My Present Age (27 page)

And all the while Rubacek kept asking me what was the matter. I hated him. Couldn’t he see what was the matter? There I was, lying on the floor, clasping my chest, twisting from side to side. Did he expect me to say it?

The view from a stretcher is ceiling. The ambulance attendants and Stanley struggled with their burden down two flights of stairs; there is no elevator in the Twin Spruce Apartments. Turnings in the stairway were difficult to navigate. I was bumped, tipped, jogged, cursed. My eyes fixed, I watched the ceiling tilt and slide. Whenever McMurtry came too near me I yelled. He trotted alongside the stretcher with my clothes bundled under one arm.

“Keep away from me, you goddamn vulture!” I shouted. Apartment doors opened. I heard a baby crying.

McMurtry kept plucking at the coarse blanket that covered me. I slapped at his palsied hand, raged whenever his avid face lurched into my field of vision. “Bugger off!” He was trembling with the horrible happiness that overtakes some of the old when they see a member of a younger generation seriously ill. On such occasions
they are full of self-congratulation and flash the cheerful grimace of the survivor, the smile of the man found in a lifeboat with the dead stacked up all around him.

Rubacek was managing one of the stretcher poles at my head. I could hear him explaining my behaviour to the ambulance attendants. His theory was that it resulted from mixing drugs and booze.

“I seen it before,” he grunted. “Bad news mixing tranks and booze. Some guys flip right out, go ape-shit. Now I don’t take nothing myself in that line, not even an aspirin, say. Keep the system clean.”

It wasn’t tranks and booze. McMurtry was trying to draw the blanket over my face. That was what had me bellowing. I wasn’t dead yet.

The younger of the nurses is back at the door. “You’re in luck,” she says. “Your brother is here. He says not to worry about a taxi, he’ll get you home.”

“My brother?”

She steps aside and Rubacek sidles into the room. He looks sheepish. “Hi, Ed,” he says.

“Hi, Stan. How’s Mom and Dad?”

“All right,” he mumbles, casting down his eyes.

“Stan lives with my parents,” I explain to the nurse. “He can’t hold a job.”

“I’ll leave now,” she says pointedly, “so you can change into your street clothes.”

When the door closes I scold Rubacek. “What do you think you’re doing, telling people you’re my brother?”

He shrugs. “I know these hospitals. They won’t tell you nothing unless you’re like a blood relative.”

“And just what the hell did you need to know, Stanley?”

“Well, Jesus, I was worried, right? You looked like death warmed over by the time we got you here and into emergency.”

“What do you expect? I was having a heart attack.”

Stanley shakes his head. “You weren’t neither, Ed. And you know it.”

“What!”

“Come on, Dr. Keitel talked to you this morning and he told you same thing he told me. You wasn’t having no heart attack.”

“I sure as hell was! Keitel! Keitel! So you’ve been talking to him, have you?”

“Yeah. That’s right, Dr. Keitel.”

“Dr
. Keitel? The bone through his nose didn’t cause you second thoughts? Keitel a doctor? The man’s idea of medical diagnosis is to split open a pullet with a hatchet under a full moon and peer into its steamy entrails while he hops around the patient on one foot awaiting revelation. We’re talking witch doctor here. We’re talking graduate of Haiti’s ivy league, Voodoo U.”

Stanley chuckles.

“Literally! Literally!
I’m speaking
literally!”

“Get off it, Ed. The man’s an important cardiacologist.”

“Cardy
quack
ologist!” I shout. “That’s what he is. Cardy
quack
ologist!”

“Sssh! This is a hospital,” warns Stanley. “And you’re getting excited.” He opens the closet door and hands me my pants. “Here, put these on.”

I carry on, my voice reduced to a vehement whisper. “Yeah, well, let Oogooboogoo Keitel have the kind of pain in the brisket that I had. You saw how I was. Let
him
have the goddamn excruciating pain in his chest and see if he doesn’t say it’s a heart attack,” I mutter, struggling into my trousers.

“Dr. Keitel says it was muscle spasms. Brought on by tension.” Stanley passes me a wrinkled shirt.

“Muscle spasms!” I throw up my hands in disgust, the shirt sleeves flap. “So he gave you that little song and dance too, did he? What do you expect? That he’s going to tell the truth? Tell a thirty-one-year-old his heart’s ready to go? Make him worry so that it
poops out sooner than it would have otherwise? Listen, Stanley, they tell you what they think is good for you.”

“He says your EKGs are fine.”

“I heard it. I heard it all.”

“The other doctor agrees.”

“Who? The skinny one?”

“Yeah.”

“When didn’t they ever agree? The whole medical profession is a network of pathological cronyism. When they graduate from medical school they swear a secret blood oath of mutual protection and kiss each other on the cheeks. Compared with them the Mafia is a loose organization of snitches and squealers.”

“Your shoes,” says Stanley.

As I bend over to tie my laces the blood rushes into my head, my temples feel swollen. Is it an elaborate hoax? Is Rubacek also in on the plan to keep the truth about my precarious condition from me? I sneak a sly glance at his face.

“Dr. Keitel says your blood pressure is up,” Stanley informs me, “but I explained you’re experiencing some interpersonal problems.”

“Did you mention Victoria to him? Did you? Answer me, Rubacek.”

“Sort of.”

I throw back my head and groan, “Lord, stay my hand.”

Stanley is unconcerned by this breach of privacy. “Somebody called Marsha phoned. I told her you was in the hospital.”

“Phoned? Phoned where?”

“Our place.”

“It isn’t our place. It’s
my
place.”

“Maybe not for long,” says Rubacek. “That old guy had me down to see what you done to his apartment the other night. You knocked plaster off his ceiling. Believe me, he’s bugged.”

“So he’s bugged.”

“You ought to be nice to him. He can make trouble. I played
him a couple of games of rummy and sweet-talked him and said you’d be glad to make him a reimbursement. I explained … you know … about your wife running away and being pregnant and like that. Maybe it helped. He said he’d consider your offer.”

Not only has Stanley been fraternizing with the enemy, he also has been bearing tales.

“You explained about my wife? You don’t know anything about my wife to explain. Quit explaining my situation to people, Rubacek. Understand? As to my offer, he’s got nothing to consider. I didn’t make him any offer.”

Rubacek shrugged. “Save yourself some trouble. Give him a few bucks. He told me he’s saving for a trip to see his daughter. What the hell?”

“The road to hell is paved by compromise. Some people can’t appreciate principles.” Anyway, I’ve already paid that old ogre thirty bucks and what did it get me? Public electronic abuse.

Rubacek opens the door, ushers me into the hallway. We make our way amid gurneys, trolleys, wheelchairs, creeping patients. I’m leaving the hospital. I don’t want to. How did this happen?

“That Marsha a girlfriend?” asks Rubacek.

“No.”

“She seemed real worried about you. Wanted to know if it was serious.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said no. Said you were in for a rest.”

“What a diplomat.”

“She said something about a wedding.”

“So that’s it.” Trust Hideous Marsha. “That’s what she’s worried about. That I’ll be in Boot Hill before the glorious day dawns.”

“You got her in trouble, Ed?”

“Rest your evil little mind, Stanley.”

We continue down the hallway in silence, turn right, enter the waiting room, where a woman wearing a corsage sits at an
information desk. Descending a ramp we arrive at the hospital entrance. Only now do I realize I haven’t a coat. When McMurtry bundled up my clothes my parka was forgotten and left behind in my apartment.

Stanley suggests I wait by the door. He’ll warm the car up and bring it around to the entrance. I watch him cross the road to the parking lot, straddle-legged on the ice. Where the glass of the door meets the metal frame the pane is scalloped with frost, finely veined like feathers. I watch Stanley start the car in the parking lot. It’ll be some time before it’s warm enough for a man in shirt sleeves.

I turn away from the door just as a middle-aged man and woman come down the ramp. He wears a shabby overcoat and an unfashionable suit. Her brand-new plaid housecoat and fuzzy pink slippers mark her as a patient. Her thin hair lies flattened on her scalp, the skin of her face is ravaged with milky splotches.

