I’m whirling round and round, spinning, careening, smacking my palms together. The room blurs, light and darkness flash in my eyes, like flags unfurled and cracking in the wind.
“You make a grown man –”
It hurts. My elbow. I’ve fallen. Blood on my lip. I’ve bitten it. Legs don’t work. Shaking. I ought to crawl. Where’s that light come from? There’s too much light. My eyes don’t work in the light.
I glance up. The two figures in the open doorway are black cutouts, target men on a police firing range. The shock of seeing them makes something suddenly hurt in my chest. It feels like a muscle has ripped.
“Who?” A whisper.
One of them flicks a light switch. It dazzles my eyes. I blink, squint. I’m grunting too, panting. What is this? I’ve been hit in the chest with a brick. It’s smashed my sternum. I can’t lift my head; I’m staring into a slippery pool of polished hardwood. I hear footsteps.
“Who?” I say.
Two pairs of shoes stop. “He’s drunk,” someone says. Then: “Can you hear me?”
I can’t seem to talk. I reach for the shoe. It pulls back.
“There’s plaster all over my apartment.” McMurtry. I roll on to my back, press the pain in my chest with both hands, trying to hold it down, keep it from spreading. I look up two pairs of trouser legs; the faces hang over me. Rubacek and McMurtry.
Rubacek pitches his voice very high. “Can you hear me? Where’s my car keys?”
McMurtry’s feet give off an earthy odour. There’s a pee stain the size of a quarter centred in the crotch of his pants. He stoops down. The pull of gravity makes the loose skin sag away from the skull. He looks like death.
“Go through his pockets,” he says.
Rubacek shouts, “Where’s my fucking car keys?”
I snatch at McMurtry’s pant leg. He pulls back, totters, almost falls.
“My chest,” I say. “It hurts.”
“What?”
“He’s drunk,” says McMurtry disdainfully.
“He doesn’t look too hot,” says Rubacek.
“My chest. Please. It hurts.”
“Now he’s crying,” says McMurtry. “Shame.”
13
“You’re still in your hospital gown,” observes the nurse.
I am sitting in a chair by the window, and balanced on my red, scurfy knees is the note pad I sent the candy-striper down to the tuck shop for several hours ago. I don’t lift my eyes from it. I’m making a list. My pencil hovers above the page and then scratches down another name. James Agee.
“Dr. Keitel has signed your release. It’s one-thirty now. You’ll have to be out by two o’clock. All right?”
I don’t answer. Dan Blocker.
“If you have nobody to pick you up I can call you a taxi from the nursing station,” she offers. “Would you like me to call you a taxi?”
“No.” Elton John.
Out of the corner of my eye I watch her step into the hallway and beckon. Her legs, encased in white hose, are muscular chalk. She and her superior confer. “What do you mean you don’t think he’s going to leave? He’s been discharged. He’s got to leave.”
“Yes,” agrees the nurse, “of course, he’ll have to leave. But what if …?”
“What if what?”
“What if he won’t?” She’s coaxed me two or three times to get dressed and I’ve ignored her. The nurse says that in her opinion I’m scared to leave the hospital.
She’s right.
There I go, pressing too hard again. The lead has cut through the paper. Mama Cass.
“Well, damn it, give him fifteen minutes to make up his mind to get unscared. We’ve got a surgery to be admitted at two. If he isn’t out of there by then, call me,” she says grimly. “Where is he? In here?”
“Yes.”
She pokes her head in the door. “Okay, get your pants on. Shore leave at two, sailor.” She’s gone, her passage marked by a starchy whisper of garments.
Elvis Presley, Roy Clark.
What the younger nurse said is true. I don’t want to leave the hospital because I’m afraid. At first I was afraid to be here, and now I’m afraid not to be here. Because this is the place they have the tubes that go up your nose and into your veins to keep you alive. This is the place that doctors and nurses stand alert, ready to fire a stalled heart with jumper cables, or hook up a respirator to inflate and deflate weakened lungs.
