And Go Like This

by John Crowley

  Then:

  I sought shelter, and eventually found a space under a bridge. I have been welcomed and taken in by the others there, who are very kind. I have laid out blankets and set up a camp stove. I never would have thought I could live this way, but I find I can, and have not lately thought of moving on.

  My ______________ is no longer a _______________ .

  For a moment, pen in hand, Harry felt a shame so profound and thoroughgoing that it seemed to draw into his soul all the embarrassments and lacks of his life, his cowardice, his unwarranted self-reliance, his pride.

  He turned back to the screen. There was a word typed there that he had not entered.

  woman

  He regarded it in bafflement. He lifted a finger to erase it, or to type something else, as a test; but felt suddenly immobilized. Another word typed itself as he looked:

  womb

  What glitch in the program could possibly. He reached to turn it off. Another word appearing on the screen stopped him:

  woe

  A shiver passed over Harry. If his wife, or his dead mother, were speaking arcane words to him through the machine, or over the dial-up Web, should he reply? What could he say? He laughed aloud in mystified awe. For a time he waited to see if further messages would be sent. None came.

  He ought to get out now, he thought, staring, and go for a walk. Yes he should.

  He nearly tipped over his chair as he rose. Sought his jacket and hat, thinking What on earth, and also that maybe he should save his work, and its work also. He might need the evidence. Pausing before the computer, jacket half on: yes, the words were there, none added, none erased. He powered down, but not off. Let it be.

  The otherwise rather charmless small town where Harry had rented his house was blessed with Wordsworthian walks, climbs, views. Like all such New England places its old fields and farms were becoming reforested (were reforesting?), but still there were broad meadows and hedgerows, ponds and wetlands; grand old maples on their last legs marched along the quiet roads, left alone by the first settlers so as to shade the way after they had cut and sold or used the others. Harry, walking upward through the dense pools of shadow these cast, looking out to far hills pale with sun, thought not for the first time that landscape painters must be the happiest of people, with a job that could only bring peace and delight. He felt a vast gratitude that he had been allowed to experience this, all this, the world, the air, the wonderful gatherings of five senses.

  He hadn’t reached the top of the rise when he had to stop. A pain across his breastbone, or maybe his back, hard to say. This familiar pain he attributed to a pulled muscle in the chest area caused by moving things into and out of his rental. Certainly it would get better, he told his daughter and wife, and both urged him to just go get it checked out; but Harry, as a doctor’s son, had an antipathy to bringing trivial complaints to Dr. Beha, a good man but (like Harry’s father) seeming to enjoy being cheerfully dismissive. It’s not a pulled muscle, Harry, Mila told him over the phone. It’s angina! My mother just got diagnosed with it! Will you please just listen? And he said he would.

  The pain had sharply worsened. The top of the rise seemed far away suddenly, and Harry had broken out in sweat. Nausea flooded him. He stopped by a mailbox, and put his hand on it to stay standing. After a moment the door of the house to which the mailbox belonged opened and a woman hurried toward him, wiping her hands on her jeans, a gesture somehow betokening help and mercy.

  His good neighbor, whose husband had died of—but there she’d stopped her relation—took him in her truck to the ER at the nearest hospital, Harry alternately trying to breathe and to read the colorful prayer stuck to the dashboard. Though doubtful, at his insistence she dropped him off at the wide doors, still walking at least, waving her goodbye.

  First an EKG was done, inconclusive but not good. Blood tests showed he had not had a heart attack, not precisely anyway. A stress test, quickly aborted when Harry began to exhibit danger signs. An angiogram, showing multiple blockages in Harry’s coronary arteries. But, but (he complained to no one, there being no one to complain to) he’d taken his statins faithfully, he’d cut down on fats, he walked often. Pretty often. His carotid artery when last tested was clean as a whistle—that was the term used. But like characters in Wonderland, the doctors and staff behaved as though there was nothing surprising at all about Harry’s having fallen into this hole and down among them, and went on talking sense to him that sounded as strange to him as nonsense. He was put to bed and scheduled for a double bypass as soon as a room opened up. Mila was called, Dr. Beha (who had privileges here) looked in on him and made mild jokes, his insurance thank God was in force, Mila and Hope arrived and stayed by him. And clothed in a backless johnny printed with violets, holding their warm hands, before nightfall Harry went meekly into oblivion.

