CARLO THOUGHT ROSE’S HABIT of walking around in the nude was hilarious, but the obsession with locking the front door rubbed off on him, maybe because of Carlo’s time in prison. When Rose would go into his lengthy inspections, Carlo would assist, standing outside on the stairwell landing, turning the knob, and shouting through the door. Edgar spent much of his time at a small typewriter, working on the political tracts he signed “Cyclops,” but in the evening and on Saturday morning he’d be more sociable, watching TV with Rose and Randy. Since he’d become a revolutionary, Edgar said, he didn’t have time for television. Moreover, it was the primary tool of capitalist education. When he watched Randy’s favorite shows, he did so as a scholar, analyzing the plot and themes until the imperialist guilt of Krazy Kat and Bugs Bunny was revealed.
Randy differed in the matter of Bugs. Wasn’t it true, as the French surrealists believed, that Bugs Bunny was an anarchic hero of the Left? His outrageous behavior symbolized revolutionary youth, the mad and dispossessed, while Elmer Fudd was the bourgeois ideal of militarism (Fudd as hunter), imperialism (Fudd evicts Bugs from his home), and the leisure class (Fudd has no discernible job).
Edgar thought about that. While Randy had a point about Fudd, Bugs Bunny was also a landholder, in spite of the “underground” metaphor of his living conditions. And his frequent recognition of the audience, by winking or waving in its direction, was a formalist gesture characteristic of the most retrograde antisocialist and decadent phases of modern Russian literature. Bugs was “avant-garde” on the surface, but his embracement of the paying audience was no different from that of a butcher shaking a pork chop in a housewife’s face.
Randy scowled and worked his hands together. He believed in the antiauthoritarian stance of cartoon characters, most of whom conspired with the youthful audience to subvert parental authority. If Bugs Bunny were co-opted by the status quo, then revolution would be in a sense impossible, opposition reduced to an adolescent gesture, to be outgrown as one entered adult society. Children understood better than their parents what it was to be free, and they must teach their anarchism to the Fudds of this world.
Edgar thought Randy was a revolutionary simpleton. Randy had to understand that the whole medium of television was empowered by capitalism. It was saturated with the values of that system and reiterated them. Weren’t there commercials for toys and cereal between the cartoons? What about the violence? Even when Bugs kissed Fudd on the face, causing him to blush, he was performing a bourgeois act. Capitalist technology was designed as a hymn to itself, and that included movies and television.
“Not books?” I asked from the dining room.
“Certainly not,” said Edgar, “because there the technology is so archaic the medium has entered the populist realm. It is roughly equivalent to speech, which is free. Virtually anybody can get his hands on a printing press.”
“But the education that shapes that speech is not free,” I said. “What school did you attend?”
“Princeton,” he said.
“Rhineland College,” I said, pointing at my chest.
“Never heard of it.”
“There you go,” I said.
“It proves nothing,” Edgar replied.
We argued for a while about the relative value of our educations, and I asked Edgar how he made a living. The question caught him off guard and his eyes narrowed.
“I can’t talk about that,” he said.
“Because you get your money from home?” I asked.
“Certainly not!” he said. “At least not at the present time.”
“Tell the man where you get your bread,” Carlo said, looking at me with yellow eyes.
“I did get a certain amount from my trust fund,” Edgar said, “but that is no longer necessary. Now I have my own income, earned through my own efforts.” He seemed very proud of his abilities as a wage earner, yet I’d never seen him go to work.
“But what do you do exactly?” I asked.
Edgar looked around the room, and Carlo nodded OK, as if giving him permission to talk. “Actually,” he said, “I go around the world cashing stolen traveler’s checks. I get them from an associate who works hand in hand with the owner of the checks. The owner buys ten thousand dollars’ worth in large denominations and gives them to my friend, then goes to American Express and claims they’re missing. They give him replacements, but meanwhile I travel from London to Amsterdam to Paris, cashing the checks as quickly as I can. I go only to the largest banks, where the size of the checks will prove no problem.”
“You got to work fast,” said Carlo, “before the list gets around.”
“They compile a list of missing checks,” said Edgar, “so all transactions must be complete within two days. Of course, the original owner gets a share, and my associate and I keep the rest.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?” asked Rose, in awe of Edgar’s life of adventure.
