Saigon, Illinois

by Paul Hoover

  Randy said he and Carlo had decided nothing was innate in the way people dressed. If a man wanted to wear kilts or negligees down the street, that was his business. In fact, the fashion statement was, in a real sense, the final statement of the revolution. When everyone felt free enough to risk the ridiculous, society would be truly free, not before.

  “Did you sleep with them?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said proudly. He winked and went into another room.

  It made me feel better about Randy. He had always been so self-conscious and anxious, which made him the perfect victim, and here he was, the seducer and flirt. If this could happen after being beaten up by your girl friend, world peace was possible.

  It was the Fourth of July, and I had trouble getting to work because of all the traffic on Lake Shore Drive where the annual Air Show was going on. Sitting on bleachers, the family audience watched their country’s war machines fly over Lake Michigan. As I sat in the middle of a traffic jam, ten minutes late for work, an enormous jet flew in at high speed, braked in the air, and floated over the harbor like an ancient reptile. The exhaust from its ventral jet made the water concave in an area the size of a baseball diamond. Its power was disgusting and frightening. Then the Blue Angels streaked out of the horizon, the four planes peeling off from the center. The picture they painted in jet exhaust was that of a flower. The crowd sighed and clapped at the beauty of it all.

  That night nobody died at the hospital, but a black nursing aide named Ida came to work beaten up. One eye was nearly closed and the cornea of the other was red with blood. She looked like she needed to be hospitalized.

  “What happened?” I asked Linda Ruh, the nurse on Six North.

  “Ida was raped last night on her way home from work,” she said as she put the six o’clock med tray together.

  “She looks terrible,” I said. “Why is she at work?”

  “She called in sick,” Linda said, “but Graven wouldn’t let her take the day off. She said if she didn’t show up, she was fired.”

  Malvinia Graven was probably the most feared nursing supervisor. She was of the old school and gave no slack. When she came onto a unit, everyone sat up straight and tried to look busy.

  “It isn’t fair,” I said. “She was really raped?”

  “He pulled her behind an elementary school,” Linda said, “and stuck a gun in her mouth.”

  I went into the supply room, where Ida was collecting towels for the bedbaths she had to give.

  “Hi, Holder,” she said.

  “I heard what happened,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That bitch Graven is gonna get it someday,” she said with surprising heat. She was usually very mild-mannered and one of the best aides in the hospital. I knew she couldn’t afford to lose the job, because she had three small children and no husband. She could have made more money on welfare than on an aide’s salary, but she was too proud to accept it. At that moment, I hated Graven, the United States Air Force, apple pie, hamburgers, and the sky over Montana. Life had never seemed more outrageous.

  “Maybe Graven will fall down a laundry chute and die,” I said, but as soon as I said it, Ida’s face told me to shut up and turn around. There was Malvinia Graven, clipboard in hand, regarding me with cold fury. She didn’t say anything, but I knew I was in for some serious trouble. Blue veins stood up on the backs of her hands, and her gray eyes quivered.

  Around ten o’clock that night, Barbara, Ed, and I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, where there was an exercise deck and solarium for ambulatory patients. It was rarely used, but now and then you’d see some sturdy soul out there, struggling in the wind. There was something about the place that communicated sadness. In one corner of the solarium, old hospital furniture and equipment was stacked in disarray. Behind the heap, where you would least expect an office, a door opened and a small man in a rumpled suit walked rapidly toward the elevator, holding a sheaf of rumpled papers. This Kafkaesque figure was David Timor, whose job was making out employee schedules. That was all he did, high above the city, in a room with no windows. All evening he filled out grids with names and dates, in two-week segments. You could request a certain schedule, but it was finally David Timor’s decision, filling in an O for a day off with impeccable penmanship. According to Romona, who had told us of his existence, he never mixed with any of the other employees. As far as I knew, this was the first time any regular employees had seen him. The moment was eerie and giddy, as if we’d come across an obscure salamander that was only rumored to exist. We couldn’t help laughing because of the way he carried himself, like a common little god. When he saw us, he scuttled into a stairwell and was gone.

