The Anatomy Lesson (3 page)

She devised a chart to trace the progress of the treatment on his outlook. At the end of seven days it looked like this:

On the eighth afternoon, when she arrived with her d
ra
wing pad at room 611, Zuckerman was gone; she found him at home, on the playmat. half drunk.
“
Too much inlook for the outlook,
”
he told her.
“
That all-encompassing. Too isolating. Broke down.
”

“
Oh,
”
she said lightly,
“
I don
’
t think this constitutes much of a breakdown.
I
couldn
’
t have tasted an hour.
”

“
Life smaller and smaller and smaller. Wake up thinking about my neck. Go to sleep thinking about my neck. Only thought, which doctors to turn to when this doesn
’
t help the neck. There to get well and knew I was getting worse. Hans Castorp better at all this than I am. Jennifer. Nothing in that bed but me. Nothing but a neck thinking neck-thoughts. No Settembrini, no Naphta, no snow. No glamorous intellectual voyage. Trying to find my way out and I only work my way further in. Defeated. Ashamed.
”
He was also angry enough to scream.

“
No, the problem was me.
”
She poured him another drink.
“
I wish I were more of an entertainer. I only wish I weren
’
t this lough lump. Well, forget it. We tried—it didn
’
t work.
”

He sat at the kitchen table rubbing his neck and finishing the vodka while she made her bacony lamb stew. He didn
’
t want her out of his sight. Levelheaded Jenny, let
’
s make the underside of domesticity the whole thi
ng—live with me and be my sweet
tough lump. He was about ready to ask her to move in.
“
I said to myself in bed,
‘
Come what may, when I get out of here I throw myself back into work. H
”
it hurts it hurts and the hell with it. Muster all your understanding and just overcome it.
”‘

“
And?
”

‘
Too elementary for understanding. Understanding doesn
’
t touch it. Worrying about it, wondering about it, fighting it, treating it, trying to ignore it, trying to figure out what it is
—
it makes my ordinary inwardness look like New Year
’
s Eve in Times Square. When you
’
re in pain all you think-about is not being in pain. Back and back and back to the one obsession. I should never have asked you to come down. I should have done it alone. But even this way I was too weak. You, a witness to this.
”

“
Witness to what? Come on, for
my
outlook it was just fine. You don
’
t know how I
’
ve loved running around here wearing a skirt. I
’
ve been taking care of myself a long time now in my earnest, blustery way. Well, for you I can be softer, gentler, calmer—you
’
ve provided a chance for me to provide in a womanly way. No need for anybody to feel bad about that. It
’
s guilt-free time, Nathan, for both of us. I
’
ll be of use to you, you be of use to me, and let
’
s neither of us worry about the consequences. Let my grandmother do that.
”

Choose Jenny? Tempting if she
’
d have it. Her spunk, her health, her independence, the Van Gogh quotations, the unwavering will—how all that quieted the invalid frenzy. But what would happen when he was well? Choose Jenny because of the ways in which she approximates Mrs. Zuckermans I, II, and III? The best reason not to choose her. Choose like a patient in need of a nurse? A wife as a Band-Aid? In a fix like this, the only choice is not to choose. Wait it out, as is.

It was the severe depression brought on by the eight days imprisoned in traction—and by the thought of waiting it out as is—that sent him running to the psychoanalyst. But they didn
’
t get on at all. He spoke of the appeal of illness, the returns on sickness, he told Zuckerman about the psychic payoff for the patient. Zuckerman allowed that there might well be profits to be reckoned in similarly enigmatic cases, but as for himself, he hated being sick: there was no payoff that could possibly compensate for his disabling physical pain. The
“
secondary gains
”
the analyst identified couldn
’
t begin to make up for the primary loss. But perhaps, the analys
t suggested, the Zuckerman who
was getting paid off wasn
’
t the self he perceived as himself but the ineradicable infant, the atoning penitent, the guilty pariah
—
perhaps it was the remorseful son of the dead parents, the author of
Carnovsky.

It had taken three weeks for the doctor to say this out loud. It might be months before he broke the news of the hysterical conversion symptom.

“
Expiation through suffering?
”
Zuckerman
said.
“
The pain being my judgment on myself and that book?
”

“
Is it?
”
the analyst asked.

“
No,
”
Zuckerman replied, and three weeks after it had begun, he terminated the therapy by walking out.

