“Hey, I am a fuckin’ doctor,” said Gideon. “I don’t fuck around playing doctor. You got the real thing here, baby.”
“I’m a doctor, too,” Kerrigan said.
“Yeah, a doctor of bullshit. What was that word again?”
“Verisimilitude.”
“A doctor of fucking verisimilitude.”
“And you’re the doctor of love, ey? Professor of desire. Set their souls on fire.”
Gideon, a man of many parts, surprised Kerrigan by flinging some Carlos Fuentes at him: “Hey, love is doing nothing else. Love is forgetting spouses, parents, children, friends, enemies. Love is eliminating all calculations, all perceptions, all balancing of pros and cons. That’s my fuckin’ motto.”
“Order! Order!” said Kerrigan.
“Order has nothing to do with love, my friend Kerrigan! Columbanus: Amor non tenet ordinem. Get with the program.”
And Kerrigan considers Fuentes’s words, his Associate, and calculations, perceptions, pros, cons.
He doesn’t mind lying for Gideon. It was only for the sake of appearances—the young women always knew that, too. But there is Gideon’s young wife in Uppsala, and Kerrigan remembers reading the Arnold poem again last night over the lake, alone: “… love, let us be true to one another!” And he thinks of his Associate and the husband who pinched her, drunk every night. And he wants her to have better than that.
Kerrigan signals for the bill.
“Something wrong with the champagne, sir?”
“Not as thirsty as I thought,” Kerrigan says. “But do you have any cigars? A Cohiba perhaps? Robusto?”
It was his plan to taxi over to Holstein Street, surprise her, but it takes so much effort to flag and get into the cab that he decides what he needs is a night’s sleep first.
Kerrigan wakes and cannot get his breath. He really cannot get his breath. He sits up in bed and wonders if he will ever get breath into his lungs again.
He wakes again a moment later, pitched diagonally across his bed. Apparently he stood up and fell down again.
Dreams about strange rooms in a strange apartment in which he is lost. His eyes open in the dark, look at his wristwatch: 11:20 P.M. He’s slept for seven hours just like that. He turns on the overhead light. He doesn’t feel so good. He stands up and looks back toward his bed, wondering if he can sleep or whether he ought to have a snack and a glass of wine.
The air in the room marbleizes with shadow. He takes a step.
Then he wakes to find himself flopped on his back on the carpet. He has pissed his pajama pants. He tries to inhale but cannot. He has no air. He begins to understand he is dying. It hurts to die. Life will not leave him peacefully. It requires painful tearing from his body, his throat, his chest. He is suspended in his dying, in its pain, the pain of breath that will not come.
Flat on his back, he points with a quivering finger upward at the white ceiling above his face, which seems to want to smother him. Then something opens in his chest and a tiny fistful of that most precious of commodities—air—enters. Replenished, he manages to rise to his feet. He feels drunker than he has ever been, though he can’t remember having had a single dram all day. He staggers to a hard-seated chair, aware and ashamed that he has wet himself, and his lungs once again lock. They will not permit breath to enter. He gulps with impotent impatience to fill them with the black-and-white air all around him, and it scratches frantically at his throat but is granted no entry.
At last, a drop of breath slips in, another. He notices again his pee-soaked pajama pants, tugs them and his drawers down, kicks them an inch away where they lie in a soppy, stinking heap.
He begins to understand he will die here. Now. Not, as he always expected, a calm dignified guttering out. No, it comes with pain. Death takes it all and takes it hard. Nothing is easy. His eyes glimpse the phone on the table just beyond arm’s reach. He half rises and his hand palms it—one finger punches three numbers—positions the receiver at his mouth. His throat ejects airless words that his tongue and teeth and palate sculpt to fit into the mouthpiece. It feels strange to request an ambulance for himself. He hears his voice straining over the message, giving his address.