  Seeing him reminded me that a patient was rumored to live on the eighteenth floor. His name was Harms and he had been there for years—wealthy, eccentric, and chronically ill. After he donated a few million dollars to the hospital, they converted a storeroom into a penthouse, where private nurses tended him around the clock. In fact, his was the only room on the eighteenth floor. One floor below, in the fenced-in exercise area, we could see the lights of his room, mysterious and yellow. Nobody ever saw Harms except for nurses and doctors, and I often wondered if he wasn’t a myth, like the phantom of the opera. Timor was his gnomic assistant, and Malvinia Graven, with her Medusan disposition and transparent teeth, was the agent of change, the one who went forth from this high place.

  Our plan was to watch the fireworks display over Oak Street Beach, some of which had already started. You could hear dull thuds and explosive static. After a while, the show grew in intensity, and the near sky filled with light. The deck on which we stood was brightly lit for a moment, then shivered into darkness. It was like the flares in Vietnam, I imagined, but no enemy soldiers flickered along the horizon. Barbara put her arm around me when Ed wasn’t looking, but she nervously dropped it after a while. The fireworks didn’t please her very much and she wanted to go back inside. Ed was having a wonderful time. He’d noticed other fireworks displays all over the city and ran from one parapet to another, pointing at them. One was on the West Side, perhaps in Garfield Park. Another was on the South Side, in Comiskey Park, where the White Sox had just finished a game. Two displays of lesser intensity could be seen farther out, perhaps in the suburbs. You couldn’t hear them, but they gave you a sense of fireworks going off all over the country at that moment, in the small towns and fading cities, in ball parks and broken-down drive-in theaters. You could imagine the faces of people gazing up at the fire, but they weren’t the confident faces of a Norman Rockwell drawing. They were tense with history, because they knew someone fighting in Vietnam, and the fireworks made his peril real to them.

  Barbara asked me to come home with her that night, and when I gave an excuse she looked hurt. I couldn’t tell her that Gary Janush had called from his home with news about Malvinia Graven. She’d called repeatedly, asking for my resignation. He said he’d try to protect me, but his own job was in jeopardy, and Normal Cane had already spoken of me with suspicion. If my involvement in the demonstration and the insult to Graven were put together, I didn’t stand a chance. That was too bad, he said, because I had only two months to go. At any rate, there would be a meeting tomorrow to decide my fate, and I wasn’t invited.

  The apartment on Halsted was desolate and dreary. When I turned on the kitchen light, cockroaches exploded out of the sink and headed for every crack and crevice. Nobody else appeared to be at home. All the bedroom doors were open except for Penelope’s. I knocked on it, and when there was no answer, I entered. The room was extremely small. There was space enough for the bed and a small nightstand, but there wasn’t even a closet. A small pile of her sad-looking clothes occupied one corner. They were dark and musty, and, standing near them, I could smell camphor, wool, lonesomeness, and weekends. There was also the unexpected smell of men’s cologne. I thought it was probably Edgar’s, then I was sure it was Edgar’s, and to my shock I felt a stirring in my groin. Olfactory voyeurism? Pen
elope and Edgar? It didn’t seem possible.

  My face in Penelope’s small antique mirror was a shock. It was known to me, but it was new. It seemed to belong to someone of vast inexperience, or even to a person who had never had an experience. There was intelligence in the eyes, but, on the whole, this was the icon of a face, the drawing of a face, faceness. I pushed the rubbery features with my fingers, as Rowdy Triplett had done to his dead son.

  Exhausted, I lay down on the bed, which was far too short for me and narrow, nearly, as a bench. The ceiling looked very distant, as if drifting out of reach. During the day, light came into the room feebly, colored by years of dirt on the glass. It was as if the light withdrew at the very moment it entered. For all I knew, someone from the government was watching me even now, taking notes and smiling. It was the smile of that invisible agent that crossed my mind as I drifted off to sleep, arms and legs askew. Not even the drowned, floating underwater, ever slept so soundly.

