Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The room with its photographs and cards and mounted heads, the house itself and the woman who sat inside it so obediently, all these were Jagger’s way of counting coup. Together they symbolized Jagger’s status as a man. Though this room contained proof of many triumphs, none was as important as the one tonight. At most there would be six persons readied for the 2008 presidential election, and now it looked as though he would be one of them.

  The triumph went onto a red card in firm black letters: Jagger! Finalist!

  He wanted to crow, howl, dance, brag to someone, anyone, but he couldn’t do that. His joy could have only himself as celebrant, only himself to chant his war song in this buried room, hearing his own words booming back from the walls as from the inside of a drum: Jagger, Finalist, Jagger, Finalist, Clever, Clever Jagger!

  After a time even this euphoria palled. He wiped his moist lips on the back of his hand before dancing out, curvetting, though he didn’t realize it, like a skittish show horse, all wide eyes and prancy feet. Back in the quiet house he walked firmly down the wide hallway toward his own room, glancing in passing at his wife’s door. She was sitting inside, of course, trying to stay awake. If he waited a bit, he might catch her napping.

  Inside the room Helen was sitting as he imagined her, hands folded in her lap, still dressed. She had heard the car arrive. Peering through the blind, she had seen the men get out of it, glowing like fire, like blood, and had, instinctively, without thought, crossed herself. It could have been those sunset rays of fuchsia light that ensanguine the mountains, the Sangre de Cristos. Still, when she saw the two visitors radiant in that bloody light, she had shuddered as at a vision of hell. She had felt eyes probing the walls and windows of the house as though seeking her out. She had moved back to escape those eyes, had gone to the dresser and dug out the familiar, now forbidden, rosary, clutching it as though it were a lifeline as she bent her head above the beads and removed herself in prayer from this place, this time, this company. She did not return from prayer until she heard the car leave once more.

  It was all imagination, of course. Stress and abuse gradually destroying her mind. She knew that on one level, had even consented to it on one level. In her inmost soul she did not believe it and would never consent to it.

  When the drone of the departing car dwindled away, she’d gone to the window again and seen her husband jittering about the courtyard like a crazy man. She’d seen him go into what she called his butcher shop, his game room, and remain there for a time. She didn’t wonder what he was doing because she didn’t want to know. When he returned to the drive, he was jumping like a goat, the way he did when he had done something dreadful and gotten away with it. He thought she didn’t know how he did things. He thought she was too stupid to know how her sister Greta had died, how her parents had died. Let him go on believing so. If he thought she knew something about him, he was probably capable of killing her now instead of later. She didn’t mind the thought of his killing her, rather wished he had already done so, except for the deep, buried conviction that she had a duty yet to perform.

  She heard him come into the house, heard his footsteps going past and a few moments later the sound of the shower, just the other side of the wall. She slipped out of her chair, out of the door, leaving it closed but unlatched, down the hall and into the kitchen. She desperately needed a cup of something warm. Quickly she boiled water in a saucepan, not risking the whistling kettle. Quickly she poured hot water into a small pot, added the tea bag, went back up the hall, and slipped into her room before the shower shut off.

  The pot went into her bathroom, where she had cached a cup, a supply of sugar, a few cookies, some dried fruit, her bottle, filled by inches from the bar in the living room, her thievery hidden by watering the liquor. The bourbon-laced tea she drank gulpingly, almost burning her tongue in her eagerness, feeling the warmth, the sweetness, pour down her dry and aching throat into her knotted stomach. Tomorrow, after he’d gone, she’d remind herself she was a human being. He did not allow her to have money, but she found coins sometimes, in the couch, in the laundry. She had almost a dollar’s worth hidden in the toe of one of her shoes. Tomorrow, after he’d gone, maybe she’d walk down to the call box at the road and call Carolyn, just to talk to a friend, just to let Carolyn know she was still alive. But now, for the children’s sake, she must endure. For duty’s sake, she must endure.

