Hell is not heat or cold, it is banishment to the ultimate ego. And in a few hours I shall be stoppered forever, she thought. I will not be able to speak, I will not be able to hear. I will be mad.
She asked for a pencil and paper. She wrote, and her handwriting was not her own; it was strange and inchoate like the sawings of the line of a fever chart. She looked at it with desperation. Will I scream? Will I groan? Will I grimace and mouth meaningless words? What will I do, with all of them watching me, crawling loathsomely inside the bottle, the face plastered on the purple stinking tissue like the fearful little faces in the spoons; while they watch, with their cool, well eyes, dressed all in white.
She tried to explain about the bottle on the paper with her failing handwriting, and then she folded it and wrote the doctor’s name outside.
“Put it somewhere,” she said urgently. “I want you to give it to Doctor Beckwith tomorrow if . . . if I . . .”
If I can no longer communicate what I feel, if I am mad.
“You’re going to be fine,” the nurse said. “You’re going to be fine. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Don’t be afraid.”
She thinks I mean die. No. Only the bottle. Or die?
Or die? For they are coming in the morning with something in their hands. For they are coming in the morning, footsteps measured, slow, down the corridor to me, bearing . . . the cross? . . . in their arms. No. No. You can still endure a little, do not think of Christ, that’s the beginning. When the stopper is jammed at last deep into the neck of the bottle, then it will all be thoughts of Christ. Just with the last resisting inch, I can avoid the thought of Christ. . . .
But Christ. So cool, so calm, so bright. O Jesus thou art standing outside the fast-closed door. Jesus with his mild face, his mournful eyes, the bright brown beard, the suffering. Oh, no!
The minutes, the hours passed in ever-gathering procession. Miss Percy ran water and opened the high, narrow bed and helped the woman into it.
“Dave is coming to say good night to you,” she said above the bed.
“Dave is coming to say GOOD NIGHT TO YOU,” she said.
Oh . . . Dave is coming to say good night to me. . . . Dave? I don’t know what is that word: Dave. Something; once; better; but not now. Only the bones of ego smelling of fear and dirt.
“Mrs. Myles.”
“Mrs. Myles.”
“Mrs. Myles.”
“MRS. MYLES!”
She turned her head and in the doorway, unreal, remote, beyond hell, they stood, the nurse, white and slender, and the young man—he was Dave. They stood there, down a tiny vista beckoning, the last reminder. For they were love. It still endured, somewhere, upon the fading world. It was a flickering candle point upon the dark; flickering in the waves that even now, like the great winds of hell, blew the candle flame, tiny, tiny.
The woman on the bed strained toward what she saw. Upon these bones of ego hangs one last shred of flesh, and as long as it hesitates there, gnawed by the mouths of cockroaches, so long that shred of flesh shall reach, shall strain toward what it sees, toward love. The shred is hanging by a nerve, and the candle point flickers and grows far, far away at the end of the cone-shaped darkness.
“Good night, Mrs. Myles.”
“Good night,” she said. “Are you going out somewhere together?”
“Unh-hunh,” Miss Percy said. “Reckon we’ll go for a drive in the country to find a breeze.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “I hope it’ll be cool, in the country. I hope you have a lovely time. I hope you’re happy.”
She turned her head away from the door and closed her eyes, struggling to maintain that point of light somewhere in the darkness that was growing. As long as I can see it the bones will not be wholly bare, and the world not gone. I hope they will be happy. They love each other. Here I lie: in my sepulcher, and the stopper hovers, and the smell of brimstone everywhere. But while the candle flickers I will remember. When it gutters and goes out, I will go out, and the shred of flesh shall drop at last and the paw that reeks shall push the stopper down. . . .
“Well, if you need anything, you know you just have to ring and Miss Perley will get it for you, dear. Good night,” the nurse said.
But that, the woman did not hear.
