Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Herzl is really on a roll now. “Why did you take all your clothes off and walk through the gallery, Mr. Caragan? Did you think you would frighten people with your penis? Do you think it is menacing?”

  “Because I’m crazy,” I say. “Because I thought Life should imitate Art.”

  The hospital is silent at night. Nothing like I would have imagined – no dim cries, or the muffled sounds of sleepers dreaming bad dreams. Everyone has sunk into the opaque slumber of the correctly dosed and medicated. Except me. I hide my pills under my tongue and make a magnificent show of swallowing.

  I hear the night-duty nurse go by. The moon is so bright tonight, so full and white and gleaming, that I can write my fifth letter to Dr. Herzl without showing a light under my door and risking detection at three o’clock in the morning.

  On my shaky plastic desk my books are piled. I have Herzen, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Lermontov, Soloviev, Leontiev, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Rozanov to keep me company in exile. Day by day I feel a little of my guilt subside as I share her sentence. Like her father, Cynthia sleeps in an institution.

  The people who care for her tell me she doesn’t remember me from visit to visit. That is why Miriam never goes to visit the child. It is pointless, she says. Cynthia is profoundly retarded, and nothing will ever change that. I refuse to feel guilt.

  But my daughter is four years old now. She is no longer a baby. She must remember me.

  And whenever I look into her wise, calm eyes set like stones in their Asiatic folds, I sense the grandeur of Russia, the infinite, colossal steppes sleeping there.

  A Taste for Perfection

  “A NEW FACE,” said Albert the orderly in a dispirited voice. He had spent twenty years in the navy, had his nose broken twice and his arms covered with an ornate green scrollwork of tattoos. That, a pension, and some bad memories were all he had to show for it. Now, much to his despair, he was an orderly in a hospital. He lingered by the bed and rustled the pages on his clipboard officiously. “Mr. Ogle? Is that it?” he said, concentrating on a sheet.

  “Yes, that’s right. Tom Ogle.”

  “B.M. this A.M.?” inquired Albert, his pen poised above the clipboard.

  “I’m sorry,” Ogle said, confused, unsure whether to trust his ears or not. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “B.M.,” said Albert, tapping the pen on his metal watch-band. Click. Click. Click. “B.M., B.M.,” he said impatiently.

  “Bowel movement,” translated Morissey, the patient in the next bed. He was a rack of bones and loose skin moored to the narrow bed by transparent tubing stuck in his veins. Looking at him, Ogle estimated he couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Morissey stared back with the saucer eyes of a famine victim glittering in his wizened face. His dentures slipped and cracked on shrunken gums. “Bowel movement, he means,” Morissey repeated, sawing the air inappropriately with a bony hand whose nails were as yellow and ridged as a chicken’s feet. “He’s asking if you had a shit this morning.”

  “No,” said Ogle, turning back to Albert, “I didn’t.”

  Albert made a mark on the sheet and went out.

  “I don’t like that son of a bitch,” said Morissey in a stage whisper that could have been heard in the next room. “He’s rough – got no consideration. You should see the bastard put in a catheter. You’d think he was shoving a meat thermometer into a roast of beef. Jesus.” He considered for a moment. “The other one though – David – he’s okay.” He paused. “He’s a Jew.”

  “Yeah?” said Ogle.

  “Imagine,” said Morissey, “a Jew working in a hospital who ain’t a doctor.”

  David the orderly, the bedpan-fetcher. David the polymath, whose mind was a blizzard of equations, snippets of verse from Heine and Browning, contending languages, and line scores from yesterday’s baseball games. Perhaps as a consequence of the perpetual storm of information blowing in his head, he dropped urine specimens, upset trays, and generally careened recklessly among the beds.

  But if his hands had no aptitude for graduated cylinders and bedpans, his own private tragedies and melancholy lent them gentleness whenever they came in contact with flesh. A refugee of post-war Europe, David had shunted through eight different countries, and finally, as Ogle later came to imagine, collapsed of nervous exhaustion in Canada. A cousin had drawn him to Saskatchewan, and now, marooned in the midst of the prairies, he yearned for the ancient sun-baked stones of Jerusalem, the oranges of Jaffa, the lithe and saucy sabras packing firearms.

