I am eleven and the world is not less complicated, despite what the nostalgics suggest. I am at the ICU at St. Vincent’s hospital. I am told I was born here, in some faraway place called the maternity ward, but I have never seen this building. It seems huge and labyrinthine. The lights are too bright on this floor, and the nurses too quiet. It is marked in its difference from the rest of the hospital, and by extension the bright pulse of the city and the rest of the world. This is not a place for celebration, or health.
It is a week before Christmas. I don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore, but I can still feel the impending joy the thought of him recently engendered. Outside of this place it is in the air, crackling like buzzing electricity above us and through us. A shared connection and liked-mindedness I’ve only ever experienced in a sports stadium when the home team player hit a ball long and deep and the crowd stood and waited for it to descend beyond the fence. That anticipation.
This place is immune to it. In the lobby there is a tree with white lights. Ribbons and wreaths adorn the walls. It all disappears when the elevator doors open. In the ICU, everything seems blue, the color of veins returning spent blood back to its source to become replenished. Death returning to life, the daily miracle. I imagine veins to be similarly subdued.
I hold in my hands a piece of green construction paper cut into the shape of a Christmas tree. Taped to the middle of the tree is a Polaroid of myself, my sister, and three brothers sitting on the stairs that lead to our bedrooms, peeking through the banister supports decorated in evergreen. It was taken a year ago. We are smiling and looking off to our right at some real or imagined joy. We are evergreen as well.
Around the photo I had drawn colored bulbs, red, purple, orange. At the top is a yellow star. I am no artist, but I liked the way it turned out, and I liked my mother and grandmother’s reaction when I showed it to them. Would you look at that! Ah, the creature. It’s beautiful. I want to give it to my Grandpa. Not just give it to him, hand it to him myself. I want his validation.
But he is sick, which is why we all piled into our rickety car and drove to the city, to our grandparents’ four-room apartment with the tiny Christmas tree sitting on top of the television. We were there so my mother could visit her sick father. I want to see him too. My parents looked at each other indecisively.
I am the oldest of my siblings and my grandfather’s favorite, as I heard in whispered declarations from my Grandma. When I was small I would sit transfixed at the kitchen table and listen to him tell tales of his bartending days in his Irish brogue. I remember few of the stories, but I can recall the cadence and intonation. He taught me to play solitaire and rummy. When my grandparents would come to our house in the suburbs, bringing endless brown-paper bags of food and love, he would sit in a lawn chair in our backyard and throw me ground balls. I love him with abandon.
Which is why I bring red, green, and yellow into this blue ICU. Whatever my Grandpa’s condition, I am stubbornly convinced, it will not be worsened by seeing me. I am his favorite and I love him and I made this for him. But in this hushed place where the air seems dense, my convictions wobble. I feel wholly misplaced, in my color, my redness, my youth. I am an interloper, armed only with a piece of construction paper, and I am overmatched. I’m left alone in a sterile waiting room while my Grandma and my parents go to assess whether my Grandpa is up to seeing me. The television drones, unwatched and unheeded. I can feel each second pass.
Visiting hours are nearly over when my father comes to fetch me. You have to talk really quiet, he says, and we can’t stay long. Your Grandpa’s not feeling well. OK, I say. I lost whatever small will I had to argue. His bed is coming off the right hand wall and my mother and grandmother are standing on the far side. My Grandpa is facing them. His glasses are off. His hulk is contained in a light blue gown and a white sheet. He has an IV in his wrist and a breathing tube in his nose. The room is dim.
Look who’s here to see you, my Grandma says, and my Grandpa turns in my direction. He can’t make me out without his glasses. Who? Who is it? It’s Brian come to visit you. There is a jolt of recognition in his face, then he turns away and begins to cry. I had never seen him cry. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. Can gods cry? I weep myself for causing his tears.
I didn’t want him to see me like this, he says. He came to bring you something, my mother says, something he made for you. I am struck dumb and lifeless. My father takes the Christmas tree from my hand and hands it to my mother. My Grandma says, put your glasses on and look. He wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand and reaches to the nightstand to fetch his glasses. They are thick, and when he puts them on his eyes are magnified. I can see the leftover wetness from his tears. Look at that Jeremiah, my Grandma says, it’s a picture of the kids. My Grandpa nods. Ah now that’s nice, he says. We’ll tape it up here on the wall, my mother says, so you can see it.
It is dark when we leave the hospital, but lights abound. Taxi headlights, storefront blinking lights, the red and green of stoplights extending down into the recesses of Seventh Avenue, turning from one color to the other in a rolling, endless spiral. The city is impossibly big and vibrant, and I am infinitesimally small. Holiday lights hang in odd apartment windows. Reds, greens, and whites, shining boldly with arterial life and expectation. The air is cold and bracing. Vital. There is no blue.
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When Gods Cry
Copyright © 2025 by Brian C. Petti
Brian C. Petti is a Hudson-Valley, NY-based playwright who has been published and produced in NYC, LA, and Ireland. I am also a proud member of Dramatists Guild.
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