Rabbit at rest (24 page)

His collapse twenty-six hours ago did have its blissful
aspect: his sense, beginning as he lay helpless and jellyfishlike
under a sky of red, of being in the hands of others, of being the
blind, pained, focal point of a world of concern and expertise, at
some depth was a coming back home, after a life of
ill-advised journeying. Sinking, he perceived the world
around him as gaseous and rising, the grave and affectionate faces
of paramedics and doctors and nurses released by his emergency like
a cloud of holiday balloons. His many burdens have been lifted away
in this light-drenched hospital, this businesslike emporium
where miracles are common if not cheap. They have relieved him of
his catheter, and his only problem is a recurrent need to urinate
- all this fluid they keep dripping into him - sideways
into a bed pan, without pulling loose the IV tube and the wires to
the heart monitor and the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.

Another small problem is fog: a football game he has been
looking forward to seeing, the NFC playoff game between the Eagles
and the Bears at Soldier Field in Chicago, is on the television set
that comes out on a tan enamelled metal arm not two feet from his
face, but the game, which began at twelve-thirty, as it goes
on has become dimmer and dimmer, swallowed by an unprecedented fog
blowing in off Lake Michigan. Television coverage has been reduced
to the sideline cameras; people up in the stands and the announcers
in their booth can see even less than Rabbit lying doped-up
here in bed. "Heck of a catch by somebody," said one color
commentator, Terry Bradshaw as a matter of fact, Bradshaw who in
the Super Bowl at the beginning of the decade was bailed out by a
circus catch by that lucky stiff Stallworth. The crowd, up high in
the fog, rumbles and groans in poor sync with the television
action, trying to read the game off the electronic scoreboard. The
announcers - a black guy with froggy pop eyes, maybe that
same guy who married Bill Cosby's television wife, and a white guy
with a lumpy face - seem indignant that God could do this,
mess with CBS and blot out a TV show the sponsors are paying a
million dollars a minute for and millions are watching. They keep
wondering aloud why the officials don't call off the game. Harry
finds the fog merciful, since before it rolled in the Eagles looked
poor, two perfectly thrown TD passes by Cunningham called back
because of bonehead penalty plays by Anthony Toney, and then this
rookie Jackson dropping a pass when he was a mile open in the end
zone. The game flickering in the fog, the padded men hulking out of
nothingness and then fading back again, has a peculiar beauty
bearing upon Rabbit's new position at the still center of a new
world, personally. The announcers keep saying they've never seen
anything like it.

He has trouble at first realizing he must perform for his
visitors, that it's not enough to lie here and accept the
apparition of them like another channel of television. During the
commercial, the one for Miller that shows the big black guy lifting
the pool table so all the balls roll into the pocket supposedly, he
lowers his eyes to Judy's eager face, bright and precise as
watchworks free of dust and rust, and says to her, "We learned,
didn't we, Judy? We learned how to come about."

"It's like a scissors," the girl says, showing with her hands.
"You push toward the sail."

"Right," he says. Or is it away from? His thinking is foggy. His
voice, nasal and husky, doesn't sound like his; his throat feels
raw from something they did to him when he was brought into the
hospital, something with oxygen, he was half out of it and then all
the way out thanks to something they slipped into him in the
confusion.

"Harry, what do the doctors say about you?" Janice asks. "What's
going to happen?" She sits in a chair near his bed, a new kind of
vinyl-cushioned wheelchair, like a revved-up version of
Fred Springer's pet Barcalounger. She has that anxious skinned look
to her forehead and her mouth is a dumb slot open a dark
half-inch. She looks in that two-tone running suit and
those bulky Adidas like a senior-league bowling champion, her
face hard from too much sun, with two little knobs like welts
developing over her cheekbones. The delicate skin beneath her
eyebrows is getting puckery. With age we grow more ins and
outs.

