Night Train

by Thom Jones

  Some other guy comes in with this awful burn because a pressure cooker exploded in his face, and he’s got this receding hairline, and you can see the way the skin is peeled back—poached-looking. The guy’s going to need a hairpiece for sure. A doctor comes out eating a sandwich, and I hear him tell the nurse to set up an I.V. line and start running some Dilaudid for the guy, which he deserves, considering. I would like some for my thumb, but all I get is Novocain, and my doctor says, “You aren’t going to get woozy on me, are you?” I tell him no, I’m not like that, but I have another problem, and he says, “What’s that?” and I tell him I can’t jack off left-handed. Everybody laughs, because it’s the graveyard shift, when that kind of joke is appropriate—even in mixed company. Plus, it’s true.

  After he stitches me up, I’m in no pain, although I say, “I’ll bet this is going to hurt tomorrow,” and he says no, he’ll give me some pain medication, and I’m thinking, What a great doctor. He’s giving me pain medication. And while he’s in a giving mood I hit him up for some prostate antibiotics because my left testicle feels very heavy.

  “Your left testicle feels heavy?” he says skeptically.

  Yeah, every guy gets it, shit; I tell him my left nut feels like an anvil. I mean, I want to cradle it in my hand when I’m out and about, or rest it on a little silk pillow when I’m stationary. It doesn’t really hurt, but I’m very much conscious of having a left testicle, whereas I have teeth and a belly button and a right testicle and I don’t even know. I tell him I don’t want a finger wave, because I’ve been through this a thousand times. My prostate is backing up into the seminal vesicles, and if you don’t jerk off it builds up and gets worse, and the doctor agrees—that does happen, and he doesn’t really want to give me a finger wave, especially when I tell him that a urologist checked it out a couple of months back. He puts on a plastic glove and feels my testicle, pronounces it swollen, and writes a script for antibiotics, after which he tells me to quit drinking coffee. I was going to tell him that I don’t jerk off because I’m a sex fiend; I have low sex drive, and it’s actually not that much fun. I just do it to keep the prostate empty. Or should I tell him I’m a doctor myself, albeit defrocked, that I just got back from Africa and my nut could be infected with elephantiasis? Highly unlikely, but you never know. But he won’t know diddle about tropical medicine—that’s my department, and I decide I will just shut my mouth, which is a first for me.

  The duty nurse is pretty good-looking, and she contradicts the doctor’s orders—gives me a cup of coffee anyhow, plus a roll, and we’re sitting there quietly, listening to the other doctor and a nurse fixing the guy with the burned forehead. A little human interaction is taking place and my depression is gone as I begin to feel sorry for the guy with the burn, who is explaining that he was up late with insomnia cooking sweet potatoes when the pressure cooker blew. He was going to candy them with brown sugar and eat them at six in the morning and he’s laughing, too, because of the Dilaudid drip. After Linda Ronstadt sings “Just One Look” on the radio, the announcer comes on and says that we’ve set a record for cold—it’s thirteen and a half below at the airport—and I notice that the announcer is happy, too; there’s a kind of solidarity that occurs when suffering is inflicted on the community by nature.

  My own thing is the Vincent van Gogh effect. I read where he “felt like a million” after he cut off his ear. It only lasted for a couple of days. They always show you the series of four self-portraits that he painted at different times in his life as his mental condition went progressively downhill. Van Gogh One is a realistic-looking pic, but as life goes on and his madness gets worse he paints Van Gogh Four and it looks as though he’s been doing some kind of bad LSD, which is how the world had been looking to me until I cut my thumb. It gave me a three-day respite from the blues, and clarity came into my life, and I have to remind myself by writing this down that all the bad stuff does pass if you can wait it out. You forget when you’re in the middle of it, so during that three-day break I slapped this note on the refrigerator door: “Richard, you are a good and loving person, and all the bad stuff does pass, so remember that the next time you get down and think that you’ve always been down and always will be down, since that’s paranoia and it gets you nowhere. You’re just in one of your Fyodor Dostoyevsky moods—do yourself a favor and forget it!”

