HE OPENED HIS eyes.
He had no idea where he was or who he was. He was lying flat on his back on a single bed in a room somewhere. It was, or seemed to be, night.
His room was dark, but there were shadows on the ceiling cast by the night lights below his field of vision.
A telephone ringing outside his room caused him to turn his eyes in the direction of the sound.
He saw that the door to his room was open. Light from the corridor spilled into his room, creating a carpet of light on the floor.
The carpet of light delighted him, as if the ability to see, simply to have eyes that could see, was cause for joy.
Knowing neither his identity nor location, he stared at the rolled-out carpet of light on the floor, as if any minute a messenger would arrive to answer all his questions. In the meantime, until the messenger arrived, he gave himself over to the joy of seeing.
It didn’t take him long to determine that he was in a hospital.
He was strapped to the bed so that he could not move his body, or raise his arms. The image he had of himself was of someone lying at attention.
A tube, its diameter the size of a little finger, ran out of his body. It meandered upwards, riverlike, and with his eyes he followed its course to its source, a glass or a plastic container above his head, attached to a stainless-steel apparatus. The shape of the container, transparent and half-filled with liquid, reminded him of a hummingbird feeder.
Nurses in white uniforms and white shoes walked noiselessly past his doorway. Their images appeared and disappeared like full-length living portraits stepping in and out of a picture frame.
When he saw the same nurse twice, he experienced the thrill of recognizing somebody he neither knew nor would ever get to know, but the joy of seeing her again, the joy of seeing in general, was a joy in itself.
As far as he was concerned, he could just go on, happily seeing forever.
Every now and then, a telephone rang in the corridor and then stopped.
If he was, as he had determined that he was, in a hospital, then it followed that something was wrong with him. People were not dragged off to hospitals in this day and age, in any day and age for that matter, if there was nothing wrong with them.
He felt so good, he couldn’t imagine the reason for his confinement.
Strapped to the bed and all.
He wondered what the matter with him was.
A heart attack?
An aneurysm?
Maybe he was a victim of a random shooting.
He was not worried or anxious about it. Merely curious. Just as he was curious about the location of the hospital.
Chicago?
LA?
New York?
Paris?
His hospital room’s nondescript decor provided no clues. For all he knew, he could be anywhere.
Another, but related question: When he was released from the hospital, as people always are, where would he go?
He didn’t have a clue.
The only answer that came to him was “Home.” But where was that?
He had no idea.
He would know when the time came for him to check out of the hospital.
Out in the corridor, he heard the telephone ringing and he gave himself over to the joy of hearing the sound before it stopped. He could see. He could hear. He could think. All three at once, in fact.
He wondered if perhaps he had been brought to this hospital not because of some physical affliction but because there had been no joy in his life.
From time to time he wondered who he was.
He knew, although he didn’t have one yet, that he was supposed to have an identity. He even knew the general components that made up an identity.
A first and last name. A birthdate and birthplace. Current address. Occupation. Somebody to call in case of an emergency. Daytime phone number. Favorite author. Favorite quote. And so on.
It struck him as a curious thing, this concept of an identity. Curious in the sense that the components that made it up didn’t seem all that personal.
If he were never to have an identity, would it be such a loss?
Of what significance was it that he didn’t have one now?
Or did he?
Here he was, after all, seeing, hearing, thinking, full of joy. Was that not an identity?
Or was the joy he felt a substitute for an identity?
If so, then he wasn’t all that keen on acquiring one.
Though he was bound fast to the bed on which he lay, his head was free to move in any direction. There was nothing external, no clamp or vise, to keep his head from turning this way or that.
And yet he kept his head perfectly still.
It was as if some precious and precarious balance existed inside his head that would not only be upset should he move it, but upset with dire consequences. Something would topple. Some peace within would collapse. Some flood of calamitous information would invade him and make him drown, should the balance be compromised. Therefore, when he looked to his left or to his right, only his eyes moved, turning within their sockets like floating compass balls.