The doorbell rings, and he supports himself along the wall, buzzes them in, opens the apartment door. Then he is far away, beyond pain. A narrow light indicates the crack of untroubled peace he hoped for and into which his being has slipped. But the light widens, invading this sublime nothingness—which only becomes sublime with the splinter of awareness that has found him. Instantly, emotion follows: profound annoyance that he is still alive. He opens his eyes. He is in his apartment again, lying on the floor beside his blue metal waste basket, which is on its side. Two strange men are moving toward him. Their mouths move, bulbous eyes observe him, hands reach to drag him from his crack of peace.
The stretcher is rolled out the vehicle’s back into chill night air, good on his sweated face. Wide automatic doors swing open with a whoosh of welcome to the dismal empty space inside. And his stretcher rolls fast along a corridor, rounds a corner, slips away into a bare, dimly lit room where a nurse wearing a short-sleeved, low-cut white blouse takes his right hand.
“My name is Sara, Terrence,” she says. All visible patches of skin on her arms and shoulders and chest and neck are adorned with tattoos of shooting stars and exploding rockets and color-illuminated constellations. There is a fiery red-and-yellow Big Dipper over the lush curve where her left breast disappears into her blouse.
“We are going to take a sound picture of your heart, Terrence,” she says, squeezing his hand in both of hers, and he squeezes in response, in syncopation to the drops of saltwater dribbling off his lower eyelids. He wants to explain to her what happened, all of it, how he fainted, how he couldn’t breathe, how he pissed himself, but realizes all he needs is her hand.
There are two or three nurses around him. One of them is feeling with both her hands down his legs to his feet. She sees him looking at her from behind his plastic oxygen mask and smiles mischievously with a dimpled cheek and cute small teeth from the foot of the gurney; touching his feet, she asks with a teasing threat, “Ticklish, Terrence?”
She doesn’t realize what a randy old goat he really is, but then he thinks that she does know and is just trying to engage him, to keep him alert and interested and alive—that all these people around him in this big colorless empty room are here for one reason: to keep his sorry arse alive.
The nurse who tickled his feet comes closer, and he focuses on her dimple as she asks, “Does anyone know you’re here?”
He shakes his head.
“Do you live alone?”
He nods.
“Isn’t there a girlfriend? An ex, at least?”
He shakes his head, and her expression is so profound with deeply concealed pity that he blurts, “Well, I do get laid once in a while!”
Smiling, she asks, “Is there no one to call?”
He glimpses the large round face of a clock affixed to the wall. “It is two forty in the morning,” he says, begs the question. “It’s too late to call anyone at this hour.” Could he call his Associate? The thought of her not being here fills him with terror, but more terrifying is the thought of her refusing to come.
Then he realizes that the fact that they want him to call somebody throws a serious light on things. It occurs to him once again that he might be not far from death. He remembers not being able to breathe earlier; he does not want to experience that again.
“Shouldn’t we give you some more comfortable hospital clothes?” the nurse asks.
Something bothers him about this. Then he remembers that earlier when he passed out and pissed himself, he removed his briefs and pulled on jeans without underwear. He whispers, “I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t have any underpants on.” Immediately he sees the absurdity of what he’s said, but she plays along. “It’s okay,” she says. “I won’t look.”
They tug off his jeans and pull a pair of
hospital shorts up his legs, fit his arms into the sleeves of a white top that snaps up the front. His left arm aches and his left leg and his left knee, too, and he is given a plastic baggie that contains his ID card and keys and crumpled money.
“You can just keep that under the covers for now,” the dimpled nurse says. “We want to take you up to X-ray.”
A very large porter rolls his bed to the elevator bank, along a hall to an X-ray room. A dark-haired woman in white asks, “Can you stand up against this?” indicating a large blank screen. His oxygen mask is removed and he is helped to stand. He’s seeing stars. “Press your chest against here,” she says, and steps out of the room. The stars begin to brighten and move very fast. There is an electronic grinding sound and he is fainting, but the gurney is behind him again and the mask is over his nose and mouth. He hates the feel of the clammy plastic, but he does not want to part with that thing again.
Back in the big empty colorless room, a dark-haired young woman standing on his left tells him her name is Laura. “I’m a doctor,” she says, and rips open the snaps of his shirt to slather on some kind of lubricant. She produces a wand, on the tip of which she smears more lubricant.
