Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He got away from Myron and went up to the interns’ lounge, where he had to force himself to decide between going to the lavatory or lying down at once. Milton Kuzma was sleeping in a chair. His clothes were soiled with faint smears of blood and vomit. Jesse did not want to wake him—Milton was having trouble at the hospital and their two-month-old baby at home disturbed his nights. Jesse could not decide: should he go to the lavatory or lie down? He was very tired. But if he lay down he might have to get up again in a few minutes. He stood by a cot, thinking. Minutes passed. He pressed his forefinger against his teeth, rubbing at the fine, rather slimy coating on them—the leftover scum of a minute’s panic, now forgotten. There was something else he was supposed to do. Telephone his wife. Yes, he should telephone his wife. But he could not decide about moving forward or backward or in any direction at all. His legs felt distant from him, not tired but impersonal, remote. That woman in heart failure: swollen legs. Fluid puffing up her flesh. Curious, Jesse bent to touch his own legs, to see what they felt like. Could not remember having done this before. He could sit on the edge of the cot and rest like that, or he could lie down and sleep, or go to the lavatory right now and get it over with; or he could telephone Helene.

  Milton Kuzma woke with a groan.

  “Jesse …? What are you doing? What time is it?” Milton said vaguely. He passed his hands over his face. “Jesus, did I have a bad time. You heard about it, I suppose. That little girl …?”

  Jesse was startled at Milton’s bleary eyes and dry, stained lips.

  “… they brought her in with meningitis …? Jesus, was she going fast, and if you know what happened please don’t tell me.…”

  Then he was paged—Dr. Vogel, Dr. Vogel—in that efficient expressionless voice, and with relief he ran to the telephone. It was good to know what he must do! Only someone who had died, and would Dr. Vogel please come up to pronounce him dead? It was only one flight up. The patient, an old man, looked familiar to Jesse but Jesse could not remember him. He pronounced him dead. Yes, he was dead. A young blond nurse was saying shakily to Jesse, “This is the first time anybody died on me.…” but Jesse was already on his way. He had new admissions to check all afternoon, and since he had decided not to take a nap and not to have lunch, he might as well get started on them at once. Now that he was moving, his legs moving energetically again, he would take advantage of momentum. It was a kind of gravity, sideways gravity. Horizontal gravity. He was pleased with himself.

  Sat on the edge of a windowsill and asked about complaints, symptoms, troubles, having to raise his voice so that the man in the bed could hear. Not very old, but he was nearly deaf; diabetes; trouble with gall bladder. And what about his past illnesses?—must ask about everything, every small bit of bad news. The man stared at him stupidly. Past illnesses? After a few awkward minutes Jesse got an answer, at least something to write down. Now, what about the illnesses of a man’s parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters? A baffled stare. Could this old man have had parents? Grandparents? Jesse managed to get something out of him, something to write down. Yes, yes.

  Now a blood sample. A simple operation. But the old man flinched, then recoiled. Then began to shout in Jesse’s face. “No! Get away! You too young! Not you!” Jesse tried to soothe him. He took hold of the old man’s arm and the old man snatched it away. Then, swinging it back, he struck Jesse on the side of the face. “No blood from me, not me! I’ll kill you! Stick you with it instead!” Jesse was afraid the needle had been broken but it looked all right. He approached the old man again, explaining something he had explained a hundred times before. His face stung lightly. This time the old man’s feet seemed to be coming to life, stirring beneath the bedclothes. He was cringing back against the stiff pillows, moaning, “No. No. No.” Jesse eyed his foot under the covers and wondered if he was strong enough to swing it out and kick Jesse with it. Probably not.

