The girl thumbed through the card file in front of her. When she found his card she said, “Feldman, sir? He’s satisfactory.”
“I understood he was very sick. Condemned.”
The girl looked again at the card. “My card says ‘Satisfactory.’ ”
“Oh,” Feldman said.
“That only means he’s comfortable. In these terminal cases that’s all they ever say.”
“Satisfactory? Comfortable? Why doesn’t the hospital tell him? He’d be pleased.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sure,” Feldman said.
Outside, it occurred to him that since he had been partner to him in everything else, he would call his doctor. He went into a drugstore and dialed.
“It’s me. It’s Feldman. I’m out.”
“Where are you, Feldman?” the doctor asked.
“In a phone booth. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me well. I wanted to thank you.”
“What are you talking about? Where are you?”
“I told you. I’ve left the hospital. That idea of mine about a fraternity among the sick? It wasn’t any good. I just blackballed myself. A man almost died in my room a few days ago and it paralyzed me. I couldn’t help him. I held him away from me as though he were soiled linen.”
“Get back to the hospital.”
“What for?”
“What am I going to say, that you’re cured? The charts still exist.”
“So do I. I’m not going back. I’m going to business.”
“You’re in no condition to go to business. Do you want to aggravate an already untenable position?”
“You are maybe the world’s all-time lousy doctor. You promised death. Now you threaten it. You said a year, and I sat down to wait. Well, I’m not waiting any more, that’s all.” He wondered if the old doctor’s passion for rhetoric were still strong in him. He decided to try him. “On every occasion I am going to hit for the solar plexus of the solar system,” Feldman said.
There was silence. Then the doctor, calmer, said, “I’ll call your wife.”
Outside the drugstore the sun was shining brightly and everything looked clean and new. Feldman was aware of the keenness of his impressions, but astonished more by the world itself than by his perception of it, he wondered at the absolute luminescence of the things about him. Objects seemed bathed in their own light. Things looked not new, he decided, so much as extraordinarily well kept up.
Across the street was a park, but between the park and Feldman was a boulevard where traffic raced by swiftly. He had to dodge the cars. It was an exciting game, having to dodge cars for one’s life as though death were, after all, something that could be held off by an effort of the will. The idea that he could control death made him giddy, and once, in his excitement, he almost slipped and fell. He thought, even in the act of regaining his lost balance, how strange that the death that might have resulted from his misstep would have been an accident unrelated to his disease. I’ve cured cancer, he thought happily.
In the park he sat down on a bench to rest. His activity had made him tired. “Slowly, slowly,” he cautioned himself. He had been aware of pain in his stomach since he left the hospital. Though it was not great, it was becoming gradually more severe, and he was afraid that it would become too much for him. He found that by holding his breath and remaining very still he could control the pain. Does it hurt? he asked himself. Only when I breathe, he answered. Nevertheless, he waited until he thought he could move without reawakening what he still thought of as the slothful parasite within himself, and then he looked around.
The world he had thought he was never to see again when he entered the hospital lay now around and before him in adjacent strata, disparate but contiguous planes in space. Because of his heightened awareness it seemed compartmentalized. He had the impression that he could distinguish where each section had been sewn onto the next. He saw the wide-arced slope of grass and trees — the park. Interrupting it — the busy boulevard like an un-calm sea. Beyond the angry roll and toss of traffic and black frozen asphalt like queer, dark ice in perpetual lap against the gutters of a foreign shore — an avenue. A commercial country of bank and shop where the billboards and marquees hung appended and unfurled, annexed like gaudily partisan consulate flags — almost, it seemed to Feldman in its smugly high-tariffed insularity, like a young and enterprising foreign power. Tall apartment buildings backstopped the planet, mountain ranges stacked against the world’s last margins, precarious and unbalanced. He knew that over these and beyond the curve of his world there were many leftover worlds. And the sun shone on them all. It was remarkable to him that people and worlds should be dying beneath such a sun.
A young Negro girl came by, pushing a baby carriage. She sat down on Feldman’s bench.
Feldman smiled at her. “Is your baby a boy or a girl?” he asked her.
The girl laughed brightly. “My baby an elevator operator downtown. This one here is a white child, mister.”
“Oh,” Feldman said.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Feldman wondered whether she would get up now, whether she had taken him for one of the old men who sit in parks and tamper with the healthy they meet there.
He got up to go. “ ’Bye, mister,” the girl said.
He looked to see if she was mocking him.
He started toward the corner. He could catch a bus there. With a panic that startled the worm sleeping in his stomach and made it lurch forward, bringing him pain, he realized that in leaving the hospital he had given no thought to where he would go. He understood for the first time that when he had gone into the hospital not to be cured but to die, he had relinquished a sort of citizenship. Now he had no rights in a place given over to life. People did not come back from the grave. Others wouldn’t stand for it. He could not even stay in the park, unless he was to stay as one of the old men he had for a moment feared he had become.
He could go home, of course. He could kiss his wife and explain patiently to her what had happened to him. He could tell her that his disease had been a joke between the doctor and himself — not a joke in the sense that it didn’t really exist, but merely a sort of pale irony in that while it did exist, it did not behave as it had in others; that he was going to die, all right, but that they must both be patient.
He saw a large green and yellow bus halted at the stop light. He did not recognize its markings, but when it came abreast of him he got on. He sat up front, near the driver. When the bus had made its circuit two times, the driver turned toward Feldman.
“Okay, mister, end of the line.”
“What?”
“You should have slept it off by this time. End of the line. Far as we go.”
“But there are still people on the bus.”
“Sorry. Company rule.”
“If I pay another fare?”
“Sorry.”
“Look,” he started to say, but he was at a loss as to how to complete his thought. “All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
He got off and saw that he had come to a part of the city with which he was unfamiliar. He could not remember ever having been there before. It was a factory district, and the smoke from many furnaces forced on the day, still in its early afternoon, a twilight haze. He walked down a block to where the bare, unpainted shacks of the workers led into a half-commercial, half-residential section. He saw that secured between the slate-colored homes was more than the usual number of taverns. The windows in all the houses were smudged with the opaque soot from the chimneys. The brown shades behind them had been uniformly pulled down almost to the sills. Feldman sensed that the neighborhood had a peculiar unity. Even the deserted aspect of the streets seemed to suggest that the people who lived there acted always in concert.