Free Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos Page B

would have been treated for a week or so at a time intravenously; bedpans were the rule, and a mixture of food and children’s toilet smells filled the air. Sweets were unknown to us, and what I mainly remember of the food amounted to the blandest of things—like boiled potatoes and carrots, cream of wheat, and possibly skim milk, along with some form of protein, like broiled chicken, but never served with salt, and skinless, a far cry from the euphoria of fat-laced, crispy lechón —ah, Cuba, Cuba. What birds we saw went flying through pictures on the walls, and while I have a vague recollection of playing with a set of Tinkertoys and of seeing a few brightly colored toy trucks rolling across a floor, the wonderful nature of daily childhood discovery seems not to have been a part of my stay. I doubt that we did much of anything at all except submit to our treatments and sleep and sleep and sleep. I’d sometimes hear the other children crying, and moaning in pain—from what, I don’t know, perhaps from loneliness—but though it’s hard to see their faces now, I would pop up in the middle of the night, feeling overwhelmed by the notion that these kids were only fleeting shadows, slipping away and just out of reach from me, on the other side of the room.
    Though I spent a year in that place, I haven’t a single name of any of the home’s doctors or nurses in my head or, for that matter, any sense of what the hospital’s staff members looked like, though my guess is that in the Connecticut of 1955–56, they were most likely decent, locally recruited New England folks, and since it seems to have had a somewhat religious atmosphere—here and there crucifixes hung on the walls—I would imagine that a chapel could be found somewhere inside and a chaplain, perhaps an Episcopalian priest, who would officiate over the services, say prayers over the young patients’ beds, and console parents when things did not quite work out.
    You see, there were others in my ward, some whose renal functions worsened and never quite recovered. It’s a fact that not all the kids who were sent there to convalesce got better, some beds emptying mysteriously overnight. Those who were healthy enough were allowed into a playroom. That’s where I got to know Theresa, a pigtailed, sweet-natured girl who, also suffering from nephritis, exhibited the same listlessness and bloated limbs as I: We were cooped up in the same rooms; our arms ached in the same way from where blood had been taken; our urine swished, pinkish, in vials; and, in that isolation, there was always someone around to examine for blood what we’d left in the bedpan or potty. Breathing haltingly, we shared the same shocked expression and, like all the kids in that place, went for months without seeing the light of day, for we were never allowed outside to romp in the surrounding greens, whose sunny glare we spied flowing through the windows far above us. If I have mentioned her, it’s because Theresa is the only name I came away with from that hospital and because, as it would happen, aside from recalling that we were always playing with alphabet blocks on the floor and that I’d sometimes see her curled up in a corner, drowsily trying to stay awake—whatever medicines they gave us knocked us out—she would be the only fellow patient I’d run into years later, during my feeble-brained and quite timid adolescence.
    Ah, but the anxieties we shared, the treatments I received, and the isolation I felt during that period would later come back to me in recurring dreams, the chronic nightmares I’d suffer from well into my thirties. In one of them I’d feel a rod—possibly a catheter—being inserted into my urethra, and a flinching over that pain, some nasty burning in my center; the sensation, as well, of choking on the dryness of pills, of swallowing metallic powders, would come to me, along