Charles Baxter: There's Something I Want You to Do

In the distance the doctor saw the blinking red light of a radio transmission tower.

When you got down to the heart of things, you found desolation. Even in the midst of joy, you would find it. But you would find joy everywhere too. His son took joy in combat and sometimes laughed in practice sessions. So complicated, the mixture of the two. The doctor reached for the Oreos and ate several. He had attained a new low, or was it a new high, in sleepiness. He felt like fighting the drowsiness, but the drowsiness welcomed him, as any narcotic does, taking him up and away.

Christmas is coming, the doctor thought, the geese are getting fat. A child’s rhyme from elementary school. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. Why are the geese fat? Who feeds the geese? If you haven’t got a penny…what will do…the doctor heard a sound, without definition, and the road tilted a bit…

—

Then things were flying around him — the cell phone had escaped from his coat pocket and was airborne in front of him, as were various other items, including the bags of snack food and a clipboard from the front seat — and he heard the sound of crunching or of some huge animal chewing up the car as it rotated and fell down into a ditch, and Elijah, now thoroughly awake, felt his driver’s-side door open (how had that happened?), and he was ejected sideways, having forgotten to buckle his seat belt. Narcolepsy, he thought, with an odd diagnostic lucidity even as he came to rest on a little hill at the side of a field with, he instantly knew from the pain, a broken leg, a fractured tibia. He had always been a crack diagnostician, and even now on his back in the dirt, staring up at the night sky, cookie crumbs on his lips, his skills had not deserted him. How stupid pain is . From below the knee, thanks to the fracture, pain sent its dull, insistent message upstairs to the brain. Pain was like a siren. Pleasure never worked that way. The air had turned very cold.

Now he felt himself shivering rather violently from the cold and shock amid the field’s dirt and snow. He saw the constellations above him wheeling in their eternal rounds, and a great peacefulness took hold of him, like the slow spreading of pleasure under the skin in a vague fog diffusing itself in a warm glow — a fog that lit up the soul. Underneath the peacefulness dwelt the pain. They could coexist.

He sniffed. The temperature was below freezing. He would die of hypothermia out here. No one would see him. He had landed in the middle of nowhere. His right hand was lacerated and was bleeding steadily. But it was perfectly all right, all of it, especially the bleeding.

The image of his son sparring intervened, and he realized that he didn’t want the last faces he ever saw on Earth to be the faces of Herb and Eleanor Lundgren. Yes! He had remembered their names! He tried to sit up, and he looked around: in the distance, across the field directly behind him, stood a farmhouse with a single light at the top of a pole illuminating its driveway. He would have to be Gerald, it seemed, to get over there, and he could do it, and he thanked his wife for imagining Gerald, a combative man, into existence. He began crawling, using his elbows and dragging the rest of his incapacitated body, and he distracted himself from his own loud cries by admiring the sky full of stars indifferent to his situation, and also admiring the plainspoken stupidity of pain burning a hole in his leg. He crawled a certain distance, he didn’t know how far, trying to reduce his cries to groans. What was the point in groaning? No one would hear.

He was in terrible pain but a rather good mood.

Ahead of him, in the field, to the right, out of the cold, out of the dark, out of the emptiness, a bell rang: his cell phone.

He crawled toward it. He dragged along the ground every cell of his corpulent body. By the time he reached the phone, the screen read, “Missed Call.” The phone had been flung, as he himself had been, from the car, and now here it was, a gift from the gods who perhaps did not want him dead after all or had changed their minds, and after grasping the phone and reading the missed-call message — it had been from Democratic Party headquarters, no doubt soliciting a donation — he called home and told Susan what had happened to him and that he loved her, as she cried and shouted and then at last calmed down and told him how much she loved him and always had. Where was he? she demanded. He said he didn’t know and would call the police. He promised to call her back, and then, peering down at the numbers, he called 911. He tried to describe his location to the dispatcher, but he didn’t know the name of the road he had been on, so, between the bursts of imbecilic pain, he did his best to inform her about everything he saw, the blank landscape, the nondescript trees, the constellations above him (he was in shock, he knew), and again luck was with him: he said he thought he could maybe spot a tattered sign in the distance advertising a U-pick apple orchard, and the dispatcher said, oh, all right, yes, she knew where he was, and besides, they could find him using his phone and a GPS track. Stay calm, she told him. Don’t move.

—

He disobeyed her. When the EMT guys arrived, their incandescent spotlight found his face, and he waved his arm at them and shouted for his life.

In memory of THB

and for Chris

He had stuffed his suitcase into the empty overhead bin, having purchased early-boarding rights from the airline, and had settled into his nonreclining seat, 32-B, when he had to stand up again to let the passenger in 32-A get past him. 32-A accompanied almost every move — taking off his raincoat, placing his crossword-puzzle book on the seat — with an unpleasant, guttural grunt. 32-A was a short man, of a certain age, stooped but solid, with hair dyed inky black. Apparently indifferent to mere appearances, he displayed traces of dandruff on his rumpled suit. Dandruff had also made its way onto his soiled and unpressed lime-green necktie. Harry Albert, who, by contrast, dressed rather elegantly and could still turn heads for his handsomeness, gave the man a nod, but 32-A did not nod in return. When 32-A finally sat down, he said, “Whoof.”

Harry nodded and, between staged laughs, said, “That’s right!” trying to be friendly. However, 32-A did not seem interested in Harry’s amiable agreement and pulled out a battered copy of that day’s Minneapolis Star Tribune . He turned to the business page and commenced to read. From time to time he uttered subvocaliz ations. Grim-faced, the flight attendants announced that they had “a very full flight.” They proceeded to help passengers force their luggage into the already crammed overhead spaces. They gave instructions in the use of seat belts and oxygen masks, and eventually the plane was airborne.

Going through the cloud cover, the plane bounced and rattled. A few passengers laughed nervously. One overhead compartment popped open. A little girl screamed. The captain announced that there would be no beverage service, for now: too much turbulence.

“Bumpy flight,” Harry Albert said.

“Unhrh,” 32-A replied.

Well, he wouldn’t bother to introduce himself to a man whose only conversational gambit consisted of nonverbal animal-like rumbling. Trying to doze, Harry heard 32-A making more peculiar sounds, like a dog having a nightmare. It would be impossible to doze off with this guy growling next to him. Feeling despondent, Harry reached for his paperback copy of Schindler’s List, which someone had recommended.

32-A glanced over and grunted again. Finally he spoke up. “I was one of those.” He had traces of a middle European accent, nearly gone, mostly dead but still living, a ghoul-accent.