“A NEW FACE,” said Albert the orderly in a dispirited voice. He had spent twenty years in the navy, had his nose broken twice and his arms covered with an ornate green scrollwork of tattoos. That, a pension, and some bad memories were all he had to show for it. Now, much to his despair, he was an orderly in a hospital. He lingered by the bed and rustled the pages on his clipboard officiously. “Mr. Ogle? Is that it?” he said, concentrating on a sheet.
“Yes, that’s right. Tom Ogle.”
“B.M. this A.M.?” inquired Albert, his pen poised above the clipboard.
“I’m sorry,” Ogle said, confused, unsure whether to trust his ears or not. “I didn’t catch that.”
“B.M.,” said Albert, tapping the pen on his metal watch-band. Click. Click. Click. “B.M., B.M.,” he said impatiently.
“Bowel movement,” translated Morissey, the patient in the next bed. He was a rack of bones and loose skin moored to the narrow bed by transparent tubing stuck in his veins. Looking at him, Ogle estimated he couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Morissey stared back with the saucer eyes of a famine victim glittering in his wizened face. His dentures slipped and cracked on shrunken gums. “Bowel movement, he means,” Morissey repeated, sawing the air inappropriately with a bony hand whose nails were as yellow and ridged as a chicken’s feet. “He’s asking if you had a shit this morning.”
“No,” said Ogle, turning back to Albert, “I didn’t.”
Albert made a mark on the sheet and went out.
“I don’t like that son of a bitch,” said Morissey in a stage whisper that could have been heard in the next room. “He’s rough – got no consideration. You should see the bastard put in a catheter. You’d think he was shoving a meat thermometer into a roast of beef. Jesus.” He considered for a moment. “The other one though – David – he’s okay.” He paused. “He’s a Jew.”
“Yeah?” said Ogle.
“Imagine,” said Morissey, “a Jew working in a hospital who ain’t a doctor.”
David the orderly, the bedpan-fetcher. David the polymath, whose mind was a blizzard of equations, snippets of verse from Heine and Browning, contending languages, and line scores from yesterday’s baseball games. Perhaps as a consequence of the perpetual storm of information blowing in his head, he dropped urine specimens, upset trays, and generally careened recklessly among the beds.
But if his hands had no aptitude for graduated cylinders and bedpans, his own private tragedies and melancholy lent them gentleness whenever they came in contact with flesh. A refugee of post-war Europe, David had shunted through eight different countries, and finally, as Ogle later came to imagine, collapsed of nervous exhaustion in Canada. A cousin had drawn him to Saskatchewan, and now, marooned in the midst of the prairies, he yearned for the ancient sun-baked stones of Jerusalem, the oranges of Jaffa, the lithe and saucy sabras packing firearms.
Ultimately, however, his courage failed him and he never packed and left. No one in the hospital was sure why. People speculated that he sensed that the reality could never equal the bounty, the splendour, the milk and honey of the land of Canaan that he imagined. Better to be here, dreaming, than there, disillusioned.
“Yeah, David’s okay,” said Morissey. “Better than most, and believe me, I know them all. Everybody. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, aides. I should. I been here six months; ever since January three. I’m a regular. Seen three guys die in that bed,” he said primly. “That’s why I got a policy of not getting too friendly.” He paused meaningfully. “With nobody.”
He extricated his arm from a loop of intravenous tubing and turned over on his side, his back to Ogle. “Jesus,” he said tiredly, staring out at the ragged green of the trees tearing the sunlight before it struck the lawn, and watching the clouds shred in the wind, “another day, another dollar. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”
Ogle, who had been brought in the night before, after collapsing at work, felt panic strumming in his gut. His throat pinched and he felt damp invade his groin and slide down his spine into the small of his back.
“The doctors,” he said, holding his voice steady, treading carefully the tightrope of his anxiety, “when do they make their rounds? When will I see my doctor?”
“Don’t get your shit in a knot,” Morissey replied. “In here you learn to wait. If your doctor is anything like the rest, he’ll come when it suits. But don’t start thinking about getting shut of this place in a hurry. They don’t put nobody on this ward for a tune-up.” And he snapped his false teeth in anger at the very idea.
Morissey was right. Ogle’s doctor made infrequent appearances when it suited him. Nevertheless, Ogle spent the mornings perched on the edge of his bed while the doctors made their rounds, keeping a sharp watch and scrutinizing the hallways, daring to hope Dr. Bartlett would make an appearance, and, with the utterance of an incomprehensible medical term and a flourish of his healer’s hand, dispel, like a necromancer, the terrible sentence of uncertainty. But four days of this and a battery of alternately painful, humiliating, and exhausting tests taught Ogle the rudiments of resignation. He was made aware also of something else.