  I awoke at four in the morning, staggered down the hall, and peeked into my own bedroom. Penelope wasn’t there. An emptiness filled the apartment that was change itself. None of us were the same as yesterday, and we would be even more different tomorrow. I wanted this change to stop. I wanted leaves to stop falling, and meat to stop rotting. The rivers could all stop flowing, as far as I was concerned. We needed a little stability here.

  A cigarette glowed in the dark of the front room. It was probably Randy scrunched down on the couch, having intense and dark thoughts. Instead, it was Penelope and Randy, sharing his cigarette. They were also entirely naked.

  “Hello,” said Penelope crisply and brightly. “Did we have a good sleep?”

  “I should be asking you that question,” I said.

  “It’s the bed,” she said, stroking Randy’s chest with one hand. “It puts one into a virtual coma.”

  I studied their bodies. In spite of her limp, Penelope had no signs of a crippling injury, and she was better put together than I had thought. In fact, she looked a lot better naked than she did dressed. In the nude, she had the confidence of a professional model. It was I who felt ill at ease, slumped in a canvas chair, shaking the sleep out of my head. Randy gave me a look that mixed snideness and pity. Disengaging himself from Penelope’s arms, he leaned forward, his round face illuminated by the available light from the hall.

  “Want a cigarette?” he asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said glumly.

  “What’s the matter, Jim?” asked Penelope with concern.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about things at work. About things in general.”

  “You should take a break from that place,” Randy said. “It’s not good to be around death so much.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Every time I take a body to the morgue, I think, This will be me someday. Somebody will wrap me in cloth, load me onto a cart, and drop me onto a cold slab. They won’t know who I was or what I thought about life. It won’t matter; I’ll just be dead.”

  Wind came through the window behind Penelope, the slightly chill wind of early morning. She shivered and reached for her purple top, which was on the floor beside her. It immediately made her smaller and mousier. As Penelope retreated into a more timid persona, Randy also seemed less confident. His eyes made an anxious accounting of the room, and he puffed nervously on the cigarette.

  “I don’t know how you can stand that job,” said Penelope. “It would drive me absolutely into an asylum.”

  “The job is all right, actually,” I said. “The people are nice, and you more or less get used to the bodies. There are exceptions, of course. The other day, when we pulled back the curtains, the corpse was sitting up in bed. My friend Ed and I jumped back about six feet.”

  Randy was interested in the story. He liked all my morbid stories about the hospital, because they fit into his superhero conception of the world.

  “How can a corpse sit up?” Penelope asked.

  “It was actually a little old lady with a humpback that made her appear to be sitting,” I said. “It wasn’t only her position that was scary; it was also her height. She was only four feet tall.”

  “Like Isis,” said Randy, more or less to himself, “a tiny Isis embalmed in Memphis.” Lost in thought, he tapped cigarette ashes onto the coffee table.

  A shudder ran through Penelope and she began to look around on the floor for another article of clothing. She slipped a man’s blue sock onto her right foot, but made no attempt to find its mate.

  “The body was so light,” I said, “you could reach over with one hand, pick it up like a satchel, and lift it onto the cart. It couldn’t have weighed over fifty pounds.”

  “Is that what you did?” asked Randy.

  “Actually, I picked it up with both hands, gripping the sheet from above, swung it around…”

  “Like a derrick,” said Randy.

  “…and lowered it onto the cart. But the body still looked like it was sitting up. We had to push the head down in order to get the slab back in the wall. Ed said it was like shoving a kid downhill on a sled.”

  “Disgusting,” said Penelope.

  “Once we had a body that dripped blood all over our pants and shoes,” I said, remembering how Ed and I had to change into surgical trousers for the rest of the shift.

  “Stop right there!” said Penelope, pointing at me with one of her shoes.

