by Steve Tesich
25
I wish I could say that what followed was caused by something snapping inside of me and that therefore I did what I did as a result of being out of control.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Nothing snapped. There was nothing left to snap.
I began howling.
“Oh, Saul,” I howled.
My cry, or shriek, or howl aborted Leila’s speech. She winced and drew back from me. She flashed a frightened look of inquiry at Billy in the backseat and received from him, or not, some reply.
“Oh, Saul,” I howled.
My only thought (I could think and howl at the same time) was of escape.
Escape from the point we had reached.
From the road we were on.
From the pain I was feeling.
My hope was that once we were in motion again, it would once again provide a distraction from the pain. Distraction from everything. And so I set us in motion.
Bookended by cars, trapped in an endless sentence of cars, I made the decision to break out of there.
I put the car in gear and, stepping on the gas, slammed into the car in front of me, just as that little dog appeared in the rear window. Then I put the car in reverse and slammed into the car behind me.
I had to repeat the procedure several times before the drivers of the cars in question, despite a manly show of outrage, provided me enough room for my getaway.
Since I couldn’t go forward, I made a U-turn and, with the whole lane to myself, I set off in the direction from which I had come.
Back toward Pittsburgh.
As if the happy ending I had conceived for the three of us still awaited us there.
As if the consequences of things irreversible could be eluded by a deftly executed U-turn on a two-lane highway in southwestern Pennsylvania.
26
I was driving fast. My aim was to drive fast enough to cause a distraction from any story in the car requiring further development and exposition.
I could not stop howling my name and, once I started, I could not stop crying.
I was sobbing, keening, weeping, blubbering, out of frustration or grief at being unable to summon with the sound of my own voice the chordlike resonance my name had possessed when it was uttered by Leila.
“Oh, Saul!” I kept howling.
“Oh, Saul!” I kept crying.
But it was a hollow sound that I produced.
Like a single finger plinking away at a single piano key.
And no matter how I tried to discover some biographical intimacy with all those Sauls I had been or tried to be in my past, I couldn’t.
The public, Leila and Billy in this case, had (I suspected) a much deeper and a much more personal appreciation of what I was going through than I did.
It wasn’t that my connections to my past were severed or impaired in any way, but rather that those connections conveyed nothing.
My memory was still perfect. Even under the stressful circumstances in which I found myself (howling out my name, weeping, and driving at a pretty good clip), I could recall at will almost any episode from almost any period of my life.
It was a summer afternoon and I was maybe three or four at the time. A stout, tall woman came to visit my mother. She wore a long-sleeved polka-dot dress and because she was so tall and I was so tiny, she loomed above me like a magnificent tower of polka dots. She stopped in the kitchen when she saw me, smiled, and said, “There you are. You must be Mrs. Karoo’s little boy, Saul.”
The whole of that long summer, I walked around as if I had been knighted at a very early age. I was set for life. I was Mrs. Karoo’s little boy, Saul.
“Oh, Saul,” I howled, weeping like a fool, not because that memory from my childhood meant so much to me but because I couldn’t get it to mean anything.
“Oh, Saul,” I cried. “Oh, Mrs. Karoo’s little boy, Saul.”
Leila and Billy sat in silence, neither looking at me nor saying anything. By now they were like hostages who were either paralyzed into inaction from fear or had adopted inaction as the best way to keep from provoking me into even more extreme behavior.
27
The car held the road and I held on to the steering wheel of the car with both hands, howling.
The road seemed to have a current of its own that made us pick up speed without any action on my part.
Like some rolling river accelerating as it rolled along.
The only other car I ever drove that reminded me of this Checker cab was an old Packard Clipper I drove once with a friend in the summer of ’59.
I was smoking Pall Malls at the time.
The thought that there was such a thing as the summer of ’59 now struck me as one of the wonders of the world.
I was Billy’s age.
“Oh, Saul!” I howled.
But the sound of my name, as uttered by me, caused no resonance. It was like dropping a pebble into a pond with ripple-proof water.
Leila and Billy sat in silence, not looking at me or out the window or at each other.
They seemed arrested in some midhowl of their own.
I could tell that they thought I had lost my mind.
I didn’t blame them for thinking that, or take it personally.
I only wished that they were right.
Unfortunately, the human mind can’t be lost as easily as most people think.
So there we were, the three of us speeding down a highway we had traveled in the opposite direction not that long ago.
There was clear sailing ahead of us as far as the eye could see.
High above our heads, those sunlit chrysanthemum clouds rolled across the sky of southwestern Pennsylvania.
PART V
Here and There
CHAPTER ONE
1
HE OPENED HIS eyes.
He had no idea where he was or who he was. He was lying flat on his back on a single bed in a room somewhere. It was, or seemed to be, night.
His room was dark, but there were shadows on the ceiling cast by the night lights below his field of vision.
A telephone ringing outside his room caused him to turn his eyes in the direction of the sound.
He saw that the door to his room was open. Light from the corridor spilled into his room, creating a carpet of light on the floor.
