Melancholy Elephants Page 6
“I’m sorry,” she said gravely. “Even in a hospital you can’t tell me that’s a cup of coffee.”
“Corpuscle paint, Ms Harding,” he said cheerfully. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Kindly tell the doctor that I would be obliged if he would insert his thumb, rectally, to the extent of the first joint, pick himself up and hold himself at arm’s length until I drink that stuff. Advise him to put on an overcoat first, because hell’s going to freeze over in the meantime. And speaking of hell, where in it is my coffee?”
“I’m sorry, Ms Harding. No coffee. Stains the paint—you don’t want tacky corpuscles.”
“Dammit…”
“Come on, drink it. It doesn’t taste as bad as it smells. Quite.”
“Couldn’t I take it intravenously or something? Oh Christ, give it to me.” She drained it in a single gulp and shivered, beating her fists on her desk in revulsion. “God. God. God. Damn. Can’t I just have my leukemia back?”
His face sobered. “Ms Harding—look, it’s none of my business, but if I was you, I’d be a little more grateful. You give those lab boys a hard time. You’ve come back literally from death’s door. Why don’t you be patient while we make sure it’s locked behind you?”
She sat perfectly still for five seconds, and then saw from his face that he thought he had just booted his job out the window. “Oh Manuel, I’m sorry. I’m not angry. I’m…astounded. You’re right, I haven’t been very gracious about it all. It’s just that, from my point of view, as far as I remember, I never had leukemia. I guess I resent the doctors for trying to tell me that I ever was that close to dying. I’ll try and be a better patient.” She made a face. “But God, that stuff tastes ghastly.”
He smiled and turned to go, but she called him back. “Would you leave word for Bill McLaughlin that I won’t be able to see him until tomorrow after all?”
“He didn’t come in today,” the nurse said. “But I’ll leave word.” He left, holding the glass between thumb and forefinger.
She turned back to her desk and inserted the new disc, but did not start it. Instead she chewed her lip and fretted. I wonder if I was as blasé last time. When they told me I had it. Are those memories gone because I want them to be?
She knew perfectly well that they were not. But anything that reminded her of those missing six months upset her. She could not reasonably regret the bargain she had made, but almost she did. Theft of her memories struck her as the most damnable invasion of privacy, made her very flesh crawl, and it did not help to reflect that it had been done with her knowledge and consent. From her point of view it had not; it had been authorized by another person who had once occupied this body, now deceased, by suicide. A life shackled to great wealth had taught her that her memories were the only things uniquely hers, and she mourned them, good, bad, or indifferent. Mourned them more than she missed the ten years spent in freeze: she had not experienced those.
She had tried repeatedly to pin down exactly what was the last thing she could remember before waking up in the plastic coffin, and had found the task maddeningly difficult. There were half a dozen candidates for last-remembered-day in her memory, none of them conveniently cross-referenced with time and date, and at least one or two of those appeared to be false memories, cryonic dreams. She had the feeling that if she had tried immediately upon awakening, she would have remembered, as you can sometimes remember last night’s dream if you try at once. But she had been her usual efficient self, throwing all her energies into adapting to the new situation.
Dammit, I want those memories back! I know I swapped six months for a lifetime, but at that rate it’ll be five months and twenty-five days before I’m even breaking even. I think I’d even settle for a record of some kind—if only I’d had the sense to start a diary!
She grimaced in disgust at the lack of foresight of the dead Virginia Harding, and activated the data-disc with an angry gesture. And then she dropped her jaw and said, “Jesus Christ in a floater bucket!”
The first frame read, “PERSONAL DIARY OF VIRGINIA HARDING.”
