Van Gogh's Room at Arles

by Stanley Elkin

  He slept like a baby. He didn’t dream. He didn’t once wake up. And, in the morning, it was like being roused from a trance, awakened, like someone from the audience, on stage, in the middle of a hypnotist’s act, come to life after a surgery in a room one can’t remember. Even, in those first several blank-slate seconds, experiencing what was not joy, not hope, not peace or patience, curiosity or wonder or even pleasure, so much as a sort of passivity, even obedience, something almost theological, some deep trust, almost— and here’s Schiff’s brain kicking in, and here’s Schiff—he supposes, like faith, like a perfect numb composure, Schiff detached and poised as an angel, like one of those rare dreams—and here’s Schiff with the slow, ever-so-gradual beginnings of self-consciousness—where he dreams himself moving, walking, running, pleased with the smooth point- to-point of his compliant synapses. And here’s Schiff. Tumbled from grace like a man overboard. Alert, alive, aware of the facts, passed sudden and roughly from one condition to the next like a clumsily transferred baton. Here’s Schiff. All at once the phone is ringing, his bladder is bursting, virtually screaming, “Do something, do something, will you, before I wet your pants all over you, your blankets, sheets, and pillowcases, your carpets and furniture and upholstery, before I take matters into my own hands and leave what used to be your dick jumping around every which way, loose and as out of control as a live wire spraying indiscriminate voltage like a hose in the street,” and his bones and body are stiff, filling up with pain in every cavity like air stretching a balloon, and—here’s Schiff, here’s Schiff now— he pulls himself up in bed to sit on its side and he reaches for his pisser but the son of a bitch is filled to the top—the job he did on it before retiring last night—and somehow he has to get into the toilet without—there’s no time to put them on—his shoes with their footdrop braces standing up in them like long shoehorns, and which permit him to put his feet out in front of him without kicking a foot into the carpet, smashing his practically hammertoes, tripping and stumbling the length of his body headfirst into the floor. So, here’s Schiff landed back in Farce, his homeland practically, and he pictures himself falling arse over tip down the stairs shoved tight against the aircraft and diving, face down, nose to the tarmac, which he kisses as if he’s finally come home after a long exile.

  He’s up on his walker now, skedaddling to the John before he bursts, Schiff’s version anyway, his modified skedaddle, distracting himself, thinking, Push, Step, Pull (on “Push” pushing his walker out in front of him; on “Step” stepping out with his right foot; on “Pull” pulling his left foot up almost even with it), though even as he thinks Push, Step, Pull, he’s wondering if it wouldn’t be better to change his mantra to Push, Step, Drag, because times change and a chap owes it to himself to keep up with his disease. (And because the effort is so great. He should, he thinks again, have been an event in the Olympics.) What, it occurs, are these tears in these eyes? Because suddenly he can’t remember the last time he walked without having to resort to these diversionary tactics and gambits, when he didn’t have to think of his walker as a plow, or his floors as fields, when he didn’t have to break down his progress—progress, hah!—into tiny, divisible bits like so much sovereign acreage or, just to keep himself from going nuts—walking was so difficult now, required such concentration; this was how he concentrated on it—providing a running—running, hah!—commentary on it, like some kid muttering the play-by-play in his head as he throws a rubber ball against a stoop. The pressure on his bladder is driven by its own terrible, gathering momentum. Schiff, still pushing the walker, concentrating, but switching over to alternative modes even as he begins to feel a little, a little, not much, leakage—— I think I can, I think I can! Or “Schiff not out of the woods, yet, ladies and gentlemen, though even if he pees now, at least it won’t be on the Berber. Because once that stuff gets on wool, it’s yech, and watch out, it’s time for the Home! Over to you in the crapper, Jim.” “Thanks, Dave Wilson, but you’ve just about told the whole story. Schiff, as you say, had begun to feel a little moisture, but, fortunately, this was just about the time he was swinging his walker around, dropping his drawers, and already lowering himself onto the toilet seat. Maybe I can get him to give us a comment. Jack, Jack, it’s Jim Johnson, You do much damage?” “No, Jim, I don’t think so. There’s a phrase in Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ that best sums it up, I think. Something about the ‘evening dews and damps.’ I don’t think anything actually got on the tile though there may be some small humidity in my pants, however. In any event, I’m chucking them into the laundry basket on my way out.”

