As for how Christopher might be amusing himself otherwise, if he hadn’t been pushed to the side of his own life, the subject never came up. It never came up because it so obviously groaned with frustration and futility. But there was this one time, in Texas in the fall of October 2011, brought about by happenstance…
It was then seventeen months since onset and a full year since he published his first report from the land of the stricken (it would become Chapter 1 of Mortality), where he wrote, ‘I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it.’*1 What he was most immediately looking forward to, Blue told me, was a leisurely circuit of various universities with their daughter Antonia, who was then seventeen, and by October 2011 that window had closed.
The missed opportunity I was about to present him with was in comparison vanishingly slight. But minor wounds, too, can hurt and connect (‘once one has got used to the big wrongs of life,’ wrote V. S. Pritchett, ‘little ones wake up, with their mean little teeth’). We were in the Zilkhas’ garden, among its statues and butterflies, and I said as casually as I could,
‘When I leave tomorrow I’ll be heading south. Over the Rio Grande.’
‘Oh? To what end?’
‘Just a festival. By air to Veracruz, then by road to Xalapa.’
And it struck me: I couldn’t think of an adventure he would find more powerfully enticing. The late flight out of Houston, the midnight landing in violent Veracruz, the drive to the complimentary hotel, the international cast of thinkers and drinkers, the fresh audiences of upturned faces – in Mexico, with its voluptuous flora, its tangily effectual margaritas and mojitos, its scorching spices, land of revolution and of knifepoint anti-clericalism, land of the implacable rebel, of Álvaro Obregón, of Pancho Villa, of Emiliano Zapata…
‘Sorry, Hitch.’
‘What for?’ he said without any sign of disappointment in his open face. ‘Someone’s got to do it. They did ask me, if I remember.’
‘Of course they asked you. I saw your picture in one of the programmes.’ Instead of going to Mexico, Christopher would be going to MD Anderson, most days – for monitoring and therapy. I thought of the past summer, when he returned to Washington and a) waited out a throat-to-navel radiation rash (caused by thirty-five days under the synchrotron),*2 and b) was admitted to a DC hospital which gave him ‘a vicious staph pneumonia (and sent [him] home twice with it)’; during that time – certainly, confessedly – he came very close to despair and to surrender; but then there were ‘intervals of relative robustness’ marked by nothing much worse than ‘annihilating fatigue’. I now said, ‘But I’m changing my ticket. I’m coming straight back here. By the weekend, Hitch, I’ll once again be in your arms.’
On Tuesday evening as I climbed into the yellow cab (Michael Z was unaccountably elsewhere), Christopher came to see me off, out on the driveway, in shirtsleeves, cheerfully and lovingly…And then the flight south through the darkness, and the long bus ride to Xalapa with a score of other attendees, and the meal break en route at a roadside bodega, where I had a stimulating talk with the historian Niall Ferguson (husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on whom the Hitch had long had a crush). He, Christopher, might’ve had all this happen to him too, together with me, in the alternate world of health.
‘I didn’t want to be discouraging, but now you’re back safe and sound, Little Keith, I can tell you a very crunchy story about Mexico City. It’s a good one.’
‘Please.’
Out of hospital for a while, Christopher, by now very much used to being in and out of hospital, was in hospital. Up in the Tower and in his own room – the scattered notebooks and typescripts, the beeping monitors, the high bed standing to attention.
‘A Nordic theologian,’ said Christopher, ‘a gentleman and a scholar, landed at the airport and took a taxi to his hotel. Before he could get inside he was snatched and bundled into a car. They had him humped over on his knees in the back and they kept jabbing his arse with their awls and skewers – as he told them all his passwords and pin numbers. Then they drove him around to various ATMs and had great fun with his bank account. And you’d think that’d be the end of it. But no…Now the narrative takes on a tragic complexion.’
