Uncle Jimmy
Franklin was worse than worthless over the phone. I'd never heard him like that. His voice was crumpled like an ancient wax cylinder recording. His sentences were incoherent beyond editing.
I had to steady him, lead him with Twenty Questions. Slowly now, back up: what's happened? I've killed him; I've killed the man. No one was even dead. But disaster, the 65.5 per 100,000 people per year chance, had settled in. Uncle Jimmy had had a stroke. Although alive, he had been severely hit.
Franklin's hysteric claim of responsibility possessed a distant logic. Jimmy's further inquiries about his premium error had at last awakened a sleepy corporate hierarchy. He had been requested to answer a couple of ad hoc actuaries. Their questions had raised the possibility, in insinuating office dialect, that Jimmy might know more about the source of the computer irregularity than he let on.
Jimmy, most oversensitive of men, already nursing accumulated anxiety over his inadvertent failure to meet a premium, was so bewildered by the probe — mere formalities, all part of good investigation — that he ruptured an aneurysm that had been hiding, an inherited deficiency, secret and soft in his cerebral arteries. He apoplexed on the examination carpet, proclaiming innocence while going into coma.
Not until his evening arrival did Franklin learn it. Dr. Ressler broke the news, alone in knowing how Todd tied in. Franklin harassed the hospital where Jimmy had been rushed until the answer-givers on the other end refused to speak to him. He forced Ressler to repeat over and over that the hemorrhage was not his fault, and each time he refused to believe it. Torturing himself into organic nightmare, he called the only person in the world who might further torture him.
I calmed him as best I could, offering to come right over. He screamed in agony, "No. Not me. Jimmy." I said I'd be at the hospital within the hour, and that alone comforted him a little. 1 rang off, threw some clothes on, and was gone. Not until I entered the hospital did I collect myself enough to realize: Jimmy. That courtly, clumsy truism-speaker, inept and universal flirt who every afternoon called his mother to say he was on his way home, too free of complication to understand, let alone repeat, the slurs that pass for human conversation.
I felt the queasy calm of worst-case scenarios. Cool, calm, and collected: the highest rung in Tuckwell's ad world, the one that will deliver us from harm. The building's smell — alcohols, ethers, gauze — made me feel I was picking Jimmy up from the dentist's rather than heading for Intensive Care. I asked for him at the reception desk, an antiseptic module as wide as a Canadian football field and as blond as Sweden. The linen nurse addressed me too gingerly. "Are you the wife?"
I smiled, despite the immediacy, to imagine Jimmy and me as life mates. I said the patient was single. The registrar nurse examined a huge, Dickensian ledger printed in dot matrix rather than quill. She flipped to Jimmy's lookup code: Steadman, James S. STEA3-J13-72-6. My correct answer apparently earned me admission, for she directed me to a waiting room. The sprawling complex consisted of an outer shell of functional, modernist passages laid out in star-shaped pods wrapped around an industrial kernel with low ceilings and forced steam heat that probably should have been trashed at the turn of the century. The two symbionts didn't quite align. Old floors ramped up to new; catwalks cut across obsolete passages. Colored stripes and system icons indexed each region of local suffering like a Byzantine underground parking lot.
Children in slippers and tunics, hair thinned to pointless patches, carried listless trucks under their arms, remembering everything about the ritual of toys except the reason. Mint-green semiconscious shapes with bloated bellies lay in half-obscured bedrooms in the care of LED banks, chins fighting for air, tubes rammed so deeply up their noses that it bruised their eyes. Some sat in pharmaceutical storms. Orderlies, acutely reassuring, wheeled people by on hydraulic flatbeds, cots that smelled of runny ulcers and fecal ooze, smells dusted over by musty astringent. Worse than Passchendaele, more hideous than Bosch: everything proceeded with supermarket calm.
In embarrassed hall-alcove clumps stood the healthy — by fault of intimacy, the go-betweens to this hideous lab. We avoided one another's eyes. An accidental exchange of glances and I found myself staring into the face of a scared woman who flashed me a conspirator's look: Don't tell anyone you saw me here. By the time I located the 1C waiting room, I knew the dirty secret. Individuals were woundable, sickly, inconvenient, contemptible, tragic in every way except numerically, smudges on endless fan-fold paper. Despite everything culture has ever insisted, hospitals were not shows. Even here, at the one moment my entire life should have trained me for — Intensive Care, 5W, North Tower, Green Wing — obscenely lacerated, lost: wanting, needing, but not knowing how to hear the makeshift, temporary metronome measuring out so obvious a rhythm, the meter of the faltering human platelet pump.
A months-old trade magazine in the waiting room declared that more Americans enter hospital every month than were alive at the Revolution. I stared awhile at the magazine's other unabsorbable facts, then matched wits against quiz TV. I sat on a wraparound petroleum-based sofa, kitty-corner to a volatile, overweight woman who had the lounge phone's receiver surgically incorporated into her double chin. She was not using the phone, just holding it, keeping the line open for a message she had long given up hope of receiving. My companion watched as I answered the one about the oldest city in the continental United States being St. Augustine and correctly gave "nano" as the prefix meaning one billionth in the metric system. The only question worth addressing at that instant was in the IC, stroked out. But I kept on answering these others, eye-calm.
The woman looked at me reverently. "You could make a lot of dough, honey." Having paid me the highest compliment, she could now let me into the intimacy of her being here. She said, "My little girl," tapping the receiver as if it were the child. She flashed me one of those in-your-own-best-interests grins. "She's down the hall, about to be cut open in several places." I apologized, not knowing what else to say. She waved me off. "I'm trying to find out who the anesthetician is. That's very important. A girlfriend's husband once died under the hands of a bad anesthetician."
Courtesy dictated my saying something about waiting to see what was left of a friend following his massive stroke. I didn't. After a pause during which she twice said "Hello" into the unresponsive phone, my partner turned again to me with the two-syllable, singsong question "Children?" She nodded reassuringly— Easy one. If you knew St. Augustine, this one's a gift. For some reason, I couldn't figure the question out. Did children exist? Which was the oldest? What was one billionth of one called? Up from the unfigurable field of memory came that old jump-rope rhyme: Franklin and Janny sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Janny with a baby carriage.
I smiled and said I wasn't married. She made a just-as-well face, and all at once I felt Franker lean over my shoulder and whisper, "Holbein." Habit; with specialist's myopia, he would look at a tree deranged by autumn and, taking in the clash of colors, would come up for air saying, "Bonnard!" Nothing was what it was, but always a comparison to paint. When he came closest to genuinely loving me, he would freeze, beg me not to move, and exclaim in a half-rapture, " 'Girl with the Pearl Earring.'" He was a lost cause, wrecked on aesthetics. Seeing Rembrandt's ox-sides in the meat case at the supermarket marked him as unfit for life.