“She’s pulled the tube out,” he said. He followed her back to the room. She immediately turned off the oxygen and he noticed something as strange as anything he’d noticed lately; stamped into the side of the iron-brown tank was a swastika and some words in German.
The nurse zipped the tape from Thelma’s forehead and let the tube go down to the floor. She said, “The doctor said if she pulled it out again not to call him, just leave it out.”
“Can she breathe all right?”
“Oh, she can breathe. She’s just got to learn not to pull it out. We’d have to put her in restraint and she sure wouldn’t like that.”
“Sowwy!” Thelma cried. “Node itch! Can hep it!” She was embarrassed and guilty—he’d seen that look before. She panted, her meaty tongue looking like something she didn’t want to chew and swallow.
The nurse looked at her wristwatch. “The doctor’s going to be here pretty soon anyway and he’ll look in on her. We don’t like the jaundiced look she’s getting.”
“How long?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Are you going to stay?”
He looked at the nurse carefully, for the first time, because she asked him that question. She was a little older than he was, with heavy down on her upper lip and chin, traces of acne and the luminous, darkrimmed pretty eyes that quite often went with skin problems. Her starched white uniform was a perfect blankness, snow too bright to look at. All of these things made her seem deeply female. He’d looked at her too long, and she blushed.
“Are you going to stay?” she asked again.
“Do you want me to?”
“Well, we’re not absolutely sure how well she’s breathing. I can get a mask if there’s any trouble.” She glanced at Thelma, who turned her head to the side and back, her habitual look over her shoulder. She was listening to them, though.
“You can’t put that catheter back in?” he said.
“No, the doctor does that. It’s unsterile now anyway.”
“I’ll watch her, then,” he said.
“She’s your sister?” the nurse said, frowning because she wished she hadn’t said such an unprofessional thing.
He was about to say Thelma was his half-sister but that seemed at the last second mean. “Yes, she’s my sister,” he said. The nurse was competent and slim and reminded him a little of Dory.
“John ith my brother,” Thelma said, startling the nurse so much she became tense, as if her authority were in doubt.
“Now, can she breathe comfortably without the oxygen?” the nurse said.
Thelma coughed and drooled, but went on breathing. “Don fee good,” she said. The nurse nodded professionally. She took a cord and push button from a side table and plugged it into a wall receptacle at the head of the bed.
“We couldn’t use the call button with the oxygen because it might cause a spark,” she explained. “If she has any trouble use the button, all right?” She left, walking self-consciously, he could tell by her purposefulness.
Thelma breathed out loud. He found a chair and sat by her side, holding the hand she put out to him. She breathed and rubbed her nose with the hand that held his, squashing her face with their hands, getting them wet.
He understood her words more and more, though they changed according to how they were combined. Sometimes she lisped, sometimes she dropped consonants, sometimes she left out articles; there was a pattern to it, though, he was discovering. A word used as one part of speech changed when used as another even though it wouldn’t in his language. Hard sounds became soft, long vowels became short. Some words, though still ghostly in her voice, she carefully articulated.
What if she were his seventeen-year-old sister and hadn’t this curse of fog and bloat upon her? She would be a trim blonde girl with honest blue eyes and they could talk freely and evenly, equally, to each other, no mysteries or tensions because they would be brother and sister, twin perceptors of all the bothersome complications of the world. Imagine having a sister. What questions they could answer for each other.
Thelma spoke to him, saying her daddy loved her and would come take her home. She would see Grandma Hearne, too, and Sylvan. Bonnie would give her a shampoo. Her dog Skip would come back. Her friend Alfie, too. When you died you went to heaven and were never sick and nobody was mean to anybody.
She said she knew she was retarded, that she had a condition that made her unable to do things that others could. She could read and write only a few words. She was proud of her drawing because she could really do that. She knew she didn’t look like other people, except Alfie and some of the children at her school. She knew she couldn’t go to real school, she couldn’t ever get married, she couldn’t have a job and make money, as other people did. Her daddy said that in the next world she would read and write as well as anybody and be beautiful and run like the wind. “Run lye win. Run like uh win. Run lika win,” she said, trying it, looking at him. The phrase seemed comfortable, something he might say himself.
