by John Gardner
He, for one, had nothing against any of them. Perhaps, when he was young he’d imagined that he was working for Law & Order, but he’d been disabused of such foolishness long since. In the mindless game Winning-or-Losing-One’s-Case, he served whoever got him when the teams chose up. In that, he was no different from any other, in his opinion. Take a perfectly good, decent Republican young man from the pastures of Ohio, put him in a large university—in English, sociology, or political science—his conscience would drive him to the Democratic Party within the year. Send him to BankAmerica as a responsible executive, and reason—common decency—would turn him Republican within the month. Make him a policeman, within a week he’d start memorizing football scores. One must talk, after all; share interests with the people one’s surrounded by. What kind of humbug, in a city of rapists, holds out for the dignity of womanhood? No crime; no shame. Reality! So the life force rose up sometimes as an elephant, sometimes as a tree. No harm; Craine had no objection—no serious objection. Nevertheless, having noticed that the whole game was rigged, one had to concentrate, make small adjustments, to keep on playing.
Ironically, Craine had been the darling of his doctors, a marvel of good attitude. He healed as if magically, seemed hardly to notice the pain or confinement. The first cut in his abdomen had infected—no fault of Craine’s; the intestines are known to be a filthy place—and so he’d lain for weeks with gray packing in the wound, which nurses came to change every three, then four hours, and doctors would come, every three or four days, to pick at a little with their knives. Craine read, slept, read. “It must make you want to scream, just lying here like this,” his surgeon, a woman, had said to him once, not looking at him, running her eyes over his chart. She was lean as a sapling; hard-boned, sharp-eyed. Her blond hair was cut like pillow feathers. Her chin was like an Indian’s stone knife. “Well, no,” Craine had said. Sometimes, troubled by intestinal cramps (this was later, after his second operation, when he’d begun to be mobile), he’d considered screaming. It was the worst pain he’d ever experienced, and where pain was concerned, Craine was no novice. He’d been shot, wrecked in cars, beaten, et cetera, the usual fol-de-rol of his witless occupation. But the idea of screaming was tiresome and depressing, especially the idea of screaming over a thing so unheroic, even bestial, as intestinal cramps. Screaming, even if the cause was Justice or Truth or earthquakes in Chile, seemed to Craine a little babyish, a foolish exaggeration of one’s importance in the world—though groaning was all right, a little honest groaning could be a blessed thing, like healthy defecation. Inhale: silence; exhale: groan. Like the rhythm of the womb. It was not, like screaming, an appeal for pity or even interest. A noise, simply; a temporary annoyance of one’s neighbors, like traffic sounds or bells of a clock tower out of tune, a noise that, making no demands, could be endured, tuned out. He’d clenched his teeth and hobbled up and down the hospital corridors—the usual cure for intestinal cramps—inching along like a ninety-year-old man, gripping in his right hand, half-leaning against it, the aluminum tree from which his tubes and bottles hung.
Friends—acquaintances—came by, sent cards, wakened him with phone calls, sent flowers. It was astonishing that he, testy, cold-blooded old bastard that he was, should be so rich in friends or anyway acquaintances. Showed what a remarkable capacity people had for self-delusion. Yet there he was lying a little, of course. It was standard practice, in Craine’s profession, to give the client every possible benefit of the doubt; standard practice to lay yourself out for every asshole that hired you. Snarl as he might, it was Gerald Craine’s nature to assume that even the most despicable of mortals had something to be said for him, at any rate as much as could be said for the miserable bastards who rose up against him. He defended the indefensible, blanched at nothing, mothered the monstrous; and this was his reward, a roomful of friends whose names for the most part escaped him. If anyone had pushed him, he’d have admitted more: that he was glad to see them. Sometimes when one of them came grinning through the door, Craine’s eyes, to his shame and indignation, would well up with tears. He was tempted to say to himself, “Life means more than you thought, you old fart. Look how many people, as the saying goes, ‘care.’ ” He imagined an army—Craine’s people against the world. A woman he’d helped with her divorce years ago came, packed like a pigeon, in a tweedy suit, and gave him a “friendship ring.” Her lips were shiny as wax, like the lips of a cadaver in state. A young man, formerly of Carbondale, now fisherman on a boat on the Chesapeake Bay, told Craine how Craine had changed his life. Craine accepted it, smiled grimly, listening—all with the same sublime indifference, or anyway the same metaphysical indifference, that made him heal more quickly than the doctors had had reason to expect. Better people than Craine howled and fought against death, rang their bells for the nurses, asked their doctors for more detail, more detail. Craine visited them—travelling to ward off more cramps—meaninglessly passing his time. To one of them, a pretty young woman without a hope in the world, he gave his Mother Seton tooth. Temporarily, she improved.
