by Rick Bass
This type of operation was successful about 95 percent of the time, and its surprising failure had caused Jim to consider for the first time that which he had previously been purposefully avoiding—the realization that he might never get back his sight in that eye.
The second, alternative operation—called the bubble procedure—was successful only about 75 percent of the time; if it failed and a third treatment was needed, and then a fourth or a fifth, the percentages continued to decline dramatically.
After Jim got the bad news, they sat for a long time in the waiting room. Jim apologized to Jerry for the two of them having now to stay overnight.
“Hell, don’t worry about that,” Jerry said. “I’m just sorry you didn’t get the answer you wanted. I hate that they have to go in there and work on it again.”
“After this operation, I have to keep my head pointed down at the ground for a week,” Jim said. The retina had only partially attached the last time, so Dr. Le Page would have to go back in there and cut it loose and burn away all the old scar tissue with lasers, then hang the weary retina back in its proper place. At that point, the doctor would pump a bubble of nitrogen gas right behind the retina, packing the eye socket tight to prevent the retina from slipping loose again, until the connective tissues of life could reclaim it, reattaching and binding it to the back of the eye. That was the reason that Jim would have to keep his head tipped down for several days—to keep the bubble, tucked back in there like a Ping-Pong ball, from sliding to one side or another, wherein the retina, the wallpaper, might slide off.
Near-perfect calm and stillness would be required for the next six to seven days, to keep the bubble balancing there, like an egg perched not even in the cup of a spoon, but on the inverted arc of the spoon overturned—inflated tight-but-not-too-tight against the precarious curve of his eye.
Jim slumped in the outpatient chair. It was a beautiful day outside, nothing but blue sky with bright late-winter sunshine. “I don’t even mind the six or seven days,” Jim said. “I just mind the not-knowing for that period of time. I’ll do anything to get my sight back. Anything. Whatever it takes,” he said, “sign me up for it. Anything.”
The second operation was scheduled for later in the afternoon; they had six or seven more hours to kill, though Jim showed no inclination toward doing anything but remaining slumped in that chair.
“I thought it was all right,” he said. “I thought that because I could see patches of light, it was going to be okay.” He sighed deeply. “I knew I was fucked though when he held up two fingers and I couldn’t see them. He held them right in front of my face, and still I couldn’t see them. Just black.”
He slumped farther into his seat.
“The nurses all kept saying how lucky I was to have him—that he’s the best in the Northwest,” Jim said. “They said he’s a miracle worker.” Jim shrugged, talking more to himself than to Jerry. “I don’t know. I will say this, he’s a joker; he did try to make me feel better. It was kind of weird, and only a little bit funny, but at least he was trying.
“After he’d told me the bad news, he left me alone there for a minute to digest it. Said he had to go look at an x-ray. What he really did though was put on this disguise, one that made him look a little different. It was pretty real-looking, especially since I could see just out of the one eye. He was wearing a wig that was just slightly different from how his real hair was, and he had this fake rubber nose, again very realistic, that was just a little different from his real one—longer, and more angular. He had on a slightly different set of eyeglasses, too—not wildly different from the ones he’d been wearing, but a little different, so that you’d notice something had changed—and he was wearing a different smock, one that said ‘Doctor Smock’ instead of ‘Doctor Le Page.’
“When he saw me give him a double take, he laughed and said, ‘I’m not Doctor Le Page, I’m Doctor Smock. Don’t worry, you’re not going crazy: it happens all the time. Everyone thinks there’s just one of us—or sometimes they think we’re twins!’ He folded his clipboard to his chest and sidled in closer, far cheerier than Doctor Le Page had been. ‘What’s that old buzzard been telling you—that the odds are long you’ll ever see again?’ He leaned in close to my eye, spread it open with his fingers a little, and clucked. ‘I don’t know what that old buzzard told you—’
“‘He didn’t tell me anything,’ I said.
