Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  “Your father didn’t have your aspirations.” “My father didn’t need them.”

  “A certain amount of ambition is healthy.”

  “Healthy! Look at me, for Christ’s sake! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?”

  “Yes, I have, but I’m not clear whom you’re blaming for your present condition. Is it people like this lunch companion from Emerging Markets, Sid Graeme, Gorman, the managing director? Is it your wife, Terry Brabet—?”

  “Don’t leave anyone out, Doc.”

  “Joe Geraghty, of course. Is that who you mean?”

  “Now you’re talking. What’s-her-name, Pamela, took snapshots, and Helen stood in for her as a catcher. She photographed the fall, and you can see him. She gave me a copy. I can barely look at it. He’s the one, Alex.”

  “I have one other scapegoat to put to you. You blame yourself, don’t you? . . . Dennis? You think that what’s happened to you is punishment for supping with the devil, don’t you? . . . Dennis? Tell me what happened after you let go of the rope.”

  11. “I fell backwards onto many different levels of hands. There were supposed to be nineteen people standing there waiting for me, nine on my left, nine on my right, and one in the middle to catch my head, thirty-eight outstretched arms with their palms facing up. But Joe Geraghty, in all likelihood the strongest person there, was distracted. Had he been responsible for catching my head, I might be dead already instead of just . . . wishing . . .”

  “Instead of just wishing you were dead?”

  “It was strange because at first I didn’t feel . . . I wasn’t in absolute agony or anything. I felt like I’d been punched in the back, like I’d received a huge punch square in the middle of my back from a heavyweight. I mentioned how it felt to Pamela and I remember she told me to tell Brabet, perhaps he could help and, slightly dazed, I did. He didn’t say anything. By then he was ushering us on to the next exercise, another one involving ropes.”

  “So you thought you might be hurt, but you continued anyway?”

  “Well, I was a little spaced-out. The immediate pain of the impact was diminishing, and I just thought . . . Everyone had seen what had happened to me, and no one was acting like it was any big deal. They’d all done it by the end, even the most timid of them, and they all seemed all right. As I said, the immediate pain was diminishing. I suppose I was sort of in shock, and I just followed everyone else to the next exercise.

  “By suspending five feet of rope four feet off the ground, Brabet had demarcated an area that he called ‘jail.’ He divided us into two groups of ten and it was the task, in turn, of each group to get all of its members out of jail without going under the rope or even touching it. By the time it was my group’s turn my leg was starting to stiffen up.”

  “Dennis, I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you there. You said that at the moment that you were falling in the previous exercise, Joe Geraghty was playing with his phone. I think you said ‘fumbling.’ Was he taking the call? Was he talking to Donald Sheere?”

  “No. That’s what I thought too, but when I asked him afterwards what the hell he was doing with the phone he said he’d just turned it off to stop it from ringing while I was jumping. So that he would be there for me. Alex, he’s full of shit. He’ll say anything to avoid responsibility.”

  “But you would have heard the ring.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. My head was fifteen feet off the ground and I was about to fall backwards. Maybe I did hear it and have forgotten.”

  “Forgotten hearing it?”

  “Sure, why not? After what happened to me.”

  “But, Dennis, someone would have heard it. Brabet would have heard it and confiscated it. He would have rebuked Joe Geraghty, held up proceedings to make an example of him and to maybe find out how Joe got his phone back. You don’t remember him doing any of that?”

  “I’d just fallen backwards more than thirteen feet.”

  “But you weren’t concussed and you didn’t then know the extent of your injuries.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So you would have been aware of any fuss being made if Joe had been caught with his phone. Since you don’t remember that, it probably didn’t happen. Joe might have been telling the truth. Perhaps he did turn the phone off in order to be there to catch you. Especially if Sheere didn’t call him back—”

  “Alex, he did. Sheere did call. I don’t know exactly when. Maybe it wasn’t then, but it doesn’t matter. The phone isn’t important anymore. Joe couldn’t talk Sheere around. I knew and even he knew he wasn’t going to manage it. Sheere had nothing to lose by selling. By the time Joe told me about the call, I was in agony. I didn’t care anymore. I was packing to leave a day early, but it was all over.

