The Critical List

by Wenke, John;

  I took out my phone and jabbed redial.

  Once again, I got Delilah’s service. The receptionist’s voice was young and scratchy, with a lazy Valley Girl inflection.

  “This is David Higginson calling back for Delilah Faye. Has she picked up my message? I’m the emergency room guy.”

  “She called a little while ago. She said you stood her up.”

  “I would’ve called her, but I don’t have her number in my phone. I only had the service. It was either stand her up or maybe drop dead. Was she mad?”

  “When I said you were in the emergency room, she was very relieved. Nothing personal, I’m sure. But it’s an ego thing. Being stood up’s okay if there’s a reason. Say, how are you?”

  “I had a near syncope.”

  “Omigod! Really? What’s that?”

  “I almost fainted, but they don’t know why.”

  “Look, I gotta split. Another line’s lighting up. You got a message for Ms. Faye? I’d give you her direct number, but I’m not allowed.”

  “Tell her David’s at The Blasted Tomato. I’ll be there for at least an hour and a half. Tell her she can come on by if she gets the chance. I owe her one.”

  Nate Newell was sitting with a young black guy with a shiny shaven head, a sad face, and antic smile. They were hogging a sequestered corner table designed for eight. The red vinyl cushion arced like a half moon. Nate sat in the middle, twisting a straw. The other guy rattled ice at the top of the crescent. The table was awash with glasses. The mashed and mixed remnants of a Super Deluxe Nacho Supreme were spewed in the middle. Gashed guacamole, globbed sour cream, shredded yellow cheese, splattered salsa, and sprinkled leeks lay like carnage atop a gouged battlefield of refried beans, greasy ground beef, and smashed tortilla chips. I sat at the bottom of the crescent.

  “David, meet Harry Wilson. He’s with the theater department for a six-week residency. He’s directing Iceman.”

  I pushed up and shook hands across the battlefield. I knew him from somewhere. But it was becoming harder to distinguish between people I’d actually met and those I merely saw on stage, screen, or television.

  “Weren’t you in Hurlyburly?”

  “Yeah, I was in the traveling show that came through L.A. last fall. I played Billy.”

  “That’s right. I liked the play. Nice to meet you.” I looked at Nate. “Who’s our waitress?”

  “We got a waiter. A new guy. He must be wearing his invisibility cloak. Next time I see him, I’m ordering two drinks.”

  “That’s him,” Harry pointed, his head bobbing. He waved both hands. The waiter came over. Each of us ordered two drinks. I went with their Fetzer Cabernet. All the reports indicated that red wine busted arterial plaque. I spun the plastic cube that held the snack menu. I passed over their heart attack burgers and studied Healthy Favorites.

  “I’ll take the Right-For-Life salad. Hold the tofu but give me extra carrots and another handful of alfalfa sprouts.”

  I shoved the cube toward the center of the table. It bulldozed through some vagrant chips but was stopped by a dollop of sour cream.

  “What were you doing in the emergency room?” Nate asked. “I hope it’s not the heart. Guys our age, we gotta worry about the heart.” His forehead wrinkled. His mouth twitched at the corner. Nate was preoccupied by sudden heart attacks. Late last fall, his father had checked into a hospital in Clearwater, Florida, complaining about chest pains. He’d had a mild infarct. The next morning, they’d scheduled a cardiac catherization, but during the night, on a trip to the bathroom, Ray Newell dropped dead. When the nurse found him, he had been a ghost for at least an hour. Since November, Nate had been taking out his grief by writing a book of poems about fathers. It’s called That Father Lost, Lost His. Nate had to tell me where he stole the title. It’s from Hamlet, from where the hypocrite king, who killed Hamlet’s father tells Hamlet he’s unmanly and obstinate for being so aggrieved. All fathers die. It’s built into the scheme of things—nature’s way—and no big deal.

  “I don’t think it was my heart,” I said. My fingers slithered inside my shirt, working over the spaces between the ribs and feeling for the steady beat, beat, beat. I couldn’t find it. “More like the brain. I think there’s something wrong in my head. I had a near syncope.”

