334

by Thomas M. Disch

  It was the lack of sleep, he decided, since having an explanation helped. Even this wakefulness would have been tolerable if he could have filled his head with something besides his own thoughts—a program, checkers, talk, the job….

  The job? It was almost time to clock in. With a goal established he had only to whip himself toward it. Stand: he could do that. Walk to the door: and this was possible though he distrusted his arrhythmic legs. Open it: he did.

  The glare of Emergency edged every common place with a sudden, awful crispness, as though he were seeing it all raw and naked with the skin peeled back to show the veins and muscles. He wanted to return to the darkness and come out through the door again into the average everydayness he remembered.

  Halfway across the distance to the next door he had to detour about a pair of DOA’s, anonymous and neuter beneath their sheets. Emergency, of course, received more bodies than actual patients, all the great city’s gore. Memories of the dead lasted about as long as a good shirt, the kind he’d brought back before prison.

  A pain formed at the base of his back, rode up the elevator of his spine, and stepped off. Braced in the doorframe (sweat collected into drops on his shaved scalp and zigzagged down to his neck), he waited for the pain to return but there was nothing left but the faraway jingle jingle jingle that he would not answer.

  He hurried to the duty room before anything else could happen. Once he was clocked in he felt protected. He even swung his left arm round in its socket as a kind of invocation to the demon of his usual pain.

  Steinberg looked up from her crossword puzzle. “You all right?”

  Chapel froze. Beyond the daily rudenesses that a position of authority demands, Steinberg never talked to those under her. Her shyness, she called it. “You don’t look well.”

  Chapel studied the wordless crossword of the tiled floor, repeated, though not aloud, his explanation: that he had not slept. Inside him a tiny gnat of anger hatched and buzzed against this woman staring at him, though she had no right to, she was not actually his boss. Was she still staring? He would not look up.

  His feet sat side by side on the tiles, cramped and prisoned in six-dollar shoes, deformed, inert. He’d gone to the beach with a woman once and walked shoeless in the heated, glittering dust. Her feet had been as ugly as his, but…

  He clamped his knees together and covered them with his hands, trying to blot out the memory of…

  But it seeped back from places inside in tiny premonitory droplets of pain. Steinberg gave him a slip. Someone from ‘M’ was routed to a Surgery on 5. “And move,” she called out after him.

  Behind his cart he had no sense of his speed, whether fast or slow. It distressed him how this muscle, then that muscle, jerked and yanked, the way the right thigh heaved up and then the left thigh, the way the feet, in their heavy shoes, came down against the hard floors with no more flexion than the blades of skates.

  He’d wanted to chop her head off. He’d often seen this done, on programs. he would lie beside her night after night, both of them insomniac but never talking, and think of the giant steel blade swooping down from its superb height and separating head and body, until the sound of this incessantly imagined flight blended into the repeated zoom zim zoom of the cars passing on the expressway below, and he slept.

  The boy in “M” ward didn’t need help sliding over onto the cart. He was the dunnest shade of black, all muscles and bounce and nervous, talky terror.

  Chapel had standard routines worked out for his type.

  “You’re a tall one,” it began.

  “No, you got it backwards—it’s your wagon that’s too short.”

  “How tall are you anyhow? Six two?”

  “Six four.”

  Reaching his punch line, Chapel made a laugh. “Ha, ha, I could use those four inches for myself!” (Chapel stood 5′ 7″ in his shoes.)

  Usually they laughed with him, but this one had a comeback. “Well, you tell them that upstairs and maybe they’ll accommodate you.”

  “What?”

  “The surgeons—they’re the boys that can do it.” The boy laughed at what was now his joke, while Chapel sank back into a wounded silence.

  “Arnold Chapel,” a voice over the PA said. “Please return along ‘K’ corridor to ‘K’ elevator bank. Arnold Chapel, please return along ‘K’ corridor to ‘K ‘ elevator bank.”