  White in the face, the man stared at him. Saliva glistening around his lips. Jesse talked gently to him. Gently. Someone leaned in the doorway and said, “You need any help in here?” and Jesse, not glancing around, said that everything was under control. The old man shuddered and extended his arm to Jesse. Ah, that was good. Good.… Next, on the fourth floor, a dwarfish banged-up child of fifteen; his mother pacing in the aisle between the beds, heavily perfumed and impatient as a dancer. The child was homely, bruised in the face and shoulders, scratched, dazed. His lip was swollen and discolored. He had fallen down a flight of stairs. Fallen or was pushed?—Jesse wondered as he took notes. The boy was very small for his age. Listless, his eyes open but unfocused. Was he feebleminded? Jesse was amazed at the number of feebleminded people he saw here. The mother stood close to Jesse and complained, “He fell. He’s always falling. He can’t walk right. Or maybe he can’t see right. He even falls upstairs. The kids push him around, the bastards are always chasing him. He’s been falling since he was a baby. Falls on his head. His nose bleeds for no reason—when he picks it, it bleeds twice as bad.” Her breath was intimate and liquorish. Jesse tried not to look at her tight pullover sweater and her red slacks, very tight in the hips. Open-toed shoes. Something tinkled—jewelry, maybe her earrings—but he did not want to glance up. She kept touching Jesse, but very lightly, as if they were simply making conversation. “What do you think, Doctor? You are a doctor, aren’t you? You look kind of young to me. But I bet you know what you’re doing, huh? What do you think of him? They said probable concussion. What’s that? When can I bring him home?” Jesse examined the boy and saw the old scars, the old sprawling yellowish bruises of a few weeks before, old bumps, the bad teeth, the curious drab eyes. No resistance. Jesse moved his hand in front of the boy’s face and his eyes did not seem to notice anything. Blind?

  The mother was complaining in a voice that rose and fell as she thought of the other patients in nearby beds and then forgot them in her anger, then recalled them again with a kind of demure shame. “I can’t take much more of this. You hear? He’s a bad boy. He’s always getting knocked around. Won’t listen. They kicked him out of school, he was so dumb. His goddamn father sucks ale and that’s that. It’s not my responsibility all by myself. Listen, you have to cuff him to make him even look at you. I’m not kidding. I had to take off work today just for this.…” After a few minutes Jesse located one of the young doctors on the staff and consulted with him. Then, the woman’s voice still shrill and flirtatious in his head, he took the back stairs all the way down to the cafeteria. Must eat. It was important to eat.

  He remembered the day Helene had been sitting here, just sitting here by herself. What a shock that had been, to approach her and to realize that she was noticing nothing! She had awakened only when he had touched her.… The odors of food discouraged Jesse but he pressed forward through a small crowd and picked up a tray. It was still wet. Jack Galt, another intern, turned to talk to him. He lived near Jesse and sometimes he dropped in to visit Jesse and Helene; a tall, thin, slightly stooped young man with glasses, very intelligent, very nervous. He was talking to Jesse excitedly. Something about an out-of-town physician who had had a coronary during a routine appendectomy that morning. Jack was on surgical service. Jesse could not pay much attention because he had to decide about what to eat—a tuna fish sandwich, which was on white bread and wrapped in cellophane, or should he take a chicken salad sandwich, which was on cracked wheat bread? He stared at the sandwiches while Jack talked. Jack poked his arm. “There’s a line behind you,” he said. Jesse hurried along and took only a cup of coffee. He was not really hungry after all. Jack sat across from him, sighing with exhaustion and a kind of counterfeit despair. “What a mess upstairs! The guy just fell over. We were all panicked!” Once when Jack had come to visit the Vogels he had complained to them in the same voice about a friend of his who had returned a Mahler symphony, a record, badly scratched; and now Jesse got this old news confused with the news about this coronary in the operating room. He felt lightheaded. Something nagged at him: should he go back
and check on the uremia case? He had not worked up the man properly. And when the man had tried to talk about his bad dreams Jesse had not responded.… And the banged-up boy with the mother. Should check him out, see if he had a record of hospitalizations. Someone was beating him, obviously. Now Jack Galt was gossiping about Milton Kuzma, who had been given hell by Dr. Perrault just the day before. Had Jesse heard? Everyone agreed that it had not been Milton’s fault, whatever happened. And something else had happened, not a patient of Perrault’s but an out-of-town man’s: an ulcer patient who had hemorrhaged about a quart of blood in the hall. Jack said sharply, “You’re spilling your coffee, Jesse.” For some reason this reminded Jesse of his need to telephone home.

