Spooner (45 page)

T
hey came for him at fifteen minutes before six in the morning. Spooner had seen his X-rays and knew the femur had to be realigned,
but he couldn’t remember anybody telling him this was the morning they meant to do it.

He said good-bye to Mr. Graves, who was scheduled for his own surgery in the afternoon—the sixth in three weeks—and then was
rolled off into the cold. He’d become attached to the old man and imagined himself dropping in to visit him after they both
got out.

The hallway outside the operating room smelled like meat.

H
e came awake the first time seemingly an instant after he’d gone to sleep, paralyzed. He remembered the shot of Valium, then
something else, and being asked to count backwards. And an instant later here he was—there is no sense of time passing under
anesthesia; what it imitates is not sleep but death—awake, unable to draw breath or open his eyes. Above him somewhere he
heard the bone doctor giving orders—he wanted this, he wanted that, no, not that, that—and felt an occasional dull tugging
in the area of his hip, and there was no air to breathe, and it reminded him of times when he’d stayed down too long underwater,
of that last ten or fifteen feet to the surface.

Why this?

And he lay on the table, waiting to break back into the breathing world, and then went beyond that into new territory, passing
through random passing thoughts, and then came a certain reflexive panic, and presently the panic dimmed with everything else,
and in the place where it had been was something strangely familiar, the process of dying.

Then the bone doctor’s voice: “What the hell’s going on over there?”

Into the random thoughts a series of hallucinations: he was locked in a box, in a closet, and finally in the trunk of a car.
There was a kid back in Vincent Heights named John Arthur Ramsey whose daddy took him fishing one Sunday morning, locked him
in the trunk, and shot himself in the ear.

Was that Calmer he heard looking for him somewhere outside?

He thought of causing some sound, some tiny movement, but what that might be he didn’t know. He could cause nothing in this
world.

And life moved away a little at a time. It seemed to Spooner that a long time ago the bone doctor had asked an excellent question—
What the hell’s going on over there?
—but there had been no answer. Had he meant something else? Was someone masturbating in the corner?

He heard a faint whistle as breath went in and out of someone’s nose, and dropped further away, so far away, he realized,
that Calmer would never find him now, and then abruptly a tube of some sort was being forced roughly into his throat—gouging
the sides as it went down, he thought, like picking your nose with a hangnail—and a moment later, unexpectedly, he felt his
lungs fill with air, and Spooner, mute and helpless, dead meat, came fully alive again without moving a muscle.

He heard the bone doctor again, perhaps speaking to the anesthesiologist—not a nurse, anyway, to someone of his own station.
He said, “Imagine the fucking tap dance we’d have to do if we lost this one.”

Someone laughed—a man’s voice—and then abruptly stopped when nobody laughed with him.

That was all Spooner heard. Someone laughed alone, and then Spooner went back into the dark.

What now?

He felt the tugging at his hip more distinctly than before, and a moment later a feeling rose through his body at amazing
speed, and nothing had moved through him like that since he’d tried to short out all the lights in that motel in Iowa on the
family’s annual trip to Conde, South Dakota, and blown himself halfway across the room instead.

There was a pause, and things settled and went still. He thought about his grandmother, wondering if she was still alive.
He couldn’t remember her now, what she looked like.

And oh, lord, it came through him again, and the sound and the feeling converged into one thing, and then it was quiet again,
and in the quiet he realized what it was. A drill. They were using an electric drill to screw home the bolts and screws into
his bone, and it came again and stopped again and the elements of the thing, the pain and the noise and the electricity, settled
out during the quiet, one from another, and then rose together in an instant, and Christ in heaven he was not supposed to
be feeling this, was not supposed to know something like this existed, and he lay helpless to open his eyes, to move even
the smallest muscle.

Then it was quiet, and then it coursed through him again, and again, and another screw went home into the bone.

Why this?

He could taste something burning. The screws went in and he tasted the burning and then they paused and there was the tugging
again as they pulled aside muscle or tendons to clear a section of the bone for the next screw, or manipulated the bone itself
into a new position, and then would come the stillness and quiet, a kind of blessing before it washed through him again. He
thought of his wife and could not remember her name.

The bone doctor was five screws into the job before he looked over at the heart monitor and noticed Spooner’s vital signs.
“Now what?” he said. As if a child were tugging at his pants leg, nagging him while he tried to work.

And then mercifully the world went black and dead, and Spooner went with it.

How long had it gone on?

He couldn’t say.

Fifteen minutes?

A voice in it now, whose he didn’t know.

Look, time’s got nothing to do with it. Try buying your dog a wristwatch; see how much time means to him.

Still, time had passed somewhere, and when Spooner and the world reconvened on the other side of it, Spooner found it—the
world—subtly distorted, and realized a little at a time that he hadn’t quite made it all the way back.

