Acceptable Losses (32 page)

Now he was on a boat. He could feel the throbbing of great engines. Somehow he knew that they were on the boat, somewhere in warm Pacific waters, probably off the coast of Indonesia and they were there making a movie, under the direction of Mr. Gray. Only Mr. Gray was not there. He had disappeared. Mysterious Indonesia. Damon had to continue without him.

He descended below decks. A man in a white coat was bent over a radio transmitter. The man had a straggly brownish beard and was young, with a kind face. “In the absence of Mr. Gray,” Damon said to the man, “I will take over the movie. I appoint you to run the ship.” The man with the beard looked angry. “I have other things to do,” he said.

A very pretty Eurasian girl with flat features passed through the room. She was wearing blue jeans and a man’s shirt hanging outside them, flapping on her. Damon knew she was to be the star of the film. She was supposed to sing in the film, but when she talked her voice was a harsh, unmelodious croak. Damon winced as he heard her. “You have to do something with that girl’s voice,” he said to the man with the beard.

“Leave me alone,” the man said impatiently. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”

“I called my brother,” Oliver said. It was the next morning. Sheila had slept in the private room, Oliver on the couch in the waiting room. Whenever any of the doctors passed them, they seemed annoyed. “He asked if they’d put in an arteriogram, to see where the bleeding is coming from. Have they?”

Sheila shook her head numbly.

“Anyway, he said you should suggest it to them. Do you know what it is?” Oliver asked.

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

Sheila nodded. “I’ll try. I don’t know if anything’ll do any good. The doctors seem to have given him up. They’re just going through the motions. Thank God for the nurses. They don’t leave him alone for a minute. The night nurse said he’s not making any red blood corpuscles, the level is sinking to the critical point. And he’s having trouble breathing. They think he has pneumonia now. They keep pumping out his lungs through a tube. His eyes are still open but he doesn’t seem to recognize me.”

A little later Zinfandel came in, his eyes red with lack of sleep, his nose twitching nervously. “I believe, Mrs. Damon,” he said, “that you ought to try to get some rest or we’ll be having to work on you too. You’re not doing your husband any good by wearing yourself out like this.”

“Is he still bleeding?” Sheila asked, ignoring what he had said.

“I’m afraid he is.”

“Are you going to try an arteriogram?”

Zinfandel looked at her suspiciously. “What do you know about arteriograms, Mrs. Damon?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve been talking to other doctors.” The tone was accusing.

“Of course I have. I’ll talk to a thousand other doctors if I thought one of them would save my husband’s life.”

“As a matter of fact,” Zinfandel said, without grace, “we’ve decided to try an arteriogram this morning.” Then he resumed his more cordial pedantic manner, like a kindergarten teacher. “It’s a process in which a needle is put into an artery in the groin and a catheter is inserted through it to the suspected lesion. Then contrasting material, a dye if you will, is introduced. After it has flowed through to the source of the trouble X-rays are taken and with luck we find where the trouble lies. Then small gelatin pellets are blown under pressure through the catheter into the artery, two, three, four, depending on the case. With luck, the pellets block the rupture. There is no guarantee of success. If the hemorrhage is stopped, we must wait for several days to see if it is permanent. Is that all clear, Mrs. Damon?”

“Thank you, yes.”

“I am not one of those doctors,” Zinfandel said with pride, “who likes to mystify either the patient or his loved ones. I believe in presenting things as they are at all times, no matter how drastic it may seem at the time.”

“I appreciate it,” Sheila murmured.

“I will tell you how it comes out as soon as I know. In the meantime, please take my advice and get some rest.”

“Thank you again,” Sheila said.

Zinfandel bustled out of the room. He moved through the hospital at a lope, as though that were the only gait that would keep pace with enveloping death in the impossibly great area he had been appointed to oversee.

“He’s a horse’s ass, if you ask me,” Oliver said, “but he seems like one hell of a doctor.”

“Yes,” Sheila agreed. “If only
he
had operated instead of the other one.”

