Boswell (19 page)

“That bandage has to stay on,” the new voice said.

“Not in a common grave,” I said.

“Get him out of here,” the second voice said suddenly.

I was very grateful. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate all you’ve done. I realize how it must be for you, but I have a name. I’m James Boswell.”

“We’ll put him in 508,” the new voice said.

Sure, of course, I thought, thirteen.

Hands were suddenly lifting me, scooping me out of the grave.

“He weighs a ton,” another voice said.

Ah, I thought sadly,
dead weight.

They shoved me onto some sort of slab and began to wheel me through the dark. It was very pleasant. Sure, I thought. I’m James Boswell. Fair is fair.

March 20, 1949. St. Louis.

“I must have given you people some trouble last night,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It was the morphine talking,” the nurse said. “You’re off it now, anyhow. You have too many anxieties to take morphine.”

“My pain is very bad,” I said.

“We’ll give you some codeine,” the nurse said. “Is there anything else you need?” she asked when she had finished bathing me.

I shook my head. “Nurse,” I said, “am I going to die?”

“Of what?”

“Well,” I said, “my beating.”

“No, of course not.”

“There’s no sclerotic damage?”

“Sclerotic damage?”

“Well, the bandages,” I said.

“Those are for your bruises.”

“What about a concussion?”

“The x-rays were perfectly clean. Look, Mr. Boswell, your doctor should be telling you all this.”

“Was there any damage to the kidneys? To the lungs?”

“Really,” she said, “you do have anxieties.”

“Was there?”

“I doubt if you’ve even been checked for any. You haven’t even any broken bones. You were just very badly beaten up.”

“I’m not in any danger, then?” I said.

“Only from the nurses,” she said pleasantly.

March 22, 1949. St. Louis.

“Where did you go to school, Doctor?” I asked after the nurse had left.

“The University of Chicago.”

“The University of Chicago, that’s one of the best in the country, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s certainly a top-flight school, yes.”

“This may seem too forward,” I said, “but if you don’t mind me saying so you strike me as being a very excellent doctor.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“I’ll bet you were at the very top of your class.”

“I was second in my graduating class,” he said.

“Second,” I said.

“A young woman was first. Dr. Angela Shauffert. She became a mission doctor in Africa and was killed during one of the tribal wars. It was a terrible waste.”

“Well, you’re the top now,” I said suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“I mean if she was first and she’s dead, that means you’re first now. I mean, there’s no
living
doctor who did better than you did in your graduating class.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true, though I don’t see what difference it makes,” the doctor said.

“You’re very modest, Doctor,” I said. Closing my chart, he shrugged and prepared to leave. The nurse came back with a mirror and held it in front of my face.

“How many stitches did you say I had?” I asked the doctor.

“Thirty-seven.”

“That must be the record,” I said.

“Hardly,” he said, “but it would almost make a good pair of pants.”

“Will there be scars?”

“No, I don’t think so. Most of them will heal very rapidly.”

“I look pretty bad,” I said.

“Did you know I saw the fight?” the nurse said to the doctor. “It was awful. I thought those things were fixed.”

“He damn near killed me,” I said. “When I collapsed in the dressing room I thought I was finished.”

“Well, you’ll be fighting again in no time,” the nurse said.

“In no time is right,” I said.

The nurse took the chart from the doctor and went out of the room. The doctor was about to follow her when I called out to him. “Oh, Doctor,” I said, “one other thing.”

“Really,” he said, turning around, “you’ll be fine.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not about that. Have you ever had anything in the
Medical Journal?”

“Well, I have, yes.” He laughed. “You seem so interested.”

“I am interested,” I said. “Could you bring me a copy?”

“Of the
Medical Journal?”

“Of your article in the
Medical Journal.
Now that my bandages are off and I can read again, I’d like to read something really worthwhile.”

“But it’s technical. Anyway, it has nothing to do with anything you’ve got, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“No, of course not,” I said. “Please, Doctor.”