He’d had three operations: the exploratory, from which he emerged with the abdominal infection; the extraction of the cancerous section of his colon, which left him with the colostomy bag and cramps; and the colostomy takedown. Coming out of anesthesia for the third time, after the third operation, he came to the realization that each of the three times, just before waking, he’d heard the same queer sentence, a series of syllables in what might have been Finnish, a pronouncement he somehow understood. He hadn’t thought about it, the first and second times, had simply registered, after he’d opened his eyes, its hollowly resonating gibberish—he could not now recall the words, if they were words—and had mused briefly, until present reality took precedence, on the eerie sensation of rising from one plane of existence to another, not as one rises from a dream to waking life, it seemed to him, but in a fashion quite different, something not even he, adept at fancy language and rant, could express. This, perhaps: like being drawn abruptly to human consciousness from the consciousness of a fish. (There was a sound, like the noise on a television set after “The Star-Spangled Banner”; it was through this noise that the other came.) He couldn’t remember, afterward, who had been there with him in the recovery room—possibly one or two nurses, possibly his doctor. He’d had an impression, after each of his awakenings, that after the sentence of, perhaps, gibberish, what he’d next heard was a man’s voice, some intelligible sentence in English, perhaps “Wake up!” or “Mr. Craine, open your eyes!” Perhaps a nurse had joined in the command. But he’d had, the third time, a distinct impression that what the doctor said was not at all what the voice of the drug had said; and, more important, he’d had the impression—it amounted to a chilling certainty—that the sentence in gibberish was exactly the sentence he’d heard both times before. In fact this third time he’d known almost certainly, hearing the strange sentence, that in an instant he’d be awake, and then he was. It was not hard to think of physiological explanations; nevertheless, it was a queer effect. He must have remained awake, if it could be called that, only for a moment before dropping back into sleep, a different sleep now, familiar and comforting, morphine luminous but otherwise no different from an ordinary sleep, or such was his impression. He couldn’t quite remember that either, afterward; in fact, though after the second operation he’d spent three days in the recovery room, he’d found when he was back in his own room—a bright, large private room, with a print by Matisse, on the seventh floor of the Nelson Building—he could remember almost nothing about the recovery room, nothing but the fact that the walls were gray—exactly the shiny, snake-belly gray of the basement walls of the grade school he’d attended fifty years ago, forgotten until now—and that down there in the bowels of the hospital, where the work of life and death was done, the cloth screens set up at the foot of his bed were gray-green, like the garb of those who worked there and the sheets on his metal-railed bed.
One end of his room was now
a hedge of flowers and potted plants. Half hidden by the plants, a window ran from one wall to the other, looking out on the old Johns Hopkins tower, Osier dome, reared against the skyline of Baltimore, a dark brick dome cut by arches and blocked-in windows, below it high chimneys ornately corbeled, their flues sealed off half a century ago—stiff, plugged throats around a colossal, brooding dove.
