Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  ‘What gym?’

  ‘The hospital gym. In the elevator press minus one.’

  On the way down I thought about the first wedding of the Hitch, when we all went to Cyprus. Hitch flew in, and so did friends and relations, and we stayed in a beachside Nicosia four-star (where the toilets in the public spaces were designated Othellos and Desdemonas). Christopher never went near the sea or even the pool – where I, along with others of his coterie or clan, lay bronzing myself between dips and lengths (and sets of tennis). Whenever he came near us out there, often wearing a dark two-piece suit (but no necktie), his stride was dismissively brisk: he was heading for the shaded outdoor bar to meet some journalist or terrorist or Greek Orthodox archbishop. The near-naked torsos on lilos and loungers – it was all distastefully frivolous to him, this business with the body and its lotions and unguents, its narcissism, its hubris…

  ‘Well, Hitch,’ I said as we embraced. ‘Here you are in a gym.’

  ‘I know. I’m doing this under orders but guess what, I’m feeling almost keen.’

  Blue and I sat on a plastic bench and watched. The vast space was occupied not by unsmiling young strivers in T-shirts and sweatpants but by vague wanderers in light gowns and pyjamas, who moved among the various contraptions (rowing machine, punchbag) sceptically, like cautious shoppers. Among them Christopher cut a relatively dynamic figure, mounting a fixed bike and going at it with real will and evident pleasure, his pale, thinned legs gamely whirring.

  ‘Look at him,’ we said. ‘He’s really on for it.’

  A little later he approached a wooden contrivance in the shape of a freestanding staircase, cut off by a latticed paling on the fourth step. He mounted it, climbed it, backed down, climbed it, backed down; and after that he could do no more. He seemed surprised, puzzled, almost offended. Blue said quietly,

  ‘There’s a long way to go. But he’ll get there.’

  ‘Of course he will. A hospital gym,’ I went on, ‘it’s a contradiction – like a Young Conservative. Anyway, he’ll be back in the guest house tomorrow.’

  We went over. Christopher sat resting, sober faced, on the ground floor of the little stairway that led nowhere.

  ‘You’ll be out of here tomorrow,’ said Blue.

  And I said, ‘In time for the Republican debate. Think of all you’ll learn at the feet of Herman Cain and Rick Santorum.’

  ‘Cat, you ought to lie down for a while,’ said Blue. ‘Rest up for your homecoming.’

  * * *

  —————

  It was the evening of May 5, and he was home. At the dinner table in the garden he raised an arm for silence and said,

  ‘I can’t…I can’t breathe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t breathe.’

  The speed of time

  This took place at around seven-thirty. Blue, Christopher, and I got back to the Zilkha annex at three in the morning.

  He could survive without eating and drinking and (more doubtfully) without speaking, but he couldn’t survive without breathing. Christopher was under attack from ‘dyspnoea’, to use the typically melodious medical name for it: a condition best understood as air hunger. To Joseph Conrad the exercise of captaincy seemed the ‘most natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing’. What was breathing as natural as? ‘I imagined I could not have lived without it.’ As natural, then, as living.

  Within minutes Blue was steering us towards the looming heights of MD Anderson…Christopher stayed silent, slightly hunched over in his seat with a concentrating look on his face, and now and then his eyes would swell and widen.

  There was no waiting-room period. The three of us were at once ushered into a warren of cubicles and labs, and a stream of specialists came and bent over him one after the other, and then sailed off again; and nobody was there when his air hunger suddenly increased.

  Dyspnoea brings with it mortal fear, a clinical condition in its own right. Christopher was facing it without obvious physical strain. But I wasn’t – I was in fact making something of a spectacle of myself, pacing the floor and waving my arms and yelling out, ‘He can’t breathe!’

  And from then on there was always someone sticking an instrument down his throat or sticking another instrument up his nose or kneading his neck and shoulders or making him cough or sniff or snort or stand or sit…

  ‘This can’t be right,’ I said, staring at my watch and pouring myself a huge glass of wine. ‘I thought it was about ten-thirty at the latest. Unbelievable how quickly that all seemed to go…’

  We were settling down on the porch in the dusty Dixie night.

  ‘I bet it didn’t feel that way to you, Hitch.’

  ‘No.’ He drew on his Rothmans. ‘From my point of view there were certain uh, longueurs. But I see what you mean – in the sense of never a dull moment.’

  Exhaustively and exhaustingly pinched and poked, Christopher now looked battered, and spiritually battered, too. The medics went about their work with impressive vocational drive; but it was the pathology that interested them, exclusively, and not the patient. Hitch himself was no more than a delivery boy or a beast of burden, bearing this savoury load, this disease, for their delectation.

  ‘Many strange divestments’, he said, ‘await you in the land of the sick…Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some catching up to get done – in the rethink parlour.’

  Meaning the toilet…‘Blue,’ I said ruminatively, ‘have you heard about the new money spinner in the healthcare business – the Walk-In Medical Centers? You show up off the street, you get dealt with, and you pay your bill. The great thing about Walk-Ins is this. Having walked in, you can then walk out. Hitch can’t walk out. I can walk out whenever I want, and even you, you get some…respite if just for ten minutes. But he doesn’t, he never does. He’s always in it, he’s never not in it.’

  She faced me levelly, not drinking but levelly smoking. She said,

  ‘He can’t get out, not for the duration. He says it isn’t like a war, but it is, even if you’re a civilian. All you can do is wait for it to end.’

  ‘Wait for it to roll through villages. But he’s a warhorse. And he’s still an ox.’

  ‘He’s still an ox.’

  Christopher returned. We stayed up till dawn, with our computers on YouTube, laughing and weeping at the songs of our youth.

  Mortal combat

  ‘Christ, Chreestophairr,’ I said (this was the way Eleni Meleagrou used to say it), ‘for a while you were as bad off as Japan. Earthquake, nuclear accident, tsunami.’

  ‘Well, when sorrows come, Little Keith, they come not single spies…’

  ‘True, O Hitch. It’s much better now, your voice.*6 You’re perfectly audible. You just sound a bit like Bob.’ A reference to Whispering Bob Conquest, who was piano all his life. ‘Only much louder.’

  ‘Good. The trouble is, I keep thinking it’s going to come back again. I mean go away again…Let’s do one more.’

  ‘Two more.’

  Some days had passed and the out-patient was an in-patient all over again. I don’t think he was often seen in the hospital gym, but twice a day he would do ‘laps’ in the Texan-scale atrium, and I or Blue would accompany him as his personal trainer. Each circuit took ten or fifteen minutes, and we always did two or three of them. Now in his dressing gown he moved slowly by my side, not a shuffler, more like a wader, making steady progress through a countervailing medium – through an element that never sleeps and never tires. He said,

  ‘How did the idea of combat get itself attached to cancer? They never say, So and so pegged out after a long battle against heart disease or brain death. Or old age.’

  ‘You won’t remember, but I lectured you about this one night here in Houston when you were half asleep.’ And I repeated some of what I’d said.

  ‘Yeah, but you can’t make war when
you’re this bad off. It just seems absurd to me. How can you fight when you’re flat on your back?’

  ‘By maintaining your spirit and your courage.’

  He sighed. ‘I think the struggle stuff is there just to trick you into thinking you’ve got a part to play in all this. To stop you blacking out from sheer inanity. No one ever says how null it is, cancer. Boring. Boring avec. Don’t forget boring.’

  ‘And you evoke it. You’re at your desk. You’re not snivelling in a corner.’

  ‘No, I’m staggering round in circles. Good try, Mart, but it’s not a fight. Who or what am I fighting? My past life, my body, me myself? That’s the whole trouble with it. The patient can’t ever get away from the patient. One more lap.’

  ‘…Two more laps.’

  He said, ‘I hope this isn’t a chore for you.’

  ‘Not at all. I love it.’

