Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  “You’ve been lucky,” the doctor said. “The year I gave you has turned out to be much more than a year. Perhaps your luck will continue longer, but it can’t continue indefinitely. Get out of your mind that there’s any cure for what you have. You’ve been mortally wounded.”

  “I didn’t say anything about cures.”

  “Then what good would a hospital be? Surely you don’t mean to die in a hospital? I can’t operate. There’s no chance.” The doctor spoke slowly, his voice soft. Obviously, Feldman thought, he was enjoying the conversation.

  “What I have, this imperfection in my side, is too private to remove,” Feldman said, rising to the occasion of the other’s rhetoric, engaging the old man’s sense of drama, his conspicuous taste for the heavy-fated wheelings of the Great Moment. Looking at the doctor, Feldman was reminded of his nephew. He felt, not unpleasantly, like an actor feeding cues. “I thought that with the others…”

  “You’re wrong. Have you ever been in a hospital room with three old men who are dying, or who think they are? Each is jealous of the others’ pain. Nothing’s so selfish. People die hard. The death rattle, when it comes, is a terrored whine, the scream of sirens wailing their emergency.”

  “You’re healthy,” Feldman told him. “You don’t understand them.”

  The doctor did not answer immediately. He remained by the porcelain bowl and turned on the hot-water tap. When it was so hot that Feldman could see steam film the mirror above the sink, the doctor plunged his hands into the water. “I’m old,” he finally said.

  Oh no, Feldman thought; really, this was too much. Even this ridiculous old man could not contemplate another’s death without insisting on his own. “But you’re not dying,” Feldman said. “There is nothing imminent.” He noted with unreasonable sadness that he had soiled the tissue paper which covered the examination table. He stood up self-consciously. “I want to be with the others. Please arrange it.”

  “What could you gain from it? I’m tired of this talk. It smells of voices from the other side. Disease has taught you nothing, Feldman. When you first knew, you behaved like a man. You continued to go to business. You weren’t frightened. I thought, ‘This is wonderful. Here’s a man who knows how to die.’ ”

  “I didn’t know I would be stared at. The others watch me, as though by rubbing against it now they can get used to it.”

  “I had a patient,” the doctor said, “who had more or less what you have. When I told him he was to die, his doom lifted from him all the restraints he had ever felt. He determined to have the most fun he could in the time he had left. He left here a dangerous, but a reasonably contented, man.”

  “Of course,” Feldman said. “I’ve thought about this too. It’s always the first thing that occurs to you after the earthquakes and the air raids, after the ice cream truck overturns. It’s a strong argument. To make off with all you can before the militia comes. I feel no real compulsion to appease myself, to reward myself for dying. Had I been forced to this, I would have been forced to it long before I learned I must die. For your other patient, nothing mattered. To me, things matter very much. We’re both selfish. Will you send me to the hospital?”

  The ring of steam had thickened on the mirror. Feldman could see no reflection, only a hazy riot of light. The doctor told him he would make the arrangements.

  At first the rituals of the hospital room strangely excited Feldman. He watched the nurses eagerly as they came into the four-bed ward to take temperatures and pulses. He studied their professional neutrality as they noted the results of blood pressure readings on the charts. When he could he read them. When they brought medication to the men in the other beds, Feldman asked what each thing was, what it could be expected to do. By casually observing the activity in the room, Feldman discovered that he could keep tabs on the health of the others, despite what even the men themselves might tell him when he asked how they were feeling.

  He soon knew, though, that his was an outsider’s view, a casualness that was the result of a life’s isolation from disease, the residual prejudice of the healthy that somehow the sick are themselves to blame for what is wrong with them. Realizing this, he deliberately tried to negate those techniques which had come naturally to him while he was still the stranger in the room. He would have to acknowledge himself their diseased ally. If his stay in the hospital were to help him at all, he knew he had willfully to overcome all reluctance. Thus, he began to watch everything with the demanding curiosity of a child, as though only through a constant exercise of what once he might have considered bad taste could he gain important insight into the processes of life and death. He began, then, non-judiciously to observe everything. It was a palpable disappointment to him when a doctor or a nurse had occasion to place a screen around the bed of one of the other patients, and often he would ask the man after the nurse had gone what had been done for him.

