There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  “Why?”

  “Any man over the age of thirty-five who isn’t overweight is a narcissist.”

  “That’s kind of oversimplified.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Dennis says. “You met Nathaniel Farber, didn’t you?”

  “Don’t leave me here,” Benny tells Dennis, after a long silence. “Don’t go away.”

  “Don’t leave me here,” Dennis repeats, holding his hand out for Benny to take. “Don’t go away.” After another long silence, during which they both hear a car horn honking outside, Dennis asks, “What was her name again?”

  “Nan.”

  “Oh, right. I introduced you to her.”

  “Yeah,” Benny says. “I guess you did. At that party.” If you invited Dennis to a party, he would always hold out on you, in case there might be a better party elsewhere.

  “We had a thing,” Dennis says. “Nan and me. For two weeks. I told you that. She was cute. Don’t be offended, but I slept with her. I slept with all of them. Maybe that’s why I got cancer. Or maybe it was the cocaine. There’s a theory about cocaine and…” He winces. “It’s all disinformation.”

  “But that was just lust, what you had,” Benny says, wanting to rouse Dennis to argumentation after another pause, with the hospital’s ventilation system whirring in the background. “What we had, Nan and I, well, that was special.”

  That morning when Nan had made scrambled eggs in Benny’s apartment kitchen, she had added salsa, and when she approached the kitchenette table where Benny was sitting, wearing only his boxer shorts underneath which his dick was again hardening to pay her tribute, she carried the serving plate toward him with a expression of the purest happiness and anticipation, and at that moment, though never afterward, she walked toward him looking like a gift, like all the colors of the rainbow. If that wasn’t love, what else could it be?

  “You’re funny,” Dennis says to Benny, as Lucille comes in, closing the curtain around Dennis momentarily. When she draws the curtain again, his face has relaxed somewhat.

  “Well, there are other fish in the sea,” Benny tells his friend. “That’s the cliché with which I comfort myself. Other fish, other seas. I’ll be feeling one hundred percent soon.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “But I need coaching. From you.”

  “You’re funny.” Then he says, “You’re going to be on your own in no time flat. Where’s your hand?” Benny takes his friend’s hand again.

  “How come this?” Benny asks.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Well, you have a right to be,” Benny says, before he realizes how undiplomatic that is. “I only meant that…”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. Did I tell you…they found a hospice for me?”

  “No. You didn’t tell me.”

  “It’s out in Hopkins. It’s cheap. At last: a hospice I can afford. Where are the girls now?” Dennis asks. “Where have the girls all gone? I haven’t had a lot of them visit me. Maybe they’ll drop roses on my casket.”

  “They’ll be here.”

  “Describe them. Do me a favor. Tell me a story. Let’s fill the time.”

  “Well,” Benny says. He tries to think of what would comfort his friend. A paradise, not of virgins but of experienced worldly women, funny, quick-witted, sharp-tongued women, moviegoers who know the difference between early and late Ozu, or Kurosawa, of the styles of screwball comedies, of Stanwyck saying, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” but instead, sitting next to the bed and holding the hand of his friend, who seems now to be drifting into unconsciousness, he launches into a verbal dreamworld of tits and ass, blowjobs, ecstasy, a little touch of verbal porno here at the bedside, to keep his friend’s spirits up, at least for a while.

