Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  Hester seems to be looking at him.

  As she did yesterday, she can direct toward him an intelligent facsimile-look with movements of her head. But never real looking: an exiting from the head by means of sight, an exchange of looks, complicity with the eyes. The faces of the blind are not in dialogue with other faces as faces. Only with other faces as flesh. Touch, the sole complicity.

  Her expression not perceptibly altered since Mrs. Nayburn’s departure.

  Had Hester’s face been equally inexpressive yesterday? With Diddy hardly noticing, so profound and urgent was the need he’d felt for union with the body below the face. But isn’t that very idea, “a face” atop “the body,” one only sighted people can entertain of themselves and of other people? Among blind people, the face is just another part of the body.

  The independent life of faces depends on sight. If sight goes, the face largely dies. Or becomes tentative, provisional. A representation—maybe skillful—of a face; not a real face. An object-face.

  The faces of the blind are set above their bodies like lanterns that have been turned down, or extinguished. A face with dead eyes, lacking the visual clues for learning expressiveness from other faces, will never invent that whole vocabulary by itself. Haphazard or approximate signals of feeling may be attempted, out of the longing to conform to an imaginary uniform ideal. But were it true to its own condition, the face without sight has neither reason nor means to become any more expressive than a hand or a foot or a breast.

  How does an inexpressive face age? More slowly, one would suppose. A sightless face, one that’s never learned to be consistently expressive by watching other faces, probably remains unlined many years after the exertions of expression have creased and wrinkled seeing faces of the same chronological age. Maybe Hester isn’t as young as she looks. With another rhythm of use, another rhythm of aging.

  Is Diddy looking too intently? The wrong power microscope. Step back to get the unassisted view. Perhaps Hester is just being quiet, waiting for him to speak first. Something stirs in her face. Around the mouth, that’s where he must look. If for ordinary people the eyes rule the face, with blind people it must be the mouth. There was the complicity he sought. Not of eyes and looks. But of mouths and touch.

  Yet Diddy doesn’t feel like kissing Hester at this moment. Something too passive about her, too willful in him. The hospital room is inert, dead. How different from the compartment on yesterday’s train, a space that was buoyant, that became an independent vehicle equipped for vast stretches of travel. Or from the close, droning space of the washroom in which they both stood; clinging and mingling with each other.

  Diddy slouched in the chair near the foot of the bed, faintly reviving the hurt in his spine that had begun in the conference room about four o’clock. “Already started your tests?” he says stiffly.

  “They took some blood this morning. An ECG. A urine sample. That’s all.”

  “Those are just routine pre-operative tests. Has anyone been around to look at your eyes?”

  “Not yet.”

  Diddy doesn’t know what words to bring up next. He’s far away. Looking out the window, enjoying what Hester cannot—a view. Colors. Moving shapes. The recurring distribution and thinning out of things into “near” and “far.”

  “Want some chocolates? Aunt Jessie brought me a box, but I don’t like them.”

  Where are the chocolates? On the night table. “No thanks.”

  Diddy inspecting Hester’s room, as if it might serve as a mnemonic device. A memory room, a series of places to which Diddy might return in imagination at some future time; as he moves through the room, extracting from the memorized places the images he had stored in them. But the featureless room seems to resist such a use.

  All the hospital has supplied converges on a single color. The walls are off-white, and so are the muslin curtains. The wooden chest of drawers is painted a flat white, as is the iron bed, which has a white blanket over the usual white sheets. The white metal table beside the bed has a white Formica top; the shiny white porcelain base of the table lamp offers the faintest contrast with the dull sheen of the white plastic shade. And the two chairs—indicating an official maximum of two visitors?—are covered in grainy white Leatherette. Had he not known better, Diddy might have surmised that ophthalmologists find white to be easier than any other color on ailing eyes.

  The maroon and gilt cardboard box containing the chocolates, a yellow bathrobe across the foot of Hester’s bed, the tan leather sandals on the floor beside her bed, and Diddy’s flowers are the only things in the room that aren’t white.