“Turn on your left side, can you do that for me, Terrence?” He does as told, though his left arm and leg throb under the weight of his body. He glances at his left knee; it is three times normal size. Beside him on a chest-high rolling stand is a computer and screen and switches and pinpricks of green and red and yellow light. She jams the lubricated wand hard under his ribs and tacks with the fingers of her free hand at the computer keys.
He hears an odd, wet, deep-barreled tympani, irregular in its cadence, and manages breath to ask, “Is that … my heart?”
“Yes,” says Dr. Laura, all business, while she continues to rejelly the wand and thrusts it beneath his ribs. Then he sees it. He sees his heart. It is dancing on the computer screen. It looks a little like a black-and-white version of a Class V Ectoplasmic Manifestation from Ghostbusters, but this Manifestation is full of emotion as it angrily tries to do its work. It is dancing; it is a serious dance his Ectoplasmic Manifestation of a heart does in black-and-white on the computer screen. He can see that one segment of the heart is not participating in the dance. It occurs to him that death is not participating in the dance; death wants to stop the dance, and stopping the dance means tearing life from his heart. The upper left quarter is flattened and arrhythmic while the rest of it, doing all the work of the dance, is angry at the nondancing part because it has to dance harder and harder.
Is the upper left quarter of the heart dead? he wonders. Will the dead meat rot?
Dr. Laura relubricates the wand and presses it none too gently in under his ribs as she is joined by a male colleague. “See that?” she asks him.
“Yeah,” says the male colleague, who glances at him. “My name is Troels,” he says. “I’m a doctor.” He shakes his hand.
“Clotting in the lungs,” says Dr. Laura.
“Yeah,” says Dr. Troels, and then the gurney is speeding on its wheels along another corridor, an invisible man with muscular tattooed arms that frame Kerrigan’s face propelling it from behind, and Dr. Troels hurrying alongside. “You’re going to have a CT scan,” he says.
“They won’t take my oxygen mask,” he says flatly, too proud to plead.
“No,” Dr. Troels says. “You need your oxygen. I won’t let them take it.”
“Thank you.”
In the CT room he is assisted by the doctor and the muscular-armed attendant in transferring onto a narrow bed, and an invisible woman says, “We’re going to shoot contrast through you. You’ll feel very warm in your body, and like you have to piss, but you won’t.” Impressed by her frankness, he feels the warmth spreading through his body, and he doesn’t feel like he has to piss. But he does feel like he has to shit, and he prays to whatever forces enabled him to call the ambulance to also help him keep a tight asshole for it is one thing to die, yet quite another to have the last thing he witnesses his own ignominy.
A voice that sounds like the deep bass of James Earl Jones commands through a speaker inside the big metal doughnut into which his narrow bed now slides: “Breathe in! Release! Thank you. Breathe in! Release! Thank you.”
There are indeed things to be thankful for in any situation. In this instance, he is thankful that he does not shit.
Now the gurney is racing back down to the anonymous blank room where his heart danced on the screen, and Dr. Troels, who he now notices is a dark-haired handsome man of perhaps thirty-two—is jogging beside it, saying, “You have clots in both lungs. That’s why you can’t breathe. Have you traveled recently?”
“Couple times.”
“Did you wear support stockings? Move around in the plane to keep your blood flowing?”
“Not really.”
He shakes his head ruefully. “The only thing to do now is a massive injection of blood thinner—heparin. That should dissolve the clots. Did you hit your head when you fainted?”
“Don’t think so.”
The doctor is running his fingers over Kerrigan’s skull, pressing here and there. “Any soreness?”
“No.”
“Have you urinated blood recently?”
“Not since a few years ago when I had a bunch of prostate biopsies.”
“Did they find anything?”
“Not a thing.”
The doctor’s young eyes meet his, smiling faintly in collusion. “Does, uh, your, uh, still function at all for you?”
“It still knows what it wants, and it does okay.”
