DANGER! BALANCE MAY SHIFT WITHOUT WARNING ABOVE THIS STEP! Morris
was wearing his carpenter’s apron with the wide pockets, one of the pockets filled with
nails and the other filled with heavy-duty staples. The ground under the stepladder’s feet
was slightly uneven and the ladder rocked a little when he moved. His neck ached with
the unlovely prelude to one of his migraines. He was out of temper. ‘What?’
‘Come down from there, I said, before you break your back.’
‘I’m almost finished.’
‘You’re rocking on that ladder like you were on a boat, Morris. Come down.’
‘I’ll come down when I’m done!’ he said angrily. ‘Leave me alone!’
‘You’ll break your back,’ she reiterated dolefully, and went into the house again.
Ten minutes later, as he was hammering the last nail into the rain-gutter, tipped back
nearly to the point of overbalancing, he heard a feline yowl followed by fierce barking.
‘What in God’s name -?’
He looked around and the stepladder rocked alarmingly. At that same moment, their
cat – it was named Lover Boy, not Morris – tore around the corner of the garage, its fur bushed out into hackles and its green eyes flaring. The Regans’ collie pup was in hot
pursuit, its tongue hanging out and its leash dragging behind it
Lover Boy, apparently not superstitious, ran under the stepladder. The collie pup
followed.
‘Look out, look out, you dumb mutt!’ Morris shouted.
The ladder rocked. The pup bunted it with the side of its body. The ladder tipped over
and Morris tipped with it, uttering a howl of dismay. Nails and staples flew out of his
carpenter’s apron. He landed half on and half off the concrete driveway, and a gigantic
agony flared in his back. He did not so much hear his spine snap as feel it happen. Then
the world greyed out for awhile.
When things swam back into focus, he was still lying half on and half off the driveway
in a litter of nails and staples. Lydia was kneeling over him, weeping. Rogan from next
door was there, too, his face as white as a shroud.
‘I told you!’ Lydia babbled. ‘I told you to come down off that ladder! Now look! Now
look at this!’
Morris found he had absolutely no desire to look. A suffocating, throbbing band of
pain had cinched itself around his middle like a belt, and that was bad, but there was
something much worse: he could feel nothing below that belt of pain – nothing at all.
‘Wail later,’ he said huskily. ‘Call the doctor now.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Rogan said, and ran back to his own house.
‘Lydia,’ Morris said. He wet his lips.
‘What? What, Morris?’ She bent over him and a tear splashed on his cheek. It was
touching, he supposed, but it had made him flinch, and the flinch had made the pain
worse.
‘Lydia, I also have one of my migraines.’
‘Oh, poor darling! Poor Morris! But I told you -‘
‘I’ve got the headache because that potzer Rogan’s dog barked all night and kept me
awake. Today the dog chases my cat and knocks over my ladder and I think my back is
broken.’
Lydia shrieked. The sound made Morris’s head vibrate.
‘Lydia,’ he said, and wet his lips again.
‘What, darling?’
‘I have suspected something for many years. Now I am sure.’
‘My poor Morris! What?’
There is no God,’ Morris said, and fainted.
They took him to Santa Donate and his doctor told him, at about the same time that he
would have ordinarily been sitting down to one of Lydia’s wretched suppers, that he
would never walk again. By then they had put him in a body cast. Blood and urine
samples had been taken. Dr Kemmelman had peered into his eyes and tapped his knees
with a little rubber hammer – but no reflexive twitch of the foot answered the taps. And at
every turn there was Lydia, the tears streaming from her eyes, as she used up one
handkerchief after another. Lydia, a woman who would have been at home married to
Job, went everywhere well supplied with little lace snotrags, just in case reason for an
extended crying spell should occur. She had called her mother, and her mother would be
here soon (“That’s nice, Lydia’ – although if there was anyone on earth Morris honestly
loathed, it was Lydia’s mother). She had called the rabbi, he would be here soon, too
(That’s nice, Lydia’ – although he hadn’t set foot inside the synagogue in five years and
wasn’t sure what the rabbi’s name was). She had called his boss, and while he wouldn’t
be here soon, he sent his greatest sympathies and condolences (That’s nice, Lydia’ –
although if there was anyone in a class with Lydia’s mother, it was that cigar-chewing
putz Frank Haskell). At last they gave Morris a Valium and took Lydia away. Shortly
afterwards, Morris just drifted away – no worries, no migraine, no nothing. If they kept
giving him little blue pills like that, went his last thought, he would go on up that
stepladder and break his back again.
When he woke up – or regained consciousness, that was more like it – dawn was just
breaking, and the hospital was as quiet as Morris supposed it ever got He felt very calm
… almost serene. He had no pain; his body felt swaddled and weightless. His bed had been surrounded by some sort of contraption like a squirrel cage – a thing of stainless
steel bars, guy wires, and pulleys. His legs were being held up by cables attached to this
gadget. His back seemed to be bowed by something beneath, but it was hard to tell – he
had only the angle of his vision to judge by.
Others have it worse, he thought. All over the world, others have it worse. In Israel, the Palestinians kill busloads of farmers who were committing the political crime of going
into town to see a movie. The Israelis cope with this injustice by dropping bombs on the
Palestinians and killing children along with whatever terrorists may be there. Others have
it worse than me … which is not to say this is good, don’t get that idea, but others have it
worse.
He lifted one hand with some effort – there was pain somewhere in his body, but it was
very faint – and made a weak fist in front of his eyes. There. Nothing wrong with his
hands. Nothing wrong with his arms, either. So he couldn’t feel anything below the waist,
so what? There were people all over the world paralyzed from the neck down. There
were people with leprosy. There were people dying of syphilis. Somewhere in the world
right now, there might be people walking down the jetway and onto a plane that was
going to crash. No, this wasn’t good, but there were worse things in the world.
And there had been, once upon a time, much worse things in the world.
He raised his left arm. It seemed to float, disembodied, before his eyes – a scrawny old
man’s arm with the muscles deteriorating. He was in a hospital johnny but it had short
sleeves and he could still read the number on the forearm, tattooed there in faded blue
ink. A499965214. Worse things, yes, worse things than falling off a suburban stepladder
and breaking your back and being taken to a clean and sterile metropolitan hospital and
being given a Valium that was guaranteed to bubble your troubles away.
There were the showers, they were worse. His first wife, Heather, had died in one of
their filthy showers. There were the trenches that became graves — he could close his eyes and still see the men lined up along the open maw of the trenches, could still hear
the volley of rifle fire, could still remember the way they flopped backwards into the
earth like badly made puppets. There were the crematoriums, they were worse, too, toe
crematoriums that filled the air with the steady sweet smell of Jews burning like torches
no one could see. The horror-struck faces of old friends and relatives … faces that melted
away like gutturing candles, faces that seemed to melt away before your very eyes —
thin, thinner, thinnest. Then one day they were gone. Where? Where does a torch-flame
go when the cold wind has blown it out? Heaven? Hell? Lights in the darkness, candles
in the wind. When Job finally broke down and questioned, God asked him: Where were
you when I made the world? If Morris Heisel had been Job, he would have responded:
Where were You when my Heather was dying, You potzer, You? Watching the Yankees
and the Senators? If You can’t pay attention to Your business better than this, get out of
my face.
Yes, there were worse things than breaking your back, he had no doubt of it But what