What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Corky’s attention is riveted upon Vic Slattery a few yards away.

  Vic is still on his feet, shaking hands, talking with Mario Cuomo, the Governor must also be seated at the head table but for the moment both men are on ground level as hundreds of guests drift into the dining room to locate their tables, a slow surging Brownian movement that always requires more time than organizers calculate for already it’s 8:12 P.M. and the dinner was scheduled to begin promptly at 8 P.M. and Andy van Buren has yet to make his ebullient welcoming remarks standing stiff behind the podium compulsively cleaning his glasses and smiling blindly out into the sea of faces. Uniformed attendants are ushering the guests along. Photographers’ cameras flash. Beneath the affable high-pitched din a string quartet from the local Riverdale Academy of Music plays invisibly from a mezzanine, something fiercely bright and baroque to which no one listens and if Corky Corcoran chanced to hear he might have thought it a bright-mad plucking and sawing of strings inside his own brain. Just walk out of here. You don’t even need to denounce them. Yet unable to turn back.

  Instead pushing forward as if drawn, tugged by gravity. As if transfixed by the figure of Vic Slattery, tall broad-shouldered tawny-blond head, smiling at Cuomo, taller too than Cuomo by two or three inches, Corky doesn’t even hear Sandra Slattery calling gaily down to him from her seat at the raised table, come sit down Corky, here’s your seat Corky, he’s watching though not hearing Vic Slattery and Mario Cuomo talking earnestly together, the two men are political allies yet not friends precisely for there’s the awkward matter of Oscar Slattery between them, the rough history of Union City Democratic politics since the time of Buck Glover. Corky presses forward, and now Vic has seen him, blinking and staring at him distracted for the instant from his conversation with the Governor, and even at this point Corky is irresolute not knowing if he’s going to take his seat at the head table and if so, what will follow, what will he say, what words will spring unbidden from him though the sensation of a rubber band straining tighter and tighter inside his head urges him onward You can’t go back; Time moves in one direction only.

  Pausing then as if by chance Corky turns, scanning the crowd, there’s a cigarette burning in his fingers though on his way into the dining room somebody’s asked him please to put it out, it might be he’s looking for Oscar Slattery, and also Red Pitts, a cruel laughter stirring his very groin at the memory of Red Pitts doubled over that look of absolute astonishment in his face Take that! pimp! and so by chance at 8:13 P.M. Corky sees a tall dark-haired young woman making her way forward through the crowd with the urgent yet unhurried grace of a sleepwalker, solitary and unaccompanied and knowing her destination unlike most of the others around her and it’s this determination in her manner that catches Corky’s eye even before he recognizes her: Thalia.

  Thalia!

  Corky’s so astonished seeing his stepdaughter here, emerging out of a sea of faces that deathly-pale grimly beautiful and ecstatic face, he doesn’t wonder why she’s here; to what mad purpose she’s here; and wearing Corky’s own white silk Christian Dior shirt!—the one he’d left for her on the bed.

  Wearing this elegant shirt that’s too big for her, shoulders drooping, cuffs covering half her slender hands, and what looks like an ankle-length shapeless black skirt of some cheap layered muslin material purchased off a rack of sale items at an East Indian emporium, and no doubt she’s bare-legged, in scruffy leather sandals or even black aerobic shoes. And she’s carrying an awkward-sized leather handbag conspicuously different from the tiny silk or sequined evening bag every other woman in the place is carrying. And she’s shining-eyed, and staring straight ahead. Transfixed, too. Not seeing, as if he’s invisible, her own stepfather Corky Corcoran gesturing frantically at her. It’s Vic Slattery she’s looking at.

  It happens like this, though so swiftly Corky will never register it, as if a series of electronic flashes have gone off in his face: Thalia moves in a straight unerring line toward Vic Slattery removing from her bag the Luger she’d stolen from Corky’s bedside table, lifting the long-barreled heavy weapon with her right hand and steadying it with her left in a pose, a gesture practiced to grim perfection, her expression is stony yet radiant as Corky remembers in the hospital in Ithaca when she’d seemed to be peering over the rim of the very Earth into Death, and liking what she saw. And in this same instant calling out “Vic Slattery! Murderer!” in a voice high, soprano-clear, unwavering as if much practiced, too.

