Hostages to Fortune (30 page)

Life too was a club in which your membership was kept active even when your dues had gone unpaid. From this most unexclusive of clubs you were not permitted to resign. Once a member, you were kept on the roll for as long as a breath was left you.

Should you try to opt out, you were never afterwards a popular member; you were ostracized as an ingrate and shunned as a renegade, a traitor to the side. It began at once. A team of army doctors working to save the life of an enemy soldier must do so with the same detachment, the same professional disinterest as those working to save the life of a would-be suicide. What they were working to save was not the person but the principle. The principle was the one to which they had sworn their Hippocratic oath, the sanctity of all human life, even an unwanted one. And just as the enemy soldier saved from death was not repatriated but was kept a prisoner for the duration, so with the thwarted suicide: it was restricted life to which he was restored, it was those comrades of his for whom hostilities had ceased, the army of the dead, whom he was not permitted to rejoin.

Once he had been critical of Cathy for supposing that Anthony had taken an easy out by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills. Now he was to learn how uneasy an out that was when you tried it and barely failed and how grievous the aftereffects could be. You did not just wake up from a longer and deeper than usual sleep.

He had very nearly succeeded in his intention. He had snuffed out the flame of life, only the pilot light burned on, a pinpoint of vitality that flickered like a match in the vastness of a cavern. He could see nothing, hear nothing, could not move a muscle. Was he in a coffin, in his grave, mistakenly thought to be dead? In a straitjacket to restrain him from further violence to himself? He would be told later of times when he had shown no outward sign of life, no pulse, no discernible respiration, no reaction to the prick of a pin. He did not know where he was or at first who he was. His mind was a blank. It held no memories, received no stimuli. It might have been a disembodied organ kept alive in a culture. In this comatose condition he was like the victims of certain venomous spiders, paralyzed, wound in webs, preserved from spoiling by the barest circulation of their own blood until such time as they were wanted to provide a meal.

Sounds reached him, human voices, words in a language he had once known, reminding him of living, of the pain of living. He tried to speak, to say, “Please, let me die. I want to die. Please, leave me and I will be able to die.” Even after his sight had returned his tongue remained partially paralyzed and his speech slurred like that of a person who has suffered a stroke, but at some point he must have managed to make himself understood because he was told no, he was not blind. His eyelids were paralyzed—temporarily—but he was not blind. Later he would learn that no one knew for sure that it was only temporary or that he was not blind as well. He could have been. He could have been totally, permanently paralyzed. He could have suffered incapacitating brain damage.

Out of the milky mists a world slowly took shape in which everybody was twins. A world in which people, ghosts of people, all in white, all silent in their rubber-soled shoes, were all in the endless process of doubling as though through binary fission. He gestated. The room, white, unrelieved by color, uterine, was his womb, the oxygen tent his placenta, the tube attached to his arm his umbilical cord. Most of the time he slept. Later he pretended to sleep so as to avoid contact with the nurses and the doctors. As these gained in substantiality they saddened him all the more. He longed to die. He dreaded having to make the excuses and the apologies, to tell the lies, that would be expected of him for having tried to do so.

Even when, as in staring at the halves of a stereo picture until finally the two images merge and become one, people ceased to be twins and became single individuals, the expressions on their faces remained split by their mixed feelings toward him. He was not your ordinary patient recovering from near death through accident or disease. They were wary of him as though he might be contagious, yet they were intrigued by a specimen different enough to reject the gift of life and anticipate the universal dread, the very thing it was their profession to postpone.

