The Man in the Window by Jon Cohen, Nancy Pearl Page A

unending blur of breakfast-lunch-dinner.
    The ventilator alarm suddenly buzzed, and the high pressure limit light flashed on. The Tube Man turned dusky. Iris popped open a suction kit, went down his airway, and sucked out a big mucus plug. His color slowly returned to normal. She half smiled: she’d just saved his life for the umpteenth time. He’d been getting a lot of plugs lately. His heart had been slowing over the last few weeks, too, and going into wacky rhythms. He didn’t have much longer; something would finally get him. Then the nurses would pull out all his tubes, tie a toe card on him, and wrap him in his shroud sheet—and that would be that.
    The last thing Iris did for him was comb his hair. When he came in five months ago, he’d had a fine full head of gray hair. Hardly any remained. She combed the wispy strands anyway, and restrained herself from saying, “There, now you look nice,” which is what she usually said after fixing a patient’s hair. Nice? You couldn’t make a dying skeleton who was full of tubes look nice. No wonder no one came to visit the Tube Man anymore. Who could bear to look at him? Only the nurses, whose job it was to care for all the abandoned bodies, to touch the untouchables.
    Iris straightened up the room and checked the supplies, then she emptied his urine bag and totaled his intake and output on the daily chart. His urine output had tapered to practically nothing over the last couple of days. No, it wouldn’t be long.
    “Okay, sir. I’m going out of the room now.” She clicked off the overhead light and turned to walk out the door.
    And then behind her, rising above the sound of blips and beeps and sighs from all the machines crowded into the room, a word, a single word:
    “Is.”
    Iris slowly turned and looked at the Tube Man. He had spoken again. She could see in the dim light that his eyes had closed; otherwise, everything about him was exactly the same. The same, except that he had moved from the depths of his coma and said a word. Was he starting a new sentence? A sentence beginning with “Is”? He’d never get it out—he didn’t have five more months to speak another sentence.
    She went over to him, went up on tiptoes, and repeated his word in his ear. “Is? Is?” And then she waited a moment, as if there was some kind of real and actual chance he’d speak again. Despite herself she said, “Give me more, can’t you?” She felt funny in the chest, nervous, and her mouth was dry. The Tube Man lay motionless. She could almost hear the winds of Pluto whistling through his brain.
    “You have to finish it, don’t you see?”
    She said the word to herself, trying to imagine how he would work it. “
Is
this a hospital?” “
Is
this fair?” “
Is
this it?”
    She had a thought then. “Is” wasn’t the start of a new sentence, but a continuation, maybe, of his first one? “The man in the window.” She’d assumed that was all of it. But no, the Tube Man was still working on it. “The man in the window
is
…”
    Iris hugged herself as she watched the ventilator puff breaths into the dying figure beneath the white sheet. She knew that someday soon, he would speak the name of the man in the window.

CHAPTER SIX
    A RNIE SAT on the front porch steps in the late summer dark. Duke wandered around in the yard, trying to eat fireflies. Arnie couldn’t see too well, but even with one deaf ear he could hear Duke snapping at them, and then there’d be a lot of spitting and chewing sounds when he caught one.
    “Duke. What the hell you doing out there? What are you eating bugs for?”
    Duke snapped and spit again.
    “You swallow enough of those fireflies, your balls will light up. What’ll Iris say, she comes home and sees your balls blinking on and off?”
    A window slammed closed next door. Guess you aren’t supposed to shout about dog balls in this neighborhood. Arnie smirked, then took another sip from his beer. His hook crunched into the can, and a few