A Whisky with Hemingway

 

She was talking about her rose garden and the black spot fungus that had laid siege to it. He was frantically trying to recall the arguments made by the German Chancellor the previous night in favor of the merciless slashing of European public debt. In the meantime, an erection was unmistakably taking shape between them.

Christ! Get it over with, Victor said to himself miserably. But the nurse appeared to have all the time in the world. She held his hardening prick vertically by the flaccid flesh of its open end, her razor suspended in the air, and speculated on the chances of winning her fight against the fungal disease.

It looks like a toadstool, thought Victor, in an ultimate botanical effort to stem the rush of blood to his groin. But no, no, he argued silently, if we cut down public expenditure and national deficits, we shall reduce debt repayment, relieving fiscal pressure on the taxpayer, which will in turn encourage consumption …

“Go easy on my … testicles,” advised Victor to bring the nurse back to the task in her hands and, not incidentally, to preserve his manhood from any distracted assault.

She smiled whimsically, intoxicated by the perfume of her roses, applied an additional dollop of lather to his balls and resumed her shaving.

As Victor methodically retraced the Chancellor’s rhetoric once more, he was relieved to observe that his penis demonstrated the same level of enthusiasm for economic issues as he was inclined to feel and sank rapidly back into its customary slumber. If the nurse had seen anything, she was good enough not to acknowledge it. Five or six deft razor strokes and the job was finished. She wiped him with a towel and wishing him luck for his operation went off, he assumed, to torment another patient.

Victor had arrived well pickled at the clinic, confident that no one would notice. He had studied and crafted his drunken states over the years to remove all external evidence of their presence. Only those who saw for themselves the impressive quantities of whisky and wine that he could down without any discernible alteration in his mental or physical capacities could possibly credit his talent for dissimulation.

Now he lay in bed in that agonizing hiatus of time known to all hospital patients and, he thought, most surely to prisoners: time not time at all, a parenthesis in time; the transferal of one’s time to assorted strangers who had lost all notion of its existence. And he thought about the joys of drinking, slipping his hand down by the bedside to check that his bag was still there and feeling once again the contours of the bottle he had brought with him.

Men often pride themselves on their most puerile, fatuous achievements, dismissing as secondary the public accomplishments for which others may admire them. One has mastered the use of a boomerang and driven his dog crazy with unrequited desire to catch and bring it back to him. Another has taken up skateboarding at fifty, overcoming the ridicule he senses in the eyes of his neighbors and greedily trouncing his young son in races around the estate car park. Victor believed that his own claim to uniqueness was his alcoholic prowess. He had found early in manhood that, owing to some physiological fluke, he could drink absolutely anybody under the table. Even Montenegrins! He didn’t know whether they were the absolute standard against which to measure oneself, but he imagined it so. This belief came from the time he had lived in Belgrade and indulged in great alcoholic revelry with his Serbian circle of friends, no mean drinkers themselves. They couldn’t imagine for an instant that a Slav could be outdrunk by a slight, beer-nurtured Briton, but every time he had agreed to their challenge for one more binge, he had wiped the floor with them, and with much swearing and bad faith they had finally given in to the evidence. But once they had sprung a surprise on him: they had brought in their own champion for one of these drinking contests, one of their class at university, lured all the way from Podgorica to save Slavic honor. Sasa was tall, even slimmer than Victor at that time, and had mischievous sparkling brown eyes. They quickly agreed that whisky, which both liked greatly, should be the arm of their duel, and their host, an airline pilot, had happily accumulated a great stock of it from his weekly flights abroad.