Her intelligence seemed as precise as any, her knowledge of the truth as deep—at least of this world; the other world was a myth so comforting to her it didn’t bear thinking about.
She half sat up. Suddenly her throat grew thicker and with a bray like a goat she projected a dark liquid toward the foot of her bed. She seemed as surprised as he was, but then he saw that her surprise was that she couldn’t get a breath. Some engine in her body was still explosively pumping out the dregs of a thick, tea-colored liquid with an odor like phosgene gas, or lewisite—the one that smelled like frying onions. He pushed the button.
She couldn’t get a breath. She was suffocating with her mouth open to the same air he breathed without effort. He didn’t know what to do. He could run out into the corridor. He could wait. He could yell for help. Her eye whites were yellow and he was afraid blue had begun to stain her fingers. He’d run away from plenty of things in his life and if he tried to do something for her now it might be the wrong thing. He wasn’t a medic; nobody could blame him if he did nothing. He grabbed her and turned her on her side, trying to get her over. It was like trying to move a boulder sunk too far into the ground—all round and nothing to get a good hold of, but he finally got her face-down over the side of the bed and slapped her hard on her round back. Her johnny didn’t fit all the way around her. The pimples on her back were surrounded by blue. She’d powerfully soiled herself, he could smell. The dark liquid shook from her mouth in drops and strings. Tracheotomy, he thought; get out your jackknife and operate. There had been a famous case in the infantry when a GI had saved his buddy’s life with a knife and the barrel of a fountain pen. Christ, he might put her out of her misery, too. Medic, he called silently, for Christ’s sake!
When they pulled him aside his hand tingled. The nurse and two orderlies or doctors pushed him out and drew the movable partitions closed. He heard them talking and muttering in there for a long time. One of them had a voice that carried. “Simple catarrhal jaundice.” “Yeah, but…,” the other said. “Aspirated vomitus.” He could understand that. “Acathectic?” “Hepatogenous.” “You think so?” “There.” “How long was it?” “Three or four minutes,” the nurse said. “Brain damage?” Incredibly, a laugh. “I didn’t think of that. We’d better use a tent this time.” “Give her mutter mutter mutter.”
At least he didn’t have to do anything. The tea-dark, onion-smelling stuff was on his shirt and down his right pant leg.
“Get her cleaned up,” one of the doctors said.
The nurse came out carrying a bundle of bedclothes in one hand, away from her uniform. She stopped, startled to see him right there. “She’s all right now,” she said. “She’s breathing all right now.”
A child’s urgent whine of pain came from behind the partition. “Liver’s sensitive,” a doctor said.
“Let me say goodbye to her,” he said, and without waiting for an answer pulled the partition aside and went in. They were not ready for visitors. She lay spread out on her bac
k, gray folds like rhino skin on her knees, an enormous hairy complex leading to her belly, where chafed red skin showed through the tangle.
“Hey. What? You should wait outside,” one doctor said. He pulled her stained johnny down over her belly, a small tablecloth over a boulder. The stench was sweet, like licorice. He went around the doctor to where her head was, and thought she looked at him. He said her name but she went on whining, one eye definitely not seeing him, the other maybe. “Thelma?” he said again.
He was past horror. She didn’t by her freakishness violate anything worthwhile, but was, he could see, a small center, bright as a distant candle, which knew it was itself and that it was alone. For a moment everything came together for him. If she were lost she would be lost to herself forever, her self and her talent condemned not by any fault of hers or any lack of brilliance and resolve. So purely lost. It was a void so perfect it had taken him all his life to understand it. She was herself, indivisible. Oh, Hearne, figure this out. If lost she would be lost forever to herself. It was all so final, a clarity so immense it disdained grief or sorrow. How could his father not know this?
