In the Land of the Living (7 page)

Isidore hammered a nail into the side of the crate while Happy held the side in place for him, breathing out an acetone-ish air of cherry bourbon.

“No, what do you mean?” Isidore said.

“I mean—”

“I know, Happy, I get it.”

They hammered together another couple of broken crates and Happy kept on talking and talking about his prick. But just when Isidore thought he couldn’t take it anymore, Happy went climbing up the ladder with surprising strength and energy, up toward the blue light of the hatch with an anchor-chain link in his left hand—the hand missing a finger.

“See ya, Schooner Rig, my turn to drive.”

That morning, Happy had emptied his last bottle of Red Stag cherry bourbon. “You’re going to the wheelhouse,” Isidore said. “You sure you should?”

“Coop and me used to take a bottle
into
the wheelhouse sometimes. We was hellraisers, me and Coop.”

A gust of wind whooshed against Isidore’s ear and banged loud on the hold floor next to his feet. The chain link that Happy had been carrying had dented the hold floor.

Happy looked down but didn’t say anything.

“That link weighs thirty pounds!” Isidore said. “Jesus H. Christ!”

“So it does,” Happy said. “You’re learning more every day, I tell you.”

Happy went on up the ladder, occasionally missing a rung and swinging off the ladder in a very unintentional yet balletic way.

At lunchtime, Happy didn’t come down to eat. Isidore looked out a porthole.

“I don’t think we’re meant to be sailing into our own wake, are we,” he said.

They said Happy, who had fallen asleep not at the proverbial wheel, but on it, would be put off the boat in Hawaii.

This led to a long period of uncharacteristic silence from Happy, who didn’t laugh at Isidore’s farts anymore, or even complain about them. The weather was fine and Happy slept much of the days.

But at Honolulu, Happy sat down to his food as though there were no trouble.

“This fish has been dead a long time,” he said cryptically.

It was extra crowded in the mess hall. The crew of the SS
President Buchanan,
which was docked beside them, had come over to the
Garfield
to eat.

“Hey, Happy, isn’t your friend Cooper on the
Buchanan
?” one of the sailors said.

Happy said nothing.

“Isn’t that Cooper?” another man said, pointing to a long and lanky sailor with dirty brown hair sticking out from under a wool cap and big scarred hands clasped behind his head. There were moons of black grease under his fingernails.

“Yeah, that’s him,” another sailor said. “That’s Cooper right there.”

Cooper half-turned his head.

Happy didn’t look up from his fish. All he said was “This fish been dead a long, long time.”

Before he left the boat, Happy gave Isidore his sou’wester rain hat and his bottles of linseed oil.

“And you take these pants, too,” Happy said. They were the army pants that Happy said he’d bought on the black market in Vietnam. They’d probably come straight off the legs of a dead GI. “Now you ain’t Schooner Rig no more,” Happy said.

“Thank you, Happy. That’s real nice of you. It really is.”

“You believe I killed that boy in Vietnam?”

“I believe whatever you say, Happy,” Isidore said.

“Don’t
believe
whatever I say.
Do
whatever I say. But believe this: you don’t want to know what I done,” Happy said, and he walked onto the gangway, perfectly steady, and whistling in the Honolulu sunshine.

That night Happy bought the drinks, and Isidore had no choice but to match him drink for drink. He got so drunk that when he came back up the gangway in the middle of the night alone, high over the black water where duplicates of the harbor lights burned and waved like fire upside down, he walked as slowly as he knew how, thinking,
I am too high up. This is the most dangerous thing I have ever done, this is the most dangerous walk I have ever made.
But he made it aboard again, and back to his bunk, which was not so noisy as it had been before Happy was put off the ship, but still smelled like engine oil.

Isidore returned to land, where the light of the table lamp and Laura’s hairbrush and warm, dry, plaid bathrobe remained just as he’d left them. The death dreams fled. By comparison with the sea, medical school seemed civilized, the way a base camp at the foot of the Himalayas must seem civilized in comparison with the storm, snow, and avalanche above. And at the same time he felt a power gathering inside him to summit a mountain, and he smelled the nearness of the peaks in the sharp clarity of the air: he could do it. He was going to be good at this. He was going to do good.

THE CANDLE THAT
burned for his mother flickered on the sill, and raindrops traveled slowly down the dark pane facing Overlook Drive. On days like that Isidore read Keats from a wine-red book that still had the Harvard Coop sticker on the back cover, and he copied down a few phrases, which he would toss in a briefcase with poems he had written on prescription pad paper.
Sea-shouldering whales, vision of greatness, a new thinking into the heart
.

Isidore grabbed his rough red coat from the hook and said, “Did you know Keats’s girlfriend was named Fanny Brawne?”

“What does a poem accomplish in this world?” James said. “If you’re gonna waste time, wouldn’t you rather waste it with me at the bar? Cripes, we have boards coming. If you’re gonna read, read Stepp or the
New England Journal of Medicine
or something. You make me nervous.”