“There is some risk involved,” Edgar said coolly, “but the rewards are very good. There was a real problem on only one occasion.”
“Dallas,” said Carlo, laughing to himself.
“I was scheduled to receive the checks directly from the owner, whose name was Howdy Brown, but when he showed up, he was already being chased by the state police. He picked me up in front of a suburban motel and sped off in his blue Cadillac convertible at a hundred miles an hour. We were a few miles down the road, heading into the desert, when I heard the siren. It was pretty far behind us, but getting closer. None of this concerned Howdy Brown in the least. He was a big red-faced cowboy, and he made normal conversation about football and the weather before pulling the checks out of his jacket.”
“Tell ʼem about the baby,” Carlo said, gesturing with a quart of beer.
“The craziest part was Howdy Brown’s little boy,” Edgar said. “He’d been sitting on the backseat the whole time, playing with some toys, but when the cops got nearer, Howdy thought he would have some fun. He yelled at the kid, whose name was Goober, to climb up in front with us. Goober had blond hair and couldn’t have been more than two. He was still wearing a diaper. But he climbed over the back of the seat, which is difficult at that speed, and stood at the steering wheel. Howdy sat in the middle with his foot on the gas, and Goober held the wheel with both hands, jumping up and down with excitement. The wind blew into his face so hard, it made him look Chinese. He was an excellent driver. Most of the road was dead straight ahead; he kept it right in the middle, so we cut the white line right through the middle of the hood ornament. When a car came in the other direction, he’d ease the Cadillac over into the right lane without any problem. Evidently, he’d done this kind of driving before.”
Carlo loved the story, even though he’d heard it many times. So did Randy, who’d forgotten his philosophical differences with Edgar. Rose seemed to regard Edgar as a celebrity.
“So what happened?” I said. “Did you get away from the cops?”
“It was a supercharged engine, according to Howdy. They were chasing him on a speeding violation. He let them pull up next to us, laughed at their reaction to the baby driver, and floored it. They didn’t have a chance against us.”
About this time we decided to go down to the Loop for a demonstration against the war. We hated the war, we especially hated the government, but most of all we hated LBJ showing his surgical scar to the nation on television. It was all right if your uncle did it, between the fourth and fifth beer, but the president wasn’t allowed. It symbolized the crassness of our leadership, its essential mediocrity.
The demonstration was to take place on State Street, in the heart of the shopping district. Carlo and Edgar had something to do with it, indirectly, through the Union for a Free Union. Randy and Penelope were going with them, and Rose and I planned to meet them later. Around noon we climbed the subway stairs into warm sunlight. A large crowd looked on from the sidewalk, mostly office workers on their lunch breaks. A smaller group of about two hundred white college students sat in the middle of the street. They were relaxed and cheerful, as if on a senior-class picnic.
Rose had been smoking joints all morning in preparation for the event, but grass had begun to make me nervous, so I was laying off. He talked softly to himself in a rhythmic fashion, as he often did—a list of the states and their capitals in alphabetical order. He was up to South Dakota. I told him I’d always liked the sound of “Helena, Montana.”
We had expected a stage and microphone, some minimal preparations, but there was nothing. The stage was the street itself. The idea was to stop traffic, and it had worked. Buses and cars were lined up to the south and north as far as you could see. Not too far from us, two buses were side by side with their doors open; the drivers leaned on their steering wheels, watching the demonstrators through the enormous windshields. They seemed in no hurry. The faces I saw through the windows were all black. Some looked restlessly down at the crowd, but most were reading or staring into space. The sky was a perfect blue, a shade you see only in Chicago, or maybe Oslo. Every blink of the eye was a perfectly developed picture. Rose looked straight in the air, and people around us looked up, too. A few people leaned from office buildings. A couple of pigeons struggled over the crowd, as if inconvenienced.
I saw Randy and Penelope sitting on the curb across the street. They had half entered the demonstration, like bathers testing the water. Carlo was not in evidence, but Edgar was at the rear of the crowd on the other side, taking photographs of the FBI with a small camera. Poorly disguised as students, they walked blatantly among the seated demonstrators, taking their photographs. The two agents in plain clothes pointed to each other, indicating a sector of students that had been missed. I wondered what kind of files they must have, to go to this kind of trouble.
