334 (5 page)

“I—I threw it away.”

“You threw it away! My private letter?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I wanted you to be—I wanted just another day like the last couple.”

“What did it say?”

“Birdie, stop!”

“What did it fucking say?”

“Three points. You got three points.”

He let go of her. “That’s all? That’s all it said?”

She rubbed her arms where he’d held her. “It said you had every reason to be proud of what you’d written. Three points is a good score. The team who scored you didn’t know how much you needed. If you don’t believe me, read it yourself. It’s right here.” She opened a drawer, and there was the yellow envelope with its Albany postmark and the burning torch of knowledge in the other corner.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“I believe you.”

“It said if you wanted that one extra point you could get it by enlisting in the service.”

“Like your old friend Jock, huh?”

“I’m sorry, Birdie.”

“So am I.”

“Now maybe you’ll reconsider.”

“About what?”

“The pills I bought.”

“Will you leave me alone with those pills? Will you?”

“I’ll never say who the father is. I promise. Birdie, look at me. I
promise.”

He looked at the black, bleary eyes, the greasy, flaking skin, the hard little lips that never smiled far enough to betray the fact of her teeth. “I’d as soon jerk off into the toilet as give it to you. Do you know what you are? You’re a moron.”

“I don’t care what you call me, Birdie.”

“You’re a goddamned subnormal.”

“I love you.”

He knew what he had to do. He’d seen the thing last week when he’d gone through her drawers. Not a whip, but he didn’t know what else to call it. He found it again at the bottom of the underwear.

“What was that you just said?” He thrust the thing into her face.

“I love you, Birdie. I really do. And I guess I’m about the only one who does.”

“Well, this is how I feel for
you.”

He grabbed the collar of her robe and pulled it down off her shoulders. She’d never let him see her naked before and now he understood why. Welts and bruises covered her body. Her ass was like one big open wound from being whipped. This was what she got paid for, not being fucked. This.

He laid into her with his whole strength. He kept going until it didn’t matter anymore, until he had no feelings left.

The same afternoon, without even bothering to get drunk, he went to Times Square and enlisted in the U.S. Marines to go and defend democracy in Burma. Eight other guys were sworn in at the same time. They raised their right arms and took one step forward and rattled off the Pledge of Allegiance or whatever. Then the sergeant came up and slipped the black Marine Corps mask over Birdie’s sullen face. His new ID number was stenciled across the forehead in big white letters: USMC100-7011-D07. And that was it, they were gorillas.

“Take a factory,” Ab said. “It’s the same sort of thing exactly,” What kind of factory Chapel wanted to know.

Ab tipped his chair back, settling into the theory as if it were a warm whirlpool bath in Hydrotherapy. He’d eaten two lunches that Chapel had brought down and felt friendly, reasonable, in control. “Any kind. You ever worked in a factory?”

Of course he hadn’t. Chapel? Chapel was lucky to be pushing a cart. So Ab went right on. “For instance—take an electronics-type factory. I worked in one once, an assembler.”

“And you
made
something, right?”

“Wrong! I put things together. There’s a difference if you’d use your ears for one minute instead of that big mouth of yours. See, first off this
box
comes down the line, and I’d stick in this red board sort of thing, then tighten some other mother on top of that. Same thing all day, simple as A-B-C. Even you could have done it, Chapel.” He laughed.

Chapel laughed.

“Now what was I really
doing?
I
moved
things, from here to there….” he pantomimed here and there. The little finger of the left hand ended at the first knuckle. He’d done it himself at his initiation into thek ofc twenty years ago (twenty-five actually), a single chop of the old chopper, but when people asked he said it was an industrial accident and that was how that goddamned system destroyed you. But mostly people knew better than to ask.

“But I didn’t
make
anything at all, you see? And it’s the same in any other factory—you move things or you put them together, same difference.”

Chapel could feel he was losing. Ab talked faster and louder, and his own words came out stumbling. He hadn’t wanted to argue in the first place, but Ab had tangled him in it without his knowing how. “But something, I don’t know, what you say is … But what I mean is—you’ve got to have common sense, too.”

“No, this is
science.”

Which brought such a look of abject defeat to the old man’s eyes it was as if Ab had dropped a bomb, boff, right in the middle of his black, unhappy head. For who can argue against science. Not Chapel, sure as hell.

