Winter Journal (17 page)

Meanwhile, Sue is on her feet, scanning the room for Bigelow, looking anxious, distraught, puzzled by his failure to return. Bigelow catches sight of her, then swings around and invites Jeanie to go somewhere else with him. There are people he wants to avoid, he says, and surely there must be other interesting places in San Francisco. Yes, Jeanie says, but she hasn’t quite had her fill of the Fisherman. Why don’t they meet up later when she hits her next spot of the evening, and then she writes down a telephone number on a piece of paper and tells him to call her there in an hour.

Bigelow returns to his hotel room, pulls out the scrap of paper with Jeanie’s number on it, and picks up the phone, but before he can make the call, he glances up and sees that a bouquet of flowers has been delivered to the room. There is a card from Paula attached to the wrapping paper, and the message reads:
I’ll keep a light burning in the window. Sweet dreams
. Bigelow is chastened. Instead of going out again to spend the night chasing skirts, he tears up Jeanie’s number and tosses it in the trash, and a moment after that the story enters a different register, the real story begins.

The poison has already begun to do its work. Bigelow’s head aches, but he assumes he has drunk too much and will feel better after he has slept it off. He climbs into bed, and as
he does so the air fills with strange, disjointed sounds, the echoing voice of a distant female singer, mental debris from the jazz club, signs of mounting physical distress. When he wakes in the morning, Bigelow’s condition has not improved. Still convinced that he drank too much and is suffering from a hangover, he calls room service and orders a pick-me-up, one of those tart, eye-opening nostrums spiced with horseradish and Worcestershire sauce that are supposed to jolt you into instant sobriety, but once the waiter shows up with the concoction, Bigelow can’t face it, the mere sight of the drink fills him with nausea, and he asks the waiter to take it away. Something is seriously wrong. Bigelow clutches his stomach, appears dizzy and disoriented, and when the waiter asks if he is all right, the fatally ill victim-hero, still in the dark about what has befallen him, says he must have had too big a night of it and needs to get some fresh air.

Bigelow goes out, staggering ever so slightly, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, and climbs onto a passing cable car. He jumps off at Nob Hill, and then he is walking, walking through deserted streets in broad daylight, walking with purpose, on his way somewhere—but what where and to what purpose?—until he finds the address he is looking for, a tall white structure with the words
MEDICAL BUILDING
chiseled into the stone façade. Bigelow is far more worried than he let on to the waiter at the hotel. He knows, indeed he knows, that something is seriously wrong with him.

At first, the results of the examination are encouraging. Looking at Bigelow’s X-ray, a doctor says: “Lungs in good
condition, blood pressure normal, heart fine. It’s a good thing everybody isn’t like you. It would put us doctors out of business.” He instructs Bigelow to put on his clothes as they wait for the results of the blood tests administered by his colleague, Dr. Schaefer. As Bigelow knots his tie in the foreground, face to the camera, expressionless, a nurse walks into the room behind him, too addled to say a word, staring at him with a look that combines both horror and pity, and at that moment there can be no doubt that Bigelow is doomed. Dr. Schaefer enters, trying to mask his alarm. He and the first doctor confirm that Bigelow is unmarried, that he has no relatives in San Francisco, that he has come to the city alone. Why these questions? Bigelow asks. You’re a very sick man, the doctor says.
You must steel yourself for a shock
. And then they tell him about the luminous toxic matter that has entered his system and will soon be attacking his vital organs. They wish there was something they could do, they say, but there is no antidote for this particular poison. He doesn’t have long.

Bigelow is incredulous, filled with rage. This is impossible! he shouts. They must be wrong, there must be an error, but the doctors calmly defend their diagnosis, assuring him that there hasn’t been an error—which only increases Bigelow’s fury. “You’re telling me I’m dead!” he roars. “I don’t even know who you are! Why should I believe you?” Calling them both crazy, he pushes them aside and storms out of the office.

Cut to an even larger building—a hospital? another
medical center?—and a shot of Bigelow bounding up the front steps. He barges into a room marked
EMERGENCY
, apoplectic, a man about to explode into a hundred fragments, and shoves his way past two bewildered and frightened nurses, insisting that he see a doctor at once, demanding that someone examine him for luminous poison.