Ogle was young – not yet thirty – and had never considered the ills to which the flesh is heir. He was not yet acquainted with sorrow and grief. But sitting on the edge of his bed he was introduced to the uninterrupted parade of disease and infirmity that crept and wheeled past his doorway. The participants in this cavalcade lurched by on canes, supported themselves against walls, tottered along clinging to the arms of nurses, rolled briskly past, pushed by orderlies. Senile old ladies with inquisitive, darting eyes and flickering vipers’ tongues cried out for babies they had borne half a century before, their hair as white, startled, and on-end as a dandelion gone to seed. A victim of kidney disease rolled by, his mind overwhelmed by the poisons his body could no longer eliminate, calmly and silently smiling to himself, his monstrously swollen leg supported on a sheepskin and ripening to a shiny, mottled-purple iridescence. A coronary patient took his first post-convalescent, tremulous steps, his face vibrant with fear and his bathrobe fallen open to display a livid blue scar on his chest. A diabetic who had lost a leg to gangrene swung by on crutches, his face grey and wrinkled with anxiety and concentration.
And as Ogle watched them troop by, he wrung his wet palms together and shuffled his cold feet in his slippers. There was little else to do. There were no visitors to relieve the monotony because Ogle had never troubled to make friends. He was an essentially shy man who had early learned to disguise his timidity with rancour, and who had, given time and practice, transformed his mouth into a cynical gash in what otherwise would have been an open and frank face. He had the neurotic’s partial vision of life, and a sense of the absurdity which adheres to all effort when observed in the light of a long enough perspective. This had never made him popular. Most people didn’t care for his desperate, crabbed views. Of course, the people from the office had felt obligated to send him a get-well card and flowers (they couldn’t ignore him; he had keeled over at their feet), but no one had troubled to visit him.
His days were spent waiting, being directed here and there, from X-ray to lab, from pillar to post. He dozed and ate and lived the elemental life of a prisoner, shaving with an exactitude that could never be duplicated outside the walls of the hospital, moving his bowels with the patience of Job, brushing each tooth many times over. He murdered each day minute by minute.
When night came he found he couldn’t sleep. He hid this fact from the nurses to avoid medication. His only previous experience with sleeping-pills had left him with the feeling that he was toppling blindly into a grave.
By ten o’clock every night Morissey was dead to the world, enjoying, Ogle imagined, the dreamless sleep of the blessed. By eleven the ward came alive with the sounds of night terrors. The dying made broken cries; those made bitter by pain piped complaints to the staff in querulous voices. A stroke victim, never seen but much discussed by Morissey, tunelessly struck up “God Save the Queen” to ring down the curtain on the day, and a senile clergyman across the hall began a litany of blasphemies triggered out of his subconscious by a plaque-clogged artery in the brain.
During the course of a night Ogle slept by moments, but woke often with a start that jerked him upright in bed, shivering. His fingers trembled as he scrubbed his face and squeezed his eyelids tight. And every night at three o’clock he smelled the coffee percolating at the nurses’ station as they took their shift break. By association, that aroma awakened another hunger. Ogle was prompted to swing his legs out of bed, pull open the drawer of his night table and take out a cigarette and matches. Then, his bare feet sticking to the linoleum, he padded across the room to the can, carefully skirted the foot of Morissey’s bed, and paused for a moment at the window to look out on the city.
He was always surprised and a little exalted by the number of lighted windows burning so bravely in the night. What did they signify? A sick child? A tired domestic dispute lengthening, with tears and recriminations, past resolve? A happy, drunken party? A couple achingly grinding out the night’s last session of love? He never speculated for long, but took a little comfort from those terrestrial, temporal stars in the night.
The sudden glare of the light in the bathroom glancing off rubbed enamel and spanking bright tiles hurt his eyes. The place smelled of antiseptic and somebody else’s turds.
Ogle examined his face in the mirror over the sink. It seemed to him that the left side of his face had altered, although he couldn’t be sure. There was a sensual droop to the eyelid, and the corner of his mouth felt a little slack and lacking in decision. He flexed the fingers of his left hand and made a weak fist; he felt faint.
He sat down on the toilet seat, lit his cigarette, entwined his long legs about one another and meditatively scratched his shin. All he wanted now was four ounces of Scotch, neat. That would make this an occasion. The cigarette smoke hovered around his head, a blue nimbus.
