The man, the Reverend, was big, handsome, sad, and powerful. He had the snouty, screen-filling face of a politician. Not that he'd ever get anywhere with it, in the U.S., not these days anyway. The coloring was wrong, the tango-tutor's mustache was wrong. I thought instantly that there was something pathetic and obscene about his thick burgundy suit, which made you wonder what other kinds of outfit or uniform he'd like to dress up in. His black necktie was steadied by a gold pin the shape of a crucifix. There were other religious accessories around the place and, on the walls, idealized renderings of New Testament scenes. We sat facing him from the customer's end of a leather-topped desk. Sinisterly, there were two beds in this inner room, twin beds, with identical coverlets and cushion arrangements.
For a while he talked details, addresses, some familiar, some not. Then he said, "I just want to make clear that I pay you every correcti-tude for what you were involved in over there."
John said gratefully, "All I ever wanted to do was help people."
"You'll be able to continue with your fine work. I guarantee it."
He guaranteed it. With his limp shrug. The Imperial was full of old people. It was an old-people hotel. We had seen and sensed them on our way up, their tentative postures, their unanimity of hesitation. Judging by his office suite, and his strictly localized charisma, I assumed that the old people were partly in Kreditor's care. I guarantee it. . . . You could imagine him guaranteeing a lot of things, or at least saying he guaranteed things a lot.
John said, "I do want to go on helping people."
"Make a clean break and resume elsewhere. It's another plus you have no family."
"That's necessary?"
"Better yet," he said, "just leave New York. Thus far in it's all at state level. We're not talking San Cristobal. We're talking New Jersey. We're not even talking Canada."
"That I don't need."
"Our backup could take the form of a defense fund and legal help."
"What do you advise?"
"The Immigration and Naturalization Service. To revoke your citizenship."
"Explain."
"Worst case: the Justice Department makes an application to the INS."
The Reverend paused. "God forbid," he said, and touched his cruciform tiepin with a buxom fingertip. For a moment, again, he looked sad and powerful. The sadness, perhaps, of the intercessor or shaman who, though in close and constant touch with the spirit world of angels and demons, is often oppressed by the thought of his own talent-lessness—when set against their virtues and glamours, their hoodoos, their evil eyes.
"The only present danger," Kreditor resumed, "is if the press pick up on it like they did with that poor, poor lady in Queens."
John waited. He was staring at the twin beds. Then, both quickly and suddenly, he turned to the Reverend— who was now holding before him a photograph, of which he allowed us only the briefest glimpse. Thank Christ. This photograph, this swipe of grain, so briefly glimpsed: I could tell it contained extraordinary information. It was black and white. It was about power. Twelve men were depicted there, in unmistakable configuration. Twelve men, but two distinct human types, equally represented, six of one type, half a dozen of the other. The first type had power, and safety in numbers. The second type had no power—had numbers, but no safety: numbers conferred only grief and weakness. The first type was silently saying something to the second type. Six men were saying to the other six: Whatever else divides us, whatever else is between us, only one thing matters. We belong to the living, you to the dead. We are the living and you are the dead. The dead.
"So. All they have is this, which is thirty years old, and two so-called witnesses."
"Nothing," said John.
"What, nothing?"
"I had no criminal record."
"The usual catch: did you lie about your criminal record?"
"Ah."
"It's taking the form of inquiries about your U.S. naturalization."
"Go on."
"There's some heat," said Kreditor.
And I wondered if he meant the heat that was all over John's body. Now John looked away shyly and said, "My mother ..."
Kreditor seemed interested. "That's a plus for us."
"My first language."
"Hey, that's right, I remember. You're the one with no accent."
The two men stood up and shook hands. John said, "I'm going to tell you the truth. Yesterday was better."
"Sir, how are you today?"
"Reverend."
"Doctor."
