T. Boyle - World's End

“You’re just mad because his grandfather won’t sell you the precious property, aren’t you?” She sliced the air with the edge of her hand, as absolute and immovable as a hanging judge. “Is that all you can think about, huh? History and money?”

“Hippie,” he hissed. “Tramp.”

“Snob. Dirt-eater.”

“Christ!” he roared. “I was only trying to make conversation, be nice for a change. That’s all. I used to know his father, this Van Brunt kid, that’s all. We’re two human beings, right? Father and daughter. Communicating, right? Well, I used to know this man, that’s all. And I thought it was ironic, interesting in a kind of morbid way, when I saw that his son had lost his foot.”

Mardi’s expression had changed. “What’d you say his name was?” she asked, bending for the paper.

“Van Brunt. Truman. Or, no, the son’s named something else. William or Walter or something.”

She was on her knees, smoothing out the newspaper on the threehundred-year-old planks of the kitchen floor. “Walter,” she murmured, reading aloud. “Walter Truman Van Brunt.”

“You know him?”

The look she gave him was like a sword thrust. “Not in the biblical sense,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

Walter was lucky.

Two weeks after his collision with history, he left Peterskill Community Hospital with a new plastic flesh-colored foot, courtesy of Drs. Ziss and Huysterkark, the Insurance Underwriters of Pensacola Corporation, and Hesh and Lola. Dr. Ziss, after three vigorous sets of early-morning tennis, had been called in to the emergency room to ensure safe closure of the wound. He debrided the damaged tissue, recessed tibia and fibula, brought down two flaps of skin and muscle for cushioning and sutured them together over the bone in a fishmouth closure. Dr. Huysterkark had appeared the following afternoon to provide hope and demonstrate the prosthesis. The Insurance Underwriters, in collaboration with Hesh and Lola, footed the bill.

Walter had been dozing when Huysterkark turned up; he woke to find the doctor perched on the edge of the visitor’s chair, the plastic foot in his lap. Walter’s eyes went instantly from the doctor’s patchy hair and fixed smile to the prosthesis, with its bulge of ankle and indentations meant to delineate toes. It looked like something wrenched from a department store mannequin.

“You’re awake,” the doctor said, barely moving his thin, salmon lips. He wore a scrub coat and two-tone shoes, and he had the air of a man who could sell ice to the Eskimos. “Sleep well?”

Walter nodded automatically. In fact, he’d slept like a prisoner awaiting execution, beset by irrational fears and the demons of the unconscious.

“I’ve brought along the prosthesis,” Huysterkark said, “and some”—he’d begun to fumble through a manila folder—“supporting materials.”

Though Walter had graduated from the state university, where he’d studied the liberal arts (a patchy overview of world literature, a seminar on circumcision rites in the Trobriand Islands and courses in the history of agriculture, medieval lute-making and contemporary philosophy with emphasis on death obsession and existentialist thought, to mention a few of the highlights), he was unfamiliar with the term. “Prosthesis?” he echoed, his eyes fixed on the plastic foot. All at once he was seized with panic. This obscene lump of plastic, this doll’s foot, was going to be grafted in some unspeakable way to his own torn and wanting self. He thought of Ahab, Long John Silver, old Joe Crudwell up the block who’d lost both legs and his right forearm to a German grenade in Belleau Wood.

Intent on the folder, Huysterkark barely glanced up. “A replacement part. From the Greek: a putting to, an addition.”

“Is that it?”

Huysterkark ignored the question, but he lifted his eyes to pin Walter with a look of shrewd appraisal. “Think of it this way,” he said after a moment. “What if your body was a machine, Walter — an automobile, let’s say? What if you were a Cutlass convertible? Hm? Shiny, sleek, right off the showroom floor?” Walter didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to talk about cars — he wanted to talk about feet, about mobility, he wanted to talk about the rest of his life. “Chances are you’d run trouble-free for years, Walter, but as you accumulate mileage something’s bound to give out sooner or later, you follow me?” Huysterkark leaned forward. “In your case, let’s say one of the wheels goes bad.”

Walter tried to hold the doctor’s gaze, but he couldn’t. He studied his hands, the sleeves of his hospital gown, the crease of the sheets.

“Well, what do you do? Hm?” Huysterkark paused. The foot sat like a stone in his lap. “You go down to the parts store and get yourself a new one, that’s what.” The doctor looked pleased with himself, looked as if he’d just announced a single cure for cancer, heart disease and yaws. “We’ve got it all here, Walter,” he said with a sweep of his arm that took in the whole hospital. “Eyes, legs, kneecaps, plastic heart valves and steel vertebrae. We’ve got mechanical hands that can peel a grape, Walter. In a few years we’ll have artificial kidneys, livers, hearts. Maybe someday we’ll even be able to replace faulty circuits in the brain.”

There was no breath in Walter’s body. He could barely form the question and he felt almost reprehensible for asking it, but really, he had to know. “Can I–I mean, will I — will I ever be able to walk again?”

The doctor found this hilarious. His head shot back and his smile widened to expose a triad of stained teeth and gums the color of mayonnaise. “Walk?” he hooted. “Before you know it you’ll be dancing.” Then he dropped his head, crossed his legs and began reshuffling the papers; in the process, the foot slid from the lap, fell to the floor with a dull thump and skittered under the chair. He didn’t seem to notice. “Ah, here,” he said, holding up a photograph of a man in gym shorts and sneakers jogging along a macadam road. The man’s leg was abbreviated some six inches below the knee, and a steel post descended from that point to a plastic, flesh-colored ankle. The whole business was held in place by means of straps attached to the upper thigh. “The la Drang Valley,” the doctor said. “An unfortunate encounter with one of the enemy’s, uh, antipersonnel mines, I believe they call them. I fitted him myself.”

Walter didn’t know whether to feel relieved or sickened. His first impulse was to leap from the bed, hop howling down the corridor and throw himself from the window. His second impulse was to lean forward and slap the therapeutic smile from the doctor’s face. His third impulse, the one he ultimately obeyed, was to sit rigid and clench his teeth like a catatonic.

The doctor was oblivious. He was busy fishing under the chair for Walter’s foot, all the while lecturing him on the use and care of the thing as if it were a hothouse plant instead of an inert lump of plastic manufactured in Weehawken, New Jersey. “Of course,” he said, as he straightened up, the recovered foot in hand, “it’s no use fooling yourself. You are now deficient”—he paused—“and will experience some loss of mobility. Still, as things stand, I believe you’ll find yourself capable of just about the full range of your previous activities.”

Walter wasn’t listening. He was staring at the foot in Huysterkark’s lap (the doctor unconsciously juggled it from one hand to the other as he spoke), a sense of hopelessness and irremediable doom working its way through his veins like some sort of infection, feeling judged and condemned and at the same time revolting against the unfairness of it all. Old Joe had the Huns to excoriate, Ahab the whale. Walter had a shadow, and the image of his father.