Stanley Elkin - Boswell

The deaths of others are no less terrible. On my floor there are many very sick men, men who need oxygen tents in order to breathe, or who are fed through tubes, or who pass their water through catheters — who do now under difficulty, and only with the aid of machines, what once they did with no effort and no thought. These machines are oppressive; I cannot look at them without feeling sick. And yet, how much better to take nourishment through a rubber tube, to live in an oxygen tent as in a dog’s house, to pass waste through grotesque piping, than not to function at all? I see now what is bad about death. Its most terrible aspect is that it is cumulative— nails that do not grow, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, flesh that does not feel, brain that cannot think, blood that will not flow. It is like being strangled. I think of a small boy’s panic when a companion ducks his head under the water and holds it there. Of course death makes one insensible, but surely there must be, at the moment of death itself, just this sense of impotence — only greater, much greater, and more terrible. One cannot will the simplest thing, to bend a finger, roll the eyes. There is something horrible in such nullification, to have no more significance than a grain of sand; once having mattered, to count for nothing through eternity.

So shocking is this certainty, and so profound, that the merest hint of it seeping into the still living man’s consciousness is enough to contaminate everything that has come before it.

There is a man in the next room who has an advanced cancer. The others in the room with him are offended by his pain and his odor, but the man himself has grown indifferent to them as one is indifferent toward one’s bowels or the coarse sounds one makes in private. His family visits him — his son has come from Washington — but the man no longer cares about any of them. I learned from his son that the father was a printer, and that all his life he worked hard, making terrible sacrifices for his wife and children. By taking a second job some years ago he was able to earn enough to put his son through the university. Now the son is a lawyer and very grateful to his father, but the father is as indifferent to his son’s gratitude and love as he is to his own pain, as he is even to his own old fierce love for his boy. Already he is beyond this world and functions with a different intelligence. He knows new things. He knows what animals in traps know, what stones know.

Johnson says: “Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation which those who begin it by prudence and continue it with subtlety, must, after long expense of thought, conclude by chance.” He means, perhaps, that everybody’s happiness and unhappiness total up to the same thing finally — that the bill, when it is presented, is always the same. Perhaps. I see that no one ever really gets away with anything, that we all owe a death, but surely it is senseless to argue that some of us do not get more for our death than others. In a way, the housewife’s economy is the highest wisdom. One must watch the ads, risk the crowds, know his needs.

The thing is, I see, to be great, to sit the world like a prince on horseback, to send out the will like a tyrant his armies, with the warning not to come back empty- handed. I need what the tyrant needs. Like him, I need plunder and booty and tribute and empire and palace and slave. I need monuments and flags and drums and trumpets. I need my photograph enlarged a thousand times in the auditorium. I am not, however, a great man. I see that I will never have these things, that I must adjust to my life as I must to my death, and that finally the two adjustments are the same. But despite this, I will never do what others do. I will not write my life off or cut my losses. I will never treat with it as the man in the next room has been forced to treat with his. I see what happens to such men. Their cancers take away their histories. My cancer, when it comes, must not do that. When I am downed, when the latest drug proves useless, when the doctor, embarrassed, asks who is to be notified, when the morphine is no longer effective and pain builds on pain like one wave slapping another at the shore, when the high tide of low death is in, I must still have my history, and it must, somehow, matter!

I have conceived a plan. It is not clear in all its aspects yet, but I envisage a kind of club. It must include all the great men of my time, and I am to be the spirit behind it, mine the long table on the dais. If I cannot be great, then I can at least be a kind of Calypso. Heroes will sing in my caves, sit on my shores, seek sails on my illusory horizons.

Only the gods or death will free them.

My Uncle Myles came into the hospital room. He set his umbrella against the bed and placed his derby carefully over the leather handle.

“James, I did not come before because you refused to see me when I contacted you in your hotel.”

“Contacted me in my hotel? What are you talking about?”

“The evening of the fight. I called at your hotel and the room clerk rang you up.”

“I don’t remember that, Uncle Myles,” I said. “Why would I refuse to see you? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Nor did it to me,” my Uncle Myles said.

I tried to remember the evening my Uncle Myles referred to. It was less than two weeks before, but it might have been in another life. I remembered that I had been trying to locate Sallow. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I was trying to get in touch with John Sallow. The phone rang and I thought it must be him calling, but when I answered, it was the desk clerk telling me that some people wanted to see me. A man, I think, and a woman and a little boy.”

“I was the man,” my uncle said.

“Well, but the clerk didn’t give me your name, you see. I was very preoccupied. I should have asked. I was crazy that week.”

“I read of your defeat in the papers,” he said. “They said you were badly beaten.”

“I was,” I said. -

“You seem recovered now.”

“I’ll be getting out in three days,” I said. “I could have been discharged yesterday, but my policy pays for most of this and… well, I’ve no place to go now. I’ve quit wrestling.”

He seemed to hear this. “It paid well,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not rich, but I was able to save a little money.”

My uncle nodded. I thought I saw what was troubling him and I said, “I won’t be able to send you any more checks until money is coming in again.” (I had started to send him a little money after I began to wrestle.)

“You’ve been very generous,” he said stiffly. “I haven’t always been easy to get along with.”

“You’ve been very fine, Uncle Myles,” I said.

“We don’t agree about things.”

“I suspect we’re more alike than you think,” I said. “I’m a very conservative person.”

“I hope that is so,” he said. He sat down and looked around the room. “You have a private room,” he said after a while.

“I was in a ward at first — my policy stipulates a ward — but I couldn’t stand it there and I asked to be transferred. I pay the difference.”

“Of course you’ll have to be careful about your money now that you aren’t wrestling.”

“Yes. I suppose I will. It was just that I didn’t like being with sick people.”

“With strangers,” my uncle said.

“Yes, of course,” I said, remembering my uncle’s illness, “with strangers.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s very difficult. Even with people one has a feeling for. You know, James, I don’t mean to offend you, but I can’t say I’ve been unhappy about your going away. People get used to needing others. They are often surprised to learn they can do quite well without them.”