  And I did love it. I was back with Gus (not quite three, and very consciously the younger brother), circumnavigating the roundabout in his first leather shoes. And just a week before he had been in despair about ever growing up, prostrate under the kitchen table and slowly pounding the floor with his fists (I’ll always be doing silly phings…I’ll always be with little childs), and now here he was, a few days later, Gus, mightily shod as he paced the darkening city, with his smile seeming to say, At last – at last I’m getting somewhere.

  The man of God

  There was a knock on the door, which was in itself quite unusual – a knock on the door to Christopher’s single-occupancy ward at MDA. Usually they swept straight in with stethoscopes flying. I answered it, and then returned to the bedside.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Oh just some goddamned man of God. By the way, Hitch, I know you like decapitalising the word God, as in god is not great. Looks very iconoclastic. But you really ought to capitalise it in all talk about monotheisms. Where they’re referring to a definite bloke.’

  ‘…So where is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him with a small aitch.’

  ‘Oh the wowser. I don’t know. Maybe he’s still out there.’

  ‘Well we must…What kind of wowser?’

  ‘I don’t know. You mean what denomination?’

  ‘No. What kind of bloke.’

  ‘Oh. The standard peanut. All aglitter. What should I do with him? I know. I’ll tell him his faith stinks and kick him down the stairs.’

  ‘No, Mart, ask him if he’d be good enough to step inside…Go on. What the hell. Sling him over.’

  ‘Are you sure? All right, then I’m off to get a coffee.’

  In the central bay I attended to the hot-drinks machine. Nurses and doctors, men and women in jumpsuits holding clipboards, launderers and caterers, the conditioned and sanitised air, the tubfuls of medical waste, the cloudwracks of used linen…After at least twenty minutes the man of God slipped out, looking pleased.

  ‘Jesus, he took his time. Was he after your soul?’

  ‘Of course. All in a day’s work.’

  ‘Well I hope you sent him on his way with a few choice words.’

  ‘No, I let him meander on a bit. You sidetrack them. Steer them towards points of doctrine. I got him going on redemption.’

  ‘Doesn’t that just lead to conversion? Well, the Hitch is big game. Maybe he’d get a bounty or a finder’s fee. I’m amazed you can spare the patience.’

  ‘I’m just endlessly riveted by the religious mind. Religion really is the most interesting thing on earth.’

  ‘Except when the other chap believes in it. Then at the flick of a switch it becomes the least interesting thing on earth.’

  ‘That isn’t so. It’s far more interesting than cancer. And it’s not about me.’

  I turned my head and looked out. Here, even the sky seemed enclosed. The totems of MDA, their darkened and treated windows filled with one another’s reflections…

  ‘Did he talk about hellfire and targeted cancers?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t of that chapter.’

  ‘Did you ask him about childhood leukaemias and infantile tumours?’

  ‘No. I didn’t have the energy. I couldn’t be fucked. Come on. Let’s do our laps.’

  God is not impressed by death

  You saw them as they were coming in or going out, the little childs, accompanied by one parent or another or by both. Now and then, if you looked through the wrong passageway porthole, you saw them in groups, gathered round a rec-room table. The in-patients and out-patients of Pediatric Oncology were all boys (they’re ‘almost entirely boys. No one knows why’); and so all the bald children ‘look like brothers’.*7 Hairless heads, and enormous, startled, blinking eyes – as if blinking off the effects of a flashbulb. And they seemed to me to be asking themselves the same question their parents were asking. ‘When a baby gets cancer, you think, Who came up with this idea? What celestial abandon gave rise to this?’

  There’s the Peter Pan Ward, and there’s the Tiny Tim Lounge:

  The Tiny Tim Lounge is a little sitting area at the end of the [Pediatric Oncology] corridor…On one of the lounge walls there is a gold plaque with the singer Tiny Tim’s name on it: his son was treated once at this hospital and so, five years ago, he donated money for the lounge. It is a cramped little lounge, which, one suspects, would be larger if Tiny Tim’s son had actually lived. Instead, he died here, at this hospital, and now there is this tiny room which is part gratitude, part generosity, part fuck-you.

