Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “I’m sorry if you find us lacking,” said Bartlett. He pocketed his pen-light and smoothed his white jacket with his palms, readying himself to depart. “But we’re not a grand hotel. Bear with us.”

  “The pass,” said Ogle, hating himself, but none the less begging.

  “I’ll leave one at the desk – on condition you’re accompanied by someone.” Bartlett showed his teeth in a medical smile. “Charm one of your friends into going for a stroll with you.”

  He went out.

  Ogle lay without moving a muscle until he felt the shame drain out of his face. He supposed he had no choice. There was no one else. He got out of bed and went to the pay phone at the end of the hallway. He dialled Barbara’s number. They had lived together for two years before separating six months ago on fairly amicable terms. She had simply had enough of him. Too much drinking, irresponsibility, and scorn.

  Her voice conveyed no hint of alarm or even surprise as he explained what he wanted, his body involuntarily writhing and twisting on the hook of his embarrassment.

  Yes, she would come.

  No, not tomorrow. The day after. When she finished work.

  No trouble. Take care.

  Then there was nothing but a dial tone in his ear. He couldn’t remember having said goodbye. Ogle put the receiver carefully back on the hook.

  It was the following day that Ogle saw Morissey weighed for the first time. The weighing took place weekly and the results were meticulously recorded.

  Morissey was afflicted with a rare metabolic disorder that was slowly making him waste away, imperceptibly killing him inch by inch, or rather, pound by pound. Nothing arrested the melting of the flesh from his bones, not the 2,400 liquid calories daily dripped into his veins by tubes, not the three hearty meals he dutifully choked down every day. For Morissey, every weighing marked a stage on his journey to extinction.

  At eleven o’clock the scale was pushed into the room by Albert and David.

  “Weigh-in time, champ,” said Albert.

  “Please, Mr. Morissey,” said David, seeing the terror which crossed Morissey’s face at the sight of the scale. “Co-operate. Relax.”

  This admonition was followed by an uneasy silence that made Ogle sit up in bed. The two orderlies were watching Morissey closely. He had burrowed down into the bedclothes and his bony hands were clinging to the metal railing of the bed. His eyes swivelled cautiously in their sockets.

  “Ah, shit,” said Albert. The old boy in 44 had tried to bite him earlier, and now he had to put up with this. “We got to go through all this again, champ?” he inquired bleakly.

  “Bugger off with that scale,” said Morissey. “Weigh your own fat, lazy ass with it.”

  David went to the bed and took him by the wrist, handling it as carefully as if it were made of balsa wood. “We’ll just slide the railing down so you can get out a little easier,” he said. A certain emphasis of pronunciation, vaguely foreign, lent his voice a lulling quality. His red hair, profuse and crested, bobbed in the sunshine as he worked on Morissey’s grip.

  “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” roared Morissey, “you’re hurting me!”

  He wasn’t, of course, and David was affronted by the accusation. “Mr. Morissey,” he said and clucked his tongue.

  “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” yelled Morissey unconvincingly.

  “Shut your gob,” said Albert. “You’re scaring the chickens.”

  A nurse stuck her head in the doorway. “Trouble, fellows?” she asked.

  “Nah,” said Albert, “we’re just weighing the champ here. Same as always.”

  She nodded understandingly and went away.

  Gradually, patiently, David had worked Morissey to a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

  “Now,” he said, “if you please, step down on the scale, Mr. Morissey.” Old-world courtliness.

  “Hop on,” said Albert.

  “Jump down a fucking well yourself,” replied Morissey.

  “It don’t bite,” said Albert. “What the hell is the problem?”

  “I ain’t climbing on that scale,” said Morissey with trembling lips. “It ain’t correct; it lies.” Tears pricked his eyes and he snuffled.

  “Okay,” said David to Albert, “lift him now.”

  And a stunned Morissey was snatched off the mattress, hospital gown fluttering, and lowered onto the scale. He slumped purposely, a passive dead weight in David’s arms. Albert manipulated the sliding weights and tried to shield the reading from Morissey’s view.

  “What is it?” implored Morissey, craning his neck. “I’m heavier, ain’t I? I’m heavier, ain’t I? Oh, God, sure I am.”

