ST. MARTIN AND THE BEGGAR

 

              “Gees, he’s really bad, huh,” said Dr. Graziano, looking at the hands and feet, black, gangrenous, of course they’d have to amputate, but then the surgical assistant lifted the sheet up all the way, exposing the rest of the body, taking Graziano’s hand and wordlessly bringing it down to the lower right margin of the rib-cage, Graziano nudging and palpating, gall-bladder, liver, then down across the abdomen, down into the groin, you could see the lines of the tumors following along the lymph-paths everywhere, humps, hummocks of tumors, like tells, tumobs, tumuli in the desert, it was everywhere, stopping, hating most this part of his job, bringing them in off the streets, sliding, slid already to the lips of Death’s hungry maw, Graziano just talking, the way he shouldn’t have talked, but did anyhow, “I mean, what are you going to do for this guy, you gonna do amputations, frozen sections, fine needle biopsies, you gonna classify and  pigeonhole, I mean what am I, the fucking Angel of Death Keeper of the Records or something, like my mother, she had what she had, it was hopeless, they just canceled out the pain and waited, and they didn’t have to wait long, you know what I mean...,” depressed, and he knew he shouldn’t be, ought to be beyond the beyond after twenty years on the job, but he swore he was getting more sensitive every year instead of more callused, things bothering him more and more and more, like he was starting to witness his own death played out there daily all around him, looking down at the face of the man on the white sheet in front of him, weird face, potato-nose, thick eyebrows, kinky, crinkly beard, almost totally white hair crinkling down around his bulbous (like dried apricots) ears, he looked like the Egyptian God of Pregnancy/Childbirth, Bes, little dwarf god...funny he should remember that, an afternoon of Egyptian stuff over at the Brooklyn Museum, something about Bes having begun as this image of a lion, yeah, that was it, a certain leonine, savage look about the little guy’s face, noble savage, an almost midget Cowardly Lion....

              A groan, he began to stir, opened  his eyes, but didn’t look at anything, stared unfocused or maybe focused on some point out beyond the ceiling, out at the end of infinity.

              “Any I.D.? Name?”

              Graziano looking for some sort of chart attached to the bed, on top of the bedside table. Nothing.

              “He don’t have no name, man,” another bum off the street, three beds down, sitting up, looking not so bad, color in his face, a little dirty, smudged, whiskery, but solid, stable, ‘whole,’ “man, I’ve known this motherfucker for years. He’s like retarded, man, like you’re not even there, like his body’s here, his head’s somewhere else, you know what I mean?” Graziano thinking to himself, this is not what Emergency Medicine was all about, these weren’t bones that had to be set, wounds to be stanched, heads and bellies and arms that had to be restitched together, hearts to be restarted, this was the boringly chronic State of the Nation.  “Like he don’t even know to come in out of the cold, man. I’ve taken  him into the subway a thousand times, I guess I missed him this time. I’m not his keeper, right?”

              “Yeah, right, right,” thinking Shut the fuck up already, what was the point of amputating the hands and arms of a dying man, of why do biopsies except for academic purposes, why do anything but morpheus-morphine him up, zip him up in the beyond-pain sleep-bag and let it all just fucking HAPPEN....

              Looking like he was going to lapse back  into sleep, coma, over the edge into death...and then all of a sudden he stiffened, started to raise himself  up on his elbows, his face transfigured like the afterflash of a sudden unexpected snapshot, and he started to talk, like he was on a stage, through the ceiling, the roof, the clouds, to whatever was out there in the Great Beyond, his voice like tubas and lower-register French  horns, kettle drums, bass fiddles, where did the resonance come from in that dwarf, congested chest: “ GAN NAOUS ACHOTI KALA EEM PAREE MAGADEEM. BATI LAGANI AHOT KALA SHE RO SHEE NEEM LA-TAL ADOTZOTA RSI SAY LAL.”

              Graziano was stunned. No meaning, but the “delivery” said it all. Style, like Kabuki when he’d been in Japan after the war, who knew “what” in terms of “meaning,” but when you were in the presence of the Real Thing, you knew it...like one time when he was in Bombay and he’d gone to this Mahabharata dance drama, and....

              “What did I tell you!” said the old bum three beds down, “he’s fucking nuts, no sense,” pointing to his own grizzled, matted head, “nothing working.”

              The old man on the table stopped now, lying back down, eyes still staring through the ceiling, all luminosity, up,  ecstatic, high, then the eyes closing, a slump, kind of “crack,” crumpling inward, like someone with his mouth around the top of a bag sucking in instead of blowing out...and....

              Graziano passing his hand over the old guy’s mouth and nose like he was doing a card trick, lightly grasped his wrist.

              “He’s gone.”

              “I told you....” the old bum three tables down starting in again.

              “Shut the fuck up!” said Graziano.

              As an old Jew in a ridiculously large black felt hat, like a joke hat, came down the dark hall into the bright lighted area around the just dead man, Graziano thinking The Requiem Clown, what the fuck’s next ?

              The old Jew crying. Long black coat and a face all lined and tragic, right out of a Rembrandt painting, as he came fully under the light and all the creases and wrinkles and folds of his face came jumping out at him, Graziano thinking about how Rembrandt would actually go to the synagogue in Amsterdam looking for faces for his Old Testament paintings.

              “Who was just reciting?” asked the old Jew in a thick, what was it, Lithuanian/Yiddish accent, looking down at the dead man,

              “What was he saying?” asked Graziano, “Yiddish....”

              “No, no, no, Hebrew, The Song of Songs, The Song of Solomon,” his voice cracking, “and what a delivery!”