T. Boyle - World's End

PETER: Ay-eh.

This time the room was painted marigold yellow, and the doctor’s name was Perlmutter. Walter lay sedated in the comfortless crank-up bed while Hesh and Lola kept watch at his side and the hushed voices of the intercom whispered in his ear like the voices of the incorporeal dead. His left foot, the good one, was good no more.

As he lay there, his face as composed as a sleeping child’s — not a mark on him, the hair swept back from his brow where Lola’s hand had rested, his lips parted and eyelids trembling in the deeps beyond consciousness — he was assailed by dreams. But this time everything was different, this time his dreams were free of mocking fathers, sententious grandmothers and carcasses stripped to the bone. He dreamed instead of an unpeopled landscape, misted and opaque, where sky and earth seemed to meld into one and the air was like a blanket pulled over his face. When he woke, smothering, Jessica was leaning over him.

“Oh, Walter,” she moaned, a low rumble of grief rising up like gas from deep inside her. “Oh, Walter.” Her eyes were wet for some reason, and two sooty streaks of mascara traced the delicate flanges of her nose.

Walter looked around the room in bewilderment, looked at the gleaming instruments, the IV bag suspended above him, the empty bed in the corner and the cold gray eye of the television mounted on the wall. He gazed on the chipper yellow of the wall itself, that uplifting, breakfast-nook yellow, and closed his eyes again. Jessica’s voice came to him out of the darkness. “Oh, Walter, Walter … I feel so bad for you.”

Bad? For him? Why should she feel bad for him?

This time he didn’t take her hand, press his lips to hers, fumble with the buttons of her blouse. He merely flashed open his eyes to give her a venomous look, a look of resentment and reproach, the look of the antihero on his way out the door; when he spoke, he barely moved his lips. “Go away,” he murmured. “I don’t need you.”

Walter didn’t become fully aware of his predicament until late that afternoon, when, on waking to the hellish heat of his invalid’s room and a blur of snow across the window, he glanced up to see Huysterkark grinning and scraping his way into the room. Then, and only then, did he feel for his left foot — his favorite, his precious, his only foot — and understand that it was no longer a part of him. The image of the deserted landscape of his dream fused in that moment with the leering face of his father.

“Well, well, well, well,” Huysterkark said, rubbing his hands together and grinning, grinning. “Mr. Van Brunt— Walter Van Brunt. Yes.” Clamped firmly between his right arm and chest as if it were a rolled-up copy of the Times was the new prosthetic foot. “Well,” Huysterkark beamed, drawing up a chair and crab-walking to the bed, “and how are we on this fine blizzardy afternoon?”

How were we? There was no way to answer that question. We were panicked, in the throes of despair and denial. We were angry. “You, you—” Walter sputtered. “You took my, my only—” He found himself overwhelmed by self-pity and sorrow. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled, tears in his eyes. “You couldn’t save it? You couldn’t try?”

The question hung between them. Snow drove at the windows. Dr. Rotifer to Emergency, Dr. Rotifer, crackled the intercom.

“You’re a very lucky young man,” Huysterkark said finally, wagging his head and pressing a pensive finger to his blanched lips. His voice dropped and he extracted the foot from the nest of his underarm. “Lucky,” he whispered.

Walter had been out for two days, Huysterkark informed him. When they’d got him into Emergency it was nearly dawn and he was frozen half to death. He was lucky to be alive. Lucky he hadn’t lost his fingers and nose to frostbite in the bargain. Did he think the staff here was incompetent? Or apathetic? Did he understand just how mangled that foot had been — comminuted fracture, ankle joint demolished, soft tissue mashed to pulp? Did he know how Doctors Yong, Ik and Perlmutter had worked over him for two and a half hours, trying to restore circulation, set fragmented bones, reattach blood vessels and nerves? He was lucky he hadn’t gone down someplace upstate or on the other side of the river — or what about in the Deep South or in Italy or Nebraska or some other godforsaken place where they didn’t have Hopkins-trained physicians like Yong and Ik and Perlmutter? Did he realize just how fortunate he was?

Walter didn’t realize it, no, though he tried. Though he listened to Huysterkark’s voice sail through its range of expression, through the sforzando of intimidation to the allegro of thanksgiving and the bustling hearty brio of salesmanship. He could think of one thing only, and that was the unfairness of it all, the relentless, crippling, terrifying assault of history and predestination and lurking conscious fate that was aimed at him and him alone. It boiled in him till he closed his eyes and let Huysterkark do with him what he would, closed his eyes and fell back into his dream.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that Mardi showed up. She’d abandoned the raccoon skin for a black velvet cape that sculpted her shoulders and hung from her like a shroud. Underneath it she was wearing blue jeans, painted cowgirl boots and a see-through blouse in a shade of pink that glowed like Broadway on a rainy night. And beads. Eight or ten strands of them. In the doorway behind her was a guy Walter had never seen before.

There was the pain killer, the drowsy stuffiness of the room, the leaden sky with its angry black bands of cloud that stretched like bars across the window. “You poor thing,” she cooed, clacking across the linoleum to bend over him in a blast of perfume and briefly insert her tongue in his mouth. He could feel the nimbus of her hair framing his face, tendrils of sensation poking through the flat dead field of his pain, and despite himself experienced the first faint stirrings of arousal. Then she was straightening up, unfastening the clasp of the cape and indicating her companion with a jerk of her head. “This is Joey,” she said.

Walter’s eyes cut to him like knives. Joey was in the room now, but he wasn’t looking at Walter. He was looking out the window. “Joey’s a musician,” Mardi said.

Joey was dressed like Little Richard’s wardrobe designer, in three clashing paisleys and a Tillamook-colored cravat that fell to his waist. After a moment he stole a glance at Walter, laid out flat and footless in bed, and said “What’s happening, man?” without a hint of irony.

Happening? What was happening? Mutilation, that’s what. Dismemberment. The reduction of the flesh, the drawing and quartering of the spirit, the metastasis of horror.

“God,” Mardi said, perched on the bed now, the cape fallen open to reveal the see-through blouse and all there was to see beneath it, “if only you’d come with Joey and Richie and me the other night — down to Times Square, I mean. …” She didn’t finish the thought. Finishing the thought would have meant admitting the inadmissible. She settled for a pronouncement on the lack of proportion in the cosmos: “It’s just so bizarre.”

To this point, Walter hadn’t uttered a word. He wanted to utter a few, though. He wanted to give vent to the outrage percolating inside him, wanted to ask her what she meant by leaving him in a house full of strangers while she trotted off to New York with this chinless fop in the Beatle boots and cheesy necktie, wanted to ask if she loved him still, if she’d have sex with him, if she’d shut the door and pull the shades and tell Joey to go take a hike, but her eyes went strange all of a sudden and he checked himself. Her slow gaze took in the length of him stretched supine on the bed, and then she turned to look him in the face. “Does it hurt?” she murmured.