Donald Antrim: The Hundred Brothers

Dogs chewed. Barry felt around for intimations of Maxwell’s vital signs. Siegfried, Christopher, and Milton stood awaiting doctor’s orders to assist if need be. Rolfe, the woolly sheepdog, sniffed, affably, Maxwell’s clothing. No one seemed to notice Rolfe sniffing the mysterious green branch coming out of Max’s breast pocket. A stick! Rolfe gathered leafy stick into sopping mouth and off he trotted with it. Gunner eyed this. Nearby, someone sneezed. A reaction to dogs? It is impossible to keep track of who is allergic to what around here. All of us get skin rashes, and someone is always sneezing, and someone else always has a cough or the flu, and someone else is forever about to throw up. How much can you truly know about other people’s afflictions?

“Would someone please bring me my bag?” Barry asked in his usual authoritarian manner — as if speaking to an orderly.

The bag was over by the fireplace. Hiram was closest to it. Christopher fetched it.

“Oh, God, please don’t let him give Max a shot,” whispered overwrought Virgil, who buried his head in his hands and absolutely would not look when Christopher brought the bag to Barry, who opened it up and extracted latex surgical gloves, cotton, various utensils. Gunner, being a dog, could not resist investigating with his nose. “Get the dog away,” said Barry, hoisting a small vial containing what turned out to be an opiate antagonist administered to counteract respiratory depression induced by narcotic overdose. How did a general practitioner happen to stock a bottle of something like this in his doctor’s kit? The answer is simple and pitiful. Over the years, Barry has had to bring many of us — including Virgil here — down from bad trips.

Max’s face was ashen. His brothers in a ring peered down at his staring eyes. “Why’s his tongue green?” asked Siegfried, still clutching porcelain fragments. Fielding with his eight-millimeter circled the scene, trying different angles. Finally Chuck dragged Gunner away by the collar and leashed him to an art nouveau armchair; this space vacated by the dog allowed Fielding a clear alley to shoot through. “Uh, can someone move that coffee table a tad to the left? My left. Back a little. Watch the edge of the carpet. Perfect. Don’t anybody move, okay?” Fielding cautioned his brothers. Meanwhile Chuck humored his animal. “Sorry, buddy, I have to tie you up,” Chuck said. The Doberman, restrained, started barking. The dog’s loud noise caused Virgil to look up surprised. At that moment Barry did the things doctors do with vial and syringe, the flourish of bottle and needle as the liquid is drawn into the hypodermic payload.

“Oh, no,” whispered Virgil.

“Try not to let it bother you,” I said to him.

“I can’t help it, Doug. I see one of those things and everything starts turning black and I feel like I’m being strangled.”

I put my arm around him, and he tried to move away, to rise from the love seat, but he couldn’t because we were pressed together too tightly on it. So I held him closer, and after a restless moment he ceased moving and sat quietly beside me, though his eyes worked left then right, left then right, looking anywhere but directly ahead and never settling on Barry and Maxwell. I recognized this state as a paranoid regression of sorts: Virgil’s bodily quiescence, the rigid and insistent placidity mediated by acute cerebral hypervigilance. It was as if forbidding thoughts lay perilously in wait, unwelcome feelings that even simple physical movements might shake free and liberate. As I have already pointed out, Virgil’s childhood years were not cheery. He suffered ailments, and several times came close to death. He was picked on mercilessly.

I grabbed Virgil’s arm and pulled him close to me as, from room’s center, the voice of Barry commanded, “Push Max’s sleeve up, someone.”

Christopher did this, and Barry plunged the needle in Maxwell’s arm.

“There,” Barry said when the job was done. Fielding behind his camera added, “That’s a wrap.”

Inappropriate remarks like the above are what make us hate Fielding and his pointless movies of whatever sorrow we happen to be going through. Why even dignify him with a response? Barry explained, “Max’s tongue is green from leaves he’s been chewing. See these flecks?” He stuck a rubber-gloved finger in Maxwell’s mouth and swabbed one out as Fielding started his camera again and leaned in for an extreme close-up. “Some kind of botanical psychoactive he must’ve picked up in the jungle. Probably a datura. It’s anybody’s guess how long Max has been hallucinating. Several hours, possibly longer. Did anyone happen to see Max earlier in the day? No? Heart rate is down and respiration is impressively low. The pupils are contracted and exhibit minimal sensitivity to light. I’ve given him Narcan, intramuscularly, to counteract the narcotic. What is it with you guys and your drugs? Can someone please get the dog to be quiet ?”

Amazingly, for without pressure from its owner, Gunner did fall silent. I must presume under the circumstances that the dearness of life, the value of it, its perceived worth — though neither value nor worth describe, fittingly, the crushing weight, for friends and relations at least, that a life has when threatened with its own ending — I must, under these grim circumstances (the doctor’s frustration with the patient’s condition; the dog’s shutting up; the young husbands’ soberly putting away their antiquated smut), presume that this so-called, by me, dearness of life can, in fact, be read in the demeanor and the attitude, the conscious or unconscious deportment of the average onlooker waiting a seeming eternity for the good or the bad news — even if the onlooker is, alas, a dog. I say this because of the way we all took, from Gunner’s sudden cessation of baying, our own cues to make like Max and stop breathing (if such were possible! — all hundred of us, not counting George, gathered around and taking in, holding in, simultaneously, those brisk little audible inhalations that indicate distress, curiosity, skepticism, hope) — to make like Max and stop breathing, and to consider, sympathetically (Didn’t we all feel a bit giddy and faint-headed ourselves, sitting or standing or kneeling there deliberately without oxygen?), how Max, if he had any feeling, must’ve felt in that moment while his lungs strained to get going — how lonely and how cold — and, also, how much we really did love him, would love his memory if he passed away from us. Even black-haired, towering Zachary, whose emotional life is too often characterized by violent, jocular aggression toward the weak and humble, seemed subdued, genuinely concerned over Maxwell’s welfare, or, at any rate, sensitive to the mood of concern suffusing the room. Zachary knew better than to give anybody an arm burn now. Back at a distance he stood, fists in pockets, head bent forward. (What size could Zachary’s shoes be? Do they make a fifteen? I’d like to know.) And Hiram, over by the fireplace, seemed to have forgotten, for the time being, the fire he had earlier undertaken to engineer. Blankly he peered over his walker. His wrist was swollen hugely but he was paying no mind. At his side his helper, Donovan, clutched, in delicate pink hands, a wad of incompletely crumpled Sunday newspaper. Donovan remained extremely still, because to move at all would mean possibly rustling that paper, a rudeness for sure in light of the suspense we all felt as Barry leaned over to massage Maxwell’s chest.

Fielding’s camera whined. The married guys watched it all from over by the porno cabinet; they, like Zachary, had their hands stuffed deep in their pockets, and one (Clay) showed, beneath worsted trousers, a boner.