It was evening and the other patients had left the old man’s office. They had gone, he knew, to drugstores to obtain prescriptions which would make them well. The doctor stood over the small porcelain sink, rubbing from his hands the world’s germs.
“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.