On Friday afternoon, after my mother said her leg hurt, I sat with her as she had a video visit with a doctor. She had fallen the previous weekend, while scaling a pair of steps in a friend’s house, and had then sat on the top step and claimed that she was fine. For the following days she seemed to be fine. But it turns out there was a bad bruise and it wasn’t getting better. It was painful. Now, as she pulled up her pants for the doctor to reveal her calf, I saw a swelling and discoloration. I felt a swirl of emotions that resolved as annoyance—why hadn’t she mentioned this sooner?
The doctor sat at a desk, a woman with a blond bun, and behind her was a window through which you could see leaves, tree branches. Whenever you schedule a video visit with a doctor they want to know where you are, in what state, and it occurred to me that this doctor could be anywhere in New York State—the Bronx or Staten Island or the Finger Lakes up by the Canadian border. She thought my mother should go to an emergency room to get an ultrasound. The trees and leaves rustled behind her. You could see the features of her face but they were in shadow, a foreground against the brightness of the outdoors. In the shadow, her expression struck me as a bit skeptical. The bedside manner wasn’t cold, exactly, but there was something between aggrieved and fatigued behind the matter-of-fact, let’s-get-on-with-it facial expression.
What did she think about the scene she was looking at on her screen? My mother in her chair, me behind her, the bedroom of a New York City apartment that had been occupied for as long as I have been alive, with all the accumulations—and then the pants leg pulled up like a curtain while I angled the desktop iMac downward, a kind of curtain raising to reveal a swollen and bruised calf—what she made of all this, and the parade of interiors that preceded it, I couldn’t imagine. Still, her aloofness made an impression, which hovered in my thoughts and then vanished with the command to get an ultrasound at the hospital right away.
We didn’t go right away. I waited a couple of hours. It was such a nice afternoon. I went out and played basketball. I took a shower. I took my time. My mother was stoic and good humored about it. This was going to be a trip of sorts, an expedition. When we set off, around 6:30, it was as if we were headed to a kind of picnic, and in that spirit I packed a bag with my laptop, some extra clothes in case it was cold inside, and a small towel that said Let’s Go Knicks: Playoffs 2026.
We went to the nearest hospital, up near Saint John’s Cathedral on Amsterdam Avenue. There was something serene about the weather and the evening that extended to the emergency room itself.
The place was empty when we walked in, checked in, and shortly after people began to arrive, a kind of parade of ailments. We had beaten the rush. Everyone was very nice, and my mother was smiled at and said hello to, and reciprocated warmly, as she does, and even though I was in a state of emotional lockdown—because my mother was fine, but she was also 94, and I had been in hospitals with her before, and there is nothing to do in these situations but be brave and pragmatic—I felt a sense of comedy about the whole thing that I can’t explain. It was as though the prospect of catastrophe made the likelihood that there would be no catastrophe something to be celebrated.
Eventually we went into the big room with all the beds and people on gurneys. It was horrible in the way these rooms are, but also encouraging, all the humanity, the tiny civilities.
On the other side of a curtain there was moaning. My mother chose not to lie on the bed. Instead she sat on the seat of her rollator, that magnificent device that has kept her mobile and bopping around town in slow motion years beyond what a cane would have afforded, and I sat on the edge of the bed next to her, took out the laptop, and put it on her lap. But first I put the Knicks towel on her lap, like a tablecloth. She doesn’t care about the Knicks, but she was a dancer, and whenever she would watch basketball, like when she came to my high school and college games, she would make very non-sports remarks like, “Oh, they run like the wind!”
So without any of the usual sports fan cathexes, we began to watch Game Two of the finals. When the doctor came over—they all look so young now; I still think of my father-in-law’s joke to the physician a few days before he died, going full Bensonhurst in his accent while in a North Carolina hospital bed: “Doctor, you are going to make a fine doctor one day!”—he greeted us warmly and then came to hunch over and watch with us for a minute and discuss the game. “We need KAT to get going,” he said, after Karl-Anthony Towns had a strong rebound and got fouled, and then when they showed it in slow motion, shot from under the back, it looked like a bunch of statues in a Roman fountain had come to life and started wrestling. “Oh, wow,” said my mother, who has always responded to the slow motion replays. After granting himself this interlude the doctor offered his opinions on my mother’s leg—no ultrasound, but an X-ray—and remarked on how well the hospital’s wi-fi was working. A nurse walked by with a Knicks shirt under his scrubs.