“A drink, a drink,” he declaimed to the opposite wall, hoisting an imaginary glass, “my sterile, christly kingdom for a drink.” Ogle attempted a suitably ironic smile but the stiff, resisting muscles of his face informed him he had failed and produced only a grimace. There is something radically wrong here, he thought.
On the other side of the door, Morissey spoke indistinctly to a character in his dreams.
“Die in your sleep, you old prick,” Ogle answered him. It had been brewing for some time. Ogle believed he hated his doctor. Dr. Bartlett didn’t care for Ogle’s attitude.
It might have had to do with the similarity in their ages. They had rubbed up against some of the same experiences, but had been weathered into very different shapes. Ogle, for all his cynicism, had carried placards denouncing the Vietnamese war and occupied a corporate recruiting office. He was sure Bartlett was the type who had watched these kinds of proceedings aloofly from a dormitory window. And convictions had had nothing to do with it.
Ogle had retained his pony-tail until economic necessity of the direst kind had forced him to relinquish it. Bartlett, with his unformed face of shaded planes, had attempted to distinguish and hearten a moist, indistinct mouth with a twitch of coppery hair on his upper lip. Ogle was convinced that growing it was the bravest thing Bartlett had ever done.
So, on the morning of the seventh day of his hospital stay, Ogle was waiting for Bartlett with the Gideon Bible resting open on his lap. He had taken to skimming it when all else failed to relieve his boredom. He had come across and marked a passage in 2 Chronicles with Bartlett in mind.
At about ten o’clock Bartlett stuck his head around the door jamb. “Good morning,” he said, “I thought I’d just pop in on you for a minute.” Popping in was the word for it.
“Good morning,” said Ogle.
“Keeping busy, I see,” said Bartlett professionally, indicating the Bible.
“Nothing like ‘The Good Book’,” said Ogle, smiting the cover.
Bartlett, who was never sure when Ogle was pulling his leg, yet loath to offend religious sensibilities, said, “I suppose so.”
“Take this here,” said Ogle, clearing his throat. “ ‘And Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers…’ What do you make of that, Doc?” said Ogle, feigning naivete.
“Very amusing, Mr. Ogle,” said Bartlett stiffly, removing a pen-light from his shirt pocket. He drew the blind at the window and went to work. “Follow the light, please,” he said, bending over Ogle and breathing a gust of warm Sen-Sen into his face. Ogle chased the light until his eye ached. “The other now. Very good. Thank you.” Bartlett snapped off the light.
“Gazing in the windows of the soul. And what did we see?” Ogle said glibly.
Bartlett extended a stubby hand with square, pink nails. “Squeeze my hand, please. Right first. Fine. Now the left.”
Ogle bore down with his left hand and felt a stain of weakness radiate from his shoulder and lodge under his rib cage. His heart caught the contagion and began to drum. He shrugged apologetically to the doctor. “Not enough breakfast, I guess,” he said, visibly discomfited.
“Yes,” said Bartlett. “No better, eh? What about the dizzy spells? Any more faintness, weakness?”
“No,” lied Ogle.
“Please stand up,” said Bartlett. His square, strong hands pushed at Ogle’s shoulders, attempting to throw them back into a military posture. “Heels together, hands at your side. Good. Good.” He paused. “Now close your eyes.”
“No tricks now, Doctor.”
“Close your eyes, please.”
He did. Something whirled in his head with crazy, wrenching speed, like a flywheel torn loose. His eyes sprang open in time to see the bed rush into his face. A muffled blow of mattress, pillows, bedclothes, and he was breathless, face down on the bed.
“Oh, how the mighty are brought low,” he said in a choked voice.
“You’re all right, aren’t you?” said Bartlett with some concern. “I tried to catch you, but you went down too quickly.”
Ogle turned over on his back and flung his forearm across his eyes. What is this? he asked himself. What is wrong with me?
“Yeah. Just fine. Hunky-dory.”
“Well now, about dizzy spells…”
“I told a fib. Gee whiz, but I’m an incorrigible fibber.”
“So you have had more?”
“Yeah.”
“I wish you would show a little more confidence in me. It would make things easier. I can’t diagnose without your help.”
“You’ve got it,” said Ogle. “So what is your diagnosis?”
“Be patient. I know it’s difficult, but I’d like to do another series of tests. The last ones weren’t conclusive.”
Ogle tangled his legs in the sheets in frustration. His voice, ground to an edge against the whetstone of exasperation, was sharp, high, keen. “You have an idea. Give me an idea of what you think.”
