by Keith Korman
Deep inside, the delicious fullness squirmed, and he felt it moving on himself, as if those iron hands had squeezed it out. The man put him down shakily. While the women, faces bloated with anger, shouted: “No! No! No!”
His mother prodded him into the bathroom, but not in anger.
When he sat on the potty, he saw his father had backed off into a corner of the room, glowering silently. “This is ridiculous,” he rumbled. “You act like a bunch of savages.”
“We didn’t ask you to butt in,” Henny snapped back.
Then all the women came to the bathroom door, peering in as he sat on the potty seat. His mother felt his ribs, her touch gentler…. The soiled loincloth lay discarded on the bathroom floor. But his fox cap still clung to his head, the long red fox tail curled around his waist as he sat on the potty. He didn’t feel like going anymore. When he looked at his loincloth, he saw most of his potty-go there.
His mother stared at his father in the most peculiar way. He had the strangest thought: that she hated the man….
“I don’t like it,” his mother said. “Shave the rest and grow it all back.”
The reedy nurse wiped the soap from a straight razor. The white goat’s beard from half his face lay in a thousand cut hairs down the front of his hospital gown. Some lay on the floor, the shorn hairs blending into the white tile invisibly. The old man knew they were shaving his face because they suspected a tumor in the cheek. My God, he felt it throbbing there himself: the warm bath and the shaving had brought sensation everywhere. If the X-rays confirmed what he already felt, they would bring him into surgery early in the after-noon without wasting time. He must remember to call home.
“We’re ready,” the nurse said.
He caught the nurse’s hand that held the razor. She didn’t struggle in his grip but relaxed her arm as if to say, There’s nothing I can do for you. Showing him how helpless he had really become. How impotent. Like an old gent walking around with his pants unzipped: open cage, dead bird. A terminal case, so why fuss?
“Please, Nurse.” He let go of her arm. “My father looked awful with half a beard. I can’t look much better. Will you shave the other side?”
Her fingers touched his shaven cheek,- a tender gesture. She had cut it close, leaving the parched old skin waxy smooth. When she turned his face in her strong hand, a thrill went through him, like a far-off train whistle in the dead of night. He liked the feel of it. Her fingers on his jaw, her firm grip saying, You’re not gone yet; I’ll do what you wish…. He looked down the length of her, seeing how the starched skirt brought out the curve of her hips. He wished he could reach over and surround her bottom with his forearm. “You’re a handsome man,” she said out of nowhere. It sounded like something she’d told herself the first moment she caught him tottering in the hall: Ah, now there’s a handsome man! He felt himself stirring, warm and bloody and alive. He began to laugh. The first time in a year! Where the hell was his wife! The reedy nurse looked at him, a little worried. “Are you all right?”
He smiled up at her, he liked her hard-bitten face. She’d make some man a good woman before too long. She drew close enough for him to see the pockmarks from a bad case of acne years gone by. His arm wanted to go around her bottom. He let it go.
“Stay still,” she hissed with a naughty grin. “You’re very bad.”
They put him under the X-ray projector, a huge metal locust of a machine, his shaved face going into shadow. The white-smocked technicians murmured at him to be still…. This was the end, then. The gnawing pain in his jaw had returned, as if some monstrous blacksmith with knotted hands was trying to hammer off the side of his head. Anything had to be better than this. He was flaccid again, his cold groin far away, like a valley covered in mist.
He had been taken in by strangers. Men in white coats, with lean, sallow faces, machinists of the corpus. Like some elaborate death ritual of ancient Egypt, preparing pharaoh’s body for its journey over the river of death. But instead of building a tomb and gathering the relics of his worldly reign, instead of painting the tomb walls with the deeds of his life and a picture of his soul, instead of waiting till he was dead before they cut out his organs, preserving them in jars — instead of all that, the white strangers wrapped his living body in a cold sheet and sent him under a dark machine.
