Spooner (43 page)

It was always half an hour before someone answered, or an hour, and then one of them would come in, taking her time, and would
remind Mr. Graves as she administered the injection that she had other patients to take care of and that he should learn to
wait his turn. Then the nurse would leave and a few minutes later Mr. Graves would sag into the straps holding him up, and
then for a while he was content enough to hang from the ceiling and talk about women drivers and common sense, and a couple
of hours would pass—pleasantly, considering the man was hanging from the ceiling—and then he would sense the drug beginning
to leave his system and he would start watching the clock.

Spooner was much in sympathy with Mr. Graves, and grateful that his own injuries didn’t require being hung from the ceiling.
On the other hand, he—Spooner—was not allowed to have morphine or anything else for the pain, and every move he made was instinctively
countered by an opposite and corresponding part of his body, which set off the same pain again, but headed in the other direction.
He had a broken femur of his own, and a broken rib and torn connective tissue in his rib cage and nerve damage in both hands.
His cheek was also broken, and his eardrum, and one of his eyebrows apparently had been sanded off against the sidewalk. His
back was fractured, although nobody had noticed it yet. The thing that bothered Spooner most those first days, though, was
not a specific injury, or being unable to move, but a feeling of riding a cold, violent wash down into the vortex of an eddy.
He was being flushed. The floor of the world dropped away and everything moved clockwise and down, and he panicked again and
again and grabbed for the sides, but there was nothing to hold on to because it was all going down with him.

Without moving his head, he asked Mr. Graves if he also had feelings of being flushed.

Mr. Graves said, “None I noticed; they just got me spunned up here like a spiderweb is all I know.” He thought a little while
and said, “That woman come after me out of nowhere. They wasn’t no common sense in it, she just do.”

They brought breakfast at dawn and gave Mr. Graves another shot of morphine and fed him quivering eggs. Spooner stared at
his own pile of eggs and felt it staring back.

A technician arrived and took blood from them both, and a little later a nurse came in and changed the dressing that covered
Spooner’s skull, and cleaned dried blood out of his hair and his remaining eyebrow and his mustache. The strokes she used
were short and punishing, as if she were angry. He asked the nurse if head injuries commonly made accident patients feel as
if they were being flushed down a toilet. He had begun to suspect a connection between the tunnel that near-death-experience
experiencers often reported and the eddy at the bottom of the whirlpool, beginning to see the pure, bitter genius behind everything
if the act of dying turned out to be flushing the toilet.

The first call came in about seven-thirty from the Associated Press. Spooner hung up.

He wasn’t angry—how many times had he made the same kind of call when he’d worked for the city desk? Or knocked on somebody’s
door? Granted, he’d usually gone to a movie instead, but there had been times back when he was a reporter when he’d done what
a city editor told him to do. And now, a few years later, and the tables turned, Spooner the newspaperman was refusing to
talk to the press. It struck him somehow as a pure distillation of the human condition.

But then, what didn’t?

The next call was the woman from the bookstore, asking if there was anything she could do.

Spooner knew the woman by now though and knew she was not calling to offer help. “Not a thing,” he said.

“I’d come over in person, but I was thinking it might be better if I didn’t have any public connection to this. You know,
with the store and all…”

Spooner didn’t answer.

“I mean, it might be best for everyone if I weren’t there at all last night, if you follow my meaning.”

“Of course,” he said.

And now she thought of it, it might be best for everyone if Stanley’s attorney wasn’t there either.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Spooner said. “It might be best for everyone if none of us were there.” And in the quiet that
followed, the floor spun and dropped out of the world.

It was a day for visitors. Just before lunch Stanley came in with his arm in a cast, and was hugely amused at the gauze cap
covering the top of Spooner’s head. His left arm was broken below the elbow, and even though the ulna was the smaller of the
two bones connecting his hand to his elbow, it was the slower and more difficult bone to heal. It was strange talking about
bones with Stanley Faint, strange to think of his having bones with the same names as everybody else’s.

Stanley had dropped Spooner off last night and then, possibly in some bit of instinctive misdirection, gone to a different
emergency room to have his own arm set. Spooner often wondered at the variant things they saw, looking at the same world,
and wondered how it might have looked to Stanley last night when the bar filled up with bats and tire irons and sociopaths.
What was it he’d said?
I hope that’s the softball team
? Or had Spooner said that himself? Had he—Stanley—even been afraid?

“This is Mr. Graves,” Spooner said, indicating Sylvester, suspended as always from the ceiling.

“What’s happening?” Stanley said.

“Oh, everything lovely here,” Mr. Graves said.

“In a way he was in a car accident,” Spooner said.

“You that fighter, aren’t you?” Mr. Graves said. “What you gone done to your arm?”

Stanley shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said.

“You two boys concoct this all up?” Mr. Graves said.

“That’s the sorry truth,” Stanley said.

