Apologize, Apologize! (24 page)

He calmed down a bit, not much, but by now I was feeling pretty upset. He hit me one more time, open-handed, a slap upside the head, for good measure. Then, his hands shaking, he and Madeleine set up to do the transfusion.

Lightning illuminated the black sky. The night was a cold and shining lake. A flame from a single white candle fluttered, creating the illusion of quietness where there was none.

The French doctor was like an unvisited place, his solitariness so thorough that it was as though I were seeing him from a distance. The dead and dying were all around him, hanging overhead, unsightly as flypaper, part of the architecture of his calling. He finished with me, and then he just got up from where he was sitting, didn’t say a word to me, pushed me aside, bumped me with the edge of his shoulder, and went on to the next kid and then the next one after that. I tried to stand up, but I started to black out. I fell back onto the cot and closed my eyes.

After it was over, Madeleine sank down beside the little boy on the floor to comfort him, easing into all that percolating effluvium as if it were a Hot Springs. Her hands were stained with blood.

The next batch of kids came in and the next after that, and I was nothing more than a turnstile, people pushing past me, going forward and back, in and out, and I wasn’t exactly in the way but just someone from whom nothing much was expected.

The next day, the little boy seemed better, brighter; the general consensus was that he was going to make it. I couldn’t stop staring at him. He used to be dead.

One of the hospital workers, his name was Santo, bravely offered to help me get back to San Salvador, to the airport and home. He asked me if I could walk. I was okay with the help of the cane, which was little more than a T-shaped stick. I felt like hell, but all I could think about was getting back home. We set out while it was still light, hoping to avoid the insurgents and the militia that prowled in the night—the area was crawling with both. We had been traveling for hours when we heard screams and shouting and saw the lick of flames shooting above the tree line.

Glowering billows of smoke obliterated the sky, choking the field, as, curled up and facedown, swallowing petrol fumes, I pressed my hands against my ears.

Rain was falling gently on giant lobelias, making a
pat-pat
sound against the leaves of young trees that were bending back and forth in the humid night breeze. My heart was beating, bumping erratically against my rib cage.

It was the last thing I heard. I turned and tried to speak to Santo, but I couldn’t hear the sound of my own voice. He dragged me around in the dark, his hand wrapped around my wrist, pulling me along, stumbling and fumbling, the night a world without boundaries. With every step, I felt as if I were walking off the edge of the earth.

Santo somehow got word to Sister Mary Ellen. She arranged for me to stay with an American priest, who got in touch with the Falcon, who organized a flight back home.

Santo left me with the priest. I hugged him in gratitude for what he had done for me. He hugged me in return, and then he turned and left. He was going back up north, back to the hospital. I don’t know if he made it or not.

I was in El Salvador for one month. During that time, I saw brave people do things that defied logic and circumstance to save my life, a stranger to them—Beto, who spoke up for me with the militia; the villager who could have kept running but instead pulled me from the pit and took me to the hospital; Santo, who brought me to the priest.

I thought about the French doctor, who could have been home in Paris, drinking champagne.

I told myself I did the right thing when I didn’t jump in after Bing. Sensible people everywhere would say I did the right thing. But that logic didn’t square with what was done for me in El Salvador, where every minute of every day people confronted with the same kind of decision I faced chose to make the leap of faith—Santo had faith he would make it to the airport and back alive.

They all jumped and would jump again and again. I wanted to believe that only an extraordinary person, knowing the dangers, would have jumped in after Bing that day in the cave. But ordinary people did brave things every day in El Salvador in 1983.

I was an ordinary person. Why didn’t I jump in?

I went to El Salvador to excavate a little personal courage.

Courage exists—even if it doesn’t exist in me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T
HE FALCON ARRANGED WITH THE PRIEST TO FLY ME HOME IN
a private plane, accompanied by a Catholic aid worker who was scheduled to come back to the United States around the same time. I don’t remember much about the return journey. I couldn’t hear a thing. I was back at Cassowary for two weeks before I heard another sound.

“They don’t call it hysterical deafness anymore—too stigmatizing, apparently.” The Falcon was sitting beside me, writing on a long yellow pad of paper. “It’s a conversion disorder. The doctors insist it happened as a result of the trauma. I tried to tell them as far as I’m concerned you’ve suffered from a conversion disorder all your life. It won’t affect our relationship at all.”

The aid worker delivered me personally to Cassowary. He brought me home and dumped me onto the living room floor like so much sand from an upturned shoe. For weeks after there was sand everywhere I looked and wherever I turned, and there were grains of sand in my eyes, in my hair, beneath my fingernails. There was sand in my food and in the sheets of my bed. I went to draw my bath and I turned on the tap and sand flowed like water from the faucet.

This wasn’t sand from Squibnocket Beach—this was drought.

Sometimes you don’t need to hear to know what’s being said.

“My best guess is post-traumatic stress,” the aid worker was saying to Ingrid. “I know a bit about what he’s going through. It’s rough. He deserves a lot of credit. You must be proud of him.”

