by C. P. Boyko
Andrew searched through Nathan and Claudia’s medicine cabinet, trying to recall if he had ever taken any of these drugs before. Methotrexate, amoxicillin, hydroxyzine, bepridil hydrochloride. The names did not look familiar, but he would hardly have recognized the names of his own prescriptions. Ignoring their indications, he scanned their side effects. “Dizziness,” “headaches,” and “malaise” held little attraction. “Stomatitis,” “pruritis,” and “enteritis” were kinds of inflammation and probably best avoided. “Thrombocytopenia” and “telangiectasia” sounded foreboding; “epistaxis,” “syncope,” and “paresthesia” had a pleasant ring . . . Then he hit the jackpot. Hidden by a row of vitamins were expired bottles of “insomnia,” “tachycardia,” “cognitive dysfunction,” and “mood alteration.” He washed down two insomnias and a mood alteration with a swig of beer, flushed the toilet and ran the faucet for a few seconds, then returned to the living room—where Connie and Bruce were getting ready to leave. Andrew remonstrated.
“Work tomorrow,” Bruce apologized.
“That never used to stop us!”
This claim was debated, which led to further reminiscence of their college days. Connie, who had not been at school with them, noticed that all their stories seemed to revolve around Andrew doing, or inciting others to do, stupid, illegal, or dangerous things while intoxicated. She could not understand or share in the laughter these memories generated, and to combat feelings of isolation, she allowed herself to feel haughty and disdainful towards her husband’s friends. She was, however, not immune to Andrew’s charms—he was tanned, languid, and unabashed—and she feared a night like the ones they described: a night of recklessness, loss of control, and joy. When Andrew waved his hands, deprecating the past, and proposed again that they all go out and make new memories, she squeezed Bruce’s arm, hard.
“How long are you going to be in town this time?” he asked Andrew. —Andrew didn’t know. “A week,” he said at random. —“Then we’ll make memories on Saturday.”
When they had gone, Claudia yawned and asked Andrew if he needed a place to sleep. Nathan began tidying the glasses, and did not offer him another beer.
Andrew said no, he was staying with his brother Roger.
“That reminds me,” said Claudia. She handed him a stack of mail. “Your folks forwarded it. I guess they figured we’d see you before they did.”
Among the bills and the bank statements was a letter from Hillary.
He would not let them call him a cab. At the door, he hugged them goodnight absentmindedly, and went out into the night.
In bed, Claudia asked Nathan, “How do you think he looked?” —“Pretty haggard,” he admitted. —“What did he get up to all this time in India?” —“Who knows. It doesn’t seem to have done his asthma any good.”
Claudia tried to imagine Andrew’s life, failed, and shook her head to clear it of the effort. “It must be awful, not having anything to live for.” —“Or anyone,” said Nathan, putting his arms around her. —“He just never grew up . . .” —“Of course that’s what I always liked about him . . .”
But they were already half asleep, and their words were merely reflexive. In broad day they would have been embarrassed by these sentiments, because pity, condescension, and bemusement were the conventional responses to Andrew’s unconventionality, and they did not believe that close friends should treat each other conventionally.
Andrew sat at a coffee-shop counter and read Hillary’s letter; his face assumed as many different expressions as that of a baby digesting, and finally settled, when he had finished, between admiration and defiance.
Hillary was his oldest friend. They had grown up together; he could not remember a time before he had known her. They had built forts and explored woods together. They had done each other’s homework. (She was good at math and history—anything involving memorization or following rules; Andrew was good at writing essays and generating hypotheses—anything requiring originality or opinion.) She had relieved him of his virginity. They had criticized each other’s lovers. They had cut each other’s hair.
But they had not seen each other, and had hardly spoken on the phone, for three years. Now she was a doctor in the army, and had been sent to the island. Now she was at war.