  Even the meals they ate together were a new experience for him. There was something elemental in the group feedings. Everything about the eating process became familiar to him. He examined their trays. He studied the impressions their teeth made on unfinished pieces of bread. He stared at bones, bits of chewed meat; he looked for saliva left in spoons. Everything was pertinent. Processes he had before considered inviolate now all had a place in the design. When a nurse brought a bedpan for one of the men and he sat straight up in his bed and pulled the sheet high up over his chest, Feldman would not look away.

  He asked them to describe their pain.

  The others in the room with Feldman were not, as the doctor had predicted they would be, old men. Only one, the man in the bed next to his own, was clearly older than Feldman. But if they were not as aged as he had expected, they were as sick. The chronic stages of their illnesses—even the fetid patterns of the most coarse inroads of their decay—were somehow agreeable to Feldman and seemed to support his decision to come to the hospital. These men shared with him, if not his own unconditional surrender of the future, then certainly a partial disavowal of it; and if they counted on getting better, at least they did not make the claims on that future which Feldman had found (it came to this) so disagreeable in others. It had been suggested to them that they might not get well. They considered this seriously and acknowledged, once they understood the nature of their conditions, the unpleasant priority of doom. Only then did they hire their doctors, call in their specialists, retire from their businesses, and set themselves resolutely to the task of getting well. This much Feldman could accept as long as—and here he drew an arbitrary line—they behaved like gentlemen. He found in the sick what he had wanted to find: a group of people who knew their rights, but would not insist on them. Their calm was his own assurance that his instincts had been right, and so what little he said to them was to encourage them in that calm.

  One morning the youngest of the four, a college boy who had been stricken with a severe heart attack, showed signs of rapid weakening. He had vomited several times and was in great pain. Someone called the nurse. Seeing the serious pallor of the suffering man, she called the intern. The intern, a nervous young doctor who gave the air of being at once supremely interested in the patient’s convulsions and supremely incapable of rising to their occasion, immediately dispatched a call for the boy’s doctor.

  “It seems,” the boy said, smiling weakly, “that I won’t be able to die until all of them have examined me.”

  It was for Feldman precisely the right note. “Hang on,” he said to him. “If you feel yourself going, ask for a specialist from Prague.”

  The boy laughed and did not die at all. Feldman attributed this to some superior element in this patient’s character which fell halfway between resolutely dignified determination and good sportsmanship.

  He had come, he knew, to a sort of clearing house for disease, and sometimes at night (he did not sleep much) he could visualize what seemed to him to be the tremendous forces of destruction at work in the room. His own cancer he saw as some horribly lethal worm th
at inched its way through his body, spraying on everything it touched small death. He saw it work its way up through the channels of his body and watched as pieces of it fell from his mouth when he spit into his handkerchief. He knew that inside the other men something like the same dark ugliness worked with a steady, persevering ubiquity, and supposed that the worm was pridefully aware that its must be the triumph.

  One night as Feldman lay between sleep and wakefulness, there came a terrible groan from the next bed. He looked up quickly, not sure he had not made the sound himself. It came again, as if pushed out by unbearable pain. Feldman buried his head in the pillow to smother the sound, but the groan continued. It was a noise that started deep in the man’s chest and became at last a gasping yell for breath. Feldman lay very still. He did not want the man to know he was awake. Such pain could not continue long. He would lie quietly and wait it out. When the noise did not stop, Feldman held his breath and bit his lips. There was such urgency in the screams, nothing of gentlemanly relinquishment. He was about to give in to the overbearing insistence of the man’s pain, but before he could force himself to do something he heard the sick man push himself nearer. Feldman turned his face to watch, and in the glow from the red night lamp above the door he could see that the man lay half out of the bed. He was trying, with a desperate strength that came from somewhere deep inside, to reach Feldman. He watched as the man’s hand clawed the air as though it were some substance by which he could sustain himself. He called to him, but Feldman could not answer.

