I want to get this tumor packed in nice and firm. I say, “Bayonet . . . Mosquito . . . Sucker . . . Clamp.”
At night the hospital creaks and ticks with cullings and triage.
On their final date, John and Nurse del Puablo went to the Metropolitan Museum. John doesn’t care for the paintings, and there’s no financial incentive, but he feels that it’s expected of him, by nurses, and by the stone and metal hydra called society. Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way. The invisible speedlines suggest a different nexus of sequence and process. That thought again. It always strangely disquiets me. I wonder: is this the case with all the arts? Well, it’s not the case with music. It’s not the case with opera, where everyone walks backward and sounds god-awful.
Every Christmas we get a card from the Reverend, informing us that the weather is temperate. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But I know what he means.
The hospital is like a permanent November. One walks through sun and rain, one walks through all kinds of weather to get there, but once sucked inside by the blatting doors, everything is desperately and essentially gray. Through these windows, at evening, the clouds look like bandages and cottonoid.
All the intelligent pain of the victims, all the dreams of the unlistened to, all the entreating eyes: all this is swept up in the fierce rhythm of the hospital.
“You do good work, Doctor,” everyone here tells me. I deny this. I immolate myself in denial. If I died, would he stop? If I am his soul, and there were soul-loss or soul-death, would that stop him? Or would it make him even freer?
I am not fond of these paradoxes, if paradoxes they are; and I don’t expect everybody—or indeed anybody—to see it my way. But you can’t end yourself, not here. I am familiar with the idea of suicide. Once life is running, though, you can’t end it. You’re not at liberty to do that. We’re all here for the duration. Life will end. I know exactly how long I’ve got. It looks like forever. I feel unique and eternal. Immortality consumes me—and me only.
The Reverend’s Christmas card is born from fire. In the Doctor’s grate.
On the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, every morning, there is a circular pool of mulch, like a vast bread pizza, like a physical calamity awaiting clearance by some twelve-foot drunk or mutant dog sickened by its own size. No. An old lady descends from the black branches of the fire escape every morning and wearily gathers it all up and clambers home with it in paper bags: the food left for her by the birds.
Every Monday morning, in Dr. Hotchkiss’s rooms on the ninth floor, we have Mortality Conference. Diseased organs are passed from doctor to doctor on plastic lunch trays.
—————
John has become more appreciative of Irene. After several desultory attempts, followed by a brief (and nurse-crammed) estrangement and then one big fight, he has reestablished their relationship on a sexual footing. I find I am not as pleased by this as I thought I might be. Jealousy is a new one on me, and amply terrible.
Are we to jump to the unlikely conclusion that John’s heart has at last been melted by the love of a good woman? A fat woman, too, of a certain age, one who forgives everything and looks over us when we sleep—who is, let’s face it, more like a mother than a lover? The turning point or empowering moment came with the telling of Irene’s “secret.” Her words themselves broke a long silence.
“She was a girl,” said Irene. “She’s with foster parents now. In Pennsylvania. I couldn’t look after her. I was suicidal.”
John snorted and said, “That makes two of us.”
“There’s something I never told you. I had a child.”
They were in bed together at the time, staring sadly at the ceiling. Then one thing led to another.
It’s paradoxical, because John doesn’t like women who have children. They can have husbands. They can have as many boyfriends as they want. But no kids. When he accidentally gets talking to women who have children, it’s practically the first question he asks them—it’s the first test they face. And then nothing ever comes of it. Lots of nurses, plenty of sisters. Many matrons. But no mothers.