  “I like your flowers,” Hester says. As if she could read his mind. “You didn’t believe me, did you, when I thanked you before? And I know why. My aunt was in the way. But you should have, you know. I’m not polite. If I say something, I mean it.” She smiles radiantly. And Diddy is there to see what he partly longs to see. A new face, delicate and alive.

  Diddy pulled back from the wide space into which he has wandered: cold, harshly lit, stony. Drawn back, gladly, to the smaller space of tenderness surrounding the girl. Melting. A sudden rush of sensual, weary happiness. He springs from his chair to the one nearer Hester that her aunt had vacated; draws it alongside her bed. Presses his face against the girl’s arm. But not to bare flesh or to any texture that felt naked. She’s wearing a long-sleeved flannel nightgown whose rough texture denies yesterday’s memory of flesh. Withholds any further knowledge Diddy’s left cheek might gain of the shape of Hester’s smooth firm arm. She, too, must dislike the feel of such material on her skin. Wouldn’t it be depressing if the nightgown weren’t even hospital issue, but some bargain-basement treasure imposed on the girl by Mrs. Nayburn? He sighs. “Well … How are you? Really?”

  “Sad.”

  As if startled, Diddy looks up. She begins stroking his close-cropped hair, and he bends his head again. “Why?”

  “I’m not hopeful about the operation. And I’ve been worrying about you, remembering what you wanted to do to yourself yesterday. I was afraid that today you’d regret not having gone through with it.”

  What effort of will for Diddy not to pull away brusquely from Hester’s body and sit upright. “Hester, listen! Once more, that wasn’t what happened yesterday on the train. I committed that folly a month ago.” An effort to remain stilled, huddled under her caress. To continue accepting her touch: placid, but imperious. “Please believe me! Can you forgive me for have lied to you at first? Because what really happened yesterday was something else, something completely different. It’s what I told you about … after. The fight with the workman.…”

  Diddy wondering if he should go further. He has no intention of producing the newspaper clipping and reading it aloud to Hester. After summoning a nurse on the floor to stand by, someone who can look over his shoulder and verify for Hester’s benefit that he’s reading what’s actually printed there.

  Since that’s Diddy decision, should he have gone even this far? Remember that Hester is the deluded one, not he; that it’s her faculties which, at least briefly, lapsed. But proving her error to her, so easy to do (now), would be a dangerous triumph. More prudent for Diddy to let the girl continue thinking he’s had a hallucination. “Hell, I know you don’t believe any of this,” he adds. “Do you? You don’t believe I was ever out of the compartment, much less off the train.”

  Diddy hoping he’s covered his tracks (now). Not that it matters much what he says at this moment. However long he goes on urging Hester to believe in yesterday’s murder, she won’t be convinced—if Diddy doesn’t display the irrefutable printed evidence in his possession since this morning. Why should she be?

  But even if Hester doesn’t credit his confession, doesn’t become the sharer of his secret, she still may have reactions that spell heartache or trouble. Believing in Diddy the Innocent, she may become afraid of Diddy the Deluded. A natural, self-protective reaction: for the relatively sane to fear the mentally damaged. But Diddy wo
uld hate that. Or if she isn’t afraid, worried. Then, when worry becomes too painful, she may relay his tale to someone else; maybe one of her doctors. Not to betray Diddy, since Hester believes he hasn’t done anything, but just to get professional advice on how best to answer a lunatic friend whenever he starts insisting again on the literal truth of his fantasy. And that third person might connect Diddy’s so-called delusion with the item in today’s Courier-Gazette. And call the police.

  Hester has been silent for a long time.

  “What are you thinking?” Diddy asks. All right to move his head (now). Not angry, not running away. Sits up straight, then leans over to rub his lips on Hester’s warm cheek. A kiss she doesn’t overtly welcome. “What’s the matter, Hester?”

  “I’m thinking. You know, this is something we shouldn’t talk about. At least not now. About what happened in the tunnel … I’m no help to you with that, Dalton. I may even be doing you some harm.”

  “Harm?” echoes Diddy, astonished.

  “Yes. Believe me, it’s not that I want to injure you. But I have the feeling, it’s hard to put into words, that something bad for you might come from me. Don’t ask me what. I’ve only a very dim idea. But you’ll have to trust my judgment anyway. I may know very little, but you don’t know anything about it at all.”