He brought his article when he came to see me today. It was about how blood pressure can affect the secretion of certain glands. As he had warned, it was very technical and I had to read it through three times before I could begin to understand it. But even on first reading I realized that the doctor was right, and I started to feel very good about him, and very proud of the both of us. When I put the article down I leaned back contentedly. That man has dressed
my
wounds, I thought, taken
my .
blood pressure.

Really, it is remarkable how I continue to respect the very people I take advantage of.

March 25, 1949. St Louis.

For three days now I have used my ambulatory status to explore the hospital.

I have met Mrs. Slabe. She is very important to the functioning of this place, yet she heals no one. She is, in a way, its bookkeeper. She defines its larger ends, giving it form, compass, reality. Without Mrs. Slabe the concept of “hospital” would be too abstract. In spite of her importance, however, Mrs. Slabe remains obscure; practically none of the staff know of either her existence or her work. I discovered her by accident.

In a hospital I like to visit the sick, to go into the kitchens in the basement, to see its operating theaters, its therapy rooms, even its furnaces and auxiliary power plant. I like to walk against the inclination of its concrete ramps, to sit in its emergency wards at night and watch the dependable foregathering, like some sullen reunion of a clan, of the losers of fights, the suddenly attacked, the poor, the dying. I like to step into the waiting rooms where the well keep bored vigil turning the pages of back-issue magazines and yesterday’s newspapers, to stop in its corridors where people with a higher stake sit leaning forward on card chairs beyond partially closed doors, listening critically to the noises of their wounded like students in the gallery of a concert hall following a score.

I had gone into its laundry with its white, soft dunes of sheets and learned the lesson there. There were sheets crusted with blood, with brown and yellowish stains, with the bright, obscene paints of the malfunctioning body. There were sheets which to the naked eye appeared white, but the machines were indifferent to these distinctions and ground democratically away at everything submitted to them, assuming filth like some first premise.

I had been on every floor, along every corridor, and yesterday came to the hospital’s morgue. I might have missed it, for it is a room behind a locked, unmarked door, but as I came up two orderlies were wheeling in a dead, pale child. I followed them in.

“Hey,” one of the orderlies said when he saw me, “you ain’t supposed to be in here.”

“I knew the boy,” I said.

“That don’t make no difference,” the orderly said. “This ain’t anything for a patient to see.” He held the door open for me and I had to leave. As I was walking out he turned back to the other orderly. “That guy made me forget to pull the ticket for Mrs. Slabe.”

I went to the personnel office. “Where does Mrs. Slabe work, please?” I asked the girl. She looked it up in her file and read the card to herself. She seemed puzzled.

“Did you want to see Mrs. Slabe for any special reason?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said fiercely, “a special reason.”

Mrs. Slabe worked on the top floor of the hospital’s oldest wing in a small office that must once have been a private room. It was exactly like the room I was in three floors below. Mrs. Slabe, a plump, small woman of about fifty-five, worked at a wooden desk in which were the conventional “out” and “in” baskets, like double bunks in a child’s room. There was an adding machine, and one of those long, thin spikes rising from a broad metal base that you see on the cashier’s counter in restaurants where truck drivers stop.

Mrs. Slabe was holding a green slip and copying information from it into a ledger when I walked in. When she had finished she impaled the slip on the spike as if it were a restaurant check.

“Mrs. Slabe,” I said briskly.

She seemed startled to see a patient. “What is it?” she asked a little nervously.

“Did the orderly bring you the slip on that little boy?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“Let me see it, please.”

She reached into the out basket

“Your little joke, Mrs. Slabe?”

“Yes,” she said guiltily.

I looked at the slip. “Then this hasn’t been entered yet,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I was just going to do it.”

“Let me see your ledger, please.”

She pushed the book toward me. As I had suspected, it was a record of all the births and deaths that had occurred in the hospital. The deaths, entered in Mrs. Slabe’s neat little hand, were written in red ink, the births in black. Debits and credits. There were three columns— name, date, fate.