A tap on the door was instantly followed by a flight attendant pushing a drinks trolley – or so for an instant I thought. It was in fact a wheeled tray of vials and tubes steered by a nurse who sang out,
‘Good afternoon!’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Christopher. ‘Ah. Blood work. I used to tell my visitors, This’ll only take a minute and it doesn’t hurt. Both claims are no longer true.’ He looked to his left. ‘And how are you, my dear?’
‘Great! And how are you doing today?’
‘Medium cool, thank you…Mart, this young lady’s prepping me for a PIC line, which is a uh, a peripherally inserted catheter. Once that’s in, there’ll be no more probing around for usable veins. Ten minutes. Go and have a quick burn.’
…Outside on the plant-lined pathway I lit up and strolled back and forth. Has all this put you off smoking? asked Alexander on one of his recent visits. No, I said. What it’s done is put me off medical treatment. So I dragged and puffed and stared at the dusty flora, each little bush and shrub on its midden of cigarette ends, which looked almost decoratively organic, like thick white catkins…
‘Success?’ I said, as the blood lady was rattling off to her next customer.
‘Yeah, as far as it went. For the actual insertion, the blood lady said she’ll need the help of at least one or two blood blokes. Where were we?’
‘Our tragic Scandinavian. Then what?’
‘Ah. Well once they’d cleaned him out the droogs took him off into the wilderness and left him naked in a paddy field miles from town. They beat him up of course – but get this. They smeared him with dogshit. All over his face and hair.’
‘…What was that in aid of? Why?’
‘Why. A very interesting question. Which I’m sure he asked himself – accustomed as he was to balancing divine providence against the existence of evil. Anyway, he flew without incident back to Stockholm or Oslo. That was three years ago. And, it’s a funny thing, but he hasn’t said a word since.’
‘Christ.’
‘Mm. Most unfortunate. He’s in a darkened room in some cackle-factory up in the tundra. But wouldn’t you agree, Little Keith, that Mexico’s much maligned? You’d never guess that the murder rate in Mexico City is much lower than St Louis.’
I said, ‘From what I saw they’re a lovely people. And you know, I was in a two-hour traffic jam in Xalapa and I didn’t hear a single horn.’
He and I talked of Mexico until the arrival of Blue, and then Alexander, and we got ready to go. Here was another thing Christopher would have been doing otherwise: joining us that night for rounds of cocktails and a three-course meal. We all commiserated in our different ways. I said,
‘You awe me, Hitch. You don’t have an issue with us going off to a snazzy grill? You don’t find it uh, concerning? You’re comfortable with that?’
‘Of course,’ he said, picking up his book. ‘I’d much rather think about you doing it than think about you not doing it. I do like to feel it’s getting done.’
‘That’s good in you, Hitch. And listen, Xalapa’s on every October and we’ll go there together a year from now. Let’s shake on it. Xalapa, in 2012.’
The Hitchenses, as a couple, were returning to Michael’s guest house less and less often. Blue slept there (except during crises), and so did I whenever I flew down: waking up to a leisurely breakfast with Blue on the sunny porch, both of us eating cereal laced with berries, and getting through enormous quantities of caffeine and tobacco. Blue and I, we were calm and companionable; when we talked about Christopher’s condition, we scoffed at his cringeing tumours and his punily curable pneumonias. Around noon we would climb into one of Michael’s cars and make the brief journey to the Tower.
And there would be Christopher, for whom ‘every passing day represents more and more’ – as he wrote that same month – being ‘relentlessly subtracted from less and less’.
Denial, rage, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.
Christopher summarised ‘the notorious stage theory’ in his first dispatch from the sickroom (September 2010). And only the other day, eight years later, did I learn that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s subject was not mortal illness; it was bereavement.
Which of course changes everything. In the case of bereavement, you are negotiating psychic terms with someone who is already dead – and not with someone who may yet survive.
So the stages would have to be revised. It wasn’t denial that ensnared us, all three of us, Blue, me, and (to an unknowable but I think lesser extent) the patient himself. It was more like hardened hope, or blind faith, or adamantine wishfulness.
