by W. S. Penn
With the same deflated look mother had had, he approached the bed and took hold of my left foot beneath the sheets. I could tell he was going to be sentimental, if I let him. ‘What the hell,’ I thought, ‘let him. Let’s see what the old guy has got to say.’
“You know, I remember the day you were born. The doctor phoned me at work and even before he said it I knew he had bad news. He said he was sorry, but that you were not going to live. He said you wouldn’t suffer any pain; that you were in an oxygen tent and that you would just slowly go to sleep. I remember going to the hospital and looking at you in that oxygen tent and all I could feel was grateful that you weren’t going to suffer any pain. Strange,” he said, “your Grandfather showed up, took one look at you, and told me and the doctors you would live. Son of a gun if you didn’t do just that. Two weeks later, you were still in that oxygen tent, and starting to look like a human being and not a baby newt. A month later, you were out of the tent.”
There was a look in father’s eyes I’d never seen before, even though he had told me this same story, ending it at the same place. This time he added, “I’ve got to tell you.”
“What?” I said, intrigued.
“You got any idea how long it took me to pay back your mother’s family for all that oxygen?”
I began to laugh. “Be a real waste, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t make it through this? Not to worry, Pop, I’ll do my best.”
He nodded and squeezed my foot. “That’s all I ask.”
The fellow in the bed beside me was British and he was named Eric. He had had nine operations already on tumors that kept growing back on the bottom of his feet.
“Guess you won’t be entering any 10K races,” I said.
“For now,” he said. One thing about the British is that their stiff upper lip attitude, while frustrating in the normal intercourse of daily life, is pleasant in abnormal or frightening circumstances, and I was grateful for Eric’s good humor in the face of nine operations with local anesthesia—which meant spinal taps, one needle at a time until the body is deadened from the waist down.
“Sure it hurts,” he said. “Each bloody needle hurts as they work in closer to the spine. Hell, if it didn’t, I’d think I wasn’t obtaining my shilling’s worth.”
The man to Eric’s right, beside the hallway wall, was named Duwayne, and from what Eric whispered to me when Duwayne was across the hall in the lavatory, he had a disease that didn’t bode well.
The boy—he must have been about sixteen—across from Duwayne was “Malaysian or some such,” Eric said. We didn’t know his name; he didn’t speak a word of English. He had a medical problem which was unique enough for the Stanford Medical Center not only to provide treatment free but also to pay for his flight into the United States. Both he and Duwayne would disappear between the time I went up to surgery and the day I awoke, but we didn’t know that, and we spent the time between father’s departure and dinner teaching the boy to speak English—at least teaching him to say our names, “hello,” and making him laugh at the way we pronounced his name (which sounded like “Choyswan”).
After dinner, Dr. Weinstein came in with my anesthetist to introduce him, and to check out blood pressure, et cetera, all ploys to let him talk to me and find out how I was doing.
“This is Dr. Green,” Weinstein said. “He’ll be the cowboy in the mask beside me tomorrow who puts you to sleep.”
“So you’re the druggist, huh?” I said. “You a good one?”
“Give you ten to one odds,” he said, “that when I tell you to begin counting backwards from 100, you won’t make ninety.”
Dr. Green explained the procedure to me, beginning with a wake-up call at five a.m., when I’d be given an injection. At six, I’d be wheeled up to surgery on a gurney, and he figured that at about ten or so, I’d be wheeled down from the recovery room. “By tomorrow night, we might even be able to feed you some chicken broth and Jell-o.”
“Galloping gourmet,” I said. Neither Dr. Green nor I, nor Weinstein for that matter, had any idea that he was off by several days.
“So, Alley,” Dr. Weinstein said when Dr. Green had left. “You seem in pretty good spirits.”
“I am,” I said as he loosened the velcro on the blood pressure band. “I’ve been trying to figure that out.”
“What do you mean?” he said, beginning to push and measure the outside of the tumor.
“Well with everything that could happen tomorrow, I thought I’d be worried. I mean I could die, right?”
“There’s a chance,” he said. “The best we can hope for is a minor paralysis of the right side of your face. Make you look as though you’re always half-laughing, though some people may mistake it for a sneer.”
“So why do I feel so calm and cheerful? I mean, I don’t want to die. I don’t plan on dying. But it could happen and thinking about that makes me say, well, what the hell, the time I’ve had has been good and if I get more it’ll be better.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I can’t explain it, but I have noticed in a few of my patients a similar sort of … what?… elation, cheerfulness the night before an operation. They are always the ones to whom I’ve felt free to even use the word ‘death’ and not some euphemism; the ones I’ve been able to be honest with, like you. And I’ll tell you something else. All, without one exception, have lived through some very serious operations.”
“Statistics are on my side, huh?” I laughed. “I’ll bet the control group was a downer. They must have been as much fun as the opening of The Seventh Seal.”
“There wasn’t a control group, of course.”
“You know what I mean.”
“All the people who are so afraid of dying, they never live.”
