only one likely to offer hope. Meanwhile I feel sorry for the doctor; I’m overcome with the urge to defend him. The darkness under his eyes tells of early aging, and I doubt that he’s actually the 55-60 that he looks. I can sense – as he absent-mindedly glances over his shoulder in the middle of a question my uncle asks him – that more than anything, he just wants to leave, to walk away from all of this and forget that it ever happened.

I miss the rest of the conversation, and it’s only as the doctor flees back down the hallway after a quick check of the monitors in my grandmother’s room, that I realize it’s over. My father walks up next to my uncle and I see, for the first time, how their body language, their mannerisms, remind me of my brother and I. The same crop, but each so different, years of growth between them, sprouts and roots extending in opposite directions and expanding, digging, farther and farther away, until everything is foreign, strange, and there is only forgetting when you try to remember where you started. The two of them begin to debate, in the open, rough way, that only brothers or close male acquaintances can, to analyze a question I doubt either ever really thought he’d have to consider.

“What do you want to do?”

“What are you asking me?” my uncle fires back, instantaneously angry at the implicit suggestion in my father’s tone.

“She wouldn’t want to be kept like this.”

“Already? Already you’re speaking about it. It’s so early still. We still don’t know what can happen.”

“Nothing will change. It will stay like this.”

My uncle’s eyes dance around in their sockets frantically. “I need to pray. Let me go pray.”

With that he races back into the room with the machines, and re-emerges with his fedora and suit jacket. He streams past us and heads straight for the elevators.



At some point I’m wandering through the hallways, looking for the restroom. I can’t seem to find it in the maze of corridors and entryways. Whenever I think I see a sign – the fattened stick-image of a faceless man standing at attention – I approach it only to find that it’s some blurry misinterpretation, and round another corner to explore further.

There’s no one to be seen, and my mind quickly corrects its imagining of late-night hospitals as filled with shouting doctors and families mulling about. All I hear are the sounds of calculating monitors, eerie green and blue blinks temporarily illuminating the dark contours of hospital furniture with its steel and plastic and foam. Sometimes I pass a room where the TV is on without the sound. I peek in to catch a quick glimpse of late night news or an infomercial shining towards a cot obscured by a drawn curtain. Only the foot of the bed lights up as the images flicker on the edge of the tucked blanket. Out of sight, there’s the occasional dim shuffling of paper booties or rubber soles over linoleum, one muffled scurry followed by silence.

I pass some last crevices of open doors before finally slipping into the men’s room which, sneakily, has been hiding from me all of this time. Just a small square sign –“Men” – hanging on the wall inconspicuously.

Inside, the lighting feels sharply brighter, the ceiling hangs lower, close enough that I can touch the paneling if I extend my hand and jump a little. There’s a drip coming from somewhere far off, a building momentum and then a release that falls deep and heavy, collapsing into an entire ocean of water that lies somewhere beyond the stalls and the alternating green and white tiles.

At the sink I twist on the water and let it drown out the hollow echoing. I splash some on my face and notice the image in the mirror. I stare at it, and as it looks back at me I notice distinct traces of my father, in the lips and the chin, the area around the nose and the cheeks. But then there’s also some of my mom, particularly around the eyes and the brow.

I think about a point in the future, a moment perhaps years from now when I will no longer be this person in his 20s, but one in his 40s or 50s of 60s, standing yet again in a hospital bathroom, peering at himself and wondering about the way time seems to flow in one uninterrupted direction, aimlessly stretching towards nothing in particular, reaching for every consecutive moment without comprehension of anything that has come to pass, without so much as ceasing for a moment to take heed.

Will my own brother be by my side when it’s our turn to patrol the hallways? One day just kids with scraped knees, rug burned elbows from attempting to recreate wrestling moves on the carpet, arguing about whose turn it is to take out the trash or do the dishes or walk the dog. And then, just as obviously, men like my father and uncle who in the intermittent years have grown into independent beings that know little about each other except that we’re both here, trying to ignore the circumstances and seeking refuge in the wrinkles and the haggard looks that betray the smooth faces from before.

I shake my head and step back from the mirror. Grabbing some paper towels, I use them to dry off. The sound of the pounding drip, loud and consuming, rises once more in the bathroom. It was there the whole time, only temporarily hidden by the running water from the sink. My shoes tap in rhythm to it as I head back towards the door, a corresponding melody of light percussion to its more thoughtful bass. One final click bids it farewell as I head back into the hall.



With some effort I find the place where I left my father, now leaning back in one of the seats outside my grandmother’s room. He doesn’t hear me as I approach and I catch him cracking his knuckles, pursing and relaxing his lips like a child trying to understand the way his mouth works, the way it can bend and fold and create all sorts of expressions.

I slide down into the chair next to him. I cross my hands on my stomach, interlocking fingers.

My father ceases his knuckle cracking and lip flexing and repositions himself.

“How’s school?” he asks without turning to look at me.

“Not bad,” I answer, letting my lids shutter slightly so that everything appears a little darker, the singular strands of eyelashes popping into my field of vision, a thick spider web of short, prickly hairs. “The semester just ended.”

“That’s good. How do you think you did?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure I did fine.” I say it to humor him, convinced that he doesn’t really understand what it means either way – this idea of a semester of law school ending – that in his mind, it takes a certain contorted, false shape.

“Just ‘fine’?” He’s used to me doing well, being the top of my class, honors, awards. I’m sorry to disappoint.

“Law school is different,” I try explaining, “everyone comes in thinking they’re exceptional, but then they realize that there are actually a lot of people who are smarter than them.”

He thinks about it for a moment. “That’s OK,” he answers eventually. “Seems more real that way.”

We fall back into silence and sit that way for a few minutes, neither of us speaking or moving, until my uncle finally returns and falls into place next to my father. I hear the crinkle of the faux-leather give way to his body.

“We should eat something,” my uncle says. He pulls the fedora off of his head, re-exposing his skull cap and salt-and-pepper hair. His pant legs climb up and I see the clumping socks underneath, failed elastic allowing them to fall into sad bunches near his ankles.

Off to our side, the machines from my grandmother’s room burr and beep and tick senselessly.



My father steers us up the BQE. I lean on the passenger side window and peer out at the sun rising over Long Island, just beginning to cast its glow on the oiliness of the East River. I turn to my left to catch the Statue of Liberty at the bottom of Manhattan – tiny from out here – and wait to see the torch dramatically illuminated by the morning rays. Except it doesn’t happen. Somewhere in the past is my one and only visit to Ellis Island, with my family, 10 years old at the time. Most of it is hazy now, but there’s still the memory of how small the Statue seemed. The pedestal itself was half the height of the entire structure, a structure I had always imagined to be more majestic, more towering. Even as a child, prone to see things bigger than they actually were, I felt disillusioned.

The radio is on soft, quiet enough that I might be imagining it. But there they are, hushed voices of men far away, pontificating into waves that become words that speak of distant lands and politics and the fate of all things. The sound, devoid of content, is oddly soothing, and saps some of the loneliness out of the car. For a moment my eyelids drop abruptly, but then bounce back open, my mind gasping in an effort not to slip away just yet.

I look at my father as he stares on stoically, focused on the road, his hands gripping the wheel tightly in his own effort not to fall asleep. He glances over at me quickly and gives me a half-smile, a genuine one, not forced or contrived, not something to smooth over the moment, just enough for me to lean my head back against the headrest and close my eyes. I feel the car pull us East, towards the sun still clamoring for recognition.

The voices from the radio, they tip-toe around us, slowly dissipating into the drum of the wheels over the bumps in the pavement, one steady beat of sound, and then, nothing.