McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “Haven’t you now?” Tess squinted at the blood-pressure tube, sighed, and once again pumped the ball and tightened the band around his arm. Her breath contained a pure, razor-sharp whiff of alcohol.

  “It makes me wonder, do I have any friends?”

  Toss grunted with satisfaction and scribbled numbers on his chart. “Writers lead lonely lives,” she told him. “Most of them aren’t fit for human company, anyhow.” She patted his wrist. “You’re a lovely specimen, though.”

  “Tess, how long have I been here?”

  “Oh, it was only a little while ago,” she said. “And I believe it was raining at the time.”

  After she left, Bill watched television for a little while, but television, a frequent and dependable companion in his earlier life, seemed to have become intolerably stupid. He turned it off and for a time flipped through the pages of the latest book by a highly regarded contemporary novelist several decades younger than himself. He had bought the book before going into the hospital, thinking that during his stay he would have enough uninterrupted time to dig into the experience so many others had described as rich, complex, and marvelously nuanced, but he was having problems getting through it. The book bored him. The people were loathsome and the style was gelid. He kept wishing he had brought along some uncomplicated and professional trash he could use as a palate cleanser. By 10:00, he was asleep.

  At 11:30, a figure wrapped in cold air appeared in his room, and he woke up as she approached. The woman coming nearer in the darkness must have been Molly, the Jamaican nurse who always charged in at this hour, but she did not give off Molly’s arousing scent of fires in underground crypts. She smelled of damp weeds and muddy riverbanks. Bill did not want this version of Molly to get any closer to him than the end of his bed, and with his heart beating so violently that he could feel the limping rhythm of his heart, he commanded her to stop. She instantly obeyed.

  He pushed the button to raise the head of his bed and tried to make her out as his body folded upright. The river-smell had intensified, and cold air streamed toward him. He had no desire at all to turn on any of the three lights at his disposal. Dimly, he could make out a thin, tallish figure with dead hair plastered to her face, wearing what seemed to be a long cardigan sweater, soaked through and (he thought) dripping onto the floor. In this figure’s hands was a fat, unjacketed book stained dark by her wet fingers.

  “I don’t want you here,” he said. “And I don’t want to read that book, either. I’ve already read everything you ever wrote, but that was a long time ago.”

  The drenched figure glided forward and deposited the book between his feet. Terrified that he might recognize her face, Bill clamped his eyes shut and kept them shut until the odors of river water and mud had vanished from the air.

  When Molly burst into the room to gather the new day’s information the next morning, Bill Messinger realized that his night’s visitation could have occurred only in a dream. Here was the well-known, predictable world around him, and every inch of it was a profound relief to him. Bill took in his bed, the little nest of monitors ready to be called upon should an emergency take place, his television and its remote-control device, the door to his spacious bathroom, the door to the hallway, as ever half-open. On the other side of his room lay the long window, now curtained for the sake of the night’s sleep. And here, above all, was Molly, a one-woman Reality Principle, exuding the rich odor of burning graves as she tried to cut off his circulation with a blood-pressure machine. The bulk and massivity of her upper arms suggested that Molly’s own blood pressure would have to be read by means of some other technology, perhaps steam gauge. The whites of her eyes shone with a faint trace of pink, leading Bill to speculate for a moment of wild improbability whether the ferocious night nurse indulged in marijuana.

  “You’re doing well, Mr. Postman,” she said. “Making good progress.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “When do you think I’ll be able to go home?”

  “That is for the doctors to decide, not me. You’ll have to bring it up with them.” From a pocket hidden beneath her swags and pouches, she produced a white paper cup half-filled with pills and capsules of varying sizes and colors. She thrust it at him. “Morning meds. Gulp them down like a good boy, now.” Her other hand held out a small plastic bottle of Poland Spring water, the provenance of which reminded Messinger of what Chippie Traynor had said about Maine. Deep woods, roads without names . . .

  He upended the cup over his mouth, opened the bottle of water, and managed to get all his pills down at the first try.

  Molly whirled around to leave with her usual sense of having had more than enough of her time wasted by the likes of him, and was halfway to the door before he remembered something that had been on his mind for the past few days.

  “I haven’t seen the Times since I don’t remember when,” he said. “Could you please get me a copy? I wouldn’t even mind one that’s a couple of days old.”

  Molly gave him a long, measuring look, then nodded her head. “Because many of our people find them so upsetting, we tend not to get the newspapers up here. But I’ll see if I can locate one for you.” She moved ponderously to the door and paused to look back at him again just before she walked out. “By the way, from now on you and your friends will have to get along without Mr. Traynor’s company.”

  “Why?” Bill asked. “What happened to him?”

  “Mr. Traynor is . . . gone, sir.”

  “Chippie died, you mean? When did that happen?” With a shudder, he remembered the figure from his dream. The smell of rotting weeds and wet riverbank awakened within him, and he felt as if she were once again standing before him.

  “Did I say he was dead? What I said was, he is . . . gone .”

  For reasons he could not identify, Bill Messinger did not go through the morning’s rituals with his usual impatience. He felt slow-moving, reluctant to engage the day. In the shower, he seemed barely able to raise his arms. The water seemed brackish, and his soap all but refused to lather. The towels were stiff and thin, like the cheap towels he remembered from his youth. After he had succeeded in drying off at least most of the easily reachable parts of his body, he sat on his bed and listened to the breath laboring in and out of his body. Without his noticing, the handsome pin-striped suit had become as wrinkled and tired as he felt himself to be, and besides that he seemed to be out of clean shirts. He pulled a dirty one from the closet. His swollen feet took some time to ram into his black loafers.

  Armored at last in the costume of great worldly success, Bill stepped out into the great corridor with a good measure of his old dispatch. He wished Max Baccarat had not called him a “jumped-up little fop” and a “damned little show pony” the other day, for he genuinely enjoyed good clothing, and it hurt him to think that others might take this simple pleasure, which after all did contain a moral element, as a sign of vanity. On the other hand, he should have thought twice before telling Max that he was a third-rate publisher and a sellout. Everybody knew that robe hadn’t been a gift from Graham Greene, though. That myth represented nothing more than Max Baccarat’s habit of portraying and presenting himself as an old-line publishing grandee, like Alfred Knopf.

  The nursing station—what he liked to think of as “the command center”—was oddly understaffed this morning. In a landscape of empty desks and unattended computer monitors, Molly sat on a pair of stools she had placed side by side, frowning as ever down at some form she was obliged to work through. Bill nodded at her and received the nonresponse he had anticipated. Instead of turning left toward the Salon as he usually did, Bill decided to stroll over to the elevators and the cherry-wood desk where diplomatic, red-jacketed Mr. Singh guided newcomers past his display of Casablanca lilies, tea roses, and lupines. On his perambulations through the halls, he often passed through Mr. Singh’s tiny realm, and he found the man a kindly, reassuring presence.

  Today, though, Mr. Singh seemed not to be on duty, and the great glass
vase had been removed from his desk. out of order signs had been taped to the elevators.

  Feeling a vague sense of disquiet, Bill retraced his steps and walked past the side of the nursing station to embark upon the long corridor that led to the north-facing window. Max Baccarat’s room lay down this corridor, and Bill thought he might pay a call on the old gent. He could apologize for the insults he had given him, and perhaps receive an apology in return. Twice, Baccarat had thrown the word “little” at him, and Bill’s cheeks stung as if he had been slapped. About the story, or the memory, or whatever it had been, however, Bill intended to say nothing. He did not believe that he, Max, and Tony Flax had dreamed of the same bizarre set of events, nor that they had experienced these decidedly dreamlike events in youth. The illusion that they had done so had been inspired by proximity and daily contact. The world of Floor 21 was as hermetic as a prison.

  He came to Max’s room and knocked at the half-open door. There was no reply. “Max?” he called out. “Feel like having a visitor?”

  In the absence of a reply, he thought that Max might be asleep. It would do no harm to check on his old acquaintance. How odd, it occurred to him, to think that he and Max had both had relations with little Edie Wheadle. And Tony Flax, too. And that she should have died on this floor, unknown to them! There was someone to whom he rightly could have apologized—at the end, he had treated her quite badly. She had been the sort of girl, he thought, who almost expected to be treated badly. But far from being an excuse, that was the opposite, an indictment.

  Putting inconvenient Edie Wheadle out of his mind, Bill moved past the bathroom and the “reception” area into the room proper, there to find Max Baccarat not in bed as he had expected, but beyond it and seated in one of the low, slightly cantilevered chairs, which he had turned to face the window.

  “Max?”

  The old man did not acknowledge his presence in any way. Bill noticed that he was not wearing the splendid blue robe, only his white pajamas, and his feet were bare. Unless he had fallen asleep, he was staring at the window and appeared to have been doing so for some time. His silvery hair was mussed and stringy. As Bill approached, he took in the rigidity of Max’s head and neck, the stiff tension in his shoulders. He came around the foot of the bed and at last saw the whole of the old man’s body, stationed sideways to him as it faced the window. Max was gripping the arms of the chair and leaning forward. His mouth hung open, and his lips had been drawn back. His eyes, too, were open, hugely, as they stared straight ahead.

  With a little thrill of anticipatory fear, Bill glanced at the window. What he saw, haze shot through with streaks of light, could hardly have brought Max Baccarat to this pitch. His face seemed rigid with terror. Then Bill realized that this had nothing to do with terror, and Max had suffered a great, paralyzing stroke. That was the explanation for the pathetic scene before him. He jumped to the side of the bed and pushed the call button for the nurse. When he did not get an immediate response, he pushed it again, twice, and held the button down for several seconds. Still no soft footsteps came from the corridor.

  A folded copy of the Times lay on Max’s bed, and with a sharp, almost painful sense of hunger for the million vast and minuscule dramas taking place outside Governor General, he realized that what he had said to Molly was no more than the literal truth: it seemed weeks since he had seen a newspaper. With the justification that Max would have no use for it, Bill snatched up the paper and felt, deep in the core of his being, a real greed for its contents—devouring the columns of print would be akin to gobbling up great bits of the world. He tucked the neat, folded package of the Times under his arm and left the room.

  “Nurse,” he called. It came to him that he had never learned the real name of the woman they called Molly Goldberg. “Hello? There’s a man in trouble down here!”

  He walked quickly down the hallway in what he perceived as a deep, unsettling silence. “Hello, nurse!” he called, at least in part to hear the sound of his own voice.

  When Bill reached the deserted nurses’ station, he rejected the impulse to say, “Where is everybody?” The Night Visitor no longer occupied her pair of stools, and the usual chiaroscuro had deepened into a murky darkness. It was though they had pulled the plugs and stolen away.

  “I don’t get this,” Bill said. “Doctors might bail, but nurses don’t.”

  He looked up and down the corridor and saw only a gray carpet and a row of half-open doors. Behind one of those doors sat Max Baccarat, who had once been something of a friend. Max was destroyed, Bill thought; damage so severe could not be repaired. Like a film of greasy dust, the sense descended upon him that he was wasting his time. If the doctors and nurses were elsewhere, as seemed the case, nothing could be done for Max until their return. Even after that, in all likelihood very little could be done for poor old Max. His heart failure had been a symptom of a wider systemic problem.

  But still. He could not just walk away and ignore Max’s plight. Messinger turned around and paced down the corridor to the door where the nameplate read ANTHONY FLAX. “Tony,” he said. “Are you in there? I think Max had a stroke.”

  He rapped on the door and pushed it all the way open. Dreading what he might find, he walked into the room. “Tony?” He already knew the room was empty, and when he was able to see the bed, all was as he had expected: an empty bed, an empty chair, a blank television screen, and blinds pulled down to keep the day from entering.

  Bill left Tony’s room, turned left, then took the hallway that led past the Salon. A man in an unclean janitor’s uniform, his back to Bill, was removing the Mapplethorpe photographs from the wall and loading them facedown onto a wheeled cart.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  The man in the janitor uniform looked over his shoulder and said, “I’m doing my job, that’s what I’m doing.” He had greasy hair, a low forehead, and an acne-scarred face with deep furrows in the cheeks.

  “But why are you taking down those pictures?”

  The man turned around to face him. He was strikingly ugly, and his ugliness seemed part of his intention, as if he had chosen it. “Gee, buddy, why do you suppose I’d do something like that? To upset you? Well, I’m sorry if you’re upset, but you had nothing to do with this. They tell me to do stuff like this, I do it. End of story.” He pushed his face forward, ready for the next step.

  “Sorry,” Bill said. “I understand completely. Have you seen a doctor or a nurse up here in the past few minutes? A man on the other side of the floor just had a stroke. He needs medical attention.”

  “Too bad, but I don’t have anything to do with doctors. The man I deal with is my supervisor, and supervisors don’t wear white coats, and they don’t carry stethoscopes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

  “But I need a doctor!”

  “You look okay to me,” the man said, turning away. He took the last photograph from the wall and pushed his cart through the metal doors that marked the boundary of the realm ruled by Tess Corrigan, Molly Goldberg, and their colleagues. Bill followed him through, and instantly found himself in a functional, green-painted corridor lit by fluorescent lighting and lined with locked doors. The janitor pushed his trolley around a corner and disappeared.

  “Is anybody here?” Bill’s voice carried through the empty hallways. “A man here needs a doctor!”

  The corridor he was in led to another, which led to another, which went past a small, deserted nurses’ station and ended at a huge, flat door with a sign that said medical personnel only. Bill pushed at the door, but it was locked. He had the feeling that he could wander through these corridors for hours and find nothing but blank walls and locked doors. When he returned to the metal doors and pushed through to the private wing, relief flooded through him, making him feel light-headed.

  The Salon invited him in—he wanted to sit down, he wanted to catch his breath and see if any of the little cakes had been set out yet. He had forgotten to order breakfast, and hun
ger was making him weak. Bill put his hand on one of the pebble-glass doors and saw an indistinct figure seated near the table. For a moment, his heart felt cold, and he hesitated before he opened the door.

  Tony Flax was bent over in his chair, and what Bill Messinger noticed first was that the critic was wearing one of the thin hospital gowns that tied at the neck and the back. His trench coat lay puddled on the floor. Then he saw that Flax appeared to be weeping. His hands were clasped to his face, and his back rose and fell with jerky, uncontrolled movements.

  “Tony?” he said. “What happened to you?”

  Flax continued to weep silently, with the concentration and selfishness of a small child.

  “Can I help you, Tony?” Bill asked.

  When Flax did not respond, Bill looked around the room for the source of his distress. Half-filled coffee cups stood on the little tables, and petits fours lay jumbled and scattered over the plates and the white table. As he watched, a cockroach nearly two inches long burrowed out of a little square of white chocolate and disappeared around the back of a Battenburg cake. The cockroach looked as shiny and polished as a new pair of black shoes.

  Something was moving on the other side of the window, but Bill Messinger wanted nothing to do with it. “Tony,” he said, “I’ll be in my room.”

  Down the corridor he went, the tails of his suit jacket flapping behind him. A heavy, liquid pressure built up in his chest, and the lights seemed to darken, then grow brighter again. He remembered Max, his mind gone, staring openmouthed at his window: what had he seen?

  Bill thought of Chippie Traynor, one of his molelike eyes bloodied behind the shattered lens of his glasses.

  At the entrance to his room, he hesitated once again as he had outside the Salon, fearing that if he went in, he might not be alone. But of course he would be alone, for apart from the janitor no one else on Floor 21 was capable of movement. Slowly, making as little noise as possible, he slipped around his door and entered his room. It looked exactly as it had when he had awakened that morning. The younger author’s book lay discarded on his bed, the monitors awaited an emergency, the blinds covered the long window. Bill thought the wildly alternating pattern of light and dark that moved across the blinds proved nothing. Freaky New York weather, you never knew what it was going to do. He did not hear odd noises, like half-remembered voices, calling to him from the other side of the glass.