“Sort of,” I said. “I think of them as the people whose death wouldn’t affect the amount of laughter in the world one whit. Maybe that’s just another way to put it.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Okay, I’m through with you for now. You can eat or drink up until midnight. At eleven, a nurse will come around with a sleeping pill for you, if you want it. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you a Jew?”
“With a name like Weinstein, you ask me that?”
“I mean practicing.”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. I’m not sure. Maybe because it means you’re Real People, at least in part. Anyway, I’m glad.”
He gave me a quizzical look and then smiled kindly. “So am I, Alley. Oh,” he said, looking back from the doorway. “I’ve arranged for you to be allowed visitors up until midnight, as long as you don’t disturb the others in the ward.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I doubt I’ll have too many.”
“There are a couple here, now. I’ll send them in.”
Grandfather had arrived virtually at the same moment as Elanna. He’d driven the Plymouth in his usual tortoise fashion and, though he looked as ancient as his race, having aged greatly since I’d last seen him, I was glad he was there. Elanna had flown Trans World Airlines halfway around the world from Athens, and their coincident arrival seemed to reaffirm Grandfather’s faith in concentration.
Elanna brought me an ancient scarab mounted on a simple silver backing that hid the lucky inscriptions on the beetle’s belly, and hung it around my neck on its chain. Another charm against the sawdust of the world. It made me think of Rachel. I could hear her already criticizing my wearing it as I lay there on the starched sheets of unknowing.
Grandfather brought me a large bag of candied orange slices which I consumed with an almost sexual determination, slowly sucking off the sugar coating and then chewing the slices with my front teeth.
“You’re going to be sick!” Eric kept telling me. “When you wake up from the operation tomorrow you’re going to feel as sick as a toad in the hole.”
“No,” Grandfather told Eric.
“You all right?” I asked her. She nodded nervously. “You know you didn’t have to come.” Instantly, I felt as stupid as I had that day in the graveyard when she was talking to mother’s mother and I had said that mother’s mother wasn’t buried in that particular cemetery.
“I couldn’t not come,” she said. “Could I?”
Grandfather settled into a chair on the other side of my bed and began watching the television program Duwayne had turned on. Every now and then, the channels would change and Duwayne would say, “Hey, who …?” and the channel would change back and Grandfather would grin.
“You know who I miss,” I said to Elanna, “is Pamela.” For a moment, Elanna seemed to share my feeling. It was as though both of us felt that Pamela was separated from us only by an argument, and a phone call and an apology could bring her back.
“Me, too,” Elanna said. “I don’t know what I’d do now, if …” She stopped herself and drew herself up. It wasn’t her way. Nor was it mine.
“A closet isn’t big enough for all of us, anyway,” I said, and we both tried to laugh.
That was how we spent the time, trying to joke with each other, teasing each other about the past we held in common and yet envisioned with the difference of brother and sister, while Grandfather gazed at the television, speechless for the most part, yet lending a solidity to that corner of the ward. Eric chatted with us or read Pogo comic books, which he claimed were his favorite. I was glad not of the company but of this company.
By nine, I’d finished half of my orange slices, still to the dismay of Eric, when Sara entered.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded, outwardly angry but inwardly overjoyed.
“Visiting. What are you doing here?”
“I told you not to come.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said, introducing herself to Elanna and Grandfather. “Here, I brought some things.” From her shoulder bag she took out three wrapped boxes.
“You’re going to bury me with gifts,” I said.
“This one’s from me,” she said. “Open it.” It was a blank book of fine paper bound between upholstered covers.
“It’s beautiful,” Elanna said.
“This one’s from the Tompsons.” She handed me the second, which I opened to find a Montblanc fountain pen and a bottle of ink. “This last,” she said, “isn’t much. But I thought you might appreciate it.”
“Ding-dongs!” I said, tearing off the wrapping paper to find a baker’s dozen of those Hostess cakes filled with cream and iced with chocolate.
“He’s happier about them than the other two presents,” Sara said to Elanna.
“Mother’s cooking made all of us chipmunks,” Elanna said, smiling.
“Oh, bloody heavens!” Eric said. “You Yanks refuse to accept good advice, don’t you?” I began to eat the first of the Ding-dongs, offering the box around to Grandfather, Elanna, Sara, and him. “You are going to enjoy those things twice, once going down and once coming up.”
“Have you ever seen me throw up?” I said to Sara. She shook her head. “You?” I asked Elanna.
“No.”
“You’ll see,” Eric said.
“All plastic parts,” I said to Eric, biting into another Ding-dong and patting my stomach. “They replaced everything with plastic when I was born. I don’t get sick to my stomach.”
“You’ll see,” Eric said again, having no idea what it was I would see when I didn’t wake up the following day but slalomed through the gaps in the dotted line between coma and consciousness, stirring enough after five and a half hours under the knife to speak to the nurses in the recovery room (they tell me) before slipping down the backside of the mountain toward the valley of the shadow. Whatever I said could only be surmised from the looks the nurses gave me after I was finally awake. Even what I said after being moved from intensive care back to my original room in the brief moments of consciousness that began to occur more frequently had to be repeated to me later.