When the man catches sight of me he hesitates, as if considering going back, so I turn politely away, only to discover their reflections in the glass of the door. Encouraged by my back, they huddle in a corner by a direct-line phone to a taxicab company. It’s obvious they’ve come here seeking privacy, to talk. The woman must be on a general ward.

I try to look through the glass, past their reflections, to concentrate on the exhaust of Rubacek’s car unravelling in the wind like the strands of a thick, white hawser. But my eyes keep snagging on the figures in the glass.

I see the woman. She is speaking very quickly. The only word that is clear is the man’s name. She says it emphatically and distinctly. “John,” she says. And again, “John,” and once more, “John.”

“The tickets,” I catch him saying. He keeps mentioning tickets.

I reach out and flake a crescent of ice with my thumbnail. I wish they would go away.

I hear him say it again. “Tickets.” Followed by the wet, flabby sounds of spilling sorrow. Crying, he bows slightly and fumbles in his pockets for a handkerchief, a Kleenex, something.

The woman wraps him in the plaid arms of her housecoat.

“Tickets,” he says loudly. “I have the tickets.”

Her face is the colour of cream. Her eyes, wide and dark with knowledge, stare. I thrust the door open. It is a way of making the eyes disappear. Stepping outside is like wading into a cold lake; my skin flinches, my shoulders lift in my thin shirt. There is a taste of chilled metal in my mouth. I run. Halfway to the car I remember my heart.

W
hile I, sweating and shaking, struggle up the narrow goat-track strewn with stones the colour and size of loaves of bread dough, I can hear someone calling my name. It can’t be Victoria because she has gone ahead of me, up there, and this voice is coming from another place, far off.

My face is stiffened by sunburn and dust. Behind me the untroubled sea stretches out to meet a sky that drips down into it like thin blue paint, running and blurring the horizon line. The shrubs and grasses and little gnarled trees on the hillside are dry, scorched, bitterly aromatic; they make the air hot and piquant. It stings my nostrils the way the feverish noise of flying insects stings my ears when they whir and click their wings in the molten light.

I hear my name again and am suddenly awake in my bedroom, awake in weak, northern sunshine.

“Ed, how do you spell ‘perpetrator’?”

Dazed, I roll on my side to consult the alarm clock. After so much sleep my limbs stir heavily between the sheets; there is a locus of lethargy in the small of my back. The clock says a quarter to three. When did I drop off again? An hour ago? Two?

“Hey, are you alive in there?” Rubacek is calling from the
kitchen. Probably still grimly scribbling on those smudged sheets of foolscap spotted with erasure marks that resemble inky fingerprints.

“What do you want?” My mouth is parched and I feel feverish. Dog-like I paw at the stifling bedclothes with one foot, trying to drag them off me.

“How do you spell ‘perpetrator’? Is it e-r or is it o-r?”

“P-E-R-P-E-T-R-A-T-O-R,” I shout.

God, how many hours have I been out? Last night I was in bed by nine, slept until ten this morning, rose, staggered to the bathroom, lurched back in here to collapse, insensible, until twelve, when Stanley served me a baloney and sweet pickle sandwich. It was his way of saying he forgave me for last night’s contretemps. I don’t feel particularly guilty, though. Stanley has a mind akin to certain faces, the kind that seem to invite a slap.

I was asleep again by one o’clock. I’ve logged sixteen or seventeen hours and I feel on the verge of nodding off again. A consequence of the heart?

“You going to get up now, or what?” he calls, voice pitched to carry down the block.

“Not just yet.”

Disapproving silence. “You ought to get up, Ed.”

“Why?”

“It’s a sign of depression, not getting out of bed.”

“Well, so maybe I’m depressed.”

“That’s why you ought to get up.”

I attempt to correct Rubacek’s logic. “It’s not that I’m depressed because I don’t get up, Stanley,” I shout; “I don’t get up
because
I’m depressed. Let’s not confuse cause and effect, okay?”

“That’s for sure, Ed. Now you get up and you’ll feel one hundred per cent better.”