T
he nurse was too loud.

He was in the recovery room, he knew that. And she was a nurse, he saw the uniform, an angry nurse. Wait, not exactly angry,
querulous
. She was talking to him in a certain
querulous
tone taken by adult children when the old deaf codger tries to walk out of the house without his pants on.

“Warren? Wake up, Warren. Warren, do you know where you are, Warren?”

Spooner didn’t mind short, simple sentences and had no real objection to being watched to make sure he had his pants on before
he went outside. The volume, though. The volume was unnecessary. He touched his index finger to his lips and tried to make
the shush sound, but with his teeth sheared and his finger splinted, nothing came out, and the stitches tickled his lips.

The nurse left for a few moments, and then she was back. “Warren,” she said, “wake up, Warren. Do you know where you’re at?”

“Why do you have to say
at
?” he said. “Why can’t you say, ‘Do you know where you are?’ ”

He slept.

The surgeon appeared late in the afternoon, carrying the X-rays under his arm, affecting the appearance of someone interested
in Spooner’s condition. Spooner was awake again, sucking on ice, disinclined to conversation until he was surer about where
he’d been dropped off on the way home.

The surgeon opened the envelopes and took out the X-rays, fitted them into the light box and turned it on. He leaned in for
a closer look at his work.

“Perfect,” he said, tracing his work, “great. Great, perfect.” He ran a finger along the picture of Spooner’s femur as if
he were checking it for splinters. “See?” he said. “It’s perfect.”

The bone, Spooner saw, had been screwed together in seven places and then baled together in a haphazard way with wire. At
least he’d missed the baling.

“What do you think?” the surgeon said, assuming the unmistakable pitch of a salesman, but to what purpose? Was Spooner being
sold his own leg? Were they negotiating a price?

Spooner felt the familiar, cold wash that announced that he was again spinning down the shithouse walls, and even as the bottom
dropped out of the world, he realized he had lost interest in his recovery, would as soon look at pictures from the bone doctor’s
family reunion (hairy, monkeylike little children all making faces for the camera) as X-rays of his femur. Then again, at
the present moment, he couldn’t think of anything he was interested in. Food, sex, sleep—what else did he like? Nothing came
to mind. Boxing? Worse yet, it seemed the bone doctor, having ignored him the last three days, now craved his company and
goodwill.

“So?” said the bone doctor. “You’re thinking,
Where am I at in all this?
”

Spooner looked but did not answer.

“You want to know how long it’s going to be, right?”

“Something happened,” Spooner said, although he had no inclination to get into it now.

He saw that he’d hurt the bone doctor’s feelings. Perhaps this was the moment, walking in with the X-rays, when the doctor
customarily accepted thanks and congratulations. “What do you mean?” the doctor said. Yes, it was hurt feelings. A moment
passed. “It went perfect,” he said, and referred again to the X-rays, as if they were the proof. “Everything went perfect.”

“I was awake,” Spooner said. “I felt you putting in the screws.”

The doctor smiled at that as if he were relieved and sat down on the side of the bed. To Spooner’s horror, the orthopod wanted
to be pals. Maybe somebody had finally broken the news to him regarding Spooner’s identity, possibly even passing along the
thought that a man who’d written openly of his wife’s menstrual cycle (
In the morning, there were bears in the yard…
) would have no qualms about violating whatever patient/doctor confidentiality was ordinarily in effect when a doctor drilled
five of seven screws into a fully awake patient on the operating table.

Not that the true nature of Spooner’s aversion to the surgeon was medical incompetence. Spooner had a tolerance for incompetence
of all kinds, which was clearly tied to ambition, which was the main thing, along with opposable thumbs, that separated humans
from the rest of the creatures of the forest in the first place. No, what Spooner couldn’t abide in regard to the bone doctor
was the ooze. The man was all ooze, too sure of himself by half, too comfortable in his own skin. Too comfortable in the world.

He was looking at Spooner now in a pitiful way, and there were flakes of dandruff in his eyebrows. “You had a dream,” the
bone doctor said. “It’s a very common phenomenon for patients to dream as they come out of anesthesia.”

“You sometimes put them to sleep, then.”

The surgeon chose not to hear that. “The important thing,” he said, indicating the X-rays, “is the procedure. The procedure
went perfectly.” He watched Spooner closely to see if he was making any headway.

And they sat there a little while, the bone doctor nodding away, encouraging Spooner to nod along with him.

Spooner would not nod, though, and when quite a bit of time had passed with nothing else coming out of the bone doctor, Spooner
looked down and considered his leg from one side and then the other and said, “Image the fucking tap dance if you’d lost this
one.”