The crowd began to stir as the agents moved through. One of them must have stepped on someone, because a young guy with brown hair and a denim jacket shoved the agent from a sitting position. The agent shoved him back, and suddenly the crowd began to writhe, like planarias around a particle of food. Some of the demonstrators stood, trying to calm things down, but it didn’t work. The guy in the denim jacket, possibly a provocateur, leaped on the agent’s back, and the whole street went up for grabs. The agent swung around in anger and threw him over his shoulder onto a group of women. One of them screamed and held her face; blood ran between her fingers. A few Chicago cops, who had been standing at the edge of the crowd trying not to call attention to themselves, waded into the street with clubs, knocking people aside. Most of the demonstrators jumped to their feet and danced away from the blows, but a few more stalwart types linked arms and stayed where they were. It was a classic nonviolent position to take, but the cops hadn’t read Gandhi. They laid into the group with the ends of their sticks. People ran and screamed, and Edgar spun this way and that, recording fragments of chaos. The two bus drivers had closed their doors and dropped out of sight. Passengers were looking at the street with horror; one elderly black man screamed something that could not be heard.
Rose and I leaned against the building behind us, amazed at the swiftness of events and unable to run. A few squadrols pulled up on Monroe Street, and about fifty cops wearing riot gear marched around the corner, holding extra-long clubs ahead of them like flagpoles, one end braced on the stomach. The first row was especially impressive. They were tall and heavy, with faces like bulldogs’. By now the street was mostly deserted, but the sidewalk was swarming. The cops had dragged off many of the demonstrators and stuffed them into squadrols. The riot squad spread out to sweep the street, creating a rush of onlookers in our direction. Clinging to the building didn’t work. Somebody knocked into me with tremendous force, and I fell into Rose. We went down on the sidewalk, pressed against each other. Somebody stepped on my back, then several people fell on us. Rose pushed me in the face with both hands, as if I was smothering him, and somehow I got to my feet and started running. It must have been in the wrong direction, because there was a stinging blur. I couldn’t see and hear anymore. I was lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood, dead to the world.
Mistakes get made at the hospital, no doubt about it. There’s a test they give to find the site of a spinal injury. The doctor puts the patient on an X-ray table, injects a radiopaque dye into the spinal column, and tilts the table to make the dye run up or down. He watches the traveling dye bump along the column, and the beauty of medicine is never more clear. When the dye reaches the injury, it stops or spreads, and the doctor makes a note on the chart. On the day Dr. Wing performed the test on Johnny Matthews, a twelve-year-old quadriplegic who’d been struck by a stray bullet on New Year’s Eve, things didn’t go so well. The story was that the doctor forgot what he was doing and allowed the dye to flow all the way to the brain. This caused a respiratory arrest, and the boy died on the table. Wing covered his tracks by shading the history and progress notes. No one in the family was astute enough to sue, but the nurses knew what had happened. When Wing sat down with them in the employee dining room, they’d leave or sit in icy silence.
That’s why, when I woke up on the neurological unit and Dr. Wing was looking into my eyes, I was a little concerned. His cold finger lifted an eyelid while he shined a light in there.
“I think he’s awake,” he said to the nurse. It was Eileen Bass, from the day shift.
There was an IV in my right arm, and the bed rail on the other side was up. There was also a tightness in my left arm that I realized was a restraint. This was quite a surprise, since they’re usually only applied when the patient is out of his mind.
“Nagloo,” I said.
The doctor stood back from the bed in an attitude of caution, but Eileen came close to look at me.
“Why, he’s all right,” she said. “He’s trying to say something is all.”
She lifted the small green oxygen mask from my face and rubbed the cheeks to get the red marks out. It must have been on for quite some time, because the skin felt numb.
“Are you all right, hon?” she said, giving me a pat.
“Fine,” I said. “What happened?”
“We had to tie you down,” she said. “You were pulling out the IV.”
“I don’t remember.”
Wing took her place as she went to the other side and straightened the covers. “We put you on the intravenous basically for feeding. We didn’t know how long you’d be out. We’ll start you on a liquid diet at lunch and see how you tolerate it.”
“Can you take off the restraint, please? It’s hurting my arm.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling OK?” he said in a patronizing voice. “You didn’t behave very well last night.”
“I promise to behave.”
“That’s a good boy,” he said, patting me on the head. He waved his hand, and Eileen started undoing the restraint.