About six months after the diagnosis I wrote a long piece about Christopher; in the London Observer, and I cleared it with him and with Blue, and also with Ian, who said (I am conflating emails and phone calls),
‘Here and there you’re too severe, I think. When you quote the more minor Hitch. I mean you’re not wrong, but…’
‘Well he and I have a tradition of being hard on each other not in person but in print. If it didn’t have some vinegar in it he’d find it – oily.’
‘I agree with your general point. And I agree about puns. But a couple of the examples you give, and what you say about them. Does he need to see that now?’
‘Now?’
‘Now he’s dying.’
I felt a jolt and had a strong impulse to say, with real indignation, ‘But he’s not dying’…I didn’t say it. I just thought it. I just thought: But he’s not dying.
A minute later I rolled a cigarette and went outside to the stone-paved garden behind the house on Regent’s Park Road, where the cold sun was staring down through huge voids and tunnels in the covering cloud. I was reminded of how it feels to be an expectant father in the days immediately before the birth – the infinite restlessness and the sense of being almost criminally underemployed. As Prince Hal says in ambivalent mockery of Hotspur: ‘He that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife: “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.” ’ Oh, what to do with all this stoppered energy. Release me. Let me go and rearrange heaven and earth with my bare hands…Is that what religion is, the groping of the powerless?
As Blue understood it, Christopher’s chances of ‘cure’ or long remission were between ‘5 to 20 per cent’. But Ian told me that even the lower figure was too high – and about medical science he was never wrong. Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four. And yet, as Carol Blue wrote in her exemplary afterword to Mortality:
Without ever deceiving himself about his medical condition, and without ever allowing me to entertain illusions about his prospects for survival, he responded to every bit of clinical or statistical good news with a radical, childlike hope.
Blue was right: ‘His will to keep his existence intact, to remain engaged with his preternatural intensity, was spectacular.’ But there was also this, from a piece about Nietzsche’s dictum ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’, which he showed me that October:
…it seemed absurd to affect the idea that this bluffing on my part was making me stronger, or making other people perform more strongly or cheerfully either. Whatever view one takes of the outcome being affected by morale, it seems certain that the realm of illusion must be escaped before anything else.
‘Nietzsche was perhaps mistaken,’ added Hitch, ‘don’t you think? Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and kills you later on.’
‘I do want to die well…But how is it done?’
So says Guy Openshaw, a character in the Iris Murdoch novel Nuns and Soldiers (1980). Guy expires overleaf (and – for clear artistic reasons – offstage), but we are on page 100 by now, and the reader has had time to see what dying well, at least as an aspiration, might be supposed to mean. This is a novel by Iris Murdoch, so everyone is implausibly articulate, and ‘dying well’ is considered above all as a task for the intellect. Guy therefore involves himself in many testing dialogues with his closest male friend – about leavetaking, about non-existence – in an attempt, as Saul had put it in The Dean’s December, to make ‘sober, decent terms with death’ and so move on to ‘the completion of your reality’.
For a long time after it was all over I thought that this was the clearest flaw of my see-no-evil approach to a potentially fatal illness: death could not be talked about. But now I think, Talk about what, exactly? The famous aphorisms about death – Freud’s, Rochefoucauld’s – maintain the intrinsic impossibility of facing up to it. ‘Philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom’, and philosophers have further defined it, more explicitly, as ‘learning how to die’; but the fruits of this learning have never been passed on to us…Noticing the first marks of age on an ex-lover’s face, Herzog identifies ‘death, the artist, very slow’. Death brims with artistic complexity, but its philosophical content is slight. Death is an artist, not an intellectual.
Death is nothingness. So talk about what, exactly? If you multiply a number, any number, by zero, the result is still zero; the answer is always zero. Christopher and I could have had long talks about nothingness. Would this have helped him? I still wonder. There is a particular photograph (which I’ll duly disclose) that makes me still wonder.
