John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Visiting his neighbors up and down the hall, he walked in a bubble of time exactly like childhood time: in the morning it never occurred to him that it would soon be noon, then afternoon, then evening. His neighbor to the left was an elderly Jew, formerly of New York, who’d once been America’s chief manufacturer of Panama hats, or so he said, and it was probably the truth. During World War II, the old man explained, hats went out of fashion. He had theories as to why. He’d become America’s chief historian of the Popular Song. He’d published several books. He had them there with him in the hospital room, in case anyone should care to look. Craine did. Bicycle-song period, baseball-song period, circus-song period. Changing styles in the political song, the nostalgia song, the love song. There were numerous illustrations — engravings of musicians and public figures, covers of sheet music. The scholarly comment was learned and tirelessly wry. The old wife sat smiling, proud beyond words of the brilliant, crotchety old man in the bed. The books had been published, she mentioned from time to time, by the Ohio University Press. “He never even started this history business till he was sixty-two years old,” she said. “Everybody said he was crazy. Some crazy!” “Mama,” the old man said, “you already told him.” The old man had two sons, one an engineer for Bell Telephone, the other a professor at Hofstra. Both of them came to visit, day after day, the engineer small and hearty, elegantly dressed, the professor large and sullen, nearsighted, shabby, both argumentative, impatient, and inconvenienced, but there at his bedside nevertheless, having flown in at once as if nothing were more natural in the world. Sometimes young women came, perhaps the old man’s daughters; also children. When no one else was there, the old woman sat long-nosed and hunchbacked, sleeping in the vinyl chair beside the bed, or worrying and fussing, complaining to the nurses, between times reading the old man jokes from magazines. Once, when something went wrong with the old man, so that he had to be placed in an oxygen tent and no one could be with him but his special nurse, the old woman went striding up and down the corridor, mile after mile, staring straight ahead, eyes like the eagle eyes of Moses. Craine, moving carefully with his aluminum tree, had been afraid to say a word to her. He saw, that day or another day just like it, a picture in a magazine, Jews in a concentration camp, behind barbed wire so messy and tangled it looked as if crows had built it. All the Jews in the picture were now dead. One of them was a girl of about twenty, beautiful. He was sexually aroused, and he looked up from the picture in distress, repelled by all existence, though when he thought about it he understood, of course, why he was aroused, why there was no more reason to be disgusted by that than by bedpans, say, or projectile vomiting, or the woman with her feet cut off. Nature’s way.

Everything he saw, in short, had confirmed him in his opinion that life was interesting, if one chose to see it that way, but not important, by no means a matter for joyful celebration. He was an excellent patient, uncomplaining, steadily healing. The only real unpleasantness in his hospital life, aside from the occasional shaking that came over him, was the food. Each time he lifted the cover off the tray — a yellow plastic cover dripping with condensation — the smell that wafted up was like ensilage, or mulch, old hay in a barn. Sometimes for days in a row he ate nothing but the Jell-O. Then the simple expedient occurred to him of putting on his clothes and walking out (he was unhooked from the tree by now). He knew the hospital routine like the back of his hand, and it was an easy matter to slip down the hall to the stainless steel back elevator, descend to the first floor, and walk past the guards there — no one looked up — cross to the front-door public telephone and call himself a taxi. He began going out to restaurants while he was still on the colostomy bag; an awkward business. Emptying the bag in the toilet was easy (every time he ate he had to empty the bag almost immediately, especially if he drank wine), but rinsing out the bag was tricky: he had to bare his gauzed and bandaged belly, hold the plastic to the faucet to get the rinse water in, worst of all empty small bits of feces in the sink, one eye on the knob of the rest room door, since if someone came in … but never mind, he managed; he was quick and as cunning as a weasel; he was almost never caught. After the takedown it was trickier yet: he had no more idea than a day-old baby when his bowels would move. Very well, he had accidents. But he managed. After one had lived in a hospital for a time, one pretty much lost all sense of shame. Vomiting, elimination, even one’s old-man dangling nakedness came to be as public as politics, less one’s own business than the business of one’s blond young nurse. It was a lesson in philosophy, another proud illusion blown rearward and flushed, as if cleaned from his system by an enema.

So Craine continued, day after day, visiting fellow patients, reading, more or less enjoying himself; and then the time came for his release. Tom Meakins arrived again, pink-cheeked, bulging in his too small checked brown suit. The nurses found boxes, which they loaded to the lids with Craine’s plants and gifts, his huge paper sacks of tape, gauze, pads, medicines, and bottles of saline solution, then stacked in two wheelchairs to carry to the taxi down below. Craine, leaning on Meakins’ arm, started down the corridor, waving his good-byes. He did not say good-bye to the music historian who’d been his neighbor; the old man had died two days ago and had been removed without anyone’s knowing — not a sound, not so much as a whisper, so far as Craine knew — in the middle of the night. “Good-bye,” Craine called to the woman who’d had both feet removed; “good-bye” to the huge, gray freak of a man sprawled like a mountain in his special chair, brought in for an operation meant to save him, whatever his opinions in the matter, from being buried alive in fat. The man stared back, too gloomy to show anger or disgust. Tom Meakins chattered, talking about the weather — it had snowed last night, maybe half an inch, a significant snowfall for Baltimore in March. Meakins’ voice was high and thin, filled with emotion. He placed his small, glossy shoes with care, taking short, timid steps, as if Craine might go crashing to the marble floor at any moment, only Meakins’ sharp watchfulness could save him. “You lost a lot of weight, old man,” Meakins said, and smiled, then turned away his face and wiped his forehead.

It was not until Craine was in the plane for Chicago — from there they’d fly down to Carbondale — that the truth burst over him and he began to weep. He was going to live. The plane groaned and shuddered, then quieted, taking off. Never in his life had Craine experienced such emptiness, such revulsion and despair. Meakins, in the seat beside him, turned to look at him, wide-eyed, then reared forward in acute distress, reaching to touch Craine’s arm with both plump, young-womanish hands. “Jerry!” he cried softly. Never before had Meakins called him “Jerry.” Meakins wet his lips, baffled and embarrassed, blushing, then brought out, “Does something hurt?” Now he too had tears in his eyes, as if he’d guessed what the trouble was.

Craine shook his head. He couldn’t speak a word for fear of bursting into whooping sobs, part sorrow, part childish rage. He covered his face, pouring the tears into his hands.

“What’s the matter?” Meakins said. “Can I get you something?”

There was no way, of course, that Craine could say what was the matter. Time was the matter; the fact that people lived and died for nothing, and horribly at that. Meakins’ daughters, once pretty, now grotesquely fat. Craine’s parents, dead when he was too young to remember; the poor old-maid aunt who’d raised him, Aunt Harriet, her silly existence vanished from the face of the earth like a puff of her Evening in Paris face powder. His friends, all those people who, incredibly, had come to visit him — faster than the airplane was rumbling toward Chicago, they were flying to their graves, all for nothing, all part of the vast, unspeakable foolishness. Women he’d loved, should perhaps have married — he no longer knew even where any of them lived — all, all were shooting like greased lightning toward the grave, or were perhaps there already.