“You’ve had a concussion,” said Wing, pushing on the bridge of his glasses. “We’re going to do some tests, but if everything works out, you can think about going home in a couple of days.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Brain scan, skull X rays, and EEC.”
“You think I’ve got a fracture?”
“We’ll see.”
He looked like he’d been on duty for a day and a half already. His clothes were wrinkled and his face sagged. Yawning broadly, he rubbed his hand through the thick black hair that was matted here and sticking out there.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Nine in the morning,” said Eileen, struggling with the final knot.
“So I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon?”
“That’s right,” said Wing, looking at his watch.
The nurse got the restraint undone, and I lifted the arm to get blood into it. The shoulder was a little sore.
Wing looked into my eyes again with the penlight, as if frowning at the back of a cave, then held up four fingers and asked me how many there were. Pulling down the sheet, he stuck a little pin into the soles of my feet to see if there was feeling. There was. Then he ran his fingernail the length of the sole, from heel to toe, to see which way the toes would curl. If they curled down, it meant you were OK, and if they curled back toward your face, you were brain damaged or something. I was not brain damaged, but I had a huge ache where the head met the spinal column. I pointed to where it hurt. Wing frowned.
“Not good?” I asked.
“Could be a subdural hematoma. Some people can walk around for a week with one, then they drop dead from it, just like that.” He snapped his fingers with finality. “It’s just like a time bomb, a walking time bomb.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
“Usually it’s a sign if one eye dilates more than the other.”
“What should I do—carry a mirror?”
He was one of those guys who had worked so hard ever since med school, he couldn’t tell if you were kidding.
“That wouldn’t be very practical, would it?” he said.
“Subdurals can be tricky,” said Eileen. “Remember Weinstein?”
“Before my time,” Wing said.
“He was getting married, and when he went to step on the wineglass, he went down on the back of his head.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Wing.
“About his falling?” I asked.
“About stepping on the glass. It’s supposed to consecrate the marriage.”
“The poor guy’s eyes looked like stoplights,” Eileen said. “He went into a coma for six weeks, and his wife, Sheila, brought things from home for the bedside table. There was a picture of her in her wedding dress and one of his mother with her cocker spaniel. It could just break your heart.”
“Did he die?” I asked.
“No,” she said, brightening. “It was like a miracle, really. She sat beside the bed, holding his hand, and one day he just woke up.”
“Don’t tell me,” Wing said, holding up his hand. “It was the power of love that saved him.”
“Actually, it was the bread.”
“Bread?” we said together.
“It wasn’t just the pictures she brought. There was this loaf of bread.”
“I see,” said Wing, as if that was possible. After all, there were healing molds like penicillin. But how did she get him to eat it?
A tall kid in a white intern’s jacket walked in the room. His blond hair fell over one eye; his pink hands were huge.
“Walters!” said Wing. “Just the man I wanted to see.”
“Is this the patient?” said the intern, looking at Eileen, not me.
“Yes. I want you to take him to EEG, but first do a full work-up.”
“OK,” said Walters with no enthusiasm. He acted like he wanted to be outside playing basketball with his friends.
“Walters here is your doctor,” Wing said. “I’m just supervising. If there are any problems, you let me know, hear?” Then, as if Walters weren’t there, he said, “He looks young, but he’s brilliant. Best scores on the state boards in thirty-seven years.” With that he left the room, and Eileen went with him.
Walters didn’t have much to say. As he did yet another workup, he sighed a lot and looked out the window. He seemed to know what he was doing, which was exactly what Wing had done. If I wasn’t mistaken, my toes curled the opposite direction this time, but he didn’t say anything. He looked very sad and disconcerted.
“Is something wrong?”
“I was just thinking about home,” he said.
“You miss your parents?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I guess you’re on a pretty fast track.”
“Pretty fast,” he sighed. “Dad thinks it’s not fast enough.”
“You’re not from Chicago, are you?”
“Elwood, Illinois. Downstate.”
“Are you going back there to practice?”
“Got to. The chamber of commerce is paying my tuition.”
“You have a contract with them?”
“I have to take up with Dr. Summers, who’s about to retire, and stay in town for at least five years.”
“Do you want to do that?”
“Oh, sure,” he said morosely. He went to look for a cart to take me to EEC.