  “My leg had gotten increasingly sore. I thought it was a hamstring. I was limping around the cabin when he tried to tell me what Sheere had said. I didn’t care anymore. I was furious with him. I was in agony and it was his fault and all he cared about was his job. I was swearing at him and he was telling me to rest the leg, to take a painkiller, telling me that we had to keep our heads. We had to keep cool if we were going to think of a way out of the mess. He’s an unbelievable idiot.

  “I drove home feeling every bump in the road, every loose twig, every atom of dislodged gravel. When I got home it was already early evening and I could barely get out of the car. I couldn’t walk properly. I had to hobble, wincing, sweating, swearing through gritted teeth. I called a feeble collective hello to my family who must have been surprised to see me home so early, and headed slowly straight up to bed. Patricia came upstairs, curious about my unannounced and premature homecoming. The last time that had happened it had really inconvenienced her. This time, however, there was nothing to suggest any infidelity, although in my condition I would have missed the telltale signs she had taught me to notice. I would have missed a lover on the other side of the bed.

  “She came upstairs and looked in on me dubiously, as if whatever it was that was going on with me, it wasn’t going to be good for her. When I had finished telling her what had happened, she put her hands on her hips and said that I was too old to be running around when I should have been working. I’d had a week off and now I’d come home, gone straight to bed, and was looking for sympathy. She hadn’t had any time off and she’d had ‘child-care responsibilities,’ as she called it. It hadn’t been a week. It had only been three days. And it hadn’t been ‘off.’ She berated me with all the invective her vocabulary permitted. As she walked out of the room, I muttered that very soon I would be losing my job. She didn’t seem to hear.

  “The pain was unrelenting. Unable to go to sleep, I just lay there in an immobile nervous sweat. At around one in the morning I limped to the shower. The heat felt good. But drying myself was difficult, and by the time I had made it back to bed the palliative effect of the hot water had almost disappeared. I told Patricia I was worried. She had her back to me and didn’t say anything, but I know she was awake.

  “ ‘I’m in a bad way. I don’t know what’s wrong. I think I should go to the hospital.’

  “ ‘Okay,’ she said. She didn’t move.

  “I slipped some clothes on. I couldn’t put much weight on my leg so everything was done incredibly slowly and, despite the cold, I was sweating again by the time I made it to the car. The streets were quiet, but not everybody was asleep. When I got to the Emergency Room, it seemed most of the city was there as well. I was told there was a line and I wouldn’t be reached for five to six hours. I drove home and, having made it in the dark to the living room, stood there leaning against the wall over the ducted heating vent. It was then that I began this . . . crying, that I seem to . . .

  “At eight-thirty the next morning I drove to the local GP and told him what had happened and that I thought I’d torn a hamstring. He examined me somewhat perfunctorily and said he thought the problem was with my back, not my hamstring. He referred me to a physical therapist down the road who, the GP assured me after pho
ning him, would see me immediately.

  “Now, Alex, you have to bear in mind how much it hurt just to get to the door of the GP’s room, let alone down the steps of his building to the car. By this time the pain was constant. The physical therapist watched the way I walked toward him and told me he wouldn’t touch me without first seeing an X-ray. He thought my injury might be serious. I went somewhere else to be x-rayed and eventually I was diagnosed with fractures of the lower vertebrae, L4, L5, and S1, to be precise. In addition, I had a prolapsed disc, which was strangling a nerve to my left leg. I didn’t spend another night in my bed for three months. When I wasn’t in hospital, I slept downstairs in the living room bent over a coffee table.

