The Eighth Day (29 page)

“In Old Quarry Pond there were millions of minnows. Mr. Marden said that fish ate their own eggs when there were too many. War—not enough food to go round.

“Crowds make you think of money. Everybody has some money in his pocket. Metal and paper. Represents a certain amount of work and the quality of the work. Biggest lie under the sun. Mr. Joch telling me about the Pullman strike nine years ago. . . . ?

“Crowds make you think about how the sexes attract one another. On the street men's eyes never quiet, every minute looking for a pretty girl. Women put blinkers on their faces; look straight ahead. Pretend they don't see anybody. Same thing. Pull of the sexes is like a carrot hanging in front of a donkey's nose. Keeps up his interest. Like Shakespeare says, ‘Lights fools the way to dusty death.' . . . ?

“Crowds make you think about religion. What did God mean by making so many? I'm not going to begin thinking about religion for five years. I don't know where to begin. Probably just a carrot in front of your nose. Makes people feel important. Maybe Papa's dead. But he's not dead for Sophie and me. He's alive in us even when we aren't thinking about him.

“Imagination means seeing through walls. And seeing through skulls. Eugene V. Debs in prison just a mile away. I wish I could be a fly on the wall and imagine what he thinks about people and cemeteries and lots of things.”

At times he felt himself shrinking to a ghost, to a nobody—cold, meaningless, and alone. To recover himself he placed Sophia beside him. “Look, Sophie! Just look!”

He decided to appraise a life in medicine. Without presenting Dr. Gillies's letter he applied at a hospital for work as an orderly and was engaged at once. The pay was as low as the dishwasher's, but he was given his meals and a cot in a dormitory. He swabbed out operating rooms and carried out pails of flesh. He fainted once, as did the nurse beside him. He washed the moribund and held the aged and broken in his arms while the nurses changed the sheets under them. He had never been ill and prior to his arrival at the Carr-Bingham he had seen very little illness. The examples of it he had seen there were obviously the result of mistakes and general foolishness. It was some time before he was able to free himself of this assumption. Here, too, he was silent, willing, and tireless. The nurses came to take it for granted that he was always on duty. There is something comical, you remember, about performing a low job perfectly. This servant had no sense of proportion. In the wards after “lights out” he would return several times during the night to tend Mr. Kegan's fistula or the unhappy Barry Hotchkiss's strangulated hernia. His devotion to duty was mistaken for sympathy. He neglected nothing; he forgot nothing. In previous tasks he had inspired friendship; here his comings and goings were followed with love. He loved no one. When he hastened silently between the beds at three in the morning whispers arose—as on some battlefield after a hard-fought defeat—“Trent! Trent!” He was much in demand as a letter writer. (“I have only time for about twenty words, Mr. Watson.” “You already owe me for three stamps, Judge.”) He was occasionally called into the women's wards. Mrs. Rosenzweig clutched his hand and said softly, “You are a good boy. God will reward you.” Roger wanted none of God's recompenses. He wanted twenty dollars to send his mother.

Every month that passed saw a reduction in the number of things that could surprise him. His contacts with his fellow orderlies enlarged his experience. Dr. Gillies had refrained from telling him that they were drawn from among the all but unemployable—men fresh from prison or absent without leave from their country's armed forces, unfrocked priests, epileptics, pyromaniacs under surveillance, cryptographers working on Shakespeare's plays, collectors of dolls' clothing, weight lifters, and world reformers. The vast room was seldom quiet, for the orderlies worked in staggered shifts. Roger slept with cotton in his ears, only ostensibly because of the noise—he could have slept through battles and cyclones—but because of the conversation. The presence of woman obsessed the dormitory at all hours, resembling a cloud of gnats, invoked and repelled in cackles, guffaws, yelps, and long feverish stories.