“Okay, gunner.”

“No, I’m just here to watch the Isidore Auberon story unfold, the hard-luck kid with the world-class arm, and I don’t want to see you throw it all away on poetry, for criminy cripes.”

“You can just say ‘Christ,’ James. He isn’t listening.”

“Not to a couple of Cleveland Heebs.”

“That’s what poems are for, by the way.”

“For what?”

“To get you through life when no one is listening, you heathen. Get your coat on,” Isidore said. “Sweet, sweet Fanny. Oh, Fanny Brawne, how do I love thee, let me count the ways. Fanny Brawne. I think I saw a case of that in proctology clinic.”

“Speaking of proctology, how’re the hemorrhoids? How’s your ass?” Ghost Boy pointed to his own ass.

“Yeah, I’m presenting it at this month’s M and M. ‘My Ass: What Went Wrong.’”

And they went out together into the wet early-evening air of Cleveland in green, green summer.

Isidore and Laura were married at Glidden House on the campus of the university. Late that night, they returned to the Neuwalders’ house in Shaker Heights, where they had first met out on the patio with the circling bees.

“You know why surgeons always stop elevator doors with their heads, don’t you?” Isidore said. “Their hands are too important to their work.”

Doc wiped a few tears away. He laughed so hard that he took his own pulse, then carried his plate to the kitchen, whistling, and joined his wife on the patio.

When he came back to the backgammon table, he smelled of smoke. “There’s nothing like family,” he said, and he put his arm around Isidore and Isidore put his arm around him and they felt each other warm and present through their shirts.

Doc dropped his matchbook back into the glass urn full of matchbooks and matchboxes. The urn was round and the matchbooks and matchboxes were of all colors so the urn looked like a globe mapping all the colors of the countries of Earth. It was very late and Isidore was still in his tuxedo with his bow tie loose around his neck. They could hear the girls talking quietly about their dresses on the patio, saying they would wear them again, and he wondered if they would. Bobby Kennedy was shot and dead, but Isidore was married. “I made it through,” he said.

“You made it,” Doc said. “We both made it.”

He told Doc about the dog that barked all night and the boards coming. And Doc came over to Izzy’s house and stuck two Librium pills inside some cold hamburger and tossed it over the fence.

James said medical school was like eating a hill of shit with a teaspoon. In fact, it was much worse than that. But it was also a crucible in which one was smelted and transformed and felt oneself being transformed, and for which four years of lifeblood was perhaps a reasonable price. Doc said that when the day came for the Hippocratic oath and the ceremony where Isidore would wear the green velvet trim of a doctor, Doc would be there to shake his hand and would be the one to give him his diploma. But that didn’t happen.

Remains of breakfast: a cold cup of coffee, the slag of eaten toast on the china, an orange peel. Doc went to California and leaned his head on a steering wheel and coasted to a stop in the highway sun and he came back in a wooden box.

IT WAS TRUE
that in the old days, he felt that some people were rooting for him. He knew many of his teachers liked him. They liked that he’d been in a foster home and paid for his dinner by working a garbage truck and that he never complained (as far as they knew) and kept up with guys who had families and money and a tradition. He had a good attitude (or so they thought) and he figured he knew what to say, and he didn’t ever give up. He was “tall and good-looking,” according to Mrs. Polanska, but more than that he lived without a cushion. He lived hysterically on the knife edge of oblivion. Most people in the world are forgotten, there’s no setting for them at the table, and that’s the way it is and there’s nothing they can do. But he was going to set his own place and pull up his own chair and refuse lost love its brutal victory and restore what should have been and realize what should be. He’d try it even if he sometimes didn’t believe it was possible, and looked around at others and thought they were chosen for success and he and his people were small and selected for pain and destruction. He would love life even though it played dirty and kicked in the balls. And some people saw this and wanted him to make it, and that meant something.

But now Doc was dead and he was an intern and nobody gave a damn if he fell off the apple cart. In fact, they hoped he would.

James the Ghost Boy’s eyes were red and the collar on his white coat stuck up on one side. The rubber loops of his stethoscope spilled out of his coat and drooped and bobbed over the edge of the chair. A penlight, dog-eared index cards, a laminated Snellen eye chart, and a green booklet of antibiotics bulged in his breast pocket.

“It’s really true,” James said. “You fleas don’t know when to get off a dead dog.”

“You called the consult,” Isidore said.

“I called in a consult, not an air strike of hypodermic needles,” James said. James and Isidore huddled together over lab values on the wavy pasted printouts in the back of the nurses’ station. James groaned. “What was the potassium?” he said again.

Beyond the dark doorways lay patients in stocking feet, with faces that reflected your gaze from out of the darkness with wet, shining eyes. Sometimes the patients sat before windows of square twilight with their bowel-prep drinks hissing ginger air beside them on the table. Sometimes they shuffled from the bathroom in feces-stained gowns.