The carpet of light delighted him, as if the ability to see, simply to have eyes that could see, was cause for joy.
Knowing neither his identity nor location, he stared at the rolled-out carpet of light on the floor, as if any minute a messenger would arrive to answer all his questions. In the meantime, until the messenger arrived, he gave himself over to the joy of seeing.
2
It didn’t take him long to determine that he was in a hospital.
He was strapped to the bed so that he could not move his body, or raise his arms. The image he had of himself was of someone lying at attention.
A tube, its diameter the size of a little finger, ran out of his body. It meandered upwards, riverlike, and with his eyes he followed its course to its source, a glass or a plastic container above his head, attached to a stainless-steel apparatus. The shape of the container, transparent and half-filled with liquid, reminded him of a hummingbird feeder.
Nurses in white uniforms and white shoes walked noiselessly past his doorway. Their images appeared and disappeared like full-length living portraits stepping in and out of a picture frame.
When he saw the same nurse twice, he experienced the thrill of recognizing somebody he neither knew nor would ever get to know, but the joy of seeing her again, the joy of seeing in general, was a joy in itself.
As far as he was concerned, he could just go on, happily seeing forever.
Every now and then, a telephone rang in the corridor and then stopped.
3
If he was, as he had determined that he was, in a hospital, then it followed that something was wrong with him. People were not dragged off to hospi
tals in this day and age, in any day and age for that matter, if there was nothing wrong with them.
He felt so good, he couldn’t imagine the reason for his confinement.
Strapped to the bed and all.
He wondered what the matter with him was.
A heart attack?
An aneurysm?
Maybe he was a victim of a random shooting.
He was not worried or anxious about it. Merely curious. Just as he was curious about the location of the hospital.
Chicago?
LA?
New York?
Paris?
His hospital room’s nondescript decor provided no clues. For all he knew, he could be anywhere.
Another, but related question: When he was released from the hospital, as people always are, where would he go?
He didn’t have a clue.
The only answer that came to him was “Home.” But where was that?
He had no idea.
He would know when the time came for him to check out of the hospital.
Out in the corridor, he heard the telephone ringing and he gave himself over to the joy of hearing the sound before it stopped. He could see. He could hear. He could think. All three at once, in fact.
What joy.
He wondered if perhaps he had been brought to this hospital not because of some physical affliction but because there had been no joy in his life.
4
From time to time he wondered who he was.
He knew, although he didn’t have one yet, that he was supposed to have an identity. He even knew the general components that made up an identity.
A first and last name. A birthdate and birthplace. Current address. Occupation. Somebody to call in case of an emergency. Daytime phone number. Favorite author. Favorite quote. And so on.
It struck him as a curious thing, this concept of an identity. Curious in the sense that the components that made it up didn’t seem all that personal.
If he were never to have an identity, would it be such a loss?
Of what significance was it that he didn’t have one now?
Or did he?
Here he was, after all, seeing, hearing, thinking, full of joy. Was that not an identity?
Or was the joy he felt a substitute for an identity?
If so, then he wasn’t all that keen on acquiring one.
5
Though he was bound fast to the bed on which he lay, his head was free to move in any direction. There was nothing external, no clamp or vise, to keep his head from turning this way or that.
And yet he kept his head perfectly still.
It was as if some precious and precarious balance existed inside his head that would not only be upset should he move it, but upset with dire consequences. Something would topple. Some peace within would collapse. Some flood of calamitous information would invade him and make him drown, should the balance be compromised. Therefore, when he looked to his left or to his right, only his eyes moved, turning within their sockets like floating compass balls.
Inside his head was his brain and within that brain was his mind and within his mind was his mind’s eye looking back at him. It seemed like a friendly presence, both familiar and strange. Like a third parent we all have but seldom see. He saw love in his mind’s eye. Love extended to him for no reason at all. Simply because he existed. Love without a motive or cutoff date.
A nurse came into his room, humming a Bob Dylan ballad. He still didn’t know his own name but he knew it was a Dylan ballad she was humming.
She stopped humming the moment she saw that his eyes were open. She seemed startled, almost frightened by his steadfast gaze, and then she smiled and grew quite excited, as if some unexpected but significant phenomenon had occurred.
“You’re awake,” she said, implying by her tone that being awake was a major accomplishment. “I better get Dr. Clare.” Even as she said this, she was backing out of his room as if unable to restrain herself from broadcasting the news of his awakening. In the next second, she was out the door and he heard her voice in the corridor.
“The guy in 312 is out of his coma. Where’s Dr. Clare?”
6
He was not really surrounded, but he felt surrounded. Dr. Clare, a woman, was on his right. On his left, keeping her distance, was the nurse who had found him awake. Neither of them was pressing in on him, but he felt invaded by their curiosity. It was as if he were a story they knew better than he did.