He put out his hand and touched Thelma’s coarse blond hair. Her skull was foreshortened, like a gourd. “Thelma?” he said. She whined and murmured, far off somewhere. His sympathy was beyond tears, pure and terrible.
“She’s disoriented,” one of the doctors said. “Best not to stimulate her now.” Both doctors were embarrassed and wanted him out of there. “Tell her father she’s had a small episode, possibly petit mal. She has so many degenerative symptoms now. Best to check on her in the morning.” This was speech caused by unease—simply authoritative chatter.
The other took it up. “Ordinarily hepatogenous jaundice has a very good prognosis, but in her case…”
“All right,” he said.
He met the nurse wheeling a narrow, cloth-covered rack toward Thelma’s room. She stopped. “Did they tell you you had to leave?” She was furious.
“They suggested it,” he said.
“Oh, I could spit!” she said, and went on.
He took the stairs, floating down on busily independent feet His motorcycle took him through dangerous dark streets and by the time he reached the parsonage his perfect understanding of the meaning of life had faded into the textures of the evening—streetlights behind perfumed trees, clouds of invisible moisture, suspicious cars at stop signs. He would never forget the moment of his insight, but he would never be able to explain it to himself, or re-create its exaltation.
29
Dory doesn’t exist in time, or even too strongly as “Dory.” She has no friends, deserves none and wants none. She has become a connoisseur of languor, its varieties and degrees. For the first time in her life she has nothing, nothing, to do, and her response to this new condition is torpor, semi-coma, the inner glimmerings of nearly voluntary shallow dreams. There are rules for these dreams; they are all interesting and not unpleasant, or she will shut them off and not let them come back. She is alone in them, neutral and aware. In them are qualities she has felt or sensed on earth: snow and sand, water and ferns, certain forms of light—textures that cause, through the sensual dream-body that is hers, almost disembodied moods. Stone is marvelously historical, like a long bare ridge of Cascom Mountain, granite or granodiorite, with lozenges of white felspar embraced in it. She moves, or just her eyes move, over miles of complicated, undulating stone, about a yard above it, and it forms pictograms for her interest, created and interpreted at her pleasure. Nothing is by accident. The textural variety of the granite and its aggregated specks of quartz and mica, garnet and felspar, is of course random, random as creation is, but she sees the march of the British Empire, invasions of China, flotillas in the Sea of Japan—arms, faces, weapons, boots, ships, horses, all ancient and true and relieved by time of all but a carefully neutral historical interest. Nothing is in human terms, only in the frieze of history before it screamed in terror and pain, before she learned that it was all agony. There is danger here, so the melting begins and the stone is gone, turning like lead to quicksilver.
Water is defined by flow, sometimes by wind, but only mild wind. No storms are allowed. Nothing is unexpected. She is not “she.” It is sometimes hard to control all of this and at the same time have no responsibility for control. Only in this liquid state can she deny it.
When her mother brings her food, it is hard to dispose of it, and therefore her mother, by placing enough of it in her mouth and making it go down. Sometimes her father stands silently in the room. They don’t threaten her; her weakness is powerful and makes them go away.
So “she” exists, inexplicably in their terms, being more careful than they can imagine.
30
Oval was home, cooking lima beans while Hadasha Kemal Allgood sat at the kitchen table. He lifted the cover of his saucepan of lima beans, which gave off a humid, slightly fishy odor, and peered in.
John went to wash up. When he returned Oval was poking a fork into the steam. He brought one bean out, bit into it carefully and nodded.
“Anyone want some lima beans?”
“You really like them?” John asked.
“They’re almost all I want to eat anymore. Here.” He brought one out of the pan on the fork and moved it unmistakably toward John’s mouth, the green seed coming at him, behind it the man balancing it carefully, with the calm intensity of an adult feeding a child, even the way the mouth imitated what it wanted the child’s mouth to do.