And yet he struggled up out of the rubble still championing common sense. “But things get made—how do you explain that?”

“Things get made, things get made,” Ab mimicked in a falsetto voice, though of the two men’s voices Chapel’s was deeper. “What things?”

Chapel looked round the morgue for an example. It was all so familiar as to be invisible—the slab, the carts, the stacks of sheets, the cabinet with its stock of fillers and fluids, the desk…. He lifted a black Identi-Band from the clutter on the desk. “Like plastic.”

“Plastic?” Ab said in a tone of disgust. “That just shows how much you know, Chapel. Plastic.” Ab shook his head.

“Plastic,” Chapel insisted. “Why not?”

“Plastic is just putting
chemicals
together, you illiterate.”

“Yeah, but.” He closed one eye, squeezing the thought into focus. “But to make the plastic they’ve got to—heat it. Or something.”

“Right! And what’s heat?” he asked, folding his hands across his gut, victorious, full. “Heat is kinetic energy.”

“Shit,” Chapel maintained. He massaged his stubbly brown scalp. Another argument lost. He never understood how it happened.

“Molecules,” Ab summed up, “moving. Everything breaks down to that. It’s all physics, a law.” He let loose a large fart and pointed his finger, just in time, at Chapel’s groin.

Chapel made a smile acknowledging Ab’s triumph. It was science all right. Science battered everyone into submission if it was given its way. It was like trying to argue with the atmosphere of Jupiter, or electric sockets, or the steroid tablets he had to take now—things that happened every day and never made sense, never would, never.

Dumb nigger, Ab thought, feeling friendlier in proportion to Chapel’s perplexity. He wished he could have kept him arguing a while longer. There was still religion, psychosis, teaching, lots of possibilities. Ab had arguments to prove that even these jobs, which looked so mental and abstract on the surface, were actually all forms of kinetic energy.

Kinetic energy: once you understood the meaning of kinetic energy all kinds of other things started becoming clear.

“You should read the book,” Ab insisted.

“Mm,” Chapel said.

“He explains it in more detail.” Ab hadn’t read the entire book himself, only parts of the condensation, but he’d gotten the gist of it.

But Chapel had no time for books. Chapel, Chapel pointed out, was not one of your intellectuals.

Was Ab? Intellectual? He had to think about that one for a while. It was like wearing some fruity color transparency and seeing himself in a changing booth mirror, knowing he would never buy it, not daring even to walk out on the sales floor, but enjoying the way it fitted him anyhow: an intellectual. Yes, possibly in some other reincarnation Ab had been an intellectual, but it was a goofy idea all the same.

Right on the button, at 1:02, they rang down from ‘A’ Surgery. A body.

He took down the name in the logbook. He’d neglected to start a new page and the messenger hadn’t come by yet for yesterday’s, so he entered Time of Death as 11:58 and printed the name in neat block letters: NEWMAN, BOBBI.

“When can you get her?” asked the nurse, for whom a body still possessed sex.

“I’m there already,” Ab promised.

He wondered what age it would be. “Bobbi” was an older type name but there were always exceptions.

He booted Chapel out, locked up, and set off with the cart to ‘A’ Surgery. At the bend of the corridor, right before the ramp, he told the new kid at the desk to take his calls. The kid wiggled his skimpy ass and made some dumb joke. Ab laughed. He was feeling in top shape, and it was going to be a good night. He could tell.

Chapel was the only one on and Mrs. Steinberg, who was in charge tonight, though not actually his boss, said, “Chapel, ‘B’ Recovery,” and handed him the slip.

“And move,” she added off-handedly, as another woman might have said, “God bless you,” or “Take care.”

Chapel, however, had one speed. Difficulties didn’t slow him down; anxieties made him go no faster. If somewhere there were cameras perpetually trained on him, viewers who studied his slightest actions, then Chapel would give them nothing to interpret. Loaded or empty, he wheeled his cart along the corridors at the same pace he took walking home after work to his hotel on 65th. Regular? As a clock.

Outside ‘M’ Ward, on 4, by the elevators, a blond young man was pressing a urinal against himself, trying to make himself piss by groaning at his steel pot. His robe hung open, and Chapel noticed that his pubic hair had been shaved off. That usually meant hemorrhoids.

