Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  (I’m only guessing about gender, actually: I’ve never gotten close enough to check. I’m pretty sure: every so often she makes determined, increasingly irritated attempts to persuade poor neutered Horsefeathers to mount her. But with brain damage so profound, who knows?)

  You cannot get her to stay indoors five seconds longer than it takes to empty that dish, no matter how cold or rainy or snowy it may be outside: Fraidy would rather be alone out in the elements than in a warm dry place occupied only by people who’ve never so much as frowned at her. Try and keep her in—if you feel like scrubbing shit out of the rug.

  Such determined paranoia is a little awe-inspiring. I confess that a few times over the years I’ve succumbed to the absurdity of becoming offended by it. I’ve been feeding you for years—what do I have to do to earn your trust, you ungrateful little flea bus? But of course it isn’t insulting at all, it’s heartbreaking.

  Now, for instance. I said, “Hi, Fraidy lady,” very softly, and instantly her head swiveled to bring her one good eye to bear. Very slowly, I leaned forward and set my mostly empty coffee mug on the deck. Then with equal slowness and care I stood and backed away. Fraidy likes anything with cream in it, and I’d used that technique before. Normally there was a pretty good chance she’d go for it, as long as you stood well clear and didn’t move. This time she looked at the mug, looked at me, looked at the mug—looked quickly round at the world in general for traps or ambushes—and then galloped in the other direction and straight up a tree, reaching the peak in seconds. This was more impressive than it may sound: the tree stood well over thirty meters tall—call it a hundred feet. I had to resist two opposing temptations: to be offended, and to burst out laughing. I sat down and finished the cold coffee myself.

  Thanks, Fraidy, I thought. You managed to brighten my mood. No matter how scary life may be, it isn’t as scary as you think it is.

  After a while it got too cool to sit outdoors, so I went inside and made another mug of coffee.

  My trusty Jura Scala Vario coffee maker is, as I’ve indicated, a noble machine. Some would say it is the peak of human technology, the ultimate culmination of generations of genius, the finest flower of the tool-making impulse, and among those some would be me. But there is no denying that it is a noisy son of a bitch, at least the extremely used model I own. Its grinder is noisy, its dumper is noisy, its boiler is noisy and all its pumps are noisy. Susan had once likened the sound of its operational cycle to a bitter quarrel between two orcs. I stood beside it for the minute or so it took, idly scanning the TV Guide to see if there was anything on that night I wanted to bother to watch. There wasn’t, of course; we were deep into rerun season by then. Nowadays that seems to affect even cable networks. You’d think one would be smart enough to counterprogram, but no. The wisdom is, in summer everyone is far too busy to stay home and watch television. Nobody in the industry has heard of the VCR, yet. I put the Guide down in disgust and decided to watch a DVD. I own very few, but one of them was perfect for my mood, just the right antidote for the kind of bleak, ugly thoughts I’d been thinking all day: The Concert for George, the tribute Eric Clapton organized at the Albert Hall one year after George Harrison died. A little “Beware of Darkness” would go down real well now.

  As I made that decision, the Jura finished its labors with one last bronchial, “RRR-RRRRRR-RRRR-thop!” and I turned to get the cream from the fridge and, ridiculous as I know it sounds, literally jumped at least a foot in the air. My reaction was so violent and uncoordinated I somehow swept the sugar bowl off the stovetop and across the kitchen.

  And that was before I saw the handgun he was holding.

  I don’t remember it taking me even the tiniest sliver of a second to get it. There seemed to be zero processing time involved. The physicists are wrong: the words “simultaneous” and “instantaneous” do have meaning. My eyes saw him standing in the kitchen doorway and simultaneously I knew who he was and why he was there, even though I could not conceive of any way he could possibly be there. All hope left me instantaneously.

  That’s the only excuse I can offer. There are few things in life I hate more than appearing stupid in retrospect. And it cannot be denied that what left my mouth the moment I saw him was unquestionably the very stupidest thing I could possibly have said, if I’d thought about it for a week.