Victor stared at the ward ceiling and recalled this, most certainly his greatest, drinking triumph. He saw again the ambitious ring of bottles that his friends had set up around the table. He remembered bank notes exchanging hands as bets were laid on the outcome. Both Sasa and he waved off the drinking tankards their friends first placed before them, protesting that they were gentlemen not peasants and insisting on crystal tumblers. They smiled warmly at each other as each sipped his first glass, but soon, driven on by the spectators, anxious that Victor and Sasa should enter as rapidly as possible a state of inebriation for their amusement, they increased the pace and the size of each gulp of whisky. They each had their own bottles, and the rules of the contest were simple and clear: either drinker had to finish his bottle and start a new one within five minutes of the other emptying his and beginning another; he who fell behind by a bottle was eliminated. This was a cunning scheme because it introduced the criteria both of speed and quantity into the game. Victor had seen that Sasa was a sly, clever man and that he was alternating these two factors to see how Victor would fare. After all, some men can drink a bucketful if they do it slowly, whereas a race to down a bottle in a few minutes might knock them out. Victor knew, however, that it would all be the same to him. And it had been so, to his life-long pride. A troubled shadow passed over Sasa’s eyes as each emptied his first bottle; when Victor tried to engage him in conversation, he simply smiled, perhaps because he would else have slurred his words. Towards the end of the second bottle, Sasa’s head began to lean forward as if he were struggling against a heavy object being pressed to the back of his skull, while Victor just stared ahead contentedly and smacked his lips in jest. At one moment, Sasa’s head had actually lurched towards the table; like a boxer unleashing an uppercut, Victor had stolen this moment of weakness to throw down two additional glasses and gain an advance he thought might be fatal to his opponent …

Victor was jolted out of these reminiscences by the sudden appearance at his bedside of another nurse, a huge, muscular black man bursting out of his white uniform. He would come in handy in a psychiatric establishment, thought Victor irrelevantly. With a tenderness belying his huge, ungainly fists, the nurse gently removed the electrodes from his chest, taking care not to rip off clusters of hair as less prudent nurses had done before him. (Once, this had happened while Victor was watching a televised football match. His scream of pain had brought a young intern rushing into his room demanding to know, “Have England scored?”)

“What’s up?” enquired Victor.

“A slot just opened,” said the big man with a smile.

“You from air traffic control then?” asked Victor.

“Yeah, that’s it,” the nurse laughed. “Ready for take off? Showered? Shaved by Mabel?” he grinned.

The nurse helped Victor to his feet, while with one hand he hastily tried to cover as much of his naked body as the absurdly inadequate hospital smock allowed. With his other hand he clung to the mobile drip bag stand and shuffled off with it haltingly, smiling to himself about the spectacle he presented. The other patients who dragged themselves up and down the hospital corridors in this way filled him with sadness and pity. These were emotions he declined, despite persistent temptation, to feel about himself. As the lift doors opened and its mirrored walls revealed Victor’s image to his own eyes, he began giggling. The nurse looked at him in the mirror and frowned.

“Sorry,” Victor apologized. “I hadn’t seen myself since I came in, and I look so pathetic, so miserable—so funny!” It was true: unshaven, his hair on one side of the head standing vertically, the mini smock barely reaching down over his testicles, his backside exposed to all and sundry.

The nurse smiled without conviction, perhaps unaccustomed to patients who laughed at their own wretchedness, and pressed the button for the basement.

Leave your dignity and pride here. Yes, thought Victor, that’s the advice they should hang over hospital entrances. After all, we can all do with a bit of humbling from time to time, some more than others of course. And everyone assumes he has a two-way ticket for the trip, so no reason to be tragic, nor any sense in complaining, even to oneself. The doctors and nurses were doing their best to keep everyone alive, of that he was sure; to demand that they should at the same time take all these carcasses as individual human beings with emotions and sensitivities was really too much to ask of them.

Once in the basement, Victor was hoisted on to an operating table. A green uniform took hold of his right wrist, gave it an injection and left. A few minutes later another masked, green figure appeared above and beside him and, though Victor could not see it for himself, cut a hole in a vein in his wrist and inserted an instrument. He knew this because he felt great pain.

“Bloody hell—that hurts,” groaned Victor.

“It can’t hurt, it’s not possible,” said the surgeon casually.

Victor winced.

“It may not be possible, but it’s nevertheless the case.”

The surgeon ignored him and continued to fiddle with his arm.