I had, at first, gone to some lengths to avoid actually seeing anyone when we arrived in that crowded room with its bodies everywhere; I don’t like gore. This aversion concentrated me on the screen and the game even more than I would have been otherwise. But I had slowly come to be aware of my neighbors, the nurses, the evolving population, with people being wheeled away and wheeled in all the time, and amidst the groans of pain or despair I began to be aware that there were many other people attending to small matters like a bruise on the lower leg. Everyone was dying but not everyone was dying right now.
I noted that many of the people in the beds were elderly and had some kind of attendant with them, a son or daughter. In fact, at that dinnertime hour on Friday up on 114th Street, I felt like that these pairs were almost a majority of the room.
And many of these people, doctors and nurses too, were aware of the Knicks game. We were, unbeknownst to us, caught in the grip of the narrative arc of the 2026 playoffs. It happened in Game 1 against the Cavaliers and it would happen again in a manner we could, in the innocent era of Game 2 of the finals, not yet imagine—the Knicks of ’26 only came into their full powers when faced with a deficit. Only then did they gain full strength and focus, and start to climb out of a hole and toward the victory. The deeper the hole, the more focused the climb, which is maybe not the worst spirit to bring to an emergency room.
How many other people were also watching the game became apparent as swells of noise would accompany dramatic moments. Now and then there would be a bad sound—a person being punctured or having a bandage removed, or a limb moved, and the concurrent noise, so painfully human, of a body in agony—and these coexisted with this other chaotic crowd sound of muted little cheers and applause, ambient excitement.
When my mother was wheeled up to the third floor for an X-ray, the young man who pushed the gurney was talking about the game with me; I kept the laptop open as I pushed the rollator behind the gurney, and the sounds of the game, the voices of the announcers, filled up the hallway, then filled the elevator, briefly froze, then returned.
She went in for the X-ray and the guy sat beside me to watch. He had a different metabolism of fandom; he had been so nice, so considerate and kind when he wheeled my mother along, and now he revealed himself to be a bit of a pessimist and worrier. We sat side by side in the X-ray waiting room, which was chilly and barren; soon I was missing the warmer chaos and perpetual crisis of the ER. Side by side, the laptop propped on the armrest separating us, a strangely intimate position. He crossed his leg and his trouser pulled up and I glimpsed the hairs on his lower leg, the sort of personal detail I had been guarding against down in the emergency room, where I was hoping to avoid any specific bodily information if at all possible.
We were, by now, in the third quarter, and the incredible fact that had been amazing all of New York for weeks and weeks was asserting itself: These Knicks can play. And it’s not just that they are daring young men on the flying trapeze, physical specimens capable of doing death-defying feats with maximum energy and then continuing to sustain that energy. You expect professional athletes to be athletic. And you expect the ones playing in the NBA finals to be extremely athletic. So there is OG Anunoby rising up off two feet with Victor Wembanyama draped over his back like a cape, the composition echoing one of those Belle Epoque posters from turn-of-the-century Paris, and then rising some more until he puts the ball into the basket, dunks the ball; and there is Josh Hart kangarooing all over the place, the high dribble, the almost comedic expression as he surveys the floor looking for someone to pass to, and there is Brunson, that implausible fire hydrant body on top of which sits the implacable big head. The small lower legs, the narrow, pigeon-toed walk, the magic trick that are his lightning quick reversals of direction on his way to the basket, variations on the Euro-step that transcend Europe, a center of gravity so low and capable of such fast reversals it’s like watching R2D2 turbo-charged and with a crossover, and all the defenders brittle CP30s staggering.
Kelly Oubre of the Sixers had mimicked that rock-em-sock-em robot way that Brunson’s head swivels on his shoulders—in Brunson’s case, side to side, as opposed to forward and back like the rock-em sock-em robot boxers of my childhood—while he was coming off the floor toward the end of a Knicks-Sixers game. It was a throwaway sort of moment after a timeout had been called. By the time I was watching Game Two, the Sixers series felt like an eternity ago, and it had rushed by, four straight victories. We still didn’t quite know what we were seeing then, when just a week earlier the Knicks had had to course-correct from a 2-1 deficit against CJ McCollum and the Atlanta Hawks; didn’t know the larger tapestry of which this tossing aside of the Sixers—did I imagine Mitchell Robinson crushing a dunk over Joel Embiid?—was just the beginning.
Oubre is such a stylish physical presence, it was no surprise that in addition to everything else—the incredible running and jumping we take for granted—he could mime Brunson’s head movement so well, and with such contempt. He had put his hands up around his own head, like a pair of parentheses, and did the Brunson movement, and it was fantastic, for a Knicks fan, because he was going to sit down. “You over there,” I recently heard one of the better players in my neighborhood park say as he dribbled up the court, addressing some heckler on the bench, still litigating the last game. “I’m over here.”