The team met for rounds in the Austrian Room, a conference room on the general surgery ward. Dr. Stepp produced his stack of blue index cards and prepared to hear lab values on his patients. High on the wall behind him was a portrait of the leaden-eyed surgeon, Dr. Austrian, in a cracked frame. If you looked at it directly it would turn you to stone.

“I’m giving him a ride home,” Isidore said. “All right if he sits in?”

“Who,” Dr. Stepp said without looking up.

“Dr. Helpern.”

“And Dr. Helpern is?”

“He’s the surgical intern,” Isidore said, “that called us to consult on Mr. Healy.”

Dr. Stepp said no more and still did not look up. Isidore looked at James and shrugged.

When Isidore said Mr. Healy’s bilirubin was missing and would have to be ordered again, Dr. Stepp’s head shot up and his eyes broke from their card-reading squint into an imperious stare. “Well, we need to know that bilirubin right now,” he said, and turned to James. “Did you order it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, where is it, then?”

“It was missing from the chart,” James said.

“Well, we need it right now,” Dr. Stepp said.

James said, “Yes, sir, I already drew another—”

“I don’t care whether you drew another,” Dr. Stepp said. “I care whether I have it in front of me. You drew another, you say—did you send it stat?”

“No, sir,” James said. “Would you like me to draw another and send it stat?”

“I said,” Dr. Stepp said loudly, “I need that value right now.”

“Yes, sir,” James said, and pushed back from the table.

“I’ll go do it,” Isidore said, and sighed loudly.

“What are you sighing at?” Stepp said. “I’ve heard the jokes you tell, Dr. Auberon. Is that how your mother raised you to behave in a public elevator?”

“Is that how
what?
” Isidore said.

“Did you know about that missing bilirubin?”

Isidore stared at Dr. Stepp. The silence grew uncomfortable. Then he said, “I was more worried about the missing chest X-ray.”

“I didn’t write for a chest X-ray.”

“Oh,” Isidore said.

“You ought to worry about yourself, young man,” Stepp said. “You may have been Leonard Neuwalder’s chosen one, but I didn’t choose you. I’ve heard the jokes you tell. Are you one of those weird people?”

“No, I vote Democrat,” Isidore said. Stepp seemed to want to say something about this but Isidore said, “Mr. Healy’s got pleurisy on the right.”

“So what?”

“The nurse agreed.”

“So, what does that mean!”

“So I thought you might want to get a chest X-ray.”

“No. If I had wanted a chest X-ray, I surely would have written that in the chart and our trusty surgical intern here would by now have procured it.” Dr. Stepp glanced over at the GI fellow, who was on the phone. “You tell me Mr. Healy has right-sided pleurisy. If you’re presenting to me, then do it right. Vitals? Does he have a fever? Did you examine him? Does he have a fluid level? Did you percuss?”

“I’m not certain about a level,” Isidore said. “I heard rales. He doesn’t have a fever. But he’s on steroids, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Dr. Stepp said in an evil way, “he’s on steroids.” And he laughed.

Isidore didn’t care if he ordered the chest X-ray or not. Mr. Healy was a doomed shade of yellow anyway and there wasn’t anything Isidore or anybody else could do about pancreatic cancer. And Burt had wrecked his car and broken a tooth and had come over unannounced asking for money.

As they were leaving the Austrian Room, Dr. Stepp said to James, “Go ahead and get a chest X-ray on Mr. Healy. This is a teaching hospital, after all.”

“I already ordered it,” the GI fellow said as he vanished into the stairwell.

“Good,” Dr. Stepp said. “Dr. Auberon will evaluate it.”

Tireless Dr. Stepp and the tireless GI fellow trooped onward from room to room while the tired interns hurried after them.

It was half past ten by the time they dragged themselves to Isidore’s car in the dank parking structure. Water was dripping from the concrete ceiling onto the steel hood of the car. The GI consult service was supposed to be an easy month, but Dr. Stepp had made sure it would not be.

 “Is that how my mother raised me. Is that how your mother raised you, you prick? To go around talking about people’s mothers? Fuck you. What is wrong with that guy?”

“I strongly suspect micropenis,” Ghost Boy said.

“Looks to me like plain old astrocytopenia.”

Before going to sleep, Isidore pulled the prescription pad from the drawer.

Laura opened her eyes and began to cry.

“No, no,” Isidore said, and petted her hair and her great big belly.

“I know you must be tired,” Laura said. “I don’t want to disturb you.”

“Is it because I yelled this morning?”

“No,” Laura said. “I just wish Daddy would have at least known about the baby. It wouldn’t have mattered. But I just wish.”

“I’m still here. It’s you and me. It’s been you and me. It would have been you and me, anyway. I’m not going anywhere.”

Isidore jotted down a line—
faces in the cracks in Hell’s hive, they reflect your passing inquisition, and damn
you—and a poem, which he called “The Austrian Room”: