My career move? One night about a month ago Tod woke up in an unusually desperate condition, half clothed, in fact, and with everything intolerably slewing around him—as if the bedroom was moored to a loosening capstan inside his gut, where his secret moans. I thought: No wonder I felt so terrible yesterday. For yesterdays are always terrible, when Tod hits the tea. Then he upped and did something . . . “significant”: coyly significant. We went into the living room and seized the brass clock that has always adorned the shelf above our fireplace (oh, what strong hands he has), and violently enclosed it in the festive wrapping paper he found in the trash. Tod stood there for a moment, staring at the clock’s face, and then the mirror’s face, with a sallow smile. The room was still circling around us. Counterclockwise. In the car we bounded off to the reception at AMS, or Associated Medical Services, on Route 6. Tod, incidentally, unloaded our clock on one of the nurses, little Maureen. Little Maureen was agitated, but she made a nice speech. Little Maureen, whose face so disturbed me, fair, freckled, abjectly Nordic, the mouth too big or just too external, designed to express only powerlessness. Powerlessness: hope and no-hope, both at the same time.
Well I can’t pretend that this doctoring business came as a total surprise. For a while now the narrow house has been filling up with medical paraphernalia, with doctoring tackle. Books about anatomy, born from fire in the backyard. Prescription pads. A plastic skull. One day Tod took from the trash a framed certificate and went and hung it on the toilet doornail. With amusement he surveyed the wrought script—for several minutes. And of course I get a big boost when something like this happens, because words make plain sense, even though Tod always reads them backward.
I swear by Apollo Physician, by Health, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. . , . I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. In whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm. . . .
Tod had a good laugh at that. . . . Also, the characteristic black bag, swung out of a closet. Inside, a world of pain.
A little stadium of pain, with darkness at the bottom of it.
Irene telephones Tod regularly now. I suppose it’s good that we should get to know each other: first. She is calm and (usually) sober; Tod accepts these calls as one of his many duties, and settles down to them with resignation, with whiskey glass, with patient perfecto. Irene says she is sad. She is lonely. She finds she is less and less inclined to blame Tod for her unhappiness. She says she knows he’s a bastard and can’t understand why she loves him. . . . Nor can I. But love is strange. Love is strange. Sometimes she contemplates—quite dispassionately, it must be admitted— the option of suicide. Tod warns her that such talk is sinful. Personally, I think we can dismiss suicide as a hollow threat. I’ve been thinking about it. Suicide isn’t an option, is it. Not in this world. Once you’re here, once you’re on board, you can’t get off. You can’t get out.
She weeps, controllably. Tod keeps his counsel. She’s sorry. He’s sorry. That’s the way it is.
I hope he makes it up to her in the end.
The actual doctoring I’ve become pretty stoical about. Not that I have any say in the matter. I don’t give the orders around here. I don’t wear the pants. So stoicism, I reckon, is my only hope. Tod and I seem to be on top of the work, and nobody has complained so far. So far, too, we’ve been spared any of the gorier stuff they do here—and some of this stuff you just wouldn’t believe. Surprisingly, Tod is known and mocked and otherwise celebrated for his squeamishness. I say surprisingly because I happen to know Tod isn’t squeamish. I’m squeamish. I’m the squeamish one. Oh, Tod can hack it. His feeling tone—aweless, distant—is quite secure against the daily round in here, the stares of vigil, the smell of altered human flesh. Tod can take all this— whereas I’m harrowed by it. From my point of view, work is an eight-hour panic attack. You can imagine me curled up within, feebly gagging, and trying to avert my eyes. . . . I’m taking on the question of violence, this most difficult question. Intellectually I can just about accept that violence is salutary, that violence is good. But I can find nothing in me that assents to its ugliness. I was always this way, I realize, even back in Wellport. A child’s breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of the father’s hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife’s blade: anything like that made me flinch and veer. But the body I live and move in, Tod’s body, feels nothing.