The humiliation of being dependent upon others, in his case upon strangers, was compounded by a sense of his unworthiness of their care and his ingratitude for it, his indifference to the life they were working to restore to him. He was expected to feel contrite and lucky to have escaped the consequences of his rashness and folly, to have learned his lesson and be thankful to these good people for having saved him from himself. He was supposed to feel like a chastised and chastened child spared by mere chance and by the mindfulness of his elders from the consequences of some childish not to say mischievous act of his. What he felt was that he had been thwarted in his purpose by busybodies, do-gooders who had invaded his privacy and interfered with his careful and terrible plans. He wanted not to know the name of whoever had found him. These people were not trying to save him out of any love for him. He was nothing to them. Less than nothing. No, he was something to them: he was a fool and a troublemaker. They had enough calls upon their time and talents from people really sick, really hurt, eager to be helped and cooperative, appreciative of the concern being shown for them—in a word, sensible people. He sensed beneath their noncommittal exteriors a hostility toward him for his disloyalty to the race of which they were the guardians. They had sworn to preserve human life; he called into question the reason for their professional dedication. How much trouble he had gone to, how much pain he had endured, and it was all for nothing! And for this he was expected to be grateful. Yet such was the force of human tradition and training that he felt ashamed of his ingratitude.

Oh! Dreadful is the check, intense the agony,

When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;

When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again.

The parts of his body reassembled bit by bit like an army put to rout, with scattered detachments straggling in and reporting day by day. They brought details of their defeat, of their losses. His perceptions remained dulled and distorted. Long after he had stopped seeing double the outlines of objects remained indistinct, blurred, colors muddied, distances deceptive. His body felt as though it had cracked apart like the pieces of a jarred jigsaw puzzle, or like the splinters of a broken mirror.

Just as his eyes would not focus properly nor his limbs coordinate, so his feelings fluctuated wildly out of his control. To the hospital staff he was a vandal who had damaged a work of art by the greatest of masters, and with the patience of a team of restorers they had pieced him together again. But he could see into himself as through a fluoroscope and knew his every crack. Fits of unprovoked rage shook him, tears of self-pity flooded him. Angry self-justification changed in a twinkling to self-loathing. To be sorry to be saved from death was too confused a feeling to cope with.

Even while he lay prostrate and helpless in bed there was one thing he knew. He would never be the same again. What he would be he did not know, just how he would differ from before, but he would never be the same again. He had trespassed a forbidden boundary and had returned a man transformed. They might restore him to life but he would be a person who, while he had failed in his attempt to kill himself, had succeeded in killing a vital part of himself, that which was his key link with his kind. As murderers did, so did unsuccessful self-murderers: he had cut himself off. He was cut off even from others like himself, survivors of suicide attempts, from them perhaps most of all, for if they were shunned and feared by everybody else they were feared and shunned the most by their own sort. They knew as did nobody else the burden of incommunicable experience and the guilt for having transgressed the primal taboo. The faces of his fellow patients with hopes for themselves and dread of death, their relatives coming to visit them, concerned for their well-being, cheered by their recovery—he was no part of that world.

As for him, his first and only visitor, when he was able to receive them, was Anthony. He found him seated in the armchair beside his bed waiting for him to awaken. It was the first and would be his last visit and he stayed just long enough to say by the contemptuous expression on his ravaged face, “Well, Dad, you botched it.”

There was something contemptible about a man who tried to kill himself and failed. Some incommensurable gap between so grim an intention and such ineptitude of execution. What could be easier? What
could
a man do who couldn't do that? What was more comical than would-be tragedy? Anthony had meant business. The method he had chosen, or that had chosen him, left no chance for failure. As for himself, he must never from the start have had the nerve to do the job efficiently. He must have meant not to succeed. He was an impostor, a faker.

He felt he had earned all mankind's mistrust. Never again would he be accepted as a reliable member of the race. Despite his efforts to conceal it, the doctor suspected that as soon as he was able he would make another attempt upon his life. Would he? Once, before trying it, he would have said no. At a later time, just before trying it, he would have said yes, and if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Having tried it and failed taught you that you never knew what you might do. He could rely upon himself now no more than others could rely upon him.

However, he doubted that he would. He doubted that he would ever again have the strength, the determination, that he could work up a deep desire even for death. He feared failing a second time and making even more of a fool of himself. It was the sense of failure of a man who had botched a job that, if anything, would make him shy of another attempt. That: not relief, not thankfulness for his reprieve, his second chance. Yet even of this he was not sure. Even to him the appetite for life might yet return. That it might was, in fact, his greatest dread. That his fragile frame might be shaken at eve with throbbings of noontide.