After eleven the hospital was quiet and the lights along the corridors were turned out, so that only the lights over the desks of the nurses in charge shone. The wards were dark and still; along some corridor could be heard occasionally the rattling trundle of a stretcher being pushed in a hurry, the stifled coming and going of a night emergency.
Elizabeth Percy went out through the hospital to the main entrance with Dave. A yawning nurse behind a desk raised her eyes and said “Hi!”; a doctor came hurriedly along the passage, wriggling his arms into a hospital coat as he went; his head was down and as Elizabeth passed he glanced upward from under his brows, nodded, and said, “Miss Percy. . . .” They came out onto the open stone flagging of the entrance hall where lights burned behind the admittance desk, and went down into the melting, melancholy night.
Elizabeth put her hand through Dave’s arm and squeezed it; he glanced down at her and smiled.
“How you, babe?” he said.
“A little whipped. . . . That case is so hard, you can’t do anything for her much and she’s going through something awful.”
“Forget it,” he said. “You’re off now. Climb in. Reckon it’ll hold together a little longer.”
She got into the old Chevrolet parked by the curb in the darkness.
They drove through the subsiding lights of the town, past the movie theatres with their electric signs turned off, now; the few people in light clothes dawdling before the doors of ice-cream parlors; there was the faint occasional hoot of a motor horn, the slam of a front door. As they passed into the outskirts of the town, the smell of the honeysuckle met them, drifting in from the country, and from far away the small sweet sawing of the crickets in the fields. They crossed a bridge and drove out along the country road, like a tunnel of darkness covered over with the branches of the trees. Their headlights made a white passage down the center of the tunnel. The smell of honeysuckle grew stronger, filling the whole night air, and sometimes they would pass a spot where the honeysuckle smell grew suddenly sharper, sweeter, bursting like fresh fountains into scent.
“My, this is nice,” Elizabeth said. Her head was leaned back against the back of the seat.
He pressed her knee with his right hand and drew it toward his.
“Heat like we’ve been having can’t last much longer,” he said. “Registered over a hundred outside the store this afternoon. Got to crack sometime. May Leeds says her father and all the farmers are praying for rain.”
“How’s May?” Elizabeth asked in her low, quiet voice.
“Oh . . . I just took her to a movie while I was waiting around for you. She just dropped in while I was finishing up. . .. I’ve got to do something with the evenings, haven’t I?”
“Of course, darling.”
“It was a lousy movie.”
She said nothing.
Far out along the road Dave stopped the car off to one side, under the boughs of the trees, and switched out the lights so that nothing could be seen; only the wide dark; the smell of the honeysuckle quivered through the darkness, and in the field beside them a whippoorwill called. Dave lit a cigarette and put his arm around Elizabeth.
“God, it’s good to get out of that hellhole,” he said.
After a moment Elizabeth spoke.
“I can’t get Mrs. Myles out of my head,” she said. “She just doesn’t get any relief at all.”
“Oh, skip the hospital when you’re out of it.”
“I know. Only I keep thinking that’s what love can do to you.”
“Inability to adjust.”
“Yes, I know. But I guess it isn’t so easy to adjust when you’re too much in love, and then everything sort of came on her. I can’t help picking things up. She
was just mad about him and apparently he never cared much about her and she knew it, and that must be just . . . awful. And then when she got pregnant he went off with this other woman, and when she had her baby it died right away. Placenta previa. It would take quite a lot of adjusting.”
“Well . . . Skip it. You can’t go stewing about patients’ problems. Leave that to Beckwith. How about kissing me?”
“You’d think she’d be through with love, wouldn’t you? But she sort of hangs on to the idea of it. Like about . . . us.”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m sorry, but I can’t go up there any more and represent something for your patient. It just makes me feel too God-damn gummy.”
“You don’t have to. You never had to, only she seemed to get so much out of seeing you and it’s awful seeing her every day, so lost. Anyway, she’s getting shock in the morning.”
“She is?”
“Yes. I hope it’ll do the trick.”
