“Thanks,” Walter said. He pressed one of his large hands against his sunken chest, passed the glass back and took a few breaths.
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine.” He grabbed his handkerchief from the bedside table, hacked up some phlegm, looked at it, and then put the cloth back on the table, folded.
“Do you want something to eat?”
“No. “ Walter looked at his watch and his features brightened. “Time for my beauty routine.”
Carl fetched the towel and the electric razor. Walter took off the oxygen and offered his face, eyes closed. He didn't have much facial hair, but he always insisted on being shaved before a visit from his girlfriend, Marguerite. His skin was cool and pale and evenly colored, like clay or a smooth beach stone. While shaving him, Carl thought about how Walter's face had looked when he was a kid — swarthy and stubbled, deeply tanned by cigarette smoke — and how different it was now, the skin so papery and light, as if in transition to becoming some entirely different substance. The bedroom was quiet except for the mosquito buzz of the razor and the hiss and pump of the oxygen machine. Every once in a while Walter drew a labored breath. When he was done, Carl dabbed Aqua Velva on his face; Walter was, and always would be, an Aqua Velva man.
Walter ran his right hand over his cheeks and down under his chin, then frowned. “You missed a spot,” he said.
He reinserted the oxygen in his nostrils and walked downstairs slowly and purposefully, carrying the oxygen line raised behind him like a king with his robe. Adding to this effect, his wispy hair stood up and waved, crownlike, above his balding head. By the time Marguerite showed up he was installed in the living room in his favorite armchair, his thick, veiny ankles visible between the cuffs of his brown pants and his brown socks.
“Hi, handsome,” Marguerite said.
She was wearing a flowing green pantsuit with gold buttons and smelled like roses. She and Walter had been dating for years. They'd met in the home, and Walter's moving back into his house, when Carl came to live with him, had given him the reputation among the residents there as a heartbreaker. But Marguerite came to see him faithfully — taking a taxi — every Tuesday and Thursday, and they drank weak coffee that Carl made, and played gin. Marguerite looked better than Walter did, in spite of being older, but she was delicate and getting a bit, as Walter put it, soft in the head. Sometimes she'd smile at Carl and say, “Oh, dear, my mind is going. If you see it anywhere, could you tell it to come back?” Other times she'd forget words and Carl, walking past the living room, would see her sitting on the couch with her hands up in the air like an agitated bird, saying, “I'm so stupid— what's the word I want?” Walter could never guess.
Carl put out the coffee, went downstairs to his office, turned on the computer, put on the headset, and listened.
GENERAL APPEARANCE: patient exhibits pedal edema. Earlier this evening patient was found by a relative who brought him in for examination.
He had started working from home a year ago, when he moved back in with Walter, in this house where he'd grown up. Walter didn't say anything to him about the first heart attack, just checked in to the convalescent home and then called to announce the change of address. Carl understood that this was Walter's dignity in action: the refusal, at all costs, to be a burden. But when he went and saw the place he felt sick. The fecal smell, the dim light, the wan, shrunken people like some alien and unfortunate race, all this had frightened Carl and pissed him off. He resolved to do whatever was required — including quitting his job, moving back home, and taking care of Walter himself — to get Walter free of it. While he was sitting in Walter's room, a man passed by the open door in a wheelchair, then back in the other direction, then again, and again. When he noticed Carl watching him, the man bared his gums and laughed.
“Walter,” Carl said, “we're getting out of here.”
“Don't trouble yourself, son,” Walter said, but he was clearly pleased.
Before setting up his own business, Carl was employed by a transcription service at a hospital, and he didn't realize how much he hated going to work every day until he no longer had to do it. Everything about it — the commute, the workplace banter, the fluorescent lighting and bad coffee — had filed him down into points. Carl had no ear for gossip, didn't tell jokes, was uneasy with the siege-like camaraderie of the office. He was not a people person. And now, away from those things, he was a great deal happier. He worked only with voices he turned into reports.
Transcription was a habit that could be mastered and even internalized. When he was watching television with his uncle or shopping for groceries, he would hear people's voices and almost unconsciously transcribe them, his foot tapping as if he were working the foot pedals. In medieval monasteries there was a room called a scriptorium where certain monks labored all day long transcribing the world into text, and it seemed to him there was an equivalent purity to the work he did in this bare basement room. Correct spelling and grammar, the unadorned finality of the perfect text, these had an astringency that pleased him.
VITAL SIGNS: steady and strong;
TEMPERATURE: 99.6 degrees
RESPIRATORY RATE: 20
Carl worked for exactly one hour. It took him forever to get through reports by Dr. Sabatini, who was his least favorite of all the doctors. Here was the height of rudeness: he ate while dictating. Chomps and smacks between words, slurps and molars grinding. It was disgusting and necessitated guesswork on the part of the transcriptionist, which Carl hated; but it was either that or ask him to clarify every other word. Sabatini sounded like a jerk, too, his syllables impatient and clipped. For some reason that Carl couldn't specify, he also sounded bald. This suspicion hadn't been confirmed, though, since they'd never met. Carl avoided the hospital as much as possible, which was very nearly completely. The world of technology made this miracle happen.
Most days he stayed downstairs until five, at which time he and Walter ate dinner while watching Jeopardy. Between the two of them they always did better than the contestants. If they could go on as one person, Walter sometimes said, pretending they were Siamese twins or with one of them hidden behind the other, well, they'd clean up. Walter was a game-show fanatic. The first summer Carl had come to live with Walter, when he was eleven, there was a guy on Tic Tac Dough who had a summer-long winning streak, and at the time, through childish superstition, he felt that as long as that guy could keep winning, as long as Walter cheered him on, then everything would be OK. He and Walter watched every day, and the tension was almost unbearable. This was years ago, of course, after Carl's mother died of what Walter liked to call “the rock-and-roll lifestyle.” In the stairwell there was a picture of her, Jane, from high school, smiling broadly, even crazily, as if she were drugged — a glimpse of the future, maybe. And there was a picture of Marie, as well, even though she and Walter had only been married five years before she left him for an army man and went to live on a base in Germany. She was still there, and every year she sent Walter a Christmas card. On the inside she crossed out the German words and wrote “Merry Christmas!” instead.
SKIN: unremarkable