“‘But I can tell you’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be all right. He’s a piece of shit, socially, that Doctor Le Page, but it’s true what they say, he’s a fine surgeon, and I can tell it’s going to turn out all right.’ Then he left the room,” Jim said, “and a minute later, he came back in, himself once more—Dr. Le Page—pretending not to know what was going on.
“It was too weird,” Jim said. “Man, I’ll tell you what, I am fucking wiped out. Can you imagine?” he said, his anger starting to rise. “What the fuck do you think he was thinking? It was just too weird. He must have gone to a shitload of time and trouble to get it all made up, manufactured just right, so that it seemed only a little different rather than a lot different.” He shook his head. “It was so weird. There wasn’t much change in him. Just one or two little things. He was hardly any different at all.”
The nurse, who had been listening as she filled out some forms at the typewriter, gave them a look that said clearly she’d heard enough moping, that it was time to move out and forward—to clear a space for the next patient. Through his one good eye, and sunk in his pensiveness, Jim noticed none of this, but Jerry said, “Come on, it’s a fine day. Let’s go outside,” and got him up and moving, and they made their way outside, back to their truck.
Jim had made reservations for them to stay at the navy base, and they stopped for lunch at a barbecue place on the way out to it. Several enlisted men came and went, young and hale in their camouflage fatigues, crewcuts, and heavy shining boots.
They drove on to the base. Jim cautioned Jerry to slow down. There were twenty-mile-per-hour speed limit signs posted around the schools, the commissary, the churches, and the hospital—and these limits were enforced totally, zealously, so that all the traffic slowed to a creep in these areas, and coming in from the wild bustle of the outside world, Jerry was disoriented by the effect. It was as if they had wandered or even descended into someplace where time, if not suspended from its usual rapid and alarming rate of decomposition, was at least slowed or postponed.
They registered at the lobby of the guest housing compound—a long row of brick apartments that reminded Jerry of the kind that college students live in, or newly married couples following their first years out of college. There was a kitchen, a tiny bedroom, and a main room with a hide-a-bed, and Jim reeled into the bedroom, exhausted, and collapsed as if into a coma.
Jerry sat down on the couch and tried to read but was made antsy by the grim cinder-block interior of the place, and he watched the cold sunlight through the window gratefully, drinking it in but too weary to get up and go out into it. During each of the seventeen years that Jerry had lived with Karen up in the mountains, the winters had gotten harder and harder for him, psychologically, and though he had not been bothered by it when he was younger, Jerry had come to believe in what the physicians were now calling “seasonal affective disorder,” where a person in a gray climate becomes sadder during the light-stricken, shortened days of winter. His fatigue wasn’t that simple, he knew, but was present on top of any other weariness, and it seemed to him that the debilitating effect of the winter-sadness was cumulative, like that of too many concussions, the true harm of which is sometimes not revealed until years after the initial injury.
Some years, enduring the winter-sadness was like taking a beating, and the flat-water place of their marriage made the beating worse. Karen went days without touching him, and there were days when she did not seem to like it when he touched her. Sometimes, however, right before falling asleep, they would hold hands, in that last half-minute of w
akefulness. Had Jerry become a less interesting person over the years? He didn’t think so, but was it possible that a lifetime of stacking rocks, one after the other, had conspired to make her believe that he had? That she had heard and seen all that he had, finally, to offer?
Jerry knew that he wouldn’t be able to be a stonemason forever: already he found he was having to use smaller and smaller rocks, using the larger ones only as capstones to save his strength and energy; and some day, all the wear and tear—cartilage and ligament damage, back failure, arthritis, and finally, general and overwhelming old-man’s weakness—would deprive him of the solace he found in his work, and that saddened him, though he tried not to think about it overmuch.
He disliked the winter more and more each year, resenting the way it covered up all the stones in the quarry so that he had to wait until spring to select the rocks he would be using in his coming year’s work, and he disliked, too, the way the snow covered not just those loose fieldstones on projects unfinished from the autumn before but also all his completed projects. He missed most of all the feeling he got at the end of each day’s work, at dusk, when he would look back with pride at the advance of his work, matching comfortably the advance of the summer day, and of how he would always, then, begin to think of Karen with deep hope and deep love, always with hope and love, and would leave his unfinished rock wall, always unfinished, and head on back home, truly eager for another try, no matter how the day had started out upon leaving home that morning.