There was coughing on the other side of the curtain. I’d thought I was all alone.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hi!”
“I didn’t realize I had a roommate.”
“The name’s Feller,” he said, “Arnold Feller.” His voice sounded muffled, as if it passed through two or three doors.
“Any relation to Bob?”
“Who’s that?” he asked softly.
“Baseball player, one of the greats.”
“I don’t follow sports,” he said.
“My name is Holder. Jim Holder.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“I got hit on the head at a demonstration,” I said.
“What were you demonstrating?” he asked with great labor.
I realized he thought I meant a Ronco vegetable slicer or something. “You sound like you’re in pain,” I said. “Maybe we should talk later.”
“That’s all right. I like to talk.”
“Too bad I can’t reach the curtain.”
“Me neither,” he said.
A suction pump engaged on his side, a little motor that sounded like someone’s fingers tapping on a table. He must have had surgery, since the pump, called a Gumco, is used to drain a wound.
“I don’t see a TV in the room,” I complained.
“It’s over here, up on the wall. I’m watching ‘Captain Cartoon.’”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“With these shows you don’t need sound,” he said.
“The doctor says I might have a subdural.”
There was no answer for a while. Then he said, “What did you say?”
“I might have a subdural,” I said much louder, as if calling over a wall. “A bruise on my brain.”
There was another long pause.
“It can knock you over anytime,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Just like that.”
It was my turn not to talk. I thought I could hear, very distantly, the frantic sounds of cartoon mice pounding each other with clubs. After a while, his suction pump went silent.
“You there?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Just checking.”
WALTERS wheeled in a cart, but its pad was missing, which filled me with horror. Somebody must have recently used it to take a body to the morgue.
“There’s no pad,” I said. “It’s got to have a pad.”
“I had a hard time finding this one,” he whined.
“Where did you get it?”
“Back by the elevators.”
“Look in the stationery closet around the corner from there.”
“Doggone it,” he said, as if complaining to one of his parents.
We got off the elevator on the third floor and wheeled down a long hall, Walters’s long head over me like a horse’s. At the very end, there was a door that was painted red instead of stained and varnished. A plaque on it said, EEG and under that
DEATH STUDIES.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “what’s Death Studies?”
“It’s the same as EEG,” he said, opening the door, “only we do it to see if you’re dead.”
Death Studies was a small windowless room, about the size of a Buick Electra. Walters could barely fit the cart inside. I had to stand in the hallway in my hospital gown, then climb back onto the cart once he’d wedged it in. Next to me was a large gray machine with dozens of lights and electrodes and a wide strip of gray paper under several dormant styluses. There was no technician, just a chair for Walters to sit on. It took quite a while to get me hooked up, since electrodes had to be placed all around my head.
As the machine jerked to a start, the styluses flipping like crab claws, I remembered one of the CO jobs I’d seen advertised. Every evening, at some university lab in New Jersey, they would hook you up to one of these machines. While you slept, the machine registered changes in your brain waves. They could tell if you were restless and if you were happy. They could tell if you were in a creative state and if you had a reptile mind. It was rumored to be hard duty, however. One CO reported that the loss of privacy he’d endured during sleep studies had made him nearly crazy. Something wasn’t right about sleeping under the gaze of a technician marking things on a clipboard. He said he aged ten years in six weeks.
I had no such problems. For some reason I was very relaxed, like a puppy curled up with a ticking clock. All sorts of things came into my head: Vicki throwing the roses, a math grade I got in grade school, the weatherman on channel 5 pointing at a bolt of lightning on a fuzzy map. The last thing I heard Walters say was, “It says here you’re asleep.”
Apparently I was, because I had a dream. In it, Dr. Walters was a patient, but he was forty years old. There were worry marks around his eyes, and the skin on his face was gray and tight, typical of alcoholics. In paper slippers and a hospital gown, he followed me down the hall, one arm straight over his head, like a student wanting to ask a question. I wanted to avoid him, and we chased through the hallways for some time. The question he wanted to ask was simple enough, I sensed, but I didn’t want to be bothered answering it. At one point, we stopped and listened to one of the residents in Ophthalmology sing a very beautiful song to two nurses. One of them gazed at him with great admiration, but the other was extremely agitated, scratching her arms with her fingernails until they were red with blood.