  “The pain took control of my life. There were red-hot daggers piercing my back. I didn’t eat or sleep for the four days that elapsed before I was given a shot of Percocet and admitted to the hospital. The pain was so unbearable during those four days that the only thing that stopped me from ending it then and there was my very incapacity. I was too physically incapacitated to do it. I don’t think, in fact I’m quite sure, you don’t understand the kind of pain I was in. The muscles where the calf attached to the shin were being pulled off the bone. They never extended. They were constantly contracting.

  “The GP I’d first seen was on vacation for the next few days. The only other one we knew was the one Patricia had serviced all those years before when she was pregnant, and he didn’t make house calls, at least not to us. I couldn’t get into hospital because I wasn’t deemed an emergency and there was a shortage of beds. By the time the first GP came back and drove out to see me with the Percocet, I would have gone down on him. He managed to get me admitted to hospital. I was there for eight days. The plan was to allow the prolapse to correct itself. I would have agreed to anything for the Percocet.

  “In those first few days before I was admitted I touched hell. I remember lying facedown over the coffee table in the middle of the afternoon crying. The rest of the house was empty, and the phone kept ringing. The answering machine picked it up each time. It was Gorman’s secretary. She was polite the first time, but subsequent calls indicated she’d absorbed her boss’s wrath. Gorman would have been furious with me. On Sheere’s instructions, Joe would have gotten rid of the Health National shares and, in doing so, committed career suicide because the firm, as the underwriter, would have to bear the loss of the consequent undersubscription. Gorman would not have been content with just Joe’s scalp, which I later learned he had within the week. No, Gorman would have wanted to drag me over the coals before having me walked out. My absence at that time would have looked deliberate, maybe willful, and his secretary would, not least through his mood and his tone, be implicitly blamed for also being derelict in her duties, one of which on this occasion would have been to find me. So as the hours and then the days wore on and Human Resources were also put onto the case, Gorman’s secretary would have grown to hate me. She could smell blood, and it came across in the increasingly strident messages she left on the answering machine.

  “I heard them only as a special effect in the sound track of the delirium I was living through. When Patricia heard them the first day, she added to their censure by informing me that I was failing her as well. Sometime later, scared that I could lose my job for not getting back to them, she took it upon herself to tell them what had happened to me. By then I was in hospital.

  “On the eighth day there, I was put in a huge back brace, given one last shot of Percocet, and sent home. Within forty-eight hours the pain had returned, more vicious than before. I saw a neurosurgeon, who recommended surgery, but by then, because it was a work-related injury, it was out of the hands of my health insurer. Surgery had to have Work Cover approval. It took Work Cover six weeks to examine me, interview other people on the course, and finalize their paperwork. In those six weeks, I spent my days and nights draped over the coffee table living from one six-hourly dose of painkillers to the next. Patricia was furious with me, as though I had injured myself to spite her. She stopped preparing my food. ‘There is food in the kitchen. Get it yourself.’ Fortunately my appetite could not even remotely rival the pain. Occasionally, the local GP would come over and give me a shot of morphine.

  “The surgery lasted seven hours, during which time they put a specially constructed metal cage, connected to the pelvis by rods, around the bottom three vertebrae. They took bone from my hips and grafted it onto the eleven fractures in my spine. I came out of the anesthetic to find a tangle of tubes sticking out of me. I wasn’t allowed to eat for ten days. The night before the surgery, I’d been told that there was a ten percent chance I wouldn’t be able to walk again after the operation, a thirty percent chance I’d have the same level of pain as before the operation, and a seventy percent chance that I’d have the pain reduced. Who could resist those odds? Right, Alex?

  “For those first ten days after the surgery I wasn’t in any pain because of the regular doses of morphine and, even though I had to wait to know the result of the operation, it was incredibly, unimaginably liberating to be so free of pain. The anxiety I had for my future registered, as you might say, almost purely cognitively, which is to say, I didn’t feel anxious. The only food I took by mouth was the occasional piece of ice, and that had to be held to my lips. Everything else I took by intravenous drip. They wouldn’t let me eat until my bowel had reactivated after the surgery.