  Diddy is mystified, balked. How could Hester determine anything important about the two of them so soon? Shouldn’t he insist (now) that she explain? Then frustrated, because he can’t. Further questions seemed like bullying. And also relieved. Yet if they have made a pact to steer clear of that inexhaustible topic, the world of the tunnel, not much is left to discuss. Hester isn’t easy to talk to. But he wants to talk. Diddy the Tongue-Tied, for all his revulsion at wasting words, once more condemned to flabby conversation. To the volley of insensate questions, gathering useless information. Well, he might as well plunge in.

  Are you comfortable?

  Are the nurses pleasant?

  Do you like your doctor?

  How’s the food?

  How soon is the operation?

  “Don’t,” she says sharply, shaking her head. “You know you don’t want to talk to me that way. And I don’t want you to. Please!”

  Diddy astonished. Does she know this, too? But unable just to be grateful for Hester’s intervention, passing on without comment to better words. “God knows, I don’t want to ask you a lot of empty questions.” Diddy has to explain. “But I feel awkward. I don’t know what to say, or what to do here.”

  She touches his hair. “What you should do is get up and go. Without saying anything.” Takes her hand away.

  Diddy gazes at Hester for a long time without replying. She’s right, of course. Clearer and braver than he. But there’s one question he has to ask, foolish as it may seem. “If I go … I mean, when I go, you will hear me, won’t you? You won’t think this time I’m still in the room with you?”

  Hester sits up a little higher in the bed, propped against the pillows; folds her hands in her lap; turned in Diddy’s direction. She nods. But doesn’t say anything.

  Diddy doesn’t want to get up. The silence between them has become very thick—full of magical, distressing, electric, paralyzed feelings. Diddy feels magnetized, then dizzy. A kind of metallic vertigo. With a thin narrow lining of panic. The footsteps of nurses and visitors in the corridor seem especially loud. Perhaps Diddy will sit here, enthralled forever. Despite the vertigo, a part of his feeling is peaceful. Unutterably tranquil.

  “I think I understand for the first time what it’s like to be blind,” he says.

  “Do you?”

  “I know how imprisoning it must be, don’t misunderstand. And what a cruel deprivation of ordinary freedom it is. But still, I imagine, there’s something good in it. It makes easy—necessary—a certain experience that’s rare and enviable. It’s the experience of paying attention all the time, with that attention never slackening, so that everything is at once very distinct and very complicated.”

  “That’s part of it.” She seems to be smiling.

  “And I’ve thought of something else, that’s harder to describe.” Diddy closed his eyes. “The world of blind people … I mean the world you see, the world I sometimes inhabit in my imagination, too … it’s terribly unstable. There’s always a hole just in front of your feet. You know about the hole, yet you have to keep on walking. But you feel dizzy all the time … And very free, too. It doesn’t really matter, matter in the old way, I mean, if you … if you fall.”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  Diddy wrenched his eyes open. Ashamed. Insensitive, self-absorbed Diddy. “I wish I could stop talking,” he says wistfully.

  Hester didn’t answer. Perhaps she was going to help him. A breeze had come up and was ruffling the curtains. Although already night, it seemed to get darker. Diddy sat a while longer, sometimes looking at the girl, sometimes comparing shades of whiteness, sometimes gazing at nothing in particular. After a time he stood up, threw his coat over his arm, and went out the door without saying a word.

  * * *

  Diddy took a taxi straight back to the Rushland, and found Jim disconsolately hanging about the lobby, pretending to be waiting for someone. Almost eight-thirty. Meeting Jim (now) not what Diddy would have chosen. He would have preferred to be alone for the rest of the evening. Feared to feel himself, by ordinary contact with people, repudiating or blunting the subtle connection with Hester.

  Still, he wasn’t too sorry. Perhaps running into Jim was for the best, since Diddy didn’t altogether trust himself to be alone. Judged that he didn’t yet merit that noble condition. Once safe upstairs in Room 414, isn’t he likely to give way to renewed brooding and to morbid indecision? His resolve to stay away from the police, at least not to go (now), was shaky; too new to be truly binding. This resolve was no mere whim—but it was as boneless, feathery, and contingent as a whim. It lacked the weight that a genuine decision ought to have, and does eventually put on. With time. Like a premature baby that must be stored in the incubator until it reaches a normal bulk. Diddy’s newly fledged hankering for life needed coddling. A special diet. Only the fit survive, and the fit are fat.