Inside his head was his brain and within that brain was his mind and within his mind was his mind’s eye looking back at him. It seemed like a friendly presence, both familiar and strange. Like a third parent we all have but seldom see. He saw love in his mind’s eye. Love extended to him for no reason at all. Simply because he existed. Love without a motive or cutoff date.
A nurse came into his room, humming a Bob Dylan ballad. He still didn’t know his own name but he knew it was a Dylan ballad she was humming.
She stopped humming the moment she saw that his eyes were open. She seemed startled, almost frightened by his steadfast gaze, and then she smiled and grew quite excited, as if some unexpected but significant phenomenon had occurred.
“You’re awake,” she said, implying by her tone that being awake was a major accomplishment. “I better get Dr. Clare.” Even as she said this, she was backing out of his room as if unable to restrain herself from broadcasting the news of his awakening. In the next second, she was out the door and he heard her voice in the corridor.
“The guy in 312 is out of his coma. Where’s Dr. Clare?”
He was not really surrounded, but he felt surrounded. Dr. Clare, a woman, was on his right. On his left, keeping her distance, was the nurse who had found him awake. Neither of them was pressing in on him, but he felt invaded by their curiosity. It was as if he were a story they knew better than he did.
Initially, he had tried to resist, to dismiss, to deny everything that Dr. Clare was telling him, but he found himself incapable of keeping up the effort. He found himself weakening. Succumbing to something in the weary monotone voice, in the weary, almost motherly eyes of Dr. Clare. The black circles under her eyes testified to sleepless nights spent looking after patients. Had she not seemed so overworked and been more businesslike, had she been a man and not a woman, he would have perhaps found a way to trigger his anger and outrage and tell her to get the fuck out of his room.
But as it was he felt helpless to be anything less than pleased with what she was doing because she seemed so certain that she was making him feel better. How could he tell her that he wanted no part of this identity that she was so kindly and yet mercilessly administering to him?
“Can you speak, Mr. Karoo?” she asked.
As soon as he heard Karoo, he remembered Saul and knew that he was Saul Karoo.
She waited patiently for him to reply, urging him to try with a weary smile and eyes kindly disposed toward him.
“Yes, I can speak,” he said, and the sound of his own voice was like a signal that caused whatever resistance he had left to collapse.
From the far corners of the world, or so it seemed to him, came caravans and cargo planes bearing back into his mind the trivia and the tragedies of his past.
The speed of this reintroduction to himself was like a nuclear chain reaction. Nothing could stop it. A blur of details invading him at the speed of light. Names, places, people he knew, books he had read, the many poolsides of his life. His once spacious interior was being furnished with the seemingly endless clutter of his life. The more there was of it, the less there appeared to be of him. It was like being buried alive in the details of his past.
The joy of life is dying, he wanted to scream out, but couldn’t bring himself to disappoint the weary-eyed Dr. Clare, who mistook the look of remembrance in his eyes for joy.
“It’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it?” she asked.
Yes, he nodded, saying nothing.
“Good,” she said. “You’ve been in a coma for almost twelve days. A concussion. It’s hard to tell with comas. We never know how long they’ll last. We don’t even know what makes one person come out of it and another stay in it forever. In case you’re interested, you have no major injuries. No broken bones. The fingertips of your hands were scraped off completely and will require time to heal. I’m afraid,” she smiled knowingly, “you won’t be doing any typing for a while.”
He wondered how it was that she knew his occupation. The trio of nurses standing in the doorway and the nurse to his left all smiled identical little smiles. They all knew too. They all seemed to know something about him and regarded him with eyes usually reserved for the famous.
“Considering the nature of the accident,” Dr. Clare told him, “it’s really a miracle that you’re still in one piece.”
There was something in the sound of the word “miracle” as pronounced by Dr. Clare that was too clipped and hurried and lacked the quality of expansiveness one usually associated with the meaning of that word.
This miracle sounded lonely on her lips.
A miracle for one.
Like a lonely Thanksgiving dinner for one.