He had to take the plump green seed on his tongue. It was hot, smooth and firm, with a bland, watery flavor that was almost no flavor at all, as if the bean were a sort of light pebble, food in name only.
“Phaseolus limensis; Phaseolus lunatus,” Hadasha intoned.
John bit into the flesh of the one bean. Its blandness, which had always suggested the inedible, such as gray clay or wet mortar, now grew in authority, blandness becoming a subtlety that encompassed space, or distance. He thought of the koala bear, who ate one food only, the leaves of the eucalyptus, the texture and flavor of which must be so perfect to the koala bear no other food could even be imagined.
Of course he must be hungry; he hadn’t had anything for over eight hours except for a cup of orange juice from the spigot at the Co-op. But there was a change in him, a little sea change near the center, somewhere, of choice, not just of mind but of something more like temperament. There was the good in the seed, the life-good in its increments, flavor a mist surrounding value. He took a small plate from the cupboard and accepted a portion of them from Oval, a finite number of them, thinking of China during famines, when merchants counted out rice by the grain rather than by the measure.
Hadasha said, “The proper Linnaean terms seems to be Phaseolus lunatus, though Webster’s says Phaseolus limensis. The common kidney bean is Phaseolus vulgaris, though by analogy one wonders why Webster’s doesn’t call it Phaseolus renalis if they’re going to do that sort of thing.”
“They should never be overcooked,” Oval said. “Never, never. It ruins them. It ruins their separateness. Try a little butter. They don’t actually need it, but they like just a tiny bit of salty nuttiness from the melted butter.” He stared and nodded as John took his advice, then added, “I like to eat them with a salad fork. I think the shape of a salad fork is best.”
“A little boat shaped like the moon, a half- or quarter-moon,” Hadasha said. “Specifically a pinnace, a light sailing craft used as a scout or a tender. Also, figuratively, a woman, a mistress.”
“What a name for a bean,” John said.
His conversion was neither immediate nor, at this point, total, but the beans didn’t grow in his mouth. They became separate from each other, less a pile or a crowd.
“Not that they aren’t good no matter what you eat them with,” Oval said. He didn’t seem to hear Hadasha’s scholarly remarks; names really didn’t mean much to him. He took another damaged package from the refrigerator. “But they deserve more. They rem
ind me of the perfection of the universe. They speak to me of the universal. I become them. There’s something sacred, a sacred trust. I’m not sure. I can’t abide throwing them away. When we have to shovel them out I can’t abide the idea they’ll become garbage. Each its perfect, separate oneness. I just can’t abide it.” He put a small amount of water in his saucepan, adding a pinch of salt. “That’s just habit,” he said. “They don’t need salt. They get a touch of it from the butter anyway. I’m going to stop putting salt in the water.” He poured out the water and started over, saltless.
Hadasha smoked one of his Houri cigarettes and sipped his coffee.
“I’m only a scholar,” he said. “All I care about is my work. My enthusiasm is engendered by a minor god. I reduce, I discard interpretations; the fanciful juxtapositions sound like mere errors to my prosifying soul. But our teacher“—he nodded toward Oval—“invests the smallest of these with passion.”
Silent blue flame bathed the bottom of the pan. Oval hadn’t been listening to Hadasha, but to the little ticks along the bottom of the pan as the water heated and began to change its form. He held the torn box of lima beans at the ready, a gaunt figure in a green sports shirt with flowers, little red propellers, printed all over it, and yellow slacks, the material unevenly faded and flimsy, as if it had once been starched but had lost it all. His shiny blue socks seemed as thin as tissue paper over his ankles, and his shoes were shiny black oxfords, the ones he must wear to church on Sunday. There was no suggestion, in the gaudy colors, of any thought or choice, and there probably hadn’t been.
A telephone rang somewhere in the parsonage, then stopped ringing. Bonnie came into the kitchen. “That was Urban,” she said. “He says Jack got into a fight and broke his hand, so he can’t come in tonight.”
The Moon Pinnace Page 36