  “My first four attempts at walking were unsuccessful. Not only did I have no control over my left leg but, having been on my back for so long, I was overwhelmed by dizziness when I tried. It was at this time that I began having the intensive physical therapy I’m still having. The hospital staff were very encouraging. The idea was to try to stimulate the muscles through massage, lifting the leg, bending the knee, rotating the foot, moving the entirety of the leg. But I was getting muscle spasms in it. Every part of me wanted to go to sleep except my left leg, which just kept dancing, and no one could tell me when it would stop. I had lost fifty-seven pounds. I was in there for four weeks and it wasn’t until the last three or four days that I realized I was going to be able to walk. That’s when they took me off the morphine.”

  “Did anyone visit you?”

  “My parents came down from Mildura. Patricia brought James in once a week, Sundays, I think it was.”

  12. “Only toward the end of my stay in hospital was I able to get out of bed to walk to the toilet. I was in the neuro ward sharing a room with three other patients, all men. On my second day of walking to the toilet I was slowly pulling up my pants around my shaky leg when one of the other three, who’d had his head shaved and stapled all the way around, burst in on me. He grabbed me and accused me of having sex with his wife right then and there in the toilet. Then he thought I was her. He lifted his gown and tried to mount me. I pushed him away as best I could, and it made him angry. He took a swing at me, and I just managed to duck. I had to hold on to him to keep him from hitting me and to keep from falling. He was still hard. I could feel him against me. I was in agony from the movement. The whole time I was calling out for a nurse. One of the other patients in the room pressed the buzzer, and two nurses came and got him off me.

  “He did eventually recover enough to be remorseful about it. His wife must have heard about it because she was embarrassed, too. It turns out they lived in Mildura. When visiting my parents recently I looked him up. He’s on welfare now and living in an apartment on his own. His wife has gone. He’s lost everything. Used to be a teacher.”

  “Did anyone else visit you?”

  “Yes, there was a day not long after the surgery when I was visited by some of the people who had been on the retreat with me. Pamela was one of them. That’s when she gave me these photographs, the ones she’d taken, including the one of my fall.”

  “Are these the photos?”

  “Yes. You can look at them if you like. I can’t bear to. They even managed to drag Terry Brabet along. Can you believe that? Stoned as I was at the time
, I couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t actually come into the room, just stood at the doorway, raised his right hand in the air, and tentatively said ‘Hi.’ I should have said, ‘Look how far I’ve gone beyond my comfort zone!’ Then he slunk off somewhere. Couldn’t look at me for too long.”

  “Did Joe Geraghty come?”

  “He did, but not with them. He did and this I remember well. He came at

  night when no one was supposed to be there. It was after visiting hours. The other three were asleep and, since I was always half asleep anyway, at first I thought I might be dreaming or hallucinating. He pulled up a chair so that he was sitting right next to me. When he leaned forward he was level with my head and I could smell his breath, heavy with alcohol. I pretended to be asleep, but that didn’t stop his whispering.

  “ ‘Mitch. Mitch, can you hear me? It’s me. It’s Joe . . . You poor bastard. What the hell has happened to you? I don’t know if you can hear me . . . Mitch? I’m finished. Gorman had me “walked out.” Sheere won’t return my calls. I wish you were awake . . . I’ve got a lot of free time now, Mitch. My wife . . .’

  “Alex, he was practically crying. I couldn’t believe it. He had the audacity to creep into my hospital room half drunk and cry for himself, after all that had happened, after everything he’d done.”

  “Dennis, when was the last time you looked at these photos?”

  “I don’t know. Pamela gave them to me in hospital. I looked at them then. I don’t think I’ve looked at them since.”

  “That was the last time you looked at this photo, the one of you falling?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Have a look at it now.”

  “No.”

  “I think you should.”

  “No.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Fuck you. Why should I? I know what happened.”