In the Land of the Living (15 page)

WHEN, FINALLY, LOVE
visited itself on him, for a reason unknown and at a time unforeseen (in fact it had happened two or three times, before he had any hair on his groin or under his arms), when it did visit with that weird genius of Love, it did it in the jaded last days of his life at home, the summer he worked in a hospital.

While he was dreaming, at least, it seemed he had been to the hospital before. The Bethesda Naval Hospital, he assumed, went a thousand stories down into the earth in the fall of 1974. There were blind giants in that hospital. Someone had taped to their cheeks and brows metal plates, pricked with little holes like a colander. The light in the hallways was as apathetic as wood lice and discovered everything like a spy satellite in the sky—blankie-humps, tantrums, whining mommy-love, urge to poop, freckle, homicidal jealousy, sadistic wishes, etc. The light was very much unlike the lustrous wholesome sunshine of his tricycle handlebars when the sun was as big as a yellow balloon; this fanatical light dulled everything within its penumbra, turned platinum to tin, diamond rings to glass, people to fear. The light smelled cold, and like paper, empty, like the inorganic antiseptic matter out in space. The people with the metal plates in their faces were led around by the hand. They had seen things they were not supposed to see and copulated with machines made of rubber tubes and glass and transistor radios and now they were monsters with metal holes in their heads who wandered the Abattoir hallways. He who looked with curiosity upon their deformities was wounded in his own eyes.

It was called the Bethesda Naval Hospital because his brother crawled out of a belly button there. (The sightless giants did the rock star deed and then hid their babies in drawers full of surgical instruments.) The giants, the babies, the bad people, the good people: they all howled and wept in elevators. Mayhem, happening and happening without purpose in the empty corridors of the universe, happening without any people in it, like the infinite regress of the opposed bathroom mirrors when there is no one between them, empty and deep as the thoughts of God.

And there were many other miraculous weird happenings around the Abattoir. For instance, women ate men. Sometimes, the female began to eat the male even before copulation with rubber hose and glass radio balloon had been completed. Oh no? Well then, how do you think the mommy got so big and round with child while the daddy wasted away to bones and died? She ate his flesh and put it in her belly to make a baby out of it, as one makes a gingerbread cookie of dough. Then the daddy tried to get his body back by sawing her belly open with a bread knife and the doctors sewed her belly with hanging black strings. And then nobody liked each other anymore and their teeth were false and they wished they had never started to hurt each other and could go back to the old house and never hear the howls of pain in the birthing room and they could be happy again and not all alone with nobody to help anybody else.

His daddy died in the Abattoir, where he had been a doctor once. Then his mommy couldn’t open any jars and cried into her
shiva
mayonnaise salads. His daddy used to open the jars, but then some mystery enshrouded him, and he moaned like an injured animal and died. Leo preferred to think he dived, but anyway, they buried him with his watch.

Leo couldn’t open the jars.

Visitors came in the weeks after. Now his daddy was dead and his mommy had babies to take care of and was bewitched like a nursemaid to Satan. In a few more years, grief would permanently disfigure her face, though the police (doctors) said her face had been vandalized by a lunatic named Ramsay Hunt. The visitors knelt on the floor and played with Leo, but not very well—they rolled him the sticky red truck but they didn’t understand him when he said, “You be the rug.” They were meant to take the part of the rug and say, “Where is my lamp? Someone moved it and now there’s a hole in me. I miss the lamp. Come back to the hole where you used to live and we’ll have tea and cookies, lamp.” And then he would be the lamp and come back. They didn’t understand. They left while he was right in the middle of saying something to them about the hole and the lamp. Sometimes he was dropped off at someone else’s house where the ice cubes smelled. They left his blankie behind. Then back home among the legs. New legs came. They cooed at the babies. “You be the couch,” he said. “‘Someone took away my afghan.’ Say that.” They knelt on the floor. They rolled the red truck. He smelled his blankie and it made him sad because it smelled like the bed and he wasn’t in his bed anymore. There was a real question of who, of where, of if, of if, of if.… Someone needed to give him some pants. It was too cold on his legs.

Sometimes he cried. There were endless strangers, endless auditions. But he had to try or there would be no one to keep him company. The constant auditions were so much work that he became physically exhausted. When he woke from naps, he saw that he had missed out on too much, and he went back to his auditions and worked twice as hard as before.