  Which made him think about laundry. Which, Jesus, gave him a jolt. Because, really, with Claire gone, how was he ever going to handle that one? He didn’t know if they even still did laundry service, couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen a laundry truck. Claire, Schiff thought, you’re the rat and I’m the sinking ship! And where, he wondered, had his mild hope for the day gone? Those few seconds or so of respite he felt when he’d first waked up? That perfect, numb composure?

  On his walker again, returning to his room, so caught up in his analysis of where he was, letting his fans know—he’s beaming his coordinates back to the PGPC—the long row he’s yet to hoe—“Technically I’m still in the bathroom, though the wheels of the walker, and even its two hind legs, are over the threshold and out in the hall, heading south, my right foot on Steppp, my left, huff puff huff puff, on Draaaag. And I’m in the hall too, now, in the hall and making my adjustments, shifting my trajectory, handling the walker, raising it up off the carpet and swinging it east, bringing my body into alignment with the walker. All right. All right. Just about ready to move on. From here it’s a fairly clean shot east to the bedroom, where I’ll have to hang a north, then jockey from there northeast to the bed. You know something, folks? I’m not saying it’s a blessing or promising rose gardens, merely mentioning in huff-puff passing that this disease could have done worse than chosen to be trapped in the body of a political geographer”—that he realizes the phone is still ringing only after he’s back in bed, that probably it hasn’t stopped since it first began eleven or twelve minutes ago. It has to be Claire, he thinks, it has to be Claire. Anyone else would have hung up after eight or nine rings, ten rings tops. When he realizes this he wonders if he should pick up at all. It’s Saturday. She knows he has to be home, that except for Tuesdays and Thursdays when he teaches his classes, unless she’s there to take him somewhere, he has to be home. Sure, he decides, let Claire ring the phone’s ass off, let her ring and ring until she pictures him dead. Then she’ll be sorry, then she will. I’m a grown fucking man, for Christ’s sake. And he picks up the phone.

  “Claire?”

  “Harry Ald, buddy. Boy, you really are crippled up. I’ve been on the line fifteen minutes waiting for you to answer. I direct-dialed, for God’s sake, but the long-distance broad broke in anyway, wanted to know if I ‘wished’ to place my call later. I told her no, let it ring, I had this stiff-in-the- joints pal took his own sweet damn time coming to the telephone. Breaks in again in five minutes, tells me, ‘Sir, please place your call later, you’re tying up the lines.’ I say, ‘How can I be tying up the lines, I’m not even connected.’ Miss Priss offers it’s some satellite thing, very technical. I go ‘Oh yeah?’ She’s gonna disconnect me, she says, if I don’t hang up, and I shoot back that that’d be a violation of the First Amendment, but I see where she’s coming from and tell her, all right then, charge me for the goddamn call, you can count from the time I first began dialing. You know what she does, Schiff? You know what she tells me? She says to hang up and call person-to-person collect. I ask how that would change anything, I’d still be tying up the line, wouldn’t I? ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘collect, person-to-person calls go through on a different circuit, that’s why we have to charge the customer extra for them.’ ‘And all the time,’ I tell her, ‘I thought that had to do with greed and operator assistance, so-called,’ which is when sh
e starts giving me this you-can-talk-to-my-supervisor crapola. Well, do I have to tell you, there’s nothing in the world worse, or more boring and futile, than talking to some telephone-company operator broad’s supervisor. Fortunately, as it turns out, however, I didn’t have to because that’s just when you finally decide to pick up. So how are you? D’ja hear anything from Claire?”

  He could be making this all up, Schiff thought. Claire could have put him up to it. He could be Claire’s beard, or decoy, or special agent, or whatever. She could be sitting beside him (even lying beside him) right now, for goodness’ sake, or listening in on an extension. It wasn’t proof she still loved him or anything, but after as long as they’d been married she was vested. Well, they both were.