I know you are against this war and disapprove of the army in general. He could recall but no longer recapture this attitude of his youth, and was appalled that they had become estranged over anything so abstract. But I believed that doctors were needed here more than perhaps anywhere on earth, and now that I am here I believe it more than ever. She was forgetting or ignoring the fact that the army had paid for her education. That was the real reason she had enlisted, and the real reason she and Andrew had argued: he could not understand why, if she needed money, she had not come to him—or, what amounted to the same thing, his parents. But she was too proud to borrow, or to ask anyone for help. The idea of her self-sufficiency was too precious to her. Some of his old anger resurfaced. To be hung-up about money, of all things! He remembered how in college she would stay at home, not because (as she claimed) she needed to study—she knew more than any of her professors—but because she couldn’t afford to come out. Though she never drank, and never ate much, she didn’t like to buy nothing, and would never permit anyone to treat her to so much as a cup of tea. In his mind was a picture of her, a vegetarian on Wing Night, nursing a diet soda that was already paid for, while her friends ran up tabs in search of satiety and oblivion.
The soldiers do not match your idea of them as leering, macho sociopaths. He doubted that he had ever put it so crudely. They are all different: shy, polite, clownish, brash, thoughtful, clever, simple, kind. They are tall and short, scrawny and stout, handsome and homely. They come from all over. They miss their farms, schools, cars, dogs, pianos, girlfriends, and brothers. They get their legs and fingers and faces and lungs pierced, torn, and blown apart by bullets and shrapnel and mine fragments, and some of them are never shy, polite, or clownish or anything ever again. They come to us hurt or dying, but none of them complain. She neglected to mention that these shy, polite boys were busy piercing and blowing apart other shy, polite boys; that they were being paid—had signed up—to kill; and that some of them, surely, must enjoy it.
The waste of life is awful, but I was prepared for that. I was not prepared for the waste of character, of personality, of unique minds filled with unique memories spilled forever like water from a smashed vase. He found himself thinking of friends who had died: Blake Burchett, who had been hit by a car while bicycling down Hawk Hill; Paul LaMoz, the best chess player Andrew ever met, who had run out of gas on the highway one winter, walked into town, and died a week later of pneumonia; Debbie Lorenzo, who had a birthmark shaped like a duck on the small of her back, who spoke like a radio announcer when she was drunk, and who had died of some disease whose name Andrew had never committed to memory. But unlike Blake, Paul, and Debbie, Hillary’s soldiers had courted death. Perhaps they did not deserve to die, but they had at least known what they were getting into.
But then Hillary, too, had known what she was getting into.
The doctors, nurses, and orderlies I work with are equally varied. There followed a series of pen-portraits: the surly doctor, the sentimental doctor, the flamboyant surgeon, the sardonic anesthetist. Andrew felt himself growing jealous of her dedicated, competent, tireless colleagues, and began even to envy the soldiers their ills and injuries. He wished that he were a doctor; he wished that he were dying. He wished that he were in charge and knew just what to do; he wished that someone else were in charge and that he need do nothing.
The ambulance drivers I have met are especially inspiring. As volunteers, they work completely without supervision, yet night and day they drive into the most dangerous areas, nonchalantly braving mortar shells, mined roads, sniper fire, and ambush.
How foolish, how ostentatious these volunteers seemed, ri
sking their lives to save others! Were their own lives worth so little to them? Were their existences so meaningless?
He put the letter away. After a minute of jaw clenching, he clapped his hands as if accepting a challenge, ordered another coffee, swallowed two tachycardias and a cognitive dysfunction, and went to the payphone in the foyer, where he began dialing numbers from his address book.
He called several friends and former girlfriends before calling Regan, but he pretended to himself, and made her believe, that she was the one person he had most wanted to see. Because her husband was out of town, she invited him over, telling him not to ring the doorbell when he arrived because her kids were sleeping. He forgot, and a little girl answered the door promptly. Though in pajamas, she did not appear to have been sleeping.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought you’d gone to bed.”
He disliked people who spoke to children in cloying, condescending voices, and who bribed them with candy and piggyback rides. He respected children (in fact, he was a little in awe of them), and addressed them as equals; consequently children did not like him much.
“You’re not company,” said the girl. “Mom said company was coming.” —“I don’t know what you’ve done with Regan, but I’m coming in now, so step aside and no sudden movements.”
Andrew and Regan sat drinking wine in the kitchen, but the little girl and her little brother kept peeking through the doorway, so finally Regan bribed them with a glass of juice and a quick game of hangman with Andrew. “But then straight to bed.”
