by Philip Roth
When the lighthearted approach proved ineffective—and then the distraction of reciting to himself what he could remember from high school of the Canterbury Tales—he held his own hand, pretending that it was somebody else. His brother, his mother, his father, his wives—each took a turn sitting beside the bed and holding his hand in theirs. The pain was amazing. If he could have opened his mouth, he would have screamed. After five hours, if he could have got himself to the window, he would have jumped, and after ten hours the pain began to subside.
For the next few days he was nothing but a broken mouth. He sucked through a straw and he slept. That was it. Sucking would seem to be the easiest thing in the world to do, something nobody had to be taught, but because his lips were so bruised and sore and the overall swelling so bad, and because the straw only fit sideways into his mouth, he couldn’t even suck right, and had to sort of draw in from down in the stomach to get the stuff to begin to trickle through him. In this way he sucked in carrot soup and mushed-up fruit, and a milky drink, banana-flavored and extolled as highly nutritious, that was so sweet it made him gag. When he wasn’t sucking liquid pulp or sleeping, he went exploring his mouth with his tongue. Nothing existed but the inside of his mouth. He made all sorts of discoveries in there. Your mouth is who you are. You can’t get very much closer to what you think of as yourself. The next stop up is the brain. No wonder fellatio has achieved such renown. Your tongue lives in your mouth and your tongue is you. He sent his tongue everywhere to see what was doing beyond the metal arch bars and the elastic bands. Across the raw vaulted dome of the palate, down to the tender cavernous sockets of the missing teeth, and then the plunge below the gum line. That was where they’d opened him up and wired him together. For the tongue it was like the journey up the river in “Heart of Darkness.” The mysterious stillness, the miles of silence, the tongue creeping Conradianly on toward Kurtz. I am the Marlow of my mouth.
Below the gum line there had been bits of jawbone and teeth smashed up, and the doctor had spent some time, before setting the fracture, picking around in there to take out all the tiny fragments. Giving him new front teeth was still to come. He couldn’t imagine ever again biting into anything. The idea of anyone touching his face was horrible. He slept at one point for eighteen hours and afterwards had no recollection of having his blood pressure taken or his [V changed.
A young night nurse came by to cheer him up with the Chicago Tribune. “Well,” she said, flushed a little with excitement, “you really are somebody, aren’t you?” He motioned for her to leave the paper beside his sleeping pill. In the middle of the night—some night or other—he finally picked up the copy she’d left him and looked at it under the bed light. The paper was folded back to an item in one of the columns.
Latest from our celebrity chauffeur: How lime jets! Sixties rebel. novelist Nathan (“Carnovsky”) Zuckerman recouping at Billings from cosmetic surgery. Just a nip and a tuck for the fortyish Romeo, then back to “Elaine’s” and the NY scene. Nathan slipped into town incognito to party at the Pump Room on the eve of the lift...
A card arrived from Mr. Freytag. On the envelope’s return-address sticker, where it read “Mr. and Mrs. Harry Freytag,” Mr. Freytag had put a line through “and Mrs.” Drawing that line would have taken some doing. The card read “Hurry and Get Well!” On the back he had handwritten a personal message:
Dear Nathan.
Bobby explained about the death of your beloved parents that Idid not know about. Your terrible grief as a son explains whatever happened and nothing more has to be added. The cemetery was the last place in the world for you to be. I only kick myself that I didn’t know beforehand. I hope I didn’t make it worse with anything I said.
You have made a great name in life for which all my congratulations. But I want you to know you are still Joel Kupperman (“The Quiz Kid”) to Bobby’s Dad and always will be. Hurry and get well.
Love from the Freytags,
Harry, Bobby, and Greg
The last of the old-fashioned fathers. And we, thought Zuckerman. the last of the old-fashioned sons. Who that follows after us will understand how midway through the twentieth century, in this huge, lax, disjointed democracy, a father—and not even a father of learning or eminence or demonstrable power—could still assume the stature of a father in a Kafka story? No, the good old days are just about over, when half the time, without even knowing it, a father could sentence a son to punishment for his crimes and the love and hatred of authority could be such a painful, tangled mess.
