HE WAS BEING CARRIED INTO a cave by four masked men. He knew the leader of the four was Zalovsky, although not a word was spoken. The cave was high and spacious, shadowed, hewn out of rock. He could not move but once he was in the cave he saw the carved stone sarcophagus that awaited him. Then he saw that he was not going to be buried alone. Standing against a wall, taller than he had realized, queenly and erect, draped in a flowing rose-colored gown, her hair flowing over her shoulders, her figure bathed in a mauve light, immobile in death, was his wife. Only he couldn’t remember her name. Coppelia was the only name he could conjure up and he repeated it to himself over and over again, irritated. Then it changed to Cornelia, but he knew that was wrong, too.
Then he felt a sharp pain in his hand and it awoke or nearly awoke him, and the cave and the tall mauve-lit figure disappeared and he remembered that his wife’s name was Sheila and that she was alive, and he was grateful to the clumsy doctor who was trying to draw blood for more tests from his hand because the pain had interrupted his dream. It was the doctor with the straggly beard whom he had tried to appoint master of the vessel on which he still believed he was sailing. Only now he was not free to go up and down between the decks, but was immured below, tied down by both wrists most of the time. The swift backward running clock, false to the hours, was still visible. It was a sly device, he had figured out, to fool him into not sleeping. He had made himself learn to write the word sleep almost clearly on the yellow legal pad. Whoever was on duty to torture him made that the first priority—to keep him from sleeping. The bright neon shone in his eyes at all times. He did not remember daylight.
They were constantly jabbing him with needles to give or take blood. His veins had collapsed and most of the doctors never could find a fit target for their needles, and his arms and hands and feet were black and blue from the incessant attempts, and he cursed Dr. Zinfandel in his heart because every time he appeared, he ordered either a transfusion or a sample of blood.
Anybody on duty seemed to have the right to draw blood from him or insert an intravenous tube, no matter how maladroit he or she was, and he became piteously grateful to the people with an instinctive touch who could find his depleted buried veins at the first try. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember them or their names.
An assorted platoon of doctors seemed to be interested in him, each of them attached to one specialist or another in some obscure medical table of organization. Doctors for his lungs, his kidneys, his throat, with the tube in it at the point where the tracheotomy had been performed, for the bedsores he had developed that went down to the bone and had to be cleansed and bandaged over and over again. He urinated through a catheter and struggled with a bedpan for his bowels, without much success, and had dreams in which he luxuriously pissed normally and sat on a toilet bowl. He was naked and exposed and treated like a piece of meat in a butcher shop and lived, if it could be called living, in a constant state of humiliation.
The nurses took turns at pounding his chest so that he could cough up the silt accumulating in his lungs. The black man stayed away from him but Damon could see him lurking in the corridor waiting for his chance. Damon warned Sheila once more about the man and wrote a pleading sentence to her asking her to get the police before it was too late.
Then one day, or night, he heard the sound of distant sirens coming nearer and felt, triumphantly, that his message to his wife had gotten through. He saw the nurses and doctors scurrying away, leaving only the black man, who came into his room and stood over him and said, “They think they’re going to let me hang in here and take the rap. Well, they’re wrong. And if you think you’re going to get away, you’re wrong, too, Mister.” It was then that Damon knew the black man was Zalovsky’s agent, insinuated into the hospital to finish what Zalovsky had begun.
Then the black man sat on his chest and began to rig a wire box with dynamite in it just in front of Damon’s mouth. “When they come through the door,” the black man said, “this thing goes up. And you with it.”
Damon felt icily calm, pleased that he was going to die so quickly.
Finished with his job, the black jumped off Damon’s chest and disappeared and Damon was left alone in a suddenly silent place, with the lights for the first time almost completely extinguished and the sirens getting closer, then starting to fade away until all was absolutely quiet.
Deserted, deserted, Damon thought. Sheila had betrayed him, had not believed him. He lay in the shadows and waited, regretting that the machine had not gone off.
Tied down and unable to call out, he tried over and over again by groans, signals with his eyes, feeble flickers of his fingers, to get the nurses and doctors who constantly passed the open door of his room to give him something to drink. They passed him by as if he were a beggar at a church door and they were in a hurry to go to a wedding or a baptism.
