Howard Engel: Dead and Buried

There was over an hour, nearly two hours to kill before setting out to see Carswell. I spent the first half-hour paying bills to the various oil companies that fuelled my car. I began feeling guilty about tapping limited fossil fuels and helping to wipe out the remaining Indians along the Amazon. Was I aiding and abetting in the destruction of rain forests somewhere, or perhaps killing North Sea seal pups? Once you dip into the question of pollution, you soon discover that it’s all around you and that you are the chief villain. I needed to confess to having stuck gum under my desk at Edith Cavell School, to not bundling and salvaging my collected newspapers and to using leaded gas in my car. I was a mass of vices calculated to destroy the ozone layer and speed along the disastrous results of the greenhouse effect. I looked at the yellow patch of ceiling above my desk, my own area of peak pollution. I resolved to put a piece of time away to begin thinking about cutting down on my tar intake. I made an appointment with myself to consider a plan to bite the bullet. I frightened myself out into the street and lighted up a Player’s until all was right with the world again.

There was still time enough to pay a fast visit to my friend Martin Lyster, who was a patient in the Grantham General. He was a book dealer around town and I heard that he was in a bad way. I’d been putting off this trip for over a week.

After getting the room number from Admitting, I took the elevator to the fifth floor, where I walked past the nursing station to Room 509. My hands were sweating already. I poked my head through the half-open door. Martin was in neither of the beds in this semi-private room. The first was occupied by a man with a bright orange face, partly covered by an oxygen mask. His open eyes were wide and staring, his breathing was frantic. The second bed, by the window, was empty. I was about to turn and check the door number again when a familiar voice called my name.

“Benny! Are you looking for me?” I followed the sound of the voice to a corner partly obscured by the open bathroom door. Martin, dressed in a striped terry-cloth robe, was sitting in a chair reading the New York Times. He was incredibly thin.

“Hello. I heard you were in here,” I said, and added stupidly, “How are you?”

“Much better, Benny. I think they’ve got a pretty good idea about this thing now. It’s taken them long enough, I’ll tell you. They won’t let me smoke or drink. I think they want to quarantine my liver. They’ve got a lien on my lungs.” Martin still sounded like Martin, although he looked terrible. He was wearing half-moon glasses. There is something indestructible-looking about people in half-moon glasses. Martin was still speaking, but my daydreaming had partially tuned him out. What was he saying?

“… I found a Brian Moore you might be interested in.”

“Who?”

“He wrote it under a pseudonym. Early on, you know. It’s a detective story. That’s right up your street, isn’t it? I told Anna all about it when she came to see me.”

“Anna? Oh, sure, she told me she’d been in.”

“Would you like to take a walk down to the end of the corridor with me?”

“Sure.” I helped him to his feet. I could hardly find an arm inside the sleeve of his robe. He was as light as cream, and it frightened me as we moved past the IV stands and folded wheelchairs to and beyond the nursing station. Nobody looked up as we went by.

“You’ve got a wonderful woman in Anna, you know, Benny. She’s read just about everything. What a girl! I think I’m going to get serious about finding somebody. We Irish always marry late. It’s time. I can see that.”

“Anna’s great, Martin, but the knot isn’t tied yet. We’re not a number yet. It’s early days. He old man’s suspicion may be the only thing that’s holding us together. But you’re right. I think she’s great too.”

“I told her about the Moore and she knew the title. How do you like that?” Martin leaned into the window alcove at the end of the passage. For a minute or two we watched the eddying circles of fallen leaves down in the street below. They blew in and out of pools of light around the streetlights. It was all rather theatrical.

“Are you still fighting your fate, Benny?”

“If I read you right, I guess I can say that I’m still resisting the call to manpower about a real job? Is that what you meant?”

“Look, Benny, you and I are alike. We’re a dying breed. We’re nearly extinct. What is the French call it? We’re the fin de race, the end of the line. We’re the last individuals left in town. Nobody rates independence any more. It doesn’t count. Everybody’s into life-styles and sitting pretty. I’ll tell you, Benny, we are witnessing the Yuppification of North America. The bottom line has replaced what we used to call ethics. It’s a terrible, terrible thing, Benny. You understand me?”

“Everything has its price but nothing has any value? Something like that?” He turned to rest his behind on the window ledge. He was breathing hard.

“Now Anna, Benny, she’s a great woman, but even the goods one slow you down. She’ll put fancy doilies on all your rolling stones. I know what I’m talking about.”

“I thought you wanted to settle down?”

“I do. I do.” He was smiling. “But I haven’t got the rhetoric down yet. It’s slow work, Benny. Let’s go back to the room, okay?”

“Sure. I have a hard time picturing you inside a picket fence, Martin.”

“Just keep watching. But, before I settle down, I’m going to go south when spring training comes around. I want to cover the Blue Jays for the Beacon the way I did a year ago.”

“Is that Sarasota?”

“That’s circuses. I go to Dunedin. Ah, don’t get me started about it. Baseball, Benny, baseball is the metaphor of our time. I want to explore it.”

“You could do a book.”

“I could indeed. And it would be some book. But first, I have to wait until they let me out of here. My doctor said this morning that I might be out by next weekend.” His expression suddenly changed from a bright, many-lined grin to one of pain. “Oops, I think it’s Demerol time.”

Back in Room 509, Martin got into bed, still wearing the terry-cloth robe to help hide his wasted arms and legs. We talked for another few minutes. From the corner of my eye I could see the man with the orange face, hidden from Martin by the curtains around that part of the bed, had stopped breathing. I was surprised, but I didn’t say anything. It was so ordinary. He had been breathing when we came back to the room, but now he had stopped. There was a tear running down from the eye closest to me to the bright earlobe below it. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t shouting, calling for help, raising the alarm. I simply said good-night to Martin, and mentioned what I had seen to a nurse at the nursing station on the way out.

“It was expected,” she said with a sad smile, as though that would make me feel better.

At six-thirty I presented myself in the waiting room of Dr. Gary Carswell. He had a fine collection of old magazines. For five minutes I read about the banning of mussels from Prince Edward Island and the arrival of the Olympic torch in Calgary.

“Mr. Cooperman?” I dropped the magazine and tried to reorganize the pile I had taken it from, while getting to my feet. Before me stood a huge bearded man of perhaps thirty-five, no more. He was wearing an English-tailored suit with a vest to cover his impressive belly. His sandy hair was parted on the right; a lock of hair nearly covered one of his eyebrows. The eyes themselves were wide-set and squinting at me. A muscle in his cheek twitched and his mouth moved. It resembled a pained smile. He repeated my name while we shook hands, and I followed the doctor’s retreating back into his inner sanctum.