El segundo nivel

You can't hear them, but you know what they're talking about. Her ashen face pales in comparison to her bright blue top, her bright red capri pants. The colors contrast starkly with the gray walls, narrowing into an unfriendly pair of doors, behind which lurks the smell of boiled plantain skins and death. Your eyes are drawn to the drama unfolding before you, but each time Doña Griselda offers a gawking comment, you avert your gaze to the stairs, to the ceiling, and you confuse the dim fluorescent bulbs with skylights under rainclouds.

Shame works on the eyes, but not on the ears.

She's the wife. Her pain is the most palpable. The others are too calm to have tasted that kind of love for him. They are dressed as drably as their surroundings. When the waiting area isn't teeming with hundreds of bodies, sweating, breathing, waiting, you can hear every tear. And she stifles her sobs into quiet gasps. How well you know those sounds, and how hard it is to ignore them after hours.

"He's in a critical condition," Griselda states to you in broken Spanish. It's not her first language, but the apple and the piece of gum you gave her unwound her jack-in-the-box tongue. The wife and the family members raise their hands in prayer, and the hallway inadvertently frames their woes into your personal theater. The wife half-falls to the floor, kneeling with palms cupped to receive the divine. The other family members remain standing. One of them places his palm on her crown. Your own hands begin to burn. You re-cross your legs and shift your weight, and the chairs groan uncomfortably.

Griselda’s narration continues. She looks at you, unabashedly, the wrinkles in her aged face contorted in pity and morbid fascination that you are too proud to admit you share. “They charge a lot for the coffins here,” she drawls, characteristically emphasizing the word mucho with a squeak. You nod affirmatively, and notice, in your peripheral vision, her jaw moving to and fro, her tongue punting the wad of gum from cheek to cheek. Her gray-black hair is draped over her back in a stringy ponytail. It barely moves as she leans over to mutter something unintelligible to Doña Linda, who just joined the audience from the chemotherapy salon. You look over to Luis, who swipes away furiously at text messages and emails on a tiny gorilla glass screen.

All four of you, sitting like ducks in a row, chew silently as you watch the wife rise from the floor. The prayer ends and she gets a phone call. “These moments are impressions that never leave you,” Luis remarks. His technological nonchalance is a ruse; his irises radiate with intensity and calm, his most charming paradox. Thirty-two years have given him crows’ feet, but you admire their elegance as he turns back to his phone. The wife disappears behind the swinging doors labeled with hostile red capital letters, “Inpatients.”

Seconds later, you hear a scream. “Bobby!” The wife runs through the doors, frantically, begging for someone to call a doctor. She begins to wail, as there is no response. All of the floor nurses have gone home but one, who emerges from the chemotherapy salon and states that the doctor has been telephoned and all should remain calm. The wife bursts back through the doors again, and as they oscillate between open and closed, you see a few pairs of blue and white scrubs and Crocs shuffling half-heartedly towards Bobby’s bed. Griselda and Linda cluck in disapproval.

A cold air washes over the four of you and you hear the wife’s strangled cry. She emerges once again, covered in yellow protective gear and a blue mask, defeated. Her agony boomerangs from her mouth to your eardrums. Your hands continue to burn. As your sternum hollows, Teresa, the pruny and frail lady you’d have never guessed was 34, hobbles through the door of the chemotherapy salon towards the cushioned chairs.

“Let’s go,” Luis says. You give Teresa a piece of gum, she beams at you, and the five of you walk towards the stairs in silence.