If you have never experienced major surgery, you are probably unfamiliar with the effects of three days of morphine followed by a day of Demerol. Rather similar results might be obtained by taking a massive dose of LSD-25 while hopelessly drunk. Part of the consciousness is fragmented…and part expanded. Time-sense and durational perception go all to hell, as do coordination, motor skills, and concentration—and yet often the patient, turning inward, makes a quantum leap toward a new plateau of self-understanding and insight. Everything seems suddenly clear: structures of lies crumble, hypocrisies are stripped naked, and years’ worth of comfortable rationalizations collapse like cardboard kettles, splashing boiling water everywhere. Perhaps the mind reacts to major shock by reassessing, with ruthless honesty, everything that has brought it there. Even Saint Paul must have been close to something when he found himself on the ground beside his horse, and Higgins had the advantage of being colossally stoned.
While someone ran an absurd stop-start, variable-speed movie in front of his eyes, comprised of doctors and nurses and I.V. bottles and bedpans and blessed pricks on the arm, his mind’s eye looked upon himself and pronounced him a fool. His stupidity seemed so massive, so transparent in retrospect that he was filled with neither dismay nor despair, but only wonder.
My God, it’s so obvious! How could I have had my eyes so tightly shut? Choking up like that when they started to Goof, for Christ’s sake—do I need a neon sign? I used to have a sense of humour—if there was anything Ginny and I had in common it was a gift for repartee—and after ten years of “selfless dedication” to Ginny and leukemia and keeping the money coming that’s exactly what I haven’t got anymore and I damned well know it. I’ve shriveled up like a raisin, an ingrown man.
I’ve been a zombie for ten mortal years, telling myself that neurotic monomania was a Great And Tragic Love, trying to cry loud enough to get what I wanted. The only friend I made in those whole ten years was Bill, and I didn’t hesitate to use him when I found out our PPs matched. I knew bloody well that I’d grown smaller instead of bigger since she loved me, and he was the perfect excuse for my ego. Play games with his head to avoid overhauling my own. I was going to lose, I knew I was going to lose, and then I was going to accidentally “let slip” the truth to her, and spend the next ten years bathing in someone else’s pity than my own. What an incredible, impossible, histrionic fool I’ve been, like a neurotic child saying, “Well, if you won’t give me the candy I’ll just smash my hand with a hammer.”
If only I hadn’t needed her so much when I met her. Oh. I must find some way to set this right, as quickly as possible!
His eyes clicked into focus, and Virginia Harding was sitting by his bedside in a soft brown robe, smiling warmly. He felt his eyes widen.
“Dilated to see you,” he blurted and giggled.
Her smile disappeared. “Eh?”
“Pardon me. Demerol was first synthesized to wean Hitler off morphine; consequently, I’m Germanic-depressive these days.” See? The ability is still there. Dormant, atrophied, but still there.
The smile returned. “I see you’re feeling better.”
“How would you know?”
It vanished again. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you’re probably quite busy, but I expected a visit before this.” Light, jovial—keep it up, boy.
“Tom Higgins, I have been here twice a day ever since you got out of OR.”
“What?”
“You have conversed with me, lucidly and at length, told me funny stories and discussed contemporary politics with great insight, as far as I can tell. You don’t remember.”
“Not a bit of it.” He shook his head groggily. What did I say? What did I tell her? “That’s incredible. That’s just incredible. You’ve been here…”
“Six times. This is the seventh.”
“My God. I wonder where I was. This is appalling.”
“Eh?” That made you jump. “Oh yes, your missing six months.” Suppose sometime in my lost three days we had agreed to love each other forever—would that still be binding now? “God, what an odd sensation.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed, and something in her voice made him glance sharply at her. She flushed and got up from her bedside chair, began to pace around the room. “It might not be so bad if the memories just stayed completely gone…”
“What do you mean?”
She appeared not to hear the urgency in his voice. “Well, it’s nothing I can pin down. I…I just started wondering. Wondering why I kept visiting you so regularly. I mean, I like you—but I’ve been so damned busy I haven’t had time to scratch, I’ve been missing sleep and missing meals, and every time visiting hours opened up I stole ten minutes to come and see you. At first I chalked it off to a not unreasonable feeling that I was in your debt—not just because you defrosted me without spoiling anything, but because you got shot trying to protect me too. There was a rock outcropping right next to you that would have made peachy cover.”
