So for two days and two nights, Jasper Gwyn stayed in the hospital, almost without sleeping, because he had to make a portrait of the only friend who remained to him in life. He settled himself in a corner, on a chair, and he saw doctors and nurses passing by without seeing them. He lived on coffee and sandwiches, every so often he stretched his legs in the corridor. Lottie came and didn’t dare to say anything.
In his bed, Tom seemed to become smaller every day, and the silence in which he was surviving was like a mysterious disappearance. Every so often he turned toward the corner where he expected to see Jasper Gwyn and he always seemed relieved to find that it wasn’t empty. When they took him away to do some test or other, Jasper Gwyn stared at the unmade bed and in that mess of sheets he seemed to see a form of nudity so extreme that it no longer needed a body.
He worked by weaving together memories and what he could now see in Tom that he had never seen. Not for a moment did it cease to be a difficult and painful activity. Nothing was like the studio, in the embrace of David Barber’s music, and every rule he had established there was impossible. He didn’t have his pieces of paper, he missed the Catherine de Médicis, and it was hard to think amid all those objects that he hadn’t chosen. The time was insufficient, the moments of solitude rare. Noteworthy was the possibility of failure.
Yet the evening before the operation, around eleven, Jasper Gwyn asked if there was a computer, in the ward, where he could write something. He ended up in an administrative office, where they gave him a desk and the password for the employee’s PC. It wasn’t a normal procedure and they kept emphasizing it. On the desk were two framed photographs and a sad collection of windup mice. Jasper Gwyn adjusted the chair, which was annoyingly high. He saw with disgust that the keyboard was dirty, and intolerably so on the most frequently used keys. He would have thought the opposite should happen. He got up, turned off the overhead light, and returned to the mice. He turned on the desk lamp. He began to write.
Five hours later he got up and tried to figure out where the hell the printer was, which, he heard very clearly, was spitting out his portrait. It’s odd where people put the printer in offices where there’s only one printer for everyone. He had to turn on the overhead light to find it, and he discovered that he had nine pages, printed in a font he didn’t especially like, paginated with margins of an offensive banality. Everything was wrong, but also everything was as it should be—a hasty precision, in which the luxury of details was removed. He didn’t re-read, he merely numbered the pages. He had printed two copies: he folded one in four, put it in his pocket, and with the other in his hand he went to Tom’s room.
It must have been four in the morning, he didn’t even check. In the room there was only a single, fairly warm light, at the head of the bed. Tom was sleeping with his head turned to one side. The machines connected to him every so often communicated something and did it by emitting small, hateful sounds. Jasper Gwyn brought a chair to the bed. It made no sense, but he placed a hand on Tom’s shoulder and began to shake him. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would please a passing nurse, he realized. He brought his mouth to Tom’s ear and uttered his name a few times. Tom opened his eyes.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. “I was only waiting. What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Late.”
“Did you do it?”
Jasper Gwyn held the nine sheets in his hand. He placed them on the bed.
“It came out a little long,” he said. “When you’re in a hurry it always comes out a little long, you know.”
They talked softly and had the air of boys who are stealing something.
Tom held the sheets of paper in his hand and glanced at them. Maybe he read the first lines. He had raised his head off the pillow, with the appearance of making a tremendous effort. But in his eyes there was something alert that no one had ever seen, in that hospital. He let his head fall back on the pillow and extended the pages to Jasper Gwyn.
“Okay. Read.”
“Me?”
“Do I have to call the nurse?”
Jasper Gwyn had imagined something different. Like Tom reading it while he went home, finally, to take a shower. He was always a little late to admit the bare reality of things.
He took the pages. He hated reading things he had written out loud—reading them to others. It had always seemed to him a shameless act. But he began to do it, trying to do it well—with the necessary slowness and care. Many sentences seemed to him imprecise, but he forced himself to read everything just as he had written it. Every so often Tom chuckled. Once he made a gesture to stop him. Then he let him understand that he could continue. Jasper Gwyn read the last page even more slowly, and to tell the truth it seemed to him perfect.
At the end, he arranged the pages, folded them in two, and placed them on the bed.
The machines continued to emit inscrutable messages, with a vaguely military obtuseness.
“Come here,” said Tom.
Jasper Gwyn bent over him. Now they were really close. Tom pulled an arm out from under the covers and rested one hand on his friend’s head. On the nape. Then he hugged him—he leaned his friend’s head against his shoulder and held it there. He moved his fingers slightly, as if to be sure of something.
“I knew,” he said.
He pressed his fingers lightly on his friend’s neck.
Jasper Gwyn left when Tom fell asleep. One hand was lying on the portrait, and to Jasper Gwyn it looked like the hand of a child.