  I felt so good I actually had the nerve to go out and buy a new set of clothes and see a movie, and then, on the last day before the depression came back, I drove out to Western State and checked my baby sister, Susan, out for a day trip. Susan was always a lot worse than me; she heard voices and pulled I don’t know how many suicide attempts until she took my squirrel pistol and put a .22 long-rifle slug through the temple—not really the temple, because at the last minute you always flinch, but forward of the temple, and it was the most perfect lobotomy. I remember hearing the gun pop and how she came into my room (I was home from college for the summer) and said, “Richard, I just shot myself, how come I’m not dead?” Her voice was calm instead of the usual fingernails-on-the-chalkboard voice, the when-she-was-crazy (which was almost always) voice, and I realized later that she was instantly cured, the very moment the bullet zipped through her brain. Everyone said it was such a shame because she was so beautiful, but what good are looks if you are in hell? And she let her looks go at the hospital because she really didn’t have a care in the world, but she was still probably the most beautiful patient at Western State. I had a fresh occasion to worry about her on this trip when I saw an attendant rough-handling an old man to stop him from whining, which it did. She’d go along with anything, and she had no advocate except me. And then I almost regretted going out there, in spite of my do-good mood, because Susan wanted to go to the Point Defiance Zoo to see Cindy, the elephant that was on the news after they transferred the attendant who took care of her, for defying orders and actually going into the elephant pen on the sly to be her friend.

  There are seven hundred elephants in North American zoos, and although Cindy is an Asian elephant and a female and small, she is still considered the most dangerous elephant in America. Last year alone, three people were killed by elephants in the United States, and this is what Susan had seen and heard on the color television in the ward dayroom, and she’s like a child—she wants to go out and see an elephant when it’s ten below zero. They originally had Cindy clamped up in a pen tighter than the one they’ve got John Gotti in down in Marion, Illinois, and I don’t remember that the catalogue of Cindy’s crimes included human murder. She was just a general troublemaker, and they were beating her with a two-by-four when some animal activist reported it and there was a big scandal that ended with Cindy getting shipped down to the San Diego Zoo; I think there was some kind of escape (don’t quote me on that) where Cindy was running around on a golf course in between moves, and then a capture involving tranquilizer darts, and when they couldn’t control Cindy in San Diego they shipped her back up here to Tacoma and put her in maximum-security confinement. It was pretty awful. I told Susan that over in India Cindy would have a job hauling logs or something, and there would be an elephant boy to scrub her down at night with a big brush while she lay in the river, and the elephant boy would be with her at all times, her constant companion. Actually, the elephant would be more important than the boy, I told her, and that’s how you should handle an elephant in America—import an experienced elephant boy for each one, give the kids a green card, pay them a lot of overtime, and have them stay with the elephants around the clock. You know, quality time. How could you blame Cindy for all the shit she pulled? And in the middle of this, Susan has a tear floating off her cheek and I don’t know if it’s a tear caused by the cold or if she was touched by Cindy’s plight. The reason they sent my sister to the nuthouse was that you could light a fire on the floor in front of her and she would just sit there and watch it burn. When our parents died, I took her to my place in Washington state and hired helpers to look after her, but they would always
quit—quit while I was over in the Third World, where it’s impossible to do anything. It was like, Meanwhile, back in the jungle/Meanwhile, back in the States…Apart from her lack of affect, Susan was always logical and made perfect sense. She was kind of like a Mr. Spock who just didn’t give a shit anymore except when it came to childish fun and games. All bundled up, with a scarf over her ears, in her innocence she looked like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront.

  We drove over to Nordstrom’s in the University District and I bought Suz some new threads and then took her to a hair salon where she got this chic haircut, and she was looking so good that I almost regretted it, ’cause if those wacked-out freaks at the hospital weren’t hitting on her before they would be now. It was starting to get dark and time to head back when Susan spots the Space Needle from I-5—she’s never been there, so I took her to the top and she wandered outside to the observation deck, where the wind was a walking razor blade at five hundred and eighteen feet, but Susan is grooving on the lights of Seattle and with her homemade lobotomy doesn’t experience pain in quite the way a normal person does, and I want her to have a little fun, but I’m freezing out there, especially my thumb, which ached. I didn’t want to pop back inside in the sheltered part and leave her out there, though, because she might want to pitch herself over the side. I mean, they’ve got safety nets, but what if she’s still got some vestige of a death wish? We had dinner in the revolving dining room, and people were looking at us funny because of Susan’s eating habits, which deteriorate when you live in a nuthouse, but we got through that and went back to my place to watch TV, and after that I was glad to go to sleep—but I couldn’t sleep because of my thumb. I was thinking I still hadn’t cashed in the script for the pain pills when Susan comes into my bedroom naked and sits down on the edge of the bed.