  Nate groaned.

  “What’s that?” Harry wondered.

  “I almost fainted.”

  The drinks came.

  “What did they do?” Nate was twisting a napkin into knots.

  “The basics. Nothing high tech. I didn’t even get to see a real doctor. I only got a physician’s assistant.”

  “They’re all bastards,” Nate seethed. He was bitter. Doctors hadn’t saved his father.

  “Wait’ll you see the bill,” Harry barked. “It’ll look like a team of surgeons removed buckets of glass from all over your body. Last year, I was peeling an apple and almost sliced my thumb off. The bill was two pages long. All they did—some medical student cleaned it out and stitched it up. He did a lousy job. Harry held up his thumb. “The seam’s crooked.”

  I turned to Nate.

  “I didn’t have any symptoms. The guy said, ‘Wait’ll you get some symptoms.’”

  “If it was me,” Nate said, “I’d check into the Mayo Clinic. You don’t want to end up like my old man.” His forehead crunched into crooked lines. “He’d been warned, the son of a bitch. For months, he thought he had heartburn. He wouldn’t get checked. Just chewed those Tums.” Nate gulped his drink. “The book’s coming along. I’m almost finished the section of twenty-one sonnets.” He turned to Harry. “The sonnets are about achieving manhood. I do new variations on the old child-is-the-father-to-the-man motif. Twenty-one fucking times. A sonnet for every year.”

  One of Nate’s problems was he carried unfinished poems around with him. I was sure he had a few on him right now. If he got shook-up enough, he’d unfold his hand-edited printouts, plop them in the guacamole, and start reading.

  I looked at Harry.

  “I tell Nate to count his blessings. His old man went in a flash. He had an easy time becoming a ghost.”

  Nate snorted. “You and your ghosts! I’d welcome ghosts, but there’s one little problem: when you’re dead, you’re dead. You cease to exist.”

  Nate gulped some more. His fingers twitched. He was getting ready to yank out some verse. I ignored him—you either believe in ghosts or you don’t—sipped my wine and looked at Harry.

  “My old man had seventeen days of high-tech death. He was under observation for a heart valve problem that caused an irregular beat. A jolt of cardiac arrest should have done him in, but they got him on a respirator. I got there twelve hours after his collapse. The respirator made his chest jerk. The tube cut the edges of his mouth. They had him drugged and lightly restrained. When the drugs started wearing off, he’d wave his hands, t’ai chi fashion, and loll his head. All the tubes rattled. He’d open his eyes, but I don’t think he could see me. He had this hunted look. At one point, they had fifteen different drugs going in. I spent seven days holding his hand, reading meters, and watching his urine bag fill. When it stopped filling, his body blew up like a fat suit. They put him on dialysis. He had a machine to breathe, another to clean his blood. There were digital meters for his heart rate, his blood pressure, his blood oxidation level. There was probably a tube in there that could tell you what the stock market was doing. All this went on for seventeen days.”

  The waiter materialized with my salad. It resembled a pile of hay. I stuffed my mouth.

  “That looks good,” Harry laughed. “It makes you want to eat.” He told the waiter “I’ll take a double burger. Rare.”

  I swallowed.

  “The point is,” I said, turning to Nate, “he hung on and suffered to no real advantage. Every now and then, he’d shake his head or nod, like he knew my sister and I were
there, but he never woke up. I think he was in a state of spiritual disarray. He was neither on one side of the line nor the other. When he passed over, it probably took him a long time to get adjusted.” I turned to Harry. “According to my sister, three nights after he died, he appeared to her. He was standing in her walk-in closet. He had his favorite shirt on, the one with the big white and blue horizontal stripes. He didn’t say anything. He just tilted his head, looking sad.”

  “I told you before,” Nate blurted, “she had a fucking dream.”

  “Loni said she was awake. She read the clock and looked at his face and said, ‘Don’t go, Daddy. Stay with me.’ Daddy went. He backed into the closet. When they return like that, it means they’re having a hard time adjusting.”

  “That’s spooky,” Harry said. “I guess it flipped your sister out.”

  “As a matter of fact, it was one of the best experiences of her life. She hadn’t been able to sleep. Not a wink for three nights—”

  “Delirious,” Nate laughed. “Hallucinations!”

  “—and then she went right out.”

  I stuffed another pitchfork of dry weeds. A rumpus erupted near the corner of the bar. A fist punched a blond head. The blond guy swung a beer bottle. From across the room, bouncers burrowed through the crowd.

  “It must be me,” Harry said. “Everywhere I go, fights break out. It’s worse than New York.”

  “They’re animals!” Nate growled. “They don’t realize how fragile their bodies are.”

  A brawny black bouncer with dreads had the blond guy by the throat, dragging him toward the door.

  “That blond guy is Ashcroft,” I said. “He’s an actor.”

  “That figures,” Harry laughed. “He looks like a guy I worked with in The Last Fix. It was an off-off play. In the middle of the run, he shows up and doesn’t know anybody. He’s real happy, like a drunk, though we all thought drugs. When he collapses, we’re sure it’s drugs. He’s in this coma for five days and then just wakes up. He’s fine. It turns out, he had cat scratch fever. The wrong kitty scratches you and you’re almost gone.”

  “That’s nothing,” Nate said. The waiter zoomed in and plopped down Harry’s mooing burger. “You can’t even get real constipated anymore. There’s this big guy in the History department. Last Friday, in the middle of class, he doubles over and curls up on the floor. Students scream. Tom Fox is groaning, clutching his guts, and some dope tries CPR. Broke his goddamn sternum. The medics cart him off. In the emergency room, they find his big ass puffed up and hard as a rock. They try to drain this infection and realize his bowel had ruptured, so it’s into surgery with him. They had to put him on a bag and they still haven’t gotten ahead of the infection. A friend of mine visited him yesterday. He said the room had your basic outhouse stench. You could hear Tom’s insides gurgle.”

  I had forked through my hay and was raking shredded carrots. Harry chomped his burger. Drips of blood drooled on his fries.

  “How old’s the guy?” I asked.

  “Our age. Maybe younger.”

  I shoveled some chickpeas. You wouldn’t think we’d be running down so soon, but we were, some slowly and others in a rush. I told the waiter to bring more hay. It couldn’t hurt.

  When the waiter was taking the empty plates, Delilah Faye appeared at the side of the table. She was smiling and wearing a fancy turquoise sweat suit. Her butch black hair was pushed up by a turquoise headband. It was a good thing she got there. Our conversation had skittered up and down the critical list. The matter of Tom Fox’s colostomy reminded Harry of Jim Bellow’s colon cancer and then we tumbled through a freefall of small and large miseries—the people we knew with intussusceptions, kidney stones, acromegaly, lupus, and AIDS.

  “Hey!” I said. “It’s good to see you. I’m sorry I missed you, but I had to get checked out.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Sick Man. I just shot over to my club and worked out. I’m famished. Move over and let me sit down.”

  I wiggled toward Nate and brushed the spilled sprouts into a pile. I made the introductions.

  “Since we’re away from the set, you can all call me by my real name. I’m Harriet Dombrowski. Delilah Faye’s a joke I got stuck with. It started with my father being almost famous in Milwaukee for doing plumbing supply ads on TV. When I got my first stage part, I picked a ridiculous name. When the parts kept coming, I thought it would be bad luck to change it.”

  “I’m related to someone almost famous,” I said. “Francis Higginson came to the new world in 1630 and wrote an essay back to England about how great the weather was. One day, he went out in the dampness, caught a cold, and died. No lie. The American literature books print his weather report and make him look like a fool. My sister found this out. She’s a genealogy nut.”

  Harriet put her hand to my forehead.

  “By the way, why’d you almost faint?”

  “How’d you know I had a near syncope?”

  “Mary. At my service. She’s a big fan of the show. She was impressed when I told her what you did.”

  “Let’s get her over here,” Nate grumbled. “Join the party.”

  “She should be more impressed by you,” I said. “You’re going to be one of our stars.”

  “I’ll be a star if I don’t get hacked out of the show.”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “Eventually, you might want to get written out, but as far as we’re concerned, you’re in line to be a contract regular. Two weeks ago, the producers gave us the word: the show will always need an anorexic, lesbian lawyer. We’ve got you blocked out on the story board. After the litigation’s over and you get Desiree off on a technicality, your anorexia and bulimia will get out of control. You’ll almost die. You’ll linger in a coma for a few weeks and then you’ll open your eyes and want to eat. After you’re on your feet again is when you’ll have an affair with your therapist. She’s going to be a cross-dresser and resemble Roseanne Barr.”

  Harry piped up. “All this stuff makes O’Neill seem bland.”

  “With O’Neill,” Nate slurred, “you get the essence of the universe and it only takes two hours. What David’s describing is pop sludge that’ll take months and months to unfold. A lot of people’ll be dead by then.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I told her. “There’ll be plenty of work with the show.”

  “That’s good,” she said, “because this is a big break.”

  “How long you been in La La Land?” Nate wondered.

  “About a year. I left Milwaukee last February. Relatively speaking, I’m new at acting. It’s what I got into on a whim. I thought I was going to die.”

  “Don’t we all,” Nate mumbled.

  “No, I had something for real. I didn’t just almost faint.”

  “What happened?” I asked. I liked that she was laughing at me.

  “I was a journalism grad from Marquette with a dream job in public relations for the Milwaukee Brewers. One day I started itching all over. I got night sweats. I lost weight. I found a lump under my arm. It turned out to be Hodgkin’s disease.”

  “Damn!” I said. “That’s terrible. But you’re here.”

  Bright light flashed from her satin turquoise folds.

  “I’m glad to be here. I’m supposedly cured. Hodgkin’s is pretty curable. But I had to do six months of chemo and some radiation. My hair fell out. I was sick to my stomach. I promised myself if I got better, I’d do something wild. When my hair grew back, I started going to local casting calls and getting some parts. After I got a big part in a Chicago show, I got my father to stake me. I drove to L.A., found an agent, and did some commercials and extra stuff. I was a murder victim on CSI: Miami. I got this part in Dawn. Now my agent’s getting a lot of calls.”

  “That’s a good story,” I said.

  “A real Hollywood minute,” Nate grumped.

&
nbsp; “I’ve been in remission for five years. I don’t worry about it. I’m into life. By the way, I’m famished. What should I have?”

  “Everything’s okay,” I said, “but nothing’s very good.”

  Nate was rumbling some papers. His head was listing. He wanted to give a reading.

  “I know you must be disturbed about your health,” Harriet said, turning toward me, “but what’s the worst that could happen? You faint and hit the deck. If you wake up, you move on. If you don’t, you’re in the next world. You find out all the secrets.”

  Nate groaned and told Harry, “David’s got a companion spiritualist.” He turned toward Harriet and me. “I don’t believe in any of that crap. All I believe in is art. I’m a poet, not a fucking poetaster. This is from That Father Lost, Lost His. I’ll give you my nineteenth sonnet. It’s about when my old man kicked my ass out of the house for smoking pot. I was nineteen at the time. He was right to do it. Here goes.”

  Five weeks have gone by and I have yet to drop dead or even have another near syncope. A few days after my episode, I went to my personal Medicine Man and took a lot of tests. Blood cultures to the max. The Poking of the Prostate. Two kinds of cardiograms. Stress tests. Eventually, I even took a CAT scan. There’s nothing wrong with me. No one knows why I almost fainted.

  Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out how to round off this story. One of the reasons I’m so fond of Charles Dickens is that after nine hundred pages and seven or eight plots you don’t have any more questions. There’s nothing left to tell. Finis. It’s over. In writing my brand of sophisticated hand wringing, I never get to do endings; in soap opera land, new complications spin naturally from old woes. Trouble keeps happening. Like now. I’m on the set, watching a taping, jotting these words and listening as Tiffany Morganchild explains legal strategy to Dawn Desiree.