Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  I got down to dinner late. Romona, Martin, Ed, and Barbara had finished eating, but they were hanging around as usual, having more cups of coffee.

  “Sorry about the business with Cane,” I said to Ed, sitting next to him.

  “That’s all right,” he said glumly, “I’ll make a comeback,” but I could tell he was pissed that Martin had taken his place. He kept looking across the table like he might throw something at him.

  Barbara was telling a story about Radiology earlier that evening. She had taken a patient to get an X-ray, and while she was waiting for him, a midget wearing a hospital gown walked into the area and sat down across from her. He was about the size of a three-year-old, and his legs dangled far above the floor. Barbara felt him looking at her while she read a magazine, and pretty soon he hopped down and walked over to her.

  “How ya doin’?” he asked.

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” he said, patting the chair beside her.

  She said she knew what was coming next, but what could she do? He scrambled into the chair beside her and looked at her with intense devotion. The ring on his finger had a Playboy emblem, a black rabbit on gold.

  “I’m not very good at small talk,” he said, looking very serious.

  “Me, either.”

  “You’re supposed to laugh at that,” he said.

  “It was a dumb joke,” she said, “I bet you use it on all the girls.”

  “That’s true,” he said, sitting up straight and cracking his knuckles. “Look,” he continued, “let’s cut through the fog. I’m attracted to you, and I’d like to take you out. What do you say?”

  “I’m pretty busy.”

  “We can go over to Rush Street. There’s a great bar there called Jay’s.”

  “I know Jay’s,” she said, “I just can’t find the time.”

  “You don’t want to go out with me because I’m small, right?” His voice was both belligerent and hurt.

  “It’s not that at all, really,” she said, crossing her long legs in the other direction.

  “Honest?”

  “Cross my heart,” she said, crossing her heart and feeling stupid.

  “I believe you,” he said, putting his hand on her leg, high on the thigh.

  “You never stop, do you?” Barbara said, standing up and glaring down at him.

  “You can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Romona thought the story was hugely funny, and so did Ed. I didn’t feel so hot myself. I kept thinking of Charles lying so perfectly in his freshly made bed, and the absurdity of Barbara’s story didn’t charm me at all. Apparently I was scowling, because Romona said, “Hey, Jim, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, rousing from my introspection.

  “You look like hell,” said Romona.

  “The world is dark,” Martin said.

  Everyone turned and looked at him.

  “What do you mean?” Romona asked.

  “It’s why I chose the evening shift,” he said through a small mouth, “because the world is so dark.”

  “I like the nights, too,” Romona said. “It’s hard to get up in the morning.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he means,” Barbara said.

  Martin had been doodling on his paper napkin with a pen. All available space was filled with tortured, swirling lines. A figure half cobra, half vulva dominated the center, then he flipped the napkin over and started on the other side.

  The rest of the shift was relatively uneventful. Martin and I sat in my office most of the night, waiting for one of our Pagemasters to go off. We had to leave only a few times, to check the snack trays around ten o’clock, and to get some coat hangers for a patient with a private room on one of his floors. It was a woman of about forty-five who was in for a face lift, and she sat on the bed with one leg up, wearing silk shorty pajamas that showed off her figure. She cocked her eye at Martin, trying to be seductive. He seemed puzzled.

  Back at the office, I told him her behavior could be explained. People get nervous when they’re admitted to a hospital. They think they’re going to die, and their craziness comes out. My theory seemed to interest him, because he became animated. He said people were always crazy. The world was dark with craziness. In fact, the bizarre was the rule, because of human will. It was will that held the world together, not good or evil. No matter what we did to limit our desires, even the attempt was another form of will. Saints and hermits are better than us because at least they try not to be willful, but of course they are crazy too. He’d been so quiet all evening, but now he was masterful as he launched into his topic, leaning back in his chair like a college professor lost in his lecture. Schopenhauer had a lot to teach us, he said. His spiritual pessimism was restorative, because nothingness is basically good.

  “You think too much,” I said.

  “Maybe you’re too dull to understand.”

  “Look, Martin, you’d better relax. There are things happening here that will tear your head off if you don’t watch out. Schopenhauer isn’t going to do you any good at all.”

  We talked better after that. I said I thought that by not going to Vietnam, I would have no contact with death, but every day I carried bodies to the morgue. Sometimes on the el I felt I was choking to death. The other day a drunk woman stood between two moving cars and took off her bra. The train rocketed into the tunnel and she nearly fell, but she caught herself, her broad face smeared-against the window. Once a rock flew against the el car window where I was sitting and shattered the glass in a weblike pattern. There were people out there who wanted to do me harm, even though they didn’t know me.

  “What you are feeling is perfectly normal,” he said. “I have these feelings myself, but I understand their origin. You are anxious because the world reveals its intentions, but if the world is will, it is also capable of change, provided your will is stronger.”