  What meaning relates anesthetic to aesthetic? His Greek professor had long ago posed that question, which ended up in Harry’s burned book. What relates cosmic to cosmetic? Mila told him that these were his first muddied remarks after arising from the depths. He didn’t believe her. Sitting with him in his semi-private room (that is, non-exclusive or shared; Harry made a mental note he soon would lose) she related this funny positively true fact to the man in the other bed, who made no reply.

  When she was gone, though, he lifted his unshaven face to Harry.

  “Anesthetics,” he said.

  “Yes,” Harry said,

  “There’s horror stories,” his roommate whispered, seeming to be one himself, as yet untold. “People waking up in the middle of their operations, not enough gas, looking up at this crew with their hands in your innards.”

  “Not possible,” Harry said. Speech hurt.

  “I’m telling you,” the other said. “It’s because the gas is so toxic that they want to use as little as possible. They take a chance on the minimum. So people are waking up, experiencing their operations, all the pain, but just unable to speak. Frozen.”

  “We’d know,” Harry said. “They’d tell.”

  “They give you this stuff so if it happens you won’t remember. Sometimes it’s called Versed. Other names. Wipes the memory. But here’s the problem: you do remember. If you try. It’s like remembering a dream. One little hint, and it all comes back.”

  Versed. Pronounced as two syllables. The anesthetician had explained it to him and to Mila, and Hope restated it. Drug names fascinated Harry; they were Joycean mashups or Lewis Carroll portmanteau words, sometimes suggestive of their claimed effects (Librium) and sometimes merely pretty or forceful-sounding, but often retaining some vestige of their chemical composition. The path to the right name, he knew, was fraught. A doctor had told him of a tranquilizer named with the common -ol ending that came near to being marketed before somebody finally said it aloud. It was called Damitol.

  Versed was also called something less handy, what was it, lovely and mysterious, the doctor had said the name. Bedazzling. Midazolam! Me bedazzled, sawn open, safe from self-knowing.

  There arose then, like a warning or truth swimming up from the dark pool within the Magic 8 Ball, a memory. A memory he should not have been able to make. Not of the surgical table, the bloodstained gowns, but after, as he lay blind and immobile on the respirator in a no-world. He had heard a voice—Mila’s. Speaking to someone, who, his doctor or some doctor or nurse. They were talking about shutting him down: Were those the words? Well, he wouldn’t want to live if he wasn’t fully okay. She was prepared, he had heard her say; he’d had a good life and she was ready to say goodbye. And she was—he heard this clearly—his health-care proxy.

  He sprang to alertness, eyes wide in the semi-dark, beside his harshly breathing roommate. A dream? Opiate hallucination? He didn’t know. For a long while he lay still, experiencing it again and again, with a deep thrill of horror each time. His monitor surveyed him, unalarmed. At last he slept.

&
nbsp; “Harry,” Mila said to him when next day he asked her, tell me the truth, had she said those things to the doctor? “Harry, how could I have. How could you think it. You weren’t even in that much trouble.”

  “Well, I thought. I mean I thought I remembered.”

  She leaned over him where he lay, and smoothed his unkempt hair. “I love you, Harry, you dope. Maybe I also can’t stand you. But I don’t want you dead.”

  “Good to know,” he said, all he could say.

  He was only in the hospital a couple of days, which amazed him. They wanted him up, they wanted him walking, they wanted him out. His roomie remained in bed, suffering something worse than he had. Harry, resting from a mandated trudge around the ward, exchanged a few words with him; they named their residences, this man’s in Boston originally.

  “Here’s a Boston riddle,” Harry said. “Why is life like Mount Auburn Street?”