The new doctor comes to the same conclusion as the first pair.
You’ve got it, all right. Your system has already absorbed it
. To prove the point, he switches off the overhead light and shows Bigelow the test tube containing the examination results. It is an eerie sight. The thing glows in the dark—as if the doctor were holding a vial of incandescent milk, a frosted bulb filled with radium, or worse, the liquefied fallout from a nuclear bomb. Bigelow’s anger subsides. Faced with such overpowering evidence, he temporarily goes numb. “But I don’t feel sick,” he says quietly. “Just a little stomachache, that’s all.”

The doctor warns him not to be fooled by his apparent lack of symptoms. Bigelow has no more than a day or two to live, a week at the most.
There’s nothing that can be done now
. Then the doctor learns that Bigelow has no idea how, when, or where he swallowed the poison, which means that it was administered by another party, an unknown party, which further means that someone intentionally set out to kill him.

“This is a case for Homicide,” the doctor says, reaching for the telephone.

“Homicide?”

“I don’t think you understand, Bigelow. You’ve been murdered.”

This is the moment when Bigelow snaps, when the monstrous thing that has happened to him turns into an all-out, unbridled panic, when the howl of agony begins. He bursts out of the doctor’s office, bursts out of the building, and starts running through the streets, and as you follow this passage of the film, this long sequence of shots tracking Bigelow’s mad fugue through the city, you understand that you are witnessing the outer manifestation of an inner state, that this senseless, headlong, unstoppable running is nothing less than the depiction of a mind filled with horror, that you are watching the choreography of dread. A panic attack has been translated into a breathless sprint through the streets of a city, for panic is nothing if not an expression of mental flight, the unbidden force that grows inside you when you are trapped, when the truth is too much to bear, when the injustice of this unavoidable truth can no longer be confronted, and therefore the only possible response is to flee, to shut down your mind by transforming yourself into a gasping, twitching, delirious body, and what truth could be more terrible than this one? Condemned to death within hours or days, cut down in the middle of your life for reasons that entirely escape your understanding, your life suddenly reduced to a thimbleful of minutes, seconds, heartbeats.

It doesn’t matter what happens next. You watch the second half of the film attentively, but you know the story is
over, that even as the story continues, there is nothing left to say. Bigelow will spend his last hours on earth trying to solve the mystery of his murder. He will learn that Philips, the man who called his office from Los Angeles, is dead. He will go to Los Angeles and investigate the activities of various thieves, psychopaths, and two-faced women. He will be shot at and punched. He will learn that his involvement in the story is purely accidental, that the villains want him dead because he happened to notarize a bill of sale pertaining to a stolen shipment of iridium and he is the only man alive who can identify the culprits. He will track down his murderer, the man with the curious collar, who is also the murderer of Philips, and kill him in a shoot-out on the landing of a darkened stairway. And then, shortly after that, Bigelow himself will die, just as the doctors said he would—in mid-sentence, telling his story to the police.

There is nothing wrong with playing it out like this, you suppose. It is the conventional thing to do, the manly, heroic option, the trope that befits all adventure stories, but why, you wonder, does Bigelow never divulge his imminent fate to anyone, not even to his doting, lovesick Paula? Perhaps because heroes must remain tough until the bitter end, and even when time is running out, they can’t allow themselves to get bogged down in useless sentiment.

But you aren’t tough anymore, are you? Ever since the panic attack of 2002, you have stopped being tough, and even though you work hard at trying to be a decent person, it has been a long time now since you last thought of yourself
as heroic. If you ever found yourself in Bigelow’s shoes, you are certain you would never do what Bigelow did. You would run through the streets, yes, you would run until you could no longer take another step, no longer breathe, no longer stand up, and then what? Call Paula, call Paula the instant you stopped running, but if her number happened to be busy when you called, then what? Prostrate yourself on the ground and weep, cursing the world for allowing you to have been born. Or else, quite simply, crawl off into a hole somewhere and wait to die.