Sometimes he dreamed that his daddy was still alive, living with another family. Or that he was somewhere lost in the Abattoir, if Leo were only brave enough to go back and find him there.

The Abattoir: sink into the wet and sorry holes of the earth and hide in old junk from the riot of the winds. But in order to survive, go back out into the winds. Audition. Go out and try also to understand the universe, which you are here to witness alone.

Dr. Helpern’s secretary’s office had a Georgia O’Keeffe ox skull in a brass frame and no windows. Dr. Helpern asked the old lady sitting at the computer to call up radiology for him. There’s a plaque dedicated to your grandfather, Dr. Helpern said, on the fifth floor.
Heavy hitters,
Dr. Helpern said: Leo Neuwalder and Isidore Auberon were heavy hitters. Doesn’t seem like the same place since he and I were residents here, he said. Medicine is really changing, he said, some would argue not for the better. Leo followed Dr. Helpern out of his office through the maze of spaces within spaces, where men copulated with rubber tubes and with machines behind tinted glass and inside a silver orifice. Attached to every windowless exam suite or lab were windowless offices where computers fanned themselves idly like butterflies, thinking on the horrors of life and death without feeling them.

“You look nervous,” Dr. Helpern said, checking his watch. “How was your graduation? We had our doubts about you, you know, Leo!” he said, and he laughed.

They passed a lady on a hospital bed laden with tanks and saline bags. She was screamingly, ragingly, crushingly old, silenced and flattened by time, and wreathed in tubes like vines on a gnarled old tree, and vessels coiled around her like old vines and many brown growths grew on her head and arms like toadstools on an ancient log. She didn’t move. She was time-ravaged. She was fallen.

Dr. Helpern saw him looking. “And she’s one of the winners,” Dr. Helpern said.

There was no real light—windows that no one bothered to wash looked onto gravel roofs—no one bothered to look out of them. They went to the basement and followed the pipes on the ceiling. The basement halls were like the tunnels of the London War Rooms and lined with canvas carts, the carts mounded with clear plastic bags, the bags filled with crumpled blue polyurethane, the polyurethane soiled by blood and iodine.

People in scrubs and funny paper hats passed them or walked beside them. People in white coats passed. It felt the same as when he saw the Cleveland Browns practice in Berea and Brian Sipe and Ozzie Newsome came right up to sign autographs. They did what he could not do, did not have the skill, strength, or courage to do. The people in the white coats were talking about “the albumin,” and he wondered again what that was. They said “hematocrit” and he wondered what that was. They said words like “supraventricular tachycardia.” Leo felt a sordid fear grabbing him.
Your father did it but you can’t do it,
it whispered.
A man stands his post and takes care of business, knows what to do. If you don’t know what to do.…

“Okay, Doc,” Dr. Helpern said as they stepped out of the elevator. “Go do some surgery.”

Josh Helpern and his friend Steve Zenilman would be doctors too. They had finished a year of college but Leo had just finished high school. The three of them scrubbed in on surgeries and then ate lunch in the hospital cafeteria, where Zenilman talked every day about different girls he’d fooled around with (everyone was back in town from college by now and the parties had started again). He said what was different about this or that girl’s legs, or nipples, or vagina, or personality, and the girls of his stories were always willing and somewhat unwitting accomplices to his Roman appetites. They were always getting caught in their underwear or exposed in some anatomical quirk like hairy arms or cellulite hips or a bifid uvula. They smoked pot and did whip-its (nitrous oxide, Leo learned, inhaled from whipped cream cans). The girls of the stories were always betrayed by their bodies, whose menstrual periods gave them away by smell or even, unbeknownst to them, stained their jeans with blood, whose little movements and moans of excitation seemed preposterous and embarrassing when scrutinized in the clinical light of a hospital cafeteria. All this Zenilman studied and reported with the thoroughly good-natured enthusiasm of David Attenborough observing muskrats or sea lions. Poor chaste Leo preferred to doubt the sex stories of males, but Zenilman’s stories, unlike those of other males, were not boastful, and furthermore Leo had witnessed for himself Zenilman’s extraordinary social ease with girls and even with grown women. Josh, too, was at ease, with girls, with women, with Zenilman and his stories, even with Leo and his stiffness, which kept him from saying much of anything at the hospital lunches, gnawing on his cafeteria hot dog. Leo was sure that Michelle Katz had surrendered up her virginity to Josh, but dared not ask. In the afternoons, they restocked the shelves of the semisterile areas behind the operating rooms, where the wheel locks of the autoclaves were lined up in rows. The wheels made the autoclaves look like submarine hatches.

