She ought to be thinking of you.
She’s thinking about death, he said. It’s staring her right in the face and she can’t deal with it. I don’t know if I could. Could you?
I can when I get that old, she said.
He watched her across the rim of his coffee cup. Dying seemed way down the line. She was fifteen years younger than he was. She was twenty five years old and her skin was poreless as marble and her mouth red and bruisedlooking. Her green eyes were the green of still deep waters and there was something arrogantly sexual about them, they said that she knew what she had and that she had an unlimited supply of it and it was going to last forever. He knew it wasn’t and he wished he didn’t.
She’s old, he said. She can’t teach anymore. She’s sick and she’s going to be sicker and then she’s going to die. And she knows all that.
She’ll outlive us all and dance on your grave, Beth said.
He set the cup down. Let’s just give it a rest awhile, he said.
Are you going to work today?
It’s Sunday.
I mean are you going to write.
I may. I don’t know.
Why don’t you write us another of those thousanddollar stories like you did that time, she said.
Thousanddollar stories don’t grow on trees, he told her.
She smiled. It was gibberish to me anyway, she said.
I know. I saw your review in the paper.
Everybody’s a critic, huh?
Everybody’s a critic.
For a moment Beth and the old woman shared a curious duality, she had been a critic too.
I saw that piece in The Atlantic, his grandmother had said. I thought it offensive.
They liked it, he had told her. It was an Atlantic First Story.
It ought to have been an Atlantic last story. It was gibberish and obscene gibberish at that.
The world is obscene gibberish, Wildman said. I find it offensive.
She studied him. I liked you better as a child. You were such a lovable child.
The phone rang at four o’clock in the morning and there was a nurse on the line. Wildman lay listening to the nurse and to Beth’s regular breathing beside him. She’s had a rough night, the nurse said tentatively. She didn’t sleep and she’s had a lot of difficulty breathing. She insisted I call, she wants you to come.
He tried to think. He was still half asleep and tatters of his strange dreams swirled about him like eddies of brackish waters. I was just down there tonight, he said.
Well. I don’t know anything about that. I just said I’d call.
He felt like a fool. A callous fool at that. I’m on my way, he said.
Highballing through the night at eighty five toward the little backwater town of Clifton where she carried all her medical business. Stringing past the barren ridges and the hollows where mist pooled white and opaque as snow. All these recent midnight runs had him feeling a denizen of the night himself, one of the whippoorwills of his childhood or the whores and drunks of his youth but he alone was still on the road. Civilization had pushed the whippoorwills deeper into the timber from where their cries came to him faint and ever fainter and the hands of the clock had pushed the whores and the drunks into each other’s arms and into their dark and dreamless slumber. He strung past empty allnight markets alight with cool white fluorescence and past gas stations and abandoned lumber yards and the only soul he saw was the one glancing back from the rearview mirror.
The hospital itself seemed geared down for the night, humming along on half power. He hated hospitals and went stealthily down the gleaming tilefloored hall. Past doors opened and doors closed. Beyond these doors folks with their various ailments sleeping in their antiseptic cubicles if they could sleep and if not lying in a drug-induced stupor that passed for sleep in the regions. Like the larval stage of something dread waiting to be born and loosed upon an unsuspecting world.
She herself was still wide awake. They’d moved her to the pulmonary intensive care unit and she sat by the window waiting for day to come until she heard the door open then turning her head to see. Ravaged and wildlooking in her hospital gown she fixed him with eyes so fierce he had a thought for what halfcrazy stranger was inhabiting her body. A look of utter viciousness as if she held him and him alone responsible for the predicament in which she found herself. For the wearing out of irreplaceable organs, for the slow inevitable recession of the tide of blood, for life seeping away like night sewage, drop by septic drop.
Then the face changed and he laid an arm about her thin shoulders and she grasped his other arm with a hand more claws than fingers. She hung on fiercely, you’d not expect such a grip from one so frail. Instinctively he tried to pull away, the dying would take you with them if they could, it’s dark down there and cold, a little company might lighten the tone of things.
Around midmorning he talked with her doctor. This doctor was young, Wildman considered him no more than a child. Styled blond hair, this wisp of a mustache. A preoccupied air. Wildman wondered was he competent. Perhaps he was a leech, a parasite, there was a pale vampirish look about him, a sucker of old folks’ thin unhealthy blood.
She has anxiety attacks, the doctor said. I’ve tried to explain it to her. The emphysema makes it difficult for her to breathe and it scares her. The fear compounds the breathing problems and her heart trouble. Everything just compounds itself.
Is she going to die?
He shrugged. Well, she thinks she is. In the past weeks she’s insisted on being tested for everything terminal. There’s no reason she shouldn’t live another five or ten years. She seems to be willing herself to die. How close are you to your grandmother?
Wildman shrugged. She raised me from a baby when my parents were killed in an accident. I guess that’s pretty close.
Perhaps you could talk to her then. And there’s no reason she has to be confined to a hospital. I’m releasing her later today.
I’ll talk to her again, Wildman said. He smiled slightly. She taught school for fifty years. She’s used to doing all the talking.
We’re all going to die, the doctor said, as if this was some hot flash that hadn’t caught up with Wildman yet and that he might want to make note of.
I’ll tell her, he said politely. Sometimes there were windy gulfs of distance between what he thought and what he said and there was something mildly disturbing about it. He went out into the hall. It smelled of floor wax, antiseptic. He followed it to where he could see morning sunlight through a glass door and he went through the door into it. His senses were immediately assaulted by sensations: warmth, colors, the smell of the hot light falling through the green trees. Everything looked bright and gold and new and dying seemed very far away.
He hired a practical nurse and she stayed two nights which contained no phone calls and no midnight drives toward flashing ambulances then his grandmother fired her.
The nurse came and told him about it. He paid her off and drove out to the farm to see the old woman.
Why did you fire her, he wanted to know. You couldn’t fire her anyway. I hired her.
She was a thief, the old woman said. She was stealing from me.
Stealing what?
My things, she said evasively. She waved an arm airily about the room. A motley of photographs, ceramic cats, plaster pickaninnies with fishing poles. I caught her stuffing them into her purse, she said.
Well, he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
I can stay by myself. I don’t need her. I don’t need you.
He lifted his shoulders in a shrug of defeat. You’re three times seven. I guess you can do what you want to do.
I’m many more times seven than that, she said caustically. And I can’t do anything I want to do. I can’t even breathe God’s own air like you and everyone else takes for granted. I’d give all that I own just to take a good deep breath.