Not that his view of the city displeased him, the sleepy miles of soft gray buildings, copper steeples, stone towers—among them one tower crudely Florentine, with a lighted clock that had letters instead of numbers: B R O M O S E L T Z E R—and not that the symbols he registered without interest reflected any deep unhappiness or distress on his part, much less fear. At night the sky above the city was soy-red beyond the blackness of the dome, and the streets stretching westward were hung with colored lights. When he awakened in the morning, just before dawn, when orderlies came in to take blood from his arm, the sky was dark blue, sprinkled with stars, and the drab, unlit buildings were a misty gray, as if the ocean a little to the east of where he lay had crept nearer when no one was looking. He saw nothing ominous in this or in anything. Life went on, and he was part of it, but not partisan. He thought of Lazarus, tyrannized back, jerking up onto one elbow, opening one eye, then the other, suddenly interrupted in some thought. The voice he’d heard just before awakening, it occurred to him, had been asking him some question, or making some demand; the voice, perhaps, of a German officer.
By day his hospital room was wonderfully pleasant, full of Naples-yellow light, crammed with cards, plants, flowers, sometimes visitors: Tom Meakins and his wife; a Carbondale lawyer for whom Craine had done odd jobs, now visiting Baltimore relatives; old friends from Chicago who’d come to Washington on business; a young man whom Craine had once gotten out of prison; people Craine had helped out, they said, in the sixties—gone bail for or gotten lawyers for, he no longer remembered—now solid citizens, working for NPR or building nuclear power plants, storage tanks for nerve gas (leaky, like all the rest), making car payments, house payments, worried about The Schools …”
At night the nurses left the door open, and the light that came in made him feel as he’d felt in his forgotten childhood, alone in the dark but safe. He lay on his back, the only position available to him, listening to the comfortable clicks and hums of the sleeping building breathing and dreaming like an animal around him, the occasional swish of a door, the suggestion of footsteps, now and then a distant voice—perhaps some guard, or doctor or nurse, or for all he knew, some patient’s TV. He slept, then wakened again as (as if in a dream) the heavy, Virginia-hills night nurse named Audrey came and changed his dressing, emptied his urine can, freshened up the water and ice in his blue plastic pitcher. “Forty years,” she said, and winked at him. “Would you believe it?” He had no idea what she meant at first, but he liked her country face and pretended to be astonished. “Forty years!” she said again, and shook her head as if even she could make no sense of it. She patted his hand as she would a child’s. “Get some sleep now, Mr. Craine.” She snapped the light off. Before her square shape was out the door, he was asleep. Then it was day again—blood samples, breakfast, bustling activity, as if everyone who came here to Nelson had come for pure pleasure.
Visiting his neighbors up and down the hall, he walked in a bubble of time exactly like childhood time: in the morning it never occurred to him that it would soon be noon, then afternoon, then evening. His neighbor to the left was an elderly Jew, formerly of New York, who’d once been America’s chief manufacturer of Panama hats, or so he said, and it was probably the truth. During World War II, the old man explained, hats went out of fashion. He had theories as to why. He’d become America’s chief historian of the Popular Song. He’d published several books. He had them there with him in the hospital room, in case anyone should care to look. Craine did. Bicycle-song period, baseball-song period, circus-song period. Changing styles in the political song, the nostalgia song, the love song. There were numerous illustrations—engravings of musicians and public figures, covers of sheet music. The scholarly comment was learned and tirelessly wry. The old wife sat smiling, proud beyond words of the brilliant, crotchety old man in the bed. The books had been published, she mentioned from time to time, by the Ohio University Press. “He never even started this history business till he was sixty-two years old,” she said. “Everybody said he was crazy. Some crazy!” “Mama,” the old man said, “you already told him.” The old man had two sons, one an engineer for Bell Telephone, the other a professor at Hofstra. Both of them came to visit, day after day, the engineer small and hearty, elegantly dressed, the professor large and sullen, nearsighted, shabby, both argumentative, impatient, and inconvenienced, but there at his bedside nevertheless, having flown in at once as if nothing were more natural in the world. Sometimes young women came, perhaps the old man’s daughters; also children. When no one else was there, the old woman sat long-nosed and hunchbacked, sleeping in the vinyl chair beside the bed, or worrying and fussing, complaining to the nurses, between times reading the old man jokes from magazines. Once, when something went wrong with the old man, so that he had to be placed in an oxygen tent and no one could be with him but his special nurse, the old woman went striding up and down the corridor, mile after mile, staring straight ahead, eyes like the eagle eyes of Moses. Craine, moving carefully with his aluminum tree, had been afraid to say a word to her. He saw, that day or another day just like it, a picture in a magazine, Jews in a concentration camp, behind barbed wire so messy and tangled it looked as if crows had built it. All the Jews in the picture were now dead. One of them was a girl of about twenty, beautiful. He was sexually aroused, and he looked up from the picture in distress, repelled by all existence, though when he thought about it he understood, of course, why he was aroused, why there was no more reason to be disgusted by that than by bedpans, say, or projectile vomiting, or the woman with her feet cut off. Nature’s way.
