Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  A car moved down Halsted Street, throwing a wedge of light across the ceiling. We lay there for a while, deciding if we really liked each other. I got out of bed and stood beside it, agitated.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’ve got to call Terry’s parents,” I said, knowing it was a dumb thing to do even as I said it. “I’ve got to do something—I was his friend.”

  Standing in the dark of the hall, I called information and listened as the exchanges clicked in, working their way into central Indiana. The operator had a southern accent, which surprised me. Maybe I had one, too, and didn’t know it. I dialed the number. There was a long pause and it began to ring: lonesome rasps like you hear only on country phones. After six rings, Mr. Grubbs picked up. He didn’t say hello, so I didn’t either. He just breathed into the phone with a masculine patience that meant, “Yes, my son has died, you contemptible weakling. What are you going to do about it?” It also meant he would never forgive Terry for beating him to the punch. He was supposed to be the bloody hero, going down in a firefight with the state police. Now survival was all that was left, and the fun had gone out of it. He had probably been sitting there most of the day with a pistol in his hand, wearing his commando gear and eating from rations cans. Now we breathed at each other over the phone, a kind of conversation.

  In this way, we mourned Terry together.

  3

  BOLGER WAS ELATED. I was perfect for the unit management program. He thought Mr. Janush, the supervisor, would like me, too. I’d have to cut my hair, of course, and a suit and tie were required, but it was the beginning of a great new career in middle management if I “played my cards right.” Bolger gave me the thumbs-up sign. He, too, had started out as a unit manager.

  Using his directions, I took the nearest elevator to Seven South, where in room 721, Gary Janush—tall, handsome, and Polish—shook my hand and offered me a chair. There was something about him that I liked already. He had the sad but efficient manner of a professional father. Someone would break his heart in life someday, but I knew it wasn’t going to be me.

  On his littered desk was an executive toy consisting of four ball bearings attached to strings in a V. If you knocked one into the group, one flew out the other end. The business metaphor was clear: the day is a series of crisp clicks; one’s efforts can be fully realized. I thought of a title for it: The Executive Dreams of Newtonian Physics. In a photo cube on the desk a little girl in a blue dress stood by a Christmas tree, and a cheerful woman with a good figure posed in the kitchen with her hands on her hips, pretending she didn’t want the photograph taken. In the backyard a boy of about six held his father’s rifle. Next to him, on a slab of concrete near the garage, there was a dead deer with dark blood seeping from its mouth in his direction. The boy smiled proudly at the camera.

  The interview went well. I remembered a tip a high school guidance counselor had given me about asking plenty of questions. It shows you’re interested in the job. Actually, I was interested. Janush said I would supervise the station clerks, make sure the laundry and food showed up on time, and take care of practical problems such as housekeeping and maintenance on three floors of the hospital, meaning six nursing stations. There were as many as 40 patients on each unit, so I would be responsible for the nonnursing care of about 240 people.

  Janush liked me from the start. He gave me a fatherly wink and patted me on the shoulder. I would not only do; I was to report to work as soon as the papers were cleared. This would take about a week. The personnel department had to notify the draft board, so I wasn’t to worry about that. I would be free to leave the job two years from the starting date. Meanwhile, there was to be a physical exam here in the hospital. I had to be cleared by Health Services, just like any other employee.

  He also assured me that he didn’t share my political views. He was a U.S. Army reservist and really loved the summer camps. His sly look suggested card games, dates with the local women, and lots of boyish good fun. He said he believed in what Patrick Henry said about “doing your own thing.” It was a free country because of the “necessary limits” every decent society places on itself. There were plenty of other countries that didn’t have our freedoms, which is why his father had left Poland in the first place. That I was working in the hospital instead of serving in the army was a credit to the democracy in which we lived, and he was damned proud of that.

  For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but he pulled himself together and walked me to the door. He would be in touch, he said, and shook my hand. Then he returned to his tiny office and waved good-bye, looking for all the world like an Olympic javelin thrower, circa 1930.

