“I can’t help it, Doug. I see one of those things and everything starts turning black and I feel like I’m being strangled.”
I put my arm around him, and he tried to move away, to rise from the love seat, but he couldn’t because we were pressed together too tightly on it. So I held him closer, and after a restless moment he ceased moving and sat quietly beside me, though his eyes worked left then right, left then right, looking anywhere but directly ahead and never settling on Barry and Maxwell. I recognized this state as a paranoid regression of sorts: Virgil’s bodily quiescence, the rigid and insistent placidity mediated by acute cerebral hypervigilance. It was as if forbidding thoughts lay perilously in wait, unwelcome feelings that even simple physical movements might shake free and liberate. As I have already pointed out, Virgil’s childhood years were not cheery. He suffered ailments, and several times came close to death. He was picked on mercilessly.
I grabbed Virgil’s arm and pulled him close to me as, from room’s center, the voice of Barry commanded, “Push Max’s sleeve up, someone.”
Christopher did this, and Barry plunged the needle in Maxwell’s arm.
“There,” Barry said when the job was done. Fielding behind his camera added, “That’s a wrap.”
Inappropriate remarks like the above are what make us hate Fielding and his pointless movies of whatever sorrow we happen to be going through. Why even dignify him with a response? Barry explained, “Max’s tongue is green from leaves he’s been chewing. See these flecks?” He stuck a rubber-gloved finger in Maxwell’s mouth and swabbed one out as Fielding started his camera again and leaned in for an extreme close-up. “Some kind of botanical psychoactive he must’ve picked up in the jungle. Probably a datura. It’s anybody’s guess how long Max has been hallucinating. Several hours, possibly longer. Did anyone happen to see Max earlier in the day? No? Heart rate is down and respiration is impressively low. The pupils are contracted and exhibit minimal sensitivity to light. I’ve given him Narcan, intramuscularly, to counteract the narcotic. What is it with you guys and your drugs? Can someone please get the dog to be quiet?”
Amazingly, for without pressure from its owner, Gunner did fall silent. I must presume under the circumstances that the dearness of life, the value of it, its perceived worth — though neither value nor worth describe, fittingly, the crushing weight, for friends and relations at least, that a life has when threatened with its own ending — I must, under these grim circumstances (the doctor’s frustration with the patient’s condition; the dog’s shutting up; the young husbands’ soberly putting away their antiquated smut), presume that this so-called, by me, dearness of life can, in fact, be read in the demeanor and the attitude, the conscious or unconscious deportment of the average onlooker waiting a seeming eternity for the good or the bad news — even if the onlooker is, alas, a dog. I say this because of the way we all took, from Gunner’s sudden cessation of baying, our own cues to make like Max and stop breathing (if such were possible! — all hundred of us, not counting George, gathered around and taking in, holding in, simultaneously, those brisk little audible inhalations that indicate distress, curiosity, skepticism, hope) — to make like Max and stop breathing, and to consider, sympathetically (Didn’t we all feel a bit giddy and faint-headed ourselves, sitting or standing or kneeling there deliberately without oxygen?), how Max, if he had any feeling, must’ve felt in that moment while his lungs strained to get going — how lonely and how cold — and, also, how much we really did love him, would love his memory if he passed away from us. Even black-haired, towering Zachary, whose emotional life is too often characterized by violent, jocular aggression toward the weak and humble, seemed subdued, genuinely concerned over Maxwell’s welfare, or, at any rate, sensitive to the mood of concern suffusing the room. Zachary knew better than to give anybody an arm burn now. Back at a distance he stood, fists in pockets, head bent forward. (What size could Zachary’s shoes be? Do they make a fifteen? I’d like to know.) And Hiram, over by the fireplace, seemed to have forgotten, for the time being, the fire he had earlier undertaken to engineer. Blankly he peered over his walker. His wrist was swollen hugely but he was paying no mind. At his side his helper, Donovan, clutched, in delicate pink hands, a wad of incompletely crumpled Sunday newspaper. Donovan remained extremely still, because to move at all would mean possibly rustling that paper, a rudeness for sure in light of the suspense we all felt as Barry leaned over to massage Maxwell’s chest.