  I stopped by Gary Janush’s office before the evening shift started the next day. As soon as I entered, he rose and came to the door. The news wasn’t good. Graven and Cane had indeed gotten together. They wanted me fired and insisted a letter go to the draft board, notifying them of my behavior. He walked me down the hall, where we could talk without the secretary hearing. We stopped in front of room 785. Inside, a teenaged girl in a body cast looked at us quizzically, as if we were discussing her.

  “I made the best deal I could,” Gary said, “but my own position isn’t the best. Graven wants to get rid of the management program altogether.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “We worked something out with Bolger,” he said, looking down the hall at an open window. “We can keep the management program for one more year if you agree to leave.”

  “Leave!” I whispered loudly. “You want me to leave? I didn’t do anything, Gary.”

  “Don’t make so much noise,” he said, looking fearfully at the nursing station. “The fact is, Holder, I had to make a deal. If I let you go now, I can save twenty-five other jobs. It’s like bleeding. You’ve got to stop the bleeding or the patient dies.”

  “That’s just great,” I said. “Thanks for your help, Gary.”

  “I busted my ass for you, Jim,” he said, offering his hand, which I let freeze in the air.

  “No,” I said, “I busted my ass for you!” I must have spoken loudly, because everyone at the station was staring at us.

  “Look,” he said with surprising heat. “You must have fucked up or things would never have gone this far. I tried for you, I really did….” His voice trailed off. He stopped looking at me directly. He said I had until the end of the week. Meanwhile, they were sending notice of my termination to the draft board. Cane had insisted on it.

  Janush turned and walked back to his office, but I knew it was no use to follow him. I stood in the hall feeling like a tunnel had opened beneath my feet. The girl in the body cast motioned to me. “Hey, you,” she said, “how about some service around here?”

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  “The service here is shit,” she said. “Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that. Your mother wouldn’t like it,” I said, leaving the room.

  That evening I worked the shift as usual. Most of the time I sat in the office waiting for the Pagemaster to go off. At ten-thirty, however, everybody gathered in room 725, where some patients were watching a “Tonight Show” rerun. It was the one in which Tiny Tim, who sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and whose humor de
pended in part on his ugliness, was getting married to Miss Vicki. The ceremony, which had been funny the first time, seemed more solemn. Johnny Carson, as best man, acted as if he were attending a real wedding. It reminded me of another evening when some of us gathered to watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon. Most people thought it was a great moment, but I stood at the back, completely bored with the idiot astronauts. The nuptials of Tiny Tim at least had the charm of a fairy tale. We knew the marriage had been a shill created by agents, and the artifice relaxed us. Armstrong probably had his lines written for him by a NASA publicist, even though his adventure was for real. “A giant step for mankind, my ass,” I had said to no one in particular, whereupon everyone in the room, the patients, visitors, private nurses, aunts, nephews, parents, children, and spiders on the wall had turned and glared at me with intense patriotic fervor.

  The American Friends Service Committee, I discovered the next morning, was located on LaSalle Street, in an old building near the Midwest Commodities Exchange. Rumpled brokers stood on the street, their pockets bulging with pieces of paper, smoking cigarettes and talking conspiratorially. I’d heard they traded in things like plywood, gold, and pork bellies—anything that had a price subject to fluctuation. If they had bought some wheat and disaster struck the crop, sending prices sky-high, they were enormous winners. In a sense, they were betting against nature, against some principle of fertility itself. I had heard that even farmers had begun to protect themselves by buying futures, betting, in effect, that their own crops would fail. It was a far cry from the image of agriculture I possessed from attending the Church of Peace, where the pastor prayed for rain in times of drought, for sunshine when the fields were too moist to support the weight of a cornpicker.

  The Merkel Building, where the Friends had their office, was on the verge of being condemned. Nothing was rented, and the old elevator, with its open grating, revealed one empty dentist’s office after another on the way to the fourth floor. The operator, who was very old, wore the uniform of a security service, but his black holster was empty, as if someone had stolen his weapon and he didn’t know it yet.