He was on a respirator all the time now because he had developed what some of the doctors diagnosed as viral pneumonia and others merely called congestion or a collapsed lung. He took a remote, cool interest in his condition and their attempts at treatment, and when Dr. Rogarth made one of his rare visits, he printed out on the legal pad, “Am I going to die?”
Dr. Rogarth answered, “We’re all going to die,” and Damon tried to turn his head contemptuously away from the sight of the man, but couldn’t manage it.
There was one doctor who seemed to Damon to be in charge of depriving him of water. He had a bedraggled wet blondish moustache, very long darkish-blond hair, mad, sly eyes and swept in and out with a loose white open robe floating behind him. He was engaged in a mysterious project that was built around a Persian carpet and involved putting Damon in poses suggested by the figures in the carpet and photographing him in those positions. Damon found himself staked out on burning sands, against looming monuments, the walls of tombs, all in merciless sunlight, hanging from a bare tree on a small island surrounded by a lake from which the noon sun was reflected like bursts of gunfire. He was transported from one place to another as if by magic, in fractions of a second, while the doctor, who by now Damon thought of as the Magician, and who was always accompanied by a wizened nurse in a disheveled uniform, clicked away with his camera while humming merrily to himself. Somehow, Damon managed to communicate with him and the Magician was not loath to talk, often very good-humoredly.
“What, exactly, are you up to?” Damon asked once.
“You will see when I’m finished,” the Magician said. “If you must know, I am in a contest. A travel magazine is giving a prize for the photo montage that comes closest to the spirit and design of my carpet. You must learn to cooperate without all this complaining about water, like everybody else.”
This was the first inkling that there was anybody else in the Magician’s power.
“Everybody would stop complaining,” Damon said, “if just once you would let them drink as much as they want.”
The Magician laughed. “All right. I’ll let everybody drink their fill from ten in the morning till noon. Then, by two o’clock, mark my words, they’ll be wailing for water again.” He untied Damon from his tree and laughed as Damon rushed to the edge of the lake and plunged his face into its cool depths.
At two o’clock, sharp, the Magician tied him again and he was thirstier than ever and from all around him he heard voices wailing, “Water, water.” Over the wailing he could hear the Magician’s laughter.
Suddenly, he did not know how, he could distinguish night from day. He was on a lower deck of the boat at night and during those hours they did not keep shining the lights in his eyes. His night nurse, whom he now recognized, was a fine-featured slender woman, tanned very dark by the sun, with a soft, delightful voice. One of the doctors, a youngish burly man with a bull neck, visited her often while she was on duty at Damon’s bedside. He made a joke about the woman’s suntan. “I’d like to be there,” he said, “the next time you go sunbathing,” and laughed coarsely. He made other lewd remarks to the woman.
Lewd remarks, Damon repeated to himself, with distaste. To such a fine and delicate creature. And he was heartbroken when one night, after the bull-necked doctor had slipped into the room to whisper into the nurse’s ear, she had leaned over Damon and said softly, “I’ll be gone for a few minutes.” He knew where she was going—to climb into some poor devil’s empty bed with the lewd doctor.
The next thing he knew, he was alone with the doctor in an open boat sailing across a lake toward an island. “I know why you’re taking me to the island,” Damon said.
“Why?” the doctor asked.
“You’re going to kill me there,” Damon said calmly.
Angrily, the doctor drew a shining metal object from his pocket and slashed Damon with it. The pain was intolerable, but it was over in a second. “I’m here to save your life,” the doctor said. “Don’t ever forget it.”
He was deep in the hold of the ship. His hands were tied to a wooden bar in front of him. He was kneeling in front of the bar and beside him was another man, whom he had never seen before, also tied and kneeling. Two nurses kept hurrying up and down an open stairway that led to another deck. He recognized the two nurses. They were Julia Larch and what must have been her daughter. Although there had to be a considerable difference in their ages, they looked exactly alike. They paid no attention to Damon’s groans and the groans of the other man as they pleaded for a sip of water. Finally, annoyed, Julia Larch came over. She gave no sign of recognition that the man in front of her was the father of her son. “You will get a drink at noon,” she said. “Now, keep quiet.”