  Ultimately, however, his courage failed him and he never packed and left. No one in the hospital was sure why. People speculated that he sensed that the reality could never equal the bounty, the splendour, the milk and honey of the land of Canaan that he imagined. Better to be here, dreaming, than there, disillusioned.

  “Yeah, David’s okay,” said Morissey. “Better than most, and believe me, I know them all. Everybody. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, aides. I should. I been here six months; ever since January three. I’m a regular. Seen three guys die in that bed,” he said primly. “That’s why I got a policy of not getting too friendly.” He paused meaningfully. “With nobody.”

  He extricated his arm from a loop of intravenous tubing and turned over on his side, his back to Ogle. “Jesus,” he said tiredly, staring out at the ragged green of the trees tearing the sunlight before it struck the lawn, and watching the clouds shred in the wind, “another day, another dollar. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

  Ogle, who had been brought in the night before, after collapsing at work, felt panic strumming in his gut. His throat pinched and he felt damp invade his groin and slide down his spine into the small of his back.

  “The doctors,” he said, holding his voice steady, treading carefully the tightrope of his anxiety, “when do they make their rounds? When will I see my doctor?”

  “Don’t get your shit in a knot,” Morissey replied. “In here you learn to wait. If your doctor is anything like the rest, he’ll come when it suits. But don’t start thinking about getting shut of this place in a hurry. They don’t put nobody on this ward for a tune-up.” And he snapped his false teeth in anger at the very idea.

  Morissey was right. Ogle’s doctor made infrequent appearances when it suited him. Nevertheless, Ogle spent the mornings perched on the edge of his bed while the doctors made their rounds, keeping a sharp watch and scrutinizing the hallways, daring to hope Dr. Bartlett would make an appearance, and, with the utterance of an incomprehensible medical term and a flourish of his healer’s hand, dispel, like a necromancer, the terrible sentence of uncertainty. But four days of this and a battery of alternately painful, humiliating, and exhausting tests taught Ogle the rudiments of resignation. He was made aware also of something else.

  Ogle was young – not yet thirty – and had never considered the ills to which the flesh is heir. He was not yet acquainted with sorrow and grief. But sitting on the edge of his bed he was introduced to the uninterrupted parade of disease and infirmity that crept and wheeled past his doorway. The participants in this cavalcade lurched by on canes, supported themselves against walls, tottered along clinging to the arms of nurses, rolled briskly past, pushed by orderlies. Senile old ladies with inquisitive, darting eyes and flickering vipers’ tongues cried out for babies they had borne half a century before, their hair as white, startled, and on-end as a dandelion gone to seed. A victim of kidney disease rolled by, his mind overwhelmed by the poisons his body could no longer eliminate, calmly and silently smiling to himself, his monstrously swollen leg supported on a sheepskin and ripening to a shiny, mottled-purple iridescence. A coronary patient took his first post-convalescent, tremulous steps, his face vibrant with fear and his bathrobe fallen open to display a livid blue scar on his chest. A diabetic who had lost a leg to gangrene swung by on crutches, his face grey and wrinkled with anxiety and concentration.

  And as Ogle watched them troop by, he wrung his wet palms together and shuffled his cold feet in his
slippers. There was little else to do. There were no visitors to relieve the monotony because Ogle had never troubled to make friends. He was an essentially shy man who had early learned to disguise his timidity with rancour, and who had, given time and practice, transformed his mouth into a cynical gash in what otherwise would have been an open and frank face. He had the neurotic’s partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular. Most people didn’t care for his desperate, crabbed views. Of course, the people from the office had felt obligated to send him a get-well card and flowers (they couldn’t ignore him; he had keeled over at their feet), but no one had troubled to visit him.