Bartlett shot his cuffs once or twice. “I don’t think there would be any point to that. I might have to retract it. I wouldn’t want to raise – or dash – your hopes.”
“Hey, the last time I looked you were human. The first mistake is on me and no complaints.”
“I have no intention of saying anything,” said Bartlett with more firmness than Ogle had thought him capable of.
“Look then, Doctor,” said Ogle, bargaining. “Leave a pass for me at the desk. I’m going crazy here. This place is driving me crazy.” There it was. An undercurrent of fear, even mild hysteria, in his voice. They’re like dogs, he thought. They can smell it. “If I could get out for a walk on the grounds… maybe I’d feel better. I wouldn’t be so jumpy.”
Bartlett caught his wheedling tone, sensed the desperation, and immediately recovered his equanimity. He had something this person wanted.
“Do you have someone to accompany you? A friend or relative?”
“No. I don’t need someone to accompany me. I don’t need training wheels. I just want to get out of here for a while. This place is getting to me.”
“I’m sorry if you find us lacking,” said Bartlett. He pocketed his pen-light and smoothed his white jacket with his palms, readying himself to depart. “But we’re not a grand hotel. Bear with us.”
“The pass,” said Ogle, hating himself, but none the less begging.
“I’ll leave one at the desk – on condition you’re accompanied by someone.” Bartlett showed his teeth in a medical smile. “Charm one of your friends into going for a stroll with you.”
He went out.
Ogle lay without moving a muscle until he felt the shame drain out of his face. He supposed he had no choice. There was no one else. He got out of bed and went to the pay phone at the end of the hallway. He dialled Barbara’s number. They had lived together for two years before separating six months ago on fairly amicable terms. She had simply had enough of him. Too much drinking, irresponsibility, and scorn.
Her voice conveyed no hint of alarm or even surprise as he explained what he wanted, his body involuntarily writhing and twisting on the hook of his embarrassment.
Yes, she would come.
No, not tomorrow. The day after. When she finished work.
No trouble. Take care.
Then there was nothing but a dial tone in his ear. He couldn’t remember having said goodbye. Ogle put the receiver carefully back on the hook.
It was the following day that Ogle saw Morissey weighed for the first time. The weighing took place weekly and the results were meticulously recorded.
Morissey was afflicted with a rare metabolic disorder that was slowly making him waste away, imperceptibly killing him inch by inch, or rather, pound by pound. Nothing arrested the melting of the flesh from his bones, not the 2,400 liquid calories daily dripped into his veins by tubes, not the three hearty meals he dutifully choked down every day. For Morissey, every weighing marked a stage on his journey to extinction.
At eleven o’clock the scale was pushed into the room by Albert and David.
“Weigh-in time, champ,” said Albert.
“Please, Mr. Morissey,” said David, seeing the terror which crossed Morissey’s face at the sight of the scale. “Co-operate. Relax.”
This admonition was followed by an uneasy silence that made Ogle sit up in bed. The two orderlies were watching Morissey closely. He had burrowed down into the bedclothes and his bony hands were clinging to the metal railing of the bed. His eyes swivelled cautiously in their sockets.
“Ah, shit,” said Albert. The old boy in 44 had tried to bite him earlier, and now he had to put up with this. “We got to go through all this again, champ?” he inquired bleakly.
“Bugger off with that scale,” said Morissey. “Weigh your own fat, lazy ass with it.”
David went to the bed and took him by the wrist, handling it as carefully as if it were made of balsa wood. “We’ll just slide the railing down so you can get out a little easier,” he said. A certain emphasis of pronunciation, vaguely foreign, lent his voice a lulling quality. His red hair, profuse and crested, bobbed in the sunshine as he worked on Morissey’s grip.
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” roared Morissey, “you’re hurting me!”
He wasn’t, of course, and David was affronted by the accusation. “Mr. Morissey,” he said and clucked his tongue.
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” yelled Morissey unconvincingly.
“Shut your gob,” said Albert. “You’re scaring the chickens.”
A nurse stuck her head in the doorway. “Trouble, fellows?” she asked.
“Nah,” said Albert, “we’re just weighing the champ here. Same as always.”
She nodded understandingly and went away.
Gradually, patiently, David had worked Morissey to a sitting position on the edge of the bed.
“Now,” he said, “if you please, step down on the scale, Mr. Morissey.” Old-world courtliness.
“Hop on,” said Albert.
“Jump down a fucking well yourself,” replied Morissey.
“It don’t bite,” said Albert. “What the hell is the problem?”
