She is standing at a railing of the esplanade, very still.
He is very still, a little distance away.
Her back is to him yet he is certain that she is a stranger.
Her hair is loose, curly, and tangled partway down her back. Her shoulders are narrow, she is delicate boned, a young woman, a girl who is (he is sure) a stranger to him. She leans forward against the wrought-iron railing, gazing out at the lake in utter stillness.
Light glimmering on the rippled slate-colored water, which seems almost to encase the woman. Or is it moisture in his eyes as he stares, he is so deeply moved …
Is it—her?
Like a clapper inside a bell his heart clamors.
Am I terminal, he’d asked.
Should I have hope? Or—is that ridiculous? Selfish?
Early that morning he’d been awakened by a sharp cramp in the calf muscles of his left leg. Jolted from the comfort of sleep that is his only solace.
When this happens he is stricken with pain in his leg. Furious at being wakened so early.
He has learned to get quickly out of bed, stamp his bare foot on the floor to soothe the cramp. Whimpering to himself like a child; the pain is excruciating.
Lightning-swift pain in his leg that clamps tight. Toes in his foot rigid as claws.
“Jesus!”—rendered helpless, staggering about trying to overcome the cramp.
Within a minute or two the worst of the pain usually fades. Like a rueful afterthought the muscle ache will remain for hours.
Since his evisceration L_____ has longed for sleep—it is his only refuge. Insomniac nights he’d resisted drugs, alcohol. He knows how easy that would be: stepping into the dark water that rises to his knees, his mutilated lower body, over his mouth, nose, eyes. No.
Sleep is L_____’s happiest time even when it’s riddled with turbulent and senseless dreams.
As a boy he’d been a runner. He’d been on the track team of the (local) high school. His leg muscles had cramped then, sometimes. But that was different. A different kind of pain. A shared pain—the other boys on the team had had cramps in their calves too.
Only vaguely he can recall, as you’d recall a dream told to you by another.
If amid the detritus in this house he encounters photographs of that boy—skinny, yearning face; dark, hopeful eyes—he turns quickly away.
“That was my life then. When I had a life.”
But there is no woman. But he is lucky.
No one sharing his bed to be a witness to the way such stabbing pain unmans him, renders him helpless as a child.
What’s a man without pride? Unmanned.
Fact is, he could not bear another knowing of his condition.
He’d told no one. He’d avoided the telling.
Bluntly he’d said to her, No. I don’t love you. It was a misunderstanding.
Doesn’t recall the look on her face; he’d turned away.
And now he has returned to the house of his childhood at Lake Cattaraugus, New York. Even if she knew she would not have dared follow.
Just go away. Leave me. And don’t touch me!—your touch makes me sick.
He has confided in no one—of course. For there is no one.
“Just tell me, Doctor: Am I ‘terminal’?”
He’d been blunt, brave. It had seemed a kind of braveness—bravado. Or possibly he’d been rude.
In fact he had not asked about hope. He had not even thought of hope at that time.
Seething with anger, even as he was shivering in the chilled examination room. He could not bear the indignity, it was the indignity that maddened him, more than the other.
The doctor’s answer was an unhesitating No. You are not “terminal”—not inevitably.
What the doctor meant was that with the proper medical treatment, of course, life is prolonged. Some sort of life is prolonged. After five years (he was told) there is a 65 percent survival rate for individuals in his age group afflicted with this particular cancer.
If the cancer has not metastasized to lymph nodes, other organs, bone. If surgery removes the malignancies. If treatment can be tolerated, which sometimes, even in seemingly healthy and “fit” individuals in his age group, it is not.
Nine months of chemotherapy following the radical surgery—the evisceration.
He does not recall the surgery clearly. Days, weeks immediately following. The relief of being alone, not having to speak of the considerable physical trauma, see its reflection in another’s (concerned, pitying) (repelled?) face.
Grateful then that he hadn’t been married. To be wed to another is to be welded to another and when you are mad to be alone, you do not wish to be either.
So, L_____ is alone with his body. If he is wed, welded to anything it is to this body.
If he examines the ravaged body, still he does not clearly recall. The partially healed shiny-white scar tissue like the configurations of frost on a windowpane, the disfigurement of his lower belly and groin that suggests a playful distortion. A mist has settled over his brain. Very easy to forget, or to misremember. There is mercy in such drifting patches of amnesia.
By day he has become brisk, matter-of fact. In his dealings with others he is hearty seeming, quick to laugh, and quick to cease laughing, inclined to impatience if cashiers, service workers, waiters don’t move fast enough for him.
On the phone he is assertive, his laughter is a kind of barking punctuation. Though he does not—ever—lift the receiver of a ringing phone unless he sees that it is a professional contact who is calling, an editor perhaps. Not the personal but the impersonal is his solace.
By day, when his clothes conceal the mutilation. Very quickly you learn to adjust to the new contours of the body, disguised by ordinary (loose-fitting) clothing. As a person afflicted by joint pain learns to walk with his weight distributed just so—no limp is detected. (Except by the unnaturally sharp eyed or the suspicious. Whom L_____ avoids.)