“Yes, we are very proud of him,” Ingrid said. “Why, I couldn’t be more proud of Collie than if he—”

The Falcon, elusive main attraction, appeared without warning, slicing through the nebulae, stepping up and extending his hand in greeting. The aid worker’s face flushed in sporadic crimson patches, physiological acknowledgment of a certain nectarous kind of star power.

“Oh, hello . . . ,” he stammered, so nonplussed that he introduced himself as Peregrine Lowell.

“It’s all right,” the Falcon reassured him, smiling and gracious, visibly pleased at wielding such a disconcerting effect. “I know who I am. Most of the time, anyway . . . and yes, Brian, yes, Ingrid is quite right. Allow me to finish the thought—we couldn’t be more proud of Collie than if you told us he had drug-resistant gonorrhea.”

“I beg your pardon?” The aid worker was confused. “I’m sorry. I must be missing something. Presumably there are things about which I am unaware.” Resorting to tact, he continued:

“Collie has been through a terrible time. It’s perfectly natural to feel and react the way that he has. I don’t think he needs a psychiatrist. He needs some time and the love and support of his family.”

“And that’s what he shall have—in abundance.”

The Falcon was taking over.

“I appreciate your efforts and your input. You’ve provided marvelous assistance when your help was really needed. And I intend to take your recommendations under serious advisement. I’ll think things over, and I’ll make the best decision for Collie.”

“Well, I think that’s wonderful. I’m sure whatever decision you make will be the right one. Collie is very lucky to have such a devoted grandfather. . . .” Brian was nervously applying obsequies like a poultice.

The Falcon laughed as he ushered the aid worker out of the room. “Our dear Ingrid will see you out. Thanks so much for your expertise. We’ll be in touch. . . .”

“Presumptuous son of a bitch,” the Falcon said, watching as my escort disappeared into the hallway with Ingrid at his arm.

I got quite a jolt the first time I looked into a mirror. My skin was the color and texture of ancient newsprint. My eyes were dark and recessed. My hair was dull and wild, so indiscriminately chopped up and sun-bleached—short, long, dark, light, shaved in spots, plucked in others—I looked like a man with a thousand frantic haircuts.

I was always pacing, trying to walk it off, needed a cane to walk, would always need a cane to walk, according to doctors, couldn’t sit still, the pounding of mortars sneaking up behind me, I was scrambling in and out of devastated buildings, and jumping aside for careening pickup trucks.

My sleep disrupted daily by nightmares, I had picked up some nuisance virus of unknown origin—my guts, soggy and bitter, felt as if they were marinating in bleach.

My hearing came back, returning as mysteriously as it had disappeared. Deafness kind of agreed with me—I actually pretended deafness for a couple of weeks after my hearing was restored. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk—I just needed a little more time, needed to get stronger to face the barrage of words I knew was coming my way.

School was out of the question; the second semester was pretty much a write-off. Pop was bugging me to come home for a visit, so he could take care of me, he said. Finally I agreed. I always liked the Vineyard in winter. In the winter, the beach was deserted, made up of crystal and craters, remote as a moonscape.

Pop was so worked up about what happened that he was ready to sue the Catholic Church and the governments of the United States and El Salvador.

Uncle Tom had smaller goals—he was lying in wait for me. We were alone near the pigeon loft. Sneaking up alongside me, he blew a whistle next to my ear to confirm his theory that I was a fraud.

“Jesus, Uncle Tom . . .” I covered my ear against the blast.

“I knew it, you conniving bastard. I never took you for a professional victim, but here you are playing us like a saxophone.”

“It’s not like that, Uncle Tom.” I felt my shoulders sag and decline into an inverted Y shape.

“No, well, so you say. Look here, Noodle, it takes a certain type to do what you set out to do, and that’s not you. God knows you tried, and that means something. But it’s no good. . . . Time for some plain talk—you’re too soft. I knew you weren’t up to much right from the start. When you were six you were crying in the garden, begging me not to kill the potato bugs. No one cares about potato bugs. No one, that is, except you. Do you understand?”

The whole time Uncle Tom was speaking, I was sitting on the edge of an empty limestone urn, freezing, wind whistling through my torn jeans, my head down and fiddling with a ballpoint pen, twisting off the plastic cap, clicking it back on again.

“Here, here, stop that distraction,” Uncle Tom ordered. “You’re acting like a child. Now, are you listening to me? Have you heard a word I’ve said?”

“I hear you.”

“But are you taking it in? Are you paying attention?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, have you learned anything?”

“Maybe I’m trying to make the world a safer place for potato bugs.”

“That’s enough smart talk. Being a wise aleck is what got you into this mess in the first place. You come inside before you expire out here in the cold. And quit thinking so much about yourself and how you’re feeling.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, watching as he headed into the house, my finger running along the rough topography of the urn.

I kept thinking about the little boy in El Salvador, the one the French doctor brought back to life. I couldn’t get him out of my head. I thought about the French doctor, too. I wanted to learn his language, wanted to absorb its magic.

It should have been a grown-up decision, my way of being useful—my first meaningful formal step on the road to manhood—but it was freighted with delusion and wishful thinking.