  “Mister, mister. You up?”

  The hand continued to reach toward Feldman until the wild strength in it pulled the man off balance and the upper half of his body was thrust suddenly toward the floor. He was almost completely out of the bed.

  “Mister. Mister. Please, are you up?”

  Feldman forced himself to say yes.

  The man groaned again.

  “Do you want me to get the nurse?” Feldman asked him.

  “Help me. Help me in the bed.”

  Feldman got out of bed and put his arms around the man’s body. The other worked his arms around Feldman’s neck and they remained for a moment in a crazy embrace. Suddenly all his weight fell heavily in Feldman’s arms. Feldman feared the man was dead and half lifted, half pushed him back onto the bed. He listened carefully and heard at last, gratefully, spasms of breath. They sounded like sobs.

  He was an old man. Whatever he had been like before, his contact and exchange with what Feldman had come to think of as a kind of poisoned, weathering rain, had left his skin limp, flaccid. (He had discovered that people die from the outside in.) After a minute the man opened his eyes. He looked at Feldman, who still held him, leaning over his bed with his arms around his shoulders as though to steady them.

  “It’s gone now,” the man said. His breath was sweetly sick, like garbage fouled by flies and birds. “I’m better.”

  The man closed his eyes and lowered his head on his chest. “I needed,” he said after a while, “someone’s arms to hold me. At the house my daughter would come when I cried. My wife couldn’t take it. She’s not so well herself, and my daughter would come to hold me when I cried from the pain. She’s just a teenager.” The man sobbed.

  Feldman took his hands from the man’s shoulders and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “It’s all right,” the man said. “Nothing will happen now. I’m sorry I made a nuisance.”

  “You’ll be all right?”

  “Sure. Yes. I’m good now.”

  Feldman watched the man’s hand draw the blanket up over him. He held the blanket as one would hold the reins of a horse. The man turned his face away, and Feldman got up and started to go back to his own bed. “Mister,” the man called. Feldman turned quickly around. “Mister, would you ring the nurse? I think…I think I wet myself.”

  After that, in the last stages of the man’s last illness, the disease multiplied itself; it possessed him, occupied him like an angry invader made to wait too long in siege beyond the gates. For Feldman it represented a stage in the process of decay he knew he might some day reach himself. When he spoke to the man he found that what he really wanted to say circled somewhere above them both like an unsure bird. It became increasingly difficult for him to speak to him at all. Instead, he lay quietly at night when in the urgency of his remarkable pain the man screamed, and pretended he was asleep. He could stand it only a week. Like the man’s wife, Feldman thought, I am not so well myself. No, I am not so very damned well myself. And one more thing, dissolution and death are not as inscrutable as they’re cracked up to be. They’re scrutable as hell. I’m tired, Feldman thought, of all this dying.

  Once he had determined to leave he was impatient. He had wasted too much time already. He had been, he realized, so in awe of death that he had cut his own to his notions of it as a tailor cuts cloth to his model.

  He moved quickly. That morning, while the old man slept and the two others were in private sections of the hospital for treatment, Feldman dressed. He hoped that the nurse would not come in. “Don’t you groan. Be still,” he silently addressed the sleeping body in the next bed. In the closet he found his clothes where the nurse had hung them. When he put them on he discovered that though he had worn them into the hospital only a few weeks before, they were now too big for him. They hung, almost without shape, over a body he did not remember until he began to clothe it. He dressed quickly, but could not resist tying his tie before the mirror in the bathroom. Knotting and reknotting it, adjusting the ends, gave him pleasure, imposed a kind of happiness.