There was a letter from the student paper. The Maroon. The editors wanted to interview him about the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Since they understood that because of his surgery he might not wish to be seen, would he please answer, at whatever length he chose, the ten questions on the sheet attached.
Well, they were kind not to show up and just grill him on the spot; he didn’t feel ready quite yet for the social pleasures of an author’s life.
1. Why do you continue to write? 2. What purpose does your work serve? 3. Do you feel yourself part of a rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition? 4. Has your sense of vocation altered significantly because of the events of the last decade?
Yes, yes, said Zuckerman, very much so, and dropped back below the gum line.
The fourth morning he got up and looked in the mirror. Until then he hadn’t been interested. Very pale, very drawn. Surgical tape under his chin. Hollow cheeks that a movie star would envy, and around the surgical tape a scraggly growth of beard that had come in all white. And balder. Four days in Chicago had undone four months of trichotogical treatment. The swelling had subsided, but the jaw was alarmingly lopsided and even through the whiskers looked badly bruised. Mulberry, like a birthmark. His cracked and spotted lips had also turned colors. And two teeth were indeed gone. He realized that his glasses were gone. Under the snow in the cemetery, buried till spring with Bobby’s mother. All the better: for now he didn’t care to see clearly the clever jokes that mockery plays. He’d been considered a great mocker once himself, but never as diabolically inspired as this. Even without the aid of his glasses, he understood that he didn’t look like he was on the ball. He thought. Just don’t make me write about it after. Not everything has to be a book. Not that, too.
But back in bed he thought. The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is.
Then the euphoria of convalescence—and the loosening of his rubber bands. During the weeks that followed the successful operation, in the excitement of giving up each day a little more of the narcotic support, full of the pleasure of learning for the second time in forty years to form simple monosyllabic English with his lips and his palate and his tongue and his teeth, he wandered the hospital in his robe and slippers and the new white beard. Nothing he pronounced, in his weakened voice, felt time-worn—all the words seemed rapturously clean, and the oral catastrophe behind him. He tried to forget all that had happened in the limousine, at the cemetery, on the plane; he tried to forget everything that had happened since he’d come out to go to school here the first time. I was sixteen, intoning “… shantih, shantih, shantih” on the El. That’s the last I remember.
The first-year interns, young men in their mid-twenties, mustaches newly cultivated and eyes darkly circled from working days and nights, came around to his room after supper to introduce themselves and chat. They struck him as artless, innocent children. It was as though, leaving the platform with their medical-school diplomas, they’d taken a wrong turn and fallen back headlong into the second grade. They brought their copies of Carnovsky for him to autograph and solemnly asked if he was working on a new book. What Zuckerman wanted to know was the age of the oldest member of their medical-school class.
He began helping the post-operative patients just up out of bed, slowly wheeling along the corridor the poles slung with their IV
bags. ‘Twelve times around,” moaned a forlorn man of sixty with a freshly bandaged head; dark pigmented moles could be seen at the base of his spine where the ties to his gown had come undone. “… twelve times around the floor.” he told Zuckerman, “… supposed to be a mile.” “Well,” said Zuckerman. through a rigid jaw, “you don’t have to do the mile today.” “I own a seafood restaurant. You like fish?” “Love it.” “You’ll come when you’re better. Al’s Dock, ‘Where lobsters are the Maine thing.’ Spelled M-a-i-n-e. You’ll have dinner on me. Everything fresh that day. One thing I learned. You can’t serve frozen fish. There are people who can tell the difference and you can’t get away with it. You have got to serve fresh fish. The only thing we have that’s frozen is the shrimp. What do you do?” Oh, God—should I now do my number? No, no. in their weakened condition too alarming for both of them. Donning that mask wasn’t a joke: all the while he was enjoying it, his exuberant performance was making even more unrelenting all the ghosts and the rages. What looked like a new obsession to exorcise the old obsessions was only the old obsessions merrily driving him as far as he could go. As far? Don’t bet on it. Plenty more turmoil where that came from. “Out of work,” said Zuckerman. “A bright young guy like you?” Zuckerman shrugged. “Temporary setback, that’s all.’’ “Well, you ought to learn the seafood business.” “Could be,” said Zuckerman. “You’re young—” and with those words, the restaurateur was choking back tears, suddenly fighting down the convalescent’s pity for alt vulnerable things, including himself now and his bandaged head. “I can’t tell you what it was like,” he said. “Close to death. You can’t understand. How it draws you to life. You survive,” he said, “and you see it all new. everything,” and six days later he had a hemorrhage and died.