What I had seen in the 96 comatose hours of floating along the FM wave between the realities of life and death mystified me. Slugged by anesthesia and shock, I had followed an old man up canyons of red rock etched by Gilas and climbed an umber cliff, the ropes anchored by the pitons of Rachel’s petulance, the carping of Laura P., and the carrot-like coaxing of Elanna and Sara Baites.
It struck me as odd that it was women’s voices and not the symbolic commentary of Grandfather that pinned the ropes to the face of the rock. Even in my dream of a dreamer dreaming, Grandfather had receded to a shadow on top of distant mountains. But I knew he was there as well as I knew that Death was sniggling about in the shadows of the valley below.
Then, too, there were images of a butterfly and a rock with another pebble lodged in its middle. Those existed on a level similar to the image of the night nurse whose face was the first I remember seeing, and whose compassion was so warm that it wrapped me back into sleep. Gradually, I awoke, and spit out hatred and rage released by the sodium pentothal and aimed at people like Mrs. DeForest, shedding the weight of it and rising one foot closer to what Sanchez had felt in the desert, and one foot nearer Grandfather’s shadow, which hovered, watched, and saw—and yet refused to speak, lacking the judgments that people like to call morality.
“But there was something else,” I told Sara after I awoke and could recognize her. She sat on my bed haggard and worn from the worry and waiting of the past five days. Sara held cherry Jell-o in front of my mouth on a spoon. The machine I dubbed “Harry,” which sucked fluids from the tube sewn into the side of my head, blipped out its purple light with the regularity of a lighthouse.
“Can you recall any of it?”
“Red rock,” I said, “like the Sonoran desert. Canyons. An old man like Grandfather. The rest keeps swimming in my head. It’s there and I feel it and know it, but I can’t say it.”
“Maybe it’s not important?”
“Maybe. But it has to do with me. Me. And with life and death.”
“Maybe it will come to you,” she said. “Maybe one day it will all come to you. If you can’t say it, then maybe you should try to write it down.”
“Those are pretty big maybes,” I said.
“This,” she said, handling the blank book she’d given me, “is a pretty big book.”
49.
The day came that Sara and Elanna had to check out of the motel room they were sharing and leave, Sara to return to Clearmont and Elanna to return to finding and dusting and cataloguing the shards of ancient Greece. Elanna was scheduled to leave that evening; Sara was catching the Red Eye late that night. Though it meant spending several hours alone in the San Francisco airport, they’d decided to share a limo in time for Elanna’s departure at nine. They liked each other, for which I was glad.
Off and on over the past few days there had been as many as eleven visitors in my room at a time, including Allison and Mrs. DeForest, who hung about uncomfortably in the immediate present, having deleted the past they shared in common with me. I abided them as well as Sara did, both of us grateful that cousins and family friends were in the room buffering what could have been either an awkward or hilarious situation. They left, and we were content to have only the four of us—Grandfather, Sara, Elanna, and me (father had come by before work)—when we were interrupted by the sudden appearance of my uncle, bringing along with him the ghost of my cousin and the Vegomatic.
Uncle’s former exuberance, out of which came the singing of popular songs, had become a morbid sentimentalism in which his fleeting happiness with Karen Manowitz struggled against his discomfort with his present materialism.
“Maybe when you’re out of here,” uncle said, “you’ll have
time to take a ride on the river in my new Chris Craft.” Having scuttled his sailboat, he had purchased—with the serene approval of the Vegomatic—a Chris Craft.
“Power boating is where it’s at,” he said. His voice sounded hollow like a confirmed bourbon drinker forced to turn to vodka or gin who tries to convince you of his pleasure in drinking those pale, tasteless liquids. It required a false belief in effect (“You can get from point A to point B without wind,” he said) and a suspension of the memory of his pleasure in process (“Boating,” he ought to have said, “is boring”).
In the same way, when he told us about my cousin, he imagined that his militant son had entered the Soviet Union for no other reason than to learn a new language. “You know how good he is with languages,” uncle said. “The son of a gun will be able to travel anywhere in the world, pretty soon.”
If the Russians ever let him out, I—we all—thought.
Elanna’s eyes had always been sharp, cutting. But in Greece they’d acquired a lightness as though bleached by the unyielding sun. The lightness turned dark and as sad as Sara’s eyes, both as sad as Grandfather’s, when uncle proclaimed that once again I had beaten Death. The four of us knew that no one beats Death. All one could do was try to score in the final minutes and force the game into overtime.
“Mighty white of you,” I muttered.
“What?” uncle asked.
“Nothing.”
Coming closer, he whispered in my ear, “Sara reminds me of a girl I once knew.” He meant she reminded him of Karen Manowitz, and it was only the regret I’d once felt for telling him I had not kept the lucky penny he’d given me that prevented me from saying that we have to live with our choices. “Because you feel sorry for someone,” I would say later to Sara, “doesn’t mean you have to excuse him.”
The Vegomatic, dressed in a blue-gray suit, her hair rigid with spray, sat crisply on the edge of the empty bed across from me. Every quarter hour, she rose and went down to the nurses’ station and took several deep breaths, before returning to the room and taking root on the bed again.