Rabbit at rest (39 page)

"He was just trying to be hospitable. It's a great trial to him,
Harry, that you're so unsympathetic."

"Unsympathetic! What's to be sympathetic with? He cheats, he
snivels, he snorts or whatever, he's a lush besides, over at the
lot he hires these gangsters and guys with AIDS -"

"Really, you should hear yourself. I wish I had a tape
recorder."

"So do I. Tape me; I'm talking truth. So what's he going to do
about the dope?" Even at this hour, going on four, a few men in
sneakers and jeans are awake in the park, conferring behind trees,
waiting on benches. "Did he promise to give it up?"

"He promised to see a counsellor," Janice says. "He admits he
might have a problem. I think that's a good night's work. Pru has
all sorts of names and agencies from these Narc-Anon meetings
she's been going to."

"Names, agencies, we can't expect society to run our lives for
us, to baby us from cradle to grave. That's what the Communists try
to do. There comes a point when you got to take responsibility." He
fingers his pants pocket to make sure the little hard cylindrical
bottle is there. He won't take a pill now, but save it for when
they get home. With a small glass of milk in the kitchen. And a
Nutter-Butter cookie to dip into the milk. Shaped like a big
peanut, a Nutter-Butter is delicious dipped into milk, first
up to the peanut waist, and then the rest for a second bite.

Janice says, "I wish my parents were still alive to hear you
talk about responsibility. My mother thought you were the most
irresponsible person she ever met."

This hurts, slightly. He had liked Ma Springer toward the end,
and thought she liked him. Hot nights out on the screened porch,
pinochle games up in the Poconos. They both found Janice a bit
slow.

Out of the park, he heads the slate-gray Celica down
Weiser, through the heart of Brewer. The Sunflower Beer Clock says
3:50, above the great deserted city heart. Something cleansing
about being awake at this forsaken hour. It's a new world. A
living, crouching shadow - a cat, or can it be a raccoon?
- stares with eyes like circular reflectors in his
headlights, sitting on the cement stairs of a dry fountain there on
the edge of the little woods the city planners have created. At the
intersection of Weiser and Sixth, Rabbit has to turn right. In the
old days you could drive straight to the bridge. The wild kids in
high school liked to drive down the trolley tracks, between the
islands where passengers would board.

As his silence lengthens, Janice says placatingly, "Weren't
those children dear? Harry, you don't want them to live in one of
those sad one-parent households."

Rabbit has always been squeamish about things being put into him
- dental drills, tongue depressors, little long knives to
clean out earwax, suppositories, the doctor's finger when once a
year he sizes up your prostate gland. So the idea of a catheter
being inserted at the top of his right leg, and being pushed along
steered with a little flexible tip like some eyeless worm you find
wriggling out of an apple where you just bit, is deeply repugnant
to him, though not as much so as being frozen half to death and
sawed open and your blood run through some complicated machine
while they sew a slippery warm piece of your leg vein to the
surface of your trembling poor cowering heart.

In the hospital in Deleon they gave him some articles to try to
read and even showed him a little video: the heart sits in a
protective sac, the pericardium, which has to be cut open,
snipped
the video said cheerfully like it was giving a
sewing lesson. It showed it happening: cold narrow scalpels attack
the shapeless bloody blob as it lies there in your chest like a
live thing in a hot puddle, a cauldron of tangled juicy stew,
convulsing, shuddering with a periodic sob, trying to dodge the
knives, undressed of the sanitary pod God or whoever never meant
human hands to touch. Then when the blood has been detoured to the
gleaming pumping machine just like those in those horrible old
Frankenstein movies with Boris Karloff the heart stops beating. You
see it happen: your heart lies there dead in its soupy puddle. You,
the natural you, are technically dead. A machine is living for you
while the surgeons' hands in their condomlike latex gloves fiddle
and slice and knit away. Harry has trouble believing how his life
is tied to all this mechanics - that the
me
that
talks inside him all the time scuttles like a waterstriding bug
above this pond of body fluids and their slippery conduits. How
could the flame of him ever have ignited out of such wet straw?

