The Bradbury Report (4 page)

“What?” I said.

“There is something I want to talk to you about.”

“What is it?”

“I want to come see you.”

“What is this about?”

“I won't tell you now. We'll talk when I arrive.”

“This sounds serious, grave.”

“It is,” she said. “Both. It is important we talk.”

“All right,” I said. “When do you want to come?”

“Soon. If it's convenient for you, I'd like to come the first week in August.”

“That's next week.”

“Will that work for you?”

“Come anytime. I couldn't be more free.”

“If it's possible, I'd like to stay with you.”

“Yes. Good. I've got too much room. Tell me when you're getting in, I'll pick you up.”

“I'll be driving,” she said.

“From Iowa?”

“Yes. Listen. Ray.” There was nothing calculated about the way she spoke my name, but the effect was uncanny. “Don't tell anyone I'm coming.”

“I have no one to tell,” I said.

I
see how one generates suspense. I am not a novelist. I am not interested in the tricks of that trade. One of my teachers at the university remarked that my prose read like a poor translation from the Czech. More than one person has suggested to me the similarities between written language—it was usually poetry they were thinking of—and the language of mathematics. I was a high school math teacher, not a mathematician, but I think this is wrong, wishful thinking on both sides. The ends—expression on the one hand, theoretic manipulation on the other—are radically different, not comparable. I have found I am deaf, and blind, to nuance. I have been told this more than once. It is an incapacity that has made my life bearable

The six days between Anna's call and her arrival in New Hampshire, I was in suspense. I didn't like it. I found it an unpleasant, frustrating state. Why had she called me, just then, after all those years of silence? What did she want to talk to me about? What did she want of me? What would happen next? Had I had anything else to do, after I'd readied the house—I had not had a houseguest in decades—I might have been able, intermittently, to put her visit from my mind. As it was, I spent most of my waking hours those six days speculating, brooding. I let my mind run, unfettered by logic or probability. I wondered if she had waited a respectable time after
her husband's death, then called to see if we might, in our later years, try again. What if she were still angry, still feeling the injury I'd done her, and was on her way, now that she had nothing to lose—in this laughable line of conjecture, I omitted thinking about her children and grandchildren, about the value of her life to her beyond her marriage—to have, at long last, her say, to take some long-meditated form of revenge? Was she coming to ask for money? Reparations? Was she dying—this notion, I admit, came as a relief—making the rounds, saying good-bye in person to all those who'd played a part in her life?

I put fresh linens on the guest room bed. I emptied several drawers in the chiffonier and cleared my winter coats, hats, and scarves out of the guest room closet, leaving a dozen empty hangers for Anna's use. Without her deftness, without taking her delight—I took no delight—I did roughly what I remembered seeing Sara do in preparation for visits from her family. (Sara's father, who would not forgive her for marrying me, was never a visitor. This was all right with me, and Sara.) I bought some cut flowers, lilies, irises, alstroemeria, arranged them clumsily in a ceramic vase, and placed them on the night table, along with a fresh box of facial tissue. I sanitized the guest bathroom, stocking it with newly laundered towels—bath sheets, hand towels, and facecloths—an unused bar of soap, and an unopened bottle of shampoo. I disposed of the few incidental and inedible items in the refrigerator and wiped down the shelves. I went to the grocery store and laid in some staples—orange juice, milk, cheese, English muffins, eggs, beer, crackers, bread. I had plenty of coffee on hand. I bought two bottles of wine, one red, one white, and a corkscrew. I mopped the kitchen floor with a lemon-scented detergent I found under the sink, and cleaned the counters with bleach. I went around the house putting away extraneous things, though, on my own, I'd acquired very little. I put off to the last the vacuuming and dusting. The lawn did not need mowing. We'd had almost no rain that summer and were under the most stringent rules for rationing water. I was not a gardener. There were no flowers to tend. Nothing remained of the elaborate perennial beds Sara had designed and planted when we moved here
some forty years ago. Over the years I'd lost a number of trees—two birches, a chestnut, a red maple, and an ancient shade oak in the front yard—to weather and insects and disease. One unlikely bit of Sara's brief tenure survived: an ornamental white-star magnolia she planted just outside the kitchen window. Suddenly, each spring—I never notice the buds—for a day or two only, until a rain or stiff breeze despoils it, this tree, or bush—I don't know which it is—is incandescent, profuse in delicate white blossoms.

