Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  Oliver sat silently through all this. He had been in to see Damon several times and had spoken to some of the younger doctors and the sympathetic nurses, and while he had been alarmed by Damon’s appearance, he was inclined to believe the doctors and the nurses he had talked to who told him that now that Damon had survived the first awful days, he would most probably eventually recover. When he talked to his brother on the phone, which he did daily and as best he could described the treatments Damon was undergoing, his brother confirmed that the doctors knew what they were doing. Sheila, he felt, was dissolving. Physically, she already seemed to have lost a great deal of weight and her once-gleaming dark hair hung lank and lusterless around her head and her face seemed sharpened to a thin, brittle edge. And she had always been a woman who had spoken briefly and with confidence and her rambling tirades were frightening, as though her character was breaking up into unfamiliar, jagged, uncontrollable fragments. He would like to have the courage to suggest to her that both for her good and Damon’s, it might be a good idea if she absented herself from the hospital for two or three days at a time; the atmosphere of the Intensive Care Unit was crushing her as well as Damon. But he knew that he couldn’t suggest it. Sheila would think that he was advocating flight, betrayal. As it was, she spent almost the whole day and night in the waiting room, sometimes dozing in a chair, waking with a start and rushing into Damon’s room to see if he needed to tell her something. And it was true that she was the only link with the world by which he could communicate anything because she was the only one who could decipher the scrawls he put on paper. He was suffering terribly from thirst now and was continually writing the word water on the yellow pad they kept at his bedside. The doctors and nurses said he was getting all the liquid necessary intravenously and through the tube down his throat into his stomach through which he was fed a nutritive powder that was supposed to supply him with fifteen hundred calories a day. He was not allowed to drink because anything he took orally would slide immediately into his overworked and cramped lungs. The one time they had tried to feed him some cold Jell-O, it had been pumped up immediately, intact. It was Sheila who got a dozen lemons and squeezed some drops on swabs soaked with glycerin that she ran over his parched lips. He smiled or tried to smile gratefully at the taste, as though the slight sharpness of the fruit gave him, at least momentarily, the illusion of assuaging his thirst.

  “He’ll forget all this,” Oliver said, searching for words of comfort, “once he’s out of here. All the nurses say the same thing.”

  “Torture.” Sheila seemed not to have heard what he had said. “He keeps writing the one word—torture—before he writes anything else.” She took a folded piece of yellow foolscap out of her bag and read from the wandering, almost illegible script, that looked to Oliver like random bird-tracks on sand. “Get out of here. Must get out. Call lawyer. O … That’s you, Oliver. O knows number. Writ. Habeas corpus. Prison.”

  “The nurses tell me it’s the same with everybody,” Oliver said. “They even have a name for it. The ICU syndrome.”

  “They’ve taken you in,” Sheila said accusingly. “They think you’re cute. I see you drinking coffee with them, going out with them to the deli for a sandwich. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Oh, Christ, Sheila,” Oliver said wearily.

  Sheila took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Oliver. Forgive me. I don’t know what I’m saying these days.”

  “Forget it.” He patted her hand.

  A doctor passed through the room and Sheila looked at him hopefully. The doctor ignored her and went into the adjoining conference room, where the staff gathered to discuss cases and listen to lectures.

  “He’s beginning to look like a skeleton,” Sheila said. “You can see every bone of his face. You wouldn’t think that a man’s arms—and such strong arms, too—could wither so fast. He seems to be losing five pounds a day. It’s as though he’s disappearing bit by bit before my eyes.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  HE WAS BEING CARRIED INTO a cave by four masked men. He knew the leader of the four was Zalovsky, although not a word was spoken. The cave was high and spacious, shadowed, hewn out of rock. He could not move but once he was in the cave he saw the carved stone sarcophagus that awaited him. Then he saw that he was not going to be buried alone. Standing against a wall, taller than he had realized, queenly and erect, draped in a flowing rose-colored gown, her hair flowing over her shoulders, her figure bathed in a mauve light, immobile in death, was his wife. Only he couldn’t remember her name. Coppelia was the only name he could conjure up and he repeated it to himself over and over again, irritated. Then it changed to Cornelia, but he knew that was wrong, too.

  Then he felt a sharp pain in his hand and it awoke or nearly awoke him, and the cave and the tall mauve-lit figure disappeared and he remembered that his wife’s name was Sheila and that she was alive, and he was grateful to the clumsy doctor who was trying to draw blood for more tests from his hand because the pain had interrupted his dream. It was the doctor with the straggly beard whom he had tried to appoint master of the vessel on which he still believed he was sailing. Only now he was not free to go up and down between the decks, but was immured below, tied down by both wrists most of the time. The swift backward running clock, false to the hours, was still visible. It was a sly device, he had figured out, to fool him into not sleeping. He had made himself learn to write the word sleep almost clearly on the yellow legal pad. Whoever was on duty to torture him made that the first priority—to keep him from sleeping. The bright neon shone in his eyes at all times. He did not remember daylight.