  He left his coffee and Jack Galt and went to look for a telephone. All in use. He could go back up to the lounge. Or wait. He decided to wait. Then he heard his name being paged, and was called back up to the fourth floor to look in on a patient with Myron Diebold and Dr. Costello, who was explaining the patient’s trouble when Jesse entered the room. Dr. Costello had a pleasant high-pitched voice. Undiagnosed pain in the abdomen; not gall bladder; hernia, a stone somewhere? Costello was a very businesslike man in his forties, with neat, stern eyebrows and a manner of lecturing to his inferiors in all conversation. Jesse was always humble around him. Now he asked Jesse a question, and though Jesse could have made a reasonable guess, he thought it more prudent to say that he didn’t know. Diebold attempted an answer and was interrupted triumphantly by Costello. “Hah! Where’d you dig that up?” Diebold flushed. After this, Jesse went up to the lounge and the lavatory, at last, and now another intern was sleeping in the chair Milton Kuzma had been in, his breath raspy and labored. Jesse washed his hands for quite a while, dreamily. Then he was called down to the emergency room again; a child no more than three or four years old, his face and head swollen, especially his eyelids and lips. He was unconscious. Jesse estimated a hundred bites—insect bites of some kind. Big red swellings, tiny angry blood-flecked dots, purplish areas of flesh … bright-colored, elaborate bumps that overlapped one another. The mother, who looked about sixteen years old, hovered nearby, weeping. “Jesus, isn’t that a sight,” one of the staff doctors said, whistling thinly. The child’s eyelids were swollen shut, his lips enormous, as if blown up, the skin bright pink and tender, very thin from being stretched so hard. Jesse felt sick. A taste in his mouth suddenly of poison: the poison in that child’s bloodstream.

  When he was finished there, he telephoned Helene again. This time she did answer the phone. “Yes, hello, is this Jesse …?” she asked faintly. He felt a rush of love for her that had something to do with the child he had just seen; it unnerved him, his love for her and for the baby she was carrying, his dependency upon her. He asked her how she felt. She answered briefly: a little nauseated yet, but nothing worse. Then they fell into silence. Characteristic silence. Jesse was suddenly eager to make her talk, he was desperate, guilty … he must get her through this pregnancy, he must prevent her escaping him.… He began to rub his eye in that silence, wondering what she was thinking. He feared her escaping to her father, back to Cambridge and the comfortable insular life she had led there. What had her father’s letter meant, what had he meant by Jesse’s “exaggeration”? But he did not dare ask. Instead, he asked, as if he had just thought of it, “Helene, what time is it?” “Ten o’clock.” “Ten o’clock at night?” he said, surprised. He stopped rubbing his eye and looked around the lounge. Yes, it must be the end of a day, for newspapers lay around on the floor; cigarette butts in the ashtrays, some of which were on the floor too. A spent, stale smell. But where had the day gone …? He felt that he might be losing his mind. “Are you sure it’s ten o’clock at night?” he asked.

  The windows of the lounge showed that it was dark out. He had not noticed that before.

  Helene spoke softly to him, as if aware of his amazement. Yes, yes, keep talking. Love me, Jesse thought. He tried to imagine her, his wife—her fine skin fading with pregnancy, her hair listless and broken off at the ends, no longer so smoothly brushed back from her face. Enlarged veins in her legs. Slender legs, breaking veins. A body swollen out of proportion and difficult to balance. Her spine ached. Her spine was too delicate for her belly. It made no allowance for the baby, unwilling to give in, to be resilient. A stubborn spine. A spine so stubborn might snap.… Beneath her ordinary wifely words there was a silence, still, that reproached him for not knowing her. But did Jesse really know anyone; how close could he come to knowing anyone? What must he do to know her?

  Once she had come to the hospital to pick him up, at eight in the morning. He had seen her walking through the parking lot, quickly and deftly making her way around the parked cars, and out of nowhere a man had appeared—this man seemed to be heading her off, and then he paused, stopped, lit a cigarette with his hands cupped about a match, turning slowly on his heels to watch her hurry by. Jesse had been angry at the arrogance of the man, but Helene had simply glanced at him coldly and contemptuously, without flinching, raising her face toward the man at just the right moment, saying nothing, dismissing him with her own arrogance. Whether the man had said anything to her or not Jesse didn’t know and he would not have wanted to ask. In that instant he himself had felt somehow weakened and banished, as if he were a brother to that man who had been so coldly snubbed and not that woman’s husband.…