The historian Timothy Snyder has recently said that African Americans are all experiencing a form of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder (an ancient concept with many names). Snyder’s premise will no doubt be challenged, but to me it has the power of ‘a truth goose’ (the phrase is Tim O’Brien’s).
Christopher, in the autumn of 2011, came to think that he now qualified as a sufferer. His episode of traumatic stress didn’t last long and was self-inflicted (also self-regulated). It took place on ‘a gorgeous day’ in May 2008 in North Carolina.
‘You know, I still can’t believe you did that,’ I said at his bedside in Houston. ‘Why’d you let it happen? No, why’d you bring it about? Why’d you seek it?’
‘Curiosity. And there’s the pro bono aspect, Little Keith.’
‘Oh, sure. I fail to understand you, Christopher Hitchens. Jesus Christ, you must fucking love it.’
He couldn’t and wouldn’t claim that he didn’t know what he was getting into. The ‘agreement’ Christopher signed beforehand was quite specific, noting that the experience he was procuring for himself
is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional, and psychological) injuries and even death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.
The ‘due to’ clause in that sentence looks woolly and equivocal, but there is no mistaking a later warning: ‘safeguards’ would be in place during the ‘process’, but ‘these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing injury or death’.
To book himself in for this, Christopher made a number of calls. The first ‘specialist’ he talked to asked his age (fifty-nine), then ‘laughed out loud and told me to forget it’. Instead of forgetting it, though, instead of deciding not to risk experiencing death, Hitch persevered. Along the way he ‘had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma’ – ‘but I wondered if I should tell them’, he continues, ‘about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades’ (which is more than forty a day). And then he got on a plane and betook himself to a remote dwelling or ‘facility’ at the end of a long and tapering country road in the hills of western North Carolina.
If you want to, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube…
We are in what looks like an orderly suburban garage (there is a fridge, and a mower or motorbike under tarps); orderly and ordinary, although it would serve perfectly well, cinematically, as the lab or rec room of some relatively unpretentious serial murderer. After a while heavyset men are purposefully busying themselves, while the viewer concentrates on a two-plank table of bare pine, supported by A-frames and tilting slightly downwards to the right, where a bucket lurks. The Hitch appears, under escort and black-hooded as if for execution (no eye-slits), and is helped into a seated position. Fade. Now he is strapped down on the sloping board so that his heart is higher than his head (and his loafers higher still). A hunched operative leans over him and says, with the plodding and patronising menace that marks the voice of American officialdom (do I make myself clear?),
‘All right, listen up. I’m going to give you some instructions…Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘We’re going to place metal objects in each of your hands. These objects are to be released if you experience unbearable stress…Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You have a code word you can use for distress. That word is red. R-E-D. Say the word.’
‘Red.’
‘Again, what is the word?’
‘Red.’
‘That is correct.’
Now the Special Forces veterans go about their work with ominously practised movements of their gloved hands. One of them aligns and steadies the subject’s body while another folds a white towel over the subject’s mouth and nose, and produces…a plastic jug of Poland Spring. And then the towel – a white mask upon a black mask – is assiduously drenched.
Seventeen seconds later the metal objects (which look like steel batons) are dashed to the ground. The men at once desist, the straps are loosened, and the hood is whipped off to reveal a face both flushed and tumid, as if about to burst.
‘All right, are you breathing?’
The live footage soon fades. What we don’t see is Christopher asking ‘to try it one more time’…When he did, the specialists, after a by-the-book interval with repeated and elaborated warnings (‘racing pulse’, ‘adrenaline rush’), duly obliged.
I glanced out of the window at the familiar towers of MD Anderson, as odiously changeless as the daily Tex-Mex blue. For I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens: this was more, now, than an often-used conversational flourish. I said,
‘You wanted another go to see if you could last longer.’