He looks with interest at Kerrigan, and for a moment—Kerrigan, the old dude, and he, the young doctor, are men in a bar, ready to exchange stories of rapture, but the young doctor seems to remember himself and instantly grows serious again. “Have you ever had blood in your feces?”
“No.”
“This procedure should do it for you,” Dr. Troels says. “But I am required to tell you there is a risk.”
The stretcher is back in place in the big dim anonymous empty room now, and it occurs to Kerrigan, face clammy behind the mask, that this is a fitting room in which to die, a blank empty colorless room in the bowels of a modern state hospital with a sculpture outside somewhere of a monolith that represents civilization in constant fall but never actually landing. Kerrigan closes his eyes and visualizes the sculpture.
“What is the risk?” he whispers.
Dr. Troels meets his gaze. “The massive dose of heparin we have to give you might induce bleeding in your brain. You might have a stroke.”
The young doctor’s eyes tell Kerrigan that there is no other way. Either risk this or let the lack of air rip life from him. And he has already had a taste of how that is and does not want another.
Two plump warm hands take his right, and he turns his face toward Sara with her shooting-star tattoos.
He looks again at Dr. Troels. His lips are sweaty behind the plastic oxygen mask as they form the word Okay.
A needle is stuck into the side of his stomach, and he can feel liquid rushing in as another needle slides in under the knob of bone in his left wrist, and he is surprised that he can register pain at all anymore. Sara has his right hand again. He looks up into her eyes. “You are so sweet,” he whispers.
“My partner might not agree,” she says with a twinkle. “Actually I’m something of a bitch.”
He smiles.
Her eyes grow serious. “The heparin was injected about five minutes ago,” she says. “The risk of stroke generally lasts for an hour. I’ll be here with you.” He follows her eyes to the large round face of the wall clock. Its hands say 3:45. He watches the second hand spastically twitch away spent instants as he waits to see what is next. Paralysis of left side? Right? Loss of speech? Loss of bowel control? Drooping drooling lips that cannot speak? A brain that cannot produce and develop words, that cannot truck them to the page?
Sara seems never to tire of squeezing his hand with
her two, perhaps because he has them trapped in his chilly claw. The phrase “death grip” floats to the surface of his mind as the clock blurs before his eyes. It is not possible, he thinks, to fall asleep during this part of his own story, but he feels his eyelids sagging, his vision losing focus as his thoughts grow dreamy to the rhythm of the oxygen blowing into his lungs; its hiss as it leaves the tank hooked to the foot of the stretcher fills his ears to overflowing, and his thoughts are dreamy collages, scraps of face and talk and gesture. The dimpled nurse’s pitying expression asking whether he has a girlfriend, Sara’s twinkle and her tattoos, and a fleeting image of his Associate beside him on Grønningen, gazing at the sculpture of the reclining girl, his Associate—Annelise—leaning into his body. The image is a weight belt that sinks him a few feet beneath the surface of consciousness. He hears a snore burring at the back of his throat, which makes him smile; he didn’t know he could snore into an oxygen mask. It is a cozy sound, and he is safe as long as Sara’s warm grip anchors him.
There is nothing then. A shallow immersion.
Until his eyelids lift, and his vision focuses on the clock face: 4:50. His eyes turn to Sara. She is smiling. She seems very, very happy. Her tattoos blaze like celebratory fireworks. Her green eyes—why did he not notice before that they are green?—fix his, and her fingers move against his cold but warming hand.
The street door buzzer rings without hesitation, and he wonders as he crosses the lobby what she will look like, whether she will be as lovely as he remembers. Barefoot. Fingers and smock spattered with oils.
She is already at the door as he turns down the hall.
“Are you drunk?” she asks.
“No,” he says, and she steps back to let him in.
“Long time no see,” she says. “Where were you—oh, you’re limping, what happened?”
“Had a fall.”
“Drunk?”
“No, I wasn’t drunk. I fainted. I’m not going to drink anymore,” he says.
Her green eyes explore his face. “This is new.”
“Not going to drink any less either.”
Kerrigan in Copenhagen Page 25