John and I returned to our new home, but it was difficult, at first, to take any pleasure in the place (the vast skylight, for example), John's state being what it was. It would have been nice to be able to keep out of his way. A woman, someone like Irene, I know, would have found him horrible to be near. So you can imagine what he was like to be inside. Then the Reverend called, with his news about the weather turning stormy, and I thought he was the last person we needed to hear from. But after that, well, it was all sea breezes. The afternoon passed in happy loneliness, TV, newspaper, the inspection of various little perplexities: waste disposer, toenail, shirt button, light bulb. Consciousness isn't intolerable. It is beautiful: the eternal creation and dissolution of mental forms. Peace ... As noon approached John adopted a behavior pattern that I knew well: stretching, scratching, complacently sighing. It meant that he was about to go to work.
I could only watch as he changed. The short-sleeved bib, the white smock. I looked for the black boots. No. Just the white clogs. What hope from them? John was purged now, and fully awake to the world.
As he walked the five blocks no one tried to stop him. The heavens didn't weep above his head, nor did the fat-cheeked clouds assume sneers of calamity. Likewise the ground, the concrete, which did not cleave to devour or entomb him. And the wind ditto, smoothing past in sweet-zephyr form, no devil-breath, no hurricano. I could adduce only the hopeless weeping of a child, the terrified stare of a black bum on Thirteenth and Seventh, and the way all the walkers, city-users, the tragedians of the street—the way they all seemed to be fleeing, and the uniformed ones (those that are responsible) saying, Don't mind us. We just wreck buildings or We just start fires or We just scar highways or We just spread trash. Here is the building, with doormen, porters, receptionists, wheeling caterers, hurrying stretcher-bearers, who know who we are. Dr. Young. For we, we, we!—we demolish the human body.
At such times, I conclude, the soul can only hang in the dark, like a white bat, and let darkness have the day. Beneath, the body does what it does, in mechanical exertions of will and sinew, while the soul waits. It must be safe to assume—surely to God—that this is it. This is the gravamen of the dreams of Tod Friendly, of John Young, where the half-dead stand in line and a white-coated figure sweats with power, cruelty, and beauty, with all that is entirely unmanageable. But the dreams lied. I thought (I was sure) that our transgression would be some kind of departure. I thought it would be extraterritorial, out of society, forming its own new universe. I certainly never figured Tod/John for a life of crime. And yet it turns out to be the same old stuff only worse, more, again, further. I mean, where is the limit? Show me the ultimate intensifiers of sin. What can you categorically not do to someone else's body? I won't claim ignorance. Pretty much the same sort of shit was coming down at AMS, if we'd gone looking for it, and of course it was happening all over town at well-known locations: St. Mary's, St. Andrew's, St. Anne's. It is general. It is general hospital. Nobody can pretend for a minute that they don't know what's going on. The ambulance is out there screaming for all to hear, its lights looping, lassoing: watch us hog-tie all the horrors of the night. Behind the fringe of orange crime-scene tape, on the street, the chalked outline of a human body. Here we are in our fatigues, delivering our damage. Stand back! People—don't interfere. Let us do what we need to do.
The air of the hospital is lukewarm, and it hums, and tastes of human organs obscurely neutralized or mistakenly preserved. We
the doctors move between ceiling and floor, between striplight and the croak of linoleum. In these passages there is a feeling of necessary novocaine; morally we are like the refrigerated tongue on the dentist's chair, mouth open as wide as it ever goes to the instruments of pain, but speechless. In the operating room you can only see my eyes.
Here the men cover their hair with paper caps, the women with scarves. On my feet are wooden clogs. Clogs. Why clogs? I wear my surgical gown, my skintight rubber gloves. I wear an outlaw's mask. My headlight band is connected to a transformer on the floor, half-submerged in blood. The cord goes down my back, under my surgical gown, and wiggles around behind me, like tail of monkey, tail of fiend. With our eyes we see only the eyes of the others there. The victim is invisible, fully shrouded: except for the bit we're working on. When it's over, we wash our hands like trained neurotics. The printed sign on the mirror enjoins: Each Finger Nail Should Be Stroked Fifty Times. Finger Tips Should Be Kept Higher Than Elbows. Each Stroke Requires Two Motions. Each Finger Has Four Sides. Then the fluorescence of the locker room, its cord carpet and steel shelves, the laundry barrels and the fattest trash cans you ever saw, from which we fish our presmeared tackle. Out in Casualty it's always Saturday night. Everything is possible.