  I decided to walk back another way, down the hall to the nursing station, since there had to be another set of elevators. There were four or five rooms on each side of the hall, each with its wide door open. Most of the rooms had four beds. It must have been Orthopedics because nearly everyone had a cast of some kind. A guy with his leg in traction and a can of beer in his hand toasted me as I walked by gawking. Everywhere I looked there was plaster. Toward the end of the hall sat a patient dressed in a gown and wearing paper slippers. There was nothing wrong with him that I could see. As I passed, he got up and went into a room, holding the back of his hospital gown with one hand. You could see most of his backside, in varying shades of pink, through the parted-curtains effect. The last door on the right was closed, and behind it one of the saws used for removing casts growled and whined.

  Behind the nursing station two nurses moved like storks. They wore different caps, which, I found out later, meant they’d gone to different schools. One was the standard kind, a modified flying nun design, but the other was crepey and fancy, like a coffee filter turned upside down. A nurse burst out of the station and passed me carrying a small silver tray with pills in little paper cups and three lethal-looking hypodermic needles pointed in the same direction. I couldn’t help watching her walk down the hall, hips swaying neatly.

  In the back of the station, three black nursing aides in salmon-colored dresses were talking and laughing. The color was just right on them, moist and warm. One of them pointed in my direction, and more laughter followed. Blushing, I stepped clumsily toward the elevators. There, in a corridor, several wheelchairs were jammed together in random storage, one of them containing an old man with wispy white hair and spots on the backs of his hands. His arms were tied with straps to the arms of the chair, and he trembled softly as if listening to music. I punched the down button and looked into a large room on the opposite side of the elevator bank to see if anyone was there. It was lit with fluorescent bulbs and filled with three-tiered stainless-steel carts. In a corner, taking trays of food from a dumbwaiter, was a black man with a surgical cap on his head. I gave him a little wave to get his attention, pointed at the old man in the hall, and mouthed the words “This yours?”

  In crisp, clear tones he said, “Are you fuckin’ crazy?”

  A tall doctor with a red face walked up in a hurry and hit the up button. Pacing back and forth, he talked to himself in an agitated way, and scratched the backs of his hands, which were bright red. He looked incredibly neurotic, but his long gray smock with “Dr. Rocks” stitched on the breast pocket meant that he was an attending physician, a real big shot. The blotches on his face were either from drinking or a skin disease, and his chin stuck out like a stone. The overall impression was of imperial command. With a surprisingly athletic move, his foot nearly level with his chest, he kicked the center of the three elevators.

  “When are you going to get these things running?” he shouted.

  “Excuse me?” I said. His face was close to mine, the great chin jutting out. All I could think was, can his name really be Dr. Rocks? The black guy from Food Service stuck his head out of the door to see what was going on, but when he saw Rocks, he ducked back into the room again. Apparently the doctor had a reputation already.

  “When are you administrative people going to get these eleva
tors working? I’m taking this to the executive committee, God damn it!”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t work here.” And of course I didn’t, at least not yet. The down elevator finally arrived, and I stepped onto it gratefully. The operator, a young Latino guy in a blue cotton jacket marked “Transportation,” stepped away from his control panel and wheeled the old man onto the elevator. The doors closed on the red-faced Dr. Rocks and we descended to the first floor, where I stepped out, and the elevator operator shoved the old man into the hall and closed the doors again.

  Here next to the emergency room, there was a good deal more traffic, but still nobody claimed the patient. People walked by quickly or dreamily, depending on their destinations. Some were probably headed for a cup of coffee; others had just received the results of their tests, and now had to tell the rest of the family. I stood for a while beside the old man, as if we were somehow connected. An old woman passing by nodded, as if to say, That’s a nice boy. Finally I figured some sort of official procedure was at work, so I left him where he was. I exited through the electric double doors where on a busy night they wheeled in the gunshot victims, DOAs, and women who had given birth in cabs.