  “I know this,” the other said. “I’ve heard it.”

  “Because,” Harry said, unwilling to leave it unsaid, “it begins at a hospital and ends at a cemetery.”

  The man mulled, lips moving as though tasting a tidbit. “Funny,” he said. “It’s not true, though.”

  “Not true?” Harry turned carefully to look at him. “That life doesn’t begin in a cemetery, or end in a, I mean the other way around?”

  “No no,” said his friend. “It’s not true of Mount Auburn Street.”

  “No?”

  “One end is up way past the Mount Auburn Hospital, toward Harvard Square. Mount Auburn Cemetery’s not far down. A few blocks. The street goes on after that.”

  “And where does it end?”

  The man gazed upward, his pain seeming for a moment mitigated by the effort of speculation. “A long ways,” he said. “I think it goes as far as the river, and ends there. The Charles. I think. I bet.”

  Harry seemed to see dark water flowing, stone riparian works, a far side where maybe lights were lit. He was near sleep. “So life isn’t like Mount Auburn Street,” he said. “But still, is Mount Auburn Street like life?”

  But his roommate was now once again actually asleep, or dead, and answer came there none.

  Harry, discharged, couldn’t return to his shack by the river: his wife and daughter were clear about that. For one thing, he wasn’t allowed to drive for several weeks, and for the first of those weeks even had to sit in the backseat of whatever car ferried him here and there. But why? Well, said the Physician’s Assistant—a new healthcare-provider role which Harry confused with the similar but different Nurse Practitioner—just suppose you were to get into an accident. Your airbag might deploy, and smack you right in the chest, and break your breastbone open again, which would be . . . well, it would be very bad.

  Mila took him to her mother’s huge old house in the city, smelling of cleaning products and boiled vegetables, the home she’d escaped from years before and from which her mother refused to move now when she was at last alone in possession. Harry through the calm of painkillers could feel clearly Mila’s sense of purgatorial impatience at being there and with them.

  When his awful wound had healed sufficiently, Harry was signed up for cardiac rehab. It wasn’t optional. He was to report every other morning at a space in the large city hospital with other heart-procedure survivors, better or worse off than he, and walk treadmills and do other things while hooked up to recording devices that would track heart rate and blood pressure, with nurses or overseers ready to take him off if he began to fail or fibrillate. Fine. There was no place Harry hated more than a gym, which this sounded very much like, where he would take his place amid a crowd of wounded or fading old men, what fun.

  “Fun,” he said to Hope on the phone.

  “Fun!” he heard Muriel cry from Hope’s side.

  “She’s so affirmative,” Hope said. “It’s amazing. Dad, just tell me you’ll go.”

  “It’s fun!” Muriel shouted into the receiver, her mother laughing and trying to retain the phone, Harry could hear it.

  “Not fun,” Harry said. “Toiling in the Devil’s pit is fun. Being drafted into the Soviet Army and doing jumping jacks for years is fun. This is not fun.” But he went. The hospital was only blocks from his (incipiently, putatively) ex-mother-in-law’s house.

  The first morning was Intake. Harry waited for his turn on a long bench outside the door, able to observe the walkers to nowhere, slow and slower, hung with recording devices, underarms of their athletic wear gray with sweat.

  His turn was called. He entered Intake’s miniature office and sat.

  “So let’s see, Watroba?”

  “Yes.”

  Intake shuffled files, opened one, then another. “And let’s see, you’re here after an incident where your pants caught on fire?” He regarded Harry without judgment. A strange moment of immobile silence fell, in which Harry doubted reality.

  “What? No,” he said. “No, not.”

  Intake looked again at the file he held. “Watroba,” he said. “Stanley. Fifty-nine years old. SS number—”

  “No,” said Harry. “Harold. Not Stanley. Sixty-one.”

  “Oh right.” He put down the folder and picked up another without apology. “Here we are. Double bypass.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a common enough name,” Intake said. “Around here.”

  “Around here,” Harry said.

