And what of the immortal soul in such transactions?

I realize, in the hallway with the brightly painted lines and signs indicating that only hospital employees should enter that this is not going to be my story. It’s not. But I was there, I observe, by request, I am there. The hospital at night is dimly lit and almost gloomy. It’s thankfully free of patients but there are so many security guards. It’s the children’s hospital and it’s painted in strong primary colors and there are decorative murals and everywhere, everywhere there are photos of happy, smiling children. I can’t decide if this is profoundly cruel or just the most basic act of decency. I’m at the hospital, I’ve been at the hospital for two hours now.

One of the security guards has taken us behind the scenes, we’re up in a high floor in a back alley of the hospital where the janitorial staff and the technicians have their corkboards and breakrooms. There’s a big room that’s lit up bright – unlike all the others – and it’s just jammed full of gurneys, stretchers – whatever you call them – they’re nose to nose, tip to tip, it’s just a room we pass going up the tower to the elevator to the roof – we’re waiting on a helicopter.

Julie wants to write more, I think that’s smart, I feel the same way. Weeks ago we resolve to start a club, we set up a day of the week and the habits we’ll have. It’s going to be at my house on Tuesdays. For three straight weeks it is not on Tuesday. It’s shifted to Monday or Wednesday or skipped – Julie has a variety of circumstances that are difficult to explain because, blessedly, I don’t have those same problems. I don’t know if anyone does. Julie is distinct in the nature of her situation but I’ve known her and been friends with her since I was 18. Loyalty is something that matters to me above other things. Above strange problems.

It’s just an hour after work. I’m lamenting my once nice shoes being soaked again in cold brine, my poor toes feeling like they’ll never be the same. It’s the Winter of 2014 – which seems like an unrelenting icy claw, an iron grip that won’t let go – this winter you feel like you felt when you were small and your father would hug you close and hold you till you tried and tried to get free – you learned some lesson in your muscles about what it is to be powerless, to be too weak. Then you grew up and then you recognized it again, the Winter of 2014. But when you were small your father would laugh and let you go and you’d swat at his face and say no! And he’d laugh and maybe you’d play Atari together. Winter of 2014 isn’t like that, Winter of 2014 has no kisses for your little face, it has no love for you, it is powerful and unrelenting and you feel it every day tight around you so it’s hard to breath.

The #7 finally comes, finally. It’s late and we all have a feeling, shuffling on, like – this could kill us. If he’s late like this, we could- we could even die from this.

I get home and walk inside, my phone is in my coat pocket, I am getting ready to eat, I’m painstakingly stripping off my shoes and socks and my other socks and then I’m soaking my poor brined-raisin toes in the tub for a while and then I’m going to finally eat today. It’s time.

I look at my phone and there are all kinds of text messages – Julie. She’s not due for another hour, maybe. “Help.” Is what it says. “Help Help Help” Over and over. I get back to her – “What’s wrong.”

She’s outside, I let her in, buzz her in. “Seeds is in the hospital.” Is what the text message says. I don’t know anyone named Seeds.

I let her in reading her message, she doesn’t look happy. “Who is Seeds?”

It’s her daughter of course – finally insultingly autocorrected to ‘Seeds’. “I don’t know how to say it, so I’ll just tell you. ‘Seeds’ father called, she’s in the hospital. He found her convulsing on the bed, she’d written a note. Can you go with me to Youngstown?”

So we go, right away, head to Youngstown – where ‘Seeds’ father lives and where very suddenly, very jarringly, I realize, poor ‘Seeds’ might die. Obviously ‘Seeds’ is not that kid’s name, but I think it now. It’s not her name but she’s 13 and you don’t need to know it. Obviously there’s a suicidal young girl who’s a friend of mine, a friend of my Daughter – obviously there are intense feelings happening. You can tell, because in the car I sit very still and attempt total silence. Julie, bless her, doesn’t even consider turning on the radio. It’s a long trip out of the Heights to the highway. It’s rush-hour and it’s dreary but the roads are clear. It’s a measure of my sudden, acute awareness of only the bare facts of the situation at hand that I am not incensed by the immaculate roads and the unshoveled sidewalks together, side by side. I can’t even fabricate any kind of meaning here, about the value of objects over people. In Youngstown a girl I know is killing herself.

At the Highway it’s the point of decision – the father calls, a helicopter is coming. It’s a miraculous kind of moment, but maybe only I notice it – just at the second when it would matter most – East or West or North or South he calls to tell her – “Akron, the helicopter is taking us to Akron.” So the car turns south onto the highway and Julie guides it haltingly through rush hours and strange interchanges.

By Akron it’s dark, and navigating is tricky. I remember, once, long ago –as a youth, when I first even knew Julie – I’d drop acid and wander around in Akron, downtown. She says, now, in the Winter of 2014 – “Where is the hospital?” and I remember all those years ago as a boy on acid after midnight wandering in Akron downtown on all the one-way streets and yellow streetlights that a car raced by me, skidded to a stop, reversed and the door swung open. A man – and you can tell a man from Akron, they’ve got an Appalachian thinness to them, a harrowed wolfish gleam – he says, and I realize as he’s saying it, that he’s been racing the wrong way down a one-way street – he says: “Where’s the hospital!” I point in any direction because in downtown Akron there are four big hospitals, and each stands at one of the cardinal points on the map.