“How about skipping the hospital, baby? You’re supposed to be a nurse, not an angel of mercy. Quit brooding about work out of hours. Kiss me.”
She put both arms around him and kissed his mouth. His arms came around her and she felt the restlessness, the impatience in his body, and the eagerness, the searching.
“Oh, darling,” she said. “I guess I’m pretty much in love with you.”
“I don’t mind you one bit myself,” he murmured.
She started to speak, checked herself, and then spoke.
“Dave, darling, you wouldn’t hurt me, would you?”
“Mmh-mmh”
“You could hurt me so easily. I’m so wide open to you.”
“That’s just the way I like you,” he said, and he put his mouth down on hers, and his hands passed down her arms. Now they were close together, closer and closer in the satin darkness, and in the field the bird called at intervals and the smell of the honeysuckle came down in waves of shuddering sweetness. Over the country where they were the night sky seemed to brood, hanging soft and thick and vast over the land. Far away a train passed in the darkness and across the fields Elizabeth heard its whistle cry three times, three times—ah, ah, aaaah.
When they drove back into town it was very late and the air had a false coolness; there was a little breeze that would go away with the dawn. Elizabeth leaned silent against the seatback. Dave sat up straight and drove, and talked about the coming year of work.
“We get Parsons in surgery and will that be something. You remember Jim Jencks from down Eliza County, he was a real nice guy, I used to see a whole lot of him; he just had one run-in with Parsons after another, and that’s one reason, I guess, he isn’t going to be able to come back this year. Hope I don’t get fixed up wrong with the old bastard.”
“What’s Jim Jencks doing now?” Elizabeth said.
“He just went on home. The damn fool, he got married. That finished him. Reckon he’ll be raising pigs the rest of his life.”
“I didn’t know he got married.”
“Yeah. Lehman, Lemmon . . .? Married a nurse, anyway. Never had good sense.”
Elizabeth made a small noise with her lips.
“Oh! . . . Beg your pardon! Only you know, the business of guys marrying nurses, the way they do. . . . You know just as well as I do.” “Yes.”
He left her in the dark and empty street before the apartment house where she lived. In the silence of the town the car sounded noisily as he drove away. Elizabeth looked after the car for a moment and then she walked slowly up the brick steps to the house full of nurses asleep.
The woman in Room 53 was awake, passing from unconscious to conscious horror, as soon the the phlegm-gray dawn had filled the corners of the room. There was the relentless metronome beat of doom rapping everywhere. It could not be slowed, nor stopped, nor avoided, but beat faster minute by minute until at last the beat would fuse, would be, the footsteps coming down the corridor outside, bearing the thing that would be borne. The woman turned her head in an old and useless reflex against horror and stared out of the window into the gray light.
On the bank opposite the hospital window there were a number of little things, moving about and pecking, and she knew that they were birds; but they were not birds, they were frightful lumps of mud, mudbirds, that jerked about the dirt. She turned her eyes away from them in loathing, but there was nowhere else to look. She closed her eyes upon the horror of outside, to meet the inside horror.
The chorus sang the evil hymns. O Jesus, thou art standing outside the fast-closed door. O Jesus, thou . . . the bright brown beard, the promise that is stained and filthied with corruption, and where is there to fly to lose this wickedness? Abide with me; fast falls the eventide. The awful sweetish dripping of the notes in chorus; that seems to be a promise, that asks for comfort.
The panic grew and the metronome beat, a little faster; the tentacles within reached out in frenzy and there was nothing there to grasp, only abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the dim valley of sin, echoing in the shadows. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff. . . . Were those what they would bear? The rod and the staff? Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. . . . I shall fear this evil, spreading like phlegm along the valley, everywhere, and all is evil, abiding with me.. ..
