Babylon and Other Stories (4 page)

Most days he stayed downstairs until five, at which time he and Walter ate dinner while watching
Jeopardy.
Between the two of them they always did better than the contestants. If they could go on as one person, Walter sometimes said, pretending they were Siamese twins or with one of them hidden behind the other, well, they'd clean up. Walter was a game-show fanatic. The first summer Carl had come to live with Walter, when he was eleven, there was a guy on
Tic Tac Dough
who had a summer-long winning streak, and at the time, through childish superstition, he felt that as long as that guy could keep winning, as long as Walter cheered him on, then everything would be OK. He and Walter watched every day, and the tension was almost unbearable. This was years ago, of course, after Carl's mother died of what Walter liked to call “the rock-and-roll lifestyle.” In the stairwell there was a picture of her, Jane, from high school, smiling broadly, even crazily, as if she were drugged—a glimpse of the future, maybe. And there was a picture of Marie, as well, even though she and Walter had only been married five years before she left him for an army man and went to live on a base in Germany. She was still there, and every year she sent Walter a Christmas card. On the inside she crossed out the German words and wrote “Merry Christmas!” instead.

At the end of the hour he went back upstairs. The television was on, sound turned up loud, and both Marguerite and Walter were dozing, their cards still spread on the table. Marguerite had gin. Carl stood behind the couch and coughed softly. Marguerite made a kind of low moan and her face sagged terribly in the second before she pulled herself into her usual cheery expression.

She glanced at Walter and then at Carl. “I guess I'd better be off,” she said.

“I'll call your cab.”

“Thank you, dear. You're a …” She looked down and turned the loose gold rings on her fingers, then said, as if to the jewelry, “What's the word I want?”

“Blessing?” Carl said, since this was what she usually called him.

Marguerite beamed. “Just so,” she said.

After he'd called, he took her elbow and they began the slow, careful walk out of the house and down the driveway. She leaned against him and clutched herself closely around the waist. They stood at the end of the driveway, waiting. Marguerite swayed a bit in the wind. “You know, dear,” she said, “he doesn't look too good.”

“Walter?”

“Dear,” she said, “of course Walter.”

“Well, he's sick,” Carl said.

“Has he been making his weekly visits?”

Carl began to tap his foot. “You know I take him, Marguerite.”

“I know you do, dear.” She looked at him, then took a tissue from her white handbag and dabbed a bit at her nose. “It's just … well.” She sighed. “At the home we get excellent round-the-clock care.”

“Walter hates the home,” Carl said flatly. Marguerite took a
deep breath, drew herself up to her full height, which wasn't very high, and said, “It isn't anybody's first choice, dear.” The taxi appeared around the corner and crept toward them.

“He's fine,” Carl said.

When the taxi pulled up, he lowered Marguerite's fragile bones onto the ripped upholstery of the backseat. As the car pulled away he felt a flash of guilt and called, ridiculously, “Thanks for coming!” He could see the white blur of her tissue in the window as she waved good-bye.

Walter was awake and watching
Matlock,
drinking a cup of coffee that by now must have been quite cold.

“Faking, Uncle Walter?”

“If I pretend to fall asleep, she falls asleep too,” Walter said, and slurped.

“That's not very polite,” Carl said.

“Well, Jesus. You know I think the world of Marguerite. But if I have to hear one more word about her grandchildren in Boca Raton, I'll fall asleep and never wake up.”

“She thinks you should go back into the convalescent home.”

“Convalescent home, my ass,” Walter said. His eyelids were heavy and he held his coffee cup loosely on the arm of his chair. “You keep convalescing and then you're dead. What day is it, son?”

“Thursday.”

“Thursday's bingo night in the home. I won once. Jar of cold cream.”

“They gave you a jar of cold cream?”

“That was the prize.” Walter put the coffee cup down on the
table, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “I gave it to Marguerite. That's how the two of us got started.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Walter said. “Don't worry. I'm fine.”

That night Walter fell out of bed. What woke Carl up from a restless, dream-drenched sleep (since he never knew the people whose illnesses or accidents were described in the reports, and never saw the doctors who dictated them, his periodic nightmares were filled with faceless strangers undergoing unidentifiable medical procedures while Carl watched, helplessly) must have been the thud of Walter's body hitting the floor. He sat up in bed, not knowing why he was awake, and heard a ragged, whispery gasp from the other side of the hall. When he got to the bedroom, Walter was looking up expectantly from the floor.

“I fell out of bed!” he whispered.

“I can see that,” Carl said.

“I feel okay, though.”

“We should probably go to the hospital.”

“I said I feel all right.”

“I heard what you said,” Carl said. He knelt down and slipped one arm under Walter's back and pulled him to a sitting position. His uncle's back felt meaty and solid through his T-shirt. But he was unsteady on his feet, and in the car he closed his eyes and didn't seem to feel well enough to talk.

At the emergency room they put him under observation, since they couldn't decide exactly what had happened to him. At the foot of the bed, Carl stood facing the digital flickering of the medical instruments. He felt calm. It wasn't the first time they'd
been to the ER and in all likelihood wouldn't be the last. He examined the screen and thought of all the tests he'd seen, the signals from inside Walter's body: the CT scans, X rays, EKG. How many people ever saw that deep inside anybody else? He was proud of it somehow.

“Sometimes people just fall out of bed,” the intern told him.

“Is that your actual diagnosis?” Carl said. “I want to see the chart.”

“I can't give you the chart.”

“I want to see the chart,” he said, and grabbed it from the intern's hand.

Walter grinned at the intern from his bed. “He knows everything.”

“You need to rest,” the intern said.

