The Air We Breathe Read Free

offered admission to a sanatorium, accept at once. Until then, stay in the open air as much as you can; if possible in the parks, woods, or fields. Never sleep or stay in a hot or close room; keep at least one window open in your bedroom at night. Have a room to yourself, if possible.
    As if a person like him would have a bedroom, or a window. As if his part of Williamsburg had a park. The nurse made him spit in a cup, ordered Rachel to keep his clothes and dishes separate, and referred him to a floating day camp for consumptives. There, during the hours he used to spend at work, he lay on a reclining chair on the rear deck of a ferryboat that had once crossed the East River between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. The breeze blew through the open decks; meals appeared on a long table built in the center, where once there’d been engines and boilers; doctors examined them in rooms along the sides. Men on the lower deck, women on the upper; all of them immigrants, all of them poor. On and off the boat stepped officials from the Board of Health, visiting nurses, social workers, all trying to find placements for the patients. Prying into their backgrounds, investigating their living situations, checking their clothes for lice. After a month he chose not to remember, a woman with lopsided lips had handed him a train ticket and told him to pack his bags.

    THE NURSE WHO’D admitted him to Tamarack State was right: he needed more clothes, and he came to miss the heat he’d so hated when he arrived. The leaves turned color, far earlier than he expected; the rain and wind poured through the long windows, kept open day and night; he was constantly cold, he was freezing. Some of us had relatives who arrived on visiting days with extra clothes or treats, but he had no one, and nothing he’d brought was right. He learned to be grateful for the worn but heavy garments grudgingly doled out to the indigent patients—which, he learned, included him. What he couldn’t learn, despite being chided again and again, was to stay still. He spoke to anyone near him, tossed, turned, sneaked out of bed to pick up a magazine he saw on a table at the end of the ward, and then read it, surreptitiously, beneath the covers. The nurses barked at him and Dr. Petrie came to speak to him.
    â€œWhy can’t you behave?” our assistant director said. “Don’t you understand how sick you are?”
    â€œI hate this,” Leo said passionately, glaring at the doctor’s small figure. With his crisp dark hair and pointed beard and small oval spectacles, Dr. Petrie resembled the inventor Charles Steinmetz, minus the hunchback. Not quite five feet tall, Leo guessed. No doubt with problems of his own. He yielded his left wrist to Dr. Petrie’s thumb and first two fingers.
    â€œYour lungs,” Dr. Petrie said, his gaze averted while he counted the beats of Leo’s heart, “have little pockets of infection scattered through them, which your body is trying to wall off. Right now the scar tissue around each pocket of germs is fragile, like a spider’s web.” He dropped Leo’s hand. “If you move suddenly, or take a deep breath or stretch your arm—like you just did, when you reached for your pillow: don’t do that —you break the scar tissue and let the germs escape. And then they make new spots of disease, and we have to start all over again. You seem like an intelligent man. Can’t you understand that?”
    â€œOf course I can,” Leo said, “but until now no one’s bothered to explain the point of lying here like a corpse.”
    With half a smile, Dr. Petrie said, “We’ll try to keep you better informed.”
    By mid-September his temperature was down, his cough had improved, he’d gained six pounds, and the nurses let him walk to the bathroom and sit, for a little longer each day, on a cure chair on the infirmary’s porch. Not since first running