He tells her, "One doc told me I have an athlete's heart. Too
big. Too big on the outside, that is, and too small on the inside.
The muscle is too thick. Apparently the heart isn't a nice
valentine like you'd think, it's a muscle. It pumps with a kind of
twisting motion, like this." He shows his little audience with a
twitching fist: beat, pause, beat, pause. Judy's face is transfixed
by the screen of the heart monitor, which he can't see; but he
supposes the effort of his small demonstration is showing up in his
running cardiogram. Janice watches it too, their four eyes
shiningly reflecting the electronic jiggle and their two mouths
both open to make identical slots of darkness. He has never before
seen any sign of heredity between them. He goes on, "They want to
put some dye into my heart, by putting a long tube into some artery
down at the top of my leg, so they can see exactly what's going on,
but offhand they think at least one of the coronary arteries is
plugged. Too many pork chops on top of all that hustle on the court
when I was a kid. No problem, though. They can bypass anything,
they do it every day now, as simple as plumbing with plastic pipe.
They tell me it's amazing, what they've learned to do in the last
ten years."

"You're going to have open-heart surgery?" Janice asks in
alarm.

The fist that impersonated a heart feels cloudy and heavy; he
lowers it carefully to his side on the sheet, and momentarily
closes his eyes, to spare himself the sight of his worried wife.
"Nothing for now. Maybe eventually. It's an option. Another option
is, this catheter has a balloon in it somehow that they inflate
when it's inside the plugged-up artery. It cracks the plaque.
That's what they call it, plaque. I thought a plaque was what you
got for winning the championship." Rabbit has to keep suppressing
the impulse to laugh, at his inability to share with Janice the
druginduced peace inside his rib cage, the sense of being at last
at the still center. Painkiller, blood-thinner,
tranquillizer, vasodilator, and diuretic all drip into his system
from above, painting the hospital world with rosy tints of
benevolence and amusement. He loves the constant action, the visits
to extract blood and measure blood pressure and check instruments
and drips, and the parade of firm-bodied odorless young
females in starchy cotton and colors of skin from every continent
who tend to his helpless flesh with a sexy mix of reverence and
brutal condescension, with that
trained
look on their
pretty faces like actresses or geisha girls. His little
white-walled room seems in his entrancement to be a stage
set, crowded with unpredictable exits and entrances.
Semi-private, it even has a curtain, which conceals his
roommate, who was burbling and vomiting and groaning this morning
but has fallen since into a silence that might be death. But for
Harry, the play goes on, and on cue another actor enters. "Here's a
doc now," he announces to Janice. "You ask him whatever you want.
I'll watch the game and Judy'll watch my heart monitor. Tell me if
it stops, Judy."

"Grandpa, don't joke," the dear child scolds.

The cardiologist is a big red-skinned immigrant Australian
named Dr. Olman. He has a pink hooked nose, brilliant white teeth,
and bleached lank hair. Years of the good life in Florida have
overlaid his clipped native accent with a Southern drawl. He takes
Janice's little narrow brown hand into his meaty red one and they
become, in Rabbit's eyes, his cardiac parents - worried
little nutbrown mother and outwardly calm and factual father. "He's
been a pretty sick lad," Dr. Olman tells her, "and we've got to
teach him how to take better care of himself."

"What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.

"The usual thing, ma'am. It's tired and stiff and full of crud.
It's a typical American heart, for his age and economic status et
cetera."

That strangely intense and slightly embarrassing
Gallo-wine commercial, about the guy who has a blind date
with a girl who turns out to be the very liquor saleswoman who
advised him what bottle to take the date as a present, comes
on.

"As best we can tell without cardiac catheterization," Dr. Olman
is saying, "the principal narrowing is the standard one, the left
anterior descending, the workhorse of the system. Luckily, he
appears to have fairly well-developed collaterals, which have
kept him going. You see, ma'am, whenever the heart's been starving
for oxygen, it tries to develop alternative routes to get blood to
the muscle. Also, from the murmur we think we hear there may be a
fair bit of stenosis around the aortic valve. Not a pretty picture,
but by no means the worst we've ever seen."

Janice looks at her husband almost with pride. "Oh, Harry! You
would mention the little aches and breathing problems, and I never
took you seriously. You didn't complain hard enough."

"It was perfect," the girl in the commercial sighingly says, at
the end of their date, starry-eyed and in soft focus; you can
see they will fuck, if not this date the next, and marry and live
happily ever after, all by the grace of Gallo.