“I ain’t climbing on that scale,” said Morissey with trembling lips. “It ain’t correct; it lies.” Tears pricked his eyes and he snuffled.
“Okay,” said David to Albert, “lift him now.”
And a stunned Morissey was snatched off the mattress, hospital gown fluttering, and lowered onto the scale. He slumped purposely, a passive dead weight in David’s arms. Albert manipulated the sliding weights and tried to shield the reading from Morissey’s view.
“What is it?” implored Morissey, craning his neck. “I’m heavier, ain’t I? I’m heavier, ain’t I? Oh, God, sure I am.”
“You’re a regular jumbo,” said Albert, tinkering. “But shut up for chrissake. I got enough trouble with this metric shit, without you making that noise.”
“I seen it!” Morissey shouted. “I lost another pound! Oh, sweet Jesus, another pound!” He began to sob and fling his body around recklessly in David’s arms. “I’m dying. Don’t nobody know I’m dying?” he moaned.
David stroked his matchstick arms like a mother soothing a child. “Hush,” he said. “We’re almost through.”
Morissey contorted himself in David’s arms, flailing his bony limbs. “I’m dying!” he cried. “Don’t you care, you bastards? Don’t it signify?”
David turned to Ogle. “Help me, please,” he said. “I can’t hold him.” But he read on Ogle’s face Ogle’s inward disturbance, the facial hieroglyphics of his own anxiety made manifest in Morissey’s struggle to free himself from the prison of his disintegrating body.
“No,” said Ogle numbly. “I can’t.” He turned his face away from Morissey’s ugly head, each bone of the skull ridging the skin, each indigo vein a distinct, anxious swelling. He found his feet and scurried out the door. His bathrobe flapped around his calves as he marched down the corridor. In his agitation he dodged beds, lounge chairs, and wheelchairs loaded with patients. All these people had been removed from their rooms and left in the hallway while the cleaning staff plied mops, scrub brushes and floor polishers in a wholesale cleaning.
I don’t belong here, thought Ogle. It’s a mistake. This doesn’t make any kind of sense.
Nothing was right. His leg felt funny; it seemed to trail along insensibly, clumsily. He stopped and leaned against the dead-green wall and kneaded the muscles of his thigh. Sweat glistened in his hairline.
“Edward.”
What the hell is the matter with this leg? He pummelled it lightly with his fists.
“Edward.”
It was the old woman in the wheelchair beside him.
Ogle looked down at her. She was restrained loosely in the chair by cotton straps that prevented her from falling out. These she hung against like a boxer on the ropes. Patches of pink, scurfy scalp showed through thin hair which had been subjected to attempts to resurrect its youthfulness by means of a rinse. Her mild blue eyes were rendered innocent by a glaze of cataracts, and a sprout of coarse white hairs on her chin made Ogle think of elderly Chinese gentlemen. What might have been a placid face was rendered angry by scabby sores which, shining with ointment, crept down her face to lose themselves in the wattles and creases of her neck.
“Edward!”
Suddenly it struck Ogle that she was speaking to him.
“Me?” he said. “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m not Edward.”
She waggled her head and crooked a finger at him vigorously. He moved a little closer. A hand darted out and snared his sleeve.
“Edward, my dear,” she said peevishly. “Where have you been?” She lost her train of thought and her eyes shifted unsteadily as she ransacked her memory. “Been. Been. Been,” she repeated vaguely. “Look what they do to me,” she said, seizing another subject and plucking at her cotton straps. “Untie me.”
“Look, lady, you’re mistaken. My name isn’t Edward. It’s Tom. Tom Ogle,” he replied uneasily.
“Nonsense, Edward. Untie me this moment. And we’ll go home.”
“No, we won’t,” said Ogle, tugging gently against her grip, attempting to retrieve his sleeve.
“Very well,” she said with a sigh. “As you wish. Home is, after all, where the heart is.”
“A case of mistaken identity,” explained Ogle.
“As if I don’t know my Edward,” she said. “Don’t be silly, my dear man.”
“Let go of me, lady. I mean it.”
She began to cry brokenly. “Been. Been. Been,” she sobbed. “Oh, don’t go away. Where have you been all these years, Edward?”
He bent towards her, trying to work her fingers loose from his sleeve. Her other hand shot up and caught him at the nape of the neck.
“Kiss me, Edward,” she said, “for old times’ sake.”
He thought he caught a whiff of a colostomy bag. He saw in detail the pitted, cracked sores, the old, milky eyes. “You can go to hell,” he said. “You can all go to hell. I just want to be left alone. Just leave me alone. It’s all I ask.”