  The living arrangements on Halsted Street were tolerable, given our lack of money. It wasn’t just Rose and I living there, however: things were complicated by the presence of Randy and Penelope. Randy was a bit of a pain, I thought. He was 5’4” with thick blond hair and looked like a pudgy nine-year-old kid. He worked for a company called Academic Industries, which published illustrated versions of classic novels, mainly for adults who were learning to read. Penelope was the daughter of an Australian banker, or so she claimed, but if she had a lot of money, she didn’t let anyone know. Slightly bent at the waist, she walked with a limp, as if she had a pain in her side, but this was never explained.

  We’d gotten together through an ad in the paper placed by a guy named Edgar, who had this huge apartment all to himself but was leaving for Mexico. There were four bedrooms, a dining room, living room, large kitchen, and a study near the living room where there was lots of light. It was cheap, too, since it was in a marginal neighborhood. It was a four-flat, very tall. The landlady, for some reason, chose to live in the basement. This kept her out of our hair. She was a professor of English in the city college system and got the building in a divorce settlement. Every now and then the sewers backed up and her things would float out the door—art books, hand-sewn rugs, Bic pens, and notes for her lectures. She’d lay everything out to dry on the sidewalk and take it back in a couple of days later. The thing I noticed about Mrs. Carter was how little garbage she produced. Once a week, this tiny white bag of antiseptic trash, so small you could put it into your purse, would appear in the garbage can that all the apartments shared.

  On the first floor were Gus and Larry, the basketball players, seven or eight feet tall. You could drive a truck down their faces and have to stop for coffee before you got to the hairline. They had played for Temple University, and Larry had a brief fling in the pros before he got cut. Both of them fancied themselves ladies’ men. They looked a little ridiculous when they tried to flirt, leaning against the wall at a party, trying to get their faces close enough for contact. But they were successful, always accompanied by a sensational-looking woman. We lived upstairs from the giants, and above us was someone named Williams whom no one knew. We could hear his feet going up on the stairs, slowly and patiently, as if he’d had a hard day at work. There was never a sound from above, and while the basketball boys were always having parties, shouting “ya-hoo” and “ee-ha,” Williams never had company. I began to suspect he suspended himself from the ceiling or walked around in foam-rubber clothes, like Gumby.

  Edgar was something else. Earlier that year, on a trip by train to attend a socialist institute in Mexico, he’d fallen in love with a thirteen-year-old girl in a private-school uniform. An affair begun holding hands in a sight-seeing car quickly resulted in her getting pregnant. Her parents sent her to London to have the abortion, and she was instructed never to see him again on threat of his imprisonment (Edgar was twenty-five). But their destiny was set. The girl planned to run away from her home in New York City and meet him near an Aztec temple. We imagined them making love in the moonlight on an ancient blood-soaked altar, romantic and ridiculous. Both of them were from wealthy families. What would happen when the money ran out and Marielle, the Lolita of Schuyler School for Young Women, had to wash her clothes in the river?

  The apartment was ours until Edgar returned with Marielle. Meanwhile, we had to take care of John Reed, Edgar’s dog, whose habits were not good. He liked to urinate on the furniture, what we had of it, and he always did so with a confident look that meant “I’m Edgar’s.” He had bald patches in his thin brown fur—the sort of skeletal creature that hangs around a medieval village, waiting for scraps of fat. Whenever he entered the room, the mood would change to subtle horror, and Penelope, in spite of her antivivisectionist opinions, would shudder with loathing. “Please,” she would implore, thin hands over her face like a caul, “get that horrible beast out of here!” But John Reed, as if to make her suffer further, would place his head in her lap and look up at her with enflamed eyes.