  I said the subway was the main problem with western civilization. Last month a woman threw herself onto the el tracks at the Chicago Avenue station. The train ran over her, but it only cut off her arm, which the doctors sewed back on. She was all healed up and back playing bridge with her friends. They said the hand on her severed arm was still clutching her large white purse when they found it on the tracks.

  Martin said that my darkness was my sense of the absurd. I thought everything was significant in life, which made me into an absurdist. A sense of the absurd and sentimentality were essentially the same thing, he insisted.

  “But you believe in nothingness,” I said. “Isn’t that sentimental?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, looking depressed. “Maybe we’re the same.” He gave the impression the comparison had lowered him in station.

  Martin was weird, all right, but at least with the patients he kept it to himself. Now and then one of us would find him sitting alone in his office with the lights turned off, but at least he didn’t spread his pessimistic philosophy while checking the dinner trays. A number of the nursing assistants liked him, and he also got along with the nursing supervisors, which was important. They’d gotten George Simas, the day manager on the seventh floor, fired over the size of a waste-basket.

  A couple of months later Martin didn’t show up for work. It wasn’t like him to be even five minutes late. Romona called his number but there was no answer, and that night at dinner we speculated on what might have happened to him. Barbara said maybe he was too shy for such a job, where you had to meet people and all. Romona said maybe the pay wasn’t enough, what with all those nice clothes he wore, and Ed was convinced Martin couldn’t handle the pressure on the twelfth floor.

  The next night he didn’t show either. This time Barbara called his number, and there was still no answer. We all had an image of his apartment, which was on Sheridan Road, facing the lake. He’d had us over one evening, and everyone had gotten quite drunk.

 
After two days, Barbara got really worried about Martin. It wasn’t like him not to call, even if he was quitting. She called the management of his building and asked them to check the room. After a few minutes, the doorman came back to the phone sounding very irritated. It was against the rules, he said, for him to check on one of the tenants, but just between the two of them, he thought he heard music inside the apartment. Barbara then checked all the major hospitals, and there was no Martin Baum to be found.

  “I think we should check the morgue,” Romona said.

  Ed liked that right away, and Barbara agreed. At midnight, after work, we got into a Yellow cab and drove over to the city morgue. It was located near City Hospital, in a black neighborhood near the expressway, and the driver gave us a second look when I gave him the destination.

  “You wanna go where?” he said.

  “The morgue,” I said. “We want to check if our friend is there.”

  “Oh,” he said, and headed toward Lower Wacker, an underground street which gets you there fast, past Billy Goat Tavern and Tribune Tower, where gleaming white trucks were being loaded with the morning edition. We glided along the Chicago River, following the curving street at fairly high speeds, then we burst from underground onto the expressway. As the lights of other traffic flooded into the car, I noticed that Ed was wearing sunglasses. It was a fairly warm April evening for Chicago, and he had a window open so the wind blew in his face. Romona’s hair was pulled tight in a bun, which made her look tough and mannish, and Barbara sat between them, thin and nervous. I was in front with the driver.

  “How come the sunglasses, Ed?”

  “Car lights,” he said.

  “The legend continues,” I said.

  At Ashland the driver got off the Eisenhower and turned back onto Harrison. Near the hospital, he turned down a side street in front of a building that was old and dark. There was a single light above the door, and one of the two doors was open, so you could see inside.

  “Can you wait for us?” I asked the driver.

  “No, thanks,” he said, “I got fares to catch.” Each of us chipped in a dollar, and he was on his way.

  The attendant was a black man in his thirties who didn’t have a uniform. He had on a rust-and-tan striped shirt and wore glasses. There was an open book on the counter that looked like an accounting text. He must have been a student working the midnight shift.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “We’re looking for a friend who may be here,” Barbara said. “We haven’t heard from him for several days.”

  “You think he might have been run over or something?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Maybe he was run over.”

  She turned and looked at us. Maybe it had happened that way. Or he had been mugged.

  Barbara gave the attendant the name of Martin Baum and he checked the records for the last two weeks. There was no one by that name, but they had several bodies that were unidentified. We were free to look at them.

  We walked down a flight of wide stairs and through a couple of doors. Now we were in the morgue itself, a long gallery that was surprisingly well lighted. The old wood trim, the table in the middle of the room, and even the design of the ceiling lights gave the impression of grace. It wasn’t cold and depressing like the small one at Metropolitan; it reminded me of a library basement—old, a little musty, but not scary.

  They didn’t have books on the slabs, however. We looked at the bodies of two white men, and neither was Martin. They were derelicts—old and puffy, with partial growths of beard. The attendant said he had one more possibility, and asked us to follow him almost to the end of the gallery. There he pulled out another slab, and we gasped when we saw the body. It was a younger white man whose throat had been cut. The head was tilted back, so the wound opened like a mouth, and the mouth itself was stuffed with gauze. Barbara turned away in shock when she saw him, and even Romona seemed shaken.