  “Nothing,” Schiff said, “not a word. Did you?”

  “Me? God no, Jack. Anyway, you know what would happen if Claire ever did show up here?”

  “What?” He felt like a straight man.

  “We go back you and me, but we ain’t seen each other in years. We probably wouldn’t even recognize each other in the street.”

  “What are you saying to me, Harry?”

  “I’m a different person, Jack. Just like you’re a different person.”

  “I’m not a different person,” Schiff said. “I’m the same person I always was.”

  “Jack, you used to do the hundred in split seconds, you used to go out for the long ones.”

  “Those are physical things,” Schiff said.

  “Physical things? Physical things?” Harry Ald said. “What the hell else is there? It took you fifteen minutes to answer the telephone. This doesn’t do something to a man’s soul? But all right, okay, you’re still the same old Jack Schiff. The spitting image. But me, I’ve changed. I’m a roughneck. I’ve got tabs in bars. Sixty years old and I’m a regular in bars. Sixty years old and I’ve got, you know, girlfriends. I’m living right now with a squaw.”

  “A squaw? Really?”

  “Well, a half-breed, really, but this is the Pacific Northwest. It ain’t that big a deal with the braves, but the women take it very seriously. You know what they say about Catholic converts, how they’re more Catholic than the pope? Well, that’s what your half-breed squaw is like.”

  “More Catholic than the pope?”

  “Ha ha,” Ald said, “that’s a good one on me all right.”

  “What?” Schiff asked. “What would happen?”

  “If Claire showed up here? Oh, nothing. She’d get gut shot is all. Flowers of the Field would see to it personally.”

  “Flowers of the Field? This is your squaw’s name?”

  “It’s a beautiful name.”

  “It is a beautiful name,” Schiff said.

  “You don’t believe me? You want me to put her on? Wait, I’ll put her on, she’ll tell you herself. Hey, Flowers of the Field, put down the Maize Flakes a minute, come over here and tell my old friend what you’d do if all of a sudden his wife showed up and wanted to move in with me.”

  “I’d gut shoot the bitch,” a woman said.

  “Jesus,” Schiff said.

  “How do you like that?” Harry Ald, who’d taken the phone back, said. “And don’t think for a minute this is some young bimbo we’re talking about here, Jack. She’s got almost a decade on me.”

  “She sounds like a pistol,” Schiff admitted.

  “She’s a bow-and-arrow.”

  He told Harry Ald about his graduate students coming over that night. He explained about the PGPC. Harry thought it was wonderful, that it would do him a world of good. “Just don’t let them mug you,” he warned.

  “Mug me? They’re my students. Why would they mug me?”

  “Sometimes,” Harry Ald said, “graduate students see a helpless old professor in his house, they can’t help themselves, they mug him, then they throw him down the stairs.”

  Schiff couldn’t have explained it, but he thought he was feeling better. Sometimes a good laugh, of course, but he felt stronger, too. He got off the bed and, moving about his bedroom, tested himself on the walker. He actually was a little stronger, back to Push, Step, Pull, from Push, Step, Drag, down to the occasional huff puff from the occasional huff puff huff puff. This wasn’t, he understood, mere fancy. He’d been to too many neurologists by this time, and knew that it was in such tiny incrementals and small diminishments that the state of his disease was tracked, his particular pathology relatively long-haul, even his death a matter more of yards than of inches. (He thought now might be a good time to fit the handle of the urinal over the walker’s crossbar, take it into the toilet, and flush its contents down the commode, but then he realized he’d have to rinse out the pisser in the bathroom sink, that, or sit with it on his shower bench and let water into it from the faucet in the tub, running over his feet, spilling on his legs.) But already his strength draining, settling, separating, retreating into its nooks, crannies, holes and corners—— all the ragged features and interiority of its customary itty-bitties. The phone ringing again and Schiff fading fast.

  Sam Creer was on the line, the law school’s Native American activist, its expert on Treaty Law, practically its inventor, in fact; world famous, in fact, who had turned down an offer from Harvard because, as he said, he’d be damned if he’d teach school in a place that had been hacked out of pure aboriginal real estate. Sam wanted to know if Jack happened to have heard from Claire yet. No, Schiff told him, and said that as long as he had Sam on the line, he wondered, had Creer ever run across a dame called Flowers of the Field?

