Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

I put my hand on his head. “You have a fever,” I said.

“Well Jesus, Peggy, maybe I have the flu like a normal person. Maybe I feel a little lousy, and I fell because of that — my balance isn’t great in the first place — and now, like a normal person, I want to sleep in my bed and drink orange juice and feel better in a few days. If there’s anything that’ll make me feel worse, it’s being in a hospital.”

I nodded. Maybe he was right — how could I tell?

“Okay,” I said. “Do you mind if I stay?”

He sighed. “I don’t plan on being real entertaining.”

“I’ve watched you sleep before,” I said, “and you’re right, you’re not exactly enthralling.”

“Okay.” He gave me a grudging smile. “I’m going to sleep now.”

“I’ve been warned.”

He took off his glasses and set them on the windowsill beside his bed. When he was asleep, I called Astoria and asked if she could handle the library by herself. I was sorry, I said, I knew I had taken a lot of time off lately—

“Peggy,” she said softly. “You’ve barely taken off any. How much vacation time do you think you’ve got stored up?”

“No idea.”

“Call town hall,” she said. “I bet it’s a record.”

And then I sat there and watched him. Maybe this was the night he’d talk in his sleep. I even thought I’d claim he did; I thought he’d like that. Caroline came over at dinnertime with some soup and crackers for both of us.

“How’s the patient doing?” she asked.

“Okay, I think. Maybe tomorrow morning we can take him to the hospital, when he’s not so scared. I think the fall shook him up.”

“Naturally,” she said.

“Naturally.”

An hour later James said something. I thought he was talking in his sleep, and I leaned closer to hear what he said. It was my name. Then he opened his eyes.

“Peggy,” he said. He put out his hand. I moved closer, put my hand in his. “Don’t,” he began, and I took my hand away, but that wasn’t what he meant, he closed his hand around mine, made it disappear, and held on.

What he said was, “Don’t let them boil me.”

“What are you talking about?”

His eyes were glossy, strange paperweights in his face. “Like Charles Byrne.”

“Who?”

“You gave me a book,” he said. “A long time ago. Charles Byrne. He was a giant and he always thought this doctor, I forgot his name, was going to steal his body and boil it for the skeleton.”

“What a thing to be thinking of,” I said.

“And then he died and he’d paid his friends to take care of him but the doctor got his friends drunk and stole Byrne’s body anyhow and now it’s in some museum hospital. You think they’ll try that? With me?”

I felt his forehead. It was slick and warm. “How do you feel?”

“Don’t let them. They want my bones.”

“Nobody wants your bones. They just want you to get well.”

“Peggy,” he said, “don’t let them boil me!”

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

Then he started to shiver. Not the way I’d ever seen anyone shiver in my life, a brief electrical jolt that can be explained by anything, medicine or superstition: a goose stepping on your grave, your body working up heat. This was ongoing shuddering.

“I’m cold,” he said, and God help me, that explained everything. He was cold. He needed to be warmer. Later I would know it was the sign of a fever spiking; maybe I knew that before, too. But at that moment, standing next to his bed, all I knew was that he was shivering like someone who was cold, and that he said he was cold. This was something I could solve, despite the fact that all my suspicions were confirmed: me, my careless supplying of books, was the source of all his habitual nightmares.

I pulled the covers up, right to his ears. I unfolded an afghan and draped it over him. He still shivered. “I’m so cold,” he said, and I went to the closet and got his overcoat out and threw that over the blankets. I arranged the tweed arms like a muffler around his neck.

“How’s that?”

He nodded. Soon he fell back asleep. He didn’t shiver in his sleep. Tomorrow morning I’d call the doctor over. Maybe he could talk some sense into James. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that before.

I’d lied, of course. Somebody did want his bones: me. Not just bones, or the quilted muscles that wrapped them, or the resistant but assailable cartilage in his ears. I wanted to ladle together my hands and dip them in him and cast from my netted fingers a net of blood onto the floor to read, untangle what was wrong and fish it out, see, no wonder you felt poorly , this was in your blood . Hard work will solve all problems. I imagined fingering white and red cells as if they were beads, sorting them.

Not just blood, or flesh — everybody wants that. I was worse than vampire, worse than cannibal. I wanted everything. Every cell of him, an airy room with an atrium and walls you could hear the neighbors through. I would have stuck my face into his to get the curiously cold mist off a sneeze. I wanted the ephemeral oxygen that visited his lungs and exited, deflowered. His urine, which (this is a scientific fact) was sterile. I would have taken his shit — there should be a lovely word for it; the ones I know are clinical or vulgar — I would have taken what his body had deliberated over and rejected as useless. And I would have been amazed: it had been somewhere I could not venture, another part of him I could not know.

By now you think I sound desperate and sick. I’m just cataloguing all the things I could not have, desiderata, desiderata . By now you are tired of me insisting, but it wasn’t sex . Well, it was, in this way: all I wanted was to become a part of him, to affect him physically. Maybe that’s all anybody ever wants, and sex is the most specific and efficient way to achieve it.

But that night I did not want sex. I wanted to drape myself over his body and be absorbed, so when I left (and I knew I would have to), we would average out: two moderately cold people, two moderately sickly people, two — well, two extraordinarily tall people. Still the two tallest people you’d ever seen. But we’d have each other, we’d share that burden.

I was tired. A week before I’d slept in that room, in bed with James, and for a minute I considered climbing in with him again. But there really wasn’t room, not unless he made it for me, and I didn’t want to disturb his sleep. I reached under the blanket and felt his ankle, which, because of his bad circulation, was cold. I gave it a rub to warm it up, but it was too big a job and I was exhausted. Finally I crawled into the big armchair and curled up. And in the morning, when Caroline came in with Alice and breakfast, I was the only one who woke up.

Taking care of James was difficult work when he was alive, but at least he was there to help us. Caroline took Alice back to the house and got Oscar. I could hear the two of them, Alice and Caroline, crying from the front house. Probably Alice was crying only because her mother was. Finally we had to call a neighbor to go sit with them. Then we phoned a funeral home two towns over.

I went back to the cottage. Most of the covers, including the overcoat, were in a hill on the ground. Oscar had pulled the sheet over James’s head, the way they do in movies, and I thought this was wrong. Doctors do that, or clergymen. Standing there, I thought it was as if Oscar had tried to improvise the last rites because a priest wasn’t available.

So I walked to the bed. Beneath that sheet, he was still in his street clothes, the shirt and pants he’d fallen in. He’s dead, I thought, that’s a simple fact. It wasn’t him anymore. Anything I decided to believe, science or religion, told me that whatever was essential to his existence was gone now, soul or cold mechanical bloodworks. The sheet lay flat along the length of him, not moving at his mouth, nor at the rib cage over his lungs, nor at his hands or knees. It was still. Whatever was essential . That was the problem, what scientists and ministers forgot. It was all essential. His soul has departed the earth , the minister would say later, and I wanted to answer, but his soul forgot something, his soul didn’t pack for that long trip. I thought I was thinking of his body; really, I was thinking of myself. The two things, my self, his body, were not distinct entities. This is how I’d always allowed myself to love him: I hired on as caretaker of his body, because his self, his soul if that’s what you wanted to call it, had no reason to need me. I needed to be essential, too, but I was still here, I hadn’t gone, I was standing by the bed, my hand still out to the sheet. He had done an awful lot in the past twenty-four hours without my permission.