Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos

with this odd fearful logic that accompanied those rituals: If I swallowed one of those pills, I’d die, while on the other hand, if I didn’t, I’d still die. Razors with pinheads pricked at my fingertips, drawing blood, and with so many things entering me, up my rectum sometimes, injections in the hard tissues of the buttocks, no wonder so many of my dreams turned into nightmares. In the silence of that ward at night, with only the humming of machines softly breathing like the children themselves, down the halls, a haunting darkness with almost a smothering human nature, like floating shrouds or shadows, which made one cry out, and some other lingering sensations that involved electricity, which would rise as a great shock from inside the body, that plump swollen bag filled with microbios , with sludge and Cuban shit, and probably with sins—why else would you be there in the first place? And while all that was going on, I’d begun to forget myself.
    I do remember a closet. Since so many infant patients came and went from that place, the children of the ward were dressed in the cast-offs of the children who had preceded them; this apparel was stored in an immense-seeming walk-in wardrobe, smelling of lacquered pine, with shelves that were piled high with trousers and shirts and other items. One day, as a nurse fitted me into a pair of corduroys with a snap-button fly and pull-up straps and a striped shirt, she started barking at me in English to step forward, to lift my arms—commands that I apparently did not respond to quickly enough, for, as I remember, she pushed me inside that closet and slammed the door behind her, leaving me in the dark for what might have been only a few minutes but seemed to me an interminably long time: In the darkness, I worried that those clothes would come to life and, lifting off the shelves like spirits, come tumbling down to smother me. As for being locked inside? It surely reminded me that I was not at home in Manhattan, nor in my auntie Cheo’s house in Holguín, nor by the beautiful Cuban sea, nor out in Oriente, dazzled by the evening sky, nor, for that matter, out on our front stoop, sitting beside my father as he smoked cigarettes, watching kids play on the street, or walking somewhere with my mother, whose faces, by then, I could barely recall.
    Instead, in its pitch-blackness, it seemed a deep and endless space through which one might fall, or from whose depths might emerge monsters. Shell-shocked, and wishing that someone—my mother, my father, anyone—would come to my rescue, I knocked on the door until that nurse finally opened it, then scolded me about behaving better, to pay attention to her when she was telling me something, and, for crying out loud, to stop being so dense and learn to answer her in English. I don’t know how many times this kind of scene played itself out over those long months, but I have a general recollection of feeling a sense of dread (as if the walls would fall on me), harangued (as if I had to watch my every word), and maligned for my ignorance of English.
    And my mother? Once I started getting better, it was she, but never my brother, who would be allowed into an inner playroom to spend time with me. While she sat on a bench along a wall, I’d play with some toys by her feet. She always seemed to be talking about something, and frantically—I wish I knew now just what she’d said; occasionally, she’d lean forward to move some blocks around, but I hardly seemed aware of her. She must have at least smiled at me now and then and perhaps affectionately so, but though she may have wanted to hold me, it wasn’t allowed—touching was forbidden. Other parents too, I recall, gathered in that room. I’ve since often wondered what she made of them or might have said to them if she could have managed more than a few phrases in English and shared her worries.
    Visiting me and finding that I