Barbara did not come the next day as she had promised. She did not come the following day. She did not come at all. Ogle did not trouble to phone her again; he was too proud.
He stood by the window and observed life go on outside the hospital as if he were watching a movie screen. The sprinklers waved majestic plumes of silver in the summer air, the green lawns sizzled cinematically in the heat. Nurses spread their sweaters on the grass and sat down on them to eat their lunches. At that distance their imperfections were obliterated. And Ogle desired their images, like those of starlets, fervently but abstractly.
He began to prowl the hospital hallways with his hands thrust belligerently in his bathrobe pockets. On his journeys he discovered a good many things: a burn ward where he heard the voices of scalded children crying in the distance, where visitors were fitted with surgical masks before being allowed to pay their visits. A room full of amputees who brandished the stumps of their arms like blunt antennae while they argued. And finally, the physical-therapy room.
The therapy room was almost empty when he came across it. A female therapist was sitting on a hard, straight-backed chair with her hands folded sedately in her lap while she watched a man with flopping, nerveless legs swing his body along between two parallel bars that stood at hip height.
The room was not provided with much equipment: an exercise bicycle stood against one wall; there was a system of weights and pulleys; some tumbling-mats. Ogle walked directly to a basketball lying in the middle of the floor and picked it up.
He relished the pebbly grain with his fingertips. He had played the game in high school and had loved its speed, grace and fluid, intricate ballet.
A hoop was fixed on the back wall. He launched a shot at it; the arc was all wrong, too flat. The ball bounded off the backboard and rattled the rim of the basket.
Jarred by the noise, the therapist unfolded her hands and watched him quizzically. Ogle was stripping off his bathrobe. He wriggled out of his pyjama top and shucked off his slippers. Barefoot, he gathered up the ball, dribbled lazily around an imaginary key, feinted to his right and lofted a soft, one-handed jumper.
His left leg almost folded up under him when he came down. He kicked it out in front of him several times and waggled his ankle. With a look of determination on his face he squeezed the ball, deked, spun and drove for the basket. The leg did not respond properly; it felt weak and rubbery.
The therapist made up her mind. She started towards him. Ogle was massaging his thigh and muttering angrily under his breath. “Come on,” he said. “Come on. Work.”
“Excuse me,” said the woman, “but I have no one on the list for eleven-thirty. Are you scheduled for eleven-thirty?”
Ogle looked up at her as if this question were an unpardonable imposition. His concern for his leg was verging on hysteria. “I’ve got a problem here,” he said. “This damn leg isn’t working right.”
“Please,” she said, “who told you to come here? Are you sure you were scheduled for eleven-thirty? Mr. Krantz needs my undivided attention. Sometimes I think they don’t know what they are doing downstairs. They know Mr. Krantz needs my undivided attention.”
“Fine,” said Ogle. “You look after Mr. Krantz. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just shoot a few hoops.”
“Who’s your doctor?” she said, becoming suspicious.
“Zorba the Greek,” said Ogle, turning his back on her and dragging his leg after him to the basketball.
“You’re not supposed to be in here, are you?” she said. “You can’t just walk in here. This isn’t a games room, it’s a medical facility.”
“Oops,” said Ogle, “there went Krantz.”
She cast a desperate look over her shoulder at Krantz trying to haul himself back up on the bar, hand over hand, after a plunge to the mats. “If you’re not out of here in one minute,” she said, “I’m calling security.”
“Sure thing,” said Ogle, “but don’t forget Humpty Dumpty over there. He wants your undivided attention.” With that he lunged towards the basket and stumbled. All the feeling in his leg was gone. Nothing.
“One minute,” she grimly reiterated.
“Hey, you dumb bitch!” he shouted in his fear and frustration. “Lay off, I got a fucking problem here. Don’t you listen? I got a fucking problem!” Couldn’t she see? Couldn’t she?
She looked as if she had been slapped. “I won’t tolerate that,” she said. “I don’t have to tolerate that.”
Ogle slammed the ball into the floor. “I’ve had it!” he yelled. “You, lady, can go piss up a rope! I have had it with this fucking place!”
“You are obviously crazy,” she said, turning away. “I’m calling security.”
Ogle climbed onto the stationary bicycle and began to pedal. He buried his head between the handlebars like a racing cyclist and his legs spun. Occasionally his left foot slid off the pedal and he barked his shin, but he kept at it. His back began to shine with sweat; his lungs swelled and collapsed like bellows.