The implication of it caused him to contract his conscious mind into a compressed dot of matter that nothing could penetrate. The fury of his denial met with momentary success, but its futility was a foregone conclusion. His teeth clenched with such force that several of them buckled and broke. The tip of his tongue, which had been pressing against them, now pushed forward. The broken tooth splinters tore at his tongue, drawing blood. Bits of broken teeth mixed with the broth of saliva and blood in his mouth and then the whole mess began to slide magmalike down his throat. He gagged. Then he began to vomit.
This was how he acknowledged to himself that both Billy and Leila were dead.
A police officer came to see him. They went to the third-floor hospital lounge to talk, Saul’s hospital-issue slippers snapping at his heels as he walked down the linoleum-covered corridor.
They sat down on chairs upholstered in green Naugahyde that had been worn smooth and discolored by a countless procession of patients and relatives sitting and squirming on them over the years.
The police officer was young and handsome and possessed the athleticism of a former high school star.
His last name was Kovalev.
“Russian?” Saul asked.
The officer nodded.
“There’s supposed to be a large Russian community in Pittsburgh,” Saul said.
“Not as large as it was,” the officer told him.
Saul had no idea at whose request this meeting was arranged and wondered if perhaps its purpose was to inform him that he was to be prosecuted for murder. He felt like a murderer and welcomed the prospect of being carried away by the assembly line of justice. On his own, he had no idea what he would do with the burden of years left in his life. Perhaps this handsome young policeman would tell him.
He was not only disappointed but felt betrayed when Officer Kovalev not only informed him but went to some trouble to assure him that the accident was not his fault.
Officer Kovalev produced a sketch, a Xeroxed copy of the original, and using it as some authoritative document on loan from the Library of Congress, he described to Saul how the accident that had taken four lives occurred.
Here was the road that Saul was on. Here was the blind curve. And here was the dirt road going off to the right.
Saul nodded, eager as always to please.
There was a stop sign right here, the officer indicated with a ballpoint pen. The driver of the other car, there were several witnesses who saw the whole thing, failed to observe the stop sign, intent on making a left turn, and entered the road down which Saul was driving. The Checker hit the Oldsmobile. There were skid marks indicating that Saul had tried to stop before the impact. The driver of the Oldsmobile, a male, was found in the autopsy to have been legally drunk, as was his companion, an out-of-state female. Both were killed instantly.
“I was speeding,” Saul said through broken teeth. “I’m positive that I was.”
Officer Kovalev looked up from the sketch in his lap and bestowed upon Saul a long, lingering look. Those eyes spoke of many things. Of his glory days as a high school hero. Of the disappointment that the glory days had been so short-lived and led nowhere. Of the gradual diminution of his athletic prowess. Of his attempt to make the best of things in his current occupation. But his gaze also informed Saul that this case was closed, that the blame, during Saul’s comatose days, had been assigned and that Saul’s opinion that he had been speeding was now neither here nor there.
Saul began to insist on his guilt, but reducing his guilt to a mere case of speeding seemed even more loathsome than being declared innocent of the crime.
His whole life had been a life of crime. To insist now that his responsibility was limited to exceeding the speed limit had the corrupt sound of plea bargaining. He would not stoop that low.
The question of speeding vanished in the silence between them.
The instant death of the couple in the other car caused a frightening question to be born in his mind during that silence.
“You said,” he stammered, “that they were killed instantly.”
“Yes. Both of them.”
“The couple in the Oldsmobile?”
“That’s correct.”
“And what about …” He could not bring himself to pronounce their names. “In my car. The couple in the car I was driving?”
“Same thing.”
“Instantly?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
They sat there in the hospital lounge on the third floor, both dressed in uniforms, the police officer in his blues and Saul in his official hospital-issue green. Both wore name tags. The officer had his on his chest. Saul wore a plastic ID around his wrist.
He didn’t know how to phrase the next question properly. It seemed obligatory that even questions should wear proper uniforms.