‘Of course. You know, family honour.’ He was sitting in his dressing gown on the padded chair beside the bed – the hospital bed, with his computer open on its detachable meal tray. ‘You seem to want me to spell it out. My ancestors, Little Keith, who faced peril on the sea. When they struggled in an alien element, their courage did not desert them.’
‘Mm.’ No one who knew him at all well would discount Christopher’s reverence for the ‘Navy Hymn’ and the no-nonsense fortitude of Commander Hitchens and all the rest. In his torture piece he talked of the ‘shame and misery’ he felt after his prompt capitulation in North Carolina (‘shame’ could be merely gestural, but ‘misery’ feels authentic, and peculiar – peculiar to him). ‘All right, you struck a blow for your ancient mariners. And as a result you’ve got PTSD.’
‘So it would seem,’ he said. ‘PTSD. Yes, I know, I used to sneer at those abbreviations and so did you. When the kindergarten shrinks were raring to drug Alexander, I’d think, Attention Deficit Disorder – these are just fancy names for the little sins of childhood. Messy Eater Syndrome. Won’t Sit Still Spectrum. But PTSD…I think it’s a real condition.’
‘So do I.*3 But the point is you went looking for it. You went cruising for a bruising, mate. Twice.’
‘Yes yes, Mart, but it was worth doing. Now we know that waterboarding’s not a “simulation” of torture. It’s an enactment.’
‘Someone had to do it – maybe – but not you. Your history ruled you out. On several counts.’ And I ticked them off: lifelong fear of drowning, waking up with air hunger (plus ‘acid reflux’), acute breathlessness after mild exertion…He said nothing. I said, ‘I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens.’
And it was true. I didn’t – and I don’t – understand him. And I reduced my thoughts, that night in Houston, to stupefied silence as I tried and failed to understand Christopher Hitchens.
…His attraction to perversity was familiar enough to everyone. In the journalistic narrative the adjective of first resort – ‘contrarian’ – was now something like Christopher’s middle name. And he did seem to covet the disapproval, even the ostracism, of his peers. Time and again I watched him do it, watched him seek the most difficult position, difficult anyway and quite exceptionally difficult for Christopher Hitchens.*4
This trait of his was always mysteriously self-punitive. Still, though – to go out of your way to volunteer for torture? In all other cases it was his intellectual reputation he put at risk, not his physical instrument – not his life.
He was obscurely compelled to embrace complication, to test his courage, to walk into his doubts and fears. And so it was that in 2008 he decided that the most difficult position, for him, was lying on his back (with his face under two layers of sopping cloth) on a narrow board that sloped downwards, so that his heart was higher than his head.
‘It is so very difficult for a sick man not to be a scoundrel,’ observed Dr Johnson, as he embarked on one of his most magisterial paragraphs:
It may be said that disease generally begins that equality which death completes. All distinctions which set one man apart from another are very little perceived in the gloom of the sick chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued…
Of all the literary genres, panegyric is easily the dullest. Yet I must now praise the Hitch. It was courage, and it was more than courage; it was honour, it was integrity, it was character. In any event, not one of the Johnsonian deficits was ever visible in him…And when you consider how swiftly even a routine illness – a potent flu, say – exhausts your reserves of patience, tolerance, civility, warmth, and imaginative sympathy, despite the tacit assurance that the miseries of the present will soon join the forgotten miseries of the past. Christopher knew no such assurance, and he had been immured in the land of the sick for seventeen months.
‘The blood squad’s due around now,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is this for the catheter? Well I’ll go and get a coffee.’
‘No, Mart, you’ll need your book. Ten minutes, they claim. Or they used to. But it’ll take longer than that.’
Christopher was proud of his ‘very rare blood type’, and would often ‘give’, spontaneously, for the public weal (as he twice did in Vietnam, in 1967 and 2006). He used to find the process absurdly easy: the clasping squeeze of the tourniquet, the brisk little stab – and then the cup of tea and the ginger biscuit (in South East Asia he also got ‘a sustaining bowl of beef noodles’). It was different now.
