The Lost Weekend (19 page)

“What does he want?” the man in the business-suit said.

“Medication. A sedative. I tell him he can help himself to the salt-tablets. We encourage that as much as possible. No sedatives in the daytime. We try to maintain or restore the normal sleep-cycle, you see—make them stay awake during the day. Put them to sleep now and they’ll be raising hell all night. That fellow over there took a running jump at the wall around three-thirty this morning and got a terrible shaking-up. Thought it was the ocean and wanted to jump in. That wouldn’t have happened in the daytime. Delirium is a disease of the night.”

As the two men moved down the ward to the rooms at the end, the staring messiah began gradually to subside in his pool of sweat, a grey oval stain that ringed him completely on the bed.

Delirium is a disease of the night
. God what an expression. Beautiful as a line of verse, something to remember and put down sometime—remember in quite a different way and for quite a different reason than he meant to remember
paraldehyde.…
Besides, it was a good thing to know. Could you bank on it?

Here was the nurse Bim with the clothes. He came along the aisle with a little bouncing step carrying the clothes wadded in a ball against his chest, with his arms around them and his hands folded in front. He set them down on the mattress and undid the rope that tied them together. The clothes rolled out in a messy heap on the bed.

“There they are, baby.”

“Where do I dress?”

“Right here.” He moved away with a smile, leaned against the wall, folded his arms, and began to watch—casual, indifferent, disinterested; but somehow it was intolerable. Nobody in the world could have been more at home anywhere, more at ease, than he was at home and at ease in this place and in himself. It simply wasn’t normal to be that nonchalant.

Don fished in the pile till he found his shorts. Burning with self-consciousness, he swung his legs over the edge of the mattress,
and shifted and wriggled till he got his shorts on, under the gown. As he began awkwardly to dress, then, an idiotic picture came into his mind: Pola Negri sitting across the table from a lecherous Prussian officer in some ancient film, and a camera-trick in which the dress seemed to fade away, revealing her naked, as if to indicate that Noah Beery had undressed her with his eyes.

He heard the purring voice. “Three-one-one, did you say?”

He glanced up sharply, to show his anger. It was no use. But the question gave him an idea—under the circumstances, a shameless one. Shameless to take this advantage. “Bim, listen. Is it possible to get some of that paraldehyde?”

The nurse shook his head. “The doctor said one dram. You had yours.”

“Look. Couldn’t you get me a little more? Sneak me some? I mean, to take home. In a little bottle or something?”

“Can’t be done. But I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

“I could bring some over sometime.”

“No thank you.”

“Are you in the book, baby?”

“No thank you, I said! Forget it.” He found his shoes and put them on. When he stood up, he felt in his pockets for money. There wasn’t a bill. In a vest-pocket he found four nickels, that was all. He wasn’t surprised—nothing about money could surprise him any more. Apparently he was supposed to go on losing it and losing it and losing it every time he got his hands on some. He looked around for his hat. “Where’s my hat?”

“Are you sure you had a hat?”

“Of course I had a hat!”

“They didn’t give me a hat with your clothes, but I’ll go see again.”

Don watched him go, the frame and build of a truck-driver sauntering along softly, insolently, like a dancer. He sat back helplessly
on the bed and helplessly gazed after the receding offending figure of Bim, accepting him at last, and knowing why.…

Here was the daydream turned inside-out; a projection, in reverse, of the wishful and yearning fancy; the back of the picture, the part always turned to the wall. The flower of the ingrown seed he had in him was here shown in unhealthy bloom,
ad terrorem
and
ad nauseam
. It was aspiration in its raw and naked state, aspiration un-ennobled, a lapse of nature as bizarre and undeniable as the figures of his imagined life were deniable, bizarre, beyond reach. All that he wanted to become and, in his fanciful world, became, was here represented in throwback. He himself stood midway between the ideal and this—as far from one as from the other. But oh, too—oh, too!—as far from the other as from the one. If he was uncomfortable in Bim’s stifling presence, did he not also have reason to be comforted? Or was midway, nothing—nothing at all?

