Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Feldman had now to compose himself and deliberately scheme out what he was to do with the remainder of his life. He was now the prisoner of his freedom of choice. Further heroism (pretending that death meant nothing) would be ludicrous with all of them looking on, their eyes shielded by impossible lace handkerchiefs. It was almost better deliberately to impale himself upon their sympathies, to cry out for water in the middle of the night, to languish visibly before their frightened stares, to call to strangers in the street, “Look, look, I’m dying.”

With their discovery of his situation, what he had hoped would be the dignified end of his life threatened in fact to become a stagey, circusy rout, rather like the disorganized, sentimental farewell of baseball fans to a team moving forever to another city. And since he would not soon die (the one year he had been given had already extended itself to sixteen months and there were no visible signs of any acceleration of his decay) he became rather annoyed with his position. He quickly discovered that planning one’s death had as many attendant exigencies as planning one’s life. Were he a youth, a mistake in planning could be neutralized, even changed perhaps to an unexpected asset; the simple fact was that he had no time. That he was still alive four months after his year of grace indicated only a mistake in calculation, not in diagnosis. Strangely, the additional four months served to make his expected end more imminent for him.

He found himself suddenly an object. On Sundays, distant cousins and their children would make pilgrimages to his home to see him. They meant no harm, he knew, but in a way they had come for a kind of thrill, and when they discovered this they grew uncomfortable in his presence. Ashamed of what they suddenly realized were their motives, they secretly blamed him for having forced their tastes into a debauch. Others, not so sensitive, made him a hero long after he himself had dismissed this as a possibility. A nephew of his, who consistently mistook in himself as legitimate curiosity what was only morbid necrophilism, would force him into ridiculous conversations which the boy considered somehow ennobling. On one occasion he had completely shocked Feldman.

“Do you find yourself believing in an after-life?”

“I think that’s in poor taste,” Feldman said.

“No, what I mean is that before it happens, lots of people who had never been particularly religious before suddenly find themselves slipping into a kind of wish-fulfillment they call faith.”

“Stop that,” Feldman told him angrily.

After his conversation with his nephew Feldman realized something he found very disturbing. He knew that he had not, after all, accepted his death as a very real possibility. Though he had made plans and changed them, though he had indulged in protean fantasies in which he had gone alone to the edge of sheer marble precipices, he had been playing merely. It was as if he had been toying with the idea of a “grim reaper,” playing intellectual games with chalky skeletons and bogeymen; he had not in fact thought about his death, only about his dying: the preoccupied man of affairs casually scribbling last words on a telephone memorandum pad. His nephew’s absolute acceptance of the likelihood that one day Feldman would cease to exist had offended him. He had considered the boy’s proposition an indelicacy, the continuance of the familiar world after his own absence from it a gross insult. He knew the enormity of such vanity and he was ashamed. He thought for the first time of other dying men, and though he knew that each man’s cancer was or should be a sacred circumstance of that man’s existence, he felt a sudden urgency to know such men, to submerge himself in their presence. Because he could think of no other way of doing this, he determined to speak to his doctor about having himself committed to a hospital.

It was evening and the other patients had left the old man’s office. They had gone, he knew, to drugstores to obtain prescriptions which would make them well. The doctor stood over the small porcelain sink, rubbing from his hands the world’s germs.

“You’ve been lucky,” the doctor said. “The year I gave you has turned out to be much more than a year. Perhaps your luck will continue longer, but it can’t continue indefinitely. Get out of your mind that there’s any cure for what you have. You’ve been mortally wounded.”

“I didn’t say anything about cures.”

“Then what good would a hospital be? Surely you don’t mean to die in a hospital? I can’t operate. There’s no chance.” The doctor spoke slowly, his voice soft. Obviously, Feldman thought, he was enjoying the conversation.

“What I have, this imperfection in my side, is too private to remove,” Feldman said, rising to the occasion of the other’s rhetoric, engaging the old man’s sense of drama, his conspicuous taste for the heavy-fated wheelings of the Great Moment. Looking at the doctor, Feldman was reminded of his nephew. He felt, not unpleasantly, like an actor feeding cues. “I thought that with the others…”

“You’re wrong. Have you ever been in a hospital room with three old men who are dying, or who think they are? Each is jealous of the others’ pain. Nothing’s so selfish. People die hard. The death rattle, when it comes, is a terrored whine, the scream of sirens wailing their emergency.”

“You’re healthy,” Feldman told him. “You don’t understand them.”

The doctor did not answer immediately. He remained by the porcelain bowl and turned on the hot-water tap. When it was so hot that Feldman could see steam film the mirror above the sink, the doctor plunged his hands into the water. “I’m old,” he finally said.

Oh no, Feldman thought; really, this was too much. Even this ridiculous old man could not contemplate another’s death without insisting on his own. “But you’re not dying,” Feldman said. “There is nothing imminent.” He noted with unreasonable sadness that he had soiled the tissue paper which covered the examination table. He stood up self-consciously. “I want to be with the others. Please arrange it.”

“What could you gain from it? I’m tired of this talk. It smells of voices from the other side. Disease has taught you nothing, Feldman. When you first knew, you behaved like a man. You continued to go to business. You weren’t frightened. I thought, ‘This is wonderful. Here’s a man who knows how to die.’ ”

“I didn’t know I would be stared at. The others watch me, as though by rubbing against it now they can get used to it.”

“I had a patient,” the doctor said, “who had more or less what you have. When I told him he was to die, his doom lifted from him all the restraints he had ever felt. He determined to have the most fun he could in the time he had left. He left here a dangerous, but a reasonably contented, man.”

“Of course,” Feldman said. “I’ve thought about this too. It’s always the first thing that occurs to you after the earthquakes and the air raids, after the ice cream truck overturns. It’s a strong argument. To make off with all you can before the militia comes. I feel no real compulsion to appease myself, to reward myself for dying. Had I been forced to this, I would have been forced to it long before I learned I must die. For your other patient, nothing mattered. To me, things matter very much. We’re both selfish. Will you send me to the hospital?”

The ring of steam had thickened on the mirror. Feldman could see no reflection, only a hazy riot of light. The doctor told him he would make the arrangements.

At first the rituals of the hospital room strangely excited Feldman. He watched the nurses eagerly as they came into the four-bed ward to take temperatures and pulses. He studied their professional neutrality as they noted the results of blood pressure readings on the charts. When he could he read them. When they brought medication to the men in the other beds, Feldman asked what each thing was, what it could be expected to do. By casually observing the activity in the room, Feldman discovered that he could keep tabs on the health of the others, despite what even the men themselves might tell him when he asked how they were feeling.