Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Pressure. Then a sudden sighing release as the needle sank in.

  The water pinkening with blood.

  What she must remember is to leave the tub unplugged and the water on. That way there would be a continual flow of fresh water, splashing and hot. The blood would drain out and new water would rush in and everything would be clean.

  Noon: a clock advertising tires. Cars and trucks were moving through downtown Chicago steadily, in a constant noisy bustle. The sound of horns. More horns. One lane was blocked off ahead, in front of the Drake Hotel; there must have been an accident. She would have to get into the left lane. She hadn’t been paying attention and now she was being drawn into the blocked-off lane, she couldn’t get out of it … a police car was parked there and men stood around. She waited patiently. What she must remember: to keep the hot water running into the tub.

  After a few minutes she eased into the left lane. Slowly, achingly, the line of traffic drew her onward. What she must remember—The traffic light ahead turned from green to red. What did that mean? She waited until it turned green again. Driving was a struggle: she sensed vehicles on all sides of her, about to lunge into her. But when she looked out she saw only cars and trucks with ordinary people in them, their hands gripped like hers on their steering wheels.

  She braked to a stop suddenly. Then she drove forward again and everything was suspended. She could not remember exactly what she was doing. Where was she headed? She must not forget the bathtub, she would have to scour it first, make sure it was clean, then turn on the hot water … very hot water.… Behind her, around her, on all sides of her traffic moved onward. It pressed against her and would not let her free. She would scream at Jesse: There are too many people! I can’t have a baby in all these people!

  Steel knitting needles.

  She would park the car and abandon it. Run, get into the crowd on the sidewalk, become anonymous. Become protoplasm. But she could not find a place to park. The balloon was inside her, fixed. She was passing drugstores, taverns, shoe stores, pawnshops, liquor stores, clothing stores. Movie houses. Old men loitered on the sidewalks here, looking around blankly, without judgment. Downtown at noon. These sights confused Helene. She might have intruded upon a sacred landscape, it was so certain, so definite. All the buildings were old, fixed, had the look of having been here for decades. The people all knew their way around perfectly. Everyone who was here belonged here. They had chosen to come here, walking in slow, measured strides or standing on the sidewalk, motionless, looking around. They had all been born at one time or another, at a precise moment. If their mothers had tried in desperation to scrape them out and lose them in bathwater they would have resisted—would have clutched the walls of flesh and refused to let go—why? Why should anyone give up life? Why not fight for it? There was an army in the womb and it would not die without a fight.

  Helene’s eye was drawn to three young women strolling on the sidewalk—flashily dressed, very cheap and pretty, their hair bleached and puffed out around their stark, glamorous, high-colored faces—how she hated them! feared them! Must remember to buy Dutch Cleanser. The tub would probably be dirty. She would scour it clean and get rid of all that impersonal dirt.… She followed the girls with her eye, repulsed by their cheerful sexual glow that was like a beacon shining out of their faces, so obvious, so disgusting, and she thought of the faint line of dirt that formed on the collars of her clothes and Jesse’s shirts after a single wearing. Where did it come from, that dirt? Clean as she and Jesse were, they were not really clean. She must remember to buy cleanser. Otherwise she would not be able to force herself to sit in that tub.

  Pedestrians passed close about her, crossing with the light. They walked with their collars turned up against their faces, like Arabs, trying to protect themselves from small whirling clouds of grit and papers. The wind was quite strong today. Their eyes were half-shut, as if with a strange contentment. All of them swelling outward in sacs, their lips thirsty and pressed against the walls of sacs, sucking blood. Nothing could dislodge them.

  She could not find a place to park. She kept driving helplessly, heading north toward LaSalle Metropolitan Hospital. She felt herself drawn there, the car drawn there. There was something she must do but she could not quite remember it: the bathtub, the Dutch Cleanser, the hot water. Scalding water. People passed in front of her car when she stopped for a red light, walking tirelessly, fiercely. They had the look of city people who have spent all the days of their lives tramping the city streets, up and down, contented, knowing exactly where they were going. Helene feared their strength. She felt lightheaded suddenly, knowing that something was going to happen to her.

