Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

He soon knew, though, that his was an outsider’s view, a casualness that was the result of a life’s isolation from disease, the residual prejudice of the healthy that somehow the sick are themselves to blame for what is wrong with them. Realizing this, he deliberately tried to negate those techniques which had come naturally to him while he was still the stranger in the room. He would have to acknowledge himself their diseased ally. If his stay in the hospital were to help him at all, he knew he had willfully to overcome all reluctance. Thus, he began to watch everything with the demanding curiosity of a child, as though only through a constant exercise of what once he might have considered bad taste could he gain important insight into the processes of life and death. He began, then, non-judiciously to observe everything. It was a palpable disappointment to him when a doctor or a nurse had occasion to place a screen around the bed of one of the other patients, and often he would ask the man after the nurse had gone what had been done for him.

Even the meals they ate together were a new experience for him. There was something elemental in the group feedings. Everything about the eating process became familiar to him. He examined their trays. He studied the impressions their teeth made on unfinished pieces of bread. He stared at bones, bits of chewed meat; he looked for saliva left in spoons. Everything was pertinent. Processes he had before considered inviolate now all had a place in the design. When a nurse brought a bedpan for one of the men and he sat straight up in his bed and pulled the sheet high up over his chest, Feldman would not look away.

He asked them to describe their pain.

The others in the room with Feldman were not, as the doctor had predicted they would be, old men. Only one, the man in the bed next to his own, was clearly older than Feldman. But if they were not as aged as he had expected, they were as sick. The chronic stages of their illnesses — even the fetid patterns of the most coarse inroads of their decay — were somehow agreeable to Feldman and seemed to support his decision to come to the hospital. These men shared with him, if not his own unconditional surrender of the future, then certainly a partial disavowal of it; and if they counted on getting better, at least they did not make the claims on that future which Feldman had found (it came to this) so disagreeable in others. It had been suggested to them that they might not get well. They considered this seriously and acknowledged, once they understood the nature of their conditions, the unpleasant priority of doom. Only then did they hire their doctors, call in their specialists, retire from their businesses, and set themselves resolutely to the task of getting well. This much Feldman could accept as long as — and here he drew an arbitrary line — they behaved like gentlemen. He found in the sick what he had wanted to find: a group of people who knew their rights, but would not insist on them. Their calm was his own assurance that his instincts had been right, and so what little he said to them was to encourage them in that calm.

One morning the youngest of the four, a college boy who had been stricken with a severe heart attack, showed signs of rapid weakening. He had vomited several times and was in great pain. Someone called the nurse. Seeing the serious pallor of the suffering man, she called the intern. The intern, a nervous young doctor who gave the air of being at once supremely interested in the patient’s convulsions and supremely incapable of rising to their occasion, immediately dispatched a call for the boy’s doctor.

“It seems,” the boy said, smiling weakly, “that I won’t be able to die until all of them have examined me.”

It was for Feldman precisely the right note. “Hang on,” he said to him. “If you feel yourself going, ask for a specialist from Prague.”

The boy laughed and did not die at all. Feldman attributed this to some superior element in this patient’s character which fell halfway between resolutely dignified determination and good sportsmanship.

He had come, he knew, to a sort of clearing house for disease, and sometimes at night (he did not sleep much) he could visualize what seemed to him to be the tremendous forces of destruction at work in the room. His own cancer he saw as some horribly lethal worm that inched its way through his body, spraying on everything it touched small death. He saw it work its way up through the channels of his body and watched as pieces of it fell from his mouth when he spit into his handkerchief. He knew that inside the other men something like the same dark ugliness worked with a steady, persevering ubiquity, and supposed that the worm was pridefully aware that its must be the triumph.

One night as Feldman lay between sleep and wakefulness, there came a terrible groan from the next bed. He looked up quickly, not sure he had not made the sound himself. It came again, as if pushed out by unbearable pain. Feldman buried his head in the pillow to smother the sound, but the groan continued. It was a noise that started deep in the man’s chest and became at last a gasping yell for breath. Feldman lay very still. He did not want the man to know he was awake. Such pain could not continue long. He would lie quietly and wait it out. When the noise did not stop, Feldman held his breath and bit his lips. There was such urgency in the screams, nothing of gentlemanly relinquishment. He was about to give in to the overbearing insistence of the man’s pain, but before he could force himself to do something he heard the sick man push himself nearer. Feldman turned his face to watch, and in the glow from the red night lamp above the door he could see that the man lay half out of the bed. He was trying, with a desperate strength that came from somewhere deep inside, to reach Feldman. He watched as the man’s hand clawed the air as though it were some substance by which he could sustain himself. He called to him, but Feldman could not answer.

“Mister, mister. You up?”

The hand continued to reach toward Feldman until the wild strength in it pulled the man off balance and the upper half of his body was thrust suddenly toward the floor. He was almost completely out of the bed.

“Mister. Mister. Please, are you up?”

Feldman forced himself to say yes.

The man groaned again.

“Do you want me to get the nurse?” Feldman asked him.

“Help me. Help me in the bed.”

Feldman got out of bed and put his arms around the man’s body. The other worked his arms around Feldman’s neck and they remained for a moment in a crazy embrace. Suddenly all his weight fell heavily in Feldman’s arms. Feldman feared the man was dead and half lifted, half pushed him back onto the bed. He listened carefully and heard at last, gratefully, spasms of breath. They sounded like sobs.

He was an old man. Whatever he had been like before, his contact and exchange with what Feldman had come to think of as a kind of poisoned, weathering rain, had left his skin limp, flaccid. (He had discovered that people die from the outside in.) After a minute the man opened his eyes. He looked at Feldman, who still held him, leaning over his bed with his arms around his shoulders as though to steady them.

“It’s gone now,” the man said. His breath was sweetly sick, like garbage fouled by flies and birds. “I’m better.”

The man closed his eyes and lowered his head on his chest. “I needed,” he said after a while, “someone’s arms to hold me. At the house my daughter would come when I cried. My wife couldn’t take it. She’s not so well herself, and my daughter would come to hold me when I cried from the pain. She’s just a teenager.” The man sobbed.

Feldman took his hands from the man’s shoulders and sat on the edge of the bed.