He was in a vaulted stone room on the top of a building. Now he realized he was in some special place in a hospital. Across from where he was lying there was a large brightly lit room where nurses and their friends seemed to be having a party, eating and drinking and chatting gaily to each other. There was the continual drone of funereal music from several cassette machines. A young doctor said, “This is a real find. I got it today. The music played at the funeral of Prince Albert of Belgium. It cost two hundred dollars, but it was worth it.”

He said, or thought he said to Sheila, who seemed to float in and out of his consciousness, leaning close over him, “Tell them to stop that damn music.”

In the same room with him there was an old man. A muscular young black in a skivvy shirt who looked like an ex-boxer was beating ferociously on the old man’s chest and abdomen. Damon knew the old man was going to die and he did. Damon knew that he was going to be next, but his hands were tied down one on each side of the bed and there was nothing he could do about it. The corpse of the old man was carted away, and the black turned to him and began to pound him ferociously with the naked muscled arms jutting out of the skivvy shirt. From time to time the black would stop hitting him and shave him with an old-fashioned straight razor. With each stroke he would put a thin piece of adhesive tape on Damon’s cheek and write the date and the hour on it with a ball-point pen. Then he would resume hitting him again. Damon refused to cry out and resigned himself calmly to being killed by the black man.

But there was a gale of laughter in the brightly lit room across from where he was lying and somebody said, “We’re late for the party. Put him away somewhere until tomorrow.”

He was moved, he couldn’t tell where, and everybody left, talking gaily, and he was alone with bright lights shining painfully in his eyes.

Sheila drifted over him again. “You’ve got to get me out of this place,” he said, although he knew somehow that no sound came out of his mouth.

“Darling,” Sheila seemed to say, “people pay a great deal of extra money to die in this room.”

“At least,” he said soundlessly, “keep the black man away from me. He’s going to kill me. They’re all going to kill me. You’ve got to go to the police. Have Oliver call up the
Times.
He knows everybody on the paper. And you have to get away, too. They’ll kill you, too.”

Sheila drifted away and he tried to sleep, but the bright light in his eyes kept him awake. There was a big clock on the wall, but it was going backward and moving swiftly, so that the hands on the dial were constantly moving. They want to fool me about time, Damon thought, they don’t want me to know day from night. It was an exquisite refinement of torture.

“He can’t talk,” Sheila said to Oliver, “but somehow he let me know he wanted a pen and a piece of paper. At least the arteriogram worked—so far—and he seems a little stronger now. He can hold a pen in his hand, and communicate
something.
It’s almost impossible to read what he writes, but I could understand that he thinks the black male nurse is trying to kill him. The man is just doing what he’s been ordered to do—pounding the chest to dislodge the stuff that’s collecting in the lungs so that it can be siphoned up and Roger can breathe. But go explain that to a man who’s out of his mind most of the time. Damon’s the least racist man I know, but I suppose somewhere inside all of us, irrationally …” She shrugged hopelessly. “Anyway, I told the doctor in charge of the ICU to keep the man away from Roger. He’s got enough things to worry about, as it is. Now it turns out that the first day they gave him twenty-six transfusions. Nobody knows what’s keeping him alive. His kidneys have shut down. They’ve ordered a shunt to put him on a dialysis machine, but the doctors who do it won’t be able to start till tomorrow morning. And they have to take the tube out of his throat soon and do a tracheotomy so his vocal cords won’t be ruined. That’s the first hopeful sign—” Her tone was bitterly ironic. “They think there’s a chance that he can live and they want him to be able to talk if it turns out that way. But the specialist who does it won’t be in till Monday, that’s four days from now, and it may be too late. You’d think that in an enormous place like this they could find someone else to do it immediately. There are all those stories in the newspapers about people doing it with a pen-knife on the floor of a restaurant when somebody is choking on a piece of steak. And they can’t even agree on the name of the operation. One doctor calls it a tracheotomy, another says tracheostomy.” Sheila shook her head wonderingly. “Naming things is important. The addition or subtraction of a single s may change the entire meaning of a word. How do I know? Now I wish I’d gone in for medicine when I was young instead of child psychology. Then maybe I could fight this terrible, hulking hospital machine.”

Oliver sat silently through all this. He had been in to see Damon several times and had spoken to some of the younger doctors and the sympathetic nurses, and while he had been alarmed by Damon’s appearance, he was inclined to believe the doctors and the nurses he had talked to who told him that now that Damon had survived the first awful days, he would most probably eventually recover. When he talked to his brother on the phone, which he did daily and as best he could described the treatments Damon was undergoing, his brother confirmed that the doctors knew what they were doing. Sheila, he felt, was dissolving. Physically, she already seemed to have lost a great deal of weight and her once-gleaming dark hair hung lank and lusterless around her head and her face seemed sharpened to a thin, brittle edge. And she had always been a woman who had spoken briefly and with confidence and her rambling tirades were frightening, as though her character was breaking up into unfamiliar, jagged, uncontrollable fragments. He would like to have the courage to suggest to her that both for her good and Damon’s, it might be a good idea if she absented herself from the hospital for two or three days at a time; the atmosphere of the Intensive Care Unit was crushing her as well as Damon. But he knew that he couldn’t suggest it. Sheila would think that he was advocating flight, betrayal. As it was, she spent almost the whole day and night in the waiting room, sometimes dozing in a chair, waking with a start and rushing into Damon’s room to see if he needed to tell her something. And it was true that she was the only link with the world by which he could communicate anything because she was the only one who could decipher the scrawls he put on paper. He was suffering terribly from thirst now and was continually writing the word
water
on the yellow pad they kept at his bedside. The doctors and nurses said he was getting all the liquid necessary intravenously and through the tube down his throat into his stomach through which he was fed a nutritive powder that was supposed to supply him with fifteen hundred calories a day. He was not allowed to drink because anything he took orally would slide immediately into his overworked and cramped lungs. The one time they had tried to feed him some cold Jell-O, it had been pumped up immediately, intact. It was Sheila who got a dozen lemons and squeezed some drops on swabs soaked with glycerin that she ran over his parched lips. He smiled or tried to smile gratefully at the taste, as though the slight sharpness of the fruit gave him, at least momentarily, the illusion of assuaging his thirst.

“He’ll forget all this,” Oliver said, searching for words of comfort, “once he’s out of here. All the nurses say the same thing.”

“Torture.” Sheila seemed not to have heard what he had said. “He keeps writing the one word—torture—before he writes anything else.” She took a folded piece of yellow foolscap out of her bag and read from the wandering, almost illegible script, that looked to Oliver like random bird-tracks on sand. “Get out of here. Must get out. Call lawyer. O … That’s you, Oliver. O knows number. Writ. Habeas corpus. Prison.”

“The nurses tell me it’s the same with everybody,” Oliver said. “They even have a name for it. The ICU syndrome.”

“They’ve taken you in,” Sheila said accusingly. “They think you’re cute. I see you drinking coffee with them, going out with them to the deli for a sandwich. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Oh, Christ, Sheila,” Oliver said wearily.

Sheila took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Oliver. Forgive me. I don’t know what I’m saying these days.”

“Forget it.” He patted her hand.

A doctor passed through the room and Sheila looked at him hopefully. The doctor ignored her and went into the adjoining conference room, where the staff gathered to discuss cases and listen to lectures.

“He’s beginning to look like a skeleton,” Sheila said. “You can see every bone of his face. You wouldn’t think that a man’s arms—and such strong arms, too—could wither so fast. He seems to be losing five pounds a day. It’s as though he’s disappearing bit by bit before my eyes.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY

H
E WAS BEING CARRIED INTO
a cave by four masked men. He knew the leader of the four was Zalovsky, although not a word was spoken. The cave was high and spacious, shadowed, hewn out of rock. He could not move but once he was in the cave he saw the carved stone sarcophagus that awaited him. Then he saw that he was not going to be buried alone. Standing against a wall, taller than he had realized, queenly and erect, draped in a flowing rose-colored gown, her hair flowing over her shoulders, her figure bathed in a mauve light, immobile in death, was his wife. Only he couldn’t remember her name. Coppelia was the only name he could conjure up and he repeated it to himself over and over again, irritated. Then it changed to Cornelia, but he knew that was wrong, too.