Everything he saw, in short, had confirmed him in his opinion that life was interesting, if one chose to see it that way, but not important, by no means a matter for joyful celebration. He was an excellent patient, uncomplaining, steadily healing. The only real unpleasantness in his hospital life, aside from the occasional shaking that came over him, was the food. Each time he lifted the cover off the tray—a yellow plastic cover dripping with condensation—the smell that wafted up was like ensilage, or mulch, old hay in a barn. Sometimes for days in a row he ate nothing but the Jell-O. Then the simple expedient occurred to him of putting on his clothes and walking out (he was unhooked from the tree by now). He knew the hospital routine like the back of his hand, and it was an easy matter to slip down the hall to the stainless steel back elevator, descend to the first floor, and walk past the guards there—no one looked up—cross to the front-door public telephone and call himself a taxi. He began going out to restaurants while he was still on the colostomy bag; an awkward business. Emptying the bag in the toilet was easy (every time he ate he had to empty the bag almost immediately, especially if he drank wine), but rinsing out the bag was tricky: he had to bare his gauzed and bandaged belly, hold the plastic to the faucet to get the rinse water in, worst of all empty small bits of feces in the sink, one eye on the knob of the rest room door, since if someone came in … but never mind, he managed; he was quick and as cunning as a weasel; he was almost never caught. After the takedown it was trickier yet: he had no more idea than a day-old baby when his bowels would move. Very well, he had accidents. But he managed. After one had lived in a hospital for a time, one pretty much lost all sense of shame. Vomiting, elimination, even one’s old-man dangling nakedness came to be as public as politics, less one’s own business than the business of one’s blond young nurse. It was a lesson in philosophy, another proud illusion blown rearward and flushed, as if cleaned from his system by an enema.
So Craine continued, day after day, visiting fellow patients, reading, more or less enjoying himself; and then the time came for his rel
ease. Tom Meakins arrived again, pink-cheeked, bulging in his too small checked brown suit. The nurses found boxes, which they loaded to the lids with Craine’s plants and gifts, his huge paper sacks of tape, gauze, pads, medicines, and bottles of saline solution, then stacked in two wheelchairs to carry to the taxi down below. Craine, leaning on Meakins’ arm, started down the corridor, waving his good-byes. He did not say good-bye to the music historian who’d been his neighbor; the old man had died two days ago and had been removed without anyone’s knowing—not a sound, not so much as a whisper, so far as Craine knew—in the middle of the night. “Good-bye,” Craine called to the woman who’d had both feet removed; “good-bye” to the huge, gray freak of a man sprawled like a mountain in his special chair, brought in for an operation meant to save him, whatever his opinions in the matter, from being buried alive in fat. The man stared back, too gloomy to show anger or disgust. Tom Meakins chattered, talking about the weather—it had snowed last night, maybe half an inch, a significant snowfall for Baltimore in March. Meakins’ voice was high and thin, filled with emotion. He placed his small, glossy shoes with care, taking short, timid steps, as if Craine might go crashing to the marble floor at any moment, only Meakins’ sharp watchfulness could save him. “You lost a lot of weight, old man,” Meakins said, and smiled, then turned away his face and wiped his forehead.