Free My Mistake by Daniel Menaker

Central Terminal fifteen years earlier descends on me again. In this terror, I’m surprised to feel my knees go weak—I didn’t know it ever really happened, outside of metaphor.
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    My brother lies in a semi-private hospital room in Brooklyn. In view of his critical condition, the room’s other patient and the doctors agree that Mike should have the room to himself. The roommate is moved out. Mike has septicemia—a vicious, systemic blood infection that he must have contracted during the surgery, which was a routine procedure to repair the ligament injury he sustained when we were playing football.
    I have a cold and I ask the resident if it’s a bad idea to go into Mike’s room and talk to him. The resident says it’s probably OK, but if I want to be on the safe side, it might be best just to stand in the doorway. That’s what I want to hear, because the truth is that I don’t want to get near my brother. I am terrified of his perilous condition—he’s conscious but very, very sick—and I don’t know how I would act or what I would say if I got close to him.
    My mother and father and girlfriend and sister-in-law and I sit in a typically inhospitable hospital waiting room. My brother had come back to consciousness after having been unresponsive for some time. But the doctors say that he is still in great danger—they say it in such a way as to make me sure that my brother is going to die. My mother encourages me to go to Mike’s room and talk to him. I get up and go down the hall and stand in the doorway.
    â€œI almost bought the farm,” Mike says.
    â€œI know,” I say. “You had us all really scared, even though I knew you were probably faking.”
    My brother smiles his dazzling smile. He’s not even thirty and looks even younger now, and in such danger. He is lying on his back, his head on a thin pillow, so he is looking at me with lowered eyes, half-lidded, as if he were in a waking dream, or watching out for an attack from below. His voice is dreamy, too. “And how are you, my young scholar?”
    â€œI have a cold or I’d go over there and straighten you out,” I say.
    â€œAnd how is Precious?” he asks.
    â€œShe’s fine—she’s here too.”
    â€œHow can someone so good-looking stand to be seen with you?”
    I am out of wisecracks.
    â€œI almost bought the farm,” he says.
    â€œTwo farms,” I say.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNever mind. You know you’re going to be fine, right?”
    â€œI don’t think so. I really feel bad all of a sudden.”
    â€œWell, I’ll go back and get the doctor or a nurse. Hang in there.”
    â€œOK—I’ll see you later,” he says.
    I leave the room and tell a nurse passing by that my brother says he’s feeling pretty bad. She goes into his room and I go back to the waiting room.
    It turns out that his coming-to is only temporary. He goes into a coma, and all his vital organs begin to slowly shut down as the infection, resistant to the strongest available antibiotics, spreads. The hospital allows us all to stay in small, functional apartments that are generally used for interns and nurses. I call Collegiate and say that I won’t be able to return to teaching for a while. In the daytime, we sit in that waiting room with its cheese-rind hues. My sister-in-law sits on a couch, closing and opening a fist, saying that as long as she does so, Mike’s heart will keep beating.
    It doesn’t.
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    Mike’s friends from Dartmouth come to Nyack to pay their respects. Dave Hiley, Alex Summer, the Good McGinnis, the Bad McGinnis, Arnie Sigler, Otter, Roger Zissu. Seeing these young men—still boys, in some ways—is unbearable. They cast their eyes down, don’t know how to act, what to say. How could they? They have had no occasion to learn comportment for such a disaster. As is only proper. And they