William Gaddis - The Recognitions

(—Baby do you know a doctor? I need a doctor. — A bone doctor? Maude managed. She looked helplessly at Herschel.

(—I've just had the most terrible accident. .

— Baby are you in the hospital? Herschel answered, taking the thing.

(—No but I will be, if you'll just tell me a doctor.

— But where are you, baby? I always told you this would happen, no one can drive the way you do and go on living in this world. . (—But it isn't an automobile accident, I have sunstroke.

— Who is this? (—It's me.

— Oh you! I thought it was you-know-who. Sunstroke? Are you drinking?

(—Second-degree burns at the very least, stop asking sillies.

— Listen baby we're going to a party. You just come there and we'll find you the cutest little doll-doctor you ever! Now listen, here's the address. .

And when he'd hung up, Herschel turned to Maude. — And I' ve had the most. . just most day, you cannot dream where I woke up! Can you tell I have this shirt on inside out?

— Who was that? Maude asked, motioning at the telephone.

— It was Rudy, I think he'd been in an auto crash, or something. He said the strangest things, he must have hit his head, and so I just told him to come right along to Esther's cocktail, baby is there a clean shirt? Because I can't possibly go anywhere in this. He followed her into the bedroom, where Maude opened a bureau drawer and took out Arny's last clean shirt.

When Arny arrived, with a full quart by the throat, Herschel was already revealing his latest arcanum: —Chavenet. It really doesn't mean anything, but it's familiar to everybody if you say it quickly. They mention a painter's style, you nod and say, Rather. . chavenet, or, He's rather derivative of, Chavenet wouldn't you say? Spending the summer? Yes, in the south of France, a little villa near Chavenet. Poets, movie stars, perfume. . shavenay, Herschel brayed becomingly.

The evening of this feast day, for so it was, perennially addressed to SS Adam and Eve, and the 40 Maidens martyred at Antioch, was brisk or cold, according to one's resources. The people in the streets had not changed; most of them, certainly, were the same people who might be seen passing the same points with the same expressions at the same hour on almost any of the three hundred sixty-five feast days of the year. Nevertheless, something had happened. There was a quality in the air which every passing figure seemed to intensify, a professional quality, as everyone became more consciously, more insistently, what the better part of the time he either pretended, or was forced to pretend himself to be. This was as true for each quantum in the bustling stream of anonymity, moving forth in an urgency of its own, as it was for such prodigies of the tyranny of public service as the policemen offering expressionless faces cut and weathered in the authority of red stone, and their contraries, a porous group in uniforms of low saturation and low brilliance gathered round something on the sidewalk before the American Bible Society, an object so compelling that it gave their diligent chaos the air of order. It appeared to be a gigantic male Heidi.

— Cross the arms on the chest, Maurice. All right there, get his feet. Wait a minute, don't lift yet until I tell you.

The policemen, busy elsewhere attending the smooth functioning of that oppressive mechanism which they called law and order, looked as unlikely of ever being seen in any other combination of lip, nostril, and cold eye, badge, uniform, and circumstance, as Saint-Gaudens' statue of the Puritan; in the same way the Boy Scouts hazarded neither past nor future, heirs to all the ages and the foremost files of time notwithstanding, they composed and expressed a pattern endowed with permanency.

— Look out f'his head, you want to break something?

— How'd it get so red?

— He's red all the way down. I looked.

— So how'd he get that way?

— You tell us, your father's a doctor.

Be Ye Doers of the word, and not hearers only, said a lighted sign behind them. In the window was a large loose-leaf book, whose lined pages were filled in a cramped round hand. A sign beside it said, It took Mrs. Gille / 75 years to / copy the Bible//The Bible / was presented / to her son / at Christmas. There was a picture of Mrs. William Gille, of New York City, and her hand-copied Bible.

— You passed First Aid, Maurice?

— Merit badge.

— What do you say?

— Artificialresperation?

— Right. Take his feet there and twist.

— He won't roll. He's big.

— Twist.

They stepped back, as the hulk rolled, and the nose hit the pavement.

— Cup the face in the arm, there.

— O.K. Get on him. — You get on him.

— I'll get on him.

— We'll both get on him.

— O.K. Ready with your side? One two three go…

— Ughhh

— two, three. . push, two, three. . push,

— Sweet little boys.

— He's talkin. He said somethin.

— He's got me by the knee.

— Sweet little boys.

The police too were busy, in as serious, if less concerted pursuits. In the Fourteenth Street I.R.T-B.M.T. subway station one of them reached Hannah. A policewoman handed that nomadic laundress over to the stronger arm of the law.

— You might at least have given me time to rinse them, Hannah said, a note of hauteur distinct in her voice as she gathered the wet clothes up under her arm. Earlier, she had gone to see Stanley. She had knocked at his door and found him not at home. Even going round to the front and peering through the bars of the grating and the dirty window, all she had been able to see was in order, that silent patient order of things abandoned. She could make out the picture of the cathedral at Fenestrula, the stacks of paper, palimpsests on the left, untouched to the right, twelve empty staves to a page but already dedicated and, she realized with a twinge of cold, as though the cold brought it to her clearly for the first time, not to her. Peering in she saw all this, even enough of the bed to ascertain that it, too, was empty. She could see everything in his room, in fact, except the crucifix, for it hung above the bed, next to the window through which she peered.

This willful insistence of finality was so pervasive that, on those occasions which seemed to resist, an element which might too easily have been called fateful intruded, heavy-handed some wheres as though fate had become exasperated; in others, no more than the cajoling hand of co-operation.

Stanley's mother had been transferred to a first floor room in a large municipal hospital, pleading, the entire journey, for her possessions. After Stanley's visit, her attendants might have noted that there was something more than the usual immediate anxiety in her voice, which had deepened with her demands to a tone which implied that they would never have opportunity to separate her from another of them. Had they brought her appendix? her tonsils? her severed limb. . and her teeth?

The denture was put into a clean glass on the bedside table, where the nurse, watching the doctor leave, poured the wrong solution into the glass without spilling a drop, and left her old patient gazing at that submarine chimera. Stanley's mother gazed. It moved gently, suspended, as though melting there before her eyes. She dug nut-sized knuckles into her eyes, and looked again. Gumming imprecations of an exhausted nostology, she slept.

She woke, jolted into consciousness by a belch, pulling her three limbs toward her, startled. What was it? She looked into the glass. There was nothing in the glass but a placid clear solution with a slight pink precipitation on the bottom. It was too much. She must get where she was going while there was still time.