  As the days passed, Penelope learned to tolerate John Reed, just as we learned to live with each other. Sometimes this wasn’t so easy, especially with Randy. He would sit on the couch, smoking a cigarette and talking incessantly about his favorite topics, the misery of being in love and the history of the comic book. We learned more than we ever wanted to know about his juvenile enthusiasms and disappointments, for in many ways he was still a child. His eyes gleamed when he talked about Rubber Man, “Spidey,” and other heroes of metamorphosis. There was a “Hegelian dichotomy,” he insisted, in the character of Superman. The Hulk, green and muscle-bound, was “clearly a hero of the nuclear age—grotesque, mutant, and essentially primitive—in indirect proportion to the technological complexity that made the Apocalypse a certainty.” Of all the heroes, Randy liked the Hulk the most. He, too, wanted a muscular id in hillbilly pants, a monster of moral imagination, to settle his scores when he got angry. Randy had the fury and essential selfishness of children, who are the sternest puritans and also the consummate victims.

  On the morning following my interview with Janush, the consummate victim burned a hole in the couch with his cigarette. As he talked, smoke rose from between his thighs—the acrid, dangerous smoke of burning foam rubber. As Spiderman crawled the wall of Randy’s most recent theory, the theorist was oblivious.

  I pointed at the source of my discomfort. It was, after all, my couch, a Swedish modern cheapie Mark Samples had sold me for ten dollars before leaving for San Francisco to discover himself through Scientology, Tibetan Buddhism, murder mysteries, and a better diet.

  “Fire!” I screamed. I was up and waving now, jabbing a finger at his crotch. Randy leapt to his feet and stared at the growing hole edged with fire. It was as if a rip in the universe had opened but somehow failed to claim him; already the event was taking on cosmic importance. I slapped out the fire with my hands.

  “Son of a bitch! It’s ruined. My new couch is ruined.”

  He looked at me with prolific unconcern. “Something like this once happened to Submariner,” he said. “He put out the fire by converting to water.” He took a drag on his still-lit cigarette.

  Penelope entered the room, fanning the air dramatically. “Good heavens,” she said.

  “Sorry about the couch,” said Randy.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I said.

  Penelope walked around the couch with small mincing steps, sniffing the air like a prize poodle. She was tall and thin, but always seemed small somehow. Her bent walk gave her the universal air of apology. “It smells like burnt almonds,” she said. “Once, on the plains of the Serengeti, we placed almonds in the campfire. They’re quite delicious.”

  Vicki had entered the room and was standing behind Penelope. As Penelope talked, V
icki mocked her, making yak-yak with one hand. Before coming to Chicago, Penelope had spent some time in Africa, and she never let you forget it. When she talked, she would stand a little too close to you, hands crossed on her chest like a saint or corpse, and tilt her head.

  “Having a campfire, girls?” said Vicki. Joan Crawford? Hermione Gingold? The tone was clear, but the reference was not.

  “Randy was immolating himself for the sake of the war,” said Penelope. She made a major monument of the word immolating. A shudder passed like a rumor through the group.

  “I’m laughing,” said Randy, pretending to yawn. Then he went over to the television and tuned it to channel 32. We pissed him off, and he was going to watch an old Chillie Willie cartoon to put us out of his mind. He lit a new cigarette and watched Chillie slide across a patch of ice into an outraged walrus. Half of him laughed, and half studied the screen with dark intellectual ambition. Meanwhile, we watched him watching. Chillie did this and Chillie did that, and nobody cared more than he did. Rose the Poet shambled into the room wearing nothing at all, a kaiser roll in one hand and Kahlil Gibran in the other. Nobody paid him any attention, and he sat on the couch, eating and reading.

  To get away from the roommates, that night Vicki and I went to a movie, something strange by the French director Godard. There was no story to speak of, and characters simply stood around in a barnyard, talking straight at the camera about political issues that were obscure to us. But the movie was interesting, in a sense, because it was so boring, and the audience was attentive. There were even points where the audience laughed heartily. Vicki and I looked at each other, wondering what the joke was.