  Sloth

  For an hour the doctor could think of nothing worth doing and no reason to rise from his chair, so he sat in a corner of the coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis, four blocks away from the hospital, with the newspaper’s sports section spread out in front of him, unread, the evening traffic outside going by with the characteristic hiss of tires on wet pavement, a sibilant personal sound like whispering. He gripped a double espresso but did not drink it. Wind gusts whipped the decorative downtown trees. That day on rounds he had checked in on one of his patients, a little girl whom he had diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome. She had developed endocarditis, an infection of the heart that had not been caught before some damage to the valves had occurred. This infection had been followed by a stroke. The family had gathered in the ICU’s waiting area, and one aunt had said loudly to the assembled relatives that her niece, lying there, was unrecognizable, and the doctor could tell—from years of similar scenes—that she, the aunt, was eager to assign blame to someone, starting with the pediatrician (himself), and then advancing up the scale of responsibility, to the radiologist, the surgeon, and at last God. With each new step the accusations would grow more unanswerable. Nevertheless, the arias of blame would soon begin, and they would have their predictable and characteristic melodies of resentment, rage, and malpractice. They were unstoppable. The lawyers would accompany her and provide the harmonizing chorus. For now, thinking of his patient, Dr. Jones could not go home or move in any direction, and, once again, sitting with his back against the coffee shop’s brick wall, the newspaper in front of him detailing the Twins’ latest loss to the Royals, he considered pediatric medicine the very worst of all specialties, a curse upon every physician who had ever practiced it, a field that he should never have gone into and would like to quit for some other better job, like selling boats. People were unusually happy when buying boats. Boat salesmen were dispensers of cheer. By contrast, the observance of pediatric medicine put the insane cruelties of God fully on display. His teachers in medical school had warned him about these psychic difficulties, but they had not warned him sufficiently, and just today one of his colleagues asked him whether he had started “laying crepe” with the girl’s relatives, doctor-talk referring to prepping family members for the patient’s untimely demise.

  He had been hoping that his friend Benny Takemitsu, the hack architect, might stop by the coffee shop on a break from his evening run, but there was no sign of him, so with great effort, Dr. Jones, who was a bit stout, at last found some resource of energy and rose from his chair and headed toward the Mississippi River, where lately he had been granted certain…visitations. The visitations were products of his exhaustion. He’d considered talking to his psychiatrist friend, Dr. Gloat—his actual name—about his hallucinatory visitors, but Gloat would probably prescribe an antipsychotic like clozapine or aripiprazole, part of that class of drugs that were chemically like a wrecker’s ball set loose in the brain. Or he could call on another pal, a gerontologist, who might diagnose him with Lewy body dementia, an affliction that included voices and full-scale hallucinations of the sort that Dr. Jones had been experiencing. With a diagnosis like that, they’d put you in the bin. Despite his visitations, he recognized inwardly, as the spirals of intuition turned gently and logically, that he wasn’t demented any more than he was psychotic. Nor was he delusional. He was just seeing things as the shamans once did, the holy men and women. He was becoming a holy man. Such a change was unprecedented in his professional experience. The prospect of going mad, or holy, did not seem to be that much of a catastrophe to him as long as he could keep calm while the specters appeared. Perhaps some bed rest would be indicated. The trouble with mad people was not the hallucinations or the garbled speech, but the panic they felt, which could be contagious and often created a vulgar effect among the villagers. Elijah Elliott Jones, M.D., considered himself a scientist. Scientists should remain calm, even if they become sanctified.

  He ambled down Second Street past the Mill City Museum, facing Mill Ruins Park, where a grain mill had exploded a century ago and the rubble had been left more or less as it once was, for tourists to gawk at. The location was billed as the Crad
le of Carbohydrates, and indeed the flour for American bread had been shipped out of here for decades: Gold Medal flour, Pillsbury’s Best, all of them, although not anymore, manufacturing having gone global in search of cheap uninsured labor. The light had a peculiar shellacked quality this evening, with a surface glitter and sheen, as if designed for a movie. He made his way to the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone and granite in 1883 for use by the Great Northern railway. The Empire Builder himself, James J. Hill, had seen to its construction. Grain from the farms of the upper Midwest had arrived here on his railroad, had been stored in his silos along the river, and had been milled with the power of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls. The riffraff railroad workers, their jobs finished, would drift toward the whorehouses and bars on Washington Avenue, but the riffraff had disappeared decades ago, along with their jobs, and Washington Avenue, following urban renewal, had gone upscale and pricey and was now full of spoiled and contemptible young professionals. Dr. Jones had almost seen the ghosts of the old workers, those tough sooty characters. He was very close to that realm. Tonight, before crossing the river, he took out his cell and called his wife, Susan, to say that he would be late in arriving home, but she had already gone to bed, and the doctor ended up speaking to their antique answering machine, the one with the microcassette. The doctor loved spunky defunct technologies. After having decided to stay on this side of the river, he chose a park bench in shadow some distance away from a sleeping bum stretched out on a bench next to the bum’s cherished bag of discarded aluminum cans. The doctor sat and closed his eyes. He felt himself falling into the other world.

