Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“It’s all right,” the man said. “Nothing will happen now. I’m sorry I made a nuisance.”

“You’ll be all right?”

“Sure. Yes. I’m good now.”

Feldman watched the man’s hand draw the blanket up over him. He held the blanket as one would hold the reins of a horse. The man turned his face away, and Feldman got up and started to go back to his own bed. “Mister,” the man called. Feldman turned quickly around. “Mister, would you ring the nurse? I think…I think I wet myself.”

After that, in the last stages of the man’s last illness, the disease multiplied itself; it possessed him, occupied him like an angry invader made to wait too long in siege beyond the gates. For Feldman it represented a stage in the process of decay he knew he might some day reach himself. When he spoke to the man he found that what he really wanted to say circled somewhere above them both like an unsure bird. It became increasingly difficult for him to speak to him at all. Instead, he lay quietly at night when in the urgency of his remarkable pain the man screamed, and pretended he was asleep. He could stand it only a week. Like the man’s wife, Feldman thought, I am not so well myself. No, I am not so very damned well myself. And one more thing, dissolution and death are not as inscrutable as they’re cracked up to be. They’re scrutable as hell. I’m tired, Feldman thought, of all this dying.

Once he had determined to leave he was impatient. He had wasted too much time already. He had been, he realized, so in awe of death that he had cut his own to his notions of it as a tailor cuts cloth to his model.

He moved quickly. That morning, while the old man slept and the two others were in private sections of the hospital for treatment, Feldman dressed. He hoped that the nurse would not come in. “Don’t you groan. Be still,” he silently addressed the sleeping body in the next bed. In the closet he found his clothes where the nurse had hung them. When he put them on he discovered that though he had worn them into the hospital only a few weeks before, they were now too big for him. They hung, almost without shape, over a body he did not remember until he began to clothe it. He dressed quickly, but could not resist tying his tie before the mirror in the bathroom. Knotting and reknotting it, adjusting the ends, gave him pleasure, imposed a kind of happiness.

He started to leave the room, but something held him. It was a vase of flowers set carefully on the window sill. The flowers had been a gift for the old man. They had been there for several days and now were fading. He walked to the window, lifted the vase and took it with him into the hospital corridor.

He waited until a student nurse came by. “Miss,” Feldman called after her softly. “Miss.” The nurse did not recognize him. “I want you to give these flowers to Feldman in Room 420.” She looked at the decayed blossoms. Feldman shrugged and said, “Alas, poor man, he’s dying. I did not want to offend him with anything too bright.” The nurse, bewildered, took the flowers he pushed into her hands. Feldman walked to the elevator and jabbed at the button. When the elevator did not come at once, he decided he couldn’t wait and took the four flights of steps down.

At the main desk in the lobby he had an inspiration. “How is Feldman, Room 420?” he asked the receptionist.

The girl thumbed through the card file in front of her. When she found his card she said, “Feldman, sir? He’s satisfactory.”

“I understood he was very sick. Condemned.”

The girl looked again at the card. “My card says ‘Satisfactory.’ ”

“Oh,” Feldman said.

“That only means he’s comfortable. In these terminal cases that’s all they ever say.”

“Satisfactory? Comfortable? Why doesn’t the hospital tell him? He’d be pleased.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sure,” Feldman said.

Outside, it occurred to him that since he had been partner to him in everything else, he would call his doctor. He went into a drugstore and dialed.

“It’s me. It’s Feldman. I’m out.”

“Where are you, Feldman?” the doctor asked.

“In a phone booth. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me well. I wanted to thank you.”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“I told you. I’ve left the hospital. That idea of mine about a fraternity among the sick? It wasn’t any good. I just blackballed myself. A man almost died in my room a few days ago and it paralyzed me. I couldn’t help him. I held him away from me as though he were soiled linen.”

“Get back to the hospital.”

“What for?”

“What am I going to say, that you’re cured? The charts still exist.”

“So do I. I’m not going back. I’m going to business.”

“You’re in no condition to go to business. Do you want to aggravate an already untenable position?”

“You are maybe the world’s all-time lousy doctor. You promised death. Now you threaten it. You said a year, and I sat down to wait. Well, I’m not waiting any more, that’s all.” He wondered if the old doctor’s passion for rhetoric were still strong in him. He decided to try him. “On every occasion I am going to hit for the solar plexus of the solar system,” Feldman said.

There was silence. Then the doctor, calmer, said, “I’ll call your wife.”

Outside the drugstore the sun was shining brightly and everything looked clean and new. Feldman was aware of the keenness of his impressions, but astonished more by the world itself than by his perception of it, he wondered at the absolute luminescence of the things about him. Objects seemed bathed in their own light. Things looked not new, he decided, so much as extraordinarily well kept up.

Across the street was a park, but between the park and Feldman was a boulevard where traffic raced by swiftly. He had to dodge the cars. It was an exciting game, having to dodge cars for one’s life as though death were, after all, something that could be held off by an effort of the will. The idea that he could control death made him giddy, and once, in his excitement, he almost slipped and fell. He thought, even in the act of regaining his lost balance, how strange that the death that might have resulted from his misstep would have been an accident unrelated to his disease. I’ve cured cancer, he thought happily.

In the park he sat down on a bench to rest. His activity had made him tired. “Slowly, slowly,” he cautioned himself. He had been aware of pain in his stomach since he left the hospital. Though it was not great, it was becoming gradually more severe, and he was afraid that it would become too much for him. He found that by holding his breath and remaining very still he could control the pain. Does it hurt? he asked himself. Only when I breathe, he answered. Nevertheless, he waited until he thought he could move without reawakening what he still thought of as the slothful parasite within himself, and then he looked around.

The world he had thought he was never to see again when he entered the hospital lay now around and before him in adjacent strata, disparate but contiguous planes in space. Because of his heightened awareness it seemed compartmentalized. He had the impression that he could distinguish where each section had been sewn onto the next. He saw the wide-arced slope of grass and trees — the park. Interrupting it — the busy boulevard like an un-calm sea. Beyond the angry roll and toss of traffic and black frozen asphalt like queer, dark ice in perpetual lap against the gutters of a foreign shore — an avenue. A commercial country of bank and shop where the billboards and marquees hung appended and unfurled, annexed like gaudily partisan consulate flags — almost, it seemed to Feldman in its smugly high-tariffed insularity, like a young and enterprising foreign power. Tall apartment buildings backstopped the planet, mountain ranges stacked against the world’s last margins, precarious and unbalanced. He knew that over these and beyond the curve of his world there were many leftover worlds. And the sun shone on them all. It was remarkable to him that people and worlds should be dying beneath such a sun.