  What she must remember.…

  She wanted to stop this car, park it at a curb. Anywhere. She wanted to abandon it. She wanted to run to a telephone booth and call her father and scream at him. I am Helene Cady! What has happened to me? I was supposed to grow up into a certain person, but where is that person? I’ve waited for years and nothing has happened, marriage hasn’t made any difference … and now my life is over, I can’t tell myself that it will happen in the future, I am through waiting for my life to happen.… I am everything now, at this moment, that I will ever be. It’s over.

  She parked in the visitors’ parking lot of the hospital. No moisture between her legs? No ache in the pit of her belly? The hospital was a large seven-story building with a broad, sandblasted façade and scores of windows. It had an old, decrepit, stained look—tar seemed to have seeped down from its roofs; its chimneys were enormous and blackened, like the chimneys of factories. The big front lawn was a bright false green, dotted with refuse. A new wing was being added, but work had been temporarily halted and girders were exposed like raw, orange, comically exaggerated bones.

  Helene entered the hospital through the big front door. A sound of wheezing as the door revolved. Inside, the familiar odor of a hospital. Helene went at once to the elevator and took it to the basement, conscious of people milling about her, the bustle of noontime. In the elevator with her were two young doctors, probably interns, Jesse’s age, and a small flirtatious nurse, and a woman in expensive street clothes who glanced around hopefully. Helene hurried down to the staff cafeteria. She had met Jesse here a few times. But now she didn’t see him, so she sat by herself at a corner table, exhausted, and stared straight ahead of her. Her mind shuddered and went blank. Doctors, young men, passed by her—someone was laughing loudly, with laughter as robust as Trick’s had been; the men conferred together as if they sensed how everything was in their keeping, everything belonged to them. Their tired, laugh-lined faces, youthful and aged faces, possessed certainty, a power, a maleness that was unconscious in them. Helene stared at them leadenly.

  Someone touched her.

  She woke to herself, alarmed. Hours had passed.

  “What are you doing here, Helene?”

  It was Jesse, as alarmed as she.

  A man of above-average height: thick red hair, eyes tired and dark in their sockets like her own eyes. Her twin. Her husband. He was a stranger to her, happening upon her like this, one of the many men dressed in white who passed so quickly and so unconsciously about her, hardly glancing at her; yet he was not a stranger at all but her husband. He had taken hold of her arm, as if in anger.

  “Is anything wrong?” Jesse asked, frowning.

  “No.”

  He sat down beside her, very close. He stared at her. “I’m just going to have my breakfast now, I’ve been running like hell all day.… Are you sure nothing is wrong?”

  “I had a doctor’s appointment this morning.”

  “What? Where?”

  His face seemed enormous to her. She could see the freckles, the faint splotches of freckles across his forehead.

  “What do you mean?” Jesse whispered.

  His fingers tightened on her arm. It was nearly a convulsion, the way he clutched at her. He knows. It was unmistakable, the way he had come over to her and claimed her.


  “Jesse, you look so tired,” she said.

  They stared at each other, their faces hard.

  Around them, behind them, people milled and bumped against chairs. A man in white sat across from them with a cup of coffee, but Jesse did not look around. He stared at Helene and there was a power, a feverish urgency, in the very bones of his face.

  She had not wanted it to happen this way.

  But it had happened: she was here with him, this particular man. They were together. He knew. She leaned her forehead against the edge of his shoulder, the stiff white material of his outfit, and closed her eyes. Exhausted, she closed her eyes.

  “Helene—” Jesse whispered.

  She could not speak. She pressed her forehead against this man and everything stopped.

  8

  “What kind of bleeding?”

  “Regular blood.”

  “But what kind? Do you pass blood?”

  “Nosebleeds.”

  “Nosebleeds?”

  “Yes. Nosebleeds.”

  Jesse stared at the man and had the idea that he was lying. But why lie? He wrote down this information.

  “Bad dreams. I have bad dreams too.”

  Jesse nodded abstractedly.