“I…I…” he sputtered.
“That felt right,” she went on doggedly, “but not entirely. I felt…I feel something else for you, something I don’t understand. Sometimes when I look at you, there’s…there’s a feeling something like déjà vu, a vague feeling that there’s something between us that I don’t know. I know it’s crazy—you’d surely have told me by now—but did I ever know you? Before?”
There it is, tied up in a pink ribbon on a silver salver. You’re a damned fool if you don’t reach out and take it. In a few days she’ll be out of this mausoleum and back with her friends and acquaintances. Some meddling bastard will tell her sooner or later—do it now, while there’s still a chance. You can pull it off: you’ve seen your error—now that you’ve got her down off the damn pedestal you can give her a mature love, you can grow tall enough to be a good man for her, you can do it right this time.
All you’ve got to do is grow ten years’ worth overnight.
“Ms Harding, to the best of my knowledge I never saw you before this week.” And that’s the damn truth.
She stopped pacing, and her shoulders squared. “I told you it was crazy. I guess I didn’t want to admit that all those memories were completely gone. I’ll just have to get used to it I suppose.”
“I imagine so.” We both will. “Ms Harding?”
“Yes?”
“Whatever the reasons, I do appreciate your coming to see me, and I’m sorry I don’t recall the other visits, but right at the moment my wound is giving me merry hell. Could you come back again, another time? And ask them to send in someone with another shot?”
He failed to notice the eagerness with which she agreed. When she had gone and the door had closed behind her, he lowered his face into his hands and wept.
Her desk possessed a destruct unit for the incineration of confidential reports, and she found that it accepted unerasable discs. She was just closing the lid when the door chimed and McLaughlin came in, looking a bit haggard. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.
“Not at all, come in,” she said automatically. She pushed the burn button, felt the brief burst of heat, and took her hand away. “Come on in, Bill, I’m glad you came.”
“They gave me your message, but I…” He appeared to be searching for words.
“No, really, I changed my plans. Are you on call tonight, Bill? Or otherwise occupied?”
He looked startled. “No.”
“I intended to spend the night reading these damned reports, but all of a sudden I feel an overwhelming urge to get stinking drunk with someone—no.” She caught herself and looked closely at him, seemed to see him as though for the first time. “No, by God, to get stinking drunk with you. Are you willing?”
He hesitated for a long time.
“I’ll go out and get a bottle,” he said at last.
“There’s one in the closet. Bourbon okay?”
Higgins was about cried out when his own door chimed. Even so, he nearly decided to feign sleep, but at the last moment he sighed, wiped his face with his sleeves, and called out, “Come in.”
The door opened to admit a young nurse with high cheeks, soft lips, vivid red hair, and improbably grey eyes.
“Hello, nurse,” he said. He did not know her either. “I’m afraid I need something for pain.”
“I know,” she said softly, and moved closer.
Half an Oaf
Half an Oaf
When the upper half of an extremely fat man materialized before him over the pool table in the living room, Spud nearly swallowed his Adam’s apple. But then he saw that the man was a stranger, and relaxed.
Spud wasn’t allowed to use the pool table when his mother was home. Mrs. Flynn had been raised on a steady diet of B-movies, and firmly believed that a widow woman who raised a boy by herself in Brooklyn stood a better than even chance of watching her son grow into Jimmy Cagney. Such prophecies, of course, are virtually always self-fulfilling. She could not get the damned pool table out of the living room door—God knew how the apartment’s previous tenant had gotten it in—but she was determined not to allow her son to develop an interest in a game that could only lead him to the pool hall, the saloon, the getaway car, the insufficiently fortified hideout and the morgue, more or less in that order. So she flatly forbade him to go near the pool table even before they moved in. Clearly, playing pool must be a lot of fun, and so at age twelve Spud was regularly losing his lunch money in a neighbourhood pool hall whose savouriness can be inferred from the fact that they let him in.
