by Lore Segal
Deborah and Shirley are engaged in the conversation that resembles a never-ending pas de deux in which Deborah foreknows the move Shirley will make in response to the last move, that she, Deborah, has made, knowing the response that she will make to Shirley’s response to it. Each believes that the next thing she is going to say will so new-formulate the self-evident truth that it must expose the other’s mistaken assumptions and make an end of the dance once and for all.
Dr. Haddad returns to the nurses’ station. She asks the nurse, “What’s with the two women in seven-eleven?”
“Around the bend,” the nurse answers.
Muzac of the Sheres
Francis Rhinelander is one of the gargoyles whom Hope observed coming up in the Sabbath Elevator. The young doctor with the good head of hair had taken care of his facial cuts and abrasions and sent him to the Release Office two doors to the right of the triage window to sign himself out, but here he is back again. Phyllis has sent Al Lesser over to follow up on his earlier interview. Al sees that something has happened. There is a difference in the sag of the tall old man’s shoulders, in his ruined smile. He sits on the edge of his bed and ducks his head. With his chin he indicates the wall-mounted TV on which a beautiful specimen of young manhood is selling a new technology not obtainable in stores or through the mails, for only four easy value-pays of $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
The old man shakes and shakes his head.
“Just some old infomercial,” Al says to him.
“I know, but listen,” Rhinelander says.
Al and his patient watch the specimen demonstrate the Twice-Told®, a plastic headband with a built-in nano computer that translates the movements of eye and facial musculature of the person sitting across from you and tells you “You’ve told this story to this person before,” before you have started telling it once again.
“Where do you have your remote? You can just turn it off,” Al suggests.
“Listen!”
The specimen guarantees us our money back, no questions asked, if we are not completely satisfied.
“The music,” the old man says, “while the man is talking.”
It is now that Al Lesser hears what is too familiar to notice, the ongoing, anonymous, circular thrumming.
“Why?” Rhinelander says in his despair.
“Oh, well, because, I mean,” Al says, “you have to have music.”
“Do you?”
“It would be—wouldn’t it be, I don’t know—kind of bald without some music?”
“Would it?” The sad old man ducks. He nods his head. “My waiter can turn Frank Sinatra down but never off. Frank Sinatra doesn’t turn off, not even in the john, and I can’t go with Sinatra in the john singing ‘The Way You Look Tonight’! Frank Sinatra in my cereal. I walked to Gristedes at the corner, going to get myself something and eat it up in my hotel room, but Frank Sinatra was signing ‘My Way’ in the bread aisle and in the dairy aisle and when I got back to my room, he was singing ‘New York, New York.’ I called maintenance. It seems they won’t remove the TV out of the room but they said they could disconnect it, but then he got on my little plastic radio I have on the seat of the chair next to my bed. I pushed the Off button so hard I pushed it all the way in. I can hear it rattling around on the inside. I can’t get it out, so I went down and got in a cab to come back here. They have TV in all the cabs. The ‘off’ button turns the music ON.”
Francis Rhinelander and Al Lesser sit and watch the specimen. He is on a high of enthusiasm, saying, “But wait!” and guarantees two Twice-Tolds® to everyone who calls within the next three minutes while the circling thrumming prevents the baldness of silence.
Francis Rhinelander says, “The reason the management never answered my letter is there is no Off option! No one can turn off the Muzak of the Spheres.” His head ducks up and down and up and down like a toy set in motion by a child’s finger.
The Ice Worm
The mistake was to have taken the advice of the woman in the cafeteria and gone home and left her mother in the ER. It is morning. Maggie goes straight to Observation, where they know nothing of any Ilka Weiss. “The doctor said you had a bed for her.”
“What doctor?”
“The doctor in the ER.”
“Better go down there, then.”
It’s a leisurely morning in the waiting area. A young mom closes the picture book she has been trying to read to her toddler. The boy, around Stevie’s age, prefers climbing over the benches.