  He started to leave the room, but something held him. It was a vase of flowers set carefully on the window sill. The flowers had been a gift for the old man. They had been there for several days and now were fading. He walked to the window, lifted the vase and took it with him into the hospital corridor.

  He waited until a student nurse came by. “Miss,” Feldman called after her softly. “Miss.” The nurse did not recognize him. “I want you to give these flowers to Feldman in Room 420.” She looked at the decayed blossoms. Feldman shrugged and said, “Alas, poor man, he’s dying. I did not want to offend him with anything too bright.” The nurse, bewildered, took the flowers he pushed into her hands. Feldman walked to the elevator and jabbed at the button. When the elevator did not come at once, he decided he couldn’t wait and took the four flights of steps down.

  At the main desk in the lobby he had an inspiration. “How is Feldman, Room 420?” he asked the receptionist.

  The girl thumbed through the card file in front of her. When she found his card she said, “Feldman, sir? He’s satisfactory.”

  “I understood he was very sick. Condemned.”

  The girl looked again at the card. “My card says ‘Satisfactory.’ ”

  “Oh,” Feldman said.

  “That only means he’s comfortable. In these terminal cases that’s all they ever say.”

  “Satisfactory? Comfortable? Why doesn’t the hospital tell him? He’d be pleased.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sure,” Feldman said.

  Outside, it occurred to him that since he had been partner to him in everything else, he would call his doctor. He went into a drugstore and dialed.

  “It’s me. It’s Feldman. I’m out.”

  “Where are you, Feldman?” the doctor asked.

  “In a phone booth. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me well. I wanted to thank you.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are you?”

  “I told you. I’ve left the hospital. That idea of mine about a fraternity among the sick? It wasn’t any good. I just blackballed myself. A man almost died in my room a few days ago and it paralyzed me. I couldn’t help him. I held him away from me as though he were soiled linen.”

  “Get back to the hospital.”

  “What for?”

  “What am I going to say, that you’re cured? The charts still exist.”

  “So do I. I’m not going b
ack. I’m going to business.”

  “You’re in no condition to go to business. Do you want to aggravate an already untenable position?”

  “You are maybe the world’s all-time lousy doctor. You promised death. Now you threaten it. You said a year, and I sat down to wait. Well, I’m not waiting any more, that’s all.” He wondered if the old doctor’s passion for rhetoric were still strong in him. He decided to try him. “On every occasion I am going to hit for the solar plexus of the solar system,” Feldman said.

  There was silence. Then the doctor, calmer, said, “I’ll call your wife.”

  Outside the drugstore the sun was shining brightly and everything looked clean and new. Feldman was aware of the keenness of his impressions, but astonished more by the world itself than by his perception of it, he wondered at the absolute luminescence of the things about him. Objects seemed bathed in their own light. Things looked not new, he decided, so much as extraordinarily well kept up.

  Across the street was a park, but between the park and Feldman was a boulevard where traffic raced by swiftly. He had to dodge the cars. It was an exciting game, having to dodge cars for one’s life as though death were, after all, something that could be held off by an effort of the will. The idea that he could control death made him giddy, and once, in his excitement, he almost slipped and fell. He thought, even in the act of regaining his lost balance, how strange that the death that might have resulted from his misstep would have been an accident unrelated to his disease. I’ve cured cancer, he thought happily.

  In the park he sat down on a bench to rest. His activity had made him tired. “Slowly, slowly,” he cautioned himself. He had been aware of pain in his stomach since he left the hospital. Though it was not great, it was becoming gradually more severe, and he was afraid that it would become too much for him. He found that by holding his breath and remaining very still he could control the pain. Does it hurt? he asked himself. Only when I breathe, he answered. Nevertheless, he waited until he thought he could move without reawakening what he still thought of as the slothful parasite within himself, and then he looked around.