  The first two words, “Jesus fuck—” weren’t so bad. Just conversational filler, harmless. What they were, really, was a golden two-heartbeat window of opportunity to stifle myself. Instead, I followed them with, “—Allen!”

  His eyes narrowed.

  Flashback:

  1968

  Grand Central Station

  or possibly

  Pennsylvania Station

  New York, New York

  USA

  1.

  I know more than a little about pain.

  In fact, I have it on good authority that I probably know more about it than you do.

  It was the end of summer, in New York City. Not a great time to be in pain, any year. But that year was an outstandingly ugly one, and the summer had been its nadir.

  In April, some racist coward (if that isn’t redundant) had murdered Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King from ambush, and pinned it on an obvious patsy named James Earl Ray. The frame held—chiefly because the FBI put its fingers in its ears, held its breath, and ignored anybody who said otherwise. They busted him in June…shortly after a genuine lunatic assassin blew Robert F. Kennedy’s brains out. The only bright spot in the year so far had been Lyndon Baines Johnson’s stunning announcement in March that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for President in the coming election—and even that proved to be a cursing in disguise.

  A week earlier, I had accompanied Bill Doane in his orange VW bug to Chicago, to attend a hippie music festival which we vaguely understood was somehow associated with the Democratic National Convention. Bill had, with his usual panache, somehow contrived to score a couple of hits of genuine Sandoz Laboratories 100% pure lysergic acid diethylamide-25, and we planned to take it there. We never did; lost it, in fact, and didn’t miss it.

  I’ve heard people say of that riot that anybody who hurls a bag of shit at an armed man deserves whatever he gets. Hard to argue. But I was there, and I say those uniformed thugs were breaking heads and other bones long before we were reduced to hurling our excrement back at them. I saw a cop deliberately maim a girl: destroy every single facial feature with his club. She was his daughter’s age. He had a big happy smile and a hard-on. Toward the end of the second day, as we huddled together inside a dumpster in Griffith Park, Bill said to me, in that gentle voice of his, “I think it’s time to go home, Russell.”

  “You think?” I said, rubbing futilely at the knot on my skull.

  “If we don’t,” he said calmly, “I’m going to fill the Bug up with all the gasoline drums I can buy, and drive it into the center of the biggest bunch of cops I can find. And I don’t think I should do that. So we’d better go.”

  I had once seen Bill take a pretty good beating from a drunk half his size, because, he said, he didn’t need to fight back. Twenty minutes later, we were on the road. And that November, Richard Milhous Nixon would become First Crook, and make LBJ look like Gandhi.

  But at the end of August, we didn’t yet know that. And the lump on the left rear portion of my skullbone I left the Windy City with is by no means the pain I’m talking about. Not even close.

  Susan was coming into town by train, from her real father’s place up in Toronto, for a week’s visit. The idea was for her to meet my parents. There was some little pressure involved, as I had not yet told them she was carrying our child. We did plan to marry before the kid turned three (and in fact, did marry on Jesse’s third birthday), but I didn’t expect that to mollify them much.

  So I was more agitated than somewhat, when I went to pick her up. Either I was supposed to meet her at Grand Central Station, and went to Penn Station instead, or the other
way round—I can’t remember anymore, and it doesn’t matter. The point is, I reached the right station one minute after her train had arrived, begged directions from a porter, tore through the place at a dead run, and was halfway down the stairs to the right platform—just spotting Susan, forlorn and visibly pregnant and surrounded with luggage down at the far end—when I felt my right lung collapse.

  I’ll never forget the rapid evolution her face went through as she saw me approach, like an actress’s whole career at super-fast forward. Gee I wish he’d/oh, there he/I love him so m/oh my God, what’s wrong with him?

  “Welcome…New York,” I said, and gestured at my chest. “Get me…hospital. Sorry.”

  Her eyes widened, she took in a deep breath—and that was all the time she needed. “Officer,” she called out, spotting a cop at the other end of the platform, “my husband’s lung has collapsed—we need to get him to a hospital!”

  New York’s finest slowly craned his head around, beheld two hippies in full regalia, one pregnant, and did his duty as he saw it. “Cab’s upstairs, lady,” he said, and returned to contemplation of the ads on the other side of the tracks.