Later, there would be the inspection, the prodding and the poking — when they took out bits of him, pieces of his bone and shreds of his flesh, which they threw in a pail at their feet: flecks to be picked apart by more sallow strangers, to determine if those shreds were good or evil.
Better to be a king cut down in middle age. So it felt now. For he wished to take the slim nurse’s bottom in his forearm once more. Or even find his wife. Take her away from whatever and do it to her. But this ugly machine hovered over him like a huge carrion fowl sucking at his guts. And him too feeble to push it away. Better to be cut down in middle age …
One of the technicians asked him not to mumble. Why shouldn’t he mumble? He had a right. He was a king who had lived too long: survived his wars, seen his men fall one by one, survived his assassins and the princely ambitions of his sons — survived them all. Alone in the end and waiting, when his body came to claim him. The last assassin. A cunning, silent watcher, standing ever by your chamber door.
Now he knew for certain: better, much better, to be caught alone while hunting in the bright forest daylight. Better to be caught by ruthless brigands far away from his soldiers and the finery of the court, to be tracked down and hunted like an animal. For even as your steed leaped over a fallen tree and a spear stove in your back, in your mind — in your heart! — you knew you might escape. In fleeing there was hope.
In the desperate struggle there was hope. Dying with a bit of life in your blood. How much better so …
When there was hope.
BOOK II
THE PATIENT’S SYMPTOMS
Chapter 1
A Meeting of Minds
Was he dead? Professor Praeger was supposed to be removing a tumor in his cheek. He remembered that much. No, a little more. A glimpse of the black X-ray machine as they slid his body out from under it. Then an even briefer glimpse of the reedy nurse’s flat stomach as she took his pulse. Perhaps not even her. Then a long pause as he lay on the gurney in a bright room somewhere.
Presently a voice said to him, “We’re going to put you to sleep now,” and he looked distractedly at the needle sliding into his arm. Then he floated over the operating table, looking down at the gowned assistants. He lay in white. A tube snaked into his nose and another dripped plasma into his thigh. What a grand ordeal they made of it! There were a few terribly vivid seconds when he saw Professor Praeger’s narrow, delicate hands holding a scalpel and going in for the first cut. The dainty hands made a deliberate stroke, and the skin separated cooperatively as blood welled from the cheek. The flow came freely, while a nurse tried to keep pace with it, dabbing around the incision with one sponge after another, then dropping the soaked sponges in a waste pail under the operating table.
“Keep it clear,” Praeger snapped. “If you can’t keep it clear, we’ll send you home and get someone who can.”
He thought this remark terribly unfair — after all, everyone knows facial cuts bleed more than others. The assistant used more and more sponges, while Professor Praeger’s spidery fingers probed deeper into his face. After a short while, the professor paused contentedly to gaze into the incision. At last he said, “There … you see?”
The narrow fingers held back the peeled skin, and all the assistants crowded round the table to look. Within the cavity of moist flesh and flowing blood sat a knot of bluish gristle, the tumor.
“You see?” Praeger sounded almost gratified with the chance to elaborate. “It goes back and back,- there’s no end to it. The carcinoma has spread to the bone below the right eye. If we probed further we’d find the brain pan affected. Local inflammation of the cranial membrane. Higher fluid pressure within the cranial
cavity. That is why the symptoms are something like spinal meningitis. Pain in the limbs, searing headaches, acute sensitivity to light. But unlike a viral infection his symptoms ebb and flow, when the body manages to absorb some of the excess fluid draining from the skull.” Then a long sigh. Td say the Subject has about a week to go … Let you be witness, ladies and gentlemen, to the long-term effects of a good cigar.”
The light in the operating room flickered as though the hospital were experiencing a power failure. He no longer cared about the body on the table. Then came a brief foggy period where he sat in the garden of his new English home in a lawn chair under the leaves of the almond tree. Lün sat in the garden doorway of his office, with her hindquarters up on a step and her front paws planted stoically in front like a stone lion. Why did dogs sit like that? With their bottoms an inch or so higher than their fronts? She looked comfortable and ridiculous at the same time. From out of the faint French doors people came into the garden and spoke to him…. He tried to answer. Friendly faces. He knew them, but the effort to recall their names had grown simply too great. He smiled and waved feebly as each new face swam into view. Some took his hand, some kissed him on the cheek. Then everyone went away and the sun streamed through the leaves of the almond tree.
His wife came out and sat beside him in a lawn chair. They held hands…. He tried to tell her about wanting to make love to her in the last few weeks, but he had lost the words. She pressed his hand in her own as if she understood, but how could she? They had not made love in such a long time. Out of the blue he noticed the same thrush sitting in a branch of the almond tree almost directly overhead. The tree was in bloom even down to the tiniest branches, covered in pink blossoms.
The thrush turned its head this way and that, inspecting him with black, glossy eyes. Then the bird flitted from the branch and swooped off toward the house.
He lost sight of it for a moment in the streams of sunlight dappling the ground. Then his eyes caught up. The thrush had landed next to the chow on the garden doorstep. But Lün paid no heed, neither barking nor pouncing…. And there they sat, inches apart, as in that odd Hicks painting The Peaceable Kingdom, where the wild animals of the jungle reposed calmly side by side. The dog looked down at the bird and the bird looked up at the dog, as if they knew each other’s thoughts. Then they both stared straight at him.
He wanted to call someone, to come and see such an odd thing. But now he couldn’t even whisper. He groped for his wife’s warm hand, to show her, but the lawn chair lay empty. He looked back at the doorstep: the chow and the thrush still sat there. What intelligent faces they had. How lucky they were. The sun came down through the pink blossoms of the almond tree, and he decided to go meet it. He could fly. Right through the soft pink petals and into the sun if he wished. He was free.
So had he found heaven? Or was this just the glow of his own mind continuing on for infinite moments, like the heated coal after the flame had gone out? Trains of thought feeding on the currents of a trillion living brains … where all the minds that had long known his person now suddenly thought of him at once? He fell along a shaft of sunlight, through a wire-mesh cellar window, and into the dark bowels of a city building. The shaft of sunlight fell on an old desk in a narrow corridor of metal shelving; row upon row, canyons of file boxes rising to the ceiling. How amusing: at last he had found the Almighty’s Hall of Records! But that meant he would presently be held accountable — a rather disagreeable prospect, considering the volume and content of his lifetime’s work.
A young man sat at the desk with a folder of London Times newspaper clippings open before him and several dozen scattered around. What a relief to discover that the most prominent thought on the lad’s mind was a pretty twenty-year-old clerk up in Editorial named Nancy, who wore very tight sweaters.
True, God might employ such young men, but probably not in his holy Hall of Records. More likely the Almighty’s clerks were skinny Quaker schoolmarms or Eton-educated male librarians with socialist vegetarian tendencies —- not frothy bucks smitten by visions of tight sweaters. Between burning glimpses of Nancy, the Times feature writer was furiously estimating how quickly he could absorb all the periodicals before him and knock out a draft of an obituary about a dead duck whose works he had never read.
Easy, Spence, you’re a ^nick study, A draft in an hour, two at the most.
À wicked thought: if only the obituary’s first line could be planted in Spence’s open and slightly desperate mind. The line should read: “Sigmund Freud, the world’s greatest living [blank], is dead.” Not a bad opener.
Let that quick study struggle over the blank. But Spence showed no signs of having taken the bait. The young man looked suspiciously over his shoulder, as if he felt someone breathing down his neck. Then he shot a disconcerted glance along the stacks.
“Who’s there?” he called nervously.
Silence yawned on the linoleum floor,- the empty corridor between the stacks marched off into the distance. Then a girlish giggle escaped from a tight sweater somewhere in infinity.
The shaft of sunlight drew him back along its path. Up and up into the sky and clouds, to where the spores lived upon thin air. The great earth below existed like a huge, curved, pregnant woman. The translucent sky, the deep blue of the oceans, and along the coast of southern India the lighter blue aquamarine of coral reefs and shoals. Great bands of clouds drove across the brown-and-green continents, covering and uncovering the ripe surface of the planet like that same swollen pregnant Venus covering and uncovering her belly with a veil.
Indochina passed slowly, and then the great lap-water of the Pacific, with the dark speckles of the Mariana Islands, a green crescent in the pale blue. A huge monsoon had risen, a coiling swirl of cloud hiding the ocean beneath. A creeping unease came with the gray-purple clouds, but it wasn’t the storm itself —for the monsoon seemed safely remote, a mere hypnotic pattern. No, something about the storm, something wrong … Then he understood. The clouds in the monsoon’s dark galaxy had stilled on the surface of the ocean, like a photograph laid upon the sea.
Now came the conviction that his souls dying spark no longer moved across the face of the earth but hovered — flickering in a fixed spot in the heavens as the earth below ground to a halt. How long could the spark of the soul float above the world as the earth stood still? While the chaos and turmoil below froze in time, midstep, midbreath, between the beat of a heart and the blink of an eye? Ages seemed to pass without an answer, nothing moving, the planet holding its breath…,
Then with a silent groan the engine of the world began once more her immense rotation — a ponderous surge — now rolling backward, east to west. The gray-purplish monsoon evaporated into itself, vanishing into white nameless clouds that quickly melted away. Watching it had a profoundly irritating effect, like trying to read handwriting in a mirror.
So were all the people down below doing likewise? Writing backward, putting verbs before their nouns, or spouting nonsense like “Market to went piggy little this?” Were all the crops returning into the ground and disappearing? The rain falling upward and all the drains in the Northern Hemisphere sucking water down the wrong way — or were they sucking water down at all? Could water flow upward into a faucet? Did gravity work? Was the Eiffel Tower lifting off its moorings? Or was it being unbuilt, demolished by its own ironworkers, rivet by rivet and girder by girder? Moving back in time presented so many problems.
And yet he sensed that far, far below, the timepieces of the world were keeping perfect time: every wristwatch, every clock tower, every clock on every mantelpiece steadily winding backward, lap after lap, tock-ticking back through the years.
Did that mean people were growing young again?
Or was this all a singular absurdity only his soul spark saw, a private fancy lasting his eighty-three years, unraveling in the moments of his own brief span like a spool of thread and then running out forever?
He wanted a closer look.
The rugged
coast of California grew hard and clear. Each time the land rippled, a great pressure surged upon him, like a voice about to speak into his mind but holding back with all its strength. As the searing white expanse of the Nevada desert rolled below, the pressure be-came a suffocating blanket. Night came. And then day and then night … He lost count of the sun and moon,- they passed and flashed and came again.
His soul spark floated in the rarefied atmosphere, a thistle upon the winds — where seeds kept aloft for years were swept along, eventually to fall and root in strange forests or lie fallow for eternity on the dry sands of nameless shores. Up here the cirrus clouds drifted like thin gauze across the sky. And then the earth rolled slowly to a stop; the going back had ceased. The thistle of himself fell like a stone.
The cirrus clouds streamed by, and the planet rushed up with a smile.
Tiny blue veins grew into rivers. Green fields blossomed. Blue lakes spread from puddles into ponds, mountains erupted from the soft wrinkles of the hills. The thistle flashed over the Black Sea: water sparkling, with ships rocking upon its waves. The land of the Crimea rose and vanished. The wind whipped across the small Sea of Azov, turning it into a panic of whitecaps. The thistle plummeted into the dark blotch of a city by a river. Ships and barges plowed their way up the channel. Smoke rose from the city’s chimneys. A hundred rooftops came at him. Alleyways, and people scurrying to and from their many tasks. The thistle fell right toward a slanting gray roof near the dockside wharves. The grimy slate came closer, close enough to see the soot everywhere. So the last spark of his soul was merely a thistle, plunging through the stratosphere to crash upon a roof. Destined to lie dormant then, until the end. Too bad, too bad …