A neat, dapper little man is talking with the nurse through the triage window. Maggie stands waiting behind him. She assumes he is an official person, and that this may be an official conversation. A harried young man comes and stands behind Maggie; she experiences his impatience uncomfortably. The probably official person folds his arms on the sill of the triage window so that now his head is inside the office; this is going to take time. Maggie leaves her place in line and walks to the door that leads into the ER and knocks on it. When nobody answers, she opens it to face a large, surprised nurse. This is not a nurse Maggie recognizes from last night. The nurse looks put-upon: No, Maggie cannot come in to see if her mother is inside. There is no Ilka Weiss in the ER. Yes, the nurse is certain, and she does not know where Ilka Weiss might have been transferred during the night. Who might know? Triage might know, or go to the Release Office. She points to a door on the left.
Maggie sees that she has lost her place behind the official person, and behind the harried young man stands an old woman holding her older husband by the arm.
A uniformed guard leans in the doorway of the Release Office. The officer sits at his desk saying, “Is that right!” and “Is that a fact!”
“Over there and large as life!” the guard says. “This old broad takes off every last stitch.”
“You don’t say.”
“Stands buck naked.”
Speaking over the guard’s shoulder, Maggie says, “Excuse me, but would you know where they transferred my mother? The name is Ilka Weiss? I left because they told me they had a bed for her in Observation, but they don’t have her in Observation.”
Nobody, it turns out, has left the ER since the Release Officer came on at 8:30. According to the roster there have been no releases after midnight.
“So she must still be in the ER?” Maggie says.
“Could might have eloped.” The guard grins.
Unfortunately, it is the put-upon nurse at the door again. She says, “Are you going to argue with me? We do not have Ilka Weiss in this ER.”
Dr. Haddad, the doctor on night duty, has left. It happens to be her day off, and the doctor who takes Maggie’s call is not acquainted with the situation. The nurse wears the look that comes into the eyes of official persons at a first suspicion that they’re dealing with someone who is going to be trouble: a kook. No, Maggie cannot go into the ER and check for herself. “I will check for you,” says the nurse, who does not care who knows that put-upon is what she is.
It’s almost noon before Maggie gets hold of her husband. “They’ve gone and lost my mom! That nurse didn’t take long enough to have checked every gurney and looked behind all the curtains in all the cubicles! I think they’ve got her disguised with bandages like what’s-her-name in what was the name of that Hitchcock movie?” Joking fails to override a small ice worm of panic that has started in Maggie’s chest.
“Call information,” Jeff says.
“I did. And I went down where you enter and talked to the woman who gives out the visitor passes, and they have no record of my mom ever even checking in!”
“Let me try calling information from outside.”
There are moments when Maggie loves her husband: He is doing this with her. “Jeff, thanks, Jeff. Jeff, call me right back!” The worm has attached itself in the middle of Maggie’s chest, where the ribs meet. Whom doth time stand still withal? Somebody waiting for somebody to call right back. Maggie cannot wait another nanosecond and calls Jeff, whose line is b
usy, of course, trying, maybe, to call her? Hang up, and wait for him to call. Maggie starts at Jeff’s voice in her ear:
“The reason they’ve got no record of Ilka’s admission is she came in via Emergency. Why don’t you go down there?”
“That is where I am. Jeff, I’m in the waiting area. There must be some reason why they won’t let me into the ER to see for myself …”
“Maggie,” Jeff says, “love, remember your monster scenarios when I’m late, or David isn’t where you imagine he’s supposed to be? The explanation that doesn’t occur to you turns out to be mind-numbingly obvious?”
“I know. Right. You’re right. I will remember. There’s somebody coming to talk to me? I’ll talk to you later.”
It’s the dapper man—Arab? Indian?—who was talking with triage. “If your mother was in the ER, she’s been transferred to the seventh floor in the Senior Center.”
Maggie needs to keep the worm from wriggling upward and spreading its mortal chill. She asks, “The Senior Center? Doesn’t that mean they didn’t find anything really wrong with her?”
“Nothing physically, necessarily. Old people’s confusions are often temporary.” Maggie scans his face for a gloss, an annotation. He says, “Nurse, tell the lady the best way to get over to the Senior Center.”