For now, he lacked the strength of will to fight the return of his bodily strength, to resist the ministrations of his keepers. “Swallow this,” they told him. “Make a fist. Repeat after me.” And he did as he was told as docilely as a child. Compliance was easier than defiance. He watched the life-giving fluid flow drop by drop from the bottle, down the tube, and into his veins with a passivity born of weakness and indifference.

If he had marveled before at man's ascendancy considering that of all creatures he was born the most helpless and dependent, so slow to mature and with so much to master, he understood nature's provision now. If an infant could know beforehand all that it faced it would say with its first words, “That's not humanly possible.” It was only after it had invested too much labor, had fallen and hurt itself too many times, that to the already bruised and weary and disheartened being was shown the long road it had to travel and the burden it must bear. In learning again to talk and to walk his added burden was the knowledge that he had inflicted this upon himself.

When he first saw his reflection—and he was deliberately kept from this for a long time—he thought again that he had actually succeeded in his intention. It was a startling experience to look into a mirror and see someone other than yourself. But the hand that reached out to touch the glass for verification, though it trembled out of his control, was his hand, and by staring long enough he could detect a resemblance between himself and the pale, puffy-eyed, white-haired old man he saw reflected. It was the resemblance between himself and his ghost.

It was not too much to say that he had succeeded in his intention. Between his after and his before an unbridgeable gulf had yawned. They told him he had been unconscious for four days and that during that time his hair had turned from black to white as though by a killing frost; to him it seemed like the twenty-year sleep of Rip Van Winkle with the difference that it was he, not the world, that had changed out of all recognition during his absence. “Mr. Curtis,” the nurses called him, every twin pair of them; it was the name on the chart at the foot of his bed and he answered to it. The name was his one connection with a life that had ended as surely as if he had accomplished his aim and destroyed himself.

Or so he thought, and so he later wished, when his memories, like those seeds preserved with the mummified pharaohs in their tombs, even after thousands of years, germinated and bore fruit. Bitter fruit it was, and the bitterest were those that had been the sweetest. Amnesia was what he had sought; total recall was what he had attained. How contrary memory was! How it teased and tantalized and eluded us when we tried to summon it, how it mocked us by coming unbidden, unwanted! The life he had lost was preserved under glass, every evidence of it; no archaeologist could have been more meticulous in his excavations, and he was a prisoner inside the museum.

He awoke now from his nap, alarmed to find that he had slept and even more alarmed at the thought that he had been awakened by an insect bite. If so, he must act quickly but not too quickly. He must not panic. He must not confuse the two kinds of pills, one of which he was to swallow six and of the other to let one melt under his tongue. He lay very still, attentive to every cell of his body. He lay until all danger was past and he could be sure he was safe. Then with a sigh of relief he sat up and armored himself afresh with repellent. As he waited with his eyes shut for the time when he might open them again he considered this example of inconsistency: a man once unafraid to swallow three dozen sleeping pills, now in terror of the sting of a honeybee. To reassure him that he was only human there came to his aid a line from an old song: I'm tired of livin' an' feared of dyin'. It was a rueful amusement but the irony of that old contradiction amused him.

Left napping on the riverbank by his companion at lunch, he had slept for several hours. The shade of his tree had shifted and he shifted with it and sat there thinking further. No longer fearful that he had been caught off guard during it, he was able to appreciate the refreshment his nap had brought him. Into his rested mind now came a new, a novel conception of himself. An odd conception it was, and even odder was the fact that it should be not only not troubling but rather soothing. It struck him that his life was like a child contested in a divorce. Both his old contending selves had been judged unfit and the court had awarded custody to a guardian with responsibility for the infant's welfare. He was now that guardian. Not even in the days when his hostile halves were warring had he felt more detached from himself, but now there was no sense of friction, rather there was the sense that decisions were out of his hands. Things were as they were and what would be would be and the end would come when it came. He would just keep rolling along—no rest till the Judgment Day.