  And, if you’re a capitaliser of pronouns, then that would have to be ‘part fuck-You’.

  Why does God preside over the deaths, by cancer, of the very young? The many televangelists in the neighbourhood had an answer. Namely, it’s because ‘He wants them with Him right away’. (Does He? What for? And as regards their parents, what does He want?) And the answer of the writers is no more satisfying. ‘You cannot understand, my child, nor can I, nor can anyone,’ says the priest at the conclusion of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.’ Oh, it’s mercy, is it – yeah, keep believing that, Believers…Greene was a theist. Saul, a deist, had the best answer, the only answer: God is not impressed by death. Yes, and also this. God never grieves.

  There he goes, the boy aged four or five, led by the orderly in the blue smock. The colour blue: the surgeon, the anaesthesiologist, all the nurses, the social worker. In their blue caps and scrubs, they look like a clutch of forget-me-nots…‘Children often become afraid of the color blue’…Then don’t go outside, little ones, don’t even look outside, because it’s all blue there, nothing but blue.

  Later in the afternoon Michael Z drove me to the airport, and soon enough I was up in it, in the blue of the careless Southern sky.

  *1 The godhead of boyhood doesn’t last long: they grow out of it by the age of three. King Lear, whose infant delusion has been prolonged by the accident of kingship, is asked to grow out of it in his eighties. And he does. ‘They flattered me like a dog…When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not cease at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie…’

  *2 Blaise Pascal’s pitiful dates are 1623 to 1662 (far back enough for his Wager to sound challenging). He was a spiritual prevaricator, and a sickly one; and I don’t know how well he was feeling when he put together his famous proposition. In it he argued that a rational (and presumably cynical) unbeliever, faced with the choice between God and godlessness, would in the end opt for God: if he wins the bet, he gains eternity in heaven as opposed to eternity in hell, and if he loses, the cost is nothing more than a minor sacrifice of some last-hour hedonism (and, we might add, a major sacrifice of last-hour dignity)…In a recent bulletin from the land of the sick Christopher had juxtaposed Pascal’s
Wager with Bohr’s Tease – Niels Bohr, the Nobelist pioneer of the subatomic world. Bohr had a horseshoe suspended over his doorway; and when a fellow scientist incredulously asked him if he believed this would bring him good luck, Bohr answered: No, of course I don’t. But apparently it works whether you believe in it or not.

  *3 In fact after Easter Sunday the crisis steadily worsened. At that point only about 16 per cent of Texas was affected; the figure would go on rising to about 70 per cent in mid-August. By then our sympathy for the South would be hypocritical no longer…The skies finally opened on October 9, almost six months after the Days of Prayer for Rain.

  *4 At this stage in the primaries there were only five participants (and the last two were about to creep back into obscurity): Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tom Pawlenty, and Gary Johnson. So no Mitt Romney, no Newt Gingrich, no Michele Bachmann, and no Rick Perry – not yet; but it was an encouraging start.

  *5 The Zilkhas were originally a banking family based in Baghdad – something like the Rothschilds of Mesopotamia. I had always assumed that Selim Zilkha, Michael’s father, had emigrated as a result of Iraqi anti-Semitism; but Michael has informed me, in his soft Oxonian tones, that Selim went into exile (his first stop was Lebanon) when he was forty days old, in 1927, during the British mandate (he came to the UK in 1960, and founded Mothercare). Iraqi Judaeophobia became proactive in the 1940s, with the rise of Zionism; and after the establishment of Israel it assumed the character of a semi-permanent pogrom. Indigenous since the sixth century BCE, the Jewish community numbered 130,000 in 1948; today there aren’t enough Jews in Baghdad to form a minyan, for which the quorum is ten males over the age of thirteen.

  *6 ‘Most despond-inducing and alarming of all [negative developments, or nasty surprises], so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at thirty paces.’ But one day, in Washington, ‘I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home – and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow.’ In the space of a few lines Christopher compares himself to a child, a piglet, a goat, and a cat – all of them defenceless beings.