That same month he described it in writing:
The phlebotomist would sit down, take my hand or wrist in his or her hand, and sigh. The welts of reddish and purple could already be seen, giving the arm a definite ‘junkie’ look. The veins themselves lay sunken in their beds, either hollow or crushed…I was recently scheduled for the inserion of a ‘PIC’ line, by means of which a permanent blood catheter is inserted in the upper arm…It can’t have been much less than two hours until, having tried and failed with both arms, I was lying between two bed-pads that were liberally laced with dried or clotting blood. The upset of the nurses was palpable.
When it was over, when the ‘life-giving thread’ had begun ‘to unspool in the syringe’ (‘Twelve times is the charm!’ cries a medic), and the smeared bed-pads had been cleared away, that’s what the half-conscious patient felt moved to think about: the upset of the nurses.
Susceptibility to emotion is not encouraged in a hospital dedicated to profit. In Britain we have the famous NHS; and despite its wartime feel (as everyone somehow bootstraps along with what they’ve got), you are always seeing the kind of vocational ardour that silently declares, This is my talent – the alleviation of suffering is what I’m good at. In America the ardour has been selected out. Hence that frostily elfin politeness that envelops you all the way from the reception desk to the intensive care unit…Invariably and effortlessly Christopher moved past the robotic spryness that surrounded him, and developed relationships that included sensitivity and humour and trust – with the oncologists, the blood-extraction teams, the caterers, and the cleaners, even as he took up the most difficult position of all.
So let me praise him, let us praise the Hitch: contra Dr Johnson, he seemed to find it the easiest thing in the world to be the very opposite of a scoundrel. In the gloom of the sick chamber, all the distinctions that set one man apart from another were unforgettably perceived; he kept hold of his gaiety and his sagacity, his wit was unclouded, his reason unperplexed. His human glory was not obliterated, and the hero was unsubdued.
I do so want to die well…But how is it done?
That is how it is done.
But of course we didn’t accept that that was what he was doing – dying.
And I myself was no doubt exorbitantly encouraged by a fresh development. During the last month or so, in our hours together, Christopher wanted to talk about – and to hear about – sex. And this was new; indeed, the subject had gone unmentioned for over a year…Very early on in his medical exile (it comes on page 8 of Mortality), Christopher owned up to a sudden and sweeping indifference to feminine allure. ‘If Penelope Cruz had been one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even have noticed. In the war against Thanatos, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.’ And now here it was again, eros, nature’s strongest – and most ineffable – force: the one that peoples the earth.
‘I’ve got a good one for you, Hitch,’ I began. ‘And one you’ve never heard before. When Phoebe stripteased my cock plum off in the bathroom at the flat…Actually she didn’t tease it off, not this time. She tempted it off. Gaw, she –’
A knock, then a nurse. Who acknowledged my presence, and indulgently withdrew.
‘Late summer 1981. Thirty years ago to the month, and you were packing your bags for America. I was too ashamed to tell you at the time.’
‘Too ashamed? You? This sounds very promising. So in your prenuptial period.’
‘Exactly. And you were giving me those pep talks about monogamy. You were very serious and very impressive.’
‘Well it’s vitally important, monogamy, when you’re squaring up to wedlock. Or else you lose the moral glow. Christ. I mean, is this or is this not an exception?’
‘Perfectly true, Hitch. And I needed to hear it.’
‘You did. Steeped in promiscuity as you were. You were a right little slag, Mart, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. And now you had before you a shining prize. Julia.’
‘Yes, and I was grateful, and I listened. You said a lot of good things. Avoid the occasion of sin, Little Keith…What’s that from?’
‘It’s a Catholic teaching, strange to say. Insultingly obvious, really, but nicely phrased. Avoid the things you know will tempt you. Avoid being alone with ex-girlfriends – that’s what it comes down to. Avoid being alone with canny and talented ex-girlfriends with a point to prove.’