Thank Christ he’d be out of here in a minute. He had never belonged here even for the few hours they’d put him away. He couldn’t identify himself with the place or with the guy sitting here on his bed waiting for his hat. It isn’t me, it isn’t happening to me. He looked about the room again, as a spectator.

A young woman had come into the ward, apparently to call on a patient who was ready to go home. The patient sat on the bed waiting for his clothes and the young woman sat in a chair. They were talking together. Don saw the young man quicken with interest and enthusiasm the longer he talked; and though he couldn’t hear a word that was said, he knew what the young man was saying—the plans that were being made, he’d get a job, maybe they’d go to the country, all he needed now was a good job, he felt like it now, he’d learned his lesson, this could never happen again, not possibly, wasn’t it a good thing it had happened really, maybe he’d needed just this to wake him up, he even welcomed the experience, didn’t regret it at all, the way he felt now he’d
never touch the stuff again in his life, and he was going to
stay
that way too, she could watch and see, he’d get that job and she wouldn’t have to go through a thing like this again, ever again, or he either.…

The girl nodded, like Helen.

Doctor Stevens and his guest came back through the ward. They stopped at the end of Don’s bed.

“Now, this one came in with a slight fracture of the skull. He’d fallen, evidently—they’re always falling—and struck his head between the right temple and eye. No real damage, just a crack. But there are a good many broken blood-vessels, which accounts for the violent discoloration. The nerves just under the surface are probably damaged too. He may have a slight area of numbness there for some time to come, possibly even for the rest of his life. I noticed when I probed, he didn’t seem to feel it at all. Here, touch it.”

Don tried to look away but he could not. If Wick could see him now, if his mother, if Helen, they would die of shame. He didn’t. What was happening to him was, in a sense, not happening at all, because nobody knew about it—least of all the man who bent over the anonymous patient and touched the right temple with his finger.

“Do you feel that?”

He couldn’t answer, he merely shook his head.

“He’s probably been drinking for days,” the doctor said. “The blood showed quite a high content of alcohol. We tried to give him a spinal tap but he wouldn’t take it. He came to at that point and refused. Obviously he’s a man of intelligence and in full possession of his faculties, for the present. So there’s nothing to do but let him go. He’s all right. Did the nurse give you the paraldhyde?”

He nodded. The other man studied him abstractedly, apparently deep in thought. It wasn’t Don he was seeing, it wasn’t anybody.
Don returned the gaze. But there was no recognition, no exchange in it at all.

“Do you feel better since you took it?”

He nodded again.

“I thought you said, Doctor,” the man in the business suit said, “that you didn’t give them sedatives in the daytime.”

“Oh, this one is ready to go home and we want him to be able to get there. We don’t want him to collapse in the street.”

“And then what will happen? Will he start all over again?”

“Possibly. They usually do. But that’s something beyond our control. Most of them come back again and again. Not so much this kind of patient—they can usually afford the private hospitals or sanitariums—as the others. We can’t help them or cure them, not here. This is merely a clearing-house. Our only business is to help them get on their feet and out of here as soon as possible.”

“I see. The poor keep coming back. The rich go away to the private places and get a cure.”

“There isn’t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don’t want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don’t, really. They can’t bring themselves to admit they’re alcoholics, or that liquor’s got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone—so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or whatever, they go at once into such a state of euphoria and well-being that they become over-confident. They’re rid of drink, and feel sure enough of themselves to be able to start again, promising they’ll take one, or at the most two, and—well, then it becomes the same old story all over again. Too bad, too. You and I don’t realize it, because liquor doesn’t mean to us what it does to them.” The doctor turned to Don. “Why don’t you go home? You can, you know.”

“I’m waiting for my hat.”

The men glanced at each other and laughed, and then moved off.