The eternal clock was there. Now it was running normally. There was no detecting the movement of its hands on the large dial. It stood at twenty past nine.
With inhuman self-control he kept himself from looking at the clock until he judged that at least an hour had passed. It was twenty-five past nine. The man tied next to him was groaning louder and louder and whenever one or the other of the nurses who were Julia Larch and her daughter appeared on the stairway, he croaked, through puffed lips, “Water! Water!”
They paid no attention to him, but hurried up and down on their errands.
After a while the man’s groans became weaker and weaker, and he began rolling his head from side to side in a demented rhythm. Damon would have liked to do something for him if it was only to choke him and end his torment, but with his hands tied and his tongue swollen in his mouth, he could only make grunting sounds of commiseration. It was the longest period of time in Damon’s life, longer than the trip to Europe, longer than any voyage across the North Atlantic during the war. Finally, when he looked up at the clock, it was one minute to twelve. He looked across at the man next to him. There was a last soft groan, like a baby’s sigh, and the man’s head lolled forward. He was dead.
Damon heard the ship’s bells strike noon. Julia Larch appeared with a pitcher of water and two glasses. “Where’s the other one?” Julia demanded.
“He’s dead.” Damon watched greedily, licking his lips, as Julia poured one glass of water. He looked for the other man. The cloths which had bound him to the wooden bar were still there but the body was gone. “They collected him or he turned into powder and blew away,” Damon said stupidly, watching Julia put the full glass of water and the pitcher down so that she could untie his hands. His hands free, he took the glass and drained it, held it out to be refilled. With no expression on her face, Julia poured again and he drained it in one gulp once more. Satisfied for the moment, he said, reproachfully, to Julia, “If you’d come two minutes earlier, he’d’ve been alive.” Julia shrugged, the blank small face impassive. “Rules are rules,” she said.
From that moment on he could drink all he wanted to. Sheila kept bringing six small cans of cold pineapple juice to him at a time and he never seemed to be able to get enough of them and kept marveling at the glorious tropical flavor of the fruit as it went in an icy torrent down his throat. The Magician and his wizened assistant disappeared and the only doctor of the many who went in and out of the Intensive Care Unit whom Damon had any liking for, a small, owl-faced man with large horn-rimmed glasses, who had performed the tracheotomy, came into the room and told him that he was going to replace the tube in his throat the next day with one that would permit Damon to talk, if he learned the trick of breathing in as he put his finger over a hole in the tube and using the breath to say a few words. The man’s name was Dr. Levine, and he had promised Damon a long time ago he would eventually be able to talk normally. He was the only one of the doctors who had said a hopeful word to him, which was why Damon liked him.
As he had promised, Dr. Levine came in the next morning with the new tube. “First,” he said, “we’ll take this gadget out.” He took hold of the slender plastic tube that was attached to the bag of nutritive powder on a steel stand above Damon’s head that led down through his nose into his stomach. “Dr. Zinfandel says it’s about time you started to eat normally.”
Damon watched him fearfully. He was sure he would not be able to eat normally and would run the risk of starving to death. But Dr. Levine seemed confident and slid the tube out swiftly and let it dangle from the sack on the steel stand. Then he took up the new metal tube through which he would breathe and occasionally, according to the doctor, be able to make coherent sounds that might be interpreted as speech, to connect him with the rest of the human race. “This will hurt a little,” he said, “maybe a lot. But it’s over quickly and if I gave you an anesthetic, the needle would hurt more.” Then he reached in unceremoniously and deftly picked out the old, pus-encrusted tube and slid in the new one. The doctor had been right about its hurting, but he tried not to show it on his face because Sheila and Oliver were in the room, watching anxiously.
The new curved metal tube felt peculiar in his throat. “Now …” Dr. Levine put his finger over the hole in the tube, like a flute player, “take a deep breath and then try to talk.”
