But the piece won't let me drop. The most chromatic catastrophe ever composed leaves me here, cashless, listening to meandering pattern stand in for plan. Accident hums the song it assembles, resigned beyond listening, intervals arcing like sparks damped in a vacuum inconceivably bigger than the code and wanting only one thing from it. The thing it makes me finish writing: how that celibate, as if only waiting for the disastrous chance, set to work living like there was no tomorrow.
XXVI
The Vertical File
Ressler alone was ready. The space of a single week showed that his slow return to engagement had been spring training for exactly this catastrophe. The bloom of the last few months, which 1 had nipped in the bud, sprang back fuller for my pruning. Todd was set to go to the insurance company with a signed confession and spend the next half of his life in prison if it meant getting Jimmy back on coverage. Dr. Ressler restrained him, pointing out that the grandstand clean breast would only transfer the unpayable liability from Jimmy to the fraudulent file manipulator.
Ressler organized a trip to the hospital. Todd could not bring himself to go. His need for exoneration was so paralyzing he could not take a step toward it. The sight of Jimmy in that bed, in that condition, would have destroyed any chance Franklin had of ever living with what he had done. Dr. Ressler, Annie, and I met by the registration desk. When she saw me, Todd's other mate pleaded with my eyes a moment. She came tentatively toward me and awkwardly stroked the hair of my forearm. She wanted to lay her head between my breasts like a little girl. Knocked down by the larger, unattainable forgiveness I then needed, I would have let her.
But we gave no hostages to humiliation on that trip. The hospital halls, the bald children, the tubes jammed into bruised faces — the entire ordeal of shame seemed, in the company of Ressler, whom 1 had not seen out of the warehouse since New Hampshire, less to be endured than understood. In the elevator, he talked to a wheelchaired victim in the extremities of MS, not about the man's disease or the work he would now never do, but about the best lines in Tennyson and which pieces of Dvorak most bore repeated listening. When we got out of the lift, Ressler turned and waved as the doors closed.
Challenge the Patient
Challenge the patient to respond to one narcotic or another, strap him to a quantifying screen that feeds back digits for his number, root out the latinate reason from the multivolume tome, circumvent the leak or seal it, magnificently postpone: he, insidious, will choose a time that signifies at least, chorus to a calculated close, spread south like the vee of geese.
I led them to Jimmy's room, issuing veiled sentences meant to warn them about what they would find. But when we got to the room, Ressler greeted his old acquaintance in the same voice he had greeted him in day after day at shift change for longer than I'd known either of them. "Hello, James. Visitors. Oh! This bed can't possibly be comfortable." Jimmy, seeing us, convulsed on his good side. Whether delight or resentment, the message was lost in the spastic independence his muscles had acquired. "Franklin has to man the fort," Ressler said. "Your being away has thrown things up for grabs at work. He wants to come see you soon." Not a lie. He wants; he wants with his capacity to come see you.
Jimmy made an awful noise, not the one he had made for me. The contour was different, changed, more desperate, more out of control, less like words than the ones he had spoken to me alone. Annie shrank from the sound and left the room. Better to have stayed and cried in front of the man. Ressler leaned over Jimmy, put his ear close as I had done, if for no other reason than to ease the chest, lungs, diaphragm. "What was that?" As if he'd just been caught off guard, not paying attention. A thump in darkness, the trickle of syllables over teeth, fricatives ululating in rapids over the pebbles of a streambed. Cruel, given the smear of noise, to make him say it again. But against expectation, Dr. Ressler turned to me after the second burst and translated.
"He says, 'My father died.'"
My hands flexed automatically to grab my neck, the escape of flushed birds. We had had no clue, until then, of the condition of Jimmy's mind. Only his sagged face and vocal cords; he was trapped somewhere inside the hull. These first words Jimmy had gotten out since his vascular accident could not have been more grotesque. I didn't know which would be worse: a real death, a second horror laid on his, or a detached, neural wandering. Dr. Ressler leaned back down to ask a question that never occurred to me. "When did your dad die, James?" He straightened and interpreted, "Nineteen-sixty."
Annie came back, sat in one of the chairs by the bed. When shifting, I caught Jimmy in certain angles — eyes alert, face at attention — where his expression seemed almost cogent. Was he decoupled, incoherent, ruined, or just rubbed raw, shot back into involuntary memory? "Mr. Steadman," Ressler smiled, holding him affectionately by both hands, sitting down on the hospital bed that, while single, was large enough for both these men. "Jimmy. Can we get you anything?" Uncle Jimmy trumpeted again, more sedately, a breaking whitecap of pitch. But the professor was growing fluent enough to be able to understand the sentence without leaning up against him.
"He'd like us to tell him a story. He says that if we give him one he'll be good." Perhaps inept irony was still intact. Or maybe he'd become a child. I searched Ressler for his opinion. I looked into the face of a biologist who thought Jimmy's request totally understandable: anyone in the world might one day reasonably request such a thing. A story. And why not? "Either of you two any good at narrative?"
But the line between simplicity and violence in Jimmy had been whittled narrower than a capacitor gap. When Dr. Ressler tried to tell Jimmy what had been happening at the office in his absence, the invalid flared out. His mouth hung open as inappropriately as a vault left swinging on its hinges. He practically howled a word that, in its vowel at least, was clearly "no."
Ressler appealed for help, but I could give none. I had no idea what Jimmy wanted. If it was really a tale with beginning, middle, and end, I was no good to him. My skill lay in retrieving, not telling. I could lead them to the encyclopedia, give them the Greek explanation for thunder or Native American rain. I knew that legenda was Medieval Latin, for things to be read at gatherings. But I could not invent one. Annie grabbed a newspaper from the stand where a visitor to Jimmy's sickmate had left it. Thinking it was sound he needed, she pulled a headline off page two: "Sunni Splinter Group Shells Suspected Shi'ite Arsenal." But Jimmy's head snapped up. He gave her what must have been a sidelong glare and growled. That was no story; he was not going to be robbed of explanation by mere reportage.
It seemed he would only be kept in check by a real barrier of narrative fable. He wanted an exegesis as precise, elegant, and exact as those old origins of thunder, evil, rainbows, suffering. But those museum pieces were rusted over beyond reviving. There was a man in the room who might make a stab at why the defective blood vessel had burst, leaving a mind flooded. But that wasn't the song Jimmy asked for. He needed a more potent bedside tale. Jimmy was pinned under wreckage, a cerebrovascular accident that had failed to throw him clear of the crash. He lay propped up in bed, sense of direction destroyed, one of those compassless whales trapped up an illusory inlet. For some reason, even after damage that could never be reversed, he still wanted the sum of his experience read back to him as an adventure.