I found all the effort a nuisance. I was not looking forward to Anna's visit. I was lonely, unrelievedly lonely, and I had been for thirty-five years, but I did not long for company. I never sought it. Not even in a pet. Anna had given me no sense of how long she planned to stay. I had no idea what we might have to say to one another once the main subject, whatever it was, had been discussed. The prospect of living in the same house with another person, for however short a time, was to me repellant. As was the thought of a protracted bout of reminiscing, of trolling a past—my memory of Sara would, I believed, under any pressure remain inviolate—in which I would figure as more or less a villain. I was closed to all but the narrowest range of feeling and experience, and I had not the slightest wish to open up.

At noon the next Saturday, almost exactly one week to the hour of her initial call, Anna called me from a rest stop on the New York Thruway, west of Syracuse. She had been driving all night. She would nap in her truck, she said, for an hour, then come on. When did I think she'd get there? I guessed she was five or six hours away. She would see me, then, around seven. I told her whenever she arrived, I'd be happy to see her. At three that afternoon—Anna would have been in Albany or western Massachusetts—I had my first heart attack.

I was vacuuming the study. “Study” is grandiose. The room, which is towards the rear of the house and looks out, past my nondescript yard, on the back side of a teetering, aboriginal barn owned by a neighbor to whom I've never spoken, is without decoration. It is a room we meant to get to, Sara and I, but didn't. That I've left
it as it was is due neither to reverence nor fetish. There is a small kneehole desk, a wooden ladderback chair, a desk lamp, a computer, and a freestanding bookcase, with room in it, still, for books. (When Sara died, I got rid of all my books and, for the most part, stopped reading.) On the floor is an oval hooked rug. There are two windows with pull-down shades. Except for a calendar, which I update each year, the walls are bare. No studying, no real work of any sort has ever been done there. When I had exams or problem sets to grade, classes to prepare—over time, there was less and less need for preparation—I set up at the kitchen table. Except to use the computer, I avoid going in.

I bent over to pull the vacuum plug out of the wall socket, and I felt light-headed. This often happened to me when I bent over or stood up too quickly. This time, the dizziness persisted. I sat down in the desk chair. I spread my left hand flat against the desk. I felt a pull, a tightening in my chest. I rested my elbows on my knees, let my head droop. I spent several minutes looking at the floor. There was no pain. The dizziness did not subside, and my chest felt heavy. It did not, then, strike me I might be seriously ill. I began to feel nauseous. Then a numbness in the two outside fingers of my left hand. My chest felt heavier. The numbness spread to the rest of my hand and up my arm. My breathing became constricted. These were common, textbook signs I failed to interpret. I stood up. I thought I'd go to the kitchen for a glass of water, that I would feel better if I could drink some water. I sagged to the floor. During none of this was I afraid. I began to wonder, in a detached way, if I might be dying. It seemed I was not afraid to die. From my knees, I reached up to the computer and struck the shortcut for emergency services. Within seconds I heard the voice of the dispatcher.

“How can I help?” the voice said. “Are you in trouble?”

Although it felt as if it were coming from a long way off, in space and time, it was a human voice, kind, dispassionate, of indeterminable gender.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I am.”

“What is the trouble?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I think I may be dying.”

“Are you in pain?”

I did not find this question bothersome. I found it interesting.