I can’t sleep. The first night, the day before yesterday, they gave me a strong sedative and a muscle relaxant, so I managed a little shut-eye. But I slept in fits and starts and could not stop myself from dreaming that it was my father who had had the heart attack. I would wake with a start, again and again, each time confused as to where I was, incapable of thinking anything but: He’s dead. My father’s dead.
Gradually I came to see this wasn’t so. I remembered it wasn’t Pop who had had the heart attack, but me. And then the truly awful realization took hold, that this was worse than the dream. Better Pop than me. Better anyone than me.
But slowly, gratefully, body and mind gave way to the drugs. Just at the moment the dream began again, I experienced a stab of recognition; I tried to fight free of it, knowing what was coming, but by then it was too late.
The dream was the same each time.
It is a murderously hot day in Texas. I’m sure it’s Texas. My father is walking on the shoulder of a highway toting a gas can. My mother and I are sitting in the stalled car watching him approach. Behind him lie brown fields, a white sky.
My mother says, in a flat voice, “He doesn’t look well. He’s getting old.”
“Not Pop. He looks like a million bucks.”
I take my eyes from him for only a second, to light a cigarette. Mother screams.
My head jerks up. He’s gone. Everything is gone. Pop, gas can, everything.
My mother shrieks, “The angels came! The angels snatched your daddy away!”
The white Texas sky is full of fire, fire twisting and shaking and leaping. Why doesn’t anyone else pay it any mind? Cars continue to tear by us, in monotonous succession, with a whine and sizzle of tires barely audible above the windy roar of flame lapping at our roof and the broken sounds of my mother’s grief.
I’d rather make this list than think of that.
Arthur Ashe.
Last night the duty nurse caught me talking to the other patient in my room, the stroke victim they moved to neurology this morning, Mr. Beattie, a gentleman my father’s age. He was brought in sunk in a coma, breathing deeply, pinkish eyelids fluttering, beaky nose tilted at the ceiling. For nearly sixteen hours he never moved.
About two o’clock this morning I heard myself speaking to Mr. Beattie. I had made an unconscious shift from thinking to talking. I was aware of the low murmur of words in the room and that brought me up short. I paused and listened intently. The ward was heavy with a suppressed kind of quiet, different from true stillness. Far off down the corridor I could hear an old woman faintly calling, “Nursie! Nursie!” She’d been doing that off and on for most of the night.
I started to talk again. I don’t know how long I’d been speaking to Mr. Beattie when he gave me a fright. Suddenly his long, bony hand sprang off the bedclothes and gripped the railing on his bed so violently that the bars shook with the vehemence of his grip.
I broke off, waited. There was nothing else. He didn’t move again. The hand clung fiercely to the bar, the knobbed arthritic fingers I’d noticed earlier in the day twisted clumsily around the chrome. I thought he might be waiting too, waiting for the sound of my voice before he summoned his strength to pull himself upright.
I raised myself up on my elbow and continued. “Ain’t this a solemn night a-layin’ on our backs admirin’ them stars? Ain’t it still? And looky at that town up high on that black hill, just looky at them bully winder lights! Lord, looky at the lights on that hill, Jim!”
The nurse in the doorway behind me said: “Is there something the matter
with Mr. Beattie?”
I threw a look over my shoulder. I couldn’t make out her face because she stood solid and dark against the soft night lamps of the corridor. They outlined her figure in an aura of ragged, spiky light.
I didn’t know what to say. The best I could manage was, “I think he moved.”
She went past me to his bedside.
“His hand,” I said, pointing.
She prised his fingers loose with some difficulty. “There,” she said, “there, Mr. Beattie.” The nurse forced it down along his side, stuffed it like wadding between his hip and the bars.
She turned to me. “Can you sleep?” she asked. “Do you want something more to help you sleep?”
“No,” I said, “I can sleep.” I was afraid of the dreams of the night before.
“Try not to pay him any attention. They often talk gibberish,” she explained to me. “Try and ignore him if you can.”
She left our room. I listened for the squeak of her crepe soles to fade away. When they did I propped myself back up. “Listen to that water,” I went on, “ain’t it soft? Cain’t you smell the mud in the river? Ain’t it good?”
And up, up from the pale coverlet the thin arm levitated, up through the darkness it rose, until his fingers found the uppermost bar and closed gently.