The practice of stuffing his ears with cotton he adopted from Clem, the oldest of the orderlies. Clem spent the larger part of his free time reading; he would have spent all of it so but for his failing eyesight. For every half hour he read he sat for a half hour with his hands covering his eyes in a pose that suggested prayer or desperation. He was a philosopher. In the limited space available to him in one corner of the dormitory he had built a hermit's cell about his bed, made from packing cases marked “Jeyes' Fluid” and “Jarvis's HCHO”—walls and bookshelves. Many of the books were in Latin or in an English as impenetrable as Latin; some were in French and German:
SPINOZA
. . . ?
DESCARTES
. . . ?
PLOTINUS
. Hence the cotton in his ears. Roger's eyes often rested speculatively on Clem's lowered sound-proof head.

Most of the patients left the hospital shaken, but cured. Roger received many gifts—cigars, religious medals, postcards of Chicago's waterfront, suspenders, pocket combs, grocers' calendars. (“Goodbye, Trent boy, thanks a lot,” “Goodbye, Trent, you've been awful good to my husband. Now don't forget what I said: we have a room for you in our house, if ever you need it.”) He was loved and he loved no one. But Roger had much to do with death. He had made a resolve not to put to himself the questions that inevitably arise from a frequent contact with death, but certain resolutions are hard to keep.

When a patient was entering on a difficult or protracted death he was lifted onto a wheeled table and rolled into a room reserved for the dying. The orderlies had an ugly name for this room that Roger never used. Priests came in and out. Relatives were permitted to stand a moment at the door. Orderlies were in the custom of dropping in and lighting a pipe. Conversation was not easy, what with all the whistling and rattling going on. Over half the patients called for their mothers—even men who appeared to be nearing a hundred. (A man's first and last words are easy to say; that
m
recurs in all languages.) A bowl of filed-down pennies stood on a shelf. Roger came to recognize fairly well the moment of death. He watched with wonder. He liked the words “gave up the ghost.” (Query: where does it go?) He could look steadily into the eyes of his older patients. He averted his eyes from the young men. From time to time the weight of these experiences bore heavily on him, just eighteen. He would wait until nightfall, hoping for clear weather. In clear weather he would carry an armful of blankets to the roof of the hospital, clear away the snow, and lie down with his face to the sky. From the gorge in Coaltown one saw only a narrow portion of the heavens. It gave him a restful feeling to think that God who had made so many people had made so many stars, too. There was probably some connection. They were shining down on “The Elms” and maybe on his father, millions of them. He was becoming reconciled to the disturbing discovery of the human multitude.

Against his will his thoughts returned often to a puzzling rigmarole told him by one of his fellow orderlies. Peter Bogardus had been a barber, but had given up the work because he was nervous; he couldn't handle knives. He was pockmarked and totally bald. He didn't drink, but he had bad habits. He was a better orderly than most—far better than Roger because he knew more. (“Quick as a fox in a crisis,” said Chief Nurse Bergstrom. “He saves twenty lives a year.”) He belonged to an association that made a study of the life after death and ghosts. He invited Roger to attend a meeting, but Roger refused; he was afraid he would be charged admission. Besides, he assimilated what he wanted from Peter Bogardus, free.

One late morning they were idling in the room for the dying. Roger often dropped in there to see how things were going. He'd accompanied many a patient along the road. The other orderlies noticed that he had a sort of gift for quieting the patients just before they “kicked the bucket.”

(“Trent, why do you always pick up the old geezers' hands?” “I don't know. Do I? I think maybe they like it.”)

It was Bogardus's day on duty there. He walked back and forth smoking long brown cigarettes. At intervals he shook off the ash into the bowl of pennies.

“Trent,” he said, “all men lead as many lives as there are sands in the Ganges River.”

Roger waited. Finally he had to ask, “What do you mean, Pete?”

“We are born again and again. These three men here—look at them!” Roger didn't have to look at what he had seen so often—the half-open suppliant eyes, the trembling chins and cheeks. “They will be dead in a few hours. But forty-nine days from now—seven sevens!—they will be born again. And they will be born again hundreds of thousands of times.”

Roger remembered hearing something about this ridiculous idea before. In Coaltown his father had put money in the collection plate at church to send missionaries across the ocean to rid ignorant people of just such notions as that. But Roger was readier than he had been to listen to old and new ideas; Coaltown had some pretty ridiculous ones of its own.

