Alma in the Hallways

by Raul E. Jimenez

Alfonso Mederos missed the daylight, the glare, the palm trees, and the gasoline-driven life of a city made rude and unclean by an immigrant population. In Miami, in the age of garbage strewn streets, he found himself hospitalized in the Jackson Heart Center, a center of cleanliness. He sensed he’d never get out alive. Where was Alma? He had left her in Cayo Barrido, Cuba, over thirty years ago. Why had he not married her? The answer came swiftly: Fidel Castro. “Fucking Fidel,” he muttered under his breath.

“Fucking Fidel is probably why I’m having a heart attack.”

Am I going to die? Alma’s married. She has her life. I should have gone back to claim her and make her mine.

Things were moving faster than the speed of light. The paramedics brought him to the hospital in the morning. In the afternoon Doctor Palmer briefed him, “You need a quadruple bypass. We’ll do it in the morning.”

Alfonso agreed and asked for a priest. A catholic from the old, Spanish school, he had always feared hell. Father Harry came after dinner and heard him out. He cried as the sins poured out of his mouth. “Father, I’ve bedded over one hundred women,” he said, his eyes tearing, his chest heaving with uncontrollable sobs. Why couldn’t he have been faithful to either Roberta, or Alma, or both?

After the CNN-induced torpor of the late evening, he fell asleep and dreamt of Frederica from Hamburg, freckled, blonde and blue eyed. Lowering her head to his penis, she wrapped it with her perfect, pouty lips and turned it into a hard beam, a critical mass of pulsating purple that exploded creamy semen into her mouth. She morphed into Beverly the Kiwi, a tanned goddess of thick black hair and over six-feet in stature. Bev flopped into bed and spread her legs in a giant Y. He licked her labia and vagina. She moaned and puffed, eyeballs rolling into the back of her head as if convulsing. She cried and sighed, and she screamed sometimes. She clawed at his back until he bled and begged her to stop.

Bev disappeared and in her place came an angel of translucent wings. The angel asked, “If you love Alma and married Roberta, why do you fuck all the others?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, closing his eyes. But he knew sex and love went together, and that he couldn’t give up any woman he’d ever loved.

I never had Alma; is that what my problem is? Did I just want to fuck her, or did I love her?

Antoinette the Nurse, a black woman with a Creole accent and green uniform, appeared in the room. “Are you awake?” Her Creole accent sounded like a rumba.

He looked at his watch and noticed the time. “It’s six o’clock. I need to pee.”

“It’s to take you to the O.R.”

Roberta was in the room, and held his hand tightly. There was fear in her eyes. Antoinette, grinning, her big white teeth bared-they made her look like a great white shark-helped him to the bathroom. He lowered his head to watch his urine trickle into the green-watered bowl and saw his face in the mirror. What had happened to his once powerful stream? He was still handsome. Did he have it, or had he lost it?

I’m a narcissist. I never fucked Alma. That would have proven that our love was real. But I’ve confessed now. Get those impure thoughts away from your head.

Jaws said, “Leave your underwear off, honey.” She smiled. Why was she so happy?

In minutes, flat on his back, he was flying at vertiginous speeds down the halls. Jaws-Antoinette-was powerful. Roberta remained in the room and would eventually move to the waiting area. He wondered how someone as fat as Jaws could move so fast. Did she ever play football in the NFL?

In his head he prayed to God to allow him in heaven, but he hoped he would live another day. What was on the other side? All his life, he remembered, he’d been scared of the “world beyond.”

Around the last corner, before the O.R., a smiling Alma appeared in the hallway. She was smiling and tall, perhaps nineteen. There were the familiar dimples on her cheeks, the serenity of her brown eyes. She always looked like June Allyson.

A cold chill swept down his spine.

Is she real?

Alma waved, and then she was gone. Where did she go? He heard mellow notes from Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.”

The Martians came seconds later. They wore green uniforms and danced around him as if pirouetting their way through “The Nutcracker.” He thought of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and how much they used to mean to him. He decided he loved Roberta and the kids after all. But he still loved Alma. He always would. He wanted to live so he could call Alma after his surgery even if he didn’t know her whereabouts. He wanted to live so he could tell Roberta he loved her. He wanted to punch at a pillow somewhere, as he’d done as a child when he woke up from the grotesque nightmares about death. Death lurked over and around him now, soaring in circles like a buzzard looking for rotten meat.

He wondered if he would turn to dust afterwards. Would Roberta remember to cremate him? Would Alma learn about his death? Would she cry? Would Alma want to see his ashes? Would Roberta want to keep an urn at home so she could remember him forever?

Funny I should turn into flakes of ashes for the rest of eternity. Is there such a thing as eternity?

The medication made him close his eyes. An enormous heaviness brought an oppressive black fog to his head. And then there was darkness and he sensed nothing.

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~ This piece was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 and was filed under Writing, Short Story. You can make comments on it below. ~