Patrice had pushed Lucy’s wheelchair the two blocks up the sidewalk, but the Senior Center can also be reached by taking the elevator down to the connecting sub-sub-basements. Because Maggie has chosen this option, Jeff’s call cannot reach her. She doesn’t know that the hospital has phoned to say that Ilka is agitated and calling for Maggie, asking who is going to pay for what she seems to think is a room in a hotel. Jeff says, “I’ll bring the boys over and see if they’ll let Ilka see them.”
Maggie feels herself to be hiking for a period outside ordinary time, through an unsuspected, unpeopled underground of white, brightly lighted corridors. The unmarked doors must open from within, for there are no visible handles or knobs. Maggie walks and keeps walking in a spatial equivalent of eternity where what is ahead is in no particular distinguishable from where she has been. Maggie pushes through a series of swinging doors into new reaches of corridors like the ones along which she is walking. She glances down corridors that branch to the left and right. Why does she think it is the one she is continuing to move along that will take her to her destination, that will have an end? To turn and retrace her steps occurs to her, but do we stop and put our nightmares in reverse? Maggie pushes viciously through the next set of doors into a corridor that squares into a room and has a bank of perfectly ordinary elevators.
Maggie steps out into the sunny, modern seventh floor with its ample space around the central nurses’ station. Here, having arrived before her, is the impatient young man from the waiting area, who turns out to be looking for his mother. “Is it her emphysema acting up?” he asks the nurse. Benedict waits for the nurse’s eyes to detach from the computer screen to which he is acutely aware of not having access. He looks behind him and sees, spread-eagled on a recliner, the square old woman, the one who took off her clothes in the waiting area last night, and she is mother-naked. Like drunken Noah’s two good sons, Shem and Japheth, Benedict turns his back to the forbidden nakedness while like Ham, the wicked son, he turns his head to cop another look.
“Excuse me,” he says to the Computer Nurse, “that woman has taken off her gown.”
The nurse says, “You’re looking for who?”
“My mother, Lucy Friedgold? Is it her emphysema?”
“Friedgold,” says the nurse. “Came in last night. Does not have emphysema.”
“F-R-I-E-D-gold. Lucy. My mother?”
“No emphysema.”
“Can I have a look at that?” says Benedict.
“No, you cannot,” says the nurse. “She’s in Room seven-twelve.”
“And do you have a Joe Bernstine?”
“Room seven-oh-six.”
“Maggie!”
Maggie hears her mother calling and there she is, Ilka sitting in a chair in a fresh hospital gown.
“Here you are!” Maggie kisses her. “Major mix-up! I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me go in to look for you. I told Jeff they had you disguised in bandages like—Dame May Whitty was her name! In The Lady Vanishes.”
“Help me!” calls Ilka.
“Mom, I’m going to take you home, only they may want to keep you awhile for observation, okay?” Maggie is distracted by trying not to turn around to look at the naked old woman on the recliner across from the nurses’ station. “Hang on,” Maggie says to her mother, and she gets up and walks over to a nurse who is typing at a computer station. “Excuse me, but that woman has taken off her gown.”
The nurse says, “Is that so,” and goes on typing.
“Maggie!” calls Ilka.
“Coming.” Maggie picks up the blanket off the floor and hands it to the old naked woman, who throws it onto the floor.
“Isn’t it odd,” says Maggie, sitting down by her mother, “that what we’re ashamed of and hide from each other are the things we have in common, like peeing, and what we pee with?”
“Help me!” calls Ilka.
“Mom?”
“Maggie!” calls Ilka.
“Darling, I’m here,” says Maggie.
“Help me!” calls Ilka. “Maggie!”
“Mom, I’m right here. I’m here with you. Mom?” but Maggie is speaking out of our common world from which no sound, no sign, no kiss, or touch of the hand reaches into the nightmare in which Ilka Weiss is alone with her terror.
“Maggie!” she calls. “Help me!”
Maggie looks around, looks for help, sees the naked old woman on the recliner, sees the nurse typing.
“Maggie!”