“Concerning the current status, I mean, as far as the remains of the deceased are …”
The officer understood and appreciated the form in which the question was put and took it from there.
Consulting a steno notebook (with a list of often misspelled words on the back cover), Officer Kovalev described the chain of events that had brought the mothers of the deceased to Pittsburgh and the manner in which the remains of the deceased had been taken to their final destinations.
All this was told to Saul in Officer Kovalev’s polite and neutral police prose, a genre of communication that was beginning to grow on Saul the longer he sat in the hospital lounge.
They had found Billy’s driver’s license in his wallet, giving his home address. They got the telephone number for that address from the telephone company. Dianah answered the phone. There were no details about her response to the news. She flew out to Pittsburgh in order to identify the body at the morgue and to claim the remains as her own.
It took longer to notify Leila’s mother. The only items of identification on Leila’s person were a social security card and a card of a member in good standing of the Screen Actors’ Guild.
Both of these, when traced, led to an address in Venice where the telephone recording of the deceased was the only reply in their repeated attempts at trying her number.
A gentleman from the film industry, Mr. Jay Cromwell, showing up at the police station after he heard of the accident, offered his assistance. Through his intercession and several calls to Los Angeles, he was able to determine that Leila’s birthplace was Charleston, South Carolina, in which city Leila’s mother still resided. When the prospect of travel to Pittsburgh on such short notice and for such a purpose proved both emotionally and financially too taxing for her, Mr. Cromwell interceded again and chartered not only a private plane to fly her out but a driver and a car to take her to the airport. He also made all the arrangements for the transport of Leila’s remains back to Charleston. Billy’s remains were flown back by Dianah.
The status of the personal belongings left in the hotel was this. Billy’s were signed for and taken by Dianah. His own and Leila’s things were still in storage at the Four Seasons Hotel, where they could be picked up at his convenience.
No, Officer Kovalev did not know anything about the nature of the funeral arrangements of either Billy or Leila.
Was there anything else he could tell him? Any other questions?
No, Saul shook his head. But he wished he could keep the young officer as a permanent companion who would render into neutral police prose the remainder of his life.
As soon as Officer Kovalev left, Saul’s capacity to focus departed as well. A dull, incoherent, but widespread pain engulfed him. A pain without a center or precedence or a proper person to feel it.
He meant to get up, to leave this hospital lounge, and return to his room, but he didn’t know as who.
So he sat there, in his Naugahyde-upholstered chair, with his hands in his lap, as if waiting for somebody. All eight of his fingers and both thumbs were capped with white bandages down to the knuckle. He remembered a movie of a criminal who had tried to burn off his fingerprints with acid and grow new ones so that he could elude the FBI and start a new life. Unfortunately the experiment didn’t work. After much pain, the fingerprints regenerated themselves into the exact same pattern as before.
Saul now knew what that felt like. The old was intolerable and all hope for the new was gone.
His telephone had been disconnected while he had been in the coma. There were many messages for him taken by the hospital switchboard. He didn’t want any of them. He took them but didn’t read them. Nor did he want his telephone to be made operational. There was no one he wanted to call, nor was there anybody he wanted to call him.
On his last Sunday in the hospital a priest appeared in his room, just as he was waking up from another dreamless sleep. The priest, another man in uniform, was tall and thin with thinning hair. He was almost a one-man exemplar of thinning, he seemed to be thinning as he stood there, his voice thinning as he spoke and offered Saul the services of a nondenominational chapel on the fifth floor. The service would start in forty-five minutes and then again at eleven fifteen.
“Sometimes,” the priest said, “it helps to turn to God in times of woe.”
“God,” as pronounced by the priest, sounded so thin and insubstantial that Saul agreed to come to the early service.
He took the elevator to the fifth floor and followed the signs to the chapel. It was a small chapel with benches on which sat people in pajamas and bathrobes, all facing the same way, as they would in a movie theater or a concert.
Something about this image struck him as wrong and self-deceiving.
