People move quickly, in straight lines, going the way they are going to the places that await them to do the things they have planned to do. Agency and autonomy transform the people below into moving dots, dedicated to the doing. At least that’s how it seems from up here.
Nine floors above the grid, the pace is slower. There are straight lines up here, too, and people continue to move that way. Going up and down in elevators and to and frow down the hallways. There are large rectangular windows in the corridors and rooms that face the city. From there, with chin on chest, the moving dots below can be seen. An East River bridge and some actual sky is also visible, but the smell of the sky is sealed off. Is it hot or cold out there? Not sure. But it is not raining. The lights in here don’t quite hum. Everything is hushed, even the color of the walls.
For a place that is dedicated to children, it sure is quiet. Brightly colored murals and curated craft projects have been framed and sanitized to evoke ‘the child’. Plastic toys are plentiful and exciting activities are at-the-ready. But there are no clomping feet or squeaking sneakers on the perfectly polished floors. Instead, there is the muted sound of wheels. Wheels on strollers, wagons, wheelchairs and gurneys. There are also soft footfalls and pleasantries. Keyboards click, and Velcro cuffs rip, and of course, there is the sound of the beeping. Endless and varied codes of beeping. One sequence for “line occluded”. Another for “infusion complete”. And yet another for the poetic and foreboding “power supply”. But the sounds of kids being loud and bold and joyful and cruel and confused and silly and daring—there are none of those sounds. Of course, there are the other kind of kid sounds but I don’t know that you want to know about those. Do you? Because those sounds come from behind the curtains and the windows in the doors.
If you are up for it, there’s the sound of a man’s voice on the phone in the hallway, seeking medical marijuana for his 8-year-old son with leukemia. There is the sound of the same man saying the words “end stage”.
Nine floors above the grid of moving dots and doers doing, is the short stick pile. Everyone here has drawn the short stick. And every short stick is different. Our pile is a stew of swirling timelines, prognoses, and treatment protocols. Everyone we run into at the coffee machine is not a part of that grid of moving dots anymore. This is what they are doing. And this is maybe who they are now. Is this who I am? I don’t know. But I do know, that if down there is the grid, then up here is a pin ball machine and we are the shiny round metal ball that’s being thwacked again and again. We don’t know where we are going to end up and we don’t know where those other balls are going either. Most of the time we never know what happens to the people we run into at the coffee machine.
For instance, I don’t know what happened to the kid whose parents were telling the doctors “We just want to get her back home.” I think they were from California or the Netherlands, some place blond and foreign. The younger siblings were playing in the playroom, but ‘play’ isn’t quite the right word for it.
I do know that Aiden died. His dad told me. He told me that even after salvage chemo and transplant there were still “blasts” in Aiden’s blood. Still blasts, that’s exactly what this is. The absence of an explosion. The negative space left by cells that just won’t quit. Overachievers, those cells. Some other kind of dots moving off-grid, maybe.
I know that Ella died, too. She and my daughter shared a room for a few days. One afternoon, they were both feeling well enough for a short walk at the same time and so they held hands. We were the two moms walking behind pushing IV poles, “tubies” trailing like veils in some kind of processional. It wasn’t quite affection between the girls as much as purpose. With their little bodies they were saying, “We are first graders. We know what to do in the hallway. We hold our buddy’s hand.” Another time we were on the outpatient side and could see Ella through the windows—the grid of moving dots buzzing below– in her hospital bed on the inpatient side. My daughter called her name and waved. Somehow Ella saw us. She waved back, too. Or I like to think so. She died that spring. Wilms’s tumor, I think.
Yesterday, five years later, I accidentally FaceTimed someone I had often wondered about but never dared to reach out to because what do you say, “Hi. I remember you and I remember your kid–are they still alive?” It was because of my coat brushing against my unlocked screen–a giant invisible flipper on a pinball machine–that I learned by text, “Hey!!! Everyone here is doing great!!”
We crossed paths with so many kids up there, nine floors above the grid, and they either lived or they died. And I think of them. Do you think people wonder about us?
Every so often we take the elevator past the colorful and curated ‘kid art’ and go down the nine floors and back out into the grid. The automatic doors open, like magic, and we step outside. My daughter lifts her chin up to the sky. It smells like rain.
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Jessica Phillips Lorenz is a writer, performer, and cancer-mom. As an emerging writer and primary caregiver, she’s quite proud to have had her work appear in Insider, Romper, Real Simple, Parents.com, MUTHA Magazine (Pushcart nominee), and a theatre festival for babies in Northern Ireland. Jess was recently awarded a fellowship to attend a writers’ residency at Ragdale. Her new play BEST PARTY EVER! will be featured as part of Piper’ Theater’s Playwright Spotlight Series in Summer 2023. Jess is a member of the Coalition Against Childhood Cancer, Momcology, Piper Theater, and Emerging Artists Theatre. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two children and pet snail.
© 2023, Jessica Phillips Lorenz
Halfway Down the Stairs 