One doctor prescribed a regimen of twelve aspirin per day, another prescribed Butazolidi
n, another Robaxin, another Per
codan. another Valium, another Prednisone; another told him to throw all the pills down the toilet, the poisonous Prednisone first, and
“
learn to live with it.
”
Untreatable pain of unknown origins is one of the vicissitudes of life—however much it impaired physical movement, it was still Wholly compatible with a perfect state of health. Zuckerman was simply a well man who suffered pain.
“
And I make it a habit.
”
continued the no-nonsense doctor,
“
never to treat anybody who isn
’
t ill. Furthermore.
”
he advised.
“
after you leave here, steer clear of the psychosomologists. You don
’
t need any more of that.
”
“
What
’
s a psychosomologist?
”
“
A baffled little physician. The Freudian personalization of every ache and pain is the crudest weapon to have been bequeathed to these guys since the leech pot. If pain were only the expression of something else, it would all be hunky-dory. But unhappily life isn
’
t organized as logically as that. Pain is in addition to everything else. There arc hysterics, of course, who can mime any disease, but
t
hey constitute a far more exotic species of chameleon than the psychosomologists lead all you gullible sufferers to believe. You are no such reptile. Case dismissed.
”

I
t was only days after the psychoanalyst had accused him, for the first time, of giving up the fight that Diana, his part-time secretary, took Zuckerman—who was able still to drive in forward gear but could no longer tum his head to back up—took him out in a rent-a-car to the Long Island laboratory where an electronic pain suppressor had just been invented. He
’
d read an item in the business section of the Sunday
Times
announcing the laboratory
’
s acquisition of a patent on the device, and the next morning at nine phoned to arrange an appointment. The director and the chief engineer were in
the parking lot to welcome him
when he and Diana arrived; they
were thrilled that Nathan Zuck
erman should be their first
“
pain patient
”
and snapped a Polaroid picture of him at the front entrance. The chief engineer explained that he had developed the idea to relieve the director
’
s wife of sinus headaches. They were very much in the experimental stages, still discovering refinements of technique by which to alleviate the most recalcitrant forms of chronic pain. He got Zuckerman out of his shirt and showed him how to use the machine. After the demonstration session, Zuckerman felt neither belter nor worse, but the director assured
him
that his wife was a new woman and insisted that Zuckerman take a pain suppressor home on approval and keep it for as long as he liked.

Isherwood is a camera with his shutter open, I am the experiment in chronic pain.

The machine was about the size of an alarm clock. He set the timer, put two moistened electrode pads above and below the site of the pain, and six times a day gave himself a low-voltage shock for five minutes. And six times a day he waited for the pain to go away—actually he waited for it to go away a hundred times a day. Having waited long enough, he then took Valium or aspirin or Butazolidin or Percodan or Robaxin; at five in the evening he said the hell with it and began taking the vodka. And as tens of millions of Russians have known for hundreds of years, that is the best pain suppressor of ail.

By December 1973, he
’
d run out of hope of finding a treatment, drug, doctor, or cure—certainly of finding an honest disease. He was living with it, but not because he
’
d learned to. What he
’
d learned was that something decisive had happened to him, and whatever the unfathomable reason, he and his existence weren
’
t remotely what they
’
d been between 1933 and 1971. He knew about solitary confinement from writing alone in a room virtually every day since his early twenties; he
’
d served nearly twenty years of that sentence, obediently and on his best behavior. But this was confinement without the writing and he was taking it only a little better than the eight days harnessed to room 611. Indeed, he had never left off upbraiding himself with the question that had followed him from the hospital after his escape: What if what was happening to you were really terrible?

Yet, even if this didn
’
t register terrible on the scale of global misery, it felt terrible to him. He felt pointless, worthless, meaningless, stunned that it should
seem
so terrible and undo him so completely, bewildered by defeat on a front where he hadn
’
t even known himself to be at war.
He had shaken free at an early
age from the sentimental claims of a conventional, protective, worshipful family, he had surmounted a great university
’
s beguiling purity, he had torn loose from the puzzle of passionless marriages to three exemplary women and from the moral propriety of his own early books; he had worked hard for his place as a writer—eager for recognition in his striving twenties, desperate for serenity in his celebrated thirties—only at forty to be vanquished by a causeless, nameless, unbeatable phantom disease. It wasn
’
t leukemia or lupus or diabetes, it wasn
’
t multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy or even rheumatoid arthritis
—
it was nothing. Yet to nothing he was losing his confidence, his sanity, and his self-respect.