The angioplasty seemed far less deep a violation than the
coronary bypass. It was scheduled for a Friday. Youngish-old
Dr. Breit, with his painfully fair skin and his
plastic-rimmed glasses too big for his button nose, explained
the operation - the procedure, he preferred to call it
- in the lulling voice of a nightclub singer who has done the
same lyrics so often her mind is free to wander as she sings. The
cardiologist's real preference was the bypass, Harry could tell.
The angioplasty to Breit was just a sop, kid stuff, until the
knives could descend. "The rate of restenosis is thirty per cent in
three months' time," he warned Harry, there in his office with the
framed color photos of a little pale woman who resembled him as one
hamster resembles another and of little children arranged in front
of their parents like a small stepladder, all with curly fair hair
and squints and those tiny pink noses, "and twenty per cent of PTCA
patients wind up having a CABG eventually anyway. Sorry
-that's percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty versus
coronary artery bypass graft."

"I guessed," Harry said. "Still, let's do the balloon first, and
save the knives for later." A lot later, he thinks to himself.

"Fair enough," said Dr. Breit, semi-singingly, his tone
clipped and grim and even-tempered and resigned. Like a
golfer: you lose this match but you'll play again next week. "You
think the way ninety per cent of all heart patients do. They love
the idea of the PTCA, and no heart specialist can talk them out of
it. It's irrational, but so's the human species. Tell you what,
Harold." No one had told him Harry was never called Harold, though
that was his legal name. Rabbit let it go; it made him feel a child
again. His mother used to call him Hassy. "We'll give you a treat.
You can watch the whole procedure on TV. You'll be under local
anesthetic, it'll help you pass the time."

"Do I have to?"

Dr. Breit seemed momentarily bothered. For so fair a man, he
sweated a great deal, his upper lip always dewy. "We screen off the
monitor usually, for the patients we think are too excitable or
frail. There's always a slight chance of a coronary occlusion and
that wouldn't be too good, to be watching it happen. But you,
you're not frail. You're no nervous nelly. I've sized you up as a
pretty tough-minded guy, Harold, with a fair amount of
intellectual curiosity. Was I wrong?"

It was like a ten-dollar press, when you're already thirty
dollars down. You can't refuse. "No," he told the young doctor.
"That's me all right."

Dr. Breit actually does not perform the procedure: it needs a
specialist, a burly menacing man with thick brown forearms, Dr.
Raymond. But Breit is there, his face peeping like a moon -
big specs glinting, upper lip dewy with nervous perspiration
- over the mountainous lime-green shoulders of Dr.
Raymond and the surgical caps of the nurses. The operation takes
two attending nurses; this is no little "procedure"; Harry's been
sandbagged. And it takes two rooms of the hospital, the room where
it happens and a monitoring room with several TV screens that
translate him into jerking bright lines, vital signs: the Rabbit
Angstrom Show, with a fluctuating audience as the circulating nurse
and Dr. Breit and some others never named to him, lime-green
extras, come and watch a while and leave again. There is even, he
has been casually told, a surgical team standing by just in case he
needs immediate bypass surgery.

Another double-cross: they shave him, down beside his
privates, without warning, where the catheter will go in. They give
him a pill to make him light in the head and then when he's
helpless on the operating table under all these lights they scrape
away at the right half of his groin area and pubic bush; he's never
had much body hair and wonders if at his age it will ever grow
back. The needle that comes next feels bigger and meaner than the
Novocain needle the dentist uses; its "pinch" - Dr. Raymond
murmurs, "Now you'll feel a pinch" - doesn't let go as
quickly. But then there's no pain, just an agony of mounting
urinary pressure as the dyes build up in his system, injected
repeatedly with a hot surge like his chest is being cooked in a
microwave. Jesus. He closes his eyes a few times to pray but it
feels like a wrong occasion, there is too much crowding in, of the
actual material world. No old wispy Biblical God would dare
interfere. The one religious consolation he clings to through his
three-and-a-half-hour ordeal is a belief
that Dr. Raymond, with his desert tan and long melancholy nose and
bearish pack of fat across his shoulders, is Jewish: Harry has this
gentile prejudice that Jews do everything a little better than
other people, something about all those generations crouched over
the Torah and watch-repair tables, they aren't as distracted
as other persuasions, they don't expect to have as much fun. They
stay off booze and dope and have a weakness only (if that history
of Hollywood he once read can be trusted) for broads.

