Nim - from Notebooks

A song for Luis Alberto Jimenez

Watching “ They Shoot Horses, Don’t they” in the eighties a teenage boy cried.

At lunchtime on February 2000, a Florida drunkard looking for a joyride stole a van from the parking lot of a Publix supermarket in Palm Beach Gardens. Few hours and many drinks later he headed east on a rural road. His stolen van and a 1988 Chevrolet Beretta crashed head-on, instantly killing two of the passengers and severely injuring the driver and a back-seat passenger.

NY Times, August 3, 2008[1]

When they brought him:
two broken thigh bones,
a broken arm and
multiple internal injuries;
no name , no face, no legal status.

For one year, two months and fifteen days
he curled in a ball.
Oblivious of the world,
He’s only bind by
an artificial placenta.

He shouted his second birth to his friend: “You are Montejo”, he said.

Stunning his relatives and medical officials he gradually woke up and started interacting with the world,
“A miracle”, shouted a nurse.
Much to the surprise of the hospital staff, he had regained cognitive function to about the level of a fourth-grade child.
“God showed him favor, mutters the resident.

But the strict realism of the institution calls for

accountability.

And whom do you hold accountable

for a sheer miracle?

God,
the doctors,
the nurses,
the hospital,
the miracle seeker,
the man that loved life too much.

In Sunday school my children learn that giving birth is a miracle.

In God We Trust.

A child is born uninsured in the United States every 41 seconds-that's more than 2,100 children every day.
(InsurancenewsNet Magazine, Pg. 15 Vol. 103 No. 6, July 11-1, 2008)[2]

Every 41 seconds,
the institution bills a mother
for delivering a miracle.
For the next 25 years
the institution prints paper bills
“In God We Trust” and every
mother bleeds again and again,
the long hours of hard labor
to pay for her miracle.

The bill for Luis Jimenez’s miracle is two million dollars

The hospital employees, normal humans in their ripe age, had to rub off the thought of billing God or sending letters to Santa at the North-Pole- a blemish on sound judgment.

With no one to be hold accountable
for his miracle
all they could do was a transposition :
Luis implies no legal status,
no legal status implies we do not have to treat him
and (add a conjunction here)
since one does not shoot men, but horses
let’s fly him to his (other) country.
This solution is sound by all rules of logic,
as Reason had warned us all miracles end.

According to discharge records a nurse accompanied him back to his native country and signed the paperwork that released him to another’s care. At her return they all felt that they were now allowed to forget, now that they flew away all worries they have had for him.

“You fool, stop crying at the movies! You are a grown-up man now.”

All that Luis was but a labor horse – we used him as long as he could work; we sent him away once he became unable to pay for room and board. All that I was but a pretty stallion for the parade. But now , all bones protruding through my scabby skin, all the ugliness of my long ill suffering days –what use am I? And they do shoot horses, don’t they?

Acknowledgements:

[1] Sontag, Deborah- Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals , NY Times, August 3, 2008 – I am indebted to the author for the great job she did as a journalist as well as a writer.

[2] The costs of health care are burying American families - InsurancenewsNet Magazine, Pg. 15 Vol. 103 No. 6, July 11-1, 2008