Peter Sellers? He must have had the first one before he was forty-five.
My list is lengthening. I didn’t know I’d squirrelled away in my mind such a dreary roll call of trivia. There are a lot of them, aren’t there? Famous People Aged Forty-Five and Younger Stricken With Heart Attacks. I actually scribbled that heading at the top of the page. It’s a sign of mild shock, I suppose, doing this. Keeps control of my thoughts though, focuses them. The word stricken is an indication of my state of mind. I wouldn’t normally use such a word. Hate it in headlines and news reports: Family Stricken With Grief.
A really surprising number of the famous are stricken, which leads me to wonder how many ordinary folk of the same age must have keeled over, unremarked, because of defective pumps. People I wouldn’t hear about because their coronaries aren’t news. It’s apparently not as unusual to have a heart attack at thirty-one as I once would have thought.
I catch myself listening to it now. If you’re really worried about the condition of your heart, there’s no need to fiddle for a pulse. It’ll interrupt a conversation. Take my word for it. It’ll thump so loudly for attention you won’t hear a word being said to you; sitting on a hard chair you can feel it chock-chocking in your buttocks. I’ve learned all this in the past thirty-six hours.
I’ve been waiting for a warning twinge. This morning, after my third EKG since I was admitted two nights ago, I caught myself shuffling down the corridor, leaning on the railing bolted to the wall, taking it easy. I sometimes even have a picture of my heart in my mind – tender, bruised, the tissues empurpled and livid with strain.
I’m a maniac. Whatever possessed me? I know better. A sedentary fat man shouldn’t leap around his living room in a frenzy. A sleepless, stressed, sedentary fat man especially shouldn’t leap around his living room in a frenzy. Top it off with the blood-pressure problem you’ve had since you were twenty-five, Ed, and your stupidity stretches the bounds of credulity. Not to mention the liquor. You’ve read about the strain alcohol puts on the heart, how it constricts arteries, restricts the easy functioning of valves. Christ.
The pain. It felt as if a wedge were being pounded into my breastbone with a mallet, as if I were splitting. I sat up, it didn’t help. I lay down, it didn’t help. I groaned, it didn’t help. I gave up groaning, no change.
And all the while Rubacek kept asking me what was the matter. I hated him. Couldn’t he see what was the matter? There I was, lying on the floor, clasping my chest, twisting from side to side. Did he expect me to say it?
The view from a stretcher is ceiling. The ambulance attendants and Stanley struggled with their burden down two flights of stairs; there is no elevator in the Twin Spruce Apartments. Turnings in the stairway were difficult to navigate. I was bumped, tipped, jogged, cursed. My eyes fixed, I watched the ceiling tilt and slide. Whenever McMurtry came too near me I yelled. He trotted alongside the stretcher with my clothes bundled under one arm.
“Keep away from me, you goddamn vulture!” I shouted. Apartment doors opened. I heard a baby crying.
McMurtry kept plucking at the coarse blanket that covered me. I slapped at his palsied hand, raged whenever his avid face lurched into my field of vision. “Bugger off!” He was trembling with the horrible happiness that overtakes some of the old when they see a member of a younger generation seriously ill. On such occasions they are full of self-congratulation and flash the cheerful grimace of the survivor, the smile of the man found in a lifeboat with the dead stacked up all around him.
Rubacek was managing one of the stretcher poles at my head. I could hear him explaining my behaviour to the ambulance attendants. His theory was that it resulted from mixing drugs and booze.
“I seen it before,” he grunted. “Bad news mixing tranks and booze. Some guys flip right out, go ape-shit. Now I don’t take nothing myself in that line, not even an aspirin, say. Keep the system clean.”
It wasn’t tranks and booze. McMurtry was trying to draw the blanket over my face. That was what had me bellowing. I wasn’t dead yet.
The younger of the nurses is back at the door. “You’re in luck,” she says. “Your brother is here. He says not to worry about a taxi, he’ll get you home.”
“My brother?”
She steps aside and Rubacek sidles into the room. He looks sheepish. “Hi, Ed,” he says.