  “This old restaurant we used to live over … I keep seeing it … something about the stairway, my old man.… Real bad nightmares. I keep having the same one all the time.… They’re all dead now.”

  He spoke with a dull anger. Propped up in bed, his big chest and stomach swelling against the hospital gown, he glared at Jesse as if Jesse were to blame for his trouble. A foxy, cagey look in spite of his weariness. His breath smelled. He had been hospitalized for uremia. Jesse was making out a report on him hurriedly, and he felt the tension rising between them, a senseless tension, as if this man blamed Jesse for the fact that he was there in bed, sick, while Jesse was making out a report on him. He was a fierce animal in an area marked off sharply by the bedclothes, the exact edges of the bed.

  “Then since I come here, in the morning, I can’t get my eyesight right. I will sue if you people are doping me up wrong. Flashes of light in my eyes, like going blind. I know a lawyer and I will sue for all you’ve got.”

  Already it was nine-thirty in the morning and Jesse was behind his schedule. He had to hurry. There was no time to investigate the intimate, cunning, frightened note in this man’s voice; a curiosity, this notation on his record—he was a “professional wrestler,” or had been; now he was fifty-five years old and going to fat. He wanted to talk to Jesse about his bad dreams, but Jesse was in a hurry and could only nod abruptly, vaguely, thinking of Helene back in the apartment—she had been sick again that morning, wretchedly sick, she was now in her seventh month of pregnancy and they were both afraid she might lose the baby, after so many months of misery—he had to telephone her as soon as he had a chance, he had run out of the apartment without saying good-by because Helene hadn’t come out of the bathroom. She had stayed in there as if hiding from him. How could he make sense of this man’s wheedling complaints? “I can smell myself. I stink. I can smell myself stinking,” the man said angrily. “You are all waiting for me to die.”

  Jesse hurried to the next patient. An hour behind the schedule he had set for himself. At the back of his mind his wife’s form wavered, more flimsy to him than the patient in this room—a woman of thirty-four with a very bright, intense, fixed stare. Months ago a stare like hers would have unnerved him; now it hardly bothered him because he knew he was only a shape in the air that drew out her bitterness, it had nothing to do with him personally. But he kept losing Helene, losing her into the weary drone of the hospital, the sound of the loudspeaker and the squeaking of wheels and the sound of his own voice, asking questions, questions. Nothing came to an end. Little stories began and then broke off abruptly. Nothing was completed, nothing was finished; he ran out of questions and had to hurry on to the next room.

  A hard, gleaming skull to this woman; her hair was very thin. Forehead big, brutal, ominous. She had been hospitalized two days before but there was no diagnosis yet. She continued to stare at Jesse brightly, almost sociably, but she would not answer his questions. Jesus Christ, Jesse thought. A nurse came between them, moving across the woman’s line of vision, but she did not seem to see the nurse. Jesse had to do a spinal tap. His hands went cold. She was going to fight him, going to tear him up—he imagined that square, hard mouth of hers opening and the teeth clenching down hard on his wrist. Jesse prepared the needle and observed his hands closely. Not trembling. Not yet. The woman began to whimper as he approached her. A single high shriek. But her body acquiesced, heavy and voluptuous in spite of the white gown she wore; when it was over she convulsed or pretended to convulse, so that Jesse had to soothe her. “It’s all over. No trouble. All over.” She had been sent to LaSalle from a private mental hospital to be checked for a brain tumor.

  It was Jesse’s private opinion that she was just crazy, but he would probably never find out what happened to her.

  Now an old man who had had a stroke. Jesse searched all over for a good vein. He began to sweat. Where the hell was a good vein, hadn’t this old man anything left? His arms and legs were thin, ghastly. Jesse poked around for nearly ten minutes, using a tourniquet. A young doctor named Diebold, the chief resident on this service, came by to watch. Jesse got a vein located in the man’s left foot and began the fluids. Diebold made a wry clever comment about something—Jesse tried to respond with a laugh—but he was aware, vaguely and nervously, of another consciousness in the room, the old man who breathed wheezingly, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. But there was really no time to think about him.

