Acceptable Losses (33 page)

Then he felt a sharp pain in his hand and it awoke or nearly awoke him, and the cave and the tall mauve-lit figure disappeared and he remembered that his wife’s name was Sheila and that she was alive, and he was grateful to the clumsy doctor who was trying to draw blood for more tests from his hand because the pain had interrupted his dream. It was the doctor with the straggly beard whom he had tried to appoint master of the vessel on which he still believed he was sailing. Only now he was not free to go up and down between the decks, but was immured below, tied down by both wrists most of the time. The swift backward running clock, false to the hours, was still visible. It was a sly device, he had figured out, to fool him into not sleeping. He had made himself learn to write the word
sleep
almost clearly on the yellow legal pad. Whoever was on duty to torture him made that the first priority—to keep him from sleeping. The bright neon shone in his eyes at all times. He did not remember daylight.

They were constantly jabbing him with needles to give or take blood. His veins had collapsed and most of the doctors never could find a fit target for their needles, and his arms and hands and feet were black and blue from the incessant attempts, and he cursed Dr. Zinfandel in his heart because every time he appeared, he ordered either a transfusion or a sample of blood.

Anybody on duty seemed to have the right to draw blood from him or insert an intravenous tube, no matter how maladroit he or she was, and he became piteously grateful to the people with an instinctive touch who could find his depleted buried veins at the first try. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember them or their names.

An assorted platoon of doctors seemed to be interested in him, each of them attached to one specialist or another in some obscure medical table of organization. Doctors for his lungs, his kidneys, his throat, with the tube in it at the point where the tracheotomy had been performed, for the bedsores he had developed that went down to the bone and had to be cleansed and bandaged over and over again. He urinated through a catheter and struggled with a bedpan for his bowels, without much success, and had dreams in which he luxuriously pissed normally and sat on a toilet bowl. He was naked and exposed and treated like a piece of meat in a butcher shop and lived, if it could be called living, in a constant state of humiliation.

The nurses took turns at pounding his chest so that he could cough up the silt accumulating in his lungs. The black man stayed away from him but Damon could see him lurking in the corridor waiting for his chance. Damon warned Sheila once more about the man and wrote a pleading sentence to her asking her to get the police before it was too late.

Then one day, or night, he heard the sound of distant sirens coming nearer and felt, triumphantly, that his message to his wife had gotten through. He saw the nurses and doctors scurrying away, leaving only the black man, who came into his room and stood over him and said, “They think they’re going to let me hang in here and take the rap. Well, they’re wrong. And if you think you’re going to get away, you’re wrong, too, Mister.” It was then that Damon knew the black man was Zalovsky’s agent, insinuated into the hospital to finish what Zalovsky had begun.

Then the black man sat on his chest and began to rig a wire box with dynamite in it just in front of Damon’s mouth. “When they come through the door,” the black man said, “this thing goes up. And you with it.”

Damon felt icily calm, pleased that he was going to die so quickly.

Finished with his job, the black jumped off Damon’s chest and disappeared and Damon was left alone in a suddenly silent place, with the lights for the first time almost completely extinguished and the sirens getting closer, then starting to fade away until all was absolutely quiet.

Deserted, deserted, Damon thought. Sheila had betrayed him, had not believed him. He lay in the shadows and waited, regretting that the machine had not gone off.

Tied down and unable to call out, he tried over and over again by groans, signals with his eyes, feeble flickers of his fingers, to get the nurses and doctors who constantly passed the open door of his room to give him something to drink. They passed him by as if he were a beggar at a church door and they were in a hurry to go to a wedding or a baptism.

He was on a respirator all the time now because he had developed what some of the doctors diagnosed as viral pneumonia and others merely called congestion or a collapsed lung. He took a remote, cool interest in his condition and their attempts at treatment, and when Dr. Rogarth made one of his rare visits, he printed out on the legal pad, “Am I going to die?”

Dr. Rogarth answered, “We’re all going to die,” and Damon tried to turn his head contemptuously away from the sight of the man, but couldn’t manage it.