  It took her two trips to get both me and the luggage up the stairs. It would have taken three trips, but she took me first, and by the time she got back for the bags there were fewer of them.

  The nearest cabstand was a long way off, to a man with a fist of steel crushing half his chest, breathing in small, terrified sips. For the first fifty yards or so she kept shouting, “Will someone help us, please?” but she soon wised up.

  “Take us to the nearest hospital,” she told the cabbie, a Sikh. He nodded, said, “Bellevue, sure, sure,” and peeled out. He was on his second pass around Central Park before I could find enough breath to tell Susan the words she had to say, and convince her that she had to say all of them. Loudly. “You cocksucker, quit jerking me off or I will have your fucking medallion and your fucking green card.” Seven minutes later he was tossing her luggage out of his trunk at Bellevue Emergency Entrance.

  There must have been the usual admissions nonsense. I remember none of it. I remember fear. I knew what was coming. To allow a collapsed lung to reinflate, you must remove the fluids that rushed to fill the empty space when it went down. You do this by poking a plastic tube into the patient’s chest. Half the times this had been done to me, it had been done with no anesthesia or numbing of any kind, and it had felt exactly like you think it would feel to have someone knife you in the ribs and then ram a tube in there.

  God bless Bellevue Emergency. I felt only the horrid pressure.

  Another long wait, holding hands with Susan. My next clear recollection is a surgeon asking me if I wanted them to do the operation that would stop my lungs from collapsing.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The operation that will stop your lungs from collapsing.”

  “Um…Doc, this is my, let me see, fifth pneumothorax. Why has nobody ever mentioned this operation to me before?”

  Shrug. “Beats me. It’s the standard treatment for your condition. First line in the textbook under ‘therapy.’”

  “Really.” Pause. “What’s it involve?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Well…what are my chances?”

  “Ten to twelve percent chance you’ll die, probably on the table.”

  “And if I live, my lungs won’t collapse anymore?”

  “Right.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  And they did.

  That’s all they told me about the operation beforehand, and although afterwards I was given more details, they were quite right: you don’t want to know them. Terrible things were done to my insides, and when it was over I had many sawn-through ribs, a scar from my right nipple almost to my spine, and a right arm that didn’t work very well because they’d damaged a major nerve trunk on the way in.

  But here’s the part you must understand: I did not know—nobody told me, then or ever—I only happened to find out by chance, over twenty-five years later, that the operation I had endured, a thoracotomy, is rated one of the most painful surgical procedures a human can survive. Nobody ever thought to tell me.

  I’m grateful I wasn’t told going in, or I’d never have let them do it—and believe me, I’m glad they did. Since then, I have had a few very minor lung collapses, but only of the other lung, and only when I was stupid enough to do something silly like try and change a tire: they no longer just happen for no good reason. And when they come, instead of costing a two- or three-month layup each time, they rarely put me in bed for more than a day or two.

  But I do wish, I do, that at least after the fact, somebody had thought to tell me about what an extraordinarily painful procedure it is. Instead, I spent the next quarter of a century believing that all operations hurt that much, and I was simply an outstanding coward.

  Because it took a good three or four months right out of my life, flat on my back, after which I tottered around like a little old man for at least another six months. It was a year before my right arm was back up to snuff—and it would be another decade before I could bear to be touched, however gently, anywhere near the scar.

  No, let me go back further, to give you some idea of the kind of pain I’m talking about. Immediately after the operation, they had me on morphine. I hurt so bad I was sure the bastards were cutting it—until they cut me off, dropped me back to lesser narcotics. Those made no perceptible dent at all in the agony that was my every breath. By the time they sent me home to my parents’ place, I had not slept since my last morphine shot, a week earlier.

  And I did not sleep for the next two weeks. Not for one minute. It hurt too much. It was necessary to remain absolutely still, propped halfway up in bed on a mountain of pillows, every second, all day and all night. If I began to drift off, some part of my body would move—a foot would flex, say, or a few fingers might twitch, or my head sag sideways on the pillow. It didn’t matter: every part of my body was directly mechanically connected to the incision. Any possible movement would produce enough pain to jolt me back awake, moaning. The pain sliced right through Demerol, Percodan, Seconal, and anything else I could get a prescription for.