  “You’re a regular jumbo,” said Albert, tinkering. “But shut up for chrissake. I got enough trouble with this metric shit, without you making that noise.”

  “I seen it!” Morissey shouted. “I lost another pound! Oh, sweet Jesus, another pound!” He began to sob and fling his body around recklessly in David’s arms. “I’m dying. Don’t nobody know I’m dying?” he moaned.

  David stroked his matchstick arms like a mother soothing a child. “Hush,” he said. “We’re almost through.”

  Morissey contorted himself in David’s arms, flailing his bony limbs. “I’m dying!” he cried. “Don’t you care, you bastards? Don’t it signify?”

  David turned to Ogle. “Help me, please,” he said. “I can’t hold him.” But he read on Ogle’s face Ogle’s inward disturbance, the facial hieroglyphics of his own anxiety made manifest in Morissey’s struggle to free himself from the prison of his disintegrating body.

  “No,” said Ogle numbly. “I can’t.” He turned his face away from Morissey’s ugly head, each bone of the skull ridging the skin, each indigo vein a distinct, anxious swelling. He found his feet and scurried out the door. His bathrobe flapped around his calves as he marched down the corridor. In his agitation he dodged beds, lounge chairs, and wheelchairs loaded with patients. All these people had been removed from their rooms and left in the hallway while the cleaning staff plied mops, scrub brushes and floor polishers in a wholesale cleaning.

  I don’t belong here, thought Ogle. It’s a mistake. This doesn’t make any kind of sense.

  Nothing was right. His leg felt funny; it seemed to trail along insensibly, clumsily. He stopped and leaned against the dead-green wall and kneaded the muscles of his thigh. Sweat glistened in his hairline.

  “Edward.”

  What the hell is the matter with this leg? He pummelled it lightly with his fists.

  “Edward.”

  It was the old woman in the wheelchair beside him.

  Ogle looked down at her. She was restrained loosely in the chair by cotton straps that prevented her from falling out. These she hung against like a boxer on the ropes. Patches of pink, scurfy scalp showed through thin hair which had been subjected to attempts to resurrect its youthfulness by means of a rinse. Her mild blue eyes were rendered innocent by a glaze of cataracts, and a sprout of coarse white hairs on her chin made Ogle think of elderly Chinese gentlemen. What might have been a placid face was rendered angry by scabby sores which, shining with ointment, crept down her face to lose themselves in the wattles and creases of her neck.

  “Edward!”

  Suddenly it struck Ogle that she was speaking to him.

  “Me?” he said. “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m not Edward.”

  She waggled her head and crooked a finger at him vigorously. He moved a little closer. A hand darted out and snared his sleeve.

  “Edward, my dear,” she said peevishly. “Where have you been?” She lost her train of thought and her eyes shifted unsteadily as she ransacked her memory. “Been. Been. Been,” she repeated vaguely. “Look what they do to me,” she said, seizing another subject and plucking at her cotton straps. “Untie me.”

  “Look, lady, you’re mistaken. My name isn’t Edward. It’s Tom. Tom Ogle,” he replied uneasily.

  “Nonsense, Edward. Untie me this moment. And we’ll go home.”

  �
�No, we won’t,” said Ogle, tugging gently against her grip, attempting to retrieve his sleeve.

  “Very well,” she said with a sigh. “As you wish. Home is, after all, where the heart is.”

  “A case of mistaken identity,” explained Ogle.

  “As if I don’t know my Edward,” she said. “Don’t be silly, my dear man.”

  “Let go of me, lady. I mean it.”

  She began to cry brokenly. “Been. Been. Been,” she sobbed. “Oh, don’t go away. Where have you been all these years, Edward?”

  He bent towards her, trying to work her fingers loose from his sleeve. Her other hand shot up and caught him at the nape of the neck.

  “Kiss me, Edward,” she said, “for old times’ sake.”

  He thought he caught a whiff of a colostomy bag. He saw in detail the pitted, cracked sores, the old, milky eyes. “You can go to hell,” he said. “You can all go to hell. I just want to be left alone. Just leave me alone. It’s all I ask.”

  Barbara did not come the next day as she had promised. She did not come the following day. She did not come at all. Ogle did not trouble to phone her again; he was too proud.