Does anyone ever actually make a sensible decision? Do the stories we present to the world ever correspond to the stories we tell ourselves?

How could I tell Pop or Uncle Tom or anyone else, for that matter, what I was up to? The truth was, I was trying to make some Fantastic Flanagan magic.

How could I admit even to myself that by deciding to become a doctor, I was trying to pull the ultimate rabbit from a hat and return my brother from the dead?

CHAPTER THIRTY

I
WASN’T BRAVE, BUT I WAS SMART—IF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT
is any indicator, which Pop and Uncle Tom repeatedly told me it wasn’t. Fortunately, courage wasn’t a prerequisite for medical school. For inspiration, I kept the image of the French doctor active in my mind through all my years of study.

It was spring 1991, and I was in the final year of my fellowship. Pediatric oncology was my specialty; it was the one that least appealed to Collie the boy—he lusted after gynecology—but it would be a feather in the cap of my glowing, fine young manhood.

I was doing okay. I decided to study medicine at Harvard, despite Uncle Tom’s everlasting disdain. All my life I’d been made daily aware of my privilege by others—
You’ve been given the whole world, Collie,
being everyone’s favorite refrain. By everyone, I mean everyone except Pop and Uncle Tom, who never could be bothered with received wisdom, and the Falcon, who considered the world to be his and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

But as far as the rest, it seemed all anyone ever really wanted from me was the appearance of gratitude and seriousness, and a simple set of scrubs took care of all that—the world was happier with me than before. The limp didn’t hurt; the ubiquitous presence of an old cane cemented my image as penitent. And although he was not entirely reconciled to my becoming a doctor—I might as well have declared my intention to become a bedbug—the Falcon wasn’t oblivious to my rising-star status at Harvard.

Boston
magazine named me the city’s most eligible bachelor; actually, they said I was one of the best catches in the world, which is quite a declaration when you think about it. An anonymous source supplied them with a shot of me at some hospital party, my hair so black and curly that it looked as if I were wearing a French poodle. I found myself holding up the page, looking at it upside down and sideways and seeing something different every time—I was becoming my own Rorschach test.

“Can you see the monkey?” I asked my grandfather, playfully extending the photo across the table for him to view.

“Every time you open your mouth,” he said, barely looking up.

Bam!
Talking with the Falcon was still a labyrinth of shut doors. I made a point of seeing him a couple of times a month. He was in his eighties but seemed ageless, was still working with no intention of stopping. But for my visits and the odd dinner party, he ate his meals alone at the dining room table, except for Cromwell, who sat at his elbow, awaiting dessert.

“Aren’t you cute and proud?” the old man flattered away, commandeering me in the hospital corridor during morning rounds.

“Yeah, yeah . . . what do you want, Pop?”

“If it isn’t Dr. Collie Flanagan, the flower of them all. . . .”

Impatiently—I had stuff waiting, important stuff—I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet, and handed over the contents, peeling off bills like so much scorn. I felt a dull thump delivered to the back of my head.

“Keep your dirty Lowell lucre,” Pop said, stinking of whiskey.

“Jesus, Pop.” I felt an anti-WASP diatribe swarming like so many angry bees.

“You think it’s money I’m after, at the expense of being treated like shite beneath your feet? You bloody Baptist, you damned Methodist circuit rider, you Presbyterian bastard . . .”

I gave him all the cash I had, I gave him my credit cards in a vain attempt to stop him before he uttered the final familiar insult—

“Dirty-legged Protestant prince . . .”

I was sagging even as the stinging swarm was receding; Pop was beginning to glory in his swag.

“May I keep bus fare?” I asked. “My car’s in the shop.”

“Jesus, take a cab, for Christ’s sake,” he said with some tenderness, returning a twenty. Immediately, he thought better of things, took back the twenty, and gave me a ten-dollar bill.

I watched him weave down the hall, shouting out happy greetings to all the good-looking nurses—homely women continued to dismay him; he viewed them as a personal affront.

Sometimes it’s a blessing to be blind, he’d say. “Did you see the sourpuss on that one? Why God in His infinite wisdom created the female gargoyle is a matter between Him and Satan. I’m persuaded they struck a deal about time served here on earth, and ugly women are a big part of the penance.”

He disappeared to the sound of feminine laughter, through the exit and down the stairwell, and I prepared to walk into the room of a nine-year-old girl in the last stages of dying, and it was a curious form of relief.

So, you can imagine the situation for yourself: twenty-eight years old, unexpectedly groomed to glistening by medicine, the Man Plan visibly progressing, here and there a rough patch, but it was mostly still water. I had made the calm choice, though I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was okay, maybe not fully alive but not dead, either, no ocean to drown me, no wave to tip my boat.

I had this growing thought that catastrophe strikes but once and then you’re off the hook for life. The monstrous event and its sticky aftermath were behind me. I had every intention of letting convention take hold, tightening its pleasant grip around my neck until I no longer felt the need to breathe, until I became implacably mild.

Dr. Collie Flanagan, my decency a belt to hold my pants in place, incandescently ordinary but for all that money, a glimmer of bland pride, shining and uneventful as a weedless lawn.