“There's a mighty ladder, boy. In each new life a man may acquire merit that will permit him to step up a rung or two, or he may fall into error and slip back. Through the merit of Gautama Buddha himself and those who have followed him all men tend to rise. Finally, when they have lived as many lives as the sands of the Ganges, they will arrive at the threshold of supreme happiness. But—now mark my words!—arrived at that threshold, these men will not step over it. They will deny themselves supreme happiness. They will continue to be reborn. They will choose to wait until all men have reached that threshold—men as numerous as the sands of the Ganges—many of them cruel and wicked men. They move about among us now, in disguise, aiding us to ascend that mighty ladder. But even when all the men on this earth, as many as are the sands of the Ganges, have reached that threshold none of them will step over it into supreme happiness, for there are other inhabited stars, as many as the sands of the Ganges. We must wait until all the men on all the stars have purified themselves. No man can wish to be happy until everyone else in the universe is happy.”

Roger stared at him, uncomprehendingly. His family had been happy at “The Elms.” Peter went on:

“You can see that great staircase, Trent—that mighty staircase? Can you count all those human beings on it? Sometimes you can see a little flutter—someone has mounted four steps—Socrates or Mrs. Besant or Tom Paine or Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes there's a moment of confusion—looks like an avalanche in the Rockies—a man—a Nero or a millionaire—has tumbled and lost fifty or a thousand of his lives. None ever stands still.” He continued to walk to and fro smoking his long brown cigarette. Suddenly he turned and shouted, “Free yourself of attachments! Wife and child—illusions! Your reputation among men, your honor, your dignity—vanity! Look at these men! Some men, at the moment of death, are given for half a second a memory of their former existences—a glimpse of their future existences. Boy, they lean for half a second over the vast abyss of time and see the long wretchedness of their past lives. Others look up and see the threshold in the far distance above them. They can see that someday there will be an end to living in this sorrowful world, this vale of tears.”

Roger started. He had seen those lightning-quick returns to consciousness—those expressions of immeasurable horror, those visions of all consolation. Bogardus crossed and leaned toward him, lowering his voice. “Trent, know this: there is a limit even to the number of the sands of the Ganges. We shall be Buddhas when the last earthbound man and the last starbound man has sprung free.”

Peter's agitation had communicated itself to two of the patients. “Judge” Bartlett's eyes were rolling imploringly from side to side. Roger could read the message of his agitated fingers on the blanket; he understood the guttural noises from his throat. He crossed the room and wiped the patient's mouth with a towel. He shouted, “I can't write a letter now, Judge. I haven't got a pencil. I'll do it tomorrow. Go to sleep. Yes, go to sleep. Get some rest.” There was the suggestion of a handshake.

On another table a patient mutters. “
Hab kei Gelt. . . . ? Mutti. . . . ? Hilf'. . . . ? Lu. . . . ? u. . . ?u . . . ? ft.
”

“
Alles gut, Herr Metzger!
” cried Roger. “
Schlaf a bissl! Ja!
”

Peter Bogardus continued: “You Christians can't wait that long—no, siree. You want your supreme happiness next Tuesday. You can't wait ten billion billion years—that's Christ's fault—impatience; always announcing the end of the world, next week, next month. And Christianity inherited his impatience—kill, torture, burn, divide. Baptize 'em or burn 'em! Believe in me or go to hell. That's what hell is—impatience.” He wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “Look at me—getting excited! Look at me—
attached
to trying to make you understand something. Why should I care whether a little peanut like you in Chicago, Illinois, learns anything? That's the damnable impatience I acquired when I was a Christian. Look at me—trembling!”

He sat down on the floor, cross-legged. “I must do my breathing exercises and calm myself. No! I'd better stand on my head. That's best.”

Peter flung his heels to the ceiling. Roger was accustomed to this. He was still thinking about the ladder of rebirth.

“You don't really believe that, do you, Peter?”

Peter, upside down, rested his pale watery eyes on Roger and waited. “Never ask a man what he believes. Watch what he uses. ‘Believe' is a dead word and brings death with it.”

A new patient, purple of face, was rolled in.

“Hello, Trent. Hello, Pete,” said the orderly.