  “Ever since I’ve been shot, I feel like those animals in the zoo. I want to set them free,” she says, in a remarkable display of insight, since that scar in her frontal lobes has got more steel bars than all the prisons of the world, and, as a rule, folks with frontal-lobe damage don’t have much insight. I get her to put on her pajamas, and I remember what it used to be like when she stayed at home—you always had to have someone watching her—and I wished I had gotten her back to the hospital that very night, because she was up prowling, and suddenly all my good feelings of the past few days were gone. I felt crappy, but I had to stay vigilant while my baby sister was tripping around the house with this bullet-induced, jocular euphoria.

  At one point she went outside barefoot. Later I found her eating a cube of butter. Then she took out all the canned foods in my larder and stacked them up—Progresso black beans (beaucoup), beef-barley soup, and canned carrot juice—playing supermarket. I tell her, “Mrs. Ma’am, I’ll take one of those, and one of those, and have you got any peachy pie?”

  She says, “I’m sorry, Richard, we haven’t got any peachy pie.”

  “But, baby, I would sure like a nice big piece of peachy pie, heated up, and some vanilla ice cream with some rum sauce and maybe something along the lines of a maraschino cherry to put on the top for a little garnish. Nutmeg would do. Or are you telling me this is just a soup, beans, and carrot-juice joint? Is that all you got here?”

  “Yes, Richard. Just soup and beans. They’re very filling, though.”

  “Ahhm gonna have to call Betty Crocker, ’cause I’m in the mood for some pie, darlin’.”

  Suzie looks at me sort of worried and says that she thinks Betty Crocker is dead. Fuck. I realized I just had to sit on the couch and watch her, and this goes on and on, and of course I think I hear someone crashing around in the yard, so I get my .357 out from under my pillow and walk around the perimeter of the house, my feet crunching on the frozen snow. There was nobody out there. Back inside I checked on Susan, who was asleep in my bed. When I finally saw the rising of the sun and heard birds chirping to greet the new day, I went to the refrigerator, where I saw my recent affirmation: “Richard, you are a good and loving person,” etc. I ripped it off the refrigerator and tore it into a thousand tiny pieces. Only an idiot would write something like that. It was like, I can’t hack it in Africa, can’t hack it at home—all I can hack is dead. So I took all the bullets out of the .357 except one, spun the chamber, placed the barrel against my right temple, and squeezed the trigger. When I heard the click of the hammer—voilà! I instantly felt better. My thumb quit throbbing. My stomach did not burn. The dread of morning and of sunlight had vanished, and I saw the dawn as something good, the birdsong wonderful. Even the obscure, take-it-for-granted objects in my house—the little knickknacks covered in an inch of dust, a simple wooden chair, my morning coffee cup drying upside down on the drainboard—seemed so relevant, so alive and necessary. I was glad for life and glad to be alive, especially when I looked down at the gun and saw that my bullet had rotated to the firing chamber. The Van Gogh effect again. I was back from Van Gogh Four to Van Gogh One.

  They’re calling from the hospital, because I kept Susan overnight: “Where is Susan?” “She’s watching Days of Our Lives,” I say as I shove the .357 into a top drawer next to the phone book. “Is she taking her Stelazine?” “Yes,” I say. “Absolutely. Thanks for your concern. Now, goodbye!”