  —

  When he bothered to turn to his right, he noted that a silhouette had materialized next to him, the famous outline of the old filmmaker encased in layers of fat. The director’s sadness and loneliness drifted up from his bulk like a corpulent mist in the still air. In his right hand he held a ghost cigar that produced ghost smoke. He wore a spotless dinner jacket, although he gave the impression of having been in the park for years, sitting there exposed to the elements. “I was wondering who it would be this time,” Dr. Jones said. “But somehow I never expected to see you of all people here. Didn’t they let you in? To heaven, or whatever they’re calling it now…?”

  “Good evening,” the director said, bending slightly toward Dr. Jones out of a habitually polite formality. His voice had the familiar sonorous rumble, mixed with audible memories of his Cockney upbringing. His face had an odd phosphorescence. “No, they didn’t let me in. Not as yet. The rules are quite complex, you see. One must wait. There are pages of rules written with blood mixed in ink, thick volumes of these rules stretching from the floor to the ceiling, which is way up there, so high that no applicant has actually seen it. You can’t imagine a room without a visible ceiling, and yet it must exist. Spiritual exercises are required, of a sort not dreamed of by the Jesuits of my youth. Those Jesuits would whip a boy’s upraised hands, palms out, to intensify the pain. They enjoyed cruelty, some of those Jesuits,” the old man said, with a trace of envy mixed with bitterness. “They were very clever in those days: they liked the boys to cower. They quite enjoyed it. It is a form of control, you understand, to cause someone to cower in fear. Fear supplied the voltage of their faith, and fear became their métier. So I was trained by masters. But as it turns out, one has to overcome…certain tendencies. As at one time I was a director, now I am directed. Tell me, have you ever thought about suspense?”

  “Your specialty,” the doctor said.

  “Yes, once.” The director nodded sadly, out of a bottomless melancholy. “All that caring about what happens next.” He waited. “Now nothing happens next.” He took a puff from his cigar, and the exhaled smoke formed itself into the shape of a cat, which sauntered away in the night air.

  “Why do they have you sitting out here, night after night? For months? Years?”

  “Penitence,” the director said. “I sit in the rain and snow observing the river. But that is not our subject. We were talking about suspense.” The director looked over at Dr. Jones. “You could lose some weight,” he said with a ghostly smile. “For the lifeboat movie I invented a nonexistent weight-reduction drug, Reduco, that you might want to try. But, yes, we were talking about suspense. For example, that homeless man over there—”

  “Wait a minute,” the doctor said. “How can I try Reduco if it doesn’t exist?”

