1

Mother is painting stars. She thinks I'm asleep on the couch, wrapped in a heavy blanket, but I watch her as she paints, peeking out from a half-open eye, seeing her through a blur of lashes. She stands quite still for minutes, stands in front of a large canvas painted a dark blue that's almost black. Then she moves to a particular spot and stabs her brush. I fall asleep. When I wake up, galaxies have appeared.

Yesterday, I was in the hospital.

I was in a room, standing in the middle where they left me, looking at the blank walls, the metal frame bed, a desk, a pen, a piece of paper. Dear Paul.

Was this my room? I couldn't pull my thoughts together. This place looked lived in, the sheets on the bed in disarray. I sat at the desk, not aware of how I got there, unable to recall walking across the room, pulling out the chair. The piece of paper was too white, the ink from the pen too blue.

Dear Paul. Underneath the words I wrote: Who are you?

I wrote it slowly and carefully, imitating the handwriting on the line above.

I'm in this room. Your name is written here. If this is my room then I wrote your name. I know who you are.

I looked up. The window was high in the opposite wall, the glass embedded with wire. I tried, for a moment, to imagine what was outside, but all I could picture was an uneven, treeless place and a flat sky.

Before I was in this room, before I sat at this desk and wrote the words on that piece of paper, I was walking down a corridor. I heard noises, people talking, things being moved around, but the noises didn't come to me all at once. They came in bits, weaving in and out of importance, balancing, then contrasting each other. It was nice in a way. I wanted to cry.

Next to me, a large man in white held my arm. I shuffled and the man was there to help me. That made sense. I leaned against the man, who was warm and hairy.

Before I was walking down the corridor, I remember being someplace else. Another room, bigger than the room with the desk and the paper. I was propped up on a bed, a hard bed with white, white sheets and railings on the side. A man leaned over me, shaving my face with an electric razor. Was this the same man who helped me down the corridor? I can't be sure. The man shaved me with the razor and I thought, how come he's shaving me? Why can't I move my arms and legs? The man took a tissue and wiped away the saliva that ran from my open mouth.

All around me in this room I sensed other people in other beds just like mine. I couldn't see them because I couldn't turn my head, but I heard them thrashing around, moaning or pulling on straps. I remembered the sound of leather stretching.

I looked at myself in my mirror. My mirror. My room.

I was wearing a bright white gown tied at the back. My hair was black and thick, but cropped close. My eyes stared back at me. Every so often I forced myself to close my mouth. I soon forgot, though, as I stared at my face. My mouth fell open again.

I mustn't be very old. That's not why I'm here. This isn't a nursing home. I'm younger than the man who brought me down the corridor. I'm a young man, really, but how young? Maybe twenty-four? Twenty-seven?

Looking at the room reflected in my mirror made me dizzy. I stepped back and lost balance.

There were so many people in that place. They walked along the corridors or sat and chattered. Doctors and nurses walked past me, sometimes smiling and asking how I'm doing. Mostly, though, they seemed preoccupied.

The orderlies never asked me anything. They told me. Sit down. Stop bothering him. Don't talk so loud. When they weren't around, I hugged whomever was near me. I'm not sure why.

In the day room, a tall man watched television for hours at a time. I, on the other hand, watched the handsome disheveled man play a board game with the long-haired and gray old man. The old man was sweating, droplets falling onto the game board when he leaned in to move his marker. He wiped the drops away with a practiced motion of his arm.

The sunlight in the room grew yellow, imperceptible to everyone but me. When the sunlight was at its most yellow, when the shadows from the thin wire mesh in the windows grew longer across the floor, the other people in the day room became wrapped in a blurry halo that obscured their faces. When they moved past me, I almost didn't see them. They could be wind. I could be alone on a beach. Instead of waves, I heard chords of music.

In the light. There was a man. He seemed to live in the light, this man. I wasn't sure if he was real, but that didn't stop me from participating.

His name is Sasha and he's not very tall. The striking oval of his face tapered into a trim brown Vandyke and a long mustache waxed to a point at each end. He held himself a bit haughtily, or maybe it was just confidence, yet there was something childlike about him, a strange sort of tenderness. I could see his long-fingered hands. He smiled and spoke in high-pitched and nervous French. His accent is Slavic, I thought, then was frightened by my matter-of-factness.

