He still could have saved himself, he still could have gone to the all-night store, he still could have called one of his current women, he still could have summoned an ambulance; but he must no longer have wanted to. He turned off the television and sat in the kitchen, smoking. I know that he was afraid, and I know that he was in pain. Maybe he searched his medicine cabinet for diazepam or aspirin? It was bare; there was nothing but an empty packet of Rutinacea tablets and two Vitamin C capsules, insufficient medication for the purposes of a resurrection. He drank cold tap water, that much is certain; he turned the faucet on, drank greedily, and wiped his mouth. Maybe he felt hungry? But in the refrigerator there were only three bone-dry chicken stock cubes and a single (though almost untouched) jar of strawberry jam. Maybe he suddenly believed? Yes, he believed that if he drank a mug of nutritious bouillon and replenished his reserves of mineral salts, he would feel better. Yes, he believed that gradually, spoonful by spoonful, he would eat the jar of strawberry jam, and the sugar and glucose and vitamins would bring back his strength. And he put out his cigarette and set about preparing his last supper, and the people who broke down the door found him like that: lying on the floor, his mouth stopped up with a white-and-strawberry seal.
Chapter 21. Thursday July 6, 2000
THE SUGAR KING — in civilian life a wealthy businessman — had announced to the alcos gathered in the smoking room that in the emotional journal he kept he had included the emotion of relief he had experienced at passing a stool. This confession caused great consternation among the female alcos in particular. Male snickers of recognition mingled with female murmurs of indignation.
“We’re supposed to keep a journal of our emotions, and you can’t argue with that,” the Sugar King said in self-defense. “In our journals we’re supposed to be completely honest, and you can’t argue with that. We do it so as to relearn how to name our emotions, something we are no longer able to do as a result of our abuse of intoxicating liquor, and we do it so as to learn how to have control over our emotions, an ability we’ve also lost, and that too is perfectly—”
“But describing the state of your soul after passing a stool seems to me inappropriate,” Fanny Kapelmeister, in civilian life a history teacher, interrupted him without conviction.
“Fanny, you should be made to start your therapy again from the beginning”—the Sugar King’s voice was filled with mockery and venom—“since you’re incapable of distinguishing the spiritual sphere from the emotional sphere. And all this after Dr. Granada, and Nurse Viola, and the therapist Moses alias I Alcohol, along with all his she-therapists, have repeated to you time and again that these are two different spheres. I’m afraid I’m going to have to present your case at the evening meeting.”
“All right”—Fanny raised her head, and by this single gesture she was transformed from the wasted fifty-year-old dwarf she resembled, into the tall and imperious thirty-year-old brunette she actually was—“all right, but start by saying, start by announcing at the evening meeting that today, Thursday, July 6, in the year of our Lord two thousand, you took a crap and it made you feel better.”
“I don’t need to say it, because I wrote it down,” replied the Sugar King, and he added a powerful comment that put me painfully in mind of the next world: “When something is written down it doesn’t need to be talked about. At the meeting there’s something else I’m going to bring up,” he added ominously.
But in the evening, when we all gathered in the cafeteria, as we did every day to take account of our lives, the Sugar King did not take the floor, and did not say a word; neither on that day, nor any other, were we able to resolve the question of whether the state of one’s soul after passing a stool was or was not worthy of being recorded in one’s emotional journal. The one debate to occur that evening was a debate over the telephone (if such a feeble exchange of opinions can even be called a debate). Fanny Kapelmeister, who was unusually animated that day — perhaps she was consumed by a terrible thirst for vodka, perhaps she was trying to avoid an embarrassing discussion on the matter alluded to above, perhaps she was afraid of the Sugar King, or perhaps she had been upset by some inadvisable contact with the outside world — in any case Fanny Kapelmeister, who was unusually animated that day, put up her hand.
“I came to understand,” she said, “after a time I came to understand why we can’t watch television, listen to the radio, play dominoes or other games, this I came to understand after a time. But why the telephone is switched off after 9 P.M. I cannot understand.”
“The telephone is switched off after 9 P.M. for the good of the patients.” Sister Viola responded to Fanny Kapelmeister’s unintentionally teacher-like tone with the deliberately intensified tone of a ward sister. “At that time some of the patients want to be asleep, and others want to use the quiet to work and write—”
“How can you talk about quiet”—Fanny Kapelmeister had undergone yet another transformation, this time metamorphosing from patient to tsarina, from supplicant to she-eagle—“how can you talk about quiet and about sleeping, when at 10 P.M. they start cleaning the hallway, with all the accompanying clatter, and then at 10:30 we all have to go to the nurses’ station with our personal mouthpieces to take a breathalyzer test. How can you talk about quiet—”
Fanny Kapelmeister suddenly fell silent and stiffened; for a moment it looked like a classic early sign of an epileptic fit, but no, Fanny Kapelmeister had fallen silent in astonishment because she had suddenly grasped the absolute essence of her fate. What does a person feel when, every evening, they stand in line with several dozen other people — personal mouthpiece in hand — in order to take a breathalyzer test? What does that person feel? That person feels nothing in particular, especially if they’ve not drunk anything beforehand, that person feels nothing in particular, unless they did have something to drink — then they feel afraid. Fine, but what does a person feel when they suddenly become aware that they stand in line every evening with several dozen alcos so as to walk up and blow into a breathalyzer? Well then, such a person — like Fanny Kapelmeister — may succumb to astonishment; they may turn into a pillar of salt. Fanny’s skull was filled with a crowd of alcos. They stood obediently one behind the other and blew into the breathalyzer with such force that they seemed to drive every thought from her head. Fanny spoke no more and slowly sat down, though that sitting down was more an involuntary slide into her chair than actually sitting down. Simultaneously, like the other half of a set of scales, as Fanny descended the therapist Quasi Moses alias I Alcohol rose at the other end of the table.