There was one doctor who seemed to Damon to be in charge of depriving him of water. He had a bedraggled wet blondish moustache, very long darkish-blond hair, mad, sly eyes and swept in and out with a loose white open robe floating behind him. He was engaged in a mysterious project that was built around a Persian carpet and involved putting Damon in poses suggested by the figures in the carpet and photographing him in those positions. Damon found himself staked out on burning sands, against looming monuments, the walls of tombs, all in merciless sunlight, hanging from a bare tree on a small island surrounded by a lake from which the noon sun was reflected like bursts of gunfire. He was transported from one place to another as if by magic, in fractions of a second, while the doctor, who by now Damon thought of as the Magician, and who was always accompanied by a wizened nurse in a disheveled uniform, clicked away with his camera while humming merrily to himself. Somehow, Damon managed to communicate with him and the Magician was not loath to talk, often very good-humoredly.

“What, exactly, are you up to?” Damon asked once.

“You will see when I’m finished,” the Magician said. “If you must know, I am in a contest. A travel magazine is giving a prize for the photo montage that comes closest to the spirit and design of my carpet. You must learn to cooperate without all this complaining about water, like everybody else.”

This was the first inkling that there was anybody else in the Magician’s power.

“Everybody would stop complaining,” Damon said, “if just once you would let them drink as much as they want.”

The Magician laughed. “All right. I’ll let everybody drink their fill from ten in the morning till noon. Then, by two o’clock, mark my words, they’ll be wailing for water again.” He untied Damon from his tree and laughed as Damon rushed to the edge of the lake and plunged his face into its cool depths.

At two o’clock, sharp, the Magician tied him again and he was thirstier than ever and from all around him he heard voices wailing, “Water, water.” Over the wailing he could hear the Magician’s laughter.

Suddenly, he did not know how, he could distinguish night from day. He was on a lower deck of the boat at night and during those hours they did not keep shining the lights in his eyes. His night nurse, whom he now recognized, was a fine-featured slender woman, tanned very dark by the sun, with a soft, delightful voice. One of the doctors, a youngish burly man with a bull neck, visited her often while she was on duty at Damon’s bedside. He made a joke about the woman’s suntan. “I’d like to be there,” he said, “the next time you go sunbathing,” and laughed coarsely. He made other lewd remarks to the woman.

Lewd remarks, Damon repeated to himself, with distaste. To such a fine and delicate creature. And he was heartbroken when one night, after the bull-necked doctor had slipped into the room to whisper into the nurse’s ear, she had leaned over Damon and said softly, “I’ll be gone for a few minutes.” He knew where she was going—to climb into some poor devil’s empty bed with the lewd doctor.

The next thing he knew, he was alone with the doctor in an open boat sailing across a lake toward an island. “I know why you’re taking me to the island,” Damon said.

“Why?” the doctor asked.

“You’re going to kill me there,” Damon said calmly.

Angrily, the doctor drew a shining metal object from his pocket and slashed Damon with it. The pain was intolerable, but it was over in a second. “I’m here to save your life,” the doctor said. “Don’t ever forget it.”

He was deep in the hold of the ship. His hands were tied to a wooden bar in front of him. He was kneeling in front of the bar and beside him was another man, whom he had never seen before, also tied and kneeling. Two nurses kept hurrying up and down an open stairway that led to another deck. He recognized the two nurses. They were Julia Larch and what must have been her daughter. Although there had to be a considerable difference in their ages, they looked exactly alike. They paid no attention to Damon’s groans and the groans of the other man as they pleaded for a sip of water. Finally, annoyed, Julia Larch came over. She gave no sign of recognition that the man in front of her was the father of her son. “You will get a drink at noon,” she said. “Now, keep quiet.”

The eternal clock was there. Now it was running normally. There was no detecting the movement of its hands on the large dial. It stood at twenty past nine.

With inhuman self-control he kept himself from looking at the clock until he judged that at least an hour had passed. It was twenty-five past nine. The man tied next to him was groaning louder and louder and whenever one or the other of the nurses who were Julia Larch and her daughter appeared on the stairway, he croaked, through puffed lips, “Water! Water!”

They paid no attention to him, but hurried up and down on their errands.

After a while the man’s groans became weaker and weaker, and he began rolling his head from side to side in a demented rhythm. Damon would have liked to do something for him if it was only to choke him and end his torment, but with his hands tied and his tongue swollen in his mouth, he could only make grunting sounds of commiseration. It was the longest period of time in Damon’s life, longer than the trip to Europe, longer than any voyage across the North Atlantic during the war. Finally, when he looked up at the clock, it was one minute to twelve. He looked across at the man next to him. There was a last soft groan, like a baby’s sigh, and the man’s head lolled forward. He was dead.

