Driving on the Rim (40 page)

There must not have been time for my diagnostic skills to offer perspective on my plight except to say that a very comprehensive debility was creeping over me almost as if a heavy rug were being pulled onto my body from several directions at once, everything going soft or limp with weight, except the astonishing rigidity of the knife. I recall thinking that this generalized enfeeblement and draining of life must be death with the peculiarity of the mind imagining even to the last minute that it was somehow exempt from this process. That was either adaptive protection to avert suffering and struggle or the very fragile thing that supported convictions about the imperishability of the spirit. I had always thought
religious assertions as to the latter were a form of hysteria, but for the moment I was prepared to keep an open mind. I had often observed in my work, especially in those days in the ER, that there is an unreliable floor to American life and if you find yourself going through it, life is quite dangerous. What I hadn’t learned was that it could apply to me.

But in that immortal phrase, I lived “to tell the tale.” A man on a bicycle came by (I was not entirely conscious) and found me squirting blood onto the walkway, and called for help. I had such a riveting view of my savior, whom I’ve never seen, that the picture stays with me still: one foot extended to hold himself up on the bicycle, he flips open his cell phone and looks at the sky as he calls for help; there is a pause, after which he cranes around urgently looking for ways to describe our location. He is a Good Samaritan, etc. I have no idea who he is. He has not chosen to “come forward either.” We would be together forever, my phantom and I.

I learned later on that Alan had been called in to Emergency for some arterial repair and that quite a lot of blood replacement had been necessary as a result of, I guess, near-fatal hemorrhaging and hypovolemic shock. I later saw Alan’s vital signs documentation and was moved by its obsessive notations. I had benefited from spontaneous closure of a small breach of the left ventricle, and was surprised by the irrational if faint horror occasioned by a description of one’s own injuries. I was relieved to learn there was negligible fluid retention in the pericardium, wherein pumping volume might have been reduced to the point of my returning to my life with a greatly impaired brain. There was a relatively small transfer of kinetic energy in a stab wound, as compared to say, a gunshot wound. So any emergency treatment provider was spared from having to worry too much about collateral injury. In other words, I was grateful that Deanne hadn’t shot me. Sweet!

I had a small incision in my chest, not far from the wound, and Alan later explained, “The way you presented, dude, I had to look around.”

By the first evening, lying in my hospital bed, I was not much worse than sore. I was even visitable. Instead of watching the television hanging from the wall above and to one side of the utilitarian sink, I looked out the door as doctors and nurses came and went. I watched them for nearly an hour before I began to cry. I cried hard but without making a
sound. It wasn’t because of what had happened to me. It was because I wanted to go to work. I asked God to let me go back to work. I don’t think I had experienced such anguish before.

About then, Jinx arrived and closed my door. She stood there and looked at me for a long time. I was too miserable to speak or to dry my face, and my body shook with suppressed sobs. Jinx locked the door, got in bed beside me, and held me in her arms. I recall a moment of incomprehension, and then gratitude for the heat of her body. After her embrace had stilled my various shudderings, quite long after, Jinx got out of bed, fussed a bit with my covers, unlocked the door, and left. The next day she dropped off some bird books with the floor nurse, who delivered them. They only rekindled my astonishment.

Several of the staff stopped in to see me, and the aversion I had expected was nowhere in evidence. They were even friendly. Haack, Hirsch, Wong, even McAllister paid their respects. Bets were really off when you got stabbed. I was strangely fascinated by the telephone beside my bed, which seemed to be beckoning me to communicate, a challenge I was not entirely up to, not because of my injury but because of my all-consuming bafflement. I thought almost continuously of Jocelyn and wondered if she knew what had befallen me. I had no reasonable explanation of the facts and was using my reduced energy to make up some sort of harmless story. I fought the drag of time by picturing her and imagining how she felt; I was plunged into mild despair when I re-imagined sex with Jocelyn or tried to get my mind around her peculiarly abstract ferocity. These were lavish erotic fancies which kept me from turning on the television.