  They were constantly jabbing him with needles to give or take blood. His veins had collapsed and most of the doctors never could find a fit target for their needles, and his arms and hands and feet were black and blue from the incessant attempts, and he cursed Dr. Zinfandel in his heart because every time he appeared, he ordered either a transfusion or a sample of blood.

  Anybody on duty seemed to have the right to draw blood from him or insert an intravenous tube, no matter how maladroit he or she was, and he became piteously grateful to the people with an instinctive touch who could find his depleted buried veins at the first try. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember them or their names.

  An assorted platoon of doctors seemed to be interested in him, each of them attached to one specialist or another in some obscure medical table of organization. Doctors for his lungs, his kidneys, his throat, with the tube in it at the point where the tracheotomy had been performed, for the bedsores he had developed that went down to the bone and had to be cleansed and bandaged over and over again. He urinated through a catheter and struggled with a bedpan for his bowels, without much success, and had dreams in which he luxuriously pissed normally and sat on a toilet bowl. He was naked and exposed and treated like a piece of meat in a butcher shop and lived, if it could be called living, in a constant state of humiliation.

  The nurses took turns at pounding his chest so that he could cough up the silt accumulating in his lungs. The black man stayed away from him but Damon could see him lurking in the corridor waiting for his chance. Damon warned Sheila once more about the man and wrote a pleading sentence to her asking her to get the police before it was too late.

  Then one day, or night, he heard the sound of distant sirens coming nearer and felt, triumphantly, that his message to his wife had gotten through. He saw the nurses and doctors scurrying away, leaving only the black man, who came into his room and stood over him and said, “They think they’re going to let me hang in here and take the rap. Well, they’re wrong. And if you think you’re going to get away, you’re wrong, too, Mister.” It was then that Damon knew the black man was Zalovsky’s agent, insinuated into the hospital to finish what Zalovsky had begun.

  Then the black man sat on his chest and began to rig a wire box with dynamite in it just in front of Damon’s mouth. “When they come through the door,” the black man said, “this thing goes up. An
d you with it.”

  Damon felt icily calm, pleased that he was going to die so quickly.

  Finished with his job, the black jumped off Damon’s chest and disappeared and Damon was left alone in a suddenly silent place, with the lights for the first time almost completely extinguished and the sirens getting closer, then starting to fade away until all was absolutely quiet.

  Deserted, deserted, Damon thought. Sheila had betrayed him, had not believed him. He lay in the shadows and waited, regretting that the machine had not gone off.

  Tied down and unable to call out, he tried over and over again by groans, signals with his eyes, feeble flickers of his fingers, to get the nurses and doctors who constantly passed the open door of his room to give him something to drink. They passed him by as if he were a beggar at a church door and they were in a hurry to go to a wedding or a baptism.

  He was on a respirator all the time now because he had developed what some of the doctors diagnosed as viral pneumonia and others merely called congestion or a collapsed lung. He took a remote, cool interest in his condition and their attempts at treatment, and when Dr. Rogarth made one of his rare visits, he printed out on the legal pad, “Am I going to die?”

  Dr. Rogarth answered, “We’re all going to die,” and Damon tried to turn his head contemptuously away from the sight of the man, but couldn’t manage it.

  There was one doctor who seemed to Damon to be in charge of depriving him of water. He had a bedraggled wet blondish moustache, very long darkish-blond hair, mad, sly eyes and swept in and out with a loose white open robe floating behind him. He was engaged in a mysterious project that was built around a Persian carpet and involved putting Damon in poses suggested by the figures in the carpet and photographing him in those positions. Damon found himself staked out on burning sands, against looming monuments, the walls of tombs, all in merciless sunlight, hanging from a bare tree on a small island surrounded by a lake from which the noon sun was reflected like bursts of gunfire. He was transported from one place to another as if by magic, in fractions of a second, while the doctor, who by now Damon thought of as the Magician, and who was always accompanied by a wizened nurse in a disheveled uniform, clicked away with his camera while humming merrily to himself. Somehow, Damon managed to communicate with him and the Magician was not loath to talk, often very good-humoredly.

  “What, exactly, are you up to?” Damon asked once.

  “You will see when I’m finished,” the Magician said. “If you must know, I am in a contest. A travel magazine is giving a prize for the photo montage that comes closest to the spirit and design of my carpet. You must learn to cooperate without all this complaining about water, like everybody else.”

  This was the first inkling that there was anybody else in the Magician’s power.

  “Everybody would stop complaining,” Damon said, “if just once you would let them drink as much as they want.”

  The Magician laughed. “All right. I’ll let everybody drink their fill from ten in the morning till noon. Then, by two o’clock, mark my words, they’ll be wailing for water again.” He untied Damon from his tree and laughed as Damon rushed to the edge of the lake and plunged his face into its cool depths.