  She said it as a litany, over and over. For Emily’s sake, for Scott’s sake, you must endure, Helen. Jake had told her that if she didn’t obey him, the children would suffer. She hadn’t believed him until Emily had broken her arm and the doctor had looked at Helen strangely, saying something about spiral breaks coming from twisting, twisting with great strength. Five-year-old Emily wouldn’t say how it happened. She, too, was frightened. That was how Helen learned that Jake did not make threats. He simply informed people what he would do, and if they didn’t obey him, he did it. The children, Emily in particular, were only pawns to him, pieces to be sacrificed to whatever horrid game he was playing.

  When he came to her door at midnight, she had endured. She was sitting by the window quite calmly, hands folded in her lap.

  “What a stupid cow you are,” he said. “What a stupid cow, not enough sense to go to bed when you’re tired.” There was the tiniest shade of disappointment in his voice. She heard it if he did not. One time she had gone to bed before he told her she could. Did he think she couldn’t remember? Even though he made up the rules as he went along, sometimes she knew very well what they were going to be.

  IN NEW YORK CITY, APRIL was still winter. After sunset, as the temperature dropped toward freezing, the city shrieked in the icy air, strident and combative. Despite the QUIET, HOSPITAL ZONE signs near the emergency entrance of Manhattan South Receiving Infirmary, the bellicose clamor was, if anything, intensified. Voices threatened, security-car horns battered, sirens cut and slashed as ambulances howled themselves in and away. Though the building had been open for only a year, the stark facade was already verminous with graffiti, the hallways scuffed to gray, the enameled walls patinaed by pressing hands. People held on to the walls. They leaned their heads against the walls, seeking a shoulder where there were no shoulders.

  Dr. Ophy Gheist had stopped noticing the dirt. When she’d arrived a year ago, she’d noticed the cleanliness almost with shock: the smell of fresh paint, the feel of slickly waxed floors. Now MSRI—which everyone, including herself, called Misery—was just another hospital like all other urban hospitals, a levee being washed out by the flood.

  “Tell me again. What did he say?” she asked the man before her, concentrating on being patient. Doctors had to be patient these days, because patients weren’t. So her husband, Simon, said.

  The white-clad ambulance tech sighed, much put upon. “Before he pass out, he say he couldn’t no more so he did himself.”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “I should know what? Whattam I? Some kinna mind reader?”

  She looked down at the bloody mess on the stretcher. The nameless, unconscious patient had shot off most of his shoulder in an attempt, presumably, to put a bullet through his heart.

  “Whatever he couldn’t do, it included killing himself,” she commented.

  “Yeah, well, tha’s the truth. He didn’t do that so good, either.”

  The ambulance door opened; gurneys came in, two or three of them. Someone was screaming, and she gritted her teeth as she made quick notes. Surgery would be complicated and time-consuming. More than one procedure, certainly. Rehabilitation would be problematical. The city would spend a million or so taxpayer dollars on this man’s behalf, after which he would probably buy another gun and try it again. Next time in the head, she urged him silently. It’s quicker and less messy, overall.

  “What’s the plan?” asked the AT.

  She shook her head. “We’ll get the bleeding stopped, we’ll stabilize him, and then we’ll send him on over to Ortho as soon as I can get him a slot.”
/>
  The ambulance driver joined them, rubbing his neck, flapping his notebook with the other hand. “Benny Jenks. That’s who he is. His wife showed up out there. She’s with some cop, and the cop wants to talk to the doctor.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She muttered orders to the green-suited Misery tech who was hovering at her elbow and watched Jenks’s bloody form wheeled away before she turned toward the new gurneys, three girls, dark-skinned, dark-haired, no more than seventeen or eighteen. One was already dead, one barely breathing, the third was the screamer, howling mindlessly at the ceiling.

  “Gunshot,” muttered the tech in charge. “Both.”

  The barely breathing one couldn’t wait; Ophy barked orders into the surgery com, getting a team together. No time to move this one anywhere but to the OR. “Was this a drive-by?”

  “No. The guy was after them. She”—he pointed his chin toward the screaming one—“she says he yelled something about vessels.”