“No.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“No.” Then, with a clarity and concision that struck me even then as odd, I enumerated my symptoms. “I'm dizzy. My chest is heavy. I'm nauseous. I can't feel my arm. I'm having trouble breathing. I can't stand up.”

“You're having a heart attack,” the voice said without hesitation.

“I am?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“In the study. I'm on the floor.”

“Stay there,” the voice said. “Help is on the way.”

What a wonderful phrase, I thought. What a wonderful system. If I'd died then, thinking this, I would have died happy.

I lay on the floor. I was calm. I began to feel as if I—I mean, precisely,
not
the room or any part of the world outside myself—were getting smaller. As if I were pulling in, compacting. There was no element of siege in this. It was a peaceful, pleasing diminishment. Such that I felt some irritation when the EMTs arrived and set to work on me. I can't tell you how long it took them to get there. It might have been minutes, or hours. I flickered in and out of consciousness. No pain. No fear, nor, more surprisingly, regret. An agreeable, seductive state. I suspect they came quickly. They'd have had no trouble getting in the house; the front door is unlocked when I am home. I have a fragmented sense of what happened next. There were two of them, young men, in uniform. Competent, efficient, reasonably gentle. One of them smelled of beets. I know they hooked me up, there in the study, to what would have been a diagnostic machine. There was a small mechanical noise. I heard one of the men say, “This guy's in arrest.” Then I was in an ambulance, attached to an IV drip. At one point I must have looked up. “You're having a heart attack,” one of
the young men said. I was lifted out of the ambulance and wheeled into the hospital—Dartmouth-Hitchcock—to the Imaging Center, where I lay on a table for what I know was a long time. (Despite the aliases I am careful to give all persons and places, including the hospital to which I was taken, I assume it will be possible for anyone who wants to, to track me down. And I assume they will. But I would not endanger the woman I am calling Anna.) I learned later they were hoping the attack would back off, waiting to see if it would. When it didn't, they performed an old-fashioned angioplasty. I don't remember this, of course. They found that two of my arteries were dangerously occluded, one of them one hundred percent blocked, the other eighty percent. They inserted two stents. All of this standard procedure and routine, though, as they told me, the attack was massive, and I might easily have died. I was in the hospital three nights, after which I was able to walk about on my own and they discharged me. There was no way yet to know the severity of the damage to my heart. We'd have to wait six or seven weeks—“let the dust settle,” was how the cardiologist phrased it—then assess my condition and, the implication was, my chances going forward.

The hospital stay was unobjectionable. The census was low, and I was given a private room at no extra charge. I slept. I ate a little. I read the newspaper. There seemed no way to turn off the television. I'd experienced no threshold revelation, had had no clarifying visions, no epochal shift in perspective. I was transformed only insofar as I was weaker, more fragile, wearier. I felt as if a tree had fallen on my chest. I knew no more about life or death than I had before I went down. Apart from the doctors and nurses and sundry hospital staff, I had no visitors, no calls. Once the sedatives and painkillers wore off and I regained my wits, I remembered Anna.

I called her cell phone, which she'd instructed me not to do. This was early Monday evening.

She was in my house. “It was wide open,” she said. “I came in, and I waited for you. You didn't come. I stayed.”

I explained what had happened.

“Dear God. How do you feel?”

“I feel tired. A little bit dazed. A lot dazed. Ginger.”

“I would say so,” she said.

“Have you been comfortable?”

“I have,” she said. “Very. Thank you. I made myself at home. I'm eating all your food. I wasn't sure where you wanted me to sleep. I took the bed in what looked like the guest room. The flowers are a lovely touch.”

“Good,” I said.

“I've been rude,” she said, “squatting like this. I couldn't go to a motel.”

“No. I was prepared for you to stay. I'm glad you did.”

“The house is nice. It's very clean.”

“I tried,” I said. “I didn't get to finish.”

“You nearly killed yourself doing it.”

“I don't think that was it.”

“There can't be any record of my visit,” she said. “We must not be connected.”