Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I have not gone berserk with worry for my wife , he thought.

Do I have a wife?

How do I know my name, if I don’t know whether I’m married? How did I know about balls? Are you born with a full knowledge of the scrotum? So that even during amnesia, you still—

I don’t want amnesia .

I don’t want to be a pendulum in a ward, swinging on crutches and sucking on cold cigarettes and laughing at people forever and never remembering.

What about my kids, if I do have kids?

The same nurse, with thin dark hair and wide white arms, was at the head of his bed, looking into his eyes this time as she wiped them. She had the voice of a twelve-year-old girl, and the teeth of someone long dead. She said, “Mr. Snuyder? Do you remember you’re Mr. Snuyder?”

He tried to nod. The pain made him hiss.

“We’ll give you something for pain after we X-ray your head again. But could you tell me if you know your name?”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Yes. And your name?”

“Woke up knowing it was Snuyder.”

“Good boy !”

“Woke up. Found out I had my scrotum, and I never knew if I had any children or a wife .” He was crying. He hated it.

“You’ll remember,” she said. “You’ll probably remember. You did take out a telephone pole and a good I say at least half of a Great American Markets rig. Worcestershire sauce and mustard and beerwurst smeared over two lanes for a quarter of a mile. If you don’t mind glass, you could make a hell of a sandwich out there, they said.”

“Kill anybody? Did I kill anybody?”

“Not unless you die on us. The truck was parked. Trucker was — how do you want to put it? — banging the lady of the house? You must of pulled a stupendous skid. The troopers’ll be by to talk about it.”

“Did you look in my wallet?”

“Doctor’ll be by too. I’m off-duty now.”

“You don’t want to tell me about my family? There wasn’t anybody with me, was there?”

“You’re supposed to remember on your own. There wasn’t anybody killed. You take care now.”

“Won’t dance with anyone else.”

“Good boy.”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He winced. He lay back. He heard himself breathe.

She said, “That’s right. You lie down and be good. Good boy.”

HE WOKE AGAIN, with a thump, waiting for the nurse to speak. He saw that she was gone, the room dark, the door closed. He couldn’t remember waking, ever before in his life, so abruptly, and with so much pain. And that wasn’t all he couldn’t remember. He thought baby, baby, baby to himself, as if in a rapture, and he tried to think of a lover or wife. Was he divorced? What about kids? He thought a gentler baby and looked within his closed eyes for children. He thought of maps — blank. He thought of cars and couldn’t see the one he’d driven. He remembered that the nurse had evaded the question of who had been with him. But at least she wasn’t dead.

And how had he known that his passenger was a woman? And how could he know he was right?

He was tired of questions and tired of hurting. He remembered, then, how they had rolled him through the halls for a CAT-scan and how, when he’d been rolled back, they had looked at him like magic people who could make him fall asleep, and he had fallen. He wanted more magic. He wanted to sleep some more and wake again and know one thing more. A woman in the car with him. Should she have been with him in the car? Should she have come with him to this room?

And he woke again, one more question not answered, to see a light that sliced at his eyeballs and to hear a general commotion that suggested daytime and what he had doubtless once referred to as everyday life. The door opened in, and Hilary was inside with him, and through dry lips he said, “I remember you!”

She said, “Can you see how little I’m cheered by that?”

No: she started to; he finished her statement in his mind, fed by memory, and he smiled so triumphantly, his face hurt. In fact, Hilary said, “Can you see—”

And he said, “Hilary. Hil.”

She shook her head as if winged insects were at her, and then she wept into her wide, strong hands, walking slowly toward him, a child at a hiding game. But she was not a child and there were no children — not here, anyway, because the boys were at school, of course, and he and Hilary, Richard and Hilary Snuyder, were alone, they were each forty-seven years old, and they were working at being alone together while Warren and Hank went to school in other states. The states were other because this one was New York. Hilary was tall, and she wore her pea jacket, so it must be autumn, and her upper lip came down on the lower one as if she wanted to make love. Richard did, then, and his hand went down to grip himself in celebration where it had earlier prodded for loss. “Hilary,” he said. The catheter guarded his loins, and his hand retreated.

She wiped at her eyes and sat on the chair beside the bed.

“Come sit on the bed,” he said.

She sat back. She crossed her legs and he looked with a sideways glance to see her jeans and Wallabees. His eyes stung, so he looked up. He sniffed, expecting to smell perfume or soap. He smelled only gravy and the finger-chewing doctor. And Hilary said, “How could you decide on — going away like that?” She said, “How could you do that? No matter what?”

“Hil, I’m having a hell of a time remembering things. I didn’t remember you until you came in, the boys and you and — would you tell me stuff? You know, to kind of wake me up some more? I don’t remember going anyplace. They said I smacked the car up.”

Hilary stood, and something on her sweet, pale face made him move. The motion made him whimper, and she smiled with genuine pleasure. Her long hand, suspended above him, was trembling. He felt her anger. His penis burned. He closed his eyes but opened them at once. He was afraid of her hand descending to seize him as if in love or recollected lust, but then to squeeze, to crush the catheter and leave him coughing up his pain and bleeding up into the blanket. He saw her playing the piano with strong bloody hands, leaving a trail of blood on the keys.

She said, “I have to go outside until I calm down. I’ll go outside and then I’ll be back. Because unlike you I do not run out on the people I love. Loved. But I’ll leave you a clue. You want to remember things? You want a little trail of bread crumbs you can follow back into your life? How about this, Richard: you drove our fucking car as hard as you could into a telephone pole so you could die. Is that a little crust of some usefulness? So you could leave me forever on purpose. Have I helped?”

THE AWFUL DOCTOR came back again, adding the insult of his breath to the injury of his armpits. He was thick, with a drooping heavy chest and shoulders that came down at a very sharp angle, so that his thick neck looked long. His fingers were large, and the knuckles looked dirtier now — this morning, tonight, whenever it was that the doctor stood at the bed, telling Richard where the orthopedic surgeon was going to insert pins of assorted sizes and alloys into the hip and femur, which the instrument panel had cracked in an interesting way. The neck was all right. The back was all right. The head seemed all right, though you never can tell with the brain. A little rancid laugh, a flicker of motion across the big jowls and their five o’clock shadow. And the ribs, of course, although CAT pictures showed no danger to the lungs. “You’ll be bound.”

“I’m a judge,” Snuyder said.

“Good man.”