  His days were spent waiting, being directed here and there, from X-ray to lab, from pillar to post. He dozed and ate and lived the elemental life of a prisoner, shaving with an exactitude that could never be duplicated outside the walls of the hospital, moving his bowels with the patience of Job, brushing each tooth many times over. He murdered each day minute by minute.

  When night came he found he couldn’t sleep. He hid this fact from the nurses to avoid medication. His only previous experience with sleeping-pills had left him with the feeling that he was toppling blindly into a grave.

  By ten o’clock every night Morissey was dead to the world, enjoying, Ogle imagined, the dreamless sleep of the blessed. By eleven the ward came alive with the sounds of night terrors. The dying made broken cries; those made bitter by pain piped complaints to the staff in querulous voices. A stroke victim, never seen but much discussed by Morissey, tunelessly struck up “God Save the Queen” to ring down the curtain on the day, and a senile clergyman across the hall began a litany of blasphemies triggered out of his subconscious by a plaque-clogged artery in the brain.

  During the course of a night Ogle slept by moments, but woke often with a start that jerked him upright in bed, shivering. His fingers trembled as he scrubbed his face and squeezed his eyelids tight. And every night at three o’clock he smelled the coffee percolating at the nurses’ station as they took their shift break. By association, that aroma awakened another hunger. Ogle was prompted to swing his legs out of bed, pull open the drawer of his night table and take out a cigarette and matches. Then, his bare feet sticking to the linoleum, he padded across the room to the can, carefully skirted the foot of Morissey’s bed, and paused for a moment at the window to look out on the city.

  He was always surprised and a little exalted by the number of lighted windows burning so bravely in the night. What did they signify? A sick child? A tired domestic dispute lengthening, with tears and recriminations, past resolve? A happy, drunken party? A couple achingly grinding out the night’s last session of love? He never speculated for long, but took a little comfort from those terrestrial, temporal stars in the night.

  The sudden glare of the light in the bathroom glancing off rubbed enamel and spanking bright tiles hurt his eyes. The place smelled of antiseptic and somebody else’s turds.

  Ogle examined his face in the mirror over the sink. It seemed to him that the left side of his face had altered, although he couldn’t be sure. There was a sensual droop to the eyelid, and the corner of his mouth felt a little slack and lacking in decision. He flexed the fingers of his left hand and made a weak fist; he felt faint.

  He sat down on the toilet seat, lit his cigarette, entwined his long legs about one another and meditatively scratched his shin. All he wanted now was four ounces of Scotch, neat. That would make this an occasion. The cigarette smoke hovered around his head, a blue nimbus.

  “A drink, a drink,” he declaimed to the opposite wall, hoisting an imaginary glass, “my sterile, christly kingdom for a drink.” Ogle attempted a suitably ironic smile but the stiff, resisting muscles of his face informed him he had failed and produced only a grimace. There is something radically wrong here, he thought.

  On the other side of the door, Morissey spoke indistinctly to a character in his dreams.

  “Die in your sleep, you old prick,” Ogle answered him. It had been brewing for some time. Ogle believed he hated his doctor. Dr. Bartlett didn’t care for Ogle’s attitude.

  It might have had to do with the similarity in their ages. They had rubbed up against some of the same experiences, but had been weathered into very different shapes. Ogle, for all his cynicism, had carried placards denouncing the Vietnamese war and occupied a corporate recruiting office. He was sure Bartlett was the type who had watched these kinds of proceedings aloofly from a dormitory window. And convictions had had nothing to do with it.

  Ogle had retained his pony-tail until economic necessity of the direst kind had forced him to relinquish it. Bartlett, with his unformed face of shaded planes, had attempted to distinguish and hearten a moist, indistinct mouth with a twitch of coppery hair on his upper lip. Ogle was convinced that growing it was the bravest thing Bartlett had ever done.

  So, on the morning of the seventh day of his hospital stay, Ogle was waiting for Bartlett with the Gideon Bible resting open on his lap. He had taken to skimming it when all else failed to relieve his boredom. He had come across and marked a passage in 2 Chronicles with Bartlett in mind.