He could have kicked himself for saying that. It made him, somehow, so utterly ludicrous and laughable that he was ashamed for the first time that morning. Oh, Christ, what difference did it make? Nobody knew he was here, and nobody here knew or cared who he was. But he was ashamed all the same. He got up and stepped to the small barred window near the end of his bed. He looked out and down. Cars and busses were going by, people moved along the sidewalk. Who of those down there knew who was up here, what was going on in this room, what was going on inside the men in this room? How many times had he himself driven down this street, past this very building where he stood looking down, and never even looked at the place, never dreamed that one day—Never dreamed it because those things just didn’t happen. Not to the kind of person he was, the kind of people he knew.…

“They say you didn’t have a hat.”

He turned and there was Bim.

“You weren’t wearing one when you came in, they say.”

“I wasn’t?”

“That’s what they tell me, baby.”

He moved away from the wall. Surprisingly, he walked well enough. He felt weak, but not too unsteady. The paraldehyde still held, if that’s what it was that was doing it. It had to hold till he got home. “Will you show me, now, how to get out?”

“Okay, let me take your arm.”

“I don’t need it. Thanks.”

They started down the ward, Don keeping his eyes straight ahead, unable to meet the derisive, yearning, or fearful glances he felt from all sides.

“You’ve got to stop at the desk and sign something.”

“What?”

“A paper. You release the hospital from all responsibility. That’s because you wouldn’t take the treatment.”

In the hall, a nurse handed up a printed form and a pen without
looking up from her work. In front of her, on the desk, was a large open jar half-full of thick white wafers—probably the salt-tablets they had been talking about.

“Right here, baby.” Bim pointed his finger at the place to sign.

Don took the pen. His mind went back to the mornings at Juan-les-Pins, the agonizing mornings at the bank when often he spent more than an hour trying to control the shaking of his hand before he could bring himself to attempt the signature on the letter-of-credit under the eyes of the watching teller. He would drop out of line again and again, just as he had reached the window, and go sit outdoors to stare at the incredible blue of the sea and take deep breaths and try to calm himself by forgetting the money he needed, the pen, the necessary signature, and the impassive teller; and when he had recovered enough to join the line again, the whole unnerving helpless performance would be repeated. But now, to his surprise—probably to Bim’s too—the hand wrote his name plainly and well. Paraldehyde—he must hang onto it, never never forget it.

“I’ll take you to the elevator, baby.”

The walk through the hall and the waiting were a more trying ordeal than he could have anticipated. They went along the corridor in silence till the nurse stopped and pushed a button in the wall. Then he leaned against the wall and looked at Don.

Never had he felt so much on trial in his life—on trial for what, he didn’t know. He went hot with exasperation and embarrassment as he felt the nurse’s eyes looking him over. He didn’t know where to turn, where to fix his own gaze. He waited in a foolish suspense—unreasonable, outlandish, bizarre. In all his life there was no precedent of behavior for such a moment. If that guy so much as spoke to him, uttered a word of advice, told him to take it easy— He felt the odd smile and fought to resist. But it was no use, he couldn’t help himself any longer. Involuntarily, he raised his eyes and looked back.

“Listen, baby.” The voice was so low and soft he could scarcely hear it. “I know you.”

The elevator doors slid open; he saw the brightly lighted car and the sudden response on the faces of the passengers (the broken blood-vessels, the violent discoloration?); he stepped in and quickly turned his back; through the small glass window of the door he saw the nurse’s eyebrows raised in farewell; and the floor gave way beneath his feet.

As he came out into the bright sunlight and started toward the street, an ambulance turned in at the gate. Dang-dang-dang-dang-dang-
gang-gang-gang-gang
-dang-dang-dang. He walked on to a bus stop at the corner, reached into his vest-pocket for one of the four nickels, and stepped into a bus.

He went to the far end of the bus and sat down, on the rear seat. But he might just as well have stayed up front. The passengers turned—and continually turned—to look at him. The driver bent his head slightly to see him in the mirror. He sat back, erect, and gazed absently out of the window, trying to show by his indifference that he had never worn a hat in his life—though a hat, at this moment, was what he longed for more than almost anything else in the world, almost as much as the half-full quart that awaited him on the living room table.