The sobbing of a woman, and Zuckerman was transfixed outside her room. He was wondering what, if anything, he should do—What is the matter? What does she need?—when a nurse popped out and rushed right past him, muttering only half to herself, “Some people think you’re going to torture them.” Zuckerman peered inside. He saw the graying hair spread across her pillow, and a paperback copy of David Copperfield open on the sheet that covered her chest, She was about his age and wearing a pale blue nightgown of her own; the delicate shoulder straps looked absurdly fetching. She might have been lying down to rest for a moment before rushing off to a dinner party on a summer evening. “Is there anything—’?” “This cannot be!” she shouted. He came farther into the room. “What is it?” he whispered. “They’re removing my larynx,” she cried—”go away!”
In the lounge at the end of the ear, nose, and throat floor he checked the relatives of the surgical patients waiting for the results. He sat and waited with them. Always somebody at the card table playing solitaire. All there was to worry about, yet not one forgot to give the deck a good shuffle before dealing a new game. One afternoon Walsh, his emergency-room doctor, found him there in the lounge, on his lap a yellow pad where he’d been able to write nothing more than “Dear Jenny.” Dear Diana. Dear Jaga, Dear Gloria. Mostly he sat crossing out words that were wrong in every possible way: overwrought… self-contempt. . . weary of treatment… the mania of sickness… the reign of error… hypersensitized to all the inescapable limits… engrossed to the exclusion of everything else... Nothing would flow with any reality—a mannered, stilted letter-voice, aping tones of great sincerity and expressing, if anything, his great reservations about writing to explain at all. He couldn’t be intelligent about having failed to make good as a man on his back, and he could not be apologetic or ashamed. Wasn’t emotionally persuasive any longer. Yet as soon as he sat down to write, out came another explanation, causing him to recoil from his words in disgust. The same with the books: however ingenious and elaborate the disguise, answering charges, countering allegations, angrily sharpening the conflict while earnestly striving to be understood. The endless public deposition—what a curse! The best reason of all never to write again.
While they rode the down elevator, Walsh savored the last of his cigarette—savoring, Zuckerman thought, some contempt for me too.
“Who set your jaw finally?” Walsh asked.
Zuckerman told him.
“Nothing but the best.” said Walsh. “Know how he rose to the white-haired heights? Studied years ago with the big guy in France, Experimented on monkeys. Wrote it all up. Bashed in their faces with a baseball bat and then studied the fracture lines.”
To then write it up? Even more barbaric than what went on in his line, “Is that true?”
“Is that how you get to the heights? Don’t ask me. Gordon Walsh never got to do much bashing. How about the five-dollar habit. Mr. Zuckerman? Remove you from your Percodan yet?”
Because of his habit Zuckerman was handed a drink twice a day looking and tasting like a cherry soda—his “pain cocktail” they called it. It was delivered routinely—early morning, late afternoon—by the nurse who put the addict through his paces. Taken at fixed times and not in response to the pain, the drink furnished the opportunity to “relearn” facing his “problem.” “Give us this day,” she said, “our daily fix,” while obedient Zuckerman emptied the glass. “Not taking anything on the sly, are we, Mr. Z.?” Though for the first several days off the pills and the vodka he’d been feeling unpleasantly jittery and nervous—at moments shaky enough to wonder who he could find in the hospital to help him break Bobby’s rules—the answer was no. “Nothing surreptitious about Mr. Z..” he assured her. “That’s the boy,” she said, and with a conspiratorial hospital wink ended the pseudo-seductive little game. The changing proportion of active ingredients to cherry syrup was known only to the staff; the cocktail was the centerpiece of Bobby’s deconditioning plan, a gradual fading process to reduce Zuckerman’s medication to zero over a period of six weeks. The idea was to phase Zuckerman out of physiological dependence on pain-killers as well as the “pain behavior syndrome.”