“How’s it going?” Chapel asked. His interest in the patients’ stories was quite sincere, especially those in Surgery or ENT wards.

The blond young man made an anguished face and asked Chapel if he had any money.

“Sorry.”

“Or a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke. And it’s against the rules, you know.”

The young man rocked from one leg to the other, coddling his pain and humiliation, trying to blot out every other sensation in order to go the whole way. Only the older patients tried, for a while at least, to hide their pain. The young ones gloried in it from the moment they gave their first samples to the aide in Admissions.

While the substitute in ‘B’ Recovery completed the transfer forms Chapel went over to the other occupied unit. It held, still unconscious, the boy he’d taken up earlier from Emergency. His face had been a regular beef stew; now it was a tidy volleyball of bandages. From the boy’s clothes and the tanned and muscly trimness of his bare arms (on one biceps two blurry blue hands testified to an eternal friendship with “Larry”) Chapel inferred that he would have had a good-looking face as well. But now? No. If he’d been registered with one of the private health plans, perhaps. But at Bellevue there was neither staff nor equipment for full-scale cosmetic work. He’d have eyes, nose, mouth, etc., all the right size and sitting about where they ought to, but the whole lot together would be a plastic approximation.

So young—Chapel lifted his limp left wrist and checked the age on the Identi-Band—and handicapped for life. Ah, there was a lesson in it.

“The poor man,” said the substitute, meaning not the boy but the transfer. She handed Chapel the transfer form.

“Oh?” said Chapel, unlocking the wheels.

She went round to the head of the cart. “A subtotal,” she explained. “And… ” The cart bumped gently into the door frame. The bottle swayed at the top of the intravenous pole. The old man tried to lift his hands but they were strapped to the sides. His fingers clenched.

“And?”

“It’s gone to the liver,” she explained in a strange whisper.

Chapel nodded somberly. He’d known it must have been something as drastic as that since he was routed up to heaven, the 18th floor. Sometimes it seemed to Chapel that he would have saved Bellevue a lot of needless trouble if he’d just take all of these to Ab Holt’s office straightaway instead of bothering with the 18th floor.

In the elevator Chapel paged through the man’s file. WANDTKE, JWRZY. The routing slip, the transfer form, the papers in the folder, and the Identi-Band all agreed: JWRZY. He tried sounding it out, letter by letter.

The doors opened. Wandtke’s eyes opened.

“How are you?” Chapel asked. “Do you feel okay? Hm?”

Wandtke began laughing, very softly. His ribs fluttered beneath the green electric sheet.

“We’re going to your new ward now,” Chapel explained. “It’s going to be a lot nicer there. You’ll see. Everything is going to be all right, uh …” He remembered that it was not possible to pronounce his name. Could it be, despite all the forms, a mistake?

Anyhow there wasn’t much point trying to communicate with this one. Coming up from surgery they were always loaded so full of whatever it was that there was no sense to anything they said. They just giggled and rolled their eyes around, like this Wandtke. And in two weeks, cinders in a furnace. Wandtke wasn’t singing at least. Lots of them sang.

Chapel’s shoulder started in, a twinge. The twinge became an ache and the ache thickened and enveloped him in a cloud of pain. Then the cloud scattered into wisps, the wisps vanished. All in the distance of a hundred yards in ‘K’ wing, and without his slowing, without a wink.

It wasn’t bursitis, that much seemed certain. It came and went, not in flashes, but like music, a swelling up and then a welling away. The doctors didn’t understand it, so they said. Eventually it went away, and so (Chapel told himself) he had nothing to complain about. That things could have been a lot worse was demonstrated to him all the time. The kid tonight, for instance, with the false face that would always ache in cold weather, or this Wandtke, giggling like he’d come from some damned birthday party, and with his liver changing itself all the while into some huge, horrible growth. Those were the people to feel sorry for, and Chapel felt sorry for them with some gusto. By comparison to such wretched, doomed creatures, he, Chapel, was pretty lucky.

He handled dozens every shift, men and women, old and young, carting them here and there, up and down, and there wasn’t one of them, once the doctors had done their job, who wouldn’t have been happy to change places with the short, thin, brittle, old black man who wheeled them through these miles of scabby corridors, not one.