  Intake went on talking, explaining things about hearts and arteries that Harry knew, and describing his own healthy outdoor practices (tracking, though not in any way harming, game and other animals). Harry, caught in an ontological twist, could listen and respond well enough, while also being elsewhere and otherwhen.

  Pants on fire. It had been in D.C., where he’d gone with Mila, who was to be interviewed for a government job. He was proud of her even if he didn’t very much want her to want a government job. Strong legs in glossy stockings, a real attache case and a smart black suit. They’d got off the train and Harry was hunting for something in a pants pocket, not finding it and giving up just when a pointing passerby cried out and then Mila too. Harry’s pocket was smoking. In fact, as he later remembered it—though he couldn’t now be sure the physics would work—his pocket was showing pale yellow flame. He beat it out in a moment. But Mila’s look in that moment he couldn’t extinguish: wonder, horror, disbelief, and then less nameable faces too, coming and going as Harry checked for burns and attempted nonchalance.

  Liar liar.

  “So you understand the regimen,” Intake said.

  He brought himself around, reviewed what he remembered of what had just been said, and said yes he understood. He didn’t however understand the mystically unlikely coincidence that put his namesake and fellow pants-burner both here. It seemed another puzzle set him, whose terms he couldn’t grasp, whose answer didn’t exist.

  It turned out Stanley wasn’t in cardiac rehab, not anyway in Harry’s class. Once having been wired up each morning and gotten underway with the others, walking steadily to nowhere all covered in dots like Lazarus’s sores, he thought about it. Which one would be taken, suddenly, at the machine, and be hustled away by the attendants? Would the rest of them walk on and on?

  Harry hadn’t ever been particularly afraid of death, and now he was. Not all the time and not seriously so far, but alone in the dark of night sometimes sharply. What exactly does that mean, “afraid of death?” It didn’t mean afraid of being dead, or afraid of Judgment or what would happen next, the strangely named Afterlife (Hugo’s peut-être, the Big Maybe.) None of that did he find alarming. No, it was the process itself, the approach to the big door, the feeling as of being unwillingly put on the scariest ride at the fun-fair. Would he funk? He was afraid of being afraid, afraid of an unseaming fear gripping him at the arrival of it. He worried about being taken suddenly by unmistakable symptoms in a public place, knowing he was d
oomed and seized by terror while blank-faced bystanders looked on, glad it wasn’t them. He didn’t know if he was brave enough to die, solid enough as a soul or as a man to face it.

  And instead it had only snuck up beside him and whispered in his ear. The doctor knew what it was, though. The Fellow in the Bright Nightgown, as W. C. Fields named him. Harry had simply come upon a flaw or trap, a gin they’d have said long ago, that had been lying in wait within him, growing more dangerous as the years passed, while he went on in ignorance, willed ignorance or at least an unwillingness to look deeply. He had been thinking of his cardiac event and all that had succeeded it as a portal that he had come to and passed through in some agony and much doubt. But it hadn’t been a portal, certainly not a portal to somewhere new. It was where he’d been all along, only he hadn’t known it. The technical medical term, Harry supposed, was fool’s paradise.

  “Harry,” Mila said to him. He was propped up on pillows in the living room, on a large plush sofa. “The insurance agent called. They’ve decided to pay. Just about the settlement I expected.”

  “Oh God.”

  “It took some maneuvering,” Mila said, almost tenderly. She pushed Harry’s pillow up behind him, and moved a coffee cup out of danger. Wife, nurse, handmaid, lawyer. A dense rush of painful gratitude possessed him.

  “So you’ve got to start thinking about what next,” Mila said.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean really thinking.”

  “Are you thinking?” Harry asked. “I mean, I’d like to know what you’re thinking.”

  Mila regarded him, seeming to be thinking many things. Following the fire she had announced (if that could be the word for her rageful flinging of reproach) that she wanted a divorce. He remembered how she had talked to the doctor about pulling the plug. No that had been a false memory.

  “Let’s start small,” she said. That was a tactic learned from his Pay Attention! program, and passed to her. “What are you gong to do right now?”