Alan thoughtfully held off the cops until I was feeling better and was less affected by the various medications, which had produced not just pain relief but a two-day erection, a various maypole around which visions of Jocelyn’s private parts danced. But then Officer Weiland, Terry Weiland, came to see me in order to file a more complete police report than the one produced when I was admitted and not conscious. Terry was in early middle age, a compact, purposeful man in the local cowboy style, very mannerly, very direct. He said, “Feeling any better?”

“Yes, I am, thank you.”

“Dr. Hirsch said he’ll have you out of here soon.”

I took this wrong at first, and then understood he meant only that I would soon be released. I had feared it meant I couldn’t work here.

“Was this a personal disagreement?”

“Not at all. You mean the guy who stabbed me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know who he was. He might have mistaken me for someone else. Unless I was robbed. I don’t know that we’ve checked that, have we? Where’s my wallet?”

“We’re struggling with this and just hoping you might have learned something that would help. Isn’t this your wallet?”

“Yes, oh good.”

“Was there time—I mean, did you get much of a look at him?”

“Absolutely.”

“And he just stepped up and assaulted you?”

“He seemed to recognize me. He told me to stay away from her, that she was his and his alone. He must have confused me with someone else.”

“The old triangle.”

“Except there was no triangle.” I was trying to keep this straight. I could no longer imagine why I took this tack. I suppose I was improvising and it got away from me. I began to labor mentally over a description of the assailant, which I knew I’d have to provide. I was a little bit panicked. I didn’t really wake up until I was required to supply “Caucasian” to Officer Weiland, who had drawn a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and was balancing a clipboard on his knee.

“Age?”

“I’m guessing late thirties.” I did notice that I was beginning to picture the assailant. I had no answers for scars, tattoos, etc., but I was able to describe the assailant in sufficient detail to satisfy Officer Weiland: dark brown hair combed straight back, a lean and narrow face with prominent teeth, ice blue eyes; he was wearing straight-cut black jeans, work boots, a snap-button western shirt with a barbed-wire motif, and a baseball hat advertising an Oklahoma fuel company.

At the end of our interview, Office Weiland told me to make a “victim personal statement” describing the impact of the crime upon me. “These are used by the judge to help him decide on an appropriate sentence.”

I said, “I learned what anyone in that situation would learn—that life can end at any time and that whatever it is you want to do with your life you should do right away. I feel that things early in your life that were unresolved can suddenly crop up later on and try to do away with you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, I’ll just write it down. Maybe it will mean something to the judge.”

I don’t know what possessed me to describe Womack so exactly. Honestly, it was unintentional. By nightfall, he was featured in a composite sketch in our newspaper and, I suppose, a few thousand people were poring over it. I saw the paper myself and was startled to see what a fine job the sketch artist had done.

Deanne was carrying the paper when she visited me, my first real visitor. She was also carrying the same purse! I stared at it and asked if she was here to finish the job. If she tried again, I’d have to accept it. Her eyes filled with tears as she shook her head and pitched forward, her face against the side of my bed. I was turbulent with emotions, as I had been interrupted in the midst of a rich fantasy of Jocelyn. But this astonishing development was pushing even Jocelyn from my mind. For the moment, I had lost interest in everything. I was also overwhelmed by the sensation that I didn’t know what I would do next. Unexpectedly, I pitied Deanne and was on the verge of bursting into tears all over again. She said, “I’m worthless, aren’t I?”

“Not in the least.”

“Don’t be nice. I’m nobody.” She looked miserable, and I was aghast at what I had just done. As though parsing some term or concept for the local philological society, I tried to persuade Deanne that it was I who was worthless, not she, but I really didn’t get anywhere. Worthless seemed to apply as a general condition in Deanne’s life, and she was determined to hang on to it.

I had another wave of terror as she retrieved a Kleenex from her purse, this time to blow her nose, and having done so, she raised the newspaper as evidence and asked why I had protected her. I had to give this long thought before telling her that I believed that she was entitled
to her action. “Oh, no!” she cried. I had known Deanne only as a worthily combative force, and I was desperate to absolve myself of having reduced her to this abject state. I had to believe that I was free of cruelty. Without that, in the words of Deanne, I would be Nobody. I would be Worthless.