Damon took a deep breath. He realized he was frightened. Despite what the doctor had said, he was sure he could not speak. But he tried. To his surprise a sound came out. Then he said clearly, although his voice sounded metallic and strange in his ears, “Get me out of here.”
Oliver and Sheila laughed. Sheila’s laugh was hysterically high.
“Now try again,” Dr. Levine said.
Damon shook his head. He had said enough for one day.
Sheila was sitting in Dr. Zinfandel’s outer office. She had had her hair done and put on fresh clothing to replace the rumpled sweater and skirt that she had not bothered to change for days. She wanted to seem composed and firmly in control of herself for the conversation that she knew was to come. Zinfandel’s secretary said, “You can go in now.” Sheila stood, brushed the creases from her skirt, strode purposefully into the inner office, where Zinfandel was still bent over the chart on his desk of a patient who had just left the room. He looked harried and depleted. Sheila knew that he arrived at the hospital each morning at five and often was still there at eleven at night. He had mentioned a wife and two children, and Sheila pitied them, although she had never seen any signs of their existence and there were no family photographs on Zinfandel’s desk. “He is a maniac of healing,” Oliver had said, and Sheila agreed that the description fit the emaciated, loping man.
Zinfandel looked up, smiled briefly, his eyes red-rimmed, his brain desperately crowded with a thousand uncured ailments. “Please sit down,” he said. “I’m glad we have a moment to talk to each other. You know what I have to say.”
“Yes,” Sheila said. “And I think you’re wrong.”
Zinfandel sighed. “I can’t take him out of Intensive Care, Mrs. Damon. Your husband is still a very sick man. His life is hanging in the balance. I do not lie or dissemble with my patients or with their families, as you well know. True, patients who have to endure long periods in the unit have a tendency to fall into a deep mental depression. But in the case of your husband it is his body we must save first. We have our professional principles, our professional experience.”
“I appreciate all that, Doctor,” Sheila said, trying to keep her voice calm, “but I know some things, too, after living with the man for so many years. He’s at the lowest ebb of his life. He’s lost so much weight that he’s just skin and bones. He’s still losing pounds daily. He refuses to eat …”
“The formula powder I prescribed, mixed with milk …”
“I know all about the formula. You can prescribe it, but he takes one sip and he turns his head to the wall. I bring him delicacies … smoked salmon, caviar, soups, fruits … All he takes is pineapple juice. How long do you think he can survive on pineapple juice? He’s in a state of fatalistic lethargy. He’s looking for an excuse to die.”
“You exaggerate, Mrs. Damon.”
“I want him moved from that damned Intensive Care Unit, where he’s surrounded by dying people, by the machines and paraphernalia of death, put him back in his own room, make any move, any, any change. He’s like a wild animal in captivity there, like those animals who refuse to eat behind bars and prefer to lie down and die.”
“It’s impossible to move him,” Zinfandel said crisply. “He needs the machines, the respirator, the oxygen, the monitors … his heart, his pulse, his blood pressure … his red blood count, which continues to be dangerously low. There may be an emergency at any time. He needs moment-by-moment attention. The ICU is the only place where we can guarantee it. You must understand, Mrs. Damon, we are responsible for his life …”
“So am I,” Sheila said. “And he’s giving up on it where he is now.”
“I understand your fears,” Zinfandel said gently. “Yours is a subjective viewpoint. We can’t permit ourselves that luxury. We have to make our decisions on an objective basis. Please trust us.”
“I don’t,” Sheila said. She stood up and strode from the office.
When Oliver came into the ICU waiting room that evening after work, which he did every evening, he could see that Sheila was much more troubled than when he had left her the night before. “What is it?” he asked.
“I have to talk to you.” Sheila looked around her. There were two other visitors in the room and the chief doctor in overall direction of the unit was whispering intently to one of them in a corner. “I don’t want to talk here. Let’s go out and get a cup of coffee.”
“Is he worse?” Oliver asked anxiously.
“He’s worse every day,” Sheila said and didn’t say anything more until they were seated at a table in the small cafe near the hospital where they sometimes took their meals and which was frequented by the nurses on their breaks from duty. There was a group of three nurses now near the entrance, and Sheila led Oliver to a table at the rear, where they were alone.