  Green-clad techs ran the gurney away while Ophy administered morphine to the screamer. The noise faded to a shriek, then to a catlike whine. The girl whispered, “Impure vessels, he said we were impure vessels. It was my uncle, and my cousins.…”

  There was no exit wound. Ophy guessed the bullet was lodged in or behind the shattered collarbone. She sent the girl upstairs for X ray. She’d probably end up at Ortho, along with Jenks. When she turned around, an orderly was wheeling the dead girl away. There would be no autopsy. They’d stopped doing autopsies on gunshot victims three years ago. Why bother?

  Ophy cast a quick look around for waiting bodies, saw none that weren’t being tended to, took a deep breath, and went through the hissing doors into the waiting room. The air system was down again. The fans in the adjacent cafeteria weren’t working. The place smelled of sweat and burned coffee, hot grease and dirty diapers. One bench, near the door, was completely occupied by bag ladies, a row of them, haunch to haunch. For some reason, lately they’d begun traveling in flocks, or coveys, or whatever one might call it. A bevy of bag ladies? A burden of bag ladies? No, no, of course: a schlep of bag ladies! A whole bench of schleppelas.

  She grinned wearily to herself. She’d save that one for Simon. From across the room the bag ladies saw her watching them and beckoned to her. She waved, then raised a finger: A minute, the finger said. Give me a minute.

  The ambulance driver was talking to a bald, stocky man with bloodhound jowls. That had to be the cop. The woman sitting next to them had a lot of stiff, colorless hair pushed up on top of her head and was crying mascara streaks. Ms. Jenks, most likely.

  Ophy approached, breasting a wave of floral musk, civet gardenia. Jungle lust. Whatever the woman had soaked herself in did not help the overall aroma. The cop was fanning himself with a magazine, trying to find some clear air.

  “Officer … ?”

  “Phil Lovato, Dr. Gheist. Hey, you remember me!”

  “Phil?”

  He chuckled. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

  She offered her hand, recognizing the chuckle if not the hangdog face or the shiny scalp.

  “What’re you doing down here?” She hadn’t seen him in … what? Three years? Closer to five.

  He shrugged, casting a sidelong look at the woman next to him, shaking his head just a little. Didn’t want to talk with her there. Ophy obligingly moved away, and he lumbered after her. When they found an empty spot, she asked, “Aren’t you still in Vice?”

  He shrugged again, hands palm up. She remembered the gesture, one he’d used often when he’d brought prostitutes into the uptown infirmary, where Ophy would stitch up their knife wounds, set their broken bones. It was a “what can you say” gesture, a “that’s life” gesture, one he used habitually. When he’d brought his wife to the hospital and she’d turned out to have a drug-resistant strain of TB, even when they’d finally lost her, he’d made that same gesture. An acknowledgment of the inscrutability of life. Go figure.

  “So you’re not in Vice anymore,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, when they legalized drugs, that cut prostitution way down. And with this AIDS thing, you know, jeez, there’s hardly any working girls left. No more illegal drugs, no more girls, damn little vice left. Me, I decided being any kind of cop was better than no kind. What else I got to do, huh? They got me back working nights.” As though for the first time, he looked down at himself with an air of surprise, shaking his head. “Who’da thought it, right?”

  He nodded toward the woman on the bench. “Anyhow, that there’s Ms. Jenks. It was her husband tried to, you know …” He pointed a finger at his head and cocked his thumb.

  The mascara-streaked woman saw his gesture. She shouted, “He didn’t do that! Don’t shoot your head, I said. Don’t. I saw my uncle, he did that, his face was all gone. Not in the head, I told him!”

  Ophy made a shushing gesture, then rubbed at the lines between her eyes as she and Phil rejoined the woman. “Your husband told you he was going to shoot himself?”

  “Not when he did. Not then. Just sometimes, you know. He’d talk about it. Might as well, he’d say. You know.” She mopped at her face with a sodden tissue, smearing the mascara streaks into dark blotches around her eyes, into the hollows of her cheeks, shadowing her face into a death’s-head.

