James Salter - Light Years

The doctors now knew what it was.

“It’s the gout,” he told people calmly, lying in bed. “I’ve always had it. It flares up every now and then.”

It was richness of living, he said, the fate of Sun Kings. He was in pain, though one could not see it. This pain would grow greater. It would spread. The skin and subcutaneous tissue would harden. He was turning to wood.

“What is it?” their friends asked Catherine.

It was innominate.

“We don’t know,” she would say.

NEDRA DID NOT SEE HIM UNTIL THE spring. It was a Sunday. When she rang the bell, Catherine came to the door.

“He’ll be glad to see you,” she said.

“How is he?”

“Not any better,” Catherine said. “He’s in the next room.”

“Shall I go in?”

“Yes, go in. We’re having drinks.”

She could hear voices. Through the doorway she could see a fat-cheeked man she did not recognize. As she entered the room and came closer she suddenly realized that this swollen face was Peter’s. She had not even known him! In six months what a giant step he had taken toward death. His eyes were deeper, his nose seemed small. Even his hair—could he be wearing a wig?

“Hello, Peter,” she said.

He turned and looked at her blankly like some dissolute stranger propped in a chair. She could have wept. “How are you?”

“Nedra,” he finally said. “Well, considering everything, not bad.”

Beneath the sleeves of his coat lay the wasted arms of a paralytic. His body had hardened everywhere, it was like the lid of a chest, he could barely move.

“Feel it,” he told her. He made her touch his leg. Her heart grew faint. It was a statue’s leg, the limb of a tree. The flesh that enclosed him had become a box. Within it, like a prisoner, was the man.

“This is Sally and Brook Alexis,” he said.

A young, red-haired woman. Her husband was thin, folded like a mantis in nondescript clothes. Their children were playing with the Daros’ in the back of the apartment.

The conversation was innocuous. Other people came, a cousin of Peter’s and an old woman who had a glass eye. She was the Baroness Krinsky.

“The doctors,” she said, “my dear, the doctors know nothing. When I was a child I was sick and they took me to the doctor. I was terribly sick. I had a fever, my tongue was black. Well, he said, it’s one of two things: either you have been eating a lot of blackberry jam or it’s cholera. Of course it was neither.”

Nedra found the chance to talk to Catherine alone. “But what is it?” she asked.

“Scleroderma.”

“I’ve never heard of it. Is it only the arms and legs?”

“No, it can spread. It can go anywhere.”

“What can they do for it?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid,” Catherine said.

“Surely there are medicines.”

“Well, they’re trying cortisone, but look at his face. Really, there’s nothing. They all say the same thing: they can promise nothing.”

“Is he in pain?”

“Almost constantly.”

“You poor woman.”

“Oh, not me. Poor man. He wakes up three or four times a night. He never really sleeps.”

“Catherine!” he was calling. “Can you open some champagne?”

“Of course,” she replied. She went to get it. “What have you been doing?” the cousin was asking.

“Thinking,” Peter said.

“Things in general?”

“I’ve been thinking of what my last words will be,” he said. “Do you know the death of Voltaire?”

He was interrupted by Catherine returning with a tray and glasses. She opened the bottle and began to pour.

“No,” Peter said as soon as he had tasted it, “something’s wrong.”

“What?”

“This isn’t the good champagne.”

“Yes it is, darling.”

“It’s not.”

“Darling,” she protested, “it’s what we always drink.”

It was in a silver bucket. She withdrew it to show him the label.

“Why does it taste so strange?” He turned to the Baroness. “How does it seem to you?”

“Quite good.”

“I see. Don’t tell me my sense of taste is going. That would be serious.” He smiled at Nedra, a strange, imitation figure, florid and corrupt.

His voice was the only thing unchanged, his voice and his character, but the structure that held them was dissolving. All the old and interconnected knowledge—architecture joined to zoology and Persian myth, recipes for hare, the acquaintance with painters, museums, inland rivers dark with trout—all would vanish when the great inner chambers failed, when in one final hour the rooms of his life dropped away like a building being wrecked. His body had turned against him; the harmony that once reigned within it had disappeared.

“The great specialists for this are in England,” he said. “Dr. Bywaters. What’s the other man’s name, Catherine? In Westminster Hospital. I forget. I thought of going to England, but why undertake such a long trip when I know the answer? The time to go to England was when you and Viri went. We should have done that, I really regret that we didn’t. I love England.”

“We stayed at Brown’s,” Nedra said.

“Brown’s,” he said. “I was having tea there one day. You know how rigorous their afternoon tea is—the fires burning in the fireplaces, cakes. Well, at the next table there was an Englishwoman and her son. He was in his forties and she was one of those county women who ride until they’re eighty. They’d been to a matinée, and for an hour they sat there discussing the play they’d seen, it was The Cherry Orchard . Of course I was listening, and in that hour they exchanged about four sentences. It was a wonderful conversation. She started by saying, after a long silence, ‘Quite a good play.’ Nothing for about fifteen minutes. Finally he said, ‘Um, yes, it was.’ Long, long pause. Then she said, ‘Those marvelous silences…’ About ten minutes more passed. ‘Yes, quite effective,’ he said. ‘So typical of the Slave temperament,’ she said. You know, the English have an absolutely unbending attitude toward pronunciation. Slave, that’s exactly the way she said it.” He fell silent, as if having said something he regretted.

“I’d love to go back to England,” Nedra said.

“Oh, yes. Well, you will.” His voice trailed off.

At the end his wife led him from the room. Small, shuffling steps, as if bearing what remained of his existence.

“He was so pleased to see you,” Catherine said at the door.

We cannot imagine these diseases, they are called idiopathic, spontaneous in origin, but we know instinctively there must be something more, some invisible weakness they are exploiting. It is impossible to think they fall at random, it is unbearable to think it.

Nedra reached the street. She was uneasy, as if the air she had been breathing, the glass from which she drank, had been contaminated. What do we really know of all this, she thought? She had touched his leg. Her throat seemed a bit sore. She must watch herself to see if there were any unusual signs. Foolish, she thought, unworthy. After all, his children lived in the same apartment, his wife slept in the same room. She passed cluttered drugstores in the rear of which pharmacists worked. Cosmetics, medicines, asthma inhalers—she saw her image reflected among them, the sacred objects which could heal, bring happiness. And somewhere above them all, perhaps sleeping now or lying in what passed for sleep, was the victim for whom all cures and benefices were in vain.

Is illness an accident, or is it a kind of choice, the way love is a choice—hidden, involuntary, but sure as a fingerprint? Do we die of some kind of volition, even if it cannot be understood?