Now the ice age, presaged by the worm under her ribs, settles into Maggie’s chest. She thinks that she has crossed into another era from which she will look back with nostalgia to her life and to the things as they have been. Maggie is mistaken. The ice age in her chest will become the way that things are. Maggie sees Jeff talking to the nurse, who has stopped typing. She is pointing: It’s all right, it turns out, for little David and baby Steven to visit their grandmother in the solarium.
V
The Meeting
Benedict goes to find Room 706 to tell Joe that Salman Haddad has rescheduled the meeting. “They’re clearing a room for us on the seventh floor because you and my mom are already up here anyway. Al and I are supposed to report on our interviewees, Gorewitz and Rhinelander, who, incidentally, was sent home and has checked himself back in. Haddad wants Dr. Stimson—he’s the head of Emergency—to go over his log of the sixty-two-pluses they’ve transferred to the seventh floor.”
Among those in Dr. Stimson’s log are: Ilka Weiss and Lilly Cobbler, who have been translated into a gap in the world where nobody can reach them; a note says that Cobbler’s sister, Sadie Woodway, returned to the location of their former business on 57th Street and jumped to her death; the nonagenarian, Anstiss Adams, started beating her caretaker, Luba; Luba keeps taking her clothes off; Francis Rhinelander believes himself to be living in a musical; Samson Gorewitz thinks he is dead; and each of his sisters, Deborah and Shirley, who can’t stop arguing; and Jack in his wheelchair, who cannot stop weeping.
“And, the reports, of course,” says Benedict, “on you and my mom.”
“It’s the terrorists,” says Joe.
“It’s the Farkasz case, Haddad says, that muddies the issue. All the others walked into the ER with their minds apparently intact, and proceeded to go around the bend. Ida Farkasz was brought in with a diagnosis of retrograde amnesia, fell asleep on one of the chairs in the ER, and woke with her memory of a lifetime of rejection and humiliation perfectly restored. The hospital sent for her daughter to take her home. Phyllis from the second floor is sending Bethy to do a follow-up interview.”
Joe says, “What interests me is that all our vitals are all good! The terrorists’ problem is t
wo-pronged: They have to drive us insane, while they keep us indefinitely alive. We are dealing with an enemy of enormous sophistication, ingenuity, and patience. They are able to imagine a West entirely populated by demented, heart-healthy centenarians.”
“So okay,” says Benedict, “so I’ll go brief my mom.”
Lucy and Jenny
When push comes to shove, the Senior Center cannot put boys and girls in the same room, even the ones that have been legally married these five-and-forty years.
Benedict finds his mother and Joe’s wife, Jenny, in Room 712. He briefs Lucy about the revised plan for the meeting. “What,” he asks Jenny Bernstine, “are you doing here?”
“I’ve gone around the bend,” says Jenny. “I told that lovely young doctor about so many things in my old age that I enjoy and she sent me to the seventh floor.”
“What do you mean, things you enjoy? What ‘things’?”
Jenny says, “I always think of the painting by Miró, at the Met. The card next to it quoted him saying, ‘I confess that I look at real things with increasing love’ and you know what things? ‘the fuel lamp, potatoes.’ Things,” Jenny says, “and the holes they make in the fence so I can see the new building going up. The doggy bag. A mother and a baby smiling at each other and the cabbie who understands about little boys and their bears. My neighbor putting a quarter in the meter to save a stranger getting a ticket. Walking on Madison Avenue, my bed, my own apartment. I love Joe, I love my Beth, and I love it when they’ve gone to the office and I have my own kingdom all to myself.” Jenny smiles. She is embarrassed. “I mean I like washing up the breakfast dishes with the sink filled full of sunlight. Moses had to strike a rock to water Israel, but a turn of my wrist and water flows cold, it flows hot. I flip a switch and there is light! I come out of my kitchen and if I stop in this particular spot I can see into my living room where I’ve arranged two armchairs as if there were friends on their way over. Lucy coming over, having a martini and sitting, talking!” Jenny says. “They’ve diagnosed me with bipolar depression stuck in a phase of permanent euphoria.”