The whole notion of turning to God struck him as absurd. If there was a God, then surely you were surrounded by Him and couldn’t avoid turning to Him even if you tried. If there was no God, then turning in some agreed-upon direction in order to find him was a gesture of such futility that he was better off without it.
So he took the elevator back to the third floor.
Two days later, after undergoing some final tests in regard to the sequence and the pattern of his brainwaves, he was pronounced fit to resume his normal life and released from the hospital.
His room was by now half filled with flowers sent by secretaries of people he knew in the movie business.
Before checking out, he made the necessary arrangements for the hospital bills he had incurred. No, he told the woman in charge of these things, he had no insurance. He had no health insurance of any kind. But his accountant would take care of it. The nonexorbitance of the hospital bill disappointed him. He would have preferred something in the astronomic range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. His need to pay for what had transpired would not be easily satisfied.
He took a cab to the Four Seasons Hotel. He had spent Thanksgiving in a coma and now Christmas decorations festooned the business district and he heard the sound of Christmas carols. He gave the cab driver a tip so preposterous that there was something underhanded and ugly about the generosity of the donor which the driver perceived and which thus robbed him of whatever joy he might have had in getting such a tip.
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” the driver parroted back Saul’s greeting, but it was strictly pro forma and without even a hint of sincerity.
At the front desk of the hotel, Saul settled his account for the ill-fated luxury suite in which he and Leila had spent one night. The bill for Billy’s room had apparently been paid by Dianah.
A bellboy brought him his garment bag and Leila’s suitcase and he, also, was made uneasy by the tip he received from Saul.
Despite the bandages on his fingers, Saul insisted on carrying the bags out of the hotel himself. The pain he inflicted upon himself by doing so was all too slight for his appetite for pain.
Another cab to the airport.
He still had his and Leila’s return tickets to New York, but the date of that return had come and gone. His ticket was still valid, but its validity was a joke compared to everything else that had perished and expired. Having no reservation, he bought a ticket on the next available flight to New York City.
It would be a considerable wait, he was told.
Carrying his bags like a traveling salesman defeated by the size of his territory, he went to the gate and sat down to wait.
Flights arrived. Those waiting greeted those disembarking. Other flights took off. New travelers arrived to wait where he was waiting and then they too got up and left and were replaced by others.
From time to time, he regarded Leila’s suitcase like some crazed terrorist who knew there was a bomb inside of it.
He didn’t know what to do with it. With that dress. That wedding gown. That once-in-a-lifetime dress meant for the premiere of her one and only film.
Once again and for the last time the film had rolled on without her.
And Billy.
As on a tape loop, a single thought kept going around and around in his mind. A son separated from his mother at birth and then separated again from her, their remains flown to different destinations after their deaths.
He, Saul, had brought them together for a brief period of time.
For what?
What had he done, what had he done, by trying to play God?
His pain was so huge, he couldn’t get at it to feel it. All he could feel was a profound depression at his inability to rise to the occasion and be savaged by the pain. Be torn to shreds.
When his plane began to board, he took the name tags off his garment bag and Leila’s suitcase and dropped them into a trash container. Then, after making sure that there was nothing in either piece of baggage to identify its owners, he left the bags where they were and boarded the plane with nothing in his hands except a boarding pass and the bandages on his fingers.
The plane took off on time, shortly before sunset, and in making a sweeping turn it dipped its wing to Saul’s side. With his forehead pressed against the window, Saul beheld the confluence of the three rivers below. Nor was he spared the memory of the metaphorical meaning he had assigned to that confluence in happier times.
All gone.
For so long, it seemed, and with such high hopes, he had waited for the trip to Pittsburgh and the happy ending he had conceived.
And now?
Now he felt like some doomed, hubristic voyager who had endeavored to journey through time and space so that he could behold his own future. Defying the odds and the gods, he had set his course for nothing less than that. The price for his arrogance was high. His spacecraft collided with his future and in the resulting explosion his future was destroyed and everyone on board perished except for himself. He alone was rescued and was now being flown back to earth, where he would have to live out his days in the knowledge that he had no future.