We end up going over the Y-Bridge, which Siri tells me is the ‘All American Bridge’. I remember again – a cold, cold night – the first morning of the Millennium in fact, when I’d gotten lost between parties and shut down and searching – when I’d announced that I (like so many before me) was going to jump from the Y-Bridge. I got lost and ended up walking below it, singing punk rock songs to the landfills to myself. At dawn I drove back to the party with donuts and apologies. I remember. I remember too much. We cross the Y-Bridge into downtown. I remember the man, all those years ago, screaming “Where’s the hospital!” and I was young and hallucinating but not so much that I didn’t notice that he’d turned onto another one-way street and raced up it in the wrong direction. I didn’t think it then, but thought now, he’d need a hospital, poor fool.

We get there and go in, I’m tasked with remembering where the car is parked, the maze of corridors and floors and color coded elevators. I try to break through and ask the security desk when Julie is saying names and trying to get a response I say: “She came on the helicopter.” The guard goes still and stony. Face turned grim, she looks into her computer and gives us directions to the emergency rooms. Elevators and halls and more guards.

Another floor, another department another guard. She’s a young girl who I’d think was pretty but she’s wearing a uniform. She takes us backstage to the security dispatch, to their control center. Radio chatter – obscure meaningless codes – numeric sequences squawk over crackling radios. We try our phones and the guard says: “It’s a dead zone.” And I can’t look at her now, and I don’t know if she knows but I can’t look at her, I wonder if she knows. I can’t look to tell though. Julie interacts, spells last names. The Helicopter, we are told, doesn’t follow normal protocols, they go right to the PICU, we are told, and do not stop to fill out forms or record names. We try our phones again – no answer.

We wait, it’s an hour, waiting. Julie notices, we’re talking. She’s handwringing about the movies they’d watched together, that may have been too much, she’s thinking about her prescriptions that went missing, so many prescriptions and a pill bottle goes missing – Julie has problems that not many other people have – things go missing, things that are needed, it’s in the nature of her problems not to understand this as a sign of something sinister. She makes a list in her thoughts. We wait – the Helicopter, we realize, should be here by now.

More talk with more guards. People are coming into the ER with their children. I think to myself This is not a place I can be, where I can be. Children die here. I can be in a place where children die, I can, but I shouldn’t and I wouldn’t, not for money, but for compassion and loyalty I guess I will. “I don’t know what I’ll do if she dies.” More talk with guards, the eldest leads us up to the backstage elevators, where the helicopter disembarks - we wait some more, it’s been a long time – but there is a signal, the phone works – there is a signal and the father is telling her to come to a room. The guard knows it, and takes us there.

There’s a waiting room – the father is there, he’d flown on the helicopter – I’ve met him only 2 or 3 times before, he looks… I don’t know how either of them is holding together. I don’t know. They start to talk. Brain activity, responsiveness –these are the things they talk about – I know better than to be in the room with Parents who are saying these words about their child. I go to the hall to stand and look – beyond the wide metal hospital doors the nurses and EMTs are working – ‘Seeds’ is in that room. They open it a crack and I don’t care, I peer in. Poor kid. Eyes wide open, unconscious, she’s got the tube breathing for her. I know that kid, she’s just little. I do what I do when I see such a thing, I make a sign and vow revenge on god.

They take her from the room to the PICU. I watch them go out and then run to get her parents. “They’re taking her somewhere else. There are a lot of people walking down the hallway. I linger at the back, I don’t want to stare at a child in a coma, This is not something I can have in my life. They roll the cart – all the technicians and pilots and doctors in actioneer jumpsuits, Velcro pockets covering them neck to ankles. They get on one of the elevators and indicate that we go to another. It’s not for us to be there, to look. We take another elevator and I am silent, as I can be. I can just be present and bear witness. That’s what I can do. I think. This isn’t my story. But I was there and I saw it. The father tries to call on his phone, he’s trying to reach his girlfriend or his mother. “It’s a dead zone here.” Says Julie, repeating what she’d heard. I make a sign and vow revenge on god.

The Elevators are on different times, we make it to the PICU last, and the father goes to the room first, they say – one at a time. Julie waits in the waiting room. I sit with her and become distressed by the Disney channel blaring – some evil fucker putting a television in the waiting room. Some sinister bastard. I put it together – Pediatric Intensive Care Unit – I realize it like solving a riddle and I think: This is not a place where I can be. I can’t be here. Children die here. I wait with Julie.

It’s her turn to go in, a doctor comes to talk to her, asks about prescriptions, what ‘Seeds’ might have laid hands on, what might have gone missing after her last weekend at her mother’s house. Julie tells and tells. I look up, on my phone, all the symptoms of overdoses of these drugs while they talk. I can’t be useful here, but I can be informed. I have habits that I can’t decide are good or bad. Julie goes with the doctor to the room. I wait in the waiting room where parents wait to learn that their children have died. I don’t know how I can be here. I am.

An hour passes, Julie returns. “She will wake up.” It’s a relief, but not a profound one, not yet. Brain damage and nursing homes and a life of disability have been discussed. “In two or three days she will wake up.” Julie calls her boss, says she won’t be in in the morning. I look at the clock – it’s nearly midnight. I ask around – my Akron friends, old pals – I need a lift back to Cleveland. Can I get a ride?

TimHutton – comes through, he always does. Takes me back home, I give him some comics and offer him some scotch. I sit up and can’t sleep. I get some messages on my phone – Julie “She’s going to be okay. Doctor is Cheerful. Not expected to be irreverisible brain damage. I amm so glad she’s not going to die”

I go to bed, it’s almost 2.

And this is what you see outside the Children's Hospital