J. Coetzee - Slow Man

The nights are endless. He is too hot, he is too cold; the leg, closed in its swaddling, itches and cannot be reached. If he holds his breath he can hear the ghostly creeping of his assaulted flesh as it tries to knit itself together again. Outside the sealed window a cricket chants to itself. When sleep comes it is sudden and brief, as if gusts of leftover anaesthetic were coming up from his lungs to overwhelm him.

Night or day, time drags. There is a television set facing the bed, but he has no interest in television or in the magazines some kind agency has provided (Who. Vanity Fair. Australian Homes amp; Gardens). He stares at his watch face, imprinting the position of the hands on his mind. Then he closes his eyes, tries to think of other things – his own breathing, his grandmother sitting at the kitchen table plucking a chicken, bees among the flowers, anything. He opens his eyes. The hands have not stirred. It is as though they have to push their way through glue.

The clock stands still yet time does not. Even as he lies here he can feel time at work on him like a wasting disease, like the quicklime they pour on corpses. Time is gnawing away at him, devouring one by one the cells that make him up. His cells are going out like lights.

The pills he is given every sixth hour wash away the worst of the pain, which is good, and sometimes send him to sleep, which is better; but they also confuse his mind and bring such panic and terror to his dreams that he baulks at taking them. Pain is nothing, he tells himself, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. But of course he is wrong. Pain is the real thing, it does not have to press hard to persuade him of that, it does not have to press at all, merely to send a flash or two; after which he quickly settles for the confusion, the bad dreams.

Someone else has been moved into his room, a man older than himself come back from hip surgery. The man lies all day with his eyes shut. Now and again a pair of nurses close the curtains around his bed and, under cover, attend to his body's needs.

Two oldsters; two old fellows in the same boat. The nurses are good, they are kind and cheery, but beneath their brisk efficiency he can detect – he is not wrong, he has seen it too often in the past – a final indifference to their fate, his and his companion's. From young Dr Hansen he feels, beneath the kindly concern, the same indifference. It is as though at some unconscious level these young people who have been assigned to care for them know they have nothing left to give to the tribe and therefore do not count. So young and yet so heartless! he cries to himself. How did I come to fall into their hands? Better for the old to tend the old, the dying the dying! And what folly to be so alone in the world!

They talk about his future, they nag him to do the exercises that will prepare him for that future, they chivvy him out of bed; but to him there is no future, the door to the future has been closed and locked. If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their own end – who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down the pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose their features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be any trouble. The only matter they cannot take care of is the body they leave behind, the mound of flesh that, after a day or two, will begin to stink. If only it were possible, if only it were permitted, they would take a taxi to the crematorium, set themselves down before the fatal door, swallow their dose, then before consciousness dwindles press the button that will precipitate them into the flames and allow them to emerge on the other side as nothing but a shovelful of ash, almost weightless.

He is convinced that he would put an end to himself if he could, right now. Yet at the same time that he thinks this thought he knows he will do no such thing. It is only the pain, and the dragging, sleepless nights in this hospital, this zone of humiliation with no place to hide from the pitiless gaze of the young, that make him wish for death.

The implications of being single, solitary and alone are brought home to him most pointedly at the end of the second week of his stay in the land of whiteness.

'You don't have family?' says the night nurse, Janet, the one who allows herself banter with him. 'You don't have friends?' She screws up her nose as she speaks, as though it is a joke he is playing on them all.

'I have all the friends I could wish for,' he replies. 'I am not Robinson Crusoe. I just do not want to see any of them.'

'Seeing your friends would make you feel better,' she says. 'Give you a lift. I am sure.'

'I will receive visitors when I feel like it, thank you,' he says.

He is not irascible by nature, but in this place he allows himself spells of peevishness, tetchiness, choler, since that seems to make it easier for his minders to leave him alone. He's not so bad under the surface, he imagines Janet protesting to her colleagues. That old fart! he imagines her colleagues reply, snorting with derision.

He knows it is expected of him now that he is improving to experience gross desires towards these young women, desires which, because male patients, no matter their age, cannot help themselves, will surface at inconvenient times and must be deflected as quickly and decisively as possible.

The truth is that he has no such desires. His heart is as pure as a babe's. It wins him no credit among the nurses, of course, this purity of heart, nor does he expect it to. Being a lecherous old goat is part of the game, a game he is declining to play.

If he refuses to contact friends, it is simply because he does not want to be seen in his new, curtailed, humiliating, and humiliated state. But of course, one way or another, people get to hear of what happened. They send good wishes, they even call in person. On the telephone it is easy enough to make up a story. It's only a leg, he says, with a bitterness that he hopes does not come across on the line. I will be on crutches for a while, then on a prosthesis. In person the act is more difficult to bring off, since his detestation of the lumpish thing he will henceforth have to lug around with him is all too plainly written on his face.

From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Magill Road to the present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him. A golden opportunity was presented to him to set an example of how one accepts with good cheer one of the bitterer blows of fate, and he has spurned it. Who did this to me?: when he recalls how he shouted at the no doubt perfectly competent though rather ordinary young Dr Hansen, seeming to mean Who drove into me? but really meaning Who had the impudence to cut off my leg?, he is suffused with shame. He is not the first person in the world to suffer an unpleasant accident, not the first old man to find himself in hospital with well-intentioned but ultimately indifferent young people going through the motions of caring for him. A leg gone: what is losing a leg, in the larger perspective? In the larger perspective, losing a leg is no more than a rehearsal for losing everything. Whom is he going to shout at when that day arrives? Whom is he going to blame?

Margaret McCord pays a visit. The McCords are his oldest friends in Adelaide; Margaret is upset at having heard so late, and full of righteous indignation against whoever did this to him. 'I hope you are going to sue,' she says. 'I have no intention of suing,' he replies. 'Too many openings for comedy. I want my leg back, failing which… I leave that side of things to the insurance people.' 'You are making a mistake,' she says: 'people who drive recklessly should be taught a lesson. I suppose they will fit you out with a prosthesis. They make such wonderful prostheses nowadays, you will soon be riding your bicycle again.' 'I don't think so,' he replies. 'That part of my life is over.' Margaret shakes her head. 'What a pity!' she says. 'What a pity!'