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“But it isn’t,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“There are no bad guys.”
“Yeah.”
“Even cancer isn’t a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re okay,” I told him. I could hear the sirens.
“Okay,” he said. He was losing consciousness.
“Gus, you have to promise not to try this again. I’ll get you cigarettes, okay?” He looked at me. His eyes swam in their sockets. “You have to promise.”
He nodded a little and then his eyes closed, his head swiveling on his neck.
“Gus,” I said. “Stay with me.”
“Read me something,” he said as the goddamned ambulance roared right past us. So while I waited for them to turn around and find us, I recited the only poem I could bring to mind, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Williams was a doctor. It seemed to me like a doctor’s poem. The poem was over, but the ambulance was still driving away from us, so I kept writing it.
* * *
And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon this observer of the universe.
Half conscious, he glanced over at me and mumbled, “And you say you don’t write poetry.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He came home from the hospital a few days later, finally and irrevocably robbed of his ambitions. It took more medication to remove him from the pain. He moved upstairs permanently, into a hospital bed near the living room window.
These were days of pajamas and beard scruff, of mumblings and requests and him endlessly thanking everyone for all they were doing on his behalf. One afternoon, he pointed vaguely toward a laundry basket in a corner of the room and asked me, “What’s that?”
“That laundry basket?”
“No, next to it.”
“I don’t see anything next to it.”