One night, at a swimming pool at the top of a hill (you got there by flagstones that led from the driveway past a wild raspberry bush), he saw her again, Michelle, though he hadn’t expected to see her there. And she saw him splayed shirtless on a raft, and she later told him that her friend liked the look of him too and said someone needed to jump his bones. (He didn’t like the expression “jump his bones,” as it reminded him of death.…) He floated himself over to the edge of the pool next to her bare and tan legs and she crouched down, lowering the most interesting parts of her anatomy to the level of his eyes. He told her that he worked with Josh, and where was Josh? She said Josh didn’t tell her where he went anymore. She had the sad-happy expression on her face that he remembered from the day in class when she said her parents were getting a divorce.

His friend had to tell him: I think you like her.

“You like her, oooooo!”

“What?” he said. “Shut up. No, I don’t.”

But why did he say that? He did like her. He asked her to dinner and took her to a restaurant called the Cheese Cellar, which his mom had recommended. He took the recommendation with his teeth clenched tight, hoping that his mother would say no more, and then tried to own the information as if it had not come from a maternal source. But then he had to ask her where it was.

After the Cheese Cellar, he took her to Bonsdorf’s ice cream shop, and only after they had sat down at one of its refrigerated tabletops did he realize: this place, too, belonged to his mother’s world, to his mother’s time. She talked about “malteds” and “root beer floats” and other things from a hundred years ago. She talked sometimes about nice old Mr. Bonsdorf, but the Mr. Bonsdorf that ran the shop now was not the old Mr. Bonsdorf, but young Mr. Bonsdorf, the son, and he wasn’t nice. He seemed to judge them unkindly from behind the counter, which he polished and polished with a stringy, holey towel. It was as if selling fudge and serving ice cream to the grubby kids who stole his candy canes were some purgatory to which he’d been assigned. People said he was mean because of his acne. The candy on the ancient table in the middle of the floor, meanwhile, looked like it had been unloaded from the back of his mother’s very own time machine. It was like eating ice cream in a morgue—which he would have been happy to do, as long as Michelle came with him.

Michelle’s mother, who had long ago put Michelle’s cat to death, at least didn’t bother them and they watched TV in the dark while the dog’s tail swished against their legs. They watched and watched late into the night, breathing in the warm, dry odor of dog, the talcum on the dog, and the odor of the disused winter coats on the rack by the door. Leo thought and thought about the undiscovered country of the naked girl sitting next to him under those clothes, her female shape readily visible through the tight T-shirt and jeans, a shape that conformed more or less exactly to a preexisting ideal in his mind, but he sat there as if shot with curare. This happened perhaps five nights in a row, and each time when it got very very late—so late that they would both have to go to work in a few hours—each time when even the cable stations ran out of programming, he went to the door and, like a nineteenth-century gentleman, kissed her demurely on the mouth, then departed in his two-tone Plymouth Horizon love chariot. The gray vinyl on the dashboard had been cracked since Kathy Main had sat before it. (He’d hammered his fist on it.)

He pulled back the Foley catheter tray. The ventilator went kush, kush, kush. A series of beeps caused the anesthesiologist to touch the bank of lights and dials and the beeping stopped.
The resident painted the skin with a sponge dripping yellow iodine, draped the blue polyurethane paper on top with the square hole in it, and taped Tegaderm onto the yellow skin and drew a dotted line on the Tegaderm with a purple Magic Marker. No one paid attention to that. Leo helped the scrub nurse open up his table. When the scrub nurse was all ready and the sterile light handles were all screwed on and the doctors all scrubbed and gowned, the resident came back to the purple dotted line across the yellow skin and traced the line with a scalpel so the skin parted and after a moment blood welled up along the line rather like tears welling a beat after hurt feelings (the other doctor mopped up the blood repeatedly with a lap pad) and the resident pulled the wound wider apart and when blubber appeared, he pulled apart the blubber, too (the other doctor zapped bleeders with the Bovie and said, “Cauterize from the top down so you can see what you’re doing,” because the blood ran from the top of the wound down), and each time the resident traced his scalpel down the seam it split wider than before. In every knife stroke you could see how sharp the scalpel was and how soft the body. A third doctor waited before the body on the table with white hands clasped low against his chest like a priest.