Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

As I may have indicated earlier, Tara didn’t come out of her coma on any accelerated schedule. In the days after the completion of her double lung transplant, I was permitted to observe my wife’s slumbering form, first in the ICU and then in the general hospital population, and this is when the word ischemia suddenly became a part of daily conversation. The doctors would ask, “Are you Mr. Crandall?” though we’d been multiply introduced, and I would say, yet again, “Why do you think I’m hanging around her bed day and night, looking as though I’m a homeless person, mumbling to myself and breaking out into, well, spontaneous heaving sobs?” They would ignore my comments. “In the coming days, it’s possible that we might see the following…,” and then the word ischemia was always slipped into the monologue. Other bits of medical argot were also deployed, diabetes mellitus, further “clubbing” of the fingertips and toes, progressive deafness due to long-term consumption of antibiotics, cross-infection from other lung patients, genetic stuff I didn’t understand, and then something about a transmembrane conductance regulator . These conversations always ended with someone asking whether I had been tested for the certain recessive gene myself, the gene that caused Tara’s difficulties. Which was another way of asking if I knew of or accepted the barrenness, the non-productivity of our marriage, to which I replied only with silence, because that was my way.

The expectations the doctors had for my wife were optimistic, after a fashion, until they remembered to ask about her age. My wife, at thirty-eight, was sicker than most people with her illness. Younger people didn’t have trouble with ischemia or reperfusion injuries subsequent to their surgery. They bounced back quicker from the infections. Whatever the cause, my wife long remained unconscious. Or, more exactly, she was in a way station between delirium and unconsciousness. During this stretch, when I was either sitting next to her bed or eating nougat-and-peanut snack items, Tara was having incredibly vivid nightmares, all of which involved persecution. She dreamed that I personally was a member of the FBI’s domestic fraud task force and was coming to cut parts of her body off bit by bit so that they could be blown up in garish desert explosions. Or I was a serial killer and was trying to administer lethal drugs to her. Or else I was eating bits of her. Or I was forcing her to have sex with me, even though she was missing limbs. Or I was using my amputation stumps to penetrate her. Or she was trying to flee from me and other persecutors, even though she had only 20 percent of lung function.

It was a good thing, therefore, that I had secured an upcoming reading at Arachnids, Inc. This was a welcome distraction. The only problem, as regarded my reading, was that I had a grand total of six or seven sentences to read to the audience. Despite the fact that I admitted to absolutely little doubt as an artist, some of these sentences were clearly better than others . Either I was going to read the sentences over and over again, so that they would transport by virtue of a canny repetition, or it was going to be a very short reading. Well, there was a third alternative, namely that I would produce some new material. I have heard of, and have never exactly approved of, people attempting to write new works just so that they’d have something to read. Here was my chance. Blood and guts. The heartbreak of mortality. The last bit of air squeezed out of a diseased lung. The love, or at least the considerable devotion, cut short by fate. Out of great adversity comes great art, and so I came up with my celebrated lung transplant sequence. (See The Collected Works of Montese Crandall , presently under construction, p. 4.)

Future readers of my works will realize that the surgery sequence, at the time, represented a huge advance in the amount of work I had at my disposal for the reading, in that it contained several sentences . It seemed to be what I was able to come up with in those weeks of drama and anxiety. I knew my wife’s illness was genetic, and that it was unlikely that I had caught it from her, and yet I found myself having to remember, almost manually, to breathe, breathe, breathe, while I was in the waiting room or in her hospital room. When I fell asleep, in fact, I began experiencing episodes of apnea, in which I would shake myself awake, chest heaving, unable to catch my own breath, just as I had so often attempted to catch my wife’s breath for her . The same was true on the nights I tried to sleep at home in the large queen-size bed that never felt right without Tara’s skeletal frame alongside me. She was one of those sleepers who move ever closer, until they have commandeered a good three-quarters of the square footage, while you are balanced precariously on the remainder. Without her, it seemed there was nothing to keep me from spreading out and taking over everything, in an orgy of self-centeredness and, thus, insignificance.

The twenty-first day of the month came around, the day when Tara went back into the ICU. They did more tests, which is what they do in the ICU, and I thought about canceling my reading at Arachnids. However, I decided that if Tara were awake, dressed in a pink miniskirt and some silky flowered top that she managed to find at one of the thrift shops on Fourth Avenue, she would have said, despite her oxygen mask, “Monty, get out there and live .” You understand, this is not to say she never felt sorry for herself, nor that she didn’t get bored of seeing me hanging around every day. In an earlier phase of her illness, she would occasionally take off on ridiculous trips up the block. Dragging her rolling oxygen tank, she would stick out her thumb and wait for someone with a minivan to come along. Then she’d say, Take me to a betting parlor, if you please . Or something similar. She would have the racing form, and the sports pages, and a copy of one of those periodicals designed for arms traders. Those illegal betting parlors were dangerous, unscrupulous, and sad. But when you don’t get out of the house much, you are willing to go almost anywhere. In the backseat of this stranger’s car, coughing her disgusting and very watery cough, spitting her sputum into a cup or sometimes out the window, Tara gazed upon the whole thing, the vast expanse of our part of the state, effusing to her driver. “Do you see any longhorn sheep?” “No, lady, no longhorn sheep.” “Do you see any bobcats?” “No, lady, I don’t see any bobcats.” “Do you see any javelinas?” “Sure, when don’t you?” And Tara would often conclude, “Once I was able to hike in parks, a little bit, anyway.”

But let us now leave my wife in her unconscious state, so that the scene might shift again to the little bookstore named after the kingdom of life-forms with prehensile second antennae, e.g., scorpions, brown recluses, and their kin. I was going to Arachnids, as scheduled, whether I liked it or not, and whether or not there were going to be any listeners in the store. It bears mentioning that I did occasionally visit Arachnids as a customer, because of its excellent used books and digital media. It was a comfortable place for the slaying of time. I belonged there. It was right that I was reading here. I was going to enter the store like some prefab pop singer, therefore, striding onto the stage as if he had ownership. And I would wear the most elegant outfit (I had put some serious thought into this), namely some undertaker’s clothes , because that was how I felt, like a merchant of death, like a man whose everyday affairs had only to do with the lost, with the teeming cities of Hades, where the souls eternally suffered. So I would wear black shiny shoes and skinny tie and black armband, a black knitted cap. Let it be noted, too, that black does flatter a gentleman who has perhaps become spread out in the midsection with the nervous eating of nougat-and-marshmallow treats.