“May I see a total?” I said.

“From the beginning or just this year?”

“Both, of course,” I said.

Mrs. Slabe suddenly recovered herself. “This is restricted information,” she said.

“I’m Dr. Boswell,” I said.

“About the boy,” she said, “has there been a mistake?”

“No, no,” I said, “he’s dead, all right.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Slabe said.

“Those totals please, Mrs. Slabe,” I said sternly.

She looked into her book, punched some figures on the adding machine and then handed me the slip. I glanced at it and gave it back to her. “Interpretation, please,” I said.

“From the beginning through the present, seventy- eight thousand five hundred fifty-three births, eighty-one thousand two hundred sixteen deaths. For 1949 to date, two hundred twenty-seven births, one hundred eighty-four deaths.”

“Does that include the little boy?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Slabe said, “I forgot.”

“Then that should be one hundred eighty-five deaths, is that right?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Hmn,” I said. “Hmn. It’s not good, is it, Mrs. Slabe?”

“Oh, I don’t know Doctor. I’ve been here many years doing this work, and you’d be surprised how each year the ratio of births to deaths goes up. It’s the new drugs, of course, the new surgical techniques. That’s what does it.”

“There’s something in that, Mrs. Slabe, something in that. Still, Mrs. Slabe,” I said, “the books eventually balance, don’t they?”

“What’s that?”

“I say the books eventually balance. For every birth there’s a subsequent death. The books balance. They always have.”

“Why, you know,” she said, “I never thought of that.”

“Well, it’s a technical thing, Mrs. Slabe,” I said,

March 27, 1949. St. Louis.

My bruises heal. Scabs thicken over the cuts. I moult. Everything itches. I do not read. It is more interesting to contemplate the slowly freshening color of my skin—like watching a dawn that comes only in its own time. It is disgusting to know that there is nothing I can do to hasten the process. I croon like Orpheus over my damaged flesh, but nothing happens.

Being in the hospital has been a strange experience. Everything about the life here is horrible, yet it is uniquely fascinating. I have never been so interested. Just as the sea is said to stimulate others, to stir metaphysical speculations in even the sleepiest of minds, so the hospital and the notion of disease affect me.

I find that I am afraid to die.

The fear of death in a young man is usually no stronger than the fear that his house may some day catch fire and burn down—it is a possibility, but hardly likely. It’s fate, chance—the sort of catastrophe that happens sometimes to others. I know better. The analogy is weak. Many houses escape unscathed, but no man does. It is not something that will happen tomorrow—though it could—or in a year, or even in twenty or thirty years. But it must come. When I think that a third of my life, perhaps a half, is already gone, I think, but it was so short, it was nothing. Already, young as I am, the days seem shorter than they once did, and I wonder what the rest will be like. I do not even bother yet about the quality; I speak only of the quantity, Perhaps fear, though, is an inexact term here. I am not so much afraid to die, I think, as
sad
to die.

The deaths of others are no less terrible. On my floor there are many very sick men, men who need oxygen tents in order to breathe, or who are fed through tubes, or who pass their water through catheters—who do now under difficulty, and only with the aid of machines, what once they did with no effort and no thought. These machines are oppressive; I cannot look at them without feeling sick. And yet, how much better to take nourishment through a rubber tube, to live in an oxygen tent as in a dog’s house, to pass waste through grotesque piping, than not to function at all? I see now what is bad about death. Its most terrible aspect is that it is cumulative— nails that do not grow, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, flesh that does not feel, brain that cannot think, blood that will not flow. It is like being strangled. I think of a small boy’s panic when a companion ducks his head under the water and holds it there. Of course death makes one insensible, but surely there must be, at the moment of death itself, just this sense of impotence—only greater, much greater, and more terrible. One cannot will the simplest thing, to bend a finger, roll the eyes. There is something horrible in such nullification, to have no more significance than a grain of sand; once having mattered, to count for nothing through eternity.