"What could be worse than Moscow in the summer?" Sasha asked. He wore old-fashioned, expensive clothes tailored to fit his small frame--a frock coat and vest and a shirt with a starched collar. "What could be worse?"

In the reception area, I floated a few inches above the floor. It really wasn't a pleasant feeling. I had so little control--pushed around and tethered like a balloon. The pills kicked in while I sat waiting in my room and now the air looked hazy. People had halos of light around them, like headaches made visible. The halos throbbed if I looked at them too long. If I looked at the people. At the halos, too. Through the foggy air, I saw a tired, uncomfortable-looking woman in a heavy wool coat. Her halo was gray. She wore glasses with big, light blue frames that helped round her thin face. She smiled.

I knew it was Mother. People and things came back to me in no particular order and just as quickly left me, but she didn't need to remind me who she was.

"The doctor says there's no reason to keep you here anymore," Mother told me. We sat in the car. It was cold.

I didn't remember walking out of the hospital or across the parking lot. I didn't remember opening the car door. I could see the hospital from where I sat. I could breathe on the window and watch my breath condense. A gray layer of hardened snow covered the ground. The other windows started fogging up.

 "He says with the medication and therapy you'll be fine. He has faith in you. Says you're a survivor." She pushed a button and a noise filled the car, followed by a jet of warm air. The windows melted before me and I could see the hospital again, a dark old building made of sweating stones. I thought about laughing, thought about reaching out to see if the windows might still be there. Then I thought about the act of laughing and the idea of the window. The air got warmer in the car.

She looked at me.

"We did this for your own good," she said, her voice trembling a little. "You needed help."

I wasn't sure how to respond, so I said nothing. She pushed another button, stepped on a pedal. The car moved.

"You don't look well, Michael. Did they feed you at all? You look so thin."

"Just tired," I said.

Mother stopped glowing as we drove away from the hospital. I looked at her--recognizing the tilt of her head, her gray and black hair, her knuckles straining from her grip on the car's steering wheel. These things seemed natural, familiar. Perhaps it was the pills, pushing me into a safe place. When I smiled, my mouth never seemed to stop moving.

"Your father couldn't come," Mother said, not looking at me, intent on the road ahead. I tried to watch the road as well, but I began rushing away as the road moved toward me, one movement canceling the other and leaving the car suspended. Only when I looked at Mother did we seem to move.

"It's difficult for him to come home when he's touring," she said.

I can't picture my father or the places where Mother and I are headed, but nevertheless I'm soothed by the certainty that everything will be clear in time. The interior of the car, the cold red upholstery, the blue tinting along the top of the windows, the tan laces weaving in and out of the steering wheel wrap--all these seemed as familiar to me as my hospital room.

"Yes," I said. "I understand."

She smiled, glanced away from the road for an instant and looked at me. I understand. Yes. I understand what words to say so Mother will smile. She loosened her grip on the steering wheel. Her shoulders relaxed. Radiating out from the corner of her eyes, a web of wrinkles didn't disappear when her smile faded.

"You remember what it's like when he's touring," she said and I understood something in her voice, hopeful and trembling, transmitted to me at a frequency I couldn't quite hear. You remember, she said again, but her mouth hadn't moved. The heated air blew from the vent, hitting my face. I wanted to blink, but couldn't.

"Yes," I said. "Touring...."

I let out a sigh. Mother nodded, then shook her head while she smiled again.

This seemed so easy, like a game. Mother spoke and I replied. There was no need to say anything new. I reused her words and she smiled, and despite my numbness, I knew that to make her smile I had to choose my repetition carefully. I must choose and react--sigh, gesture, frown--and then listen.

I was confident now. Confident and numb.

I looked out the window.

The car wasn't moving, though the wet streets and traffic lights flew past with a measured regularity. I was caught between the push and the pull. Between the roadside and the car, as immobile as we were, Sasha was standing.

What could be worse than Moscow in the summer, Sasha said, and I heard my own voice speaking some of the words along with him.

"What could be worse?" I said.

Flocks of pigeons blocking out the sky, fouling the Kremlin and the palaces with their droppings--and the constant buzzing of flies, those horrible, swarming Moscow flies. What could be worse?

"Nothing," Mother said, delighted. "Touring is the worst."

I turned to look at her, knowing that the turning of my head would make Sasha go away and make the car move again.