  Have you ever been awake for anything approaching three weeks? That in itself was mind-shattering, never mind the pain that caused it. If Susan had not been there, I’m pretty sure I would have literally gone insane. God knows I came close enough.

  Susan’s meeting with my mother, by the way, had been somewhat less than auspicious at first: they met over my semiconscious body, in a ward at Bellevue. Even though I was semiconscious, I remember it. It was like watching two strange cats meet, over a piece of meat. Mom instantly took in Susan’s condition, and her eyes widened slightly; Susan instantly took that in, and her ears flattened slightly. “Let’s go for a walk, dear,” Mom said pleasantly. “Good idea,” Susan agreed cheerfully. And they left me there and went off to settle my life. I spent a ghastly hour or so praying—when I could spare a prayer from pleas for anodyne—that I would not, on top of everything else, be forced to choose between the two most important women in my life in my hour of greatest need.

  Finally I drifted into an uneasy nap—this was before the surgery—and woke to find my mother bending over me. She was smiling gently, about Mona Lisa wattage. She looked me square in the eyes, made sure she had my full attention, and said, very softly, “Keep this one.”

  It was one of only two really happy moments in the whole experience—the other being when, a week after they sent me home, Susan proved to me that it is possible both to have and even to enjoy an orgasm while in great pain.

  It was perhaps the least of her contributions. I had until then been a committed hardheaded materialist, like most recovering Catholics: if it couldn’t be measured, I didn’t want to hear about it. Susan taught me about Buddhism, and thus about spirituality in general. She never succeeded in converting me to Soto Zen—which was okay, she wasn’t trying—but the medita
tional techniques they use were of enormous help to me in enduring the endless onslaught of pain. Not enough—but more than the drugs. That, and her own relentless selfless love, helped me to open my heart, for the first time since I’d left the seminary, to spirituality, which changed my life forever, for the better. I won’t say I was exactly having visions, there at the end. But I will say I saw some stuff most people haven’t—and that just won’t fit into words.

  It wasn’t enough, though. Even with her help and counsel, by the end of the third week I was so squirrely from fatigue and pain and pain-fatigue, I was starting to become seriously suicidal. Serious enough not to mention it to Susan. Curiously, what finally ended up saving my life was not her. It was the Marx Brothers—and Mom.

  One of my lifelines during that dreadful time was the portable TV Dad had set up in my sickroom (his old office), and tricked up with a remote control box on a long cable. (All it would do was change channels—among the existing thirteen. For volume control or on/off, you called for help.) As my marathon of awakeness was entering its fourth week, and I was beginning to amass a lethal stockpile of Seconals, one night a rare Marx Brothers movie I had never seen before came on WPIX Channel 11. It was called The Marx Brothers Go West, and it’s not surprising I’d never seen it; it had to be the worst piece of shit they ever tried to foist on an unsuspecting public. It isn’t just that a good third of the jokes were racist Indian-baiting: all the jokes were as lame as a one-legged horse, even by Marx Brothers standards. The big finish was a railroad race which the boys won by feeding the entire train into its boiler furnace, maybe only the twentieth time that gag had ever been filmed. There was not one quotable line that I can recall, or one humorous situation that wasn’t stolen from a better film—not even a single memorable bit from Harpo.

  I didn’t give a damn. In my condition, it was a special broken-glass-deep-inside pain to laugh. I didn’t give a damn about that either. I was just…in the mood. From about two minutes in, every second of that movie that I didn’t spend laughing, I spent desperately sucking in enough air to resume laughing again. I roared. I howled. I whooped. I wept. With my functional left arm I managed to bang my thigh so hard I could feel it through the sheet. I probably frightened Susan, but I was transported with laughter—just as it had been with the morphine, I was still perfectly aware of the pain, I just didn’t give a shit anymore. It moved one crucial degree out of phase from me, and no longer mattered so much.