  “Flowers of the Field,” Creer mused, “Flowers of the Field. Is she Penobscot?”

  “There’s no telling,” Schiff said.

  Others called wanting to know about Claire. Even folks with whom Schiff couldn’t recall having ever brought up the subject.

  “You know,” he was saying to a colleague with whom he hardly ever had contact, “for a guy as protective of his dignity as I am, people seem to know a whole shitload about my affairs. Every Tom and Dick. Maybe I’m not half as dignified as I think I am.”

  “No,” said the colleague, a man whose face Schiff couldn’t conjure and even whose voice was unfamiliar, “I don’t think that’s it. Why, your wheelchair alone earns you a certain amount of dignity, say thirty to thirty-eight percent. Then, anyone who ever saw you struggle on your walker into a men’s room or maneuver it into a stall would grant you at least another couple dozen dignity points. That’s, what, sixty-two? Dignity-wise, all you’d need for a gentleman’s C would be another ten or so points.”

  “Just see to it my fly is shut when I come out of the stall, as it were.”

  “As it were,” said the colleague.

  He was in bed, absently fingering the S.O.S. collar about his throat and resting up for his assault on the shower, when the phone rang again.

  “Hello?” Schiff said.

  “Professor Schiff?”

  Speak of the devil, it was S.O.S. itself. In the voice of Miss Simmons.

  “Miss Simmons?”

  “What happened? Are you all right? If it’s anywhere near you, see if you can pull the blanket off the bed and cover yourself with it. Try to stay warm. Try to keep calm. Now tell me what happened. I’m not so concerned with the extraneous details as I am with your precise location. Where are you right now? Does anything hurt? What hurts? Do you know where your wounds are? Do you know if you’re bleeding? If you’re not in a position to tell, can you say if there’s a sticky sensation that might be blood? Do you feel as if you’re going to faint? Does my voice sound muffled, does it sound like it’s coming from far away? On a scale of one to ten, mild to severe, what would you estimate the extent of your injuries to be? Do you have any chest pain, or pain radiating down your left arm? An ambulance has been dispatched to your house and should be arriving within seven minutes.”

  “Well, gee,” said Schiff, “I think I may have the wrong number.”

  “The wrong number? You haven’t fallen? You’re not exhibiting the classic sym
ptoms of heart-attack discomfort?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Schiff said, “for me, I’m feeling pretty darned relatively good.”

  “You turned in a false alarm. There’s a two-hundred dollar fine for turning in a false alarm,” Miss Simmons said.

  “A false alarm? Hey, no,” Schiff said.

  “You were playing with your button, weren’t you?”

  “Not consciously I wasn’t,” Schiff said.

  “Unconsciously is just as bad. S.O.S. has three teams on call. One’s out on a job and the second’s on its way to 225 Westgate. If the third’s called away and we get a call and are left unprotected, do you know who’s responsible if there’s a disaster that results in a subsequent lawsuit?”

  “Me, I bet you,” Schiff said.

  “That’s right,” said Miss Simmons.

  “How can this be?”

  “You’re a consenting adult, you signed papers.”

  “Ah, papers,” said Schiff.

  “That’s right.”

  “They aren’t here yet, call them back.”

  “It’s too late, I’m not allowed. You’ll just have to absorb the two-hundred-dollar fine and pray there are no emergency complications.”

  “Help me,” Schiff said. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

  Then Schiff moved to the edge of the bed and, leaning over it as far as he could, as if he were stretching for something just beyond his reach, he put out his balled fists, sought reliable purchase on the rug, and maneuvered his stronger right hip, thigh, and leg scant inches out over the mattress, and dragged his left leg up with the right one, hovering there for a moment in a sort of crippled yoga levitation. Then, gently as he could, he lowered himself carefully down off the bed and onto the floor. Stretched out on the carpet, he turned on his back, pulled the blanket off the bed and covered himself. For good measure he reached up and managed to find a pillow, which he placed behind his head.