The girl chose a word three letters long. He soon guessed the first two, “B” and “E,” but the girl denied, with obvious disingenuousness, that the third was “D.” Nor was it “G” or “T,” and no other solution made sense. He guessed “X” and “Z” and “Q” and “7.”
“That’s it,” he said. “I’m hanged. You win.” —“No, I still have to draw your toenails. Guess again.”
The figure beneath the gallows became increasingly ornate as he worked his way through the alphabet. When at last she permitted him to lose, she declared that the final space had been blank: the answer was “BE.” She was overcome by mirth at her cunning; Andrew and Regan could still hear giggles coming from her bedroom half an hour later. Andrew plotted revenge.
They drank wine and talked about themselves. Each seemed to be what the other, at that moment, wished to be. To Regan, Andrew’s life sounded dramatic and gloriously unfettered; to Andrew, Regan’s life sounded rooted and luxuriously comfortable. Andrew did not remember his girlfriends so much as he remembered himself, the way he had been, with his girlfriends: with Sandra he had been ingratiating, with Tabitha domineering, with Kasuko a child, with Pari a professor; with others louche, lazy, or clingy, a monk, a rebel, or a philosopher. (With Hillary, that first time, he had been a client, a suppliant—a patient.) With Regan he had been a connoisseur. They had traded esoteric recommendations of artists, books, and music, believing that their tastes were indices to their characters, their preferences virtues. Now he told her about the galleries he had visited, the concerts he had attended, the masterpieces he had discovered, the poets he had drunk absinthe with.
Regan was envious and amazed. Her own history seemed a series of irrevocable decisions, none perhaps regrettable in itself, but each depriving her of countless alternatives. Andrew, on the other hand, seemed miraculously to have avoided decisions; he had shed none of his possibilities, and could still be or do anything. She began devising futures for him, as his friends and family members did constantly—but she felt none of their anxiety, only excitement. She asked him why, if he loved art so much, he did not become an artist? He shook his head and replied with honest humility that he wouldn’t know what to make. Even if he decided arbitrarily to become a painter, say, he would need a lifetime just to determine his influences. There were more great paintings in the world than he could ever look at, and more being produced every day. Until he had seen them all, how could he imagine that he might do something better, or different? And then another lifetime would be needed to learn the craft. No, to be an artist required ignorance and arrogance. He was content being an art lover; that was job enough for him.
They had migrated to the floor, and sat with their backs against the cupboards. He looked at Regan, and a wave of pure nostalgia, without reference to any memory, washed over him like a breeze, and he felt that his life was sad, priceless, and larger than his understanding.
“Why did we ever break up?” he asked, moving closer to her.
Regan snorted. “Are you kidding? We weren’t ever really together. We had sex that one time, then I didn’t hear from you for months.” She said it lightly, but at the time she had been hurt, bewildered, and angry.
He ignored this. “Remember how we said we’d get married when we were forty, if we hadn’t found anyone else?”
“We were twenty then. And I am married.”
Nevertheless she let him kiss her—because she was drunk; because, arrived from nowhere after so many years, he did not seem quite real; and because he would be leaving town again soon, so nothing was irrevocable.
They had sex, quietly and in the dark, and as soon as it was over his mood plummeted. Now he saw himself quite clearly: he was a failure, a vagrant, and a callous philanderer who would say, who would temporarily believe, anything to get a woman into bed. He harbored no affection for Regan; they had hardly known each other years ago, and they had nothing in common now. Her body pressed against his was as strange and repugnant as a corpse. He broke out in a sweat. He had to get away. He escaped to the bathroom and got dressed, then reflexively searched the medicine cabinet.
He was drunk, he was restless, his heart was racing, his emotions were altered and his cognition dysfunctional, but he believed that he felt normal. As always, some core part of him remained unchanged, and he desired to be altogether changed, if only for one night, if only for an hour.
Perhaps he had taken all of Nathan and Claudia’s drugs before, after all; perhaps he had already developed a tolerance to them. He remembered Hillary warning him against increasing the dosage of his asthma medication. But if the old dose gradually became ineffective, what else could one do? For some reason, he remembered the medical term for habituation: tachyphylaxis. He filled his pockets with Regan’s medication and left the house.