‘And avoid it is exactly what I didn’t do. Oh, and I can tell you now why it always is ex-girlfriends. I mean, you wouldn’t go after someone new, would you. You don’t want any surprises. But with an ex, a long-serving ex, whose body you know as well as you know your own…It’s weird. The familiarity, the snugness, the sameyness – it flips. It goes all heady and hot.’
‘And there’s no fear of failure…Well Mart, you listened, but you didn’t learn. What were you doing in the bathroom with Phoebe Phelps?’
‘I know. That’s what I was ashamed of. You cautioned me, and the very next day I…I embraced an occasion of sin – of blazing crime.’ I said, ‘The trouble was I found the prospect of being tempted tempting in itself. I was irresistibly tempted by temptation. Because I felt sure I could deal with it. How was I to know she’d come on so, so Grand Guignol?’
‘How was I to know. See? That’s precisely the wrong attitude. Okay. I want the long version. Concentrate. It’s amazing the persistence of sexual memories, don’t you find? And the clarity of contour. I suppose, I suppose the memory’s so sharp because those are the times when you’re most alive. Begin.’
‘Well. There I was in my new flat, Leamington Road, minding my own business. And she rang from the airport and –’
A knock, and another hairdo round the door.
‘Ah,’ said Christopher. ‘Good afternoon, my dear.’
This was the pain lady, or the painkiller lady (something of a cult figure at MDA; and Christopher’s neck, I knew, was hurting, and so were his arms, and so were his hands and his fingers). And he was now readying himself for relief (‘a sort of warming tingle with an idiotic bliss to it’). As I was edging my way out she said,
‘Mr Hitchens! Good afternoon! And how are we today?’
‘Well, Cheryl, you’re obviously in top form. As for me, I have some uh, discomfort, as they call it here. But I felt twice the price the moment I saw your face…Ten minutes, Mart. Then the long version.’
Out on the main deck I was beckoned into an alcove and found myself in an informal, water-cooler symposium convened by Christopher’s carers – or perhaps convened by Blue, who was asking many questions. By now she was up to PhD standard on Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four (she knew the names and doses of all the drugs), and so the talk was mostly above my reach. But I soon fell into a whispered exchange with the blue-smocked figure called Dr Lal…Dr Lal was the most attractive of all the MDA oncologists – a lean Indian gentleman with a poet’s face, full of sadness and humanity, a face formed over many decades and many bedsides: Dr Lal was that increasingly rare kind of specialist, one who engaged with the patient, and not just with the patient’s disease. He said in an undertone,
‘Mr Hitchens is now faced with a choice. To stay here or to go home.’
I said, ‘You mean home to Washington?…No, I suppose not, or not yet. Home to our friends’ house ten minutes away? He could do that, could he?’
‘Theoretically, yes. He has the, the option of going home. Let me briefly explain.’
Christopher was caught in the double bind of his sickness: the doublecross of cancer. The tumours had been shrunken, scorched, and effectively cauterised by chemicals and protons; but the patient too was much reduced (and his immune system ravaged). Dr Lal went on,
‘He is without defences. And if he stays here, a secondary infection will certainly follow. It’s not if or when. It’s when.’
‘Then I don’t…What could be the reason for staying here?’
On the one hand, home, Michael’s: the material and emotional comfort, the padded density, the numerous staff (including the two security men who courteously and affectionately materialised to help Christopher from the car to the house, and then rematerialised to help him upstairs to his bedroom). On the other hand, MDA: the stasis, the locked windows, the false smiles and false sparkle, the hairless children – and the invisible but inevitable gigabugs, biding their time in sinks and drains…
Dr Lal arched his back, saying, ‘You see, there is the psychological element. And the fact remains that Mr Hitchens doesn’t want to leave.’
Why? What possible counterforce would make him want to stay?
The answer was that he somehow felt less threatened in hospital. And here we have to imagine a sense of limitless frailty – unquantifiably worsened by a state of mind always characterised, first and foremost, as one of overwhelming fear. It was a double bind within a double bind.
