John Irving - In One Person

The man Charles closely resembled was a tattooed muscleman with ivory-pale skin; he had a shaved-bald head, with a black patch of whiskers on the point of his chin, and two diamond-stud earrings. He wore a black leather vest and a jockstrap, and a well-shined pair of motorcycle boots, and his job at the Mineshaft was to dispatch people who needed dispatching. He was called Mephistopheles; on his nights “off” from the Mineshaft, he would hang out at a gay black bar called Keller’s. I think Keller’s was on West Street, on the corner of Barrow, near the Christopher Street pier, but I never went there—no white guys I knew did. (The story I’d heard at the Mineshaft was that Mephistopheles went to Keller’s to fuck black guys, or to pick fights with them, and it didn’t matter to Mephistopheles which he did; the fucking and the fighting were all the same to him, which was no doubt why he fit right in at an S&M joint like the Mineshaft.)

Yet the male nurse, who was attending so carefully to my dead friend, was not that same Mephistopheles—nor were the ministrations Charles made to poor Tom’s remains of a deviant or sexual nature. Charles was fussing over the Hickman catheter dangling from Atkins’s unmoving chest.

“Poor Tommy—it’s not my job to remove the Hickman,” the nurse explained to Elaine and me. “The undertaker will pull it out. You see, there’s a cuff—it’s like a Velcro collar, around the tube—just inside the point where it enters the skin. Tommy’s cells, his skin and body cells, have grown into that Velcro mesh. That’s what keeps the catheter in place, so it doesn’t fall out or get tugged loose. All the undertaker has to do is give it a very firm jerk, and out it comes,” Charles told us; Elaine looked away.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have left Tom alone,” I told the nurse.

“Lots of people want to die alone,” the nurse said. “I know Tommy wanted to see you—I know he had something to say. I’ll bet he said it, right?” Charles asked me. He looked up at me and smiled. He was a strong, good-looking man with a crew cut and one silver earring—in the upper, cartilaginous part of his left ear. He was clean-shaven, and when he smiled, Charles looked nothing at all like the man I knew as Mephistopheles—a Mineshaft thug-enforcer.

“Yes, I think Tom said what he had to say,” I told Charles. “He wanted me to keep an eye on Peter.”

“Yes, well—good luck with that. I’m guessing that’ll be up to Peter!” Charles said. (I’d not been entirely wrong to mistake him for a bouncer at the Mineshaft; Charles had some of the same cavalier qualities.)

“No, no, no!” we could hear young Peter crying all the way from the kitchen. The girl, Emily, had stopped screaming; so had her mom.

Charles was unseasonably dressed for December in New Jersey, the tight black T-shirt showing off his muscles and his tattoos.

“It didn’t seem that the oxygen was working,” I said to Charles.

“It was working only a little. The problem with PCP is that it’s diffuse, it affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels—hence into your body,” the nurse explained.

“Tom’s hands were so cold,” Elaine said.

“Tommy didn’t want the ventilator,” Charles continued; he appeared to be done with the Hickman catheter. The nurse was washing the crusted Candida from the area of Atkins’s mouth. “I want to clean him up before Sue and the kids see him,” Charles said.

“And Mrs . Atkins—her cough,” I said. “It’s just going to get worse, right?”

“It’s a dry cough—sometimes it’s no cough. People make too much of the cough. It’s the shortness of breath that gets worse,” the nurse told me. “Tommy just ran out of breath,” Charles said.

“Charles—we want to see him!” Mrs. Atkins was calling.

“No, no, no,” Peter kept crying.

“I hate you, Charles!” Emily shouted from the kitchen.

“I know you do, honey!” Charles called back. “Just give me a second—all of you!”

I bent over Atkins and kissed his clammy forehead. “I underestimated him,” I said to Elaine.

“Don’t cry now, Billy,” Elaine told me.

I tensed up suddenly, because I thought Charles was going to hug me or kiss me—or perhaps only push me away from the raised bed—but he was merely trying to give me his business card. “Call me, William Abbott—let me know how Peter can contact you, if he wants to.”

“If he wants to,” I repeated, taking the nurse’s card.

Usually, when anyone addressed me as “William Abbott,” I could tell the person was a reader—or that he (or she) at least knew I was “the writer.” But beyond my certainty that Charles was gay, I couldn’t tell about the reader part.

“Charles!” Sue Atkins was calling breathlessly.

Elaine and I, and Charles, were all staring at poor Tom. I can’t say that Tom Atkins looked “peaceful,” but he was at rest from his terrible exertions to breathe.

“No, no, no,” his darling boy was crying—softer now.

Elaine and I saw Charles glance up suddenly at the open doorway. “Oh, it’s you, Jacques,” the nurse said. “It’s okay— you can come in. Come on.”

Elaine and I saw each other flinch. There was no concealing which Jacques we thought had come to say good-bye to Tom Atkins. But in the doorway was not the Zhak Elaine and I had been expecting. Was it possible that, for twenty years, Elaine and I were anticipating we might see Kittredge again?

In the doorway, the old dog stood—uncertain of his next arthritic step.

“Come on, boy,” Charles said, and Jacques limped forward into his former master’s former study. Charles lifted one of Tom’s cold hands off the side of the bed, and the old Labrador put his cold nose against it.

There were other presences in the doorway—soon to be in the small room with us—and Elaine and I retreated from poor Tom’s bedside. Sue Atkins gave me a wan smile. “How nice to have met you, finally,” the dying woman said. “Do stay in touch.” Like Tom’s father, twenty years ago, she didn’t shake my hand.

The boy, Peter, didn’t once look at me; he ran to his father and hugged the diminished body. The girl, Emily, glanced (albeit quickly) at Elaine; then she looked at Charles and screamed. The old dog just sat there, as he’d sat—expecting nothing—in the kitchen.

All the long way down that hall, through the vestibule (where I only now noticed an undecorated Christmas tree), and out of that afflicted house, Elaine kept repeating something I couldn’t quite hear. In the driveway was the taxi driver from the train station, whom we’d asked to wait. (To my surprise, we’d been inside the Atkins house only for forty-five minutes or an hour; it had felt, to Elaine and me, as if we’d been there half our lives.)

“I can’t hear what you’re saying,” I said to Elaine, when we were in the taxi.

“What happens to the duck, Billy?” Elaine repeated—loudly enough, this time, so that I could hear her.

Okay, so this is another epilogue, I was thinking.

“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” Prospero says—act 4, scene 1. At one time, I’d actually imagined that The Tempest could and should end there.

How does Prospero begin the epilogue? I was trying to remember. Of course Richard Abbott would know, but even when Elaine and I got back to New York, I knew I didn’t want to call Richard. (I wasn’t ready to tell Mrs. Hadley about Atkins.)

“First line of the epilogue to The Tempest, ” I said, as casually as I could, to Elaine in that funereal taxi. “You know—the end, spoken by Prospero. How’s it begin?”