  Corky shouts, “Thalia! Don’t!”—stepping by instinct toward her as if to disarm her or with his bare hands impede the bullets, he’s no more than three feet from her blocking her aim thus shielding Vic Slattery from the bullets that erupt in deafening succession the first striking Corky in the chest with the impact of a sledgehammer slamming him backward even as the second bullet shatters the wristbones of his uplifted left arm and the third bullet grazes his skull as he falls as his legs vanish beneath him as if erased by a quick careless stroke of a blackboard’s chalk marks, Corky’s fallen heavily to the floor amid the panicked screams of men and women he can no longer see nor even imagine seeing blinding lights spin wildly like water sucked down a drain by a force greater than mere gravity yet no pain nor terror not even alarm only surprise and a mild curiosity as he’s sucked away So this is it. And where

  Epilogue

  May 25, 1992–May 28, 1992

  Never race a train that was his mistake maybe but he never took seriously he might die, and he didn’t die. For the knowledge of Death refutes Death for no one who has died possesses such knowledge.

  Yet, God damn: to visit a patient in the intensive care unit of the Chateauguay Medical Center even in this private room where Jerome Corcoran has been moved following his six-hour surgery you must be a relative or a spouse but this unwanted visitor they’re telling him is hanging around outside the door wanting to see him is no relative of Corky’s and he’s pissed as hell anybody might think so trying to explain to these white-clad figures he can see only through a tunnel reduced in size to thumbs and their faces with that glare of faces reflected in toasters or in the chrome trim of a car so you understand sure the faces are real but so what?—so reduced in size.

  —No don’t let the fucker in, not now and not ever.

  Trying to explain too to his aunt Sister Mary Megan of the Order of St. Ursula come to visit him to give comfort, a weird coincidence she’s just discharged from Holy Redeemer and he’s just been admitted to wherever this is he’s in, she was waiting in her nun’s habit, stark white-starched wimple and gentle eyes when at last he woke from the coma into which he’d sunk during the surgery to remove the bullet from his shattered left lung, one of the pulmonary arteries of his heart shattered too and midway in the surgery this organ abruptly ceased but was electrically stimulated to begin again to start its beat again and if Corky Corcoran had knowledge of this fact he felt no alarm not even especial concern explaining wryly to Aunt Mary Megan he isn’t a hypochondriac and thank sweet Christ he’s insured, ninety percent medical coverage through Corcoran, Inc.’s, pension plan. Unless those cocksuckers at the IRS take him to court.

  —Excuse me, my mouth, damn I’m sorry—but Aunt Mary Megan just smiles shaking her head growing up in Irish Hill so long ago she’s used to such language. And worse. And maybe in the convent and at St. Ursula’s where she’d taught English for fifty-four years misses it? Dignified old woman in her habit and the dangling rattling shiny-black beads at her waist he’d thought as a kid at Our Lady of Mercy looked like cockroaches. Corky starts to explain to Aunt Mary Megan about the IRS challenging his pension plan but he can’t seem to remember the details nor even the name of the man, the Jew money man who’s also his friend, who’s going to save his ass and fight them. And it’s then one of the windowpanes cracks or maybe the pane’s been cracked all along and he hadn’t noticed, cold black air seeping in and Corky in his tender skinned state feels it like he’s mere meat on bones, and there’s a danger of his fingers and toes being fros
tbitten. Shivering so violently the bed vibrates so Aunt Mary Megan calls Nurse! nurse! come help us, nurse! bring a blanket please! and Corky’s pissed thinking at these prices, he’d guess a minimum of $4000 a day, you deserve better. Aunt Mary Megan takes Corky’s hands in hers rubbing them briskly to bring the circulation back, then she takes his feet in her hands rubbing the toes briskly to bring the circulation back, with frostbite there’s the danger of toes and fingers snapping off. Aunt Mary Megan assures Corky who’s beginning now to be a little scared he is going to live he is going to be all right the doctors intend to take him off the respirator in the morning if he has a good night except Corky’s thinking morning looks the same as night in this place with no name they’ve brought him. Beyond the window there’s nothing. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph pray for us Aunt Mary Megan says quietly bowing her head. Corky’s vision clears for a stark moment and he’s surprised to see inside the old woman’s ashy-creased face a girl’s sweet face, a girl he’d known, blue Irish eyes and fair-freckled milky skin of her lost youth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph pray for us he’s embarrassed being prayed over like somebody on his deathbed but his aunt’s an old lady and a nun and if it makes her happy it’s O.K. with him.

