The Man in the Window (22 page)

She said, all business now, “I have to ask you a few more questions. Do you have any food or medication allergies?”

“No,” said Louis.

“Are you taking any medication at this time?”

“No,” said Louis.

“Have you had a tetanus shot within the last five years?”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

“We’ll have to give you one then.” Iris made notes on her clipboard sheet. “Okay.” She looked up at him again. “One more thing. How did you break your arm?”

Louis tried to meet her eyes. “I was at my window.” He paused.

“Your window,” Iris prompted. “At your window and…?”

“And then I was out of it.”

“Out of it?” She tilted her head.

“By accident. Onto the ground,” Louis said quickly.

“First-floor window? Second-floor window?”

“Second floor.”

“Did you hurt yourself anywhere else? Your back? Your head?”

“Oh no, just my arm. I landed in a flower bed. Where it was soft. And I wouldn’t have even broken my arm if…” He didn’t go on. If I hadn’t twisted and turned trying to keep my hat and scarf in place.

“If?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If I was luckier, I guess.”

Iris started for the door, picturing in her mind Louis at the window, and then out of it, falling and falling. “I’d say you were pretty lucky. I’m going to talk with Dr. Gunther and set you up for an X-ray, and get you a couple of pain pills. If you need anything, press the call light, that button there above the stretcher.”

She pointed, then closed the door behind her and took a long breath. She kept seeing it, Louis at the window. She closed her eyes, opened them, and began to move down the hallway. She went three steps and stopped short, and made a sound, which Inez heard as she hurried out of room 1 blowing a large bubble.

“You say something, Iris?” Inez called down the hall to her.

Iris didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, so Inez shrugged and walked off.

Louis
. The Tube Man had said “
Louis
,” not “
loose
.” Paula, the night nurse, hadn’t gotten the Tube Man’s final word right. Now the Tube Man’s words made sense, were brought to sense by the man in room 4. He fell from a window because he is the man in the window. She heard the Tube Man once more, as if she were again in his room and he was speaking to her in his whispering ventilated voice, his machine-breath coma voice. The Tube Man, the valentine-shaped dot of blood on his floor, his Cupid words like arrows piercing her heart.
The man in the window is Louis
. Iris pressed against the wall. And he has left his window, he has crossed his interminable lonely desert for me. My wounded Lawrence, whose eyes have endlessly searched the horizon, has found me. These unimaginable words came to Iris as she moved unsteadily up the hall toward the ER nurses’ station, touching the green wall for support.

Unnoticed by Iris who was in the nurses’ station trying to compose herself, unnoticed by Winnie and Inez who were busy with Big Bill Rose and the rest of the ER, unnoticed by anyone, the door to room 5 opened just a crack and an eyeball peered through it. Then the door opened a little more, and Harvey Mastuzek craned his scraggy neck and peered up and down the empty hallway. Coast clear, he thrust open the door and hopped out into the hallway, his skinny butt hanging out of the open back of his hospital gown. He lifted his nose to the air as if picking up a scent, then pointed his right index finger like a divining rod at the doors of each of the six ER examination rooms, settling at last on the one to the left of him, room 4. Soundlessly, he turned the handle to the door and hopped inside.

Louis, who’d been watching the door since Iris walked out of it, did not recognize the bedraggled man who skittered into his room and who now placed a pale trembling hand on his stretcher and peered up at him with intent eyes.

“Louis,” the man said.

The man spoke his name so sadly and so quietly. Louis leaned forward instinctively, to hear more, when the man opened his mouth to speak again. But instead of speaking, the man suddenly lifted his hand and laid it on Louis’s scarf-enshrouded cheek. Then he let his hand drop.

“Louis. Do you forgive me?”

Louis placed the voice then, and the eyes. The body had changed so, like his own, though the ravaging of it had been slower, an eating away.

“Mr. Mastuzek,” Louis said, as if he were ten years old again and addressing Harvey Mastuzek as a Saturday customer in Malone’s Hardware. How long had it been since he had waited on Mr. Mastuzek, that single time he had entered the store? It had been an entire life ago. “Mr. Mastuzek. Forgive you? Forgive you for what?”

“It was so beautiful, you see,” said Harvey, looking away.

