One

"If you're waiting for the world to get it,
if you're waiting for the world, forget it.
I'm not waiting for the world"
   Swervedriver (She Weaves a Tender Trap)

Tommy Tortelli finally found true love where he least expected it, in the moldy corridor of an old hospital emergency room. The timing wasn't so good either. He'd been brought there to die. That should have been enough for one day. It was his nephew, Jimmy Blanks, his dead sister's boy, who'd taken him there, and even though Jimmy couldn't wait for the whole thing to be done with, and didn't mind saying so, over and over again, all the way across town, Tommy didn't blame him for that. He knew from personal experience just how much dying could be a real pain in the ass for the living. His dead sister, for one. He'd done his share of carping about that so that now, lying there half-conscious in the gurney in the hallway, with the hustle and bustle of the sick and the injured and the nurses and the doctors and the visitors and the families and the boy Jimmy bitching about how long it was going to take him to get back home, especially if the old guy kept hanging in there, it was already past eleven and he could feel in his very bones the gaps in the bus schedules after midnight, Tommy would have smiled if the muscles in his face would have let him.

He was ready to die, been ready for a long while by then. He couldn't hardly stand up by himself anymore, or do anything, really, and he was a guy who'd been on his own since the age of fifteen, never needing any help from anybody, well, never much anyway. Hadn't he gone running off to see the world and hadn't he seen a whole bunch of it too. Enough, at least, so when he came back to the city and found the groove he never ventured from the next fifty years he didn't mind at all, didn't complain about his lot in life one bit. Work hard and you'll work hard, that was his own grim motto, and he did his share. He hauled and he lifted, he carried and he fetched, he stocked and he drove, he helped the products of the world find their way around in it, from factory to warehouse, from warehouse to store, from store to dwelling, from homes to landfill, the cycle of life in cardboard and plastic and metal. Tommy had lived alone, almost always. Now and then a cat came and went in and out of his life. Family on holidays. Friends on a weekend and of course Tuesday nights. From where he sat, from where he stood, the planet seemed to grow and grow like a weed all around him, open spaces getting filled, then getting tall, then blotting out the sky. He'd have to go a longer and longer way to get past all the concrete, out somewhere that trees outnumbered cars. Once or twice a summer he'd seek that out and, sitting by a lonely creek in the woods in a hundred degrees of sweat and mosquitos, he'd try and remember his childhood. Faces came out of the past and hovered over his face, shouting, it seemed.

"Do you know your name?"

"He doesn't even know where he is." That would be Jimmy.

"Do you know your name?" she was yelling again and he could feel her unexpectedly sweet breath on his face. He wanted to tell her, not tell her his name because if she wanted to know that she could read the damn tag on the side of the bed, but tell her what he was thinking, what he was feeling, all of the words rushing down from his brain and out through his toes, the trickling alphabet abandoning his mind one by one. Most of all he wanted to tell her to stop bothering with him, but she was just doing her job, he could tell by the blur of light blue that surrounded her puffy wide face.

"He was like this when I found him today," reports Jimmy Blanks for the fifty ninth time, as if the nurse wanted to know. "Nobody else even checks on the guy," he continued. "Only me. You'd think that my sister, who lives down the block, down the very same fricking street, and who used to borrow money from him all the time, you'd think that one time, just even one time when I asked, being nice, to look in on her uncle, just to see, that maybe but no, she's too busy, she's got her chiropracter to see, she's got her toenails to do, she's got laundry out the ass, so it's me, only me, all the way out in Hoboken, that's who. Nobody else. Naturally, I get there and he's exactly like this. So what do I do? I bring him in here, that's what I do. Could have just called and let the EMT have him, but he's family, and you know what they say about family."

She might have known what they said about family, but she'd already walked off in the middle of his speech, just turned on her heels and off to the next helpless sucker in line. It was busy that night, or maybe it was busy like that every night. Tommy didn't know. The thing of it was, he'd been born in that very same place. That was the kicker. Seventy three years and the mold on the wall was probably even older. It was looking all pale green and fuzzy against the dirty gray walls. He thought he could smell it, like lime or maybe it was the color that was fooling him about the smell. If he could just turn his head he could get his big old beaker right up next to it and take a big whiff, and then he would know. He concentrated on that effort, but somehow his neck would not obey his commands and he inwardly sighed. It was the same with his whole damn body. It just wouldn't do what he wanted. He strained, holding his breath as if that would help, then scolded himself for being so stupid as to be holding his breath as if that would help. He was helpless, and hopeless. Here he was, minutes or maybe even moments from death, and all he longed for was to breathe in the odor of the mold on the wall, just to know what it was like. If there is a God, he was thinking, and right then some fat slob, maybe it was even a nurse, came waddling past and bashed into the side of his gurney, causing him to roll over and nearly smack his head against that very wall. Before his head could snap back he struggled to sniff as hard as he could and for just an instant he caught the scent of it. Surprising, he thought. It's like lavendar.