  Too young at forty-three to take any of this seriously. Though losing his hair, God damn.

  Whoever it was lifted him from the bloody-slippery floor of the Chateauguay Country Club he never saw. Lifted and bore him on a stretcher away inside a speeding ambulance inside a siren’s high-pitched scream which in fact Corky didn’t hear, at least has no memory of hearing and now his inner ears are filling up with fluid it’s a puzzle for him to comprehend what hearing is. But they were traveling fast. Fast as the speed of light. For if you die, you get there first. Wherever you’re going you’re already there. Sucked over the rim of the Earth. Except, no: the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole, is like the edge of a shadow—the shadow of impending doom but that hasn’t happened yet. And won’t.

  On the operating table beneath the blinding laser lights Corky lay as on a marble slab not so much as flinching as they strapped him down and with a saw through his breastbone and instruments sharp and thin as icepicks and a bar resembling a tire iron opened his wounded chest cavity as a butcher by manual force might open a side of beef preparatory to sawing it into pieces. The .38-caliber bullet Thalia had shot into him from his own gun was removed and the damaged lung mended and the feebly beating heart mended too like magic so it seemed that Jerome A. Corcoran had not died at all, his heart had not stopped its purposeful beat and there was the promise you won’t remember any of this shit when you’re out of here. And if you don’t remember, it didn’t happen as after Harry Blackstone hypnotized Jerome as a child and he denied this ever afterward thus hadn’t been hypnotized.

  Except: he’d seen the head ripped from the body, can’t erase the sight. The body plummeting to the ground spouting blood and the loose head falling to the ground and bouncing and rolling the eyes wide-staring and affrighted. You dumb-fuck Corcoran, that’s your face! Sure. And what they did with the head, and the body leaking blood, Corky can’t remember. Must’ve been buried. Where?

  They’d lifted him, and carried him away, and he never needed to wake as they threaded him stitching him tight. The lung, the arteries, the damaged tissue. The skull, the wristbones. He’s in this cobweb tight-stitched and bars on the bed for his own safety. Tremors in his body like shouts he can’t hear, still less control. They’d inserted by force a tube between two of his ribs on the left side to drain blood and fluids from his pulmonary cavity and another tube to siphon off air. Through his grotesquely distended right nostril a straw-sized tube attached to a respirator now breathing for him in ceaseless indefatigable unvarying rhythm like a slow march. An IV dripping into the bruised flesh at the crook of his right arm and wires to monitor his brain and his heart and other vital organs and none of these he can feel nor can he feel the catheter under the sheet piercing his sad shrunken cock to drain wastes from his body of which he has no knowledge thus no embarrassment. Nor does he smell himself or the sheets so quickly soiled. Though sometimes the shadow of a white-clad figure above him panics him to wakefulness and twitching and struggling and yelling in gagged strangulated moans he rips one of the heart monitor wires loose and thus has to be restrained.

  On a TV monitor descending from the ceiling electronic patterns move ceaselessly like saw-notched waves from left to right, left to right, left to right in sometimes erratic rhythms. One of the video games in Club Zanzibar, Total Terminator II.

  Another day, his elderly aunt-who’s-a-nun has gone and in the doorway whispering, excited murmuring and Corky squints through the gauze seeing—is it Uncle Sean irresolute there in the doorway?—and beside him taller than he a red-haired man with no face or rather a dream-blurred forbidden face so Corky knows It’s him! it’s Daddy but the spell will be broken if he reveals he knows. So he lies absolutely still swaddled tight in the cobweb and the bars of the bed like a crib shameful to him but it can’t be helped. At the same time knowing Tim Corcoran is probably not there though Uncle Sean is there, turning his straw fedora anxiously in his hands. Old man’s terrified of him.

  —Hey fuck it, Uncle Sean—I’m O.K. I’m not going to die.

  Now right in front of him speaking slowly staring down at him as if not recognizing him or not wanting to recognize him. Corky can’t see his uncle very well. Nor hear him. He’s pissed at something, or maybe just tired. The cold air wears you down. Bitch never brought an extra blanket. Where the bullet tore across his head tearing out hair, skin, bloody scalp like a hook and fracturing the bone of the skull there’s a big clot of something foreign and in fact much of Corky’s head he’s beginning to realize is wound up in something foreign, heavy as crockery on the pillow and so impossible to move.