  He stood by the window and observed life go on outside the hospital as if he were watching a movie screen. The sprinklers waved majestic plumes of silver in the summer air, the green lawns sizzled cinematically in the heat. Nurses spread their sweaters on the grass and sat down on them to eat their lunches. At that distance their imperfections were obliterated. And Ogle desired their images, like those of starlets, fervently but abstractly.

  He began to prowl the hospital hallways with his hands thrust belligerently in his bathrobe pockets. On his journeys he discovered a good many things: a burn ward where he heard the voices of scalded children crying in the distance, where visitors were fitted with surgical masks before being allowed to pay their visits. A room full of amputees who brandished the stumps of their arms like blunt antennae while they argued. And finally, the physical-therapy room.

  The therapy room was almost empty when he came across it. A female therapist was sitting on a hard, straight-backed chair with her hands folded sedately in her lap while she watched a man with flopping, nerveless legs swing his body along between two parallel bars that stood at hip height.

  The room was not provided with much equipment: an exercise bicycle stood against one wall; there was a system of weights and pulleys; some tumbling-mats. Ogle walked directly to a basketball lying in the middle of the floor and picked it up.

  He relished the pebbly grain with his fingertips. He had played the game in high school and had loved its speed, grace and fluid, intricate ballet.

  A hoop was fixed on the back wall. He launched a shot at it; the arc was all wrong, too flat. The ball bounded off the backboard and rattled the rim of the basket.

  Jarred by the noise, the therapist unfolded her hands and watched him quizzically. Ogle was stripping off his bathrobe. He wriggled out of his pyjama top and shucked off his slippers. Barefoot, he gathered up the ball, dribbled lazily around an imaginary key, feinted to his right and lofted a soft, one-handed jumper.

  His left leg almost folded up under him when he came down. He kicked it out in front of him several times and waggled his ankle. With a look of determination on his face he squeezed the ball, deked, spun and drove for the basket. The leg did not respond properly; it felt weak and rubbery.

  The therapist made up her mind. She started towards him. Ogle was massaging his thigh and muttering angrily under his breath. “Come on,” he said. “Come on. Work.”

  “Excuse me,” said the woman, “but I have no one on the list for eleven-thirty. Are you scheduled for eleven-thirty?”

  Ogle looked up at her as if this question were an unpardonable imposition. His concern for his leg was verging on hysteria. “I’ve got a problem here,” he said. “This damn leg isn’t working right.”

  “Please,” she said, “who told you to come here? Are you sure you were scheduled for eleven-thirty? Mr. Krantz needs my undivided attention. Sometimes I think they don’t know what they are doing downstairs. They know Mr. Krantz needs my undivided attention.”

  “Fine,” said Ogle. “You look after Mr. Krantz. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just shoot a few hoops.”

  “Who’s your doctor?” she said, becoming suspicious.

  “Zorba the Greek,” said Ogle, turning his back on her and dragging his leg after him to the basketball.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here, are you?” she said. “You can’t just walk in here. This isn’t a games room, it’s a medical facility.”

  “Oops,” said Ogle, “there went Krantz.”

  She cast a desperate look over her shoulder at Krantz trying to haul himself back up on the bar, hand over hand, after a plunge to the mats. “If you’re not out of here in one minute,” she said, “I’m calling security.”

  “Sure thing,” said Ogle, “but don’t forget Humpty Dumpty over there. He wants your undivided attention.” With that he lunged towards the basket and stumbled. All the feeling in his leg was gone. Nothing.

  “One minute,” she grimly reiterated.

  “Hey, you dumb bitch!” he shouted in his fear and frustration. “Lay off, I got a fucking problem here. Don’t you listen? I got a fucking problem!” Couldn’t she see? Couldn’t she?

  She looked as if she had been slapped. “I won’t tolerate that,” she said. “I don’t have to tolerate that.”

  Ogle slammed the ball into the floor. “I’ve had it!” he yelled. “You, lady, can go piss up a rope! I have had it with this fucking place!”

  “You are obviously crazy,” she said, turning away. “I’m calling security.”

