Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

There must not have been time for my diagnostic skills to offer perspective on my plight except to say that a very comprehensive debility was creeping over me almost as if a heavy rug were being pulled onto my body from several directions at once, everything going soft or limp with weight, except the astonishing rigidity of the knife. I recall thinking that this generalized enfeeblement and draining of life must be death with the peculiarity of the mind imagining even to the last minute that it was somehow exempt from this process. That was either adaptive protection to avert suffering and struggle or the very fragile thing that supported convictions about the imperishability of the spirit. I had always thought religious assertions as to the latter were a form of hysteria, but for the moment I was prepared to keep an open mind. I had often observed in my work, especially in those days in the ER, that there is an unreliable floor to American life and if you find yourself going through it, life is quite dangerous. What I hadn’t learned was that it could apply to me.

But in that immortal phrase, I lived “to tell the tale.” A man on a bicycle came by (I was not entirely conscious) and found me squirting blood onto the walkway, and called for help. I had such a riveting view of my savior, whom I’ve never seen, that the picture stays with me still: one foot extended to hold himself up on the bicycle, he flips open his cell phone and looks at the sky as he calls for help; there is a pause, after which he cranes around urgently looking for ways to describe our location. He is a Good Samaritan, etc. I have no idea who he is. He has not chosen to “come forward either.” We would be together forever, my phantom and I.

I learned later on that Alan had been called in to Emergency for some arterial repair and that quite a lot of blood replacement had been necessary as a result of, I guess, near-fatal hemorrhaging and hypovolemic shock. I later saw Alan’s vital signs documentation and was moved by its obsessive notations. I had benefited from spontaneous closure of a small breach of the left ventricle, and was surprised by the irrational if faint horror occasioned by a description of one’s own injuries. I was relieved to learn there was negligible fluid retention in the pericardium, wherein pumping volume might have been reduced to the point of my returning to my life with a greatly impaired brain. There was a relatively small transfer of kinetic energy in a stab wound, as compared to say, a gunshot wound. So any emergency treatment provider was spared from having to worry too much about collateral injury. In other words, I was grateful that Deanne hadn’t shot me. Sweet!

I had a small incision in my chest, not far from the wound, and Alan later explained, “The way you presented, dude, I had to look around.”

By the first evening, lying in my hospital bed, I was not much worse than sore. I was even visitable. Instead of watching the television hanging from the wall above and to one side of the utilitarian sink, I looked out the door as doctors and nurses came and went. I watched them for nearly an hour before I began to cry. I cried hard but without making a sound. It wasn’t because of what had happened to me. It was because I wanted to go to work. I asked God to let me go back to work. I don’t think I had experienced such anguish before.

About then, Jinx arrived and closed my door. She stood there and looked at me for a long time. I was too miserable to speak or to dry my face, and my body shook with suppressed sobs. Jinx locked the door, got in bed beside me, and held me in her arms. I recall a moment of incomprehension, and then gratitude for the heat of her body. After her embrace had stilled my various shudderings, quite long after, Jinx got out of bed, fussed a bit with my covers, unlocked the door, and left. The next day she dropped off some bird books with the floor nurse, who delivered them. They only rekindled my astonishment.

Several of the staff stopped in to see me, and the aversion I had expected was nowhere in evidence. They were even friendly. Haack, Hirsch, Wong, even McAllister paid their respects. Bets were really off when you got stabbed. I was strangely fascinated by the telephone beside my bed, which seemed to be beckoning me to communicate, a challenge I was not entirely up to, not because of my injury but because of my all-consuming bafflement. I thought almost continuously of Jocelyn and wondered if she knew what had befallen me. I had no reasonable explanation of the facts and was using my reduced energy to make up some sort of harmless story. I fought the drag of time by picturing her and imagining how she felt; I was plunged into mild despair when I re-imagined sex with Jocelyn or tried to get my mind around her peculiarly abstract ferocity. These were lavish erotic fancies which kept me from turning on the television.

Alan thoughtfully held off the cops until I was feeling better and was less affected by the various medications, which had produced not just pain relief but a two-day erection, a various maypole around which visions of Jocelyn’s private parts danced. But then Officer Weiland, Terry Weiland, came to see me in order to file a more complete police report than the one produced when I was admitted and not conscious. Terry was in early middle age, a compact, purposeful man in the local cowboy style, very mannerly, very direct. He said, “Feeling any better?”

“Yes, I am, thank you.”

“Dr. Hirsch said he’ll have you out of here soon.”

I took this wrong at first, and then understood he meant only that I would soon be released. I had feared it meant I couldn’t work here.

“Was this a personal disagreement?”

“Not at all. You mean the guy who stabbed me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know who he was. He might have mistaken me for someone else. Unless I was robbed. I don’t know that we’ve checked that, have we? Where’s my wallet?”

“We’re struggling with this and just hoping you might have learned something that would help. Isn’t this your wallet?”

“Yes, oh good.”

“Was there time — I mean, did you get much of a look at him?”

“Absolutely.”

“And he just stepped up and assaulted you?”

“He seemed to recognize me. He told me to stay away from her, that she was his and his alone. He must have confused me with someone else.”

“The old triangle.”

“Except there was no triangle.” I was trying to keep this straight. I could no longer imagine why I took this tack. I suppose I was improvising and it got away from me. I began to labor mentally over a description of the assailant, which I knew I’d have to provide. I was a little bit panicked. I didn’t really wake up until I was required to supply “Caucasian” to Officer Weiland, who had drawn a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and was balancing a clipboard on his knee.

“Age?”

“I’m guessing late thirties.” I did notice that I was beginning to picture the assailant. I had no answers for scars, tattoos, etc., but I was able to describe the assailant in sufficient detail to satisfy Officer Weiland: dark brown hair combed straight back, a lean and narrow face with prominent teeth, ice blue eyes; he was wearing straight-cut black jeans, work boots, a snap-button western shirt with a barbed-wire motif, and a baseball hat advertising an Oklahoma fuel company.

At the end of our interview, Office Weiland told me to make a “victim personal statement” describing the impact of the crime upon me. “These are used by the judge to help him decide on an appropriate sentence.”

I said, “I learned what anyone in that situation would learn — that life can end at any time and that whatever it is you want to do with your life you should do right away. I feel that things early in your life that were unresolved can suddenly crop up later on and try to do away with you.”