“What’s going on?” Oliver asked. His face had been troubled ever since the shooting, but it was intensified now. To Sheila he looked like a small boy who had been lost in a crowd by his mother and was trying to keep from crying while he searched the faces around him for her.
“Something peculiar,” Sheila said. “And I don’t know just what it is.” Then she told him about the conversation with Zinfandel. “If Roger is losing ground every day,” she said, “it only makes sense to try to do something else. But the doctors’re stonewalling me. They pretend to listen, but they don’t. Have you any ideas?”
Oliver’s face twitched uncomfortably and he made some incomprehensive noises deep in his throat. “Well,” he said at last, “I didn’t want to worry you, but …”
“But what?”
“This is only a guess …” He stopped again.
“Go on, Oliver,” Sheila said impatiently. “Don’t beat around the bush.”
“They’re spreading the responsibility.”
“Who’s spreading the responsibility. What responsibility?” Sheila had difficulty keeping her voice down.
“All of them. The doctors. Sheila, I was told this in the deepest confidence.”
“Stop talking in riddles, Oliver; for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, you know that pretty blond nurse, Penny?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had a meal or two with her.” He was blushing. “She’s highly intelligent, aside from being most attrac—”
“No descriptions,” Sheila said brutally. “Go on.”
“You remember, Roger wrote you once asking you to get hold of a lawyer?”
“Of course, I remember.”
“Well, somebody read it before they gave it to you. Or one of them—the doctors, I mean—did. He told the others, I guess. They think it’s because you and Roger are going to sue Rogarth, the hospital, everybody, for malpractice. Millions of dollars.”
“Roger never would sue anybody in his life. Every time he’s read in the papers about one of those suits, he’s raged; he’s told me again and again it’s ruining the practice of medicine in America.”
“You know that,” Oliver said. “I know that. They don’t. At least according to Penny they don’t. They’re scared witless. There’s one more thing she told me—Penny.”
“What’s that?”
Oliver jerked his head around to make sure nobody had come in quietly behind him. “When they brought him into the ICU after the operation, one of the doctors on duty said, ‘Another one of Rogarth’s hatchet jobs.’”
“Oh, God,” Sheila said. Then accusingly, “Your own brother told you he was one of the best in the country.”
“I’m sorry,” Oliver said apologetically. “If he made a mistake, it was an honest one. If my brother said Rogarth was one of the best in the country, that was what he’d heard. Maybe Rogarth was once. Maybe never,” Oliver said, shrugging. “Reputations. There’re writers Roger wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole who’ve been getting great reviews for twenty years. As for doctors—it’s a closed corporation. To put it mildly, they’re not in the habit of rapping each other. And there’s one other thing Penny told me. With the log of the operation when he was sent to the ICU, there were three letters on the top page.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, Sheila.”
“What three letters?” Her tone was fierce.
“CYA,” Oliver said.
Sheila frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Penny says it means ‘cover your ass.’” Oliver sighed, as though he had delivered himself of an enormous burden. “They knew there’d been a big mistake and everyone was being warned to close ranks, they had to hide it.”
Sheila closed her eyes, then covered them with her hands. When she took her hands down, her face was stony. “The pigs,” she said quietly. “The cynical pigs.”
“You won’t say anything about this, will you?” Oliver asked anxiously. “If they trace it to Penny, they’ll kick her out in two minutes.”
“Don’t worry about Penny. I’ll handle it my own way. Roger will be out of that goddamn place tomorrow. Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
“What good would it have done? They’re afraid now. How would it help Roger if they also were furious?”
“Oliver,” Sheila said, “I can’t go back to the hospital tonight. I don’t know what I’d do or say. I’d like you to take me out to a nice restaurant, full of healthy people, who’re enjoying a good meal and not plotting against anybody and buy me a couple of drinks and a fine bottle of wine. Unless you have a date with the pretty Penny.”