So I poured myself into confessing my sins against her all over again. She had only one child and I’d seen to his demise. I left so little doubt that without my interference Cody might have lived that I half expected she would again try to kill me, but she seemed to absorb the long, slow death of Clarice. I really relived those scenes, and suffered them all over again. Never mind the knife, I was finally at her mercy, but she said, “I understand.” She didn’t say it quickly—she weighed my fate in her eyes for several long moments—but she said it. She said it with such gravity that I must have glimpsed what she was giving up.

H
AD
I
LEARNED ANYTHING?
I’d learned that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience. It wasn’t until I lay in a hospital bed fingering a near fatal wound that I gave any thought to mortality. Then I knew that the spiritual component of my self, while small, was inextinguishable. My mother had instilled in me a longing but populated it with figures I found unbelievable: the omnipotent old man with the white beard, the sad boy with the crown of thorns, the virgin mom, the board of directors called the saints. I never succeeded in differentiating them from the equally compelling characters in my collection of comic books. I confused God with Space Man, whose battles with the robot monster that controlled outer space formed my first cosmology; meanwhile my compassion for Christ caused me to submerge him into Naza the Stone Age Warrior, who returns to kick Herod’s ass and work mayhem on the Philistines.

Another thing occasioned by my close call was a vivid remembrance of childhood friends. I’d built the tree house with Chong Wells. His real name was Don Wells, but his admiration for Cheech and Chong supplied a nickname which followed him all the way to the Persian Gulf, from where he did not return. Dave “Second Hand” Smoke moved to Miles City, where he had a backhoe business. When I get out of here, I thought, I should give Second Hand a call. Childhood friends call me “Hook” for Captain Hook, which was a reference to my love of fishing.

What was left of my rudimentary religiosity? Only my question: What was far-fetched about the continued existence of the human spirit? Why was mankind in all places and all ages convinced of it? Fingering my knife wound, I went on believing that the real me could shoot out of this tiny hole in the event of a shutdown.

But most emotions attending the long hours of daydreaming were occupied with thoughts of Jocelyn, some remarkably impure, but most idealistically pastel and conceived as operatic scenes of reunion and promise. In the encounters I pictured it was only remarkable that the players were not winged. This might have been a reference to Jocelyn’s flying, but I didn’t think so. I pictured her in the cockpit with the headset pulled down over her International Harvester cap, and as I dragged her from the fuel spill at the crash site, then at the hospital in White Sulphur when I was a still-employed caregiver offering diplomatic advice in the bailiwick of another physician. In short, I could hardly wait to get my hands on her.

This grueling need so pervaded my imagination that it encouraged me to think about a long-term relationship with Jocelyn; and here I hit a wall because her air of independence betrayed a smidgeon of aversion directed either at me or, more likely, at any form of predictability. Too, I found her lack of sentimentality over the burning of the old homestead and her generally harsh remarks about home and family to be a tad extreme. Her strictly genital approach to sex could, I dimly supposed, grow thin without a larger view, but I could always supply that—thought I foolishly. As was so often the case, romance was well to the rear of the united front of thighs, breasts, etc. The little twang in her voice had me shivering with ecstasy. My most elevated thoughts were of the clean lines of her cheekbones, her smooth, round forehead, her full and insolent lips. At the moment, I could not picture her nose. Fidgeting under the sheets, I worked away at recalling the nose, then finally left it that she had one, and that was that.

She must not have known I was in the hospital.

Alan Hirsch came in to see me with his athlete’s bounce and sat, one leg on the floor, on the edge of my bed. “I think it’s time you blew this pop stand, Irving.”

“I do too.” I couldn’t mention that I had nowhere in particular to go, or that seeing him and other physicians speeding past my doorway had given me an insurmountable heartache compared to the longing for Jocelyn.