  Her private smile, slow and girlish. Her ashen skin. The length of her ashen body, oddly slender except for that swollen belly. He thought of her constantly and it seemed to him that the secret of the world was somehow in her, in her body, casually possessed by her but hidden from him. What must he do to learn it, to learn her? His eye itched painfully and he rubbed it hard. He had known Anne-Marie better. He had been closer to Anne-Marie. “How often were you sick today?” he asked hesitantly, knowing that she hated to talk about this. She did not answer at once. Then she said, “I just didn’t feel like answering the telephone when it rang. I didn’t feel like it.” “Yes, I know, but how were you? Are you better now?” Jesse asked. “Yes, I’m better now. I’m better,” she said bitterly. A few more seconds of silence … Jesse began to perspire, wondering what to do. Then Helene went on in the same voice, “I ate some dinner so that I’d have something to vomit up later this evening. I’m grateful for your concern. In the morning I’ll vomit again—a pint or a quart—it’s all predictable. Does that answer your question?” Jesse, shocked, stared out the window at the darkness, the parking-lot lights. After a minute or so Helene said in a different voice, “When are you coming home, in the morning?” “Yes,” said Jesse. “Do you want me to pick you up?” she asked.

  Jesse did not seem to hear this question. He stood rubbing his eye slowly, ponderously. Helene said, “Jesse, if I have this baby you won’t make me have another. Will you? Not another baby, Jesse. You won’t make me have another baby, will you …?” There was something in his eye, maybe an eyelash. The other day he had worked for a hard ten minutes getting an eyelash out of the reddened eye of a woman. Tears. A tiny stinging lash. “I’d better come home,” Jesse said. Helene laughed and said lightly, “No. No. There’s no reason. I don’t mean anything of what I just said. I’m not sure I even said those things.”

  They said good-by and Jesse remained with the telephone receiver in his hand. A dead end. Not even a dial tone. Nothing.

  Women showed up at the hospital, bleeding. All the time. Trying to dislodge the flesh inside their wombs, feverish with the need to scrape themselves out. What a mess they made for someone else to mop up …! Fetuses big as a man’s fist. Basins of blood. The doctors said they were crazy. Why so wild? So vicious? Savage as animals turning upon themselves, but also very sly and imaginative. The doctors said they were crazy but Jesse did not think it was that simple. A few weeks ago a night nurse had called Jesse down. There was a woman bleeding badly, looking surprised and distraught. In fact, she had just walked in off the street; she had asked where the ladies’ room was. Wanted to fix herself
up, she said. When Jesse got downstairs the blood was dripping freely on the floor, turning into a small stream. The woman, in her early twenties, was a large-boned healthy girl with a heavy chest and stomach. Wouldn’t sit down. Kept staggering around, clutching at the backs of chairs, a table. Oddly dressed for this time of year—she wore only a sleeveless top of some silky, cheap beige material, tucked loosely into a tweed skirt that was too short for the fashions of the last several years. She was shivering convulsively. Her chest heaved. Still, with all that bleeding, she would not sit down. Jesse and Jack Galt, who were covering the emergency room together, had to calm her down. Blood ran down into her shoes. Onto the floor. Jack tried to urge her one way, but she would turn and brush against Jesse blindly, and then back toward Jack again, while one of the nurses tried to coax her into lying down. Finally they got her onto the table. She seized Jesse’s arm and cried, “I don’t know what it is, Doctor! It just happened. I don’t know what it is—” There was blood everywhere and when Jesse tried to do a vaginal exam the woman began to fight him. It took several people to hold her down. “No, let me go! They don’t know where I went—they’re waiting for me back home—” The bleeding seemed to be getting worse. Jesse, now panicked, was covered with blood. She was going to bleed to death right in front of him. Bleed to death. He tried to examine her again. This time he came out with a handful of dark clotted blood and flesh and what looked like slivers of glass.… Could it be glass? The slivers were fairly large, curved pieces of ordinary glass, probably from a small fruit-juice glass; Jesse had stared at the red-and-yellow diamond design on the outside.…

  The woman’s screams. Screams.

  A fruit-juice glass jammed up toward the womb.