…Another, older name for battle fatigue is soldier’s heart. And whenever I try to evoke that fear I think of what soldiers say (and write) about the hours before battle. The heart is full of love, but the physical instrument, the outward being, is full of fear; my neck is afraid, my shoulders are afraid, my arms are afraid, my hands are afraid, my fingers are afraid.
You housefly, you horsefly – did he who made the lamb make thee?
There were no insects at MDA, not even in its slightly frowsy cafeterias at the close of a long weekend. No insects. So what lay in my view was without doubt an illusion; solemnly, stonily, I sat through it, waiting.
First, though, let us make terms with the actual. There was Christopher in his dressing gown, and he was already ill, additionally ill, as ill as I’d ever seen him, as ill as I’d ever seen anyone. Coughing, stiffly twisting in his chair, rocking from side to side, tipping himself forwards, his face wearing a light sheen of silvery sweat in the afternoon grey: that was the actual. He wasn’t groaning, he wasn’t complaining, he wasn’t swearing, he wasn’t even saying Christ. No, he was using his voice to respond to the tautened needs and nerves of his loved ones, more specifically to intercede in a row between his son and his second wife (in itself a most difficult position); the row was logistical (to do with Alexander having to foreshorten his stay), and it was unrestrained. Don’t forget that they, we, had had eighteen months of this, Blue (much the most proximate), Alexander, and I too. None of us were really ourselves: we were all someone else. And Christopher mediating and moderating, and turning aside now and then to get on with the business of being very ill. Meanwhile I sat silent in the corner with my suitcase and my plane ticket, feeling strange, feeling strange to the world. That was also actual.
What wasn’t actual was this: the room was full of flies.
All the way back to Brooklyn – all the way, from the hospital cab rank to the blue front door of 22 Strong Place – the usually reliable narrator, Martin, tried to make sense of his hallucination: a trick of the ear as well as the eye, for the flies thronged like bumblebees, as fat, as hairy, and also as noisy, purring, fizzing, sizzling. In his imagination and in his novels flies had always represented necrosis: little skull and crossbones, little gasmasked survivalists, little flecks of death – little shiteaters, little admirers of trash, wounds, battlegrounds, killing fields, abattoirs, carrion, blood, and mire.
Watch the vermin swarm for long enough, stand among them for long enough when they swarm (I used to do this in our Brooklyn woodshed), and you feel in their triumphal excitement the undoing of the whole moral order…In demonology the little flecks of death owe fealty to the Seventh Prince of Hell, who excites lust in priests, who excites jealousies and murders in cities, who excites in nations love of war – Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.
*1 In the context of premature mortality, all talk of earning this or deserving that, all talk of justice and injustice, is understandable but delusive self-pity, which Christopher instantly recognised: that same paragraph ends, ‘To the dumb question, “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?’…Larkin never grasped this and never got beyond it. ‘I really feel’, he maintained, in the last paragraph of the last letter he ever wrote, ‘[that] this year has been more than I deserve.’
*2 ‘To say the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back.’
*3 I had recently read Philip Caputo’s famous Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, published in 1977 (when PTSD was first recognised and described). After nearly a year of front-line combat, Caputo rises from his cot on ‘a quiet day, one of those days when it was difficult to believe there was a war on. Yet my sensations were those of a man actually under fire…Psychologically, I had never felt worse…a feeling of being afraid when there was no reason to be’; and of dissociation (sometimes known as ‘doubling’) – a feeling of being there and also not being there.
*4 There was nothing blithe or heedless about it. ‘Oh, man. I’m living in a world of pain,’ he said when I reached him on the phone, in the late 1990s, during an intense but transient furore. While never, ever admitting he was wrong, Christopher suffered quietly but sharply for his errancies. Above all, naturally, he was tormented by the proliferating disaster of Iraq – a neocon experiment that he supported (no, championed) from the standpoint of the hard left…