You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don't mess about. We'll soon have that off. He's got a hole in his head. So what do we do? We stick a nail in it. Get the nail—a good rusty one—from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he's allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night. Already we're busy with this bag lady we've got, welding sock and shoe plastic onto the soles of her evil feet. . . . When we're done with the bad ones, we can't wait to get them out of here. Gangway. It doesn't matter. There's always more.
I keep thinking I know them. This happens ten times a day. I keep thinking I know them, these that are wheeled on trolleys or borne on stretchers. Wait. Wasn't that Cynthia, who worked in the deli? Was that woman maybe Gay nor, whom I knew with the act of love? But surely this is Harry, the doorman at the Met. It all happens so fast. I can't hear, with the screams and the ribcrack. Whose child is that? Wasn't he the kid who used to dash across the road, back in Wellport? So many years. Slow. Children.
But then again our world is suddenly very full, humanly, full of faces and voices. Everybody knows me. I am not referring to the victims, of course, who don't know me and who, for all practical purposes, aren't human but come in sections of interest, so that even their smiles and yawns and frowns come in sections. (This habit I have of thinking I know them—as humans—is mistaken, and inappropriate. I don't know them.) I know everybody else. For the first time in my life I have friends, and interests, shared interests, like baseball and opera and partying, and I gleam and bobble with privilege. All these strangers know me. From the outset the whole team here at the hospital was instinctively pally and collegial. Esprit de corps is first rate, even idealistic. The thing called society—it's behind us. We mediate between man and nature. We are soldiers of a sacred biology. Because I am a healer, everything I do heals, somehow. The thing called society is, I believe, insane. In the locker room the steel grills are pasted with letters that say, Thanks for your kindness for making a tough time much easier to bear, and If it wasn't for all of you there at the hospital I don't know how we would have survived. The doctors read these thank-you notes with tears in their eyes, especially when gratitude is expressed in a childish hand. Not Johnny Young, though. Perhaps he knows, as I do, that the letters are propitiatory. The children ("7 yrs") haven't been here yet. They won't be so grateful when we're through.
We have many hobbies (life has filled up and fanned out), but our main extracurricular interest, naturally, is women's bodies. Women's bodies, which Johnny finds so much more interesting, by so many magnitudes, than everything else put together. He isn't after women's bodies for only one thing, not Johnny. He is after women's bodies for all the other things too: love, spiritual communion, loss of self, exaltation. Women's bodies bring out all his finer feelings. The fact that a woman's body has a head on top of it isn't much more than a detail. Don't get me wrong: he needs the head, because the head wears the face, and supplies the hair. He needs the mouth; he badly needs the mouth. As for what the head contains, well, yes, Johnny needs some of the things that live in there: will, desire, perversity. To the extent that sex is in the head, then Johnny needs the head.
Originally I was going to adopt a distant and defeated tone. Something like: As for John's sexual life during our years here in the city, suffice it to say that he dated a lot of nurses. But it doesn't suffice. Saying something like that never does suffice. It's true about nurses, by the way. Or it's true about the nurses John dates, and they seem to be a pretty typical crowd. The work looks like hell to me, it looks like loin-death from where I'm sitting, but hospitals are erotic—that's what they all say. They're always ribbing one another about it. Blood and bodies and death and power. I suppose you can see the connection. They are reconciling themselves to their own mortality. They are doing what we all have to do down here on earth: they are getting ready to die. Thus, for Dr. Young, the fatal, the mortal, the life-deciding interest in women's bodies. What can it be about women's bodies, apart from their being so incredibly interesting?