In the old days, when Karen had to leave a note for him, she would always sign it, “Love, K,” even if they had had a squabble earlier that day. But now if there has been even the slightest problem, much less an eruption—suppose Jerry has put a stamp on an envelope crookedly, giving rise to the risk, in Karen’s opinion, of the letter’s recipient getting the impression that Jerry is a “hayseed,” then Karen will omit the “Love, K” part and will leave the note, the instructions, unsigned—as if it, love, or the mention or reaffirmation of it, is a reward to be dispensed or taken away dependent upon execution of behavior, or even upon the sheer horoscopical luck, or unluck, of the day. As if it is a commodity, a finite resource prone to being earned and bartered or lost, rather than something that moves in wild currents of breath writhing in gibbous ribbons across the sky.
There at Jim’s old navy base, Jerry sat remembering once again the hope he used to feel at the end of each day’s work, and he watched the bright yellow winter sunlight for a long time before emerging from his saddened paralysis and hauling himself out into the sunlight, where he stood in the cold for a long time, ankle deep in snow in the front yard, with his face turned upward, his arms spread wide and lifted loosely to the sky, eyes shut, and felt dully the sun’s touch upon his bare face, and the faint warmth of it through his eyelids.
He stood like that for a long time, until his arms grew heavy, and even after he had lowered them he remained standing there, head tipped down and shoulders rounded, like an old horse in a barnyard, or an old hound.
***
When Jim awoke, there was little more than an hour left before the second surgery. He was groggy and silent, and though he did not seem to Jerry to be entirely accepting of his fate, whatever that might be, there was a new resolve about him, as if the despair and confusion, though not banished, had been put aside for however long it would take to get through the operation.
In some ways, this brittle steadiness by Jim was harder for Jerry to be around than Jim’s previous worries. It seemed to Jerry now that there was the feeling that a bomb was about to go off, that terror and blackness was but a thin scratch beneath the surface.
Jim knew he’d be wiped out after the surgery and wanted to go by the commissary beforehand, both to stock up on items for his trip home and to get something nice for Jerry’s dinner that night, still concerned that Jerry would have to be spending the night away from home.
“Karen won’t mind, will she?” he asked again.
“No,” Jerry said, “she won’t mind.”
“I’m sorry I won’t be much company this evening,” he said. They were each carrying a basket. Jim knew he’d want a beer afterward, and maybe some ice cream and yogurt.
“It’s okay,” Jerry said.
The commissary was an explosion of bounty and light. The high overhead fluorescent lights glared and reflected in all directions, and the floor was sparkling white. The plastic wrappings of each product glinted under the high pulsing lights, and the aisles of the store were crowded with shoppers pushing steel carts piled to overflowing with packages—toilet paper, of course, and five-liter bottles of Diet Coke, and sponges, and potato chips. The commissary was as crowded with retired military personnel as it was with those still serving in active duty, and it was the retired soldiers and sailors who seemed most determined, willful, to exploit the benefits of their previous enlistment, though in their movements they bore also a vacationlike camaraderie. Jerry watched with fascination as the ex-soldiers, men and women, middle-aged and old-aged, pushed those shopping carts up and down the aisles like looters.
Frozen pizzas for a dollar, cans of soda pop a dime each. Plastic binoculars for their grandchildren, cartoon videos for two dollars. Jelly beans, coffee beans, and fifty-pound sacks of navy beans. The prices all seemed arrested, as if halted in their natural growth twenty-five or thirty years ago, or even longer; and the old sailors and infantrymen, the battleship mechanics and howitzer specialists, the Seals and the Green Berets, fell upon these prices, these offerings, voracious now in their waning years to get back some fragment of all that which they had given. As if it might all yet balance.