  At about ten o’clock Bartlett stuck his head around the door jamb. “Good morning,” he said, “I thought I’d just pop in on you for a minute.” Popping in was the word for it.

  “Good morning,” said Ogle.

  “Keeping busy, I see,” said Bartlett professionally, indicating the Bible.

  “Nothing like ‘The Good Book’,” said Ogle, smiting the cover.

  Bartlett, who was never sure when Ogle was pulling his leg, yet loath to offend religious sensibilities, said, “I suppose so.”

  “Take this here,” said Ogle, clearing his throat. “ ‘And Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers…’ What do you make of that, Doc?” said Ogle, feigning naivete.

  “Very amusing, Mr. Ogle,” said Bartlett stiffly, removing a pen-light from his shirt pocket. He drew the blind at the window and went to work. “Follow the light, please,” he said, bending over Ogle and breathing a gust of warm Sen-Sen into his face. Ogle chased the light until his eye ached. “The other now. Very good. Thank you.” Bartlett snapped off the light.

  “Gazing in the windows of the soul. And what did we see?” Ogle said glibly.

  Bartlett extended a stubby hand with square, pink nails. “Squeeze my hand, please. Right first. Fine. Now the left.”

  Ogle bore down with his left hand and felt a stain of weakness radiate from his shoulder and lodge under his rib cage. His heart caught the contagion and began to drum. He shrugged apologetically to the doctor. “Not enough breakfast, I guess,” he said, visibly discomfited.

  “Yes,” said Bartlett. “No better, eh? What about the dizzy spells? Any more faintness, weakness?”

  “No,” lied Ogle.

  “Please stand up,” said Bartlett. His square, strong hands pushed at Ogle’s shoulders, attempting to throw them back into a military posture. “Heels together, hands at your side. Good. Good.” He paused. “Now close your eyes.”

  “No tricks now, Doctor.”

  “Close your eyes, please.”

  He did. Something whirled in his head with crazy, wrenching speed, like a flywheel torn loose. His eyes sprang open in time to see the bed rush into his face. A muffled blow of mattress, pillows, bedclothes, and he was breathless, face down on the bed.

  “Oh, how the mighty are brought low,” he said in a choked voice.

  “You’re all right, aren’t you?” said Bartlett with some concern. “I tried to catch you, but you went down too quickly.”

  Ogle turned over on his back and flung his forearm across his eyes. What is this? he asked himself. What is wrong with me?

  “Yeah. Just fine. Hunky-dory.”

  “Well
now, about dizzy spells…”

  “I told a fib. Gee whiz, but I’m an incorrigible fibber.”

  “So you have had more?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish you would show a little more confidence in me. It would make things easier. I can’t diagnose without your help.”

  “You’ve got it,” said Ogle. “So what is your diagnosis?”

  “Be patient. I know it’s difficult, but I’d like to do another series of tests. The last ones weren’t conclusive.”

  Ogle tangled his legs in the sheets in frustration. His voice, ground to an edge against the whetstone of exasperation, was sharp, high, keen. “You have an idea. Give me an idea of what you think.”

  Bartlett shot his cuffs once or twice. “I don’t think there would be any point to that. I might have to retract it. I wouldn’t want to raise – or dash – your hopes.”

  “Hey, the last time I looked you were human. The first mistake is on me and no complaints.”

  “I have no intention of saying anything,” said Bartlett with more firmness than Ogle had thought him capable of.

  “Look then, Doctor,” said Ogle, bargaining. “Leave a pass for me at the desk. I’m going crazy here. This place is driving me crazy.” There it was. An undercurrent of fear, even mild hysteria, in his voice. They’re like dogs, he thought. They can smell it. “If I could get out for a walk on the grounds… maybe I’d feel better. I wouldn’t be so jumpy.”

  Bartlett caught his wheedling tone, sensed the desperation, and immediately recovered his equanimity. He had something this person wanted.

  “Do you have someone to accompany you? A friend or relative?”

  “No. I don’t need someone to accompany me. I don’t need training wheels. I just want to get out of here for a while. This place is getting to me.”