Fielding’s camera whined. The married guys watched it all from over by the porno cabinet; they, like Zachary, had their hands stuffed deep in their pockets, and one (Clay) showed, beneath worsted trousers, a boner.
It is true that we have all seen one another undressed at one time or another, and the range of our sizes is, I can report, exactly as you might suspect. What can be said about a hundred penises of all ages? Clay had a pocketed hand wrapped around his. Gently, absently, through the pocket’s cozy inner lining, Clay kept himself hard.
“Doug, I think I need some air,” Virgil whispered, very quietly even for Virgil. He was watching the floor. Needle fear had made him sweaty.
“Right. Good idea,” whispering back in that hush of the library fraught with expectancy and tension, tugging on his arm. “Come on. I’ll help you.”
“I’m all right. Let go of my arm,” Virgil insisted.
“I don’t mind. You stand up and I’ll help. We’ll slip out to the gazebo and relax on a bench and watch the homeless people light their campfires in the meadow.”
“Doug, you’re hurting my arm. Please! I don’t want to go to the gazebo.”
A scattering of brothers swiveled heads to frown in our direction. One of these — it was Roger in his cowboy boots — waved. Neither Virgil (hunched uneasily over, palms clammy on knees) nor I (hands securely affixed to Virgil’s forearm) dared wave back. If you show Roger indication of receptivity to him, he’ll come over.
To Virgil I said, “You’re making a spectacle.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If I let go of your arm, will you pull yourself together and behave?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you running off. All right? I don’t want to have to come hunting for you.”
Gloominess from Virgil. Dead animals gazed down. Among the men gathered around Maxwell, a solemn, ethnomedical colloquium was in progress. Certain words—“rapture,” “zombie,” “potential blindness”—and longer phrases—“extensive psychomotor damage” and “Indigenous peoples along the lower Amazon use these substances in spirit rituals” and “Actually, in some cases, humans”—escaped, now and then, to rise up and echo dully against the bleak vaults above our heads. Finally from out of this ad hoc conference there came a wail, loud at first and growing louder like some animal’s sound. Every brother turned. The Doberman, hearing the sound, bounded from his place leashed to the armchair and made his own racket tugging things over. No one paid any attention to this. The wail rang out. It was coming from Max. Brothers closest to the sound did not know whether to approach or retreat as, first, Max’s hands, then his feet, next arms, and at last Maxwell’s legs began to tremble and to flail, all extremities storming the air near Milton and Siegfried and our young Christopher. Backward these three now fled. There was no holding their brother. Violently Max beat the air. Only Barry persisted — dutifully — in trying to comfort Maxwell’s sputtering head in his lap. “A tongue depressor! Hurry! In my valise!” cried the MD, but it was too late for this as Maxwell’s open hand swung furiously upward to slap Barry’s face and knock eyeglasses flying and the doctor himself tumbling backward against a table leg that stove him in the head. “Uhf,” Barry said. Then Fielding’s camera’s battery-powered spotlight bleached everything white, as Fielding climbed more or less aboard Max, shot down on the pharmacobotanist, took blows in the process. Fielding’s commitment to his craft was inspiring. Nevertheless, there was something garish about this scene. The documentary-film maker’s art is not only voyeuristic (we are, after all, meddlers in one another’s lives), but opportunistic — our poor Max suffering epiphanies on the rug and his own brother satisfied to hover above him and film it! Maxwell punched deliriously at nothing we could know. The noise rising from him was magnificent. It was a sound you might imagine coming out of a man being opened with a knife. It hurt to hear it. Virgil, hearing it, got that terrorized look he gets, eyes showing white, not a good sign, and I thought it’d likely be advantageous under these circumstances to go ahead and squire him around back for some air, so said to him, “Let’s go, Virgil.” Unfortunately leaving became immediately unfeasible. Max’s long scream, nearing its end, turned articulate. From the Persian carpet at the heart of the room, Maxwell, breathless and bloodlessly pale beneath Fielding’s camera shining down on him in his distress, cried, “Doug! Doug!”