Oh, no! she cried inside herself with one last straining, no! But where was there to look? And in the ultimate necessity there flickered far off the pale point of the candle flame
And then the footsteps down the corridor. And then the footsteps, am I dreaming them? The door opened and the priests and the acolytes came in—no, the doctor and the resident and the internes and the nurse—no, the white-robed priests of this obscene observance, this sacrifice, and I am the sacrifice that lies quite still upon the altar, and they bear the weapon in their hands: the huge, brutal, long syringe lying upon a bed of gauze, and I am Christ to meet their sacrifice, to give my life. Six people in the room, and the sacrifice.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the woman said.
The nurse, by the head of the bed, laid her hand upon the patient’s hand. The three internes stood grouped at the foot of the bed. The doctor stood on the right of the bed and looked down into the patient’s face. The resident stood halfway down the left side of the bed, and in his hands he held the syringe.
She looked up into the doctor’s face and upon it lay his eyes, flat, like gray, wet, cold oysters laid upon a plate.
“Listen,” the woman said hurriedly. “Tell me quick. Does it matter what thoughts I am thinking? I mean will this fasten them permanently this way? Because my thoughts are so bad, and I can’t seem to think any good thoughts. . . .”
“It doesn’t matter, kiddy,” said the doctor. The eyes like oysters swam at her, and spun a little round and round. He laid his fingers on her wrist. The resident took her left arm and felt with his fingers along the veins on the inside of her elbow. She closed her eyes. Now let me think one good thought, that my brain may be embalmed in this sacrifice with a good thought held in it like a fly in amber. Oh, stay with me, flame, the point before the eyes, the one last point. . . .
A wave from the outside of sick; of liquid; of shuddering horror ran up her veins.
“Thrombosed,” the resident said. “We’ll have to try another.”
“Steady, kiddy,” the doctor said.
Oh, flame, abide with me in the moment of dissolution..
Then crashingly a thousand carmine circles spun in her brain and there were crashes and mad carmine and the dark.
“Look at that,” the leftmost interne said as the figure on the bed sat straight up, clenched in convulsion.
“Patient down on G Ward fractured three vertebrae in one of those,” the resident said, watching.
“You’ll have your good days and your bad days.” The nurse’s voice came to her. “You’ll have your good days and your bad days, Mrs. Myles.”
She was eating lunch off a tray and it wa
s lettuce that she was putting in her mouth. It was thin and crisp and very cold. The world around her was hot and the sun beat through the window beside her. Everything was fatigue, and pain in her back, but the lettuce on her tongue was cool, and the nurse’s voice; her name was Miss Percy and she was always there, in the revolving mist, speaking to her out of the wilderness, cool and clear.
“You’ll have your good days and your bad days, Mrs. Myles.”
She was walking through the jungle of the world, and she was lost. She did not know where she was. It was an utterly strange, green jungle. Only the nurse, Miss Percy, was there beside her, and so she continued to walk through this land.
They came to a brook that ran through a shady hollow and they sat down on a large stone by the margin of the brook and the nurse took off the woman’s shoes, and she put her tired feet in the brook. The water was warm and fresh and ran softly past her feet. Beside the brook stood tall green trees that she had never seen before. She kept her feet in the soft running water and listened to the rustling in the leaves of the strange trees.
“How did I get here?” she asked. “Where have I been?”
The nurse’s voice came with the sound of the brook, cool and clear. “You’re taking a walk in the country. You’re staying at the hospital for a while.”
“I don’t remember . . .”
“You’ll have amnesia for a little bit. It’s all right.”
It’s all right . . .
Miss Percy stopped the doctor in the corridor.
“Doctor Beckwith, may I speak to you for a minute?”
The doctor stopped on one foot in his hurrying walk. The two horns of the stethoscope stuck up from the pocket of his white coat.
“My patient is getting hardly any sleep, doctor. I wondered if you could order something.”
“Can’t give sedatives, you know, with the treatments. Has a counteractive effect.”
“She just seems so terribly tired.”
“Well, she didn’t even feel tired before. . . . I’ll order insulin tonight, Miss Percy. See whether that’ll put her to sleep.”
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 16