  “The same way that you watch a movie about people who never walked the Earth. You swallow a pill containing dreams. Please don’t interrupt. Anyway, that man who looks like a bum is actually in flight from people who are pursuing him for reasons that I shall disclose once I think of them. He is in disguise. He merely looks like a bum. Underneath the shabby clothes and three-day growth of beard is Cary Grant. Perhaps Cary Grant has possession of some secrets related to international negotiations, but I believe it is more likely—yes, indeed I can now see it—that through a case of mistaken identity our friend here was targeted as a terrorist guilty of terrible, malicious sabotage that resulted in the darkening of an electrical grid covering much of the north-central United States. An accused saboteur, his face in all the newspapers. Did you know how easy it is to disable a nuclear reactor? No? A few broken valves, a bit of sand…And so here he is, our bum, hiding out, disguised, on the banks of the Mississippi River, accompanied by his grocery cart and bag of aluminum cans. But over there, just upstream, a mile away from where we sit, the true terrorist, whom we shall call the Arab, approaches, gripping his knife, intent on murder.” The old man paused, savoring the doctor’s interest. “The Arab approaches our scene with his knife blade out. The sharpened knife blade reflects the streetlight; it shines. And now misty rain begins to fall. The Arab has already killed others, in one instance just this morning at the Minneapolis Farmers Market in broad daylight, so that the victim’s blood splashed all over the cauliflower and the yellow squash. Blood splattered everywhere on the produce, quite a mess to clean up. There will be a chase across the river, through the hydroelectric plant right down there, ending in the caves far underneath us, below, the caves of the Mississippi, the endless caves, where the Girl is tied up. I haven’t mentioned the Girl, but she’s down there now. Imagine her: a blond beauty knotted up with hemp. Imagine the rope tight around her wrists and her ankles. We already know about her, don’t we? Beneath our feet resides an underground labyrinth, and there she is, our blonde. Her cries are piteous. We desire her, like oysters. An endless labyrinth. Cary Grant finds her, but the Arab approaches them both, with his knife. The movie will go on for days.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Well, what does sound like me?”

  The doctor thought for a moment. “ ‘Mother…’ ” he recited. “ ‘Mother…what is the phrase?…Mother isn’t quite herself today.’ ” The director nodded. After a moment, Dr. Jones thought of another line. “ ‘And you know what else, Doctor? I don’t think Mozart is going to help at all.’ ” This time the old man’s face took on a downcast expression. The line seemed to cause him pain. “ ‘That plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops,’ ” the doctor recited more happily, getting into the spirit of things.

  “Stop,” the old man commanded. “Cinema is not the writer’s medium but the director’s. All the same, none of those lines is my favorite.” He sat waiting for the doctor to ask him the inevitable question, and when the doctor did so, the director answered, “ ‘Do you know the world’s a foul sty?’ ” After a pause, he said, “That was my favorite line. I wrote it. It’s not Thornton Wilder’s line; it’s mine. Joe Cotten read it very well. Even the moronic masses got the point that time around.”

  “That’s not a very nice line,” the doctor said.

  The old man shrugged in response. “Fuck nice. Do you know,” he said, “that even now as we speak, your friend Benny Takemitsu is being mugged elsewhere, nearby, down by the Federal Reserve Building? The perpetrator of this crime is a young idea
listic gay man who needs the money for painkilling drugs. He has assaulted this Takemitsu with a baseball bat. In the montage, the baseball bat hits the back of the knee, and we cut to Takemitsu’s face, astonished with pain. Then in a medium shot, Takemitsu falls. Then we see in an insert the assailant’s hand reaching for the victim’s wallet. Your friend will be all right, however.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The dead know everything,” the director said. “But such knowledge does us no good: we cannot move from our fixed positions. Approaching death and then following it, the camera cannot move. The camera must…never move. For example, you were about to ask me if I would like to walk with you back to your car, for your trip homeward. I cannot. I must stay here on this bench of desolation until my penitence and contrition are complete. I must apologize to the Girl, the one at whom I threw all those birds. I made her a star. There are others to whom I must apologize once they reach this realm. According to the rules written in blood and ink, the rules that reach to the ceiling, I must feel the apologies inwardly. That is the hard part, the inward contrition. With respect to inward contrition, the Jesuits are no help.”

  “Why here? Why in Minneapolis?”

  “The Girl was born here,” the old man said, “and one’s spirit always naturally returns to the place where one was born. For years I sat by the Thames in London. Now I’m here. I’m not always alone. Benny Herrmann sometimes comes down here to keep me company. We are reconciled, he and I. He wrote music for me. Did you know that he once lived in Minneapolis at the Nicollet Hotel, a few blocks away from here? He composed his opera, Wuthering Heights, a pastiche of Delius, in this city. I never liked it. Don’t tell him. However, most nights I have no company. So I make pictures in my head, as I used to do. And, now, you must leave me, Doctor. You cannot stay.”

  “Mr. Hitchcock,” he asked, “will my patient die? The little one?”