A little later Stanley signed an autograph for Mr. Graves and posed with him for a picture when his wife came in with her
Instamatic camera. Mr. Graves told Stanley the story of how he had been crushed, and while Stanley’s braying was rattling
the china everywhere in the hospital, Spooner considered the cast covering his left forearm. In Spooner’s view Stanley’s one
great asset in the ring was that quality which in the boxing world was called the intangibles. The problem was that at Stanley’s
present level of competition his opponents had all the
tangibles
—i.e., speed, reflexes, power, most of all power—in the world and these had to be worn out and used up before Stanley could
narrow the matter to a contest of hearts. Which is to say he got hit too much—you didn’t have to know anything about boxing
to see that—but until now at least nobody had ever walked through his left hand to do it. What would happen now if he couldn’t
jab?

Spooner gagged and leaned over the lunch tray sitting beside his bed. Nothing came up, but the gauze cap fell off his head,
and Stanley borrowed Mrs. Graves’s camera to get the picture.

Stanley was still there when Mrs. Spooner arrived. Mrs. Graves had left—it was time to change some of Mr. Graves’s dressings,
and she could not stand to watch or hear him moan when they moved him around. For all his good qualities, Mr. Graves did not
suffer quietly.

Stanley got up from his chair, making elaborate room for Spooner’s wife to attend his bedside. She did not speak to Stanley,
did not so much as acknowledge that he was there. Instead, she delivered the news that Calmer was due in later that afternoon,
and then sat down quietly and stared across the way at Spooner’s roommate, suspended from the ceiling.

“He gagged a little bit ago,” Stanley said, “but don’t worry, I got pictures.” He laughed again, filling the room and the
hall outside with the great sound, but the room had changed moods. Mr. Graves had gotten his shot of morphine and was beginning
to drift, and Spooner’s pulse and his various miseries had slowed to one and the same thing. And Mrs. Spooner sat in a knot,
faintly vibrating—nothing audible, like a snake, just a faint, steady vibration—and, like some post office clerk who notices
the package is ticking, finally Stanley felt it too and moved carefully away, trying not to even stir the air, and vacated
the premises. He’d looked vaguely hurt that Mrs. Spooner hadn’t said hello, but then he was not used to being unloved.

It was a strange thing to watch. The man had recently boxed Early Shavers—his given name—who was the most powerful and feared
heavyweight of his era, absorbing a quantity of blows that would have knocked out all the other heavyweights who ever lived,
and in the end had exhausted him, worn him out, then knocked him out, and Mrs. Spooner had just run him out of the room.

Spooner touched her hand. She did not pull away but continued to vibrate, and did not touch him back. A candy striper came
through the door carrying two bouquets of flowers. All day long, candy stripers would be delivering flowers to Spooner’s room.
When she had gone, Spooner touched his wife again.

“He stayed there with me when he could have run off,” he said, meaning Stanley. “It’s why I’m here.”

“That is exactly why you’re here,” she said, which should not be taken to mean that she agreed with what he’d just said. Still,
she knew as well as Spooner that he hadn’t been led anywhere by Stanley Faint; that wasn’t how it worked between them. More
to the point, Spooner had been getting himself into one scrape or another ever since he could walk. Even more to the point
than that, Mrs. Spooner was not only aware of the spontaneous aspect of Spooner’s personality but back in the day had been
tacitly drawn to it. But that, of course, was back in the day, before they had a baby to think about, and a house and a lawn
and a septic tank.

She closed her eyes and the vibrating turned into shaking, and then a pretty good imitation of herself beginning to come,
but he did not see how it would do anybody any good to bring it up.

Instead, trying to maneuver the conversation away from Stanley, he said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

Mrs. Spooner opened her eyes now and slowly beheld what lay on the bed in front of her, beheld Spooner until he realized the
terrible mistake he’d made, bringing his physical appearance into it.

“Have you
seen
yourself?” she said.

Which, now that she mentioned it, he hadn’t, and the next time a candy striper came in with flowers, he asked for a mirror
and began to appreciate the extent of the damage. He tried imagining that he and his wife were in each other’s places, that
she’d walked into a bar in the Pocket and been beaten with crowbars and bats. That thought—Mrs. Spooner bruised and broken
and sewn together—led to nausea, then to half a dozen cold-wash flushings, which came one after another, with the new flushing
beginning even before the last flushing stopped. Like airport toilets.

He put the mirror down and picked up his lunch plate—meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, cling peaches, each set into its own
little quadrant with raised boundaries to keep it apart from the rest—and spewed a small helping of green beans more or less
back into the quadrant they had come from. Mrs. Spooner looked away, offering him what privacy she could while it came up,
and then got a washcloth and a plastic bowl from the bathroom and carefully cleaned off his mouth, a touch so light he barely
felt it. He saw that she liked him better now that there was something she could do to help.