Dr. Olman has sized Janice up as educable and moves into a
heavier sell. "Now, if his luck holds and the lesion isn't located
at a bifurcation and there's not too much calcification a lot of
doctors would advise you to begin modestly, with an angioplasty,
and wait and see. To my own way of thinking, though, you have to
offset the relative lack of trauma and expense - we can't
forget expense, now can we, what with Medicare's pulling in its
horns and this new chappie's promising no new taxes? - we
have to offset those psychological pluses against the minus kicker,
the likelihood of recurrent stenosis and having to do it all over
again, the odds of which, to be honest about it, are on the shady
side of fifty per cent. For my money, not to keep beating about the
bush, the artery bypass is the sucker that does the job. What do
you say in the States, never send a boy when you can send a man?
Now, ma'am, how much do you want to know about the heart?"

"Everything," Janice says, adoring of this man willing to
explain things to her, her tongue peeking through as she prepares
to concentrate.

"Way to go," Dr. Olman gamely says, and makes a big fist with
one hand and with the fingers ofthe other begins to show her how
the coronary arteries he on the heart's surface, their branches
burrowing into the hardworking muscle. Harry has seen this
demonstration earlier in the day and signals Judy to come closer to
his bed. She is wearing the pink party dress she came down on the
airplane in, and the stiff white ribbon around her braided pigtail.
Yesterday's experience at sea has given her a sunburn on her
nostril wings and beneath her clear green eyes, where her freckles
are thinnest. She keeps staring at his heart monitor.

"What do you see?" he asks her huskily.

"It's like a little twitchy worm, that just goes and goes."

"That's life," he tells her. "That's your granddad."

Judy yields to an impulse: leaning against the bed, she tries to
embrace the old man, disarraying and tugging at the tubes and wires
attached to his upper body. "Oh Grandpa," she confesses, "it's all
my fault!"

Her breath feels hot on his neck. He hugs her, as best he can,
with the arm not pierced by the IV. "Don't be silly. What's your
fault?"

"Yesterday. I scared you out there."

"You didn't scare me, sweetie. The Gulf of Mexico scared me. You
weren't scared?"

Tearily she shakes her head No.

This seems another wonder to him. "Why not?" he asks.

Her smooth little face gets that tiptoe look which in a mature
woman signals that she is about to lie. She says, a bit mincingly,
"Yon were out there with me, Grandpa. And there were lots of other
boats around."

He renews his trammelled hug and her slender little body is
unresisting, something has gone out of it; he feels a roughness in
his throat, perhaps from yesterday's gulps of saltwater. His eyes
film over with the hot relief of tears. On television, men with
wide shoulders and narrow hips move like gods on Olympus among the
clouds. You can't even see any more who is white and who is black.
Blinded though they are, the announcers keep yelling in those
straining excited voices they have. A commercial shows a Subaru
bumpily climbing a mountain of dead car chassis.

"Want to change the channel?" he asks Judy, and moves her hand
from his bandaged wrist, where it is hurting him, to the hand
control for the television set on its beige metal arm. He lies back
feeling the white walls stretch all around him just like the ocean
yesterday, his bed a raft. Judy flickers the TV through a wrestling
match, a parade, a scare commercial with Karl Malden barking that
with American Express Traveller's Checks you can't be robbed, a man
and a woman in black skating in a sparkle of ice, a
tonguein-cheek horror movie about being a teenage werewolf in
London, and another movie called, they learn from the station
break,
The Fists of Bruce Lee.
The kung-fu violence
is arresting enough to hold Judy's attention for a few minutes.
Fragments of what Dr. Ohnan is confidentially yet, in that peppy
Australian way, quite audibly telling Janice weave into the action
- murderous kicks turned into slow motion by the director,
graceful blurs of Oriental color. ". .. preliminary test . ..
pulmonary congestion common after a myocardial infarction . . .
backup of blood, leakage into the lung tissue ... hydralazine ...
inflammation of the pericardium . . . Dilantin . . . skin rashes,
diarrhea, loss of hair . . . hate to go to a pacemaker for a man
this age . . ."