Time's Arrow (11 page)

Everyone smokes and drinks and messes around. No one works out.

Last week they came and took away my color TV. They gave me a black-and-white one. I made on the deal, but when I switched it on my first thought was: uh-oh. There goes world opinion.

But world opinion, as a force, went long ago, really. You can't say exactly when it happened. After the moon shot, I remember, a little light went out in everybody's head; suddenly the world seemed cozier, more local, fuggier. World opinion, on the other hand, disappeared slowly. Like dental self-consciousness. You see ogreish smiles all over the place these days, and nobody minds. People don't mind so much what other people are like. So people can be what they are, not minding if others mind.

Clothes everywhere become more innocent. Everyone becomes more innocent, constantly forgetting. Central Park is cleaner but no safer. We are fewer.

Picture me now in the operating room, on the black tile floor, under the kettle lights, with a mild headache and half a hard-on, spooning tumor into the human body. I rest for a moment, availing myself of the leather bike seat on its stiff chrome stand. The scrub nurse, Nurse del Puablo, is giving me the eye. This is all she can give me, in her surgical yashmak. I have slept with her. So have Byron and Witney. Nurse del Puablo is widely and justly celebrated for her skilled hands, hot thighs and soft lips, her pretty belly, bad ass and
good
tits.

I want to get this tumor packed in nice and firm. I say, "Bayonet . . . Mosquito . . . Sucker . . . Clamp."

At night the hospital creaks and ticks with cullings and triage.

On their final date, John and Nurse del Puablo went to the Metropolitan Museum. John doesn't care for the paintings, and there's no financial incentive, but he feels that it's expected of him, by nurses, and by the stone and metal hydra called society. Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way. The invisible speedlines suggest a different nexus of sequence and process. That thought again. It always strangely disquiets me. I wonder: is this the case with all the arts? Well, it's not the case with music. It's not the case with opera, where everyone walks backward and sounds god-awful.

Every Christmas we get a card from the Reverend, informing us that the weather is temperate. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. But I know what he means.

The hospital is like a permanent November. One walks through sun and rain, one walks through all kinds of weather to get there, but once sucked inside by the blatting doors, everything is desperately and essentially gray. Through these windows, at evening, the clouds look like bandages and cottonoid.

All the intelligent pain of the victims, all the dreams of the unlistened to, all the entreating eyes: all this is swept up in the fierce rhythm of the hospital.

"You do good work, Doctor," everyone here tells me. I deny this. I immolate myself in denial. If I died, would he stop? If I am his soul, and there were soul-loss or soul-death, would that stop him? Or would it make him even freer?

I am not fond of these paradoxes, if paradoxes they are; and I don't expect everybody—or indeed anybody—to see it my way. But you can't end yourself, not here. I am familiar with the idea of suicide. Once life is running, though, you can't end it. You're not at liberty to do that. We're all here for the duration. Life
will
end. I know exactly how long I've got. It looks like forever. I feel unique and eternal. Immortality consumes me—and me only.

The Reverend's Christmas card is born from fire. In the Doctor's grate.

On the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, every morning, there is a circular pool of mulch, like a vast bread pizza, like a physical calamity awaiting clearance by some twelve-foot drunk or mutant dog sickened by its own size. No. An old lady descends from the black branches of the fire escape every morning and wearily gathers it all up and clambers home with it in paper bags: the food left for her by the birds.

Every Monday morning, in Dr. Hotchkiss's rooms on the ninth floor, we have Mortality Conference. Diseased organs are passed from doctor to doctor on plastic lunch trays.

—————

John has become more appreciative of Irene. After several desultory attempts, followed by a brief (and nurse-crammed) estrangement and then one big fight, he has reestablished their relationship on a sexual footing. I find I am not as pleased by this as I thought I might be. Jealousy is a new one on me, and amply terrible.

Are we to jump to the unlikely conclusion that John's heart has at last been melted by the love of a good woman? A fat woman, too, of a certain age, one who forgives everything and looks over us when we sleep—who is, let's face it, more like a mother than a lover? The turning point or empowering moment came with the telling of Irene's "secret." Her words themselves broke a long silence.