Carl took the chart out to the hall and sat down with it. The jangling noise of the hospital, even at three o'clock in the morning, and the spasmodic blinking of the fluorescent lights and the bad-smelling, recirculated air were making him claustrophobic and irritable. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the chart, the scrawlings of medications and symptoms. Everything about his uncle was here, Walter on paper, his body reconstituted as a record of its processes and ills. This, he thought, is a body of information, and there arose before him a brief image of Walter's naked body, made not of flesh and blood but of a shell of data like tattoos in the air. In this image the body was as fine and translucent as a moth, numbers running down the arms and separating into five fingers, diagrams banded across the chest: statistical, eternal.

“Mr. Mehussen?”

Carl looked up at a woman extending her hand.

“I'm Dr. Newman,” she said. “I'd like to talk to you about your uncle. And I'd like to have his chart back, please.”

Dr. Newman had straight, thin, slightly greasy blond hair that swung as she talked. Under her white coat she wore khakis and sensible brown shoes. She was in the middle of saying that falling out of bed, while a traumatic event, might not have meaningful consequences for Walter's condition when he realized who she was. He glanced at her sharply.

“Do you have a question?”

“I just—you're Dr. Newman.”

She ran a hand wearily through her hair and nodded.

“Dr. Amanda Newman.”

“Yes, that's me.”

“I do your tapes,” he said.

“My tapes?”

“Transcription,” he said. He watched her nod again, and smile politely, and then recalibrate her manner to the one she used while dealing with people employed, however tangentially, in the medical profession. She took a deep breath, moved her shoulder closer to his, and became at once friendlier and more professional.

“You have excellent diction,” he told her.

She raised her eyebrows. “Thanks,” she said.

Walter spent the night under observation. Carl spent the night in the hallway, drinking bad coffee from a paper cup. They were running some tests and awaiting results. Dr. Newman was still on duty, and at times he could hear her cool, clear voice giving orders and asking questions, and the sound of it was oddly soothing to him, reminding him of his office and his work. He closed his eyes to focus on it. Other people waited near him, flipping through magazines or whispering softly together. They were all quiet, dazed-seeming. A woman came through and began
searching around all the seats, saying, “My bag. I know I left it around here somewhere.” Then a man came and put his arms around her and led her away, glancing back guiltily over her shoulder as if the bag were a shameful or deeply personal subject, not to be discussed. He heard one of the nurses say, “Dr. Newman!” and Dr. Newman say, “In a minute!”

Walter was asleep, wheezing rhythmically. The other patient in the room was groaning in pain, a sound as distant and constant as traffic. It didn't seem to be keeping Walter up. Carl wasn't sleepy, but he slipped into a kind of a trance in the hallway, slouched in his seat. He didn't know what to do except sit and not sleep, sit and be vigilant. Whatever happened, he would be awake and present for it. He thought about when his mother died, and someone—a teacher—came and said to him, “Your mother is dead,” and it seemed like because it had happened off stage, out of his sight, that it could not be real or true. He tried to feel sad but couldn't. He kept trying to grasp the fact of it, and would sometimes repeat to himself, “My mother is dead,” and though the words would make him cry, he still didn't really feel it. The fact was too big. It defeated him. The days around the funeral passed in a blur of dark mystery, adults wearing black, speaking in whispers, the sense of being pressed in by crowds, the smell of unfamiliar food. Instead of grief he developed a sense of irritation and injustice, of being unfairly put upon. More than anything he wanted to find someone to complain to, maybe a teacher or someone else at school. He wanted to say that if only he'd been given more information, more evidence, more time, then he would have been better prepared.

Early in the morning the shifts changed and new nurses came on, pouring themselves cups of coffee and bustling around the station. He was looking down at the floor when he saw Dr. New-man's brown shoes.

She sat down beside him. “You should have gone home and slept,” she said.

“Why?” he said.

She laughed shortly, on the exhale. “Because you look tired.”

“So do you,” he said, and she did. The skin under her eyes had turned bluish and looked wrinkled and taut. She had pulled her hair back in an elastic band, but a few strands had escaped it here and there. He noticed that she was carrying a chart, and knew it must be Walter's.

She cocked her head in the direction of his room. “Let's go talk to your uncle.” She took a step, but when he didn't follow she paused and looked at him, waiting.

“Please,” he said. Meaning, Please be a good doctor; meaning, Help him. Dr. Amanda Newman stepped back and put her hand briefly on his arm, and the touch of it was shocking to him— though not as shocking as when, in the days to come, she began to say his name at the beginning of her tapes: “Hello, Carl. This is a preliminary report on …” and he would listen, fascinated, to this part, the intimacy of these four letters spoken by her clear voice,
his name,
for minutes at a time, before he could move on.

“Let's go,” she said.

He followed her to Walter's room and they went inside, and Walter looked first to her and then to Carl, who saw his uncle's worried eyes go tranquil because he was there.

“Hi, Walter,” he said.

“ 'Lo,” Walter said, and coughed with the effort. He lay stolid and unmoving, his arms exposed above the sheet. The skin there
was blotched and veiny. The other patient thrashed uncomfortably in his bed while his visitor, a younger woman, tried in vain to quiet him. Dr. Newman began to explain that Walter could go home, that there would be observation and additional medication.

As she spoke, Carl saw the cool black letters of her report unfurling in his mind.

He stood still with the revealed truth of it—that in the end, the real end, Walter was not going to be fine—and a pain bloomed hotly in his chest, as if his body were offering Walter's sympathy of its own kind. The tape in his head clicked and rewound, whirred all the way back to childhood. What he heard then was Walter's voice, smoke-tinged and hearty; what he smelled was Aqua Velva and tobacco and sweat. They were standing in the doorway of the living room, looking in at it, Walter behind him. He felt Walter's big hands pressing a bit too hard on his shoulders, the weight of them forcing him to slouch, and he was eleven and his heart flew up when Walter said, “From now on, son, this will be your home.”