But whenever his mother went out to get loaded, which was frequently these days, Spud always took his personal cue and bag of balls from their hiding place and set ’em up in the living room. He didn’t intend to keep getting hustled for lunch money all his life, and his piano teacher, a nun with a literally incredible goiter, had succeeded in convincing him that practice was the only way to master anything. (She had not, unfortunately, succeeded in convincing him to practice the piano.) He was working on a hopelessly impractical triple-cushion shot when the fat man—or rather, half of the fat man—appeared before him, rattling him so much that he sank the shot.
He failed to notice. For a heart-stopping moment he had thought it was his mother, reeling up the fire escape in some new apotheosis of intoxication, hours off schedule. When he saw that it was not, he let out a relieved breath and waited to see if the truncated stranger would die.
The fat man2 did not die. Neither did he drop the four inches to the surface of the pool table. What he did was stare vacantly around him, scratching his ribs and nodding. He appeared satisfied with something, and he patted the red plastic belt which formed his lower perimeter contentedly, adjusting a derby with his other hand. His face was round, bland and stupid, and he wore a shirt of particularly villainous green.
After a time Spud got tired of being ignored—twelve-year-olds in Brooklyn are nowhere near as respectful of their elders as they are where you come from—and spoke up.
“Transporter malfunction, huh?” he asked with a hint of derision.
“Eh?” said the fat man, noticing Spud for the first time. “Whassat, kid?”
“You’re from the Enterprise, right?”
“Never heard of it. I’m from Canarsie. What’s this about a malfunction?”
Spud pointed.
“So my fly’s open, big deal…” the fat man2 let go of his derby and reached down absently to adjust matters, and his thick muscles rebounded from the green felt tabletop, sinking the seven-ball. He glanced down in surprise, uttered an exclamation, and began cursing with a fluency that inspired Spud’s admiration. His pudgy face reddened, taking on the appearance of an enormously swollen cherry pepper, and he struck at the plastic belt with the air of a man who, having petted the nice kitty, has been enthusiastically clawed.
“…slut-ruttin’ gimp-frimpin’ turtle-tuppin’ clone of a week-old dog turd,” he finished, and paused for breath. “I shoulda had my head examined. I shoulda never listened ta that hag-shagger, I knew it. ‘Practically new,’ he says. ‘A steal,’ he says. Well, it’s still got a week left on the warranty, and I’ll…”
Spud rapped the butt-end of his cue on the floor, and the stranger broke off, noticing him again. “If you’re not from the Enterprise,” Spud asked reasonably, “where are you from? I mean, how did you get here?”
“Time machine,” scowled the fat man, gesturing angrily at the belt. “I’m from the future.”
“Looks like half of you is still there.” Spud grinned.
“Who ast you? What am I, blind? Go on, laugh—I’ll kick you in…I mean, I’ll punch ya face. Bug-huggin’ salesman with his big discount, I’ll sue his socks off.”
The pool hall had taught Spud how to placate enraged elders, and somehow he was beginning to like his hemispheric visitor. “Look, it won’t do you any good to get mad at me. I didn’t sell you a Jap time machine.”
“Jap? I wish it was. This duck-fucker’s made in Hoboken. Look, get me offa this pool table, will ya? I mean, it feels screwy to look down and see three balls.” He held out his hand.
Spud transferred the cue to his left hand, grabbed the pudgy fingers, and tugged. When nothing happened, he tugged harder. The fat man2 moved slightly. Spud sighed, circled the pool table, climbed onto its surface on his knees, braced his feet against the cushion, and heaved from behind. The half-torso moved forward reluctantly, like a piano on ancient casters. Eventually it was clear of the table, still the same distance from the floor.
“Thanks, kid…look, what’s your name?”
“Spud Flynn.”
“Pleased to meetcha, Spud. I’m Joe Koziack. Listen, are your parents home?”