Sun White Hot and Blinding

by Gaetan Sgro
The Healing Muse

Not until we’re three weeks in do I get the full story. Not some depersonalized hodgepodge of signs and symptoms―a trail of stale, clinical crumbs that lead, inevitably, to something less satisfying than the truth―but a story I can hear and actually remember. A story that sticks.

I am constantly reminded and constantly surprised by how much history hides, often in plain sight. I have to keep reminding myself: if the pieces don’t quite fit, then something is missing and you need to go after it. In this case, the missing piece is the trip.

My car rolls slowly into the lot one Saturday morning and slinks past the smoke shack where Sal and his wheelchair are docked. Our eyes meet as I coast into a spot. Sal seems too young for Vietnam, and the way his Navy cap sits squarely on his head makes him appear neatly dressed, despite red pajamas and socks with white treads. I spill out of my car and approach him with the lid of a wide, flat box peeled back, exposing rows of candy colored donuts. I watch his thin fingers hover for a beat before descending sharply―like a shorebird diving for fish―coming up again with chocolate frosting, yellow jimmies, a donut dressed up for the home team.

We meet again in his room, later, and for the first time, I actually take the time to sit down on the edge of his bed. Sal’s been bouncing back and forth between the ward and intensive care for weeks, and I’m suddenly aware that we’ve yet to have a real conversation. I can tell my gesture pleases Sal, and grants him a kind of permission.

“Hey, Doc, have I told you about my trip?”

He explains how he’d been saving all his vacation for this one, for ten days on the road, just him and his grandkids. Sal’s lean, expressive arms recall the early-morning pickup: how he slid the twins, still silent and heavy with sleep, across the wide back seat of his old sedan. He extends both fists like he’s white-knuckling it through the mountains, and I can see him barreling through blurs of tunnel lights, and straight into the sunrise.

A hand on his brow to shield the light, he shows me how he spent hours watching Michael and Kylie hopping waves in front of the lifeguard stand, and I can see his lanky figure silhouetted against the shoreline. Every night, he’d issue long strips of tickets for the rides along the boardwalk, and in the mornings woke them early to cast lines off the jetty, the tacky sweetness of sticky buns still warm on their teeth.

Coming back, they had stopped to visit his buddy in South Philly. Old pals from the Navy, Sal couldn’t believe that, all these years later, Mac had made Master Chief.

“Man loves his job,” Sal says, his head shaking slightly. “Goes to an office every morning, sits down and takes his shoes off.”

On the final leg of their journey, the kids had insisted on a stop at Kiddieland, somewhere mid-state.

“We were doing great…” Sal says, and then trails off, so that I can feel the but coming. “Made two loops around the park on Saturday, and planning on doing Splash Zone our last day when Kylie looked at me sideways and said, ‘Popop, you know your eyes are stained?’”

With that, Sal goes quiet, understanding that we’ve reached the bend in the story. He knows the yellow eyes are the thread I can follow all by myself straight back to this hospital bed. And he’s right, because this right here is my Sixth Sense moment, the twist in the plot where I realize that the main character has been dead all along. Here’s where my mind’s eye starts to dart backwards, to appreciate for the first time certain details that must have been there from the beginning: nights spent not sleeping; Sal’s sneakers propped on the balcony railing; the hum of the air conditioner; waves crashing; ice clinking. Here is the discrepancy between Sal’s possible recovery and the numbers that insist on a different story. Markers of liver injury that refuse to improve, even slightly. The scoring system for estimating mortality from acute alcoholic hepatitis that remains unequivocally bleak.

One week to the day after I discharge him, I follow Sal’s tracks across the state for my brother’s wedding. On a Thursday morning, my dad and I drive across the wide blue bridge to New Jersey where the beer and wine are plentiful and cheap. A muggy morning has dissolved into rain, and I have to work hard to see the road ahead of me. On my left, a police cruiser’s lights cause a panic in the passing lane. Ahead, a car is twisted, facing the wrong way. Beneath the overpass, a blurry figure huddles with a cellphone and, as we splash by, my cell phone rings.

I shouldn’t answer, but I can tell from the exchange that it’s the VA. A thin voice calling from the details office, needing a signature on a death certificate. A man has been found on his girlfriend’s couch by a visiting nurse, and the nurse has pulled my name off the discharge summary. By the time we arrive at the point, which is that the clerk can’t think of anyone else to notify, I am stopped beneath the green and yellow lights of BP. Ribbons of rain unravel down the windshield. Outside, all of New Jersey is drowning.

That afternoon, we take a drive to the Navy Yard, a straight shot down Broad through the heart of South Philly. We had hoped to get to the shore, but the day is a rainout, so we decide to seek shelter, and lunch, in a massive hanger that’s been repurposed as a trendy cafeteria. Here is a steampunk cathedral, outfitted with all of the trappings―exposed beams, heavy chains and polished plumbing―that delight the young designers who call this office space. The scale is industrial, not human, and the clamor of hungry hipsters in vibrant tatters and tattooed skins is disorienting.

We fill our plates with salad greens, and sit beside a wall of windows stretching up to the ceiling. The day is still dreary, but we can stare out the windows and look the river in the face.

In front of us, a ghost fleet of decommissioned warships obliterates New Jersey. The sheer number and scale of these floating relics, coupled with their obvious inertia, is eerie― and ironic.

And I guess that irony is the thing that still sticks in my throat about Sal. It’s the reason that the entirely predictable news of his death still punched me in the gut as I plowed across that flooded highway. Not irony like boxy glasses or bomber jackets that are suddenly cool again. Not even irony like aircraft carriers as tall as skyscrapers in an era when war is wages by unmanned planes. No, I mean old-fashioned, dramatic irony. Irony like Shakespeare, when the audience knows more than the characters in the play.

The thing is, I never warned Sal. I never let him in on the secret that all his numbers betrayed. I listened to his vows to give up drinking, to change his life for his grandkids’ sakes, without making the slightest effort to temper his optimism. In fact, knowing me, I probably egged him on. I probably told him he’d make it back to the shore someday. Some bright blue cloudless day. Some day when the kids are laughing, when the white hot sun is practically blinding― so that he’d never see it coming.