  Ed had removed his sunglasses at the front door. Now that our business was done, he asked a few professional questions of the attendant, like how many bodies they could accommodate, who did the autopsies, and what they did with the bodies after they were done. The attendant hadn’t heard of Princetti’s, the funeral home Ed stood to inherit, but he accepted his business card and slipped it into his pocket. Romona was strangely silent, but once we were back upstairs she came to life again.

  “Let’s all go to Janie’s,” she said. “We’re gonna need a drink after this.”

  We called a cab, which, to our surprise, came right away. It was the same driver as before, and he asked us how it had gone. The voluble Ed told him all about it, sitting in front with his sunglasses on. The three of us sat in the back, glad to be gliding down the expressway into the heart of the city. We asked the driver not to take Lower Wacker back, for the sake of our spirits, and I put my arm around Barbara, to Romona’s motherly pleasure. Soon we were inside Janie’s sitting at the bar. Roark was nowhere in sight, but Tony served us countless drinks. No one was singing tonight, and the place was nearly empty.

  It wasn’t until Barbara and I got to her place that she told me about her and Martin. They had been dating, she said, and she thought I should know about it.

  “You mean you’ve been sleeping with him?” I asked.

  “Well…,” she said shyly, looking down at her fingers.

  “I don’t believe you’ve slept with him.”

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t I?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Martin’s slept with anybody. He’s just too weird somehow.”

  “Holder,” she said after pause, “I like you a lot, but the truth is, Martin and I have slept together. He’s very sweet, really.”

  My ego went down like a dynamited building. Each brick of this building had a weight and a dust of its own.

  “I don’t know what to say, Barbara.” I walked around in a circle like I’d dropped something near my feet, then I faced her again. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because what if he’s dead? What if it’s my fault?”

  “You think he committed suicide? If he has, it’s Schopenhauer’s fault, not yours. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m consoling you. I’m the one who should be upset.”

  “What if I told you we slept together but never had sex?” she said.

  “I’d say you both were crazy.”

  We touched each other at the same time, and the result should have been on film. We stripped off our clothes while standing and left a trail of them down the hall to the bedroom. In bed, we kissed and twisted and clawed, as if we wanted to hurt and heal at the same time. But for what our love-making lacked in mental health, it made up in gymnastics.

  “Too bad we can’t tell our grandchildren about this,” I said when we were done.

  “You can tell yours,” she said. She got up on her elbow and touched my mouth with a finger. Pretty soon we fell asleep.

  At four in the morning, I woke up with a start, put on my clothes, and sneaked out of Barbara’s apartment. There seemed no point to leaving a note, and I felt better sleeping in my own bed, in the small room next to the kitchen.

  A week later we got the news that Martin was dead. He’d taken several containers of pills with Metropolitan Hospital labels. The police lieutenant told Gary Janush that he’d apparently taken whatever he had on hand: Valium, codeine #3, Seconal, Tuinal, and a bottle of aspirin. The body had been lying on the bed the whole time, and it wasn’t in very good shape. Martin’s roommate, a salesman for a printing company, had been out of town for a week and a half, and found the body when he returned. The radio was tuned to WLS, the top 40 station, and it was playing loud. The neighbors had complained about the loud rock music, but the management failed to look very far into the matter. All around Martin’s bed, hundreds of books lay open, and he was fully dressed, as if for a dinner party. A high-powered telescope, fixed on a tripod, was focused on a window in the building across the street, and in a closet o
ne of the detectives found a cache of pistols. There was no suicide note.

  The funeral was in his hometown of Mickle, Illinois, about three hours south of Chicago. Mickle was mostly a farming community with a downtown consisting of a hardware store, a small bank, and a couple of service stations. It was one of those quiet places where you’re aware of the trees, and the grass looks extra green, but while a few of the old buildings were nice, most of the new were ugly, made of green fiber glass and whatever else was cheap. The IGA was made of concrete blocks, and a few muddy trucks and cars were parked in front of it. One of the town’s distinctions, I’d read in the Chicago papers, was being the site of one of the earliest nuclear plants in Illinois. It was just outside town, on the Mickle River, and there were reports of a high leukemia incidence downriver, especially among children.

  Barbara and I got a ride to the funeral from Gary Janush himself. He wore his best blue suit and looked shaken by Martin’s death, even now, three days after the news. We didn’t say much on the way downstate. Barbara was in a quiet mood and had dark circles under her eyes. She’d taken up smoking again, and would light up every few miles. There was some small talk about work, and we gossiped about Romona, Ed, and others on the evening shift. We didn’t see Janush that much. He always went home as soon as he could, to spend time with his family. His son, he said, was in a Pop Warner league, learning not to cry when he was tackled.

  At the edge of Mickle, we stopped for a bite to eat at a place called The Country Kitchen. There were gingham curtains in the windows, but the food was industrial strength. Barbara had a hamburger, which is usually pretty safe, and I had fried chicken, which was rubbery and tasteless. Janush seemed to like his chicken-fried steak. He ate with the fork in his left hand, the knife in his right.

  “European style,” he said, holding up his utensils.

  “Don’t drink the water,” I said to Barbara as she held the glass to her mouth.