No matter! She was with him now, taking his pulse. As the visitor watched through the doorway, Jamie’s head turned wearily in the hot socket of his pillow. Whew! The bolus of hatred subsided in his throat. He forgave her. And now, instead of fearing that Jamie might die, he made light of it. It was, after all, only a sore throat.
And in fact when he returned in the afternoon, Jamie felt better. The visitor brought a deck of cards and they played gin in the cheerful yellow sunlight. Death seemed out of the question. How can anyone play a six of clubs one minute and die the next? Sick as he was, Jamie asked to be cranked up straight and now sat like a very old man, weaving a bit as the artery socked away at his head.
For the next few days they played cards morning and afternoon. Sutter came at night. It was understood that the universe was contracted to enclose the two young men. If it can be kept so, Jamie as good as said and the visitor agreed, a small sunny corner where we can play a game and undertake small tasks, nothing very serious can go amiss. For the first time the engineer understood how men can spend a week playing poker, women a lifetime at bridge. The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings — a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business.
It came to be understood too that one was at the other’s service and that any service could be required. As it sometimes happens between two young men, a kind of daredevil bargain was struck in which the very outrageousness of a request is itself grounds for obeying.
“Go out and buy me a quart of Monarch applesauce,” said Jamie at the end of a game.
“All right.”
Sutter came later in the evening. He was both affable and nervous and told them half jokingly of his two new patients, “noble intelligent women who still read Lawrence and still believed in the dark gods of the blood, why make a god of it, that was the Methodist in him, anyhow can you imagine anyone still reading Lawrence out here now,” etc. How uneasy and talkative Sutter had become! It suddenly dawned on the engineer that Sutter, strange as it seemed, could not stand the sickroom. A hospital, of all places, made him nervous. Jamie, he noticed too, became irritable because Sutter’s coming broke the golden circle of the card games. They both wished Sutter would leave. And when Jamie frowned and picked up the deck of cards, Sutter took the hint and did leave. He made a sign to the engineer, who followed him to the solarium.
“Again I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re here,” he said, placing his feet carefully inside the black and white tiles. The hospital was old and well preserved. It looked like an army hospital from the days of Walter Reed. “He doesn’t want to see me and there is no one else. Or was.”
The engineer looked at him curiously. “I thought that was what you and he wanted.”
“I didn’t want him to be — sunk. I thought he might do better, though I was afraid of this all along—” Sutter trailed off.
“Isn’t he sunk?”
“Your showing up has meant a great deal,” said Sutter hurriedly and looked at his watch.
“What’s the matter with him? Why does he have those spells?”
“Heart block,” said Sutter absently. “With some right-sided failure and pulmonary edema. And you see, he can’t read for long. His retina is infiltrated. You can read to him.”
“What do you mean, heart block? Is that serious?”
Sutter shrugged. “Do you mean will he die today or next week?” He eyed the other. “Can you take a pulse?”
“I suppose so.”
“I can’t get a private nurse. If you are here when he has a syncope, take his pulse. It will almost certainly start up in a few seconds. Now I’ve got—”
“Wait. Good God. What are you talking about?”
“If then his pulse is steady, O.K. If it is fibrillating, call the resident.”
“Good God, what do you mean, fibrillating?”
‘Try to nod your head in time with his pulse. If you can’t, he’s fibrillating.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Sutter eyed him and, shoving his hands in his pockets, began to step off the tiles in an absent-minded hopscotch. With his Curlee pants down around his hips and his long-waisted shirt, Sutter looked like Lucky Lindy in the 1930’s, standing in a propeller wash.
“I tell you what you do,” said Sutter.
“What,” said the engineer gloomily.
“Call Val. Tell her how sick Jamie is. He likes Val and wants to see her but doesn’t want to send for her himself.”
“Why don’t you—” began the engineer.
“No, I tell you what you do,” said Sutter, drawing him close in an odd little bantering confidence. “Call Rita.”
“Rita,” repeated the puzzled engineer.
“Yes, call Rita and Val and tell them to keep it to themselves and come on out.” He held the younger man by the arm in an awkward little burlesque of Lamar Thigpen’s old-buddy style.
“Why don’t you call them: after all, you’re the brother of one and the—”
“Because I’m like Jamie. I don’t want to be the one to call either.”
“I’m sorry. Jamie asked me not to call them. He trusts me.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Sutter, his eyes going vacant
“But—”
But Sutter was already on his way.
With Sutter gone, it was possible to restore the golden circle of games. Jamie was dizzy and short of breath but not uncomfortable. His illness was the sort which allows one to draw in closer to oneself. Already Jamie had discovered the small privileges and warmths of invalidism. It was not a bad thing to lie back and blink at the cards lined up on the bed table, heave up on one elbow to make a play, flop down again in simple weariness. He wrapped himself snugly in his fever like a scarf. The next afternoon the engineer sat beside the bed in the sunny corner, which smelled of old wax and honorable ether. Outside in the still air, yellow as butter, the flat mathematical leaves of the aspens danced a Brownian dance in the sunlight, blown by a still, molecular wind. Jamie would play a card and talk, gaze at a point just beside the engineer’s head where, it seemed, some privileged and arcane perception might be hit upon between them. Presently he fell back in the socket of his pillow and closed his eyes.
“Do me a favor.”
“All right.”
“Go get me a copy of Treasure Island and a box of soda crackers.”
“All right,” said the engineer, rising.
The youth explained that he had been thinking about the scene where Jim steals the dinghy and drifts offshore, lying down so he won’t be seen, all the while eating soda crackers and looking at the sky.
“Also go by the post office and see if there’s any mail in general delivery.”
“Right.”
But when he returned with the crackers and a swollen fusty library copy of Treasure Island showing hairy Ben Gunn on the frontispiece, Jamie had forgotten about it.
“There was no mail?”
“No.”
“I tell you what let’s do.”
“What?”
“Call old Val.”
“All right.”
“Tell her I’ve got a crow to pick with her.”
“All right. Do you want to see any of your family?”
“No. And I don’t want to see her either. Just give her a message.”