Krantz had hauled himself upright and was staring at him with a bemused look on his face.
“Hey, Krantz,” yelled Ogle, “look at the world-famous bicycle racer sweep up the cobbled streets of Monte Carlo.”
“Give her shit!” shouted Krantz gleefully.
Ogle jacked his butt in the air and began to really pump.
“Yahoo!” yelled Krantz, wobbling.
Ogle was determined to teach that leg its duty. But he did not feel one hundred per cent. He was not up to snuff. So when the therapist arrived with the security guard they found Krantz calling for help and Ogle in convulsions on the floor, his legs rhythmically drawing up and thrusting out again, like a galvanized frog on a laboratory table, swimming to God only knows what destination.
They opened his skull and took a look. The tumour was sequestered in the folds of the brain lobe in such a way that the surgeon lost all confidence in his scalpel. So they closed him up again and wheeled him back to the ward. The doctors wished to let the tumour “ripen.” The very word led Ogle to imagine button mushrooms swelling in the humid night of some hothouse. He lay in his bed with his head swathed in yards of gauze, his eyes hooded, seldom speaking.
Morissey, perhaps heartened by what he surmised were signs of Ogle’s imminent demise, took to conversation.
“You know what you put me in mind of?” he asked.
“A corpse.”
“Oh, Jesus, what a thing to say,” said Morissey cheerfully. “Nah, a what-you-call-it? A Hindu with a thingamajig – a turbine.”
“Is that right?” said Ogle flatly.
“Yeah, there’s one of them in here. A real black bugger with the washing wrapped around his head – a doctor.”
“I’m tired,” said Ogle. “I’m going to sleep now.”
“Sure,” said Morissey. “Keep up your strength.”
But Ogle didn’t even go through the pretence of dropping off. He neglected even to close his eyes. Instead he stared at the ceiling very hard and tried to remember what had gone through his mind during those convulsions. There had been something. He had been sure.
David tried to coax Ogle out of his depression. He described for him the glories of the Holy Land: a purifying sun like hot glass; the salinity of the Dead Sea; the holiness of the learned rabbis of Jerusalem – all as if Ogle were as ardent and as hopeful a prospective pilgrim as he. He stole a minute here, a minute there, to sit by Ogle’s bed, to smoke a cigarette and extol the virtues of the Expos. Ogle’s smokes had been taken away from him because he didn’t have full control of his limbs and the nurses were afraid he would drop a cigarette and set the bedclothes on fire. So David shared his butt, holding it for him and allowing him an occasional drag that lent Ogle’s face some of the beatific splendour of a nursing baby’s.
David discovered that Ogle had the rudiments of chess, so on the night shift when things were slow they would play a game on David’s little magnetic travelling board. The red head bobbed and weaved above the checkered square; his fingers snapped; he hummed the overture from The Nutcracker. His body writhed, and like a Hassid lost in the ecstasy of holy dance, he was transported. David was happy amidst the smell of stale urine, soiled bedclothes, fevers and agonies.
Ogle was not.
Sometimes he found himself in tears. David would pat his shoulder with a large, freckled hand, with bright, virile tufts of red hair on the knuckles. “There, there,” he would say, and on the next move gratuitously surrender a knight to Ogle.
Once Ogle threw the chessboard against the wall in a fit of petulance at losing once again. “That’s it,” he said, burning with humiliation. “I’m finished with this goddamn game. Never again. There’s no point in it. That’s it.”
David patiently picked the pieces off the floor and tidily stowed them in the board, which also folded into a case. One of the hinges of the case was bent from hitting the wall. The lid wouldn’t close.
David looked at him reproachfully. “It doesn’t close,” he said.
“I don’t give a shit,” said Ogle, beginning to cry. “Do you think I give a shit about your christly chess case?”
“You are always causing trouble now,” said David. “Why don’t you behave like a gentleman? Yesterday you wet the bed. There is no reason for that. You are turning into an exhibitionist.”
“I’m turning into a vegetable! A fucking vegetable!” shouted Ogle. “And nobody cares! Nobody does anything!”
“Did you ever consider that there is nothing to be done?” said David, grasping the chess case to his smock with both hands.
“Something can be done!” shouted Ogle. “Something can always be done!”
“Perhaps,” said David.
“Yes,” said Ogle, “yes, yes, yes.”
David came to the bed. “Tom,” he said, “be quiet. Get some rest.”
“You shit,” said Ogle. “You can do something for yourself. I can’t. Why don’t you bugger off to Israel? You’re always yapping about it. Take the bull by the horns.”