There is a fire-tinge of violence to it here in New York, as there is to everything in this city, which just won't slow down like the other city did and get more innocent and less crazy and less dirty-colorful. It makes our earlier romancing—where love would sadly bloom in a parking lot or with bitter words before a shop window dribbling with rain—seem downright courtly. For instance. He gets up at two in the morning and ventures out for a stroll. We're on Sixth Avenue, puffing on a prosaic perfecto and minding our own business—when John turns down Twenty-second Street, breaks into a run, and starts loosening his pants. . . . Now what? Those pants of his were around his knees when he slammed through the double doors of the brownstone, and around his ankles as he stumbled at speed up the first flight of stairs. We hopped straight into this apartment, straight into the bright bedroom—and turned. I have to say that the situation didn't look very promising. There was a woman in the bed, right enough. But there was a man there too. Fully clothed, enormous in midnight-blue serge suit and peaked cap, he knelt above her, rhythmically slapping her face with a pendulum action of his heavy-gloved hand. No, this didn't look like our kind of thing at all. Warily John slipped out of his socks and shirt. You have to give him credit: he keeps his cool and works the percentages. Now the two men moved strangely past each other; and with some diffidence John climbed into bed. The other guy stared at us, with raised, with churning face. Then he did some shouting and strode out of there—though he paused, and thoughtfully dimmed the lights, as he left the room. We heard his boots on the stairs. The lady clutched me.
"My husband!" she explained.
Who cared? Instantly John invaded her. With zero fore-play. No hair-stroking or sighing or staring sorrowfully at the ceiling, not for her. No extra-loud snoring or anything, not for this baby. . . . Soon afterward she took up a position at the hospital. Nurse Davis. We still date. Her husband, Dennis, is a night watchman. She keeps saying she's glad Dennis doesn't know about us and she hopes he never finds out. What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember. And I suppose, in our case, John and I should exchange high fives in squalid thanks to this human talent for forgetting: forgetting, not as a process of erosion and waste, but as an activity. John forgets. Nurse Davis forgets. The husband, Dennis, shuddering in the cold on his way to work, on his way to watch the night, forgets.
Largely out of a sense of duty I search for connections between the two interests, between the two kinds of female body. One body wallows on a barge of pillows, with warmly tousled gaze and smelling of fresh bread (you'll get no argument from me there: women are great); the other body lies flat and cold on a table
down whose eaves blood runs, like a sunset. John attends them both with his animal parts thickened. Here's another one, he seems to think. Another face with its bridal train of hair. Another thigh of astonishing might. Another female belly.
With the children, at the hospital, in Pediatrics, where the light is never off, where the little victims whom we patiently deform lie drugged and lost and itching—with the children John is at his briskest. He surges through the wards snatching toy and lollipop, wearing a skull's smile. No feeling tone. Only the men get to him. Funnily enough. He meets their eyes with a look that almost confesses. Confesses that they have a right which he hereby violates. And what is this right? It is the right to life and love.
With the men, the doctor's cultural performance is at its most tenuous. It is abruptly open to question, this idea the doctors hold in secret, that they must wield the special power; because if the power remains unused, then it will become unmoored, and turn back against their own lives.
Carter was an exception, to this and to everything else, but I used to feel that I was roughly the same age as the reigning American president. People said I resembled Gerry Ford, though of course I'm a lot more handsome than that now. I was younger than LBJ, at least to start with, and I'm definitely older then JFK, who's even handsomer than I am. JFK: flown down from Washington and flung together by the doctors' knives and the sniper's bullets and introduced onto the streets of Dallas and a hero's welcome.
Now despite years of steady disarmament they're all talking about nuclear war again, and more intensely than ever before. I wish I could put their minds at rest. It isn't going to happen. Come on: imagine the preparations that would be needed. No one's even started. No one's ready.
Remember the punks? They were ready. The experiments in mortification they performed on their own faces— the piercings, the pallor. The punks had made a start. They were ready. But they vanished decades ago.
Amis, Martin - Time's Arrow (v1.0) Page 7