  “How long has he talked about it?”

  “Off and on. You know. Just off and on.”

  “You didn’t think he meant it?”

  “Oh, well, that’s Ben. He’s always been a talker, Ben. You know.”

  “Your husband said something to the ambulance tech. Said he couldn’t anymore. Would you know what that was about?”

  The woman flushed, a deep brickish red, like a bad case of sunburn. “It was just stuff at work. Gettin’ there. Gettin’ back. You know. Like it wasn’t one thing. Every morning, every afternoon, the same thing, those bums, threatening to throw HIV-blood on you if you don’t give them money. And women, like those over there, preaching at him …”

  “Bag ladies?”

  Her voice rose. “Preaching at him! Getting up on their boxes, grabbing people, men, goin’ on like loonies! Or those other ones, the end-of-the-world ones. Ought to SLEEP them all! Ought to STOP them all. I mean that.”

  Ophy rubbed at her forehead again. Preaching bag ladies she hadn’t heard about, but end-of-the-world ranters were commonplace. Even though there were fewer and fewer people coming downtown for the crazies to confront, there were still more and more crazies all the time.

  Phil Lovato shrugged and struggled to his feet. Ophy beckoned him to one side again.

  “Phil, there were three girls in there, seventeen maybe. One of them says her uncle shot them and yelled something about impure vessels. What’s that about?”

  He shook his head, jowls flapping. “Hey, Dr. Gheist, those are the guys with the beards, Pakistanis, I think, the crazy ones that call themselves the Sons of Allah. Their women go around all in black, you know, the faces covered all up, just a kind of peek hole to look out of.”

  “Why shoot these girls?”

  “Because they were runnin’ around uncovered. No veils, no robes, legs showin’. So the men, they think they got to cleanse the family. Purify it.”

  More girl bashing? Like two years ago when the Muslim fundamentalists had bombed girls’ colleges all over the world, including Vassar and Wellesley! This wasn’t Pakistan, for God’s sake. This was the U.S. of A. Women had equal rights in the U.S. of A., or so she’d always assumed. “Shot because they didn’t wear veils?”

  “All it takes.” He turned back to the straw-haired woman. “Ms. Jenks? You want a ride back home, or you going to stay here?”

  Ophy said, “You might as well go home. Your husband won’t be conscious for some time. And he may be at Orthopedic Center, up on Seventy-fifth, by the time he wakes up.”

  “That’s all across town. Why’n’t you keep him here?” Her voice rose to a mechanical whine, a vocal nail drawn down the chalkboard of her life. Oph
y felt her eyes squinch shut, her senses recoil, her shoulders sag with weariness.

  The cop pulled the woman to her feet. “You know why, Ms. Jenks. Infirmary’s only for sortin’ people out.”

  Ophy silently recited the litany Phil Lovato had begun: Receiving infirmaries for quartage: death certificate or emergency treatment at the infirmary; referral to specialized centers for continuing care; referral to rehab agencies for disabilities; referral to hospices for the dying. If Congress acted as seemed likely, there’d be a fifth alternative added for the autopaths who kept coming back and coming back. Autopaths used up over fifty percent of all doctor time, nursing time, hospital space. The taxpayers had revolted at spending half the nation’s health resources on people who wouldn’t be helped. So if they wouldn’t quit smoking, drinking, drugging, getting into fights, the voters said to try what was working for the prisons. Put the autopaths in SLEEP pods until somebody came up with a solution.

  There were no more public rehab programs. They were all private now. Substance Abusers Anon. People Abusers Anon. Society for the Developmentally Disabled. Society for the Perpetually Unaware and Only Dimly Cognizant. No more public spending on genetic problems that could have been prevented or avoided. No more dividing Siamese twins at public expense, taking care of crack babies at public expense, no more transplants for people over sixty-five. No more high-tech intervention for patients over eighty. Still a loophole there, though. The public still paid for failed suicides.