Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

But he didn’t like the way they were handling him. They started to pull him from his wheelchair but, inexpert as friends enlisted to help move another friend into a new apartment, had no clear idea of what they were doing. They jostled his old ass. Miss Moffett, who held him under his left arm, was way too small. She was only getting in Mr. Tysver’s way. No one was supporting him at the middle and, since they were too close to each other to begin with, part of his body tended to bump along the ground rather like a rolled-up carpet, say, new, tied-up and still in its paper, that was being carried from one point to another.

He was almost too alarmed to complain, but managed, despite a sort of vertiginous fright, to get out a warning. “No,” he said, “this ain’t going to happen.”

“He’s right,” said Ms. Kohm, who had apparently been studying the situation. “Get him back into his wheelchair.”

Which might not, he was thinking, be such a hot suggestion because it would involve a sort of customized fitting, a proper folding and, at the same time, working him into an upright position, rather, he supposed, like maneuvering one of those heavy dummies they use to test-crash automobiles, into the driver’s seat. He shut his eyes. Perhaps they were better at erasing mistakes than at making them. In any event, he was back in the chair in no time at all.

“Now wheel him into the hallway,” Ms. Kohm said. “What’s the point of trying to carry him there? This is the kitchen. The stairs are in the hall. What could you have been thinking of?”

Was this a political geographer, Schiff thought, or was this a political geographer? Remind me, he thought, to give her an A in this course.

In the hall, Ms. Kohm took over.

She dismissed big Tysver, little Miss Moffett. “Too many cooks spoil the brew,” she said. “All right,” she said, “Kohm in for Moffett, Dickerson in for Tysver. Wilkins in for Bautz at the feet. Can you get out of that wheelchair by yourself?” she asked him.

“Sure,” Schiff said. “If it’s locked, if the footrests are out of the way, if I push myself up on its arms.”

“Go on,” she said, “do it. Dickerson and I will be at your side ready to grab you. Wilkins will take your feet.”

He had his misgivings, of course, but then recalled Ms. Kohm’s flexed thighs when he’d looked up her dress as she’d crouched before him that evening and, rising, gave himself over to the group like some kid with Outward Bound on a confidence course. And was correct in his instincts. Effortlessly, it seemed, they started to carry him up the stairs. Tysver followed with his walker. “I used to be quite athletic myself,” he told them mindlessly. They didn’t bother to answer. They had work to do, proceeding to do it with all the silent efficiency of kidnappers, bank robbers.

Then, to himself, chastised himself for what must surely have seemed to them such a silly, pointless remark. And, flinching, cursed his life, his rotten fate, as they took him the rest of the way up the stairs.

Perhaps, he thought, this was the fate of a gasbag, a punishment for being an academic, for daring to undertake any analysis of the world, for not taking it, that is, for granted, but always to be looking for reasons behind the great gift horse that was life; though he didn’t truly believe this, believed deep down that pain was reason enough, its own excuse for being, that anything complicated as the machinery of existence had already built into it the flaws of its own annihilation. There was something redundant about the routine responses to pain, something tchotchkying up disaster, rather like calling in all those FAA inspectors to start their investigations after some big jet had gone down, hundreds dead, dozens unaccounted for. Why, it was simple, really, when all you needed to understand in the first place was that it was an airplane.

It occurred to him that this might be a message worthy to leave on the answering machine he had put on his wish list. Though, really, he thought, he didn’t have much of a wish list left. Just, he supposed, that his plane hadn’t gone down.

They were in his bedroom.

They laid him down on his bed.

“Phew,” said Miss Moffett, “what’s that smell?” Schiff had forgotten about the nightstand, the carafe of his pee. He shut his smarting eyes. “Wherever can it be coming from?” she said. “Oh,” she said.

Crazily, he was glad Miss Simmons wasn’t here to witness this final humiliation. Even as he acknowledged the terrible casualties he’d sustained this evening, his tremendous loss, practically Oriental in its proportions, of face, he leaned on this frail, single plus — that there was someone who’d been there that evening who’d probably never know the full extent of his tumbled circumstances. Disch, Lipsey, and Freistadt he wrote off. They would be filled in soon enough by the others. (He could just imagine their version, the portrait they would serve up of him. “He lives like a farm animal. Really. Like a farm animal. Like something you could wring cheeses from, or whose fats are industrially rendered, or that you raise for its by-products, its stinking, organic mulch, the ripe, rife salvage of its bones and grease, its hair and hooves, the crap that goes in the cold cuts. All right, he’s a cripple. But not a very self-respecting one. Anyway, there are cripples and there are cripples, You should see where he lives. Or, no, where he keeps himself. Neither lair nor burrow, nor stall nor den, neither quite nest nor coop nor sty, though something of all of these. But off the beaten path, secret, out of the way, like those places beasts slink off to to die. Brr, it was creepy.”) But Miss Simmons, a stranger to them, was outside the orbit of their gossip. It was amazing, Schiff thought, the fig leaves one could, in extremis, pull about oneself for warmth and modesty. Like drawing a curtain between two beds in a hospital room and emptying one’s bowels into the bedpan, grunts, farts and all, separated not only from the party in the next bed, but from all his visitors as well. We live, he thought, by the frail myth of boundary.

And was sustained, however flimsily, by just this sense of things as Ms. Kohm and the others, good neighbors now rather than guests, went about straightening his room, offering to change his sheets, to crack a window a few inches to let in a bit of air. Even little Miss Moffett, who without a word, now that she knew the source of the at-once sharp yet faintly sour ammoniac odor in the room, could see its dark, caramel-yellow reasons beneath its loosed lid, took up the urinal and emptied it in the toilet, rinsed it under the tap, brought it back to the room and returned it (smelling fresh now, even lightly, pleasantly scented, as though she’d washed it out, scrubbed it with cleanser) to the nightstand by his bed. No more put off by his sick man’s foul ways than she might have been by her own child’s sullied diapers. But of course, Schiff thought, they lived in the age of Candy Stripers, nurse’s aides, sponge bathers, administers of enemas, handlers of bedpans, masseuses of the comatose, volunteers at just about anyone’s bedside, heroines of vicious diseases, broken in by AIDS patients, for whom the body and its poisons were just more brittle frontier. Fallen flesh meant nothing to them, nothing. (Just try to pinch one though, or steal a kiss. Cops would be brought in. Calling all cars, calling all cars.)

So they hovered, flitted about him, the alcoholic levels in their blood probably no lower now than they’d been at the height of their games on his stairway, or spreading out their picnic on his living-room floor. Whistling, giggling while they worked. Playing a sort of house with him now, a kind of family, even Bautz and Tysver, even Wilkins and Dickerson, the special care they took of him maybe even a game of deathbed, making sure as they fluffed up his pillows and smoothed down his sheets to keep their voices low, addressing each other in exaggerated whispers, cautious high sign. Two or three of them actually tiptoeing, so that, despite himself, he found he could not keep his eyes open, was succumbing to the lullaby of their oddly soothing movements.