“Hi, Stan. How’s Mom and Dad?”
“All right,” he mumbles, casting down his eyes.
“Stan lives with my parents,” I explain to the nurse. “He can’t hold a job.”
“I’ll leave now,” she says pointedly, “so you can change into your street clothes.”
When the door closes I scold Rubacek. “What do you think you’re doing, telling people you’re my brother?”
He shrugs. “I know these hospitals. They won’t tell you nothing unless you’re like a blood relative.”
“And just what the hell did you need to know, Stanley?”
“Well, Jesus, I was worried, right? You looked like death warmed over by the time we got you here and into emergency.”
“What do you expect? I was having a heart attack.”
Stanley shakes his head. “You weren’t neither, Ed. And you know it.”
“What!”
“Come on, Dr. Keitel talked to you this morning and he told you same thing he told me. You wasn’t having no heart attack.”
“I sure as hell was! Keitel! Keitel! So you’ve been talking to him, have you?”
“Yeah. That’s right, Dr. Keitel.”
“Dr. Keitel? The bone through his nose didn’t cause you second thoughts? Keitel a doctor? The man’s idea of medical diagnosis is to split open a pullet with a hatchet under a full moon and peer into its steamy entrails while he hops around the patient on one foot awaiting revelation. We’re talking witch doctor here. We’re talking graduate of Haiti’s ivy league, Voodoo U.”
Stanley chuckles.
“Literally! Literally! I’m speaking literally!”
“Get off it, Ed. The man’s an important cardiacologist.”
“Cardyquackologist!” I shout. “That’s what he is. Cardyquackologist!”
“Sssh! This is a hospital,” warns Stanley. “And you’re getting excited.” He opens the closet door and hands me my pants. “Here, put these on.”
I carry on, my voice reduced to a vehement whisper. “Yeah, well, let Oogooboogoo Keitel have the kind of pain in the brisket that I had. You saw how I was. Let him have the goddamn excruciating pain in his chest and see if he doesn’t say it’s a heart attack,” I mutter, struggling into my trousers.
“Dr. Keitel says it was muscle spasms. Brought on by tension.” Stanley passes me a wrinkled shirt
.
“Muscle spasms!” I throw up my hands in disgust, the shirt sleeves flap. “So he gave you that little song and dance too, did he? What do you expect? That he’s going to tell the truth? Tell a thirty-one-year-old his heart’s ready to go? Make him worry so that it poops out sooner than it would have otherwise? Listen, Stanley, they tell you what they think is good for you.”
“He says your EKGs are fine.”
“I heard it. I heard it all.”
“The other doctor agrees.”
“Who? The skinny one?”
“Yeah.”
“When didn’t they ever agree? The whole medical profession is a network of pathological cronyism. When they graduate from medical school they swear a secret blood oath of mutual protection and kiss each other on the cheeks. Compared with them the Mafia is a loose organization of snitches and squealers.”
“Your shoes,” says Stanley.
As I bend over to tie my laces the blood rushes into my head, my temples feel swollen. Is it an elaborate hoax? Is Rubacek also in on the plan to keep the truth about my precarious condition from me? I sneak a sly glance at his face.
“Dr. Keitel says your blood pressure is up,” Stanley informs me, “but I explained you’re experiencing some interpersonal problems.”
“Did you mention Victoria to him? Did you? Answer me, Rubacek.”
“Sort of.”
I throw back my head and groan, “Lord, stay my hand.”
Stanley is unconcerned by this breach of privacy. “Somebody called Marsha phoned. I told her you was in the hospital.”
“Phoned? Phoned where?”
“Our place.”
“It isn’t our place. It’s my place.”
“Maybe not for long,” says Rubacek. “That old guy had me down to see what you done to his apartment the other night. You knocked plaster off his ceiling. Believe me, he’s bugged.”
“So he’s bugged.”
“You ought to be nice to him. He can make trouble. I played him a couple of games of rummy and sweet-talked him and said you’d be glad to make him a reimbursement. I explained … you know … about your wife running away and being pregnant and like that. Maybe it helped. He said he’d consider your offer.”
My Present Age Page 20