Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

Everything is happening instantly and simultaneously; his hand seems to be a sign not only from Renny but Thomas, too, and the long knives of panic pierce my chest and belly. I want to have faith in the lifeguards but they’re so young, and not turning back to check Renny, I swim as fast as I can out to the line of red-and-white floats. It’s deep out here and I realize that this is where Thomas would be, this is where he would put himself, and when I dive I am absolutely sure I’ll see him. And I do: a stocky little figure, crouched as if sitting, his shape hardly discernible. I kick and swoop under him and then lift us upward. When we surface, two lifeguards take him and swim him quickly to shore. I let them because I think I wish to have faith, because there is really nothing but that for someone like me, and because of Renny, because I can’t stand yet another abandonment in my life, even if it’s for a brief moment.

Just as I reach him, Renny’s mouth dips beneath the water. I brace him and he coughs weakly. His rich brown skin is muddy, grayish about the neck and face and hands; his breathing is labored. His eyes are glassy. On the beach Liv is bleating something in a tiny voice, shuffling back in half-steps. It is in fact a natural reaction, one of the many that people can have. Against my back I can almost feel the thrum of Renny’s heart racing, then arresting, then racing again. I shout ahead to an onlooker to call for an ambulance. Some steps away the lifeguards are working on Thomas, and I hear his gasp and hack and he instinctively sits up and looks about. I nod, and he begins to cry. The presumed missing boy is walking up the shoreline with a hot dog in his hand; he’s not been in the water for some time. But Renny spasms then, as if he’s hugged me, a broad, low electric shudder, and somehow I carry his big frame right up onto the shore.

“Oh my God, he’s dying,” Liv says, collapsing to her knees. “He’s dying.”

I do not answer, not from fear that she is right but that I am so certain she is wrong, for there will be no dying for him today, I think, I cannot allow it — in the way a doctor, perhaps once or twice in his career, might not simply abide — and if I have to reach inside his chest I shall, reach inside and roughly clasp his heart and will it back alive.

WHY MUST ALL MY PATHS lead to the forlorn, unpolished wards of some hospital? Sitting here in Renny’s cramped but tidy office, I fear I am afflicted. Or even worse. For how can one slight, shrinking-in-the-bones fellow be such a lingering pall of sickness and mortality, casting darkly upon his associates and friends and recently discovered loved ones, who (almost) to the last profess their happiness for having known him, and for knowing him still? They phone him and say grace for him and invite him to their rooms, and then they even send flowers to his house when he should be bearing flowers tenfold back to them, a veritable nursery of grateful tidings.

Renny, thank goodness, will survive. Indeed, as I suspected, it was a first heart attack, and had not the paramedic unit arrived so quickly (having stopped for lunch, by chance, a few streets away at the time of the call), the damage to his heart muscle would have been dangerously severe, perhaps forever debilitating. He was napping this morning when I visited him, still propped up in the tilted bed, the lines to the various monitors and saline drip and his oxygen crisscrossing his wide, bared chest. The fluorescent light fixture above his bed had been left on, and beneath its cool, icy cast, he appeared as if he were alive but being preserved in a kind of science-fictional stasis, his hair unevenly matted from sleep, his skin dull of sheen, the beeps and hums of the machines standing in for the sounds of his living.

Thomas, whom I brought along with me, was initially frightened by the congealed, webbish sight of him, as was I. The boy wouldn’t step immediately into the room; he needed a moment or two to gather his courage. When I finally led him in he wouldn’t go past the foot of the bed, standing there as quiet and unmoving as a stone, as quiet as I have ever seen him until last week, when he was curled up in his own hospital bed after the jarring, frightening events at the pool. His mother, to my surprise, had been the picture of calm when she arrived in the ward. Thomas was by all accounts fine, solely in for a night’s observation and monitoring, and she had listened studiously to young Dr. Weil, nodding and even taking notes in a black leather organizer. She asked him questions about what to expect, what signs of complication might appear, infections and fevers and whatnot. She inquired earnestly after Renny, whom she didn’t know. I stood by and listened, not saying a word, though not avoiding her eyes, either, which weren’t accusatory or angry but rather relieved and a little frazzled, with the depth of that life-worn knowing, that hushing stare of all loving mothers and fathers. I would have gladly endured a fit of rage, or a frosty harangue of disappointment, and yet it seemed she was making efforts to assure the clearness of my conscience, despite the unavoidable fact of my momentary carelessness and lack of vigilance, which I didn’t attempt to diminish when I first phoned with the news. Why she should be so gentle with me I couldn’t figure, except for my obvious tender feeling for the boy, which I suppose anyone would see. But I heard something else, too, or so I wished I’d heard it, the willing sufferance of me in her tone, the first hint of a generous, filial allowing that I probably ought never to deserve.

In Renny’s case, I have deep regrets. He believes I saved his life, when in fact I likely endangered it by not going to him right away. But nothing I say will convince him; I’m his hero, his savior, his lifelong guardian angel. He sleeps much now, so I can’t educate him with what really happened. And then Liv, too, must be misremembering the scene, for she’s been equally grateful and then nervous, no doubt abraded by this rough brush with mortality.

“I still feel jittery, Doc,” she said to me this afternoon, in the corridor outside his room. I had taken Thomas back to Sunny and had returned to resume my vigil. Liv had arrived from her office in the interval, and she was not looking like herself; she was disheveled and not wearing makeup and drinking a non-diet Coke.

“I’m weak,” she moaned. “Terribly weak. I can hardly drive. God, I can hardly dial a number on my car phone. It’s all hitting me. Tell me it’ll soon go away.”

“I can’t truly say, Liv. But I wish I could.”

“Well, please just say something helpful.”

I asked what that might be.

“Something reassuring and wise.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I told her, “Then I am certain your strength will return. So will Renny’s. Completely for you both. And you will live together in contentment and happiness. You will grow very old together.”

“Please don’t say that, Doc!”

“Your strength is increasing already.”

“Ha!” she cried, squeezing my hand. “You’re a good doctor, Franklin Hata.”

“You know as well as anyone, Liv, that I’m not.”

“I know, I know,” she said, brushing lint from my shoulder. She sounded a bit arch again, though still tensed up, wound tightly with everything. “But you are, aren’t you? I mean inside, you are a doctor, whatever you actually know. I can tell. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or not. You have the spirit of one in you. The essence.”

“I don’t know, Liv. I don’t know what that is.”

“Well, I do,” she said firmly. “And you have it. It’s not empathy, exactly. It’s just that you know what people are feeling, and what they want. You sense their pulses, I guess.”