As for the investigation into the pain so conducive to the behavior, it had yet to be ordered. Bobby didn’t want Zuckerman, whose morale after a year and a half required a certain tactful treatment of its own, to drop into a state of confused depression because of too many fingers of too many doctors poking around to see what was wrong. Zuckerman’s energy was to be engaged for now in overcoming the long-standing addiction to the drugs and the strength-sapping trauma to the face, especially as the occlusion of the jaw wasn’t exactly as it should be and there were two front teeth still to come.
“So far so good,” reported Zuckerman on the subject of his habit.
“Well,” Walsh replied, “we’ll see when you’re out from under surveillance. No armed robber breaks into a bank while still a guest of the state. That happens the week he gets sprung.”
At the ground floor they left the elevator and started down the corridor to the emergency ward. “We just admitted a woman of eighty-eight. Ambulance went to get her eighty-one-year-old brother—a stroke. They took one whiff and brought her along too.’’
“What’d they smell?”
“You’ll see.”
The woman had only half a face. One cheek, up to the eye socket, and the whole side of her jaw had been eaten away by cancer. Ever since it had begun, as just a blister, four years before, she had been treating it on her own with Mercurochrome and dressing it with a bandage that she changed once a week. She lived with her brother in one room, cooked for him and cleaned for him, and no neighbor, no shopkeeper, no one who saw it had ever looked under the bandage and called a doctor. She was a slight, shy, demure, well-spoken old woman, poor but a lady, and when Zuckerman came in alongside of Walsh, she pulled her hospital nightie around her bare throat. She lowered her eyes. “How do you do, sir?”
Walsh introduced his companion. “This is Dr. Zuckerman. Our resident humanist. He’d like to take a look, Mrs. Brentford.”
Zuckerman was dressed in the hospital robe and slippers and his beard was, as yet, without distinction. He lacked two front teeth and had a mouth full
of metal. Yet the woman said, “Oh, yes. Thank you.”
To Zuckerman, Walsh explained the case. “We’ve been cutting the scabs away and draining pus for an hour—all cleaned up for you. Doc.” He led the resident humanist to the far side of the bed and shined a pocket light on the wound.
There was a hole in her cheek the size of a quarter. Through it Zuckerman could see her tongue as it nervously skittered about inside her mouth. The jawbone itself was partially exposed, an inch of it as white and clean as enamel tile. The rest, up to the eye socket, was a chunk of raw flesh, something off the butcher’s floor to cut up for the cat. He tried not to inhale the smell.
Out in the hallway Walsh was racked with the cough ignited by his laughter. “You look green. Doctor,” he said when finally he could speak. “Maybe you’re better off sticking to books.”
By midmorning each day the large canvas bins along the corridor were stuffed with the night’s soiled linen. Zuckerman had been eyeing these bins for weeks, each time he passed beside one tempted by the strangest yearning. It was on the morning after Walsh’s caper, when there was no one anywhere nearby to ask what the hell he thought he was doing, that finally he plunged his arms down through the tangle of sheets and bed wear and towels. He never expected so much to be so damp. The strength rushed from his groin, his mouth filled with bile—it was as though he were up to his elbows in blood. It was as though the reeking flesh of Mrs. Brentford’s face was there between his two hands. Down the corridor he heard a woman begin to howl, somebody’s mother or sister or daughter, the cry of a survivor—“She pinched us! She hit us! The names that she called us! Then she went!” Another catastrophe—every moment, behind every wall, right next door, the worst ordeals that anyone could imagine, pain that was ruthless and inescapably real, crying and suffering truly worthy of all a man’s defiance. He would become Mrs. Brentford’s physician. He would become a maxillo-facial surgeon. He would study anesthesiology. He would run a detoxification program, setting his patients the example of his own successful withdrawal.