You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether friends or strangers or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end—at least as far as others are concerned—your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and
if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others. Think of what happened to you when you were fourteen. For two weeks at the end of the summer, you worked for your father in Jersey City, joining one of the small crews that repaired and maintained the apartment buildings he and his brothers owned and managed: painting walls and ceilings, mending roofs, hammering nails into two-by-fours, pulling up sheets of cracked linoleum. The two men you worked with were black, every tenant in every apartment was black, every person in the neighborhood was black, and after two weeks of looking at nothing but black faces, you began to forget that your own face wasn’t black. Since you couldn’t see your own face, you saw yourself in the faces of the people around you, and bit by bit you stopped thinking of yourself as different. In effect, you stopped thinking about yourself at all.

Looking at your right hand as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats looking at his own right hand under similar circumstances, in the act of writing one of his last poems and suddenly breaking off to scribble eight lines in the margin of the manuscript, the bitter outcry of a young man who knew he was headed for an early grave, darkly underscored by the word
now
in the first line, for every
now
necessarily implies a
later
, and what
later
could Keats look forward to but the prospect of his own death?

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb
,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again
,

And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—

I hold it toward you
.

Keats to begin with, but no sooner do you think of
This living hand
than you are reminded of a story someone once told you about James Joyce, Joyce in Paris in the 1920s, standing around at a party eighty-five years ago when a woman walked up to him and asked if she could shake the hand that wrote
Ulysses
. Instead of offering her his right hand, Joyce lifted it in the air, studied it for a few moments, and said: “Let me remind you, madam, that this hand has done many other things as well.” No details given, but what a delicious piece of smut and innuendo, all the more effective because he left everything to the woman’s imagination. What did he want her to see? Wiping his ass, probably, picking his nose, masturbating in bed at night, sticking his fingers into Nora’s cunt and diddling her bunghole, popping pimples, scraping food from his teeth, plucking out nostril hairs, disgorging wax from his ears—fill in the appropriate blanks, the central point being: whatever was most disgusting to her. Your hands have served you in similar ways, of course, everyone’s
hands have done those things, but mostly they are busy performing tasks that require little or no thought. Opening and closing doors, screwing light bulbs into sockets, dialing telephones, washing dishes, turning the pages of books, holding your pen, brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries, swiping your MetroCard in subway turnstiles, pushing buttons on machines, picking up the newspaper from the front steps in the morning, turning down the covers of the bed, showing your ticket to the train conductor, flushing the toilet, lighting your little cigars, stubbing out your little cigars in ashtrays, putting on your pants, taking off your pants, tying your shoes, squirting shaving cream onto the tips of your fingers, clapping at plays and concerts, sliding keys into locks, scratching your face, scratching your arm, scratching your ass, wheeling suitcases through airports, unpacking suitcases, putting your shirts on hangers, zipping up your fly, buckling your belt, buttoning your jacket, knotting your tie, drumming your fingers on tables, loading paper into your fax machine, tearing checks out of your checkbook, opening up boxes of tea, switching on lights, switching off lights, plumping up your pillow before going to bed. Those same hands have sometimes punched people (as previously noted), and three or four times, in moments of intense frustration, they have also punched walls. They have thrown plates onto the floor, dropped plates onto the floor, and picked up plates from the floor. Your right hand has shaken more hands than you could possibly count, has blown your nose, wiped your
ass, and waved good-bye more often than the number of words in the largest dictionary. Your hands have held the bodies of your children, have wiped the asses and blown the noses of your children, have bathed your children, rubbed the backs of your children, dried the tears of your children, and stroked the faces of your children. They have patted the shoulders of friends, work comrades, and relatives. They have pushed and shoved, pulled people off the ground, gripped the arms of people who were about to fall, navigated the wheelchairs of those who could not walk. They have touched the bodies of clothed and naked women. They have moved down the length of your wife’s naked skin and found their way onto every part of her. They are happiest there, you feel, have always been happiest there since the day you met her, for, to paraphrase a line from one of George Oppen’s poems, some of the most beautiful places in the world are on your wife’s body.