Oliver blushed again. “We just happened to be going down in the elevator together,” he said, flustered, “and she was coming off her shift and it was dinnertime and—”
“Don’t apologize,” Sheila said. She smiled. “Just because Roger’s in the hospital doesn’t mean a man can’t look at a pretty girl once in a while. Just go up and if Roger’s awake, which isn’t likely, tell him you insisted I take a night off with you because the hospital was getting me down. He’ll understand. There’s a saloon down the block. I’ll be waiting at the bar for you. Don’t be shocked if I’m drunk by the time you get there.”
When Zinfandel made his usual visit at six the next morning, Sheila was there, sitting grimly in the little easy chair near the window. Zinfandel, as always on his morning rounds, was cheerful and lively. He looked at the nurse’s chart at the foot of the bed, touched Damon’s bare toes, which were no longer black, and asked the patient how he felt.
Damon, who by now hated the man whose presence at dawn every morning announced the beginning of another endless painful day, said, “Lousy.”
Zinfandel smiled, as though this show of spirit demonstrated that Damon was on the road to recovery. “Your toes are still icy,” he said, making it sound that he considered the fact a sign of bad faith on Damon’s part.
“Sometimes they freeze,” Damon said. “Sometimes—like now—they feel as though they’re on fire.”
“It may be a touch of gout,” Zinfandel said.
“For Christ’s sake, I haven’t had a drop of booze for more than a month,” Damon said.
“One thing can have nothing to do with the other. I’ll have somebody take some blood this morning and we’ll run some tests.”
Damon groaned. “Do you think you can find someone who actually knows where the veins in the human body can be found? The plumbers you’ve been sending in here have been stabbing me ten times in a row to get two drops of blood.”
“Your veins—” Zinfandel said sadly. “I don’t have to tell you again about your veins.” He hung the chart back on the foot of the bed after making a notation on it and turned to go out.
Sheila, who had not greeted the doctor or said a word while he was in the room, stood up. “I’d like a word with you,” she said. “Outside.” She followed him to the corridor.
“I hope it won’t take too long,” Zinfandel said. “I’m behind schedule as it is.”
“I want Mr. Damon moved to a private room,” Sheila said. “Today.”
“Impossible. I’ve already explained that—”
“If he isn’t moved,” Sheila said flatly, “I’m going to our lawyer and I’m getting a court writ to get him out of here and I’m putting him in another hospital.” She could see the little flicker in the doctor’s pale eyes at the word lawyer.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Zinfandel said.
“You will not see what you can do. You will have him moved by three o’clock this afternoon.”
“Mrs. Damon,” Zinfandel said, “you keep forcing me to act in a way that runs counter to all my training and principles. You dictate treatment, you listen to nurses’ gossip and confront me with impossible demands. Now you threaten a lawsuit …”
“Three o’clock this afternoon,” Sheila said, and went back into the room, where Damon was trying to fall back to sleep.
That morning Damon hallucinated for the last time.
For a reason that was not explained to him, he was allowed to wander around the ship at will. The ship itself had changed. It was no longer a dingy cargo vessel, but a white-painted ship crowded with passengers. Everybody was busy packing and saying good-bye, because the ship was due shortly to put into port. Without being told, Damon understood that the port was Seattle. Damon also understood that although everybody else was going ashore, he was not to disembark.
With great blasts of the ship’s horn, the ship was tied up. The nurses, whom he had grown to recognize one from the other and for whom he now realized he had developed a hopeless affection, passed him, no longer clad in white but dressed in charming traveling clothes of all colors, their hair newly done, their young faces carefully made up, their high heels clicking on the decks as they waved cordially at him and departed. Only one nurse stopped to say good-bye to him. It was the prettiest of them all, the one they called Penny. Tears streamed from her deep blue blond-lashed eyes down the angelic face.
“Why are you crying?” he asked sympathetically.
“I’m in love with Oliver Gabrielsen,” she said, “and he’s in love with me and he’s married.”
“Ah, Penny,” he said, “you were born for weeping. You will always weep.”
“I know,” she said, sobbing. She kissed him, her lips damp and soft, and carrying her bag, went down the gangplank.
The bull-necked doctor, now dressed in a zippered wind-jacket, with “University of Virginia” lettered on it, stopped in front of Damon. “Well, good-bye, old son,” the doctor said kindly. “Is there anything I can bring back for you from ashore?”