After a while the intensity of the shopping made Jerry a little queasy, and he was reminded, in almost hallucinogenic fashion, of a vast warehouse filled with tens of thousands of termites or carpenter ants, each one chewing and gnawing in full frenzy, eating out the hollowed middle of a structure that was sure to collapse at any moment, and he could barely stand to stay inside any longer.
After Jim paid for his purchases and came back outside, Jim tilted his head to look up at the winter sky. A thin sheet of haze was advancing upon the sun, a shoal of clouds bringing in weather from the west. Jim glanced at his watch. He had thirty minutes left before his operation, and Jerry felt that he too was under the gun—that though he might have slightly more time than Jim, the clock was beginning to move fast for him too, now, and that he himself might have only two or three days left before some final or important convocation, summons, or termination—though what powerful event might rest in his own destiny, and such a short notice away, he could not begin to say.
***
By the time they got to the clinic, Jim was more jittery than ever, and it did not help matters that everyone else in the crowded waiting room appeared to be as old as Methuselah. Except for the nurses, interns, and physicians, Jim and Jerry were the only citizens of vigor present.
The clinic was set up to maximize a steady high-volume flow of clients, with all the surgeons working on all the patients in a great common room, just beyond the receptionist’s desk. The operating room was separated from the waiting area by only a glass wall, so that the friends and family could stand and watch the progress of the operation. They couldn’t necessarily see the details, but they could see the doctor-in-blue bent over the skull of their patient and could tell by the patient’s stillness the depth of the anesthesia’s hold or, by the groggy stirrings, the degree of recovery. The operating room was lit brilliantly and had about it the air of a large and busy garage on a Friday evening, with all the mechanics hurrying to finish in time for the weekend.
Most of the mates and accomplices of the patients chose however to ignore the glass wall and sat with their heads tucked in magazines, or fretting with needlework or cross-stitch, chatting with one another about, among other things, the number of times they had been to Branson, Missouri. Jerry listened to one such conversation that went on for ten minutes about a split pea soup that had evidently been a
staple of a cafeteria there, as well as a favorite of both seniors. Then they began talking about the prune pies they had had for dessert.
Jerry got up and stood at the wall for a long time and tried to watch his friend, but Jim was wheeled to the very back of the room and Dr. Le Page had his own back turned to the wall, so that all Jerry could see were Jim’s big feet. After a while he sat back down and read a book, surrounded by the casual, almost dreamy murmurings of the sighted.
***
Jim and Jerry had been told the surgery would take only one hour, but it was three and a half hours before Jim emerged, his face even more swollen and discolored, with a pirate’s eye patch and mummy-wrap swathing the entire left side. Dr. Le Page did not seem to be up to any of his tricks that time, and he went out of his way to meet with Jerry and to tell him that he felt confident that he had gotten it right this time, and Jerry could see, for the first time, in both Dr. Le Page’s confidence and terseness, how much the doctor had been bothered by the failure of the first surgery.
“It took a long time because we had to burn off a lot of scar tissue,” Dr. Le Page said, using that curious vernacular “we” that so many professionals employ, even when they are the only one involved in an act. “We also inflated the bubble behind the retina extra large, to be sure the retina doesn’t slip. For a few days the eye might be a little more painful than it would have been otherwise, but I think it’s worth it. I wanted to be absolutely sure this time.”
Jim was still groggy from the anesthesia, so Dr. Le Page made sure that Jerry understood what he was saying—handed him the prescription for pain medicines, which he said Jim would definitely be needing. “The bubble will dissolve slowly,” Dr. Le Page explained, “with the gas being absorbed first into the bloodstream, and then expelled back into the outer atmosphere via the lungs. As the bubble slowly dissipates, his vision will return. Right now he won’t be able to see around the bubble—it’ll be like trying to see around a brick wall—but in time, as the bubble subsides, light will be able to reenter the brain. It was a good surgery,” Dr. Le Page said, with confidence. “He’ll be able to see again.