Damon heard the ship’s bells strike noon. Julia Larch appeared with a pitcher of water and two glasses. “Where’s the other one?” Julia demanded.

“He’s dead.” Damon watched greedily, licking his lips, as Julia poured one glass of water. He looked for the other man. The cloths which had bound him to the wooden bar were still there but the body was gone. “They collected him or he turned into powder and blew away,” Damon said stupidly, watching Julia put the full glass of water and the pitcher down so that she could untie his hands. His hands free, he took the glass and drained it, held it out to be refilled. With no expression on her face, Julia poured again and he drained it in one gulp once more. Satisfied for the moment, he said, reproachfully, to Julia, “If you’d come two minutes earlier, he’d’ve been alive.” Julia shrugged, the blank small face impassive. “Rules are rules,” she said.

From that moment on he could drink all he wanted to. Sheila kept bringing six small cans of cold pineapple juice to him at a time and he never seemed to be able to get enough of them and kept marveling at the glorious tropical flavor of the fruit as it went in an icy torrent down his throat. The Magician and his wizened assistant disappeared and the only doctor of the many who went in and out of the Intensive Care Unit whom Damon had any liking for, a small, owl-faced man with large horn-rimmed glasses, who had performed the tracheotomy, came into the room and told him that he was going to replace the tube in his throat the next day with one that would permit Damon to talk, if he learned the trick of breathing in as he put his finger over a hole in the tube and using the breath to say a few words. The man’s name was Dr. Levine, and he had promised Damon a long time ago he would eventually be able to talk normally. He was the only one of the doctors who had said a hopeful word to him, which was why Damon liked him.

As he had promised, Dr. Levine came in the next morning with the new tube. “First,” he said, “we’ll take this gadget out.” He took hold of the slender plastic tube that was attached to the bag of nutritive powder on a steel stand above Damon’s head that led down through his nose into his stomach. “Dr. Zinfandel says it’s about time you started to eat normally.”

Damon watched him fearfully. He was sure he would not be able to eat normally and would run the risk of starving to death. But Dr. Levine seemed confident and slid the tube out swiftly and let it dangle from the sack on the steel stand. Then he took up the new metal tube through which he would breathe and occasionally, according to the doctor, be able to make coherent sounds that might be interpreted as speech, to connect him with the rest of the human race. “This will hurt a little,” he said, “maybe a lot. But it’s over quickly and if I gave you an anesthetic, the needle would hurt more.” Then he reached in unceremoniously and deftly picked out the old, pus-encrusted tube and slid in the new one. The doctor had been right about its hurting, but he tried not to show it on his face because Sheila and Oliver were in the room, watching anxiously.

The new curved metal tube felt peculiar in his throat. “Now …” Dr. Levine put his finger over the hole in the tube, like a flute player, “take a deep breath and then try to talk.”

Damon took a deep breath. He realized he was frightened. Despite what the doctor had said, he was sure he could not speak. But he tried. To his surprise a sound came out. Then he said clearly, although his voice sounded metallic and strange in his ears, “Get me out of here.”

Oliver and Sheila laughed. Sheila’s laugh was hysterically high.

“Now try again,” Dr. Levine said.

Damon shook his head. He had said enough for one day.

Sheila was sitting in Dr. Zinfandel’s outer office. She had had her hair done and put on fresh clothing to replace the rumpled sweater and skirt that she had not bothered to change for days. She wanted to seem composed and firmly in control of herself for the conversation that she knew was to come. Zinfandel’s secretary said, “You can go in now.” Sheila stood, brushed the creases from her skirt, strode purposefully into the inner office, where Zinfandel was still bent over the chart on his desk of a patient who had just left the room. He looked harried and depleted. Sheila knew that he arrived at the hospital each morning at five and often was still there at eleven at night. He had mentioned a wife and two children, and Sheila pitied them, although she had never seen any signs of their existence and there were no family photographs on Zinfandel’s desk. “He is a maniac of healing,” Oliver had said, and Sheila agreed that the description fit the emaciated, loping man.