  He would eat dinner in the hotel with Jim. He would nourish his decision, he would feed himself. Proper self-feeding apparently requires the company of another person. Diddy has discovered something about his habits of the last four weeks. Particularly why and how he has virtually stopped eating.

  Until this time he’d allowed two hypotheses about his not eating. An unconscious penance imposed by his body for the fiasco of a month ago; or a dismal sequel to his humiliating regimen in the hospital. Both true enough, perhaps. But he’s neglected a crucial detail. It was after Diddy came out of the hospital that he’d begun to take all his meals alone. Refusing any dinner invitations. And, as an excuse to get out of business lunches, inventing a daily appointment at noon with a doctor who was giving Diddy shots to prevent a recurrence of his illness.

  Call it queasiness, call it a fast. It was something of both. Whatever it was, Diddy resolved, it must stop. Diddy who has already put away two meals today. Will have another. Had Jim eaten dinner yet? No. Fine. Jim seemed relieved by the invitation. Diddy flushed with good intentions. Using words, he will go along with what interests Jim; and he will just breathe. Breathing in, breathing out. He mustn’t be alone.

  Diddy found that the appetite for food that he’d prayerfully ordered with the lobster dinner arrived. But what about fattening up the soul? Putting muscle into the weightless bald will? Growing a skin around the rickety frame of the feelings that won’t bruise at the mildest touch? Ah, these are harder tasks. It wasn’t so easy: breathing in, breathing out. Jim’s banter, an asylum of inane, cranky wholesomeness at breakfast this morning, was driving a nail into Diddy’s brain tonight. Could barely listen to Jim, and his own share of the conversation was humorless, forced. Even Jim notices, and several times inquired if he were ill. Diddy kept saying no, he felt fine. But then Ji
m would go at it again. “You know, you really have been looking pretty run down lately, Dalton.” And advise him to ski this winter, or take up tennis, or work out several times a week at a gym.

  Diddy didn’t understand what had misfired. Kept trying to make the meal work. Which is why he dawdled over his hearty portion; not because he had trouble finishing everything on his plate. And why he ordered extra cups of coffee, and then a brandy he didn’t want. Diddy stalling, hoping to find out how it’s done.

  Later Diddy gave up. Ashamed to be exploiting this decent enough guy whom he didn’t like but didn’t not like either. He was bad company for Jim, who’d been perking up as the sulky units of clock-time slid by. Diddy aware that (now) Jim has gotten his second wind, is feeling full-blooded enough to go out and, as he’d say, paint the town red; is lingering out of considerateness, aware that sallow, listless Diddy isn’t up to any night life, and reluctant to leave him in the almost deserted hotel restaurant. “The Pine Room.” Clearly Diddy’s responsibility: to dissolve the bond of politeness, throw open the doors for Jim. Which he did, first yawning and then mock-confessing to a revived Jim that he was tired and heading for bed.

  “I guess you haven’t really kicked that virus you came down with last month,” Jim said, scarcely concealing his delight at being released from Diddy’s company.

  The two men stood in the lobby. Jim slapped Diddy awkwardly on the shoulder. “Good night, Dalt,” he said. “Get some shut-eye, you hear. I mean, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, huh?” At the revolving door, he waved. Diddy at the elevator waved back; went upstairs.

  Staring resentfully in the bathroom mirror at his morose face. Trying, by sheer will, to thaw himself out. What a burden Diddy the Disaffected is to himself, as well as to others.

  After showering, he immediately got into bed. Although Diddy hardly expects to sleep before first enduring the usual lengthy ordeal, there’s no place comfortable enough to settle in besides bed in this small, meagerly furnished room. But Diddy doesn’t know himself as well as he thinks. Hadn’t even time to start devoting attention to the flashing yellow sign outside his window. Diddy the Done-In was indeed terribly tired, and fell into sleep with all the lights on before realizing what he was doing.