  Just then the doorbell rings, and what I’ve got is a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ve seen enough of them on the Dark Continent to overcome an instinctive dread, since they seem to be genuinely content, proportionately—like, if you measured a bunch of them against the general population they are very happy people, and so pretty soon we’re drinking Sanka and Susan comes out and they are talking about Christ’s Kingdom on Earth where the lion lies down with the lamb, and Susan buys every word of it, ’cause it’s like that line “Unless they come to me as little children…” Susan is totally guileless and the two Witnesses are without much guile, and I, the king of agnostics, listen and think, How’s a lion going to eat straw? It’s got a G.I. system designed to consume flesh, bones, and viscera—it’s got sharp teeth, claws, and predatory instincts, not twenty-seven stomachs, like some bovine Bossie the Cow or whatever. And while I’m paging through a copy of Awake!, I see a little article from the correspondent in Nigeria entitled “The Guinea Worm—Its Final Days.” As a doctor of tropical medicine, I probably know more about Dracunculus medinensis, the “fiery serpent,” or Guinea worm, than anyone in the country. Infection follows ingestion of water containing crustacea (Cyclops). The worms penetrate the gut wall and mature in the retroperitoneal space, where they can grow three feet in length, and then generally migrate to the lower legs, where they form a painful blister. What the Africans do is burst the ulcer and extract the adult worm by hooking a stick under it and ever so gently tugging it out, since if you break it off the dead body can become septic and the leg might have to be removed. The pain of the Guinea worm is on a par with the pain of gout, and it can take ten days to nudge one out. The bad part is they usually come not in singles but in multiples. I’ve seen seven come out of an old man’s leg.

  If and when Global Aid sends me back to Africa, I will help continue the worm-eradication program, and as the Witnesses delight Susan with tales of a Heaven on Earth I’m thinking of the heat and the bugs in the equatorial zone, and the muddy water that the villagers take from rivers—they pour it in jugs and let the sediment settle for an hour and then dip from the top, where it looks sort of clean; it’s hard to get through to them that Cyclops crustacea may be floating about invisibly and one swallow could get you seven worms, a swallow you took three years ago. You can talk to the villagers until you’re blue in the face and they’ll drink it anyhow. So you have to poison the Cyclops without over-poisoning the water. I mean, it can be done, but, given the way things work over there, you have to do everything yourself if you want it done right, which is why I hate the idea of going back: you have to come on like a one-man band.

  On the other hand, Brother Bogue and the other brothers in the home office of Global Aid don’t trust me; they don’t l
ike it when I come into the office irrepressibly happy, like Maurice Chevalier in his tuxedo and straw hat—“Jambo jambo, bwana, jambo bonjour!”—and give everyone one of those African soft handshakes, and then maybe do a little turn at seventy-eight revolutions per minute: “Oh, oui oui, it’s delightful for me, walking my baby back home!” or “Hey, ain’t it great, after staying out late? Zangk heffen for leetle gorls.” Etc. They hate it when I’m high and they hate it when I’m low, and they hate it most if I’m feeling crazy/paranoid and come in and say, “You won’t believe what happened to me now!” To face those humorless brothers every day and stay forever in a job as a medical administrator, to wear a suit and tie and drive I-5 morning and night, to climb under the house and tape those pipes with insulation—you get in the crawl space and the dryer-hose vent is busted and there’s lint up the ass, a time bomb for spontaneous combustion, funny the house hasn’t blown already (and furthermore, no wonder the house is dusty), and, hey, what, carpenter ants, too? When I think of all that: Fair America, I bid you adieu!

  But things are basically looking up when I get Suz back to the hospital. As luck has it, I meet an Indian psychiatrist who spent fifteen years in Kampala, Uganda—he was one of the three shrinks in the whole country—and I ask him how Big Daddy Idi Amin is doing. Apparently, he’s doing fine, living in Saudi Arabia with paresis or something, and the next thing you know the doc is telling me he’s going to review Susan’s case file, which means he’s going to put her in a better ward and look out for her, and that’s a load off my mind. Before I go, Suz and I take a little stroll around the spacious hospital grounds—it’s a tranquil place. I can’t help thinking that if Brother Bogue fires me—though I’m determined to behave myself after my latest mishap—I could come here and take Haldol and lithium, watch color TV, and drool. Whatever happened to that deal where you just went off to the hospital for a “little rest,” with no stigma attached? Maybe all I need is some rest.