That’s what Oubre’s bitter mime of Brunson’s head shifting, dreads flying like tassels, amounted to: The Sixers were sitting down, and Oubre was bitching on the way to the bench. The Sixers sat down in four straight. Then the Cavaliers sat down. Then, incredibly, the Spurs sat down in Game One. Now I was watching Game Two on my laptop in the X-ray room. My mother emerged, smiling at her son, and the pessimist resumed his saintly demeanor and wheeled her away just as something important was happening in the game.
“I’ll let you go ahead,” I said. And for a minute, while I waited for the timeout, I was watching alone on the third floor of a hospital, as placeless a place as an airport lounge. I came to my senses and got in the next elevator. When I emerged on the ground floor, I immediately became lost. And so for a while I was wheeling the rollator in front of me with the laptop open on it, streaming the game as though it were the cheerful patient and I the attendant delivering it to the next procedure. On the screen the bodies jumped and ran, and it was like wheeling the statue of David into a hospital—the platonic ideal of the human body in the bloom of maximal health and fitness was moving through a place where one is reminded of all its frailty.
I was in the realm of empty hallways, where nurses taking a moment to check their phones were interrupted by the crowd noise of a game in San Antonio. As with the previous series, the stands of this far away city contained many Knicks fans. It was an incredible thing, a source of pride and defiance at what a bunch of nuts Knicks fans are, and also induced a mild amount of shame at the fact that the Knicks fans had such reserves of disposable income that they could simply buy out seats from the locals, make them an offer they couldn’t refuse, and jump on a plane.
I watched the game and asked for directions. But it was hard to explain where I wanted to go.
“The big room that is really crowded and has lots of people in beds,” was how I put it to that first, solitary nurse. Then an orderly came by, pointed down a hall, and checked out the game. Then, on the right track, through the right doors, I passed a big crew of people going in the opposite direction, cops and a body on a gurney and paramedics. At their request I shouted an update: The Knicks were in the midst of blowing a fourteen-point lead halfway through the fourth quarter, and my excitement at this situation, the sheer merriment and life force of it all, mingled with my grief at what was unfolding, and my awareness of how absurd it was to feel grief about such a thing in a hospital, which, I know firsthand, is a scene of real grief.
I found the crowded room, which by now almost felt like home, and pushed the rollator and its blaring laptop through the chaos to find my mother. The pessimistic orderly had half-suggested I stay in the bed while she got the X-ray, because we might lose it otherwise, but she was back in her spot, with the same neighbors. The game was nearly over.
She sat on her walker and I sat on the bed next to her. I again pulled out the Knicks towel, which I’d acquired at the Garden a week or so earlier, when I attended Game Two of the Cleveland series. They put a towel on every seat. When I was a kid I had one like it on my wall. I got that one in 1980. It hung there until the colors faded and then disappeared. Now I had another one, the orange bright and crisp.
The doctor came over, said there was no fracture, gave her some advice about a topical ointment for the leg, and then watched the game for a little while.
While we were away on the X-ray mission the number of phones that were out had multiplied, and now there were conspicuous ripples of noise corresponding to the game, joining the orchestra of beeps and groans and voices loud and soft. When Brunson hit his shot, cheers. When he missed, groans. And when Wembanyama threw the ball off Stephon Castle’s back, a wave of shouts and cheers. And then, after the free throw and the time outs and the inbounds play, when he missed the last shot, an eruption of joyful noise. We could have left by then, but we lingered for a few minutes until it was over.
“We’ll be back for Game Three,” I joked to the nurses. Everyone was jubilant. The spirit was so high throughout that it felt like this was why these doctors and nurses had chosen this line of work, as an access point to that spirit of getting through.
Out on the street we toddled along for a block, the towel draped on seat of the rollator, and stopped to talk to a guy out on the street who saw the Knicks towel.
“All my friends went down to the Garden to celebrate, it’s incredible,” he said. “They are going to win.”
“Unreal,” I said.
“Unreal,” he said.
I had been saying that throughout the whole run. Unreal.
My mother seemed delighted with this encounter, as she had throughout. Thinking about it now, it’s as though I am imposing on my mother the spirit of that small man in a tuxedo who rides along wordlessly in the back of a taxi in Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. The wedding has been canceled because the groom didn’t show, everyone piles into taxis, and this random little saint keeps smiling away, all twinkly, not saying anything. The mystery of high spirits. My mom said lots of things but her spirits in these perilous situations can become light, as though the other option is too dark.
We kept strolling, down the block toward Broadway, and ended up walking a bit more, as though the X-ray and consultation had already begun a curative process. We stopped to buy some groceries at West Side Market, everything brightly lit at that late hour, festive. We were celebrating.
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