He is somewhat proud of such adjustments. By day. Deals with himself briskly and matter-of-factly as another might deal with him.
The body he has become.
Shields the colostomy pouch close against his (flat, flaccid) belly beneath his clothes. It is hidden there, it is protected. It has become the most intimate connection of his life like an umbilical cord and this attached to the tiny hole in his stomach, the stoma. An external (plastic) gut, a practical measure, in fact an ingenious solution to having no rectum and only a few meager inches of some five feet of large bowel remaining.
The pouch has to be changed at regular intervals depending upon the uses to which he puts it. (How much he ingests, digests.) If leaking, more often. Carefully remove the old pouch, empty contents into toilet, attach the new. Dispose of the old pouch in an opaque white plastic bag placed carefully inside the dark green trash container to be wheeled out to Road’s End Lane under cover of darkness Thursday nights, for Friday morning pickup by Cattaraugus County sanitation.
His task. He is his own nurse’s aide. He is indentured to himself.
His fingers should have grown deft by now but remain clumsy, shaky, as if shy.
He would laugh, it is funny.
And what is most funny, how L_____’s teenaged self would have recoiled in disbelief and loathing foreseeing such a fate. How once with a ninth-grade friend watching a TV documentary of wounded and disabled Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs L_____ had said with the vehemence of youth if anything like that ever happened to him he would “blow out my brains with a shotgun.”
You don’t, though.
Abashed watchword of the walking wounded—You don’t.
And so it has been a shock to L_____ this morning. Having seen the young woman at the lake.
Having felt for her—something …
She is a stranger, he is certain. No one who has kn
own L_____ or L_____’s family.
The luminous figure. So still!
Elsewhere in the park were teenagers, adults with young children, even a boy with a model airplane droning overhead like a maddened wasp. Their noises did not seem to penetrate the silence that enveloped the young woman; she stood apart from them as if invisible.
Curly, tangled hair partway down her back—very fine, very pale, silvery pale, with a mineral sheen. And wearing what appeared to be a sweater or a wrap of some pale gray cobwebby material. And her white (linen?) skirt long, nearly to her slender ankles, and her bare feet in open-toed sandals, white skinned.
From a little—safe—distance he regarded her.
He was almost waiting to be disillusioned—to see that, yes, this was not a young woman but someone he knew, had gone to school with long ago. Worse yet, the daughter of an old Cattaraugus classmate.
But he did not know her, he was certain. She is new to this place also.
Feeling so strange! Light-headed, dry-mouthed …
That stab of excitement, recognition. It can leave you shaken, faint. An electric current running through the torso to the groin—the vagus nerve.
If the shock is severe, the vagus nerve shuts off blood to the brain; you fall at once in a faint.
Hello—he might (plausibly) have called to her.
Excuse me—he might (plausibly) have approached her.
His heart beats strangely, just to think so!
A shock to him, at his age and in his condition, who has expected to see nothing at Lake Cattaraugus, and to feel nothing.
Hello. Don’t think I have seen you here before …
I used to live in Cattaraugus. Now I’ve returned …
Ridiculous! Such words, faltering, stale, hopeless, and contemptible as deflated party balloons, or stray condoms in the mud at the lakeshore caught amid broken cattails.
Flung after him the cruel female taunt Go away. You are not even a man. Why would I want to speak to you?
* * *
Chloroform is the most pragmatic. Swift, clean, leaves no trace and he knows where to purchase it without being questioned.
Other methods are cruder, clumsier. Within the past several years he has perfected his method.
The primary element is surprise. And, of course, no witnesses.
He has grown deceitful. It is a rare pleasure.
Returning to the family home at Lake Cattaraugus and telling no one who knows him, not relatives in the area, not family friends, old friends from school, long-ago acquaintances.
Returning wounded, and wise in deception. Armed with a “project”—a manuscript of more than one thousand pages that requires his deepest concentration.
The great effort of L_____’s life. L_____’s remaining life.
In the cobblestone house on Road’s End Lane amid a tangle of tall old oak trees he plans (he thinks) to be happy.
For happiness is not fixed but alterable. For some, happiness is the ability to draw a deep breath without recoiling in pain. Happiness is the little stoma that is not reddened and infected but functioning perfectly.
In our small town, however, it is not possible to remain secluded for long. The more you wish to hide from us, the more we wish to seek you out.
Hello? Sorry can’t talk right now.
Yes it’s been years … Will call you back.
Busy time can I call you back.
Yes just for the summer. Thanks but—
Work. No. Don’t think so.
Work. Deadline. September first.
Sorry! Somebody at the door.
Signaling in the very jauntiness of his voice and the vagueness of his words God damn you let me alone will you! I have not returned to my childhood home at the bottom of a fetid lake to squander a moment of my remaining life with any of you.
He is not hiding. He is not one to hide.
Eventually whoever is ringing the bell will go away.
In the wake of the mysterious visitor a scribbled note stuck beneath the door knocker, or a US postal form shoved into the crack of the door, or an advertising flier, or—nothing.