Damon thought for a moment. “Bring me a Coca-Cola,” he said. “With ice.”
“It shall be done,” the doctor said, and shook his hand, his grip like steel. Then he, too, went down the gangplank and Damon had the enormous ship all to himself.
That afternoon Damon was removed to the private room. Damon didn’t ask Sheila how or why it was done and she did not tell him. The room had a private shower and toilet and using a walker because he could not stand without its support, Damon got to the toilet and sat on it, with a feeling that approached ecstasy. After he had finished on the toilet he heaved himself up, using the walker and looked at himself in the mirror. He had been shaved by the hospital barber before leaving the ICU and the lines of his face were starkly defined. Staring back at him from the mirror was a face he hardly recognized, a face greenish dull white in color, the skin stretched like mottled parchment over sharp bones, the eyes in deep hollows and devoid of all light. They are the eyes of a dead man, Damon thought, then clumsily moving the walker cautiously inches at a time ahead of him, clumped back into the room, where Sheila and the nurse helped him back into the bed, lifting his legs because he didn’t have the strength to do it himself.
He was pleased to see that there was no clock in the room.
“I brought the Times,” Sheila said. “Do you want to look at it?”
Damon nodded. He held the paper in front of him. The date was meaningless to him. The headlines made no sense to him. The language might just as well have been Sanskrit. He let the paper fall on the bedcover. He began to cough violently. The nurse attached the tube and put it down into his lungs through the open hole of the tracheotomy tube low on his throat and switched on the compressed air to drain his lungs. He had become accustomed to the treatment, but this was the first time he realized how painful it was.
Sheila had brought him a chocolate milkshake, rich with ice cream and a raw egg. He had had a passion for milkshakes when he was a boy and he drank a few sips, then pushed it away. Sheila looked worried at his refusal and he was sorry about that, but there was no getting any more of the drink down.
The dressings on his chest and stomach had been removed but he refused to look at the scars. The nurses changed the bandages and irrigated and sterilized the one huge remaining bedsore on his buttock four or five times a day and that, too, which he had scarcely noticed until now, proved excruciatingly painful, as did the placing of needles for intravenous doses of antibiotics and the continuing blood transfusions. He remembered very clearly all his hallucinations but was not clear whether they were events through which he had actually lived or merely dreamed, so he spoke of them to no one. From time to time he regretted that he had not been permitted to die before then and was sure that he never would get out of the hospital alive and that the time that lay ahead of him was a needless prolongation of agony.
He resented the prodding of Sheila and the nurses, who tended him in three shifts of eight hours each around the clock, to get him out of bed and walk, first with the walker, then with a cane, a few steps several times a day. He tried to eat, but whatever food he was offered was like dry wool in his mouth, which he chewed with effort then spat out.
His day nurse weighed him every morning. Without interest, he saw that he weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. As the days went by he neither gained nor lost a pound. When he went into the hospital, he had weighed one hundred and seventy-five.
A respirator had been set up in his room, although Dr. Zinfandel had told Sheila it was impossible to arrange. But Sheila had gone to the head nurse at the main office on the floor, an old Irish lady with whom she had become friendly and the nurse had snorted when Sheila told her what Zinfandel had said and told Sheila she could put in all the apparatuses necessary in thirty minutes. Damon hated the respirator and the oxygen mask and felt he was being smothered when they clamped it on him and he had to be restrained from pulling the mask off. Oliver was in and out of the room and tried to cheer him up by telling him how well things were going at the office, but Damon shut him up by saying, “Fuck off, Oliver,” when Oliver began to talk about contracts.
One thing Damon remembered was the pretty nurse Penny crying in his dream as she said goodbye when the ship docked. “Oliver,” he said, “are you going to marry Penny?”
Oliver looked stricken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I must warn you,” Damon said. The dream had hardened into reality. “Doris is good for you. And she’s a winner. Pretty as she is, Penny is one of the world’s eternal losers. You would eat the bread of sorrow the rest of your life.” The dying, he thought, have their right to a final honest word.