  —I said don’t worry, what the hell—I’ll be out of here by next week.

  Thalia too is hospitalized. Corky seems to know this without knowing anything further—where she’s hospitalized, for instance. Maybe somebody told him. Or he saw it on the TV screen over the bed. The promise is she’ll be O.K., too.

  The front page of Tuesday morning’s Journal, photo of Vic and Corky grinning into the camera’s flash above big black headlines GUN ATTEMPT ON SLATTERY’S LIFE, FRIEND INTERVENES.

  The Medical Center’s deluged with messages for Jerome A. Corcoran, telephone calls, cards, flowers. So many God-damned flowers! Nowhere to put them, flowers aren’t allowed in intensive care. Corky tells the pretty blond nurse Sharon take them home, they’re yours.

  Never less than sixty-four percent of the vote. That’s a fact. Now they’re talking of Jerome A. Corcoran for Mayor of Union City, now Oscar Slattery is resigning but screw that Corky’s thinking he’s finished with Union City politics, too. And no more TV interviews—unless he gets to see the questions beforehand.

  Waking to see Red Pitts above him impassive staring down at him the men contemplating each other in silence until like a bull with an injured knee Pitts walks out leaving on the aluminum table beside Corky’s bed a small object which at first Corky can’t make out, can’t see until at last it comes into dreamlike focus: the antique porcelain doll with the waved brunette hair, round empty eyes and rosebud mouth. I’ll be waiting for you.

  At the far end of the tunnel that’s like a telescope turned around he’s watching the white-clad figures working over him. Sticking him with needles extracting blood, fluids, bone marrow from his unresisting body. And out of that marrow iron dust from the farthest stars of the Universe which is trackless and has no perimeter and is isotopic meaning identical in all directions and it scares Corky to realize he’s going to die never understanding. The iron dust of the Big Bang in the very marrow of his bones and he’s going to die never understanding.

  Telling Christina it’s the saddest God-damned thing, or maybe the funniest. You live and you die and never understand where the fuck you’ve come from let alone where you’re going, or why.

  What is
passing so swiftly so irrevocably into what was.

  How many times Christina has been here, and how many hours standing at his bed Corky doesn’t know. Must have explained to reception who she is, what her special connection to the patient is, she’s carrying a pass so it’s O.K. Staring at Corky who’s smiling at her but it’s through a barrier of some kind like scratched plastic he can see her and she sees him but isn’t somehow seeing him. Oh Corky!—my God.

  —Hey c’mon sweetheart, it isn’t that bad. Give me a kiss?

  This woman leaning over him shielding him from the cold with her warm body. Dark shining hair spilling in his face so he can’t see but unmistakably it’s her, he’s forgotten her name but knows it’s her, she’s the one. And the house in the suburbs, and the kids. She’s rubbing his frostbitten fingers in her hands and then the frostbitten toes. And finally with tremulous fingers the sad bruised shrunken cock. Love love love you Corky please don’t die. Kissing the cock’s tip, caressing the shriveled veins so they stir feebly with blood. Stooping over him to suck him sucking life into him sucking him hard so it hurts Love love love love you darling.

  The monitors continue. The IV tube drips into a fresh vein in Corky’s other arm. The respirator breathes for him in perfect unvarying robot rhythm. He asks one of the doctors can a respirator keep a corpse breathing, too?—laughing at the look on the guy’s face. And day and night identical beneath the fluorescent lights. And outside the window—nothing.

  The cold is getting worse. The broken windowpane nobody notices except him. Slow seeping air. Fuck it, Corky Corcoran doesn’t like to whine but you never brought me the God-damned blanket. Theresa has warned Don’t let the cold get inside you!

  Cunning Corky: beneath his pillow he’s hidden the promissory note for Nick Daugherty to sign. Nick’s dropping by to see him tomorrow and Corky’s going to take the document out and shove it in his face saying O.K. pal let’s cut the bullshit. This is for you. And Nick’s got no option but to sign. If you don’t sign a promissory note you’re saying outright you’re a crook, a bum, you’d steal from your own best friend, you’d take advantage of a good-hearted dumb-shit’s trust. And if you do sign but don’t pay up your friend’s got the legal means to sue you.