  Obediently he reversed the cart and returned to “K” elevator bank. His identification badge had cued the traffic control system. It had been years since the computer had had to correct him out loud.

  He rolled the cart into the elevator. Inside, the boy repeated his joke about the four inches to a student nurse.

  The elevator said, “Five.”

  Chapel rolled the cart out. Now, right or left? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t breathe.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” the boy said.

  “I need …” He lifted his left hand towards his lips. Everything he looked at seemed to be at right angles to everything else, like the inside of a gigantic machine. He backed away from the cart.

  “Are you all right?” He was swinging his legs down over the side.

  Chapel ran down the corridor. Since he was going in the direction of the Surgery to which the cart had been routed the traffic control system did not correct him. Each time he inhaled he felt hundreds of tiny hypodermic darts penetrate his chest and puncture his lungs.

  “Hey!” a doctor yelled. “Hey!”

  Into another corridor, and there, as providentially as if he’d been programmed right to its door, was a staff toilet. The room was flooded with a calm blue light.

  He entered one of the stalls and pulled the door, an old door made of dark wood, shut behind him. He knelt down beside the white basin, in which a skin of water quivered with eager, electric designs. He dipped his cupped fingers into the bowl and dabbled his forehead with cool water. Everything fell away—anger, pain, pity, every possible feeling he’d ever heard of or seen enacted. He’d always expected, and then braced against, some eventual retribution, a shotgun blast at the end of the long, white corridor of being alive. It was such a relief to know he had been wrong.

  The doctor, or was it the boy routed to surgery, had come into the toilet and was knocking on the wooden door. Neatly and as though on cue, he vomited. Long strings of blood came out with the pulped food.

  He stood up, zipped, and pushed open the door. It was the boy, not the doctor.

  “I’m better now,” he said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m feeling fine.”

  The boy climbed back onto the cart, which he’d wheeled himself all this way, and Chapel pushed him around the corner and down the hall to Surgery.

  Ab had felt it in his arms and his hands, a power of luck, as though when he leaned forward to flip over each card his fingers could read through the plastic to know whether it was, whether it wasn’t the diamond he needed to make his flush.

  It wasn’t.

  It wasn’t.

  It wasn’t.

  As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. Martinez got the pot with a full house.

  He had lost as much blood as he comfortably could, so he sat out the next hands munching Nibblies and gassing with the bar decoration, who was also the croupier. It was said she had a third interest in the club, but so dumb, could she? She was a yesser and yessed everything Ab cared to say. Nice breasts though, always damp and sticking to her blouses.

  Martinez folded after only his third card and joined Ab at the bar. “How’d you do it, Lucky?” he jeered.

  “Fuck off. I started out lucky enough.”

  “A familiar story.”

  “What are you worried—I won’t pay you back?”

  “I’m not worried, I’m not worried.” He dropped a five on the bar and ordered sangria, one for the big winner, one for the big loser, and one for the most beautiful, the most successful businesswoman on West Houston, and so out into the heat and the sti
nk.

  “Some ass?” Martinez asked.

  What with, Ab wanted to know.

  “Be my guest. If I’d lost what you lost, you’d do as much for me.”

  This was doubly irking, one, because Martinez, who played a dull careful game with sudden flashes of insane bluffing, never did worse than break even, and two, because it wasn’t true—Ab would not have done as much for him or anyone. On the other hand, he was hungry for something more than what he’d find at home in the icebox.

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “Shall we walk there?”

  Seven o’clock, the last Wednesday in May. It was Martinez’s day off, while Ab was just sandwiching his excitement in between clock-out and clock-in with the assistance of some kind green pills.

  Each time they passed one of the crosstown streets (which were named down here instead of numbered) the round red eye of the sun had sunk a fraction nearer the blur of Jersey. In the subway gallery below Canal they stopped for a beer.

  The sting of the day’s losses faded, and the moon of next-time rose in the sky. When they came up again it was the violet before night, and the real moon was there waving at them. A population of how many now? Seventy-five?

  A jet went past, coming in low for the Park, winking a jittery rhythm of red, red, green, red, from tail and wing tips. Ab wondered whether Milly might be on it. Was she due in tonight?

  “Look at it this way, Ab,” Martinez said. “You’re still paying for last month’s luck.”

  He had to think, and then he had to ask, “What luck last month?”

  “The switch. Jesus, I didn’t think any of us were going to climb out from under that without getting burnt.”

  “Oh, that.” He approached the memory tentatively, not sure the scar tissue was firm yet. “It was tight, all right.” A laugh, which rang half-true. The scar had healed, he went on. “There was one moment though at the end when I thought I’d flushed the whole thing down the toilet. See, I had the Identi-Band from the first body, what’s-her-name’s. It was the only thing I got from that asshole White. … ”

  “That fucking White,” Martinez agreed.

  “Yeah. But I was so panicked after that spill on the stairs that I forgot, see, to change them, the two bands, so I sent off the Schaap body like it was.”

  “Oh Mary Mother, that would have done it!”

  “I remembered before the driver got away. So I got out there with the Newman band and made up some story about how we print up different bands when we send them out to the freezers than when one goes to the oven.”

  “Did he believe that?”

  Ab shrugged. “He didn’t argue.”

  “You don’t think he ever figured out what happened that day?”

  “That guy? He’s as dim as Chapel.”

  “Yeah, what about Chapel?” There if anywhere, Martinez had thought, Ab had laid himself open.

  “What about him?”

  “You told me you were going to pay him off. Did you?”

  Ab tried to find some spit in his mouth. “I paid him off all right” Then, lacking the spit: “Jesus Christ.”

  Martinez waited.

  “I offered him a hundred dollars. One hundred smackers. You know what that dumb bastard wanted?”

  “Five hundred?”

  “Nothing! Nothing at all. He even argued about it. Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, I suppose. My money wasn’t good enough for him.”

  “So?”

  “So we reached a compromise. He took fifty.” He made a comic face.

  Martinez laughed. “It was a damned lucky thing, that’s all I’ll say, Ab. Damned lucky.”

  They were quiet along the length of the old police station. Despite the green pills Ab felt himself coming down, but ever so gently down. He entered pink cloudbanks of philosophy.

  “Hey, Martinez, you ever think about that stuff? The freezing business and all that.”

  “I’ve thought about it, sure. I’ve thought it’s a lot of bullshit.”

  “You don’t think there’s a chance then that any of them ever will be brought back to life?”

  “Of course not. Didn’t you see that documentary they were making all the uproar over, and suing NBC? No, that freezing doesn’t stop anything, it just slows it down. They’ll all just be so many little ice cubes eventually. Might as well try bringing them back from the smoke in the stacks.”

  “But if science could find a way to … Oh, I don’t know. It’s complicated by lots of things.”

  “Are you thinking of putting money into one of those damned policies, Ab? For Christ’s sake, I would have thought that you had more brains than that. The other day my wife …” He rolled his eyes blackamoor-style. “It’s not in our league, believe me.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking at all.”

  “So? Then? I’m no mind-reader.”

  “I was wondering, if they ever do find a way to bring them back, and if they find a cure for lupus and all that, well, what if they brought her back?”

  “The Schaap?”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t that be crazy? What would she think anyhow?”

  “Yeah, what a joke.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “I don’t get the point, seriously.”

  Ab tried to explain but he didn’t see the point now himself. He could picture the scene in his mind so clearly: the girl, her skin made smooth again, lying on a table of white stone, breathing, but so faintly that only the doctor standing over her could be sure. His hand would touch her face and her eyes would open and there would be such a look of astonishment.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Martinez said, in a half-angry tone, for he didn’t like to see anyone believing in something he couldn’t believe in, “it’s just a kind of religion.”