  At two o’clock, sharp, the Magician tied him again and he was thirstier than ever and from all around him he heard voices wailing, “Water, water.” Over the wailing he could hear the Magician’s laughter.

  Suddenly, he did not know how, he could distinguish night from day. He was on a lower deck of the boat at night and during those hours they did not keep shining the lights in his eyes. His night nurse, whom he now recognized, was a fine-featured slender woman, tanned very dark by the sun, with a soft, delightful voice. One of the doctors, a youngish burly man with a bull neck, visited her often while she was on duty at Damon’s bedside. He made a joke about the woman’s suntan. “I’d like to be there,” he said, “the next time you go sunbathing,” and laughed coarsely. He made other lewd remarks to the woman.

  Lewd remarks, Damon repeated to himself, with distaste. To such a fine and delicate creature. And he was heartbroken when one night, after the bull-necked doctor had slipped into the room to whisper into the nurse’s ear, she had leaned over Damon and said softly, “I’ll be gone for a few minutes.” He knew where she was going—to climb into some poor devil’s empty bed with the lewd doctor.

  The next thing he knew, he was alone with the doctor in an open boat sailing across a lake toward an island. “I know why you’re taking me to the island,” Damon said.

  “Why?” the doctor asked.

  “You’re going to kill me there,” Damon said calmly.

  Angrily, the doctor drew a shining metal object from his pocket and slashed Damon with it. The pain was intolerable, but it was over in a second. “I’m here to save your life,” the doctor said. “Don’t ever forget it.”

  He was deep in the hold of the ship. His hands were tied to a wooden bar in front of him. He was kneeling in front of the bar and beside him was another man, whom he had never seen before, also tied and kneeling. Two nurses kept hurrying up and down an open stairway that led to another deck. He recognized the two nurses. They were Julia Larch and what must have been her daughter. Although there had to be a considerable difference in their ages, they looked exactly alike. They paid no attention to Damon’s groans and the groans of the other man as they pleaded for a sip of water. Finally, annoyed, Julia Larch came over. She gave no sign of recognition that the man in front of her was the father of her son. “You will get a drink at noon,” she said. “Now, keep quiet.”

  The eternal clock was there. Now it was running normally. There was no detecting the movement of its hands on the large dial. It stood at twenty past nine.

  With inhuman self-control he kept himself from looking at the clock until he judged that at least an hour had passed. It was twenty-five past nine. The man tied next to him was groaning louder and louder and whenever one or the other of the nurses who were Julia Larch and her daughter appeared on the stairway, he croaked, through puffed lips, “Water! Water!”

  They paid no attention to him, but hurried up and down on their errands.

  After a while the man’s groans became weaker and weaker, and he began rolling his head from side to side in a demented rhythm. Damon would have liked to do something for him if it was only to choke him and end his torment, but with his hands tied and his tongue swollen in his mouth, he could only make grunting sounds of commiseration. It was the longest period of time in Damon’s life, longer than the trip to Europe, longer than any voyage across the North Atlantic during the war. Finally, when he looked up at the clock, it was one minute to twelve. He looked across at the man next to him. There was a last soft groan, like a baby’s sigh, and the man’s head lolled forward. He was dead.

  Damon heard the ship’s bells strike noon. Julia Larch appeared with a pitcher of water and two glasses. “Where’s the other one?” Julia demanded.

  “He’s dead.” Damon watched greedily, licking his lips, as Julia poured one glass of water. He looked for the other man. The cloths which had bound him to the wooden bar were still there but the body was gone. “They collected him or he turned into powder and blew away,” Damon said stupidly, watching Julia put the full glass of water and the pitcher down so that she could untie his hands. His hands free, he took the glass and drained it, held it out to be refilled. With no expression on her face, Julia poured again and he drained it in one gulp once more. Satisfied for the moment, he said, reproachfully, to Julia, “If you’d come two minutes earlier, he’d’ve been alive.” Julia shrugged, the blank small face impassive. “Rules are rules,” she said.

  From that moment on he could drink all he wanted to. Sheila kept bringing six small cans of cold pineapple juice to him at a time and he never seemed to be able to get enough of them and kept marveling at the glorious tropical flavor of the fruit as it went in an icy torrent down his throat. The Magician and his wizened assistant disappeared and the only doctor of t
he many who went in and out of the Intensive Care Unit whom Damon had any liking for, a small, owl-faced man with large horn-rimmed glasses, who had performed the tracheotomy, came into the room and told him that he was going to replace the tube in his throat the next day with one that would permit Damon to talk, if he learned the trick of breathing in as he put his finger over a hole in the tube and using the breath to say a few words. The man’s name was Dr. Levine, and he had promised Damon a long time ago he would eventually be able to talk normally. He was the only one of the doctors who had said a hopeful word to him, which was why Damon liked him.