Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

It seemed that everything was slipping away. David had showed Ogle his face in a hand mirror the day before while he was being shaved. The left side had sagged and wrinkled and collapsed like a rotten spot on a fruit.

A cleaning lady with swollen ankles and stockings rolled down on her shoes shifted him to another spot where the sun shone directly in his face and made his eyes blink and water.

“Hey,” he said, “the sun is in my face.”

“Hold your horses,” she said, “it will only be a minute.” She waddled away. He held up his stronger hand, his right, and sheltered his eyes. But after only a minute or two his shoulder began to ache and he let the hand drop back into his lap.

He sat quietly for a moment with the sun full on his face. I’m dying , he said to himself for the first time. The idea surprised him, coming as it did apparently from nowhere. He looked about him and understood with a flash of revelatory perception that everyone on this ward was dying. Everyone was a terminal case. Morissey. The stroke victim who sang “God Save the Queen.” The blasphemous clergyman. The demented old man who ate Kleenex and wet his bed. Everybody. No one was ever discharged. He couldn’t remember a single case. As Morissey had said, three men had died in Ogle’s bed and now Ogle saw that he would be the fourth. For a short time he had believed himself different. But there was no escaping this ward. Not even for a moment. Not even on a pass. There was no outside .

And Ogle ached, for the first time in his life, with pity for them all.

“Edward.”

He swivelled in his wheelchair and, blinking the sun out of his eyes, saw the old woman.

“Edward, my dear, dear husband,” she said, “where are the children? Where are Alma and John?”

Ogle began to sob. Each sob was torn, wrenched from his gut. “I don’t know,” he said. “Lost. I suppose they’re lost.” Even as he said these things he did not know what prompted him, except perhaps the desire to enter into a different world, to escape, at any cost, the present.

“Come here, dear,” she said, and the sunlight was melted and diffused in her glazed eyes, “Come here.”

Somehow he struggled across the hallway, the heels of his palms skidding on the rubber tires of his chair.

“We’ll find them,” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

“And after we find them,” she said, “we’ll have a picnic. The perfect end to a perfect day.”

“Fine,” agreed Ogle, who had quite unexpectedly acquired a taste for perfection.

JOE WAS dreaming, and in his dream his wife and he were having an argument. She had chosen a bad time to start this one. There Joe was, rubbers buckled, overcoat buttoned to his chin, gloves pulled on – all ready to set out for school. He stood with his hand impatiently gripping the doorknob, prickly with heat and wool and anger, feeling the sweat begin to crawl down his sides, waiting for her to finish with her damn nonsense. He suspected she was going to make him late for class, and at this thought he felt very anxious indeed. In thirty-five years of teaching he had never been late more than once or twice that he could remember.

“Of course I’m pregnant,” she said. “And you’re the dirty old man who slipped the bun in my oven. At your age. Imagine.”

“Don’t be silly,” he replied, doing his best to disguise his exasperation with her. “You’re fifty-seven years old and women fifty-seven years old don’t have babies.”

“Well, if I don’t have a bun in the oven, what do I have?” she inquired with a schoolgirlish petulance that made him feel slightly queasy, a trifle faint with disgust. This wasn’t at all like Marie. And why did she keep using that idiotic euphemism?

“You know what you have,” he said, angry with her for having it, and angry too that she refused to admit it. “You have a tumour on your uterus, and it’s no good pretending it’s a baby. Old women don’t have babies. It’s a goddamn law of nature. It’s a fact.”

It was the steep descent of the plane that woke him. The sense of imbalance, of disorientation, of falling, snapped him abruptly out of the dream. Almost immediately he was conscious of where he was, of his surroundings. He seldom stumbled and groped his way out of sleep any more, but was often jarred out of his dreams in this way, catapulted into reality.

He sat absolutely still and upright, acknowledging the insistent pressure of the seat-belt on his bladder, uncomfortably aware of his damp, sticky shirt tucked up his back.

I never think of her when I’m awake, he thought. Is that why I dream? Is there a law of psychological compensation which I must pay?

The woman sitting beside him, realizing he was no longer asleep, said: “We’re beginning our landing approach now.”

Joe smiled and nodded to her while he took final stock of how she had fared on the flight. She had certainly boarded pert and powdered enough, but in the course of eight hours her make-up had been ravaged and she had undergone some changes for the worse. Everyone over forty had. At that age the body forgets how to forgive, thought Joe. Here we sit, swollen with gas, eyes raw from lack of sleep, legs cramped and toes afire with pins and needles, smiling amiably and socking back the charter-flight booze, prepared to cheerfully suffer the consequences and pay the penalties.

Joe turned and looked out his window. Rags of vapour tore past, luminous with a feeble, watery sunshine. He couldn’t see land below, only a thick, undulating surface of cloud. Nor could he make out what the pilot was saying. His ears had blocked with the change in altitude.

“What’s that? What’s he saying?” he inquired of the woman beside him. He cocked his head to indicate deafness.

“The temperature is fifty-four degrees,” she said, mouthing the words carefully. “Sweater weather.”

“Good,” he replied, acting as if it genuinely mattered to him.

“We’ll be there in minutes,” she commented, smoothing a plaid skirt down on her heavy thighs. “I can hardly wait to take a bath and crawl between clean sheets.” The woman laughed uncomfortably and inexplicably. Was it the word sheets? “I’m staying at the Penta.” She paused. “What about you? Where are you staying?”

Good God, woman, Joe thought.

“I’m staying with my son and daughter-in-law,” he lied.

“In London?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? You’ll have a full schedule with them taking you around to see the sights, won’t you?”

“Sure will.” Hungry, hunting widow. At least she had said her husband was dead, explaining her ring. But how did you know? Nowadays women were liable to lie about that sort of thing.

The plane suddenly dropped out of the bank of clouds. They were much lower than Joe had suspected. Below him he saw a rush of hummocked, rank turf of such a startling green, a green so unprecedented in his experience, that it struck him as false, a tourist’s hopeful, unrealistic vision. A tiny man toiled in his garden allotment, unconcerned as the plane bellied over him, sweeping him in its dark shadow, surrounding him in a shimmering bath of sound waves.

Joe’s ears popped, clearing, and simultaneously he heard the pilot announce, seconds before the tires touched the tarmac – a fine display of a sense of the dramatic: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to England in Jubilee Year.”

There was a ragged cheer of approval and a smattering of hand-clapping. Relief at journey’s end, at escaping this aluminum tube, at being safe.

Joe smacked his hands together too. And old English teacher that he was, though out of harness, he muttered a line of Blake’s that ran through his mind as swiftly and verdantly as the ground, only seconds before, had sped beneath him.