"She was a girl," said Irene. "She's with foster parents now. In Pennsylvania. I couldn't look after her. I was suicidal."

John snorted and said, "That makes two of us."

"There's something I never told you. I had a child."

They were in bed together at the time, staring sadly at the ceiling. Then one thing led to another.

It's paradoxical, because John doesn't like women who have children. They can have husbands. They can have as many boyfriends as they want. But no kids. When he accidentally gets talking to women who have children, it's practically the first question he asks them—it's the first test they face. And then nothing ever comes of it. Lots of nurses, plenty of sisters. Many matrons. But no mothers.

All three of us know that John has a secret. Only one of us knows what that secret is. He leaves it undisclosed, which is perhaps the best thing to do with secrets.

For most of our lives we are all doctors to ourselves. Not when we're old, and everything feels so numb and dead, and decency and disgust forbid inquiry. And not when we are young, and the body is an unexamined ecstasy. Just the time in between. Mark them, in coffee shops, on buses, wincing, wondering, doctors to themselves, medicine men and faith healers, diagnosticians and anesthetists, silent consultants to themselves.

Doctor yourself. But don't doctor others. Leave them alone. Let them be.

If John's moral life came to me I would say:

There is malocclusion and diplopia. The pulse is thready. Auscultation would reveal dyspnea, rich in rales, also tachypnea, suggesting mediastinal crunch. Eyes show strabismus and nystagmus, also arteriovenous nicking and silver-wiring. In the mouth the buccal mucosae are lesioned, the oropharynx inflamed. The heart: thrills, lifts, heaves, rubs, with a systolic ejection murmur at both sternal borders. Mental status: alert, oriented; memory, judgment, mood—normal.

Meanwhile, on their beds and trolleys, the victims look on with anxious facies.

You can see the stars, now, in the city, or everybody else can, and not just an attractive smattering here and there. No: the inordinate cosmos. Most people behave as if the stars have been visible all along. To them it's no big deal. But John likes the stars, surprisingly. His eyes roam the heavens, the patterns, the clusters. He will pick out these celebrated nightspots to the cooing nurse on his arm, and meticulously expatiate, say, on their relative distances to the earth—and to each other. It's interesting. Those two there that look like twins half an inch apart: they may in fact be nauseatingly sundered by a long light-time of depth, united only by the angle of our point of view. One a dwarf, one a giant . . . The nurses smile and half-listen, their thoughts hardly less fantastic, but much more local. Me, I'm all ears. For to me the stars are motelike, just twists of dust. Yet I feel their fire. How they burn my sight.

Some affairs actually now begin with a medical procedure. John has started bringing his work home. There's nowhere to hide. There's nowhere to hang in the dark.

These prospective lady friends arrive quietly. John, who is ready, receives them quietly. They feel cold, and rest and cry for a while, and then mount the cleared table. They assume their half of the missionary position, though John, of course, is busy elsewhere, with the full steel bowl. A rectangular placenta and a baby about half an inch long with a heart but no face are implanted with the aid of forceps and speculum. He is always telling the women to be quiet. They
must
be quiet. The full bowl bleeds. Next, the digital examination and the swab. They can get down now, and drink something, and talk in whispers. They say goodbye. He'll be seeing them. In about eight weeks, on average.

I am tentatively concluding that these are the bomb babies of Tod Friendly's dreams. It adds up. The babies, so to speak, are helplessly powerful. This is the power they wield: the mortal importance of no one knowing they are there. Naturally, there are asymmetries: in the waking reality it is the mother who must be silent, not the baby. And these babies are incapable of sound: they have hearts but no faces, no throats, no mouths to cry. But dreams are like that, aren't they. Dreams enjoy their own obliquity. After all, John Young, who daily straddles a storm of souls, which kick up in the wind like leaves, John Young wears his white coat—but no black boots. He wears gym shoes, or regular loafers, or of course those wooden clogs of his.

Nearby, the siren of an ambulance cries like a mad baby, its pitch rising as it passes us and heads on down the street.