Initially, he had tried to resist, to dismiss, to deny everything that Dr. Clare was telling him, but he found himself incapable of keeping up the effort. He found himself weakening. Succumbing to something in the weary monotone voice, in the weary, almost motherly eyes of Dr. Clare. The black circles under her eyes testified to sleepless nights spent looking after patients. Had she not seemed so overworked and been more businesslike, had she been a man and not a woman, he would have perhaps found a way to trigger his anger and outrage and tell her to get the fuck out of his room.
But as it was he felt helpless to be anything less than pleased with what she was doing because she seemed so certain that she was making him feel better. How could he tell her that he wanted no part of this identity that she was so kindly and yet mercilessly administering to him?
“Can you speak, Mr. Karoo?” she asked.
As soon as he heard Karoo, he remembered Saul and knew that he was Saul Karoo.
She waited patiently for him to reply, urging him to try with a weary smile and eyes kindly disposed toward him.
“Yes, I can speak,” he said, and the sound of his own voice was like a signal that caused whatever resistance he had left to collapse.
From the far corners of the world, or so it seemed to him, came caravans and cargo planes bearing back into his mind the trivia and the tragedies of his past.
The speed of this reintroduction to himself was like a nuclear chain reaction. Nothing could stop it. A blur of details invading him at the speed of light. Names, places, people he knew, books he had read, the many poolsides of his life. His once spacious interior was being furnished with the seemingly endless clutter of his life. The more there was of it, the less there appeared to be of him. It was like being buried alive in the details of his past.
The joy of life is dying, he wanted to scream out, but couldn’t bring himself to disappoint the weary-eyed Dr. Clare, who mistook the look of remembrance in his eyes for joy.
“It’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it?” she asked.
Yes, he nodded, saying nothing.
“Good,” she said. “You’ve been in a coma for almost twelve days. A concussion. It’s hard to tell with comas. We never know how long they’ll last. We don’t even know what makes one person come out of it and another stay in it forever. In case you’re interested, you have no major injuries. No broken bones. The fingertips of your hands were scraped off completely and will require time to heal. I’m afraid,” she smiled knowingly, “you won’t be doing any typing for a while.”
He wondered how it was that she knew his occupation. The trio of nurses standing in the doorway and the nurse to his left all smiled identical little smiles. They all knew too. They all seemed to know something about him and regarded him with eyes usually reserved for the famous.
“Considering the nature of the accident,” Dr. Clare told him, “it’s really a miracle that you’re still in one piece.”
There was something in the sound of the word “miracle” as pronounced by Dr. Clare that was too clipped and hurried and lacked the quality of expansiveness one usually associated with the meaning of that word.
This miracle sounded lonely on her lips.
A miracle for one.
Like a lonely Thanksgiving dinner for one.
The implication of it caused him to contract his conscious mind into a compressed dot of matter that nothing could penetrate. The fury of his denial met with momentary success, but its futility was a foregone conclusion. His teeth clenched with such
force that several of them buckled and broke. The tip of his tongue, which had been pressing against them, now pushed forward. The broken tooth splinters tore at his tongue, drawing blood. Bits of broken teeth mixed with the broth of saliva and blood in his mouth and then the whole mess began to slide magmalike down his throat. He gagged. Then he began to vomit.
This was how he acknowledged to himself that both Billy and Leila were dead.
7
A police officer came to see him. They went to the third-floor hospital lounge to talk, Saul’s hospital-issue slippers snapping at his heels as he walked down the linoleum-covered corridor.
They sat down on chairs upholstered in green Naugahyde that had been worn smooth and discolored by a countless procession of patients and relatives sitting and squirming on them over the years.
The police officer was young and handsome and possessed the athleticism of a former high school star.
His last name was Kovalev.
“Russian?” Saul asked.
The officer nodded.
“There’s supposed to be a large Russian community in Pittsburgh,” Saul said.
“Not as large as it was,” the officer told him.
Saul had no idea at whose request this meeting was arranged and wondered if perhaps its purpose was to inform him that he was to be prosecuted for murder. He felt like a murderer and welcomed the prospect of being carried away by the assembly line of justice. On his own, he had no idea what he would do with the burden of years left in his life. Perhaps this handsome young policeman would tell him.
He was not only disappointed but felt betrayed when Officer Kovalev not only informed him but went to some trouble to assure him that the accident was not his fault.
Officer Kovalev produced a sketch, a Xeroxed copy of the original, and using it as some authoritative document on loan from the Library of Congress, he described to Saul how the accident that had taken four lives occurred.
Here was the road that Saul was on. Here was the blind curve. And here was the dirt road going off to the right.
Saul nodded, eager as always to please.
There was a stop sign right here, the officer indicated with a ballpoint pen. The driver of the other car, there were several witnesses who saw the whole thing, failed to observe the stop sign, intent on making a left turn, and entered the road down which Saul was driving. The Checker hit the Oldsmobile. There were skid marks indicating that Saul had tried to stop before the impact. The driver of the Oldsmobile, a male, was found in the autopsy to have been legally drunk, as was his companion, an out-of-state female. Both were killed instantly.