  In the corridor Diebold said, “The old guy is dead, just between you and me. He’s finished.”

  Jesse nodded and backed away.

  He called the apartment but no one answered. On the sixth ring he heard himself being paged—“Dr. Vogel. Dr. Vogel.” He was wanted in the emergency room, which he was covering for another intern who had come down with mononucleosis. The elevator was too slow for Jesse so he ran down the back stairs; outside the March air shimmered with sunlight and health that seemed very distant to him. He had no time for it. In the emergency room he had to clean up a young Negro, brought in by the police after a chase and an automobile accident; he mopped blood and fixed the boy up, while in his brain the ringing of that telephone sounded. Why hadn’t she answered the telephone? Was she standing there, watching it, knowing it was Jesse?

  They never argued. Her silence, her strange stubborn meekness, baffled him. The pregnancy had worn her down, her legs ached constantly, and yet she never complained—she hid her sickness as if it shamed her, just as being a woman seemed to shame her. But she never complained. And yet Jesse had come across a letter to her from Cady, in which Cady made references to something Helene must have written to him: You are taking his desire to go into public health too seriously. Yes, I agree it is a delusion, but it will pass. Jesse exaggerates.… He had been stung at that letter. He had wanted to rip it up. Had Helene really said that he was deluded, had she actually used the word “delusion”?—she had accused him once, but very gently, of wanting to accomplish too much, wanting to move too quickly. But what did this mean, what did Cady mean, by saying that he “exaggerated”? The phrases kept coming back to him. I agree it is a delusion, but it will pass. Jesse exaggerates.… It was Jesse’s intention to take a residency in General Medicine here and to join a public health clinic in a year or two; this was really a modest goal. Cady would have wanted him to train for much more. Jesse did not understand how he exaggerated anything.

  But she had become pregnant, for him. She would have his baby, the first of his babies.

  The police took the young man away. By this time it was too late for lunch and anyway Jesse had no appetite, so he went right to the sixth floor to work up another new admission with Myron Diebold; a woman of sixty who had been brought in with heart failure. Her legs were grotesque, swollen to bursting. Diebol
d fired questions at her and Jesse took down the answers. He wrote quickly, in a large spacious hand he had invented for himself: Dr. Vogel taking down information, Dr. Vogel inventing himself. Evidently this woman had had rheumatic fever as a child; Jesse thought at once of Trick, who had passed into heart failure in Ann Arbor, but who had been brought out of it and had recovered, because the last Jesse had heard, Trick was living with his parents in Minnesota. Jesse was grateful that he had survived, and yet he was uneasy at the thought that he might run into Trick again someday.… Myron muttered to Jesse on the way out, “The old gal doesn’t look good to me. Hope she doesn’t die right away.” He walked with Jesse down the corridor, walking fast. Myron was talking about something, complaining, making vague absent-minded swipes at his nose, and Jesse felt a surge of despair at the thought that nothing was ever finished, nothing was ever really clear to him. Since last July he had been running constantly. He had to cover too many patients, he worked with too many other interns and residents, overlapping their duties, he came to the end of nothing, he lost contact with patients who interested him, he had no time to look up records in this hospital and certainly not in other hospitals—in the beginning he had wanted zealously to trace the records of beaten-up children, knowing that their parents were bringing them from one hospital to another, but he had never had time, and anyway he was warned against this because he could get into trouble. He did not sleep enough and he did not eat enough, he had sudden rushes of panic, he had sudden impulses to laugh at the wrong time. Myron was chiding him for missing a luncheon meeting for the second time in a week. Jesse smiled dimly and said he had been busy. “Yes, you look worn out,” Myron said perfunctorily, sighing; he looked worn out himself. Everyone looked worn out. But Jesse had really forgotten about the luncheon meeting. The word “luncheon” struck him as a strange word. He said it aloud, as if testing it: “Luncheon.” He could not remember having used that word before in his life. “I forgot about luncheon,” he said, while Myron looked at him oddly. “Lunch. Luncheon. Lunch. Lunch.”