“What was, Mr. Mastuzek?”

Harvey glanced around the examination room as if he were in another place. His eyes had softened, become hopeful. “The store. Your father’s store.”

“Yes,” said Louis.

“It was such a tidy place. It was a place of such clarity. Does that make sense, that things were clear there? You could see immediately, just by looking at all the supplies, that something could be done about everything.”

“Yes.”

Harvey’s voice took on the slow rhythm of remembrance. “You thought,” he said, walking up and down the examination room as if he were perusing the aisles of his remembered vision of Malone’s Hardware, “you thought, entering the place, that anything could be fixed. Not just the actual thing you sought to fix, the leaky pipe or the torn screen or the clogged drain, but all things, you know? It was a place that let you know that… that things could be held together, that if
this
happens, then you do
that
. Solutions, answers! Right there on the shelf, and all you had to know was what you needed, because if you needed it, Malone’s had it.” Harvey whirled around and looked wide-eyed at Louis. “And if Malone’s had it, if a simple hardware store in the middle of a nothing town like Waverly had it, then it was all around you, outside the store and everywhere. Life, is what I’m saying, Louis, life didn’t have to be such a goddamn hardship and a puzzle. Life was a fixable thing. If a thing goes wrong for you, and you know where to look and how to look, then you need not be hobbled by your calamities. You just reach right out, get the thing you need, and fix your leak and your torn screen, and yourself, most of all yourself, because it can be done, don’t you see?”

Louis nodded.

“Well it’s true, Louis, or it seemed true when I walked into Malone’s Hardware that day. That’s what I believed, looking around me and watching you and listening to you, it’s what I believed when you found me this.” Harvey reached out and placed a small black washer on the stretcher beside Louis.

“You handed me that washer and Jesus Christ, it came right to me, the idea of the washer almost dropped me to the floor. You see, when I walked into Malone’s Hardware and said, ‘I need me a washer,’ I wasn’t asking for a washer at all; and when you found me the washer, and handed it to me, and I paid my thirteen cents, that’s not the transaction that really transpired. The transaction, I knew suddenly, was this: I was actually saying, ‘Louis, boy, I got me a host of calamities that I need not specify. Maybe I beat my wife and maybe I don’t, maybe I’m a drinker and maybe not, maybe I have the cancer eating through my bowels and maybe I don’t, and maybe I need a washer for the torturous dripping of my faucet and maybe not—what I need to know is, if a thing is broke, can it be fixed?’

“And you took me all over that store pointing out all the possibilities, the ways to mend a thing, the tape, the screws, the caulk, the hammers and nails, and in that small drawer at the back of the store, the washers. Harvey, I said to myself when you handed me that perfect washer, you see how easy it is? Solutions, answers, alternatives. I floated out of the store. And I said, Harvey, it’s going to be okay. A sorrow had been eased, lifted, Louis, by what I believed I learned in my brief encounter with you in that store. I was, for the first time in years, a happy man, a man with hope. I was going to be fixed.”

Harvey’s face was very near Louis’s now. “So I hurried home, and I went down to the basement and found me a screwdriver and a pipe wrench, then I bounded back upstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, all the while clutching my little washer like it was gold. I took off the faucet handle, and I removed the valve stem and scraped out the old washer, then slipped in my new one—the first nervous step along what I thought to be the road to my rehabilitation, the restoration of my luck in life. Then I put everything back together and turned on the faucet, and the water flowed as sweetly as a waterfall, and when I turned it off, no drips!

“Hallelujah, my fortunes had turned! I danced a jig right there in the bathroom, I hugged my dog who I had treated
wretchedly only an hour before, I made plans to bust up every gin and vodka bottle that I had hidden in shoe boxes and closets in every room of my house. Louis, if I had been struck deaf and blind at that very moment, at the height of my elation, I would still be a happy man—and you would not be wearing the scarf and hat you do today.”

Louis tried to stand. “Mr. Mastuzek…”

“Wait.” Harvey held up his hand. “Because had I been deaf and blind, I would never have heard the sound that was to me catastrophe, seen the sight that dashed my faith and hope. The faucet, you see, began to drip again. It was not fixed, could not be fixed no matter how I tried. And I did try, again and again, hour after hour. No solutions, no remedies, no answers. ‘That which breaks remains broken’—those are the words that should have been painted under M
ALONE
’
S
H
ARDWARE
. Or maybe, M
ALONE
’
S
H
ARDWARE
—W
E
S
ELL
I
LLUSIONS
.”