This time, she was not hurt, bewildered, or angry. She considered this progress.
At a bowling alley, Andrew told one woman that he was a painter, another that he was a photographer, a third that he was a poet. At a billiard hall, he confided to another woman that he needed a place to sleep, and her boyfriend pushed him. Andrew laughed. He ordered a beer for himself and an elaborate, fruity cocktail for the man who had pushed him. He swallowed two dizzinesses and a syncope and challenged someone to a game of pool.
He telephoned his friends. Most of them sounded concerned, so he reassured them. He visited his brother Roger, who gave him coffee and urged him to visit their sister Nance in the morning. “She’s been worried sick about you.” Andrew batted the air dismissively.
In the street again, he stumbled, then hollered in triumph at having not fallen. He shared a taxi with someone. He took money out of a bank machine. He bought a round of appetizers. He remembered a trick he used to play on his sisters, leaving one of two hallway light switches half-on, thus breaking the circuit and rendering the other switch inoperative. He tried to tell a woman seated on a banquette about this, but the significance of the anecdote eluded her. Someone disparaged the war, giving reasons why it was unnecessary, unwinnable, and unjust. Andrew told them to shut their face.
In the morning, his brother Lawrence’s wife, Beth, nudged him awake. She winced teasingly at his hangover, and told him that he had a visitor.
At the front door was an irate taxi driver, who insisted on Andrew’s taking total and immediate responsibility for the puddle of vomit that had been left in the
taxi’s back seat.
Andrew agreed, apologized, sympathized, shook the man’s hand, invited him in for breakfast, asked his name and where he was from, and smiled winningly through his hangover when he discovered that he had, in his travels, visited the man’s hometown.
She lay on her rack but did not sleep. She felt guilty for not sleeping: she needed sleep; she had been ordered to sleep; but sleep wouldn’t come. She hadn’t slept for seven or eight days—she didn’t know how long exactly. She could only count back four days before she began to doubt her chronology. Some days blended together, too, especially those joined by all-night sessions working on mass casualties in the operating or preponderant rooms. She had last slept, she believed, the night that the massive chest trauma had suddenly expired, presumably from an embolism. Had she remembered to put him on anticoagulants? She didn’t know, and his chart had left with his body for interment registration by the time she’d started her ward rounds in the morning. She had no reason to think she had forgotten anticoagulants, and the orderly or the nurse might have ordered them even if she had forgotten—it was done routinely in nearly every case of major trauma—but she would never know. That had been either seven or eight days ago, she knew, because the next afternoon Hartner had scheduled a demonstration operation (canceled at the last minute due to mass casualties), and he only did demonstrations on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. She could ask someone what day it had been; but they might not remember either. Was a record kept somewhere? Would Hartner know? It didn’t matter.
Seven or eight days, then. It didn’t sound possible: she’d read studies in which subjects deprived of sleep for seventy-two hours began to show signs of psychosis—paranoia, hallucinations, aggression. Her symptoms were less colorful, but given her responsibilities, just as grievous: exhaustion, emotionality, mental fogginess, forgetfulness, and consequently a breathless oppressive feeling of self-doubt that undermined her every decision. In medical school she had functioned adequately on nine hours’ sleep every two days, and as a resident had often got by on less. But no sleep for a week? As far as she knew, it was not humanly possible. Therefore she must in fact have been sleeping some, without realizing it; or else lying awake thinking was giving her enough of what sleep and dreams usually gave people. What did sleep give people? Rest. Well, she was getting that. What did dreams give people? She tried to recall what she had read. Freud believed dreams were a kind of wish-fulfillment, the dramatization of our unmet desires. Jung thought dreams were a sort of pressure-release valve—the exercise yard of our criminal shadow-self. Crick and Mitchison said that dreams were an active forgetting, the neural network’s way of disburdening itself of superfluous information. Roffwarg said the opposite: that dreams were the brain reinforcing its connections. None of these theories described her own absurd, discursive dreams very well, and none could account for the efficacy of her night thoughts. She was inclined, rather, to think that dreams were what they seemed: the byproduct of a dozing, reorganizing brain; the disjointed and only half-aware efforts of the mind to review and absorb the events of the day and thus prepare itself for tomorrow.