  Since Ab could recall having said almost the same thing to Leda, he was able to agree. They were only a couple blocks from the baths by then, so there were better uses for the imagination. But before the last of the cloudbank had quite vanished, he got in one last word for philosophy. “One way or another, Martinez, life goes on. Say what you like, it goes on.”

  Everyday Life In The Later Roman Empire

  1

  The three of them were sitting in the arbor watching the sun go down over her damp melon fields—Alexa herself, her neighbor Arcadius, and the pretty Hebrew bride he’d brought back from Thebes. Arcadius, once again, was describing his recent mysterious experience in Egypt, where in some shattered temple the immortal Plato had addressed the old man, not in Latin but a kind of Greek, and shown him various cheap-jack signs and wonders—a phoenix, of course; then a crew of blind children who had prophesied in perfect strophe and antistrophe, the holocaust of earth; finally (Arcadius drew this miracle from his pocket and placed it on the dial) a piece of wood that had metamorphosed to stone.

  Alexa picked it up: a like but much larger hunk of petrified wood dignified G.’s work table at the Center: russet striations giving way to nebular sworls of mauve, yellow, cinnabar. It had come from a sad and long-since-deleted curio shop on East 8th. Their first anniversary.

  She dropped the stone into the old man’s proffered palm. “It’s beautiful.” No more than that.

  His fingers curled round it. Dark veins squirmed across white flesh. She looked away (the lowest clouds were now the color flesh should be), but not before she had imagined Arcadius dead, and swarming. No, the historical Alexa would have dreamt up nothing so patently medieval. Ashes? At most.

  He flung the stone out into the steaming field.

  Merriam rose to her feet, one arm extended in a gesture of protest. Who was this strange girl, this wisp of a wife? Was she, as Alexa might have wished, just a new mirror image of herself? Or did she represent something more abstract? Their eyes met. In Merriam’s, reproach; in Alexa’s, an answering guilt contested against her everyday skepticism. It came down to this, that Arcadius, and Merriam too in a subtler way, wanted her to accept this scrap of rock as proof that lunatics in Syri
a have died and then risen from their graves.

  An impossible situation.

  “It’s growing chilly,” she announced, though this was as patent a fiction as any Arcadius had brought back from the Nile.

  The path back home dipped down almost to touch the unfinished pool. A small brown toad squatted on the rib cage of the handsome wrestler that Gargilius had shipped up from the south. He had waited two years so, in mud and dust, for the pool to be done and his pedestal to be raised. Now the marble was discolored.

  Merriam said, “Oh look!” The toad got off. (Have I ever seen a toad alive, or only pictures of toads in Nature World? Had there been toads that summer in Augusta? or in Bermuda? in Spain?) Out of the long grass, a deep burp. And again the burp.

  The timer on the oven?

  No, there was still—she checked her watch—a quarter-hour before Willa’s pies came out and her own daube went in.

  Merriam faded to a gape. Worn strips of maple replaced the damp, elaborate grass, and the toad—

  It was the garbage bell. Had she remembered? She rose and rounded the bend of corridor into the kitchen just as the platform inside the shaft dropped. Bags from 7 and 8 came down the chute, rattling, and far below, muffled, it all smashed together into the smasher. But her own garbage was still waiting in the pail, unsorted and unwrapped.

  Let it, she thought. She tried to return to the villa, closing her eyes and clutching for the talismanic image that would place her there: a wedge of sunlight, a window, sky, and the slight sway of the pine.

  Alexa was reclining on the double bed. Timarchus knelt before her, head bowed (he was a new boy, Sarmatian, and rather shy), offering his mistress, on a scalloped tray, a small cake covered with pineae. (She was hungry.) “But I won’t touch it,” she told herself.

  To Timarchus she said: “This afternoon when the bailiff can spare you, my boy, go down by the pool with a rag and rub the statue where it’s stained. Ever so gently, you know, just as though the stone were skin. It will take days, but—” She sensed that there was something wrong with the boy.