Louis said, “But you should have come back, Mr. Mastuzek. I sold you the wrong size washer by mistake, that’s all.”

“It was the perfect washer.” He fingered the washer that lay on the stretcher beside Louis’s leg. “You sold me the right washer, but even that wasn’t enough.”

“Then you needed a new valve stem, or something else.”

“You expected me to come back?” said Harvey, fingering the washer and not looking at Louis. “You expected me to come back and go through it all over again? To buy the perfect valve stem, or whatever other perfect part you had there on the shelves of your store?”

“Sometimes it takes a while before—”

Harvey snatched the washer off the stretcher. “A while! I didn’t have a while. A while didn’t have anything to do with it. I never had a prayer. That washer, the idea of the washer, would’ve worked for anyone else but me. I watched that faucet drip for a day and a night so that my soul would be filled to overflowing with the black truth, the certain knowledge that sometimes a thing that breaks is supposed to remain broken. Ruination
is my natural state. I’ve come to accept it, but they can’t accept that here”—Harvey gestured at the walls of the examination room—“this hospital is as bad as your father’s store. They find me and bring me here, and I bleed all over them, and they patch me up for a while, but before too long, I feel the drip beginning inside me all over again, the burning drip, the unrelenting drip, the unstoppable drip of my life’s blood, which will continue unabated until I’m dry and dead.

“But”—and now Harvey’s voice dropped low—“just because ruination was to be my fate did not mean it had to be yours, and that’s why I’ve come to you, Louis, to confess, and to ask for your forgiveness. You see, I blamed your father’s store for the brief light that made darker the blackness that surrounded me. The bitter taste of hope. Enraged and drunk, I lit the match and started the fire that burned you. It was me.” Harvey could hardly speak now, and he grasped Louis’s leg. “I didn’t know you were there, though, boy. I had no idea. I tried to burn down the store, but instead I burned you.” Harvey’s agitation had opened the old diseased wound in his stomach again, and the first of the flow of blood had reached the corner of his mouth.

Louis said, “You’re bleeding.”

“I’ve been bleeding for sixteen years, boy.”

“Mr. Mastuzek, please. It wasn’t you.”

“Forgive me.” Harvey touched his tongue to the corner of his mouth where the blood welled up, and the spot was clean for a moment, then a new drop appeared almost immediately.

“It was an accident,” said Louis. “A frayed cord touched some oily rags. I tried to put it out. A spark.…” Louis closed his eyes, his voice a whisper. “A spark rose.”

“No, I was drunk, drunk in the alley behind the store and I lit a match, Louis, forgive me, I lit a match…” Harvey dragged his arm across his red mouth.

“And the spark rose, like, like a firefly,” said Louis. “Then it fell, into a jar of paint thinner, clearer than water, and when it
flashed, I thought I’d been splashed with ice water, it was so cold on my face.”

“And Louis, I pushed open the door to the back of the store, tossed the match into the darkness, and ran. I never saw you. I just ran and ran.”

“After the cold, there was heat. And flames. Everywhere flames. Heat,” said Louis, opening his eyes and looking at Harvey, “and flames.” He looked through the flames at Harvey, at the blood running now, dripping from Harvey’s stubbled chin and onto his hospital gown. He looked at Harvey and understood that Harvey’s version of the fire at Malone’s Hardware was true. And he understood, too, that his own version was true. Who knew how many true versions there were? How many people sat quietly in their houses, bleeding? How many linked their calamities and pains to his own?

Louis reached out with the end of his purple scarf and wiped the blood from Harvey’s chin. “Mr. Mastuzek,” he said softly.

Whether it was Louis’s kind act or the natural ebb and flow of Harvey’s seeping wound, the blood did not rise again where Louis had cleaned it away. Harvey stared at Louis for a long moment, then nodded once and turned for the door. He opened it a crack, peered out, then pulled it all the way. He waved once to Louis, and took off down the hallway like a man who wasn’t coming back.