  Ogle climbed onto the stationary bicycle and began to pedal. He buried his head between the handlebars like a racing cyclist and his legs spun. Occasionally his left foot slid off the pedal and he barked his shin, but he kept at it. His back began to shine with sweat; his lungs swelled and collapsed like bellows.

  Krantz had hauled himself upright and was staring at him with a bemused look on his face.

  “Hey, Krantz,” yelled Ogle, “look at the world-famous bicycle racer sweep up the cobbled streets of Monte Carlo.”

  “Give her shit!” shouted Krantz gleefully.

  Ogle jacked his butt in the air and began to really pump.

  “Yahoo!” yelled Krantz, wobbling.

  Ogle was determined to teach that leg its duty. But he did not feel one hundred per cent. He was not up to snuff. So when the therapist arrived with the security guard they found Krantz calling for help and Ogle in convulsions on the floor, his legs rhythmically drawing up and thrusting out again, like a galvanized frog on a laboratory table, swimming to God only knows what destination.

  They opened his skull and took a look. The tumour was sequestered in the folds of the brain lobe in such a way that the surgeon lost all confidence in his scalpel. So they closed him up again and wheeled him back to the ward. The doctors wished to let the tumour “ripen.” The very word led Ogle to imagine button mushrooms swelling in the humid night of some hothouse. He lay in his bed with his head swathed in yards of gauze, his eyes hooded, seldom speaking.

  Morissey, perhaps heartened by what he surmised were signs of Ogle’s imminent demise, took to conversation.

  “You know what you put me in mind of?” he asked.

  “A corpse.”

  “Oh, Jesus, what a thing to say,” said Morissey cheerfully. “Nah, a what-you-call-it? A Hindu with a thingamajig – a turbine.”

  “Is that right?” said Ogle flatly.

  “Yeah, there’s one of them in here. A real black bugger with the washing wrapped around his head – a doctor.”

  “I’m tired,” said Ogle. “I’m going to sleep now.”

  “Sure,” said Morissey. “Keep up your strength.”

  But Ogle didn’t even go through the pretence of dropping off. He neglected even to close his eyes. Instead he stared at the ceiling very hard and tried to rememb
er what had gone through his mind during those convulsions. There had been something. He had been sure.

  David tried to coax Ogle out of his depression. He described for him the glories of the Holy Land: a purifying sun like hot glass; the salinity of the Dead Sea; the holiness of the learned rabbis of Jerusalem – all as if Ogle were as ardent and as hopeful a prospective pilgrim as he. He stole a minute here, a minute there, to sit by Ogle’s bed, to smoke a cigarette and extol the virtues of the Expos. Ogle’s smokes had been taken away from him because he didn’t have full control of his limbs and the nurses were afraid he would drop a cigarette and set the bedclothes on fire. So David shared his butt, holding it for him and allowing him an occasional drag that lent Ogle’s face some of the beatific splendour of a nursing baby’s.

  David discovered that Ogle had the rudiments of chess, so on the night shift when things were slow they would play a game on David’s little magnetic travelling board. The red head bobbed and weaved above the checkered square; his fingers snapped; he hummed the overture from The Nutcracker. His body writhed, and like a Hassid lost in the ecstasy of holy dance, he was transported. David was happy amidst the smell of stale urine, soiled bedclothes, fevers and agonies.

  Ogle was not.

  Sometimes he found himself in tears. David would pat his shoulder with a large, freckled hand, with bright, virile tufts of red hair on the knuckles. “There, there,” he would say, and on the next move gratuitously surrender a knight to Ogle.

  Once Ogle threw the chessboard against the wall in a fit of petulance at losing once again. “That’s it,” he said, burning with humiliation. “I’m finished with this goddamn game. Never again. There’s no point in it. That’s it.”

  David patiently picked the pieces off the floor and tidily stowed them in the board, which also folded into a case. One of the hinges of the case was bent from hitting the wall. The lid wouldn’t close.

  David looked at him reproachfully. “It doesn’t close,” he said.

  “I don’t give a shit,” said Ogle, beginning to cry. “Do you think I give a shit about your christly chess case?”

  “You are always causing trouble now,” said David. “Why don’t you behave like a gentleman? Yesterday you wet the bed. There is no reason for that. You are turning into an exhibitionist.”