Not a trace! No one.
He is safe from prying eyes. In fact, he is in an upstairs bathroom.
In the midst of changing the plastic pouch attached to the stoma—the little surgical hole in his stomach that bleeds easily, thinly.
Very careful washing hands, sanitizing hands, shaky hands. Very careful positioning the plastic pouch that is soft, malleable as an intestine. And very careful disposing of waste in toilet and used pouch in secure opaque white-plastic bag.
His forty-second birthday is rapidly approaching.
Swiftly and deftly the chloroform-soaked cloth is pressed over hermouth, nose. She fights him bravely, desperately. He will see her eyelids flutter. He will see the light go out in her eyes. But she will not have seen his face.
Within seconds her limbs grow limp.
Surprising heaviness of the limp, slender body as if death is an icy lava flowing into her bones.
Unwittingly, he has trapped several small birds in the garage.
Shutting the slow-sliding overhead door, not realizing the birds are inside.
Cumbersome sliding door that moves—so—very—slowly—you hold your breath expecting it to stop midway.
Frantic birds! He hears their panicked cheeping, the flutter of their small wings. A scrambling sound like mice amid stacks of cardboard cartons piled to the ceiling.
Birds have built nests in the garage. In the rafters.
Quickly he presses the switch to reverse the slow-sliding overhead door but even when it is fully open the panicked birds continue to flutter their wings, throw themselves against unyielding objects, make their cheeping sounds. He can see them overhead, shadowy little shapes, blinded in terror.
“Go on! It’s open! Go.”
Claps his hands. Impatient with the birds too frightened to locate the opened door, and so save themselves.
The garage has three sliding doors. In theory the garage will hold three vehicles.
In fact, the garage is crammed with things. Too many things. L_____ can barely fit his station wagon inside and from now on he won’t bother shutting the door.
The birds have fallen silent but L_____ knows that they haven’t escaped. He presses the switch to cause another of the slow-moving doors to rise, rumbling overhead.
Presses the switch to open the third door.
All three garage doors are open now. Still the interior of the garage feels airless, trapped.
He claps his hands again: “Now go.”
The interior of the garage is crammed with the detritus of his parents’ lives. He has not wanted to see. He has not wanted to feel this sensation of dread, vertigo.
His parents have been dead for seven years (father), and for three years (mother). There is a deadness beyond dead that is pure peace and it is this L_____ wishes for them. He feels grateful that they’ve been spared knowing how their only son has been eviscerated.
They had loved him, he supposes. But love is not enough to keep us from harm.
Now their lives have been stored in the old garage, which had once been a carriage house. In the corners, stacked to the very rafters. Taped-up cardboard boxes, cartons and files of financial records, legal documents, IRS records. Household furnishings—a swivel chair, a floor lamp, an upended mattress. A tall oval mirror shrouded in a gauzy cloth. Neatly folded curtains and drapes, covered in dust. Stacks of books, magazines bound with twine. And there are myriad forgotten things of L_____’s own—bicycles with flat tires, broken wagon, toys. Weights he’d lifted in high school. Tennis rackets. Old skis, snowshoes. Boots. Mud-stiffened running shoes. L_____ feels a twinge of guilt, and a stronger twinge of resentment.
No he will not. He will not sort through these
things.
It is too late. The detritus of the past means nothing to him now.
He stumbles away, back into the empty house. Leaving the small fluttering birds to find their own way out.
Hello! Please come inside.
We won’t stay long. I will just show you—the inside of my life.
The house is locally famous; in fact, it is “historic”—a “landmark” in Cattaraugus County. An architectural oddity composed of cobblestones and mortar, originally built in 1898 with a low, sloping shingled roof above windows like recessed and hooded eyes.
Though Mura House looks large from Road’s End Lane behind a scrim of ravaged trees, the interior is divided into small rooms with small windows emitting a grudging demi-light. Upstate New York with its savage protracted winters, driving snow, subzero temperatures had not been hospitable to a wish for larger windows, scenic views.
Low-beamed ceilings, wood-paneled walls, hardwood floors. Heavy leather furniture, brass andirons.
And oddly named—“Mura House.”
“Why does our house have a name? Nobody else’s house has a stupid name.”
Growing up in Mura House he’d been embarrassed, resentful. At the same time he’d felt a twinge of pride, that the L_____ family house was locally recognized as something out of the ordinary, distinguished by a small oval marker at the stately front door.
He’d asked his parents about the name. He can remember only his mother’s vague explanation—We were told “Mura” might have been the builder’s name. We’ve made inquiries at the historical society …
Except for a glassed-in porch at the rear of the house, constructed in such a way that it is not visible from Road’s End Lane, and except for renovations in kitchen and bathrooms, Mura House has not been substantially altered since 1898. If L_____ wished to remodel the house he could not, restricted by New York State law protecting “historic” properties.
L_____ has no interest in remodeling, rebuilding. He has said to several intrusive persons who’ve made inquiries about his plans in Cattaraugus that he “doesn’t plan to live in Mura House much beyond the summer.”
He has not been seeking her.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 17