“It’s not possible,” said David.
“Oh God,” said Ogle. “I can’t feel my toes. I can’t feel my toes.”
“Be calm,” said David. “Calm down.”
“Like him,” said Ogle, pointing to Morissey sleeping a heavy, drug-induced sleep. “Calm like him. I’m not croaking like that bastard. Not in my sleep. Not yet.”
“You shouldn’t carry on this way,” said David.
“Why shouldn’t I?” yelled Ogle. “This whole business has left one bad taste in my mouth. Your doctors, your hospital, everything.”
David smoothed his trousers on his knee. “Please,” he said earnestly, “don’t be bitter. It doesn’t help.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” said Ogle. “I didn’t live twenty-eight years to end up like this – a slab of meat.”
“All right,” said David, “I won’t argue with you. But let me tell you a little story. Some time after the war – 1947 – I ended up in London. I lived with a Jewish tailor in the East End for a little while. I was very unhappy, very bitter. He left me to myself for a long time and then one day he told me a kind of parable. He said there were two kinds of bitterness: one that takes away the appetite and one that stimulates it. Pepper, he said, was of the first kind – it burns the tongue and nothing more. But horse-radish, though bitter, sharpens the hunger and makes a man impatient for the good things of the meal. So, he said, if a man becomes only bitter and downcast he goes no further. But a little bitterness, a little horse-radish, may give one an appetite for perfection.”
“How quaint,” said Ogle, “how undeniably folksy.”
David shrugged and stood up.
“You haven’t told me,” Ogle said, “why, with all your good advice, you’re still here and not in Israel? Physician, heal thyself.”
“Why? Because I fell in love with and married a gentile,” said David. He laughed. “She won’t go. She was born here. This is home to her. So I suppose you could say that I have been forced to make the best of things. I had no choice about acquiring a taste for perfection. Besides, there are no Expos in Israel.”
When it came time to clean his room according to the rotation schedule, Ogle found himself parked in the hallway in a wheelchair along with the other non-ambulatory patients. The walking wounded headed immediately for the television lounge.
Ogle sat in the hallway. He hadn’t been shaved that morning and he scrubbed his beard with his hands. He enjoyed the tingling sensation in his palms. Ogle found that his hands were growing more insensitive with every passing day, and so he was constantly rubbing, battering and thumping them against any surface that would render up some feeling.
It seemed that everything was slipping away. David had showed Ogle his face in a hand mirror the day before while he was being shaved. The left side had sagged and wrinkled and collapsed like a rotten spot on a fruit.
A cleaning lady with swollen ankles and stockings rolled down on her shoes shifted him to another spot where the sun shone directly in his face and made his eyes blink and water.
“Hey,” he said, “the sun is in my face.”
“Hold your horses,” she said, “it will only be a minute.” She waddled away. He held up his stronger hand, his right, and sheltered his eyes. But after only a minute or two his shoulder began to ache and he let the hand drop back into his lap.
He sat quietly for a moment with the sun full on his face. I’m dying, he said to himself for the first time. The idea surprised him, coming as it did apparently from nowhere. He looked about him and understood with a flash of revelatory perception that everyone on this ward was dying. Everyone was a terminal case. Morissey. The stroke victim who sang “God Save the Queen.” The blasphemous clergyman. The demented old man who ate Kleenex and wet his bed. Everybody. No one was ever discharged. He couldn’t remember a single case. As Morissey had said, three men had died in Ogle’s bed and now Ogle saw that he would be the fourth. For a short time he had believed himself different. But there was no escaping this ward. Not even for a moment. Not even on a pass. There was no outside.
And Ogle ached, for the first time in his life, with pity for them all.
“Edward.”
He swivelled in his wheelchair and, blinking the sun out of his eyes, saw the old woman.
“Edward, my dear, dear husband,” she said, “where are the children? Where are Alma and John?”
Ogle began to sob. Each sob was torn, wrenched from his gut. “I don’t know,” he said. “Lost. I suppose they’re lost.” Even as he said these things he did not know what prompted him, except perhaps the desire to enter into a different world, to escape, at any cost, the present.
“Come here, dear,” she said, and the sunlight was melted and diffused in her glazed eyes, “Come here.”
Somehow he struggled across the hallway, the heels of his palms skidding on the rubber tires of his chair.
“We’ll find them,” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“And after we find them,” she said, “we’ll have a picnic. The perfect end to a perfect day.”
“Fine,” agreed Ogle, who had quite unexpectedly acquired a taste for perfection.