Well, at least they don’t have to resort to a vein in my groin, he thought, reflexively squeezing his legs together to comfort and protect himself. He was sick of the judgment of others about his pain. They simply didn’t understand that pain is individual and thus highly variable; if one feels it, it exists, even when the textbooks say it shouldn’t. And that applied not only to physical but to moral suffering.

Surgeons are more than happy to avoid conversations with their patients and to leave them to stew in their own thoughts. And when they don’t knock you out with a general anaesthetic, operating tables are in fact excellent places to philosophize about life. And about death too, of course. Whatever kind of operation you are undergoing, there is always a slight danger of dying on the spot, which certainly adds urgency and spice to one’s reflections.

Victor had signed a paper absolving the hospital in advance from any malpractice and confirming that he “accepted” that about one percent of people who underwent angioplasty didn’t live to tell the tale. He assumed that the casual, almost gentle formulation of this statistic on the disclaimer was supposed to reassure him, but as an occasional horse-betting man he had witnessed 100-to-1 chances come home from time to time and he didn’t like it at all. In fact, if the odds were honest and one considered the turnover of clients in this sector of the hospital, he calculated that they must be discretely shipping stiffs out of the basement two or three times a week. Victor didn’t want to be the hospital’s one percent that day or that week, of this he was sure. Not because he clung desperately to his life, but because he had always, without question, wanted to die slowly. All around him people had always said: “Well, he was lucky, it took him in his sleep; he didn’t even know what hit him; thank god it was a rapid death; I’d like to go like that, without even knowing it,” and so on. He didn’t understand these people. He had never wanted to die quickly. He didn’t have any taste for long physical suffering any more than anybody else, but he really did need time to say goodbye to himself properly after such a long and intimate acquaintance. It was exactly as it would be with another, a parent or close friend, a love. And much easier. Facing your own demise, you could make a few good jokes, laugh yourself sick about it if you wanted to, where it was difficult, if not impossible, to chuckle over another’s impending death, particularly in his or her company.

Victor felt the catheter sliding stealthily like a snake up through his arm vein and into his chest and tried to forget it. So, I’m going to die, he thought. The green person will perforate my artery, and my heart will drown choking in blood. Haha! So, now’s the moment: please justify your repeated statement that you want to die slowly. We’re sorry, we haven’t been able to arrange a very prolonged death, but we think that you might well have a couple of hours here to profit from and enjoy your deathbed musings. No, no, we don’t want the tale told by an idiot. We want something from you, dear Victor, not borrowed, not from Will nor anyone else. Could you really end your life quoting others? With not a singular, personal thought? Something, not necessarily original—what’s left to say that has not been said, after all? But a few things you have thought uniquely for yourself and tried and tested against what you have lived. Nothing less will do. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Back in bed, more or less content to find himself still alive, Victor took a book and the bottle from his bag, slipping the whisky under his sheets and settling down to read. He had brought Hemingway with him, a writer he turned to when he wanted to remember how he should have lived his life. No author could make you as thirsty as Hem; if his heroes weren’t swigging gourds in mountain caves or bullrings, they were heading towards the nearest bar. Yes, reading Hemingway without a drink in your hand was simply out of the question.

As he took a large shot of whisky and snuggled up beside Maria’s soft trembling body in his sleeping bag in the snow, he said to himself: as soon as I get out of here, which will be a lot earlier than the hospital thinks, I shall do something extravagant. He had no idea what that something might be. He would return also to his operating table meditations. What indeed would he say to himself in his dying moments, whether they should last hours, days or weeks? What had he learnt that was true, true to him? It had been his third heart operation. Each time, back on his feet, he had turned back to his affairs, back to his work, and set aside such questions. Now he had no excuse. A life of leisure lay before him, thanks to his mother’s death, and he finally had the time and, it seemed, the will to confront these matters seriously. And he must not forget either (for it was indeed possible to forget such things) that he had also been observing strange events taking place on the periphery of his mind. It was high time that he should go and take a closer look at them and find out what they might mean. If anything. Yes, he had a lot to do.