The doctors and their satellites murmurously crouch over Harry's
sheeted, strategically exposed body, under a sharp light, in a room
whose tiles are the color of Russian salad dressing, on the fourth
floor of St. Joseph's Hospital, where decades ago his two children
were born - Nelson, who lived, and Rebecca, who died. In
those years nuns ran the place, with their black and white and
cupcake frills around their pasty faces, but now nuns have blended
into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody
wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more
nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their
fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this
life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just
Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you
can while you can.

Turning his head to the left, Rabbit can see, over the shoulders
that crowd around his body like green cotton tummocks, the shadow
of his heart on an X-ray monitor screen, a twitching palegray
ghost dimly webbed by its chambered structure and darkened in snaky
streaks and bulbous oblongs by injections of the opacifying dye.
The thin wire tip of the catheter, inquisitive in obedience to Dr.
Raymond's finger on the trigger, noses forward and then slowly
eels, in little cautious jerking stabs, diagonally down into a
milky speckled passageway, a river or tentacle within him, organic
and tentative in shape where the catheter is black and positive,
hard-edged as a gun. Harry watches to see if his heart will
gag and try to disgorge the intruder. Like a finger down his
throat, he thinks, feeling a wave of nausea and yet a test pilot's
detachment from this picture on the screen, blanched and hard to
read like a. section of aerial map, and these conferring voices
around him. "We're home," Dr. Breit murmurs, as if not to awaken
something. "That's your LAD, your left anterior descending. The
widow-maker, they call it. By far the most common site
oflesions. See how stenotic those walls are? How thickened with
plaque? Those little agglutinated specks - that's plaque. I'd
say your luminal narrowing is close to eighty-five per
cent."

"Rice Krispies," Harry tries to say, but his mouth is too dry,
his voice cracks. All he wanted was to acknowledge that yes, he
sees it all, he sees his tangled shadowy self laid out like a
diagram, he sees the offending plaque, like X-rayed Rice
Krispies. He nods a little, feeling even more gingerly than when
getting a haircut or having his prostate explored. Too vigorous a
nod, and his heart might start to gag. He wonders, is this what
having a baby is like, having Dr. Raymond inside you? How do women
stand it, for nine months? Not to mention being screwed in the
first place? Can they really like it? Or queers being buggered?
It's something you never see really discussed, even on Oprah.

"Now comes the tricky part," Dr. Breit breathes, like a golf
commentator into the mike as a crucial putt is addressed. Harry
feels and then sees on the monitor his heart beat faster, twist as
if to escape, twist in that convulsive spiral motion Dr. Olman in
Florida demonstrated with his fist; the shadowy fist is angry,
again and again, seventy times a minute; the anger is his life, his
soul, mind over matter, electricity over muscle. The mechanically
precise dark ghost of the catheter is the worm of death within him.
Godless technology is fucking the pulsing wet tubes we inherited
from the squid, the boneless sea-cunts. He feels again that
feathery touch of nausea. Can he possibly throw up? It would jar
and jam the works, disrupt the concentrating green tummocks he is
buried beneath. He mustn't. He must be still.

He sees, on the monitor, behind the inquisitive tip, a segment
of the worm thicken and swell, pressing the pallid Rice Krispies
together against the outlines of the filmy crimped river descending
down his heart, and stay inflated, pressing, filling; it has been
explained to him that if the LAD has not developed any collateral
arteries the blood flow will cease and another heart attack begin,
right on camera. You are
there.

"Thirty seconds," Dr. Breit breathes, and Dr. Raymond deflates
the balloon. "Looking good, Ray." Harry feels no pain beyond the
knifelike sweet pressure in his bladder and a soreness in the far
back of his throat as if from swallowing all that saltwater out on
the Gulf. "Once more, Harold, and we'll call it a day."