Put simply, the hospital is an atrocity-producing situation. Atrocity will follow atrocity, unstoppably. As if fresh atrocity were necessary to validate the atrocity that came before. As if the atrocity that came before was necessary to validate the atrocity that will come after. Stop now and . . . But you can't stop.

Atrocity upon atrocity, and then more atrocity, and then more.

I'm glad it's not my body that is actually touching their bodies. I'm glad I have
his
body, in between. But how I wish I had a body of my own, one that did my bidding. I wish I had a body, just an instrument to feel weary with or through, shoulders that slump, a head that tips back to face the sun, feet that drag, a voice that groans or sighs or asks hoarsely for forgiveness.

I don't understand. Irene still comes to the apartment but we never see her anymore except by accident. It's over. She seems cheerful: she seems relieved. Twice a week she vengefully looks in here to dust the place, and dirty all the dishes, and worry the bed. She leaves like four bucks on the kitchen counter—though it's since gone down to three fifty.

I don't understand. At the hospital we reward our victims with money. I pay the hospital. Irene pays me. I don't get it. Are we all slaves? Are we somehow less than slaves?

They wouldn't believe me, even if I could tell them. They would turn away, in excruciation and contempt.

I'm like the baby taken from the toilet. I have a heart but I don't have a face: I don't have any eyes to cry. Nobody knows I'm here.

Is it a war we are fighting, a war against health, against life and love? My condition is a torn condition. Every day, the dispensing of existence. I see the face of suffering. Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.

There's probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I'm tired of being human, if human is what I am. I'm tired of being human.

PART   2

4

You do what you do best, not what's best to do

We set sail for Europe in the summer

of 1948 —for Europe, and for war.

Well, I say
we
, but by now John

Young was pretty much on his own

out there.

Some sort of bifurcation had occurred, in about 1959, or maybe even earlier. I was still living inside, quietly, with my own thoughts. Thoughts that were free to wander through time.

Our ship is loud with all the tongues of Europe, under the big sky and its zoo of cumulus—its snow leopards and polar bears. On the lower deck, where all the people are, there is the sense of an outrageous and clarifying happiness. When it is happy, the human face seeks a particular angle: perhaps you could pinpoint it—thirteen degrees, say, from the horizontal. Also, happiness contains its own ferocity: the right to life and love, fiercely seized. John Young is always especially smart and handsome when he visits the lower deck for his strolls, morning and evening, with ivory-topped cane, with burnished black shoes, with plausible perfecto. Rather forbiddingly he saunters along the lower rink, past the clumps of families, the young mothers, the babies' cries. The cries of babies: we all know what
they
mean, in any language. Everybody seems to have at least one baby, suddenly. As if to get them safely stowed, before the violent renewal of war.

To begin with, the voyage seemed a form of evasive action, a form of flight. The sea glared on with a million eyes, a million witnesses to our getaway. Apart from wanting the law or whatever to catch up with him (which it didn't), I had taken little notice, and no interest, in John's furtive and elaborate preparations for travel—the series of interviews with the Reverend Kreditor, for example. I didn't really wake up until we made the short boat trip to Ellis Island. Of course, months earlier, I had dully taken on the likelihood of major upheaval, on account of what was happening to John's skin. At first it assumed a sallow glow; then, during the cold spring, it went all the way from hot-dog mustard to peanut butter. Jesus, I thought. Jaundice. The

I twigged: it was a suntan. I put two and two together. People often get this way before taking stylish vacations in exotic locales. The idea of John getting sick, the idea of John coming down with something: that's a good one. His vigor, nowadays, contains something savage and tasteless. It is pink tongued. It is feral—undoctored. The whites of his eyes sting like fresh frost. John's torso now closely resembles one of his more miraculous erections. At any moment and with no warning he'll throw himself onto the floor and do like a hundred push-ups. "Ninety-nine," you'll hear him grunting, ever the literalist. "Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. Ninety-six." Even during mealtimes, at the captain's table, he's forever girding his muscle and sinew. Under the table his feet jig on their soles. John's body shudders deeper than the ship itself. This war will start at an appointed time, like a ball game. He is thirty-one.