He renews his trammelled hug and her slender little body is unresisting, something has gone out of it; he feels a roughness in his throat, perhaps from yesterday's gulps of saltwater. His eyes film over with the hot relief of tears. On television, men with wide shoulders and narrow hips move like gods on Olympus among the clouds. You can't even see any more who is white and who is black. Blinded though they are, the announcers keep yelling in those straining excited voices they have. A commercial shows a Subaru bumpily climbing a mountain of dead car chassis.
"Want to change the channel?" he asks Judy, and moves her hand from his bandaged wrist, where it is hurting him, to the hand control for the television set on its beige metal arm. He lies back feeling the white walls stretch all around him just like the ocean yesterday, his bed a raft. Judy flickers the TV through a wrestling match, a parade, a scare commercial with Karl Malden barking that with American Express Traveller's Checks you can't be robbed, a man and a woman in black skating in a sparkle of ice, a tonguein-cheek horror movie about being a teenage werewolf in London, and another movie called, they learn from the station break, The Fists of Bruce Lee. The kung-fu violence is arresting enough to hold Judy's attention for a few minutes. Fragments of what Dr. Ohnan is confidentially yet, in that peppy Australian way, quite audibly telling Janice weave into the action – murderous kicks turned into slow motion by the director, graceful blurs of Oriental color. "… preliminary test… pulmonary congestion common after a myocardial infarction… backup of blood, leakage into the lung tissue… hydralazine… inflammation of the pericardium… Dilantin… skin rashes, diarrhea, loss of hair… hate to go to a pacemaker for a man this age…"
Bruce Lee kicks out, once, twice, thrice, and three handsomely costumed thugs slowly fly toward the corners of the room, furniture shattering like fortune cookies, and suddenly Judy has switched channels again, coming upon a commercial Harry loves, for some skin moisturizer whose name he can never remember, but he could never forget the look on the model's face, the way she smiles over her naked shoulder as she slinks behind the bathroom door, and then when she comes out the satisfied wicked purr in her expression, her wet hair turbanned in a bulky soft towel, her breasts showing cleavage but the nipples just off the screen, if only the screen were a little wider, if he could only slow the action down like in a kung-fu movie, for a thirtieth of a second there might have been a nipple, and the way she relaxes into a blue velvet sofa as if ever so profoundly satisfied, lovely eyes closed with their greasy lids, her eyebrows slightly thick like Cindy Murkett's, and then the part coming up where she is dressed to go out for the evening, all moisturized still beneath her gold lam amp;… "No, wait, honey": he senses that Judy is about to change channels and reaches out to stop her but fails, it's back to the werewolf, the boy's face is growing fur as he crouches in a telephone booth, and then the ice skaters, the woman sliding backward at you with her little skirt flipped up; and then the back of Harry's wrist stings from the tug he gave the IV, and a flirtatious ghost of yesterday's pain plays across his chest. The Demerol must be wearing off. They gave him a little brown bottle of nitroglycerin on his bedside table next to the telephone and a glass of stale water and he shakes one out shakily and puts it beneath his tongue as they have taught him. It burns under his tongue and then, the funny thing, a minute or two later, his asshole tingles.
"How much junk food does he eat?" Dr. Olman is asking.
"Oh," Janice says, with enthusiasm, "he's a real addict." His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station. She looks up into the doctor's big red blond face as if at an instructively beautiful sunset. The two of them make a duo, dividing him up. One takes the inside, the other the outside.
Now a turquoise Subaru is spinning along one of those steep spiky Western landscapes that the makers of automobile commercials love. A shimmery model, skinny as a rail, dimpled and squarejawed like a taller Audrey Hepburn from the Breakfast at Tiffany's days, steps out of the car, smiling slyly and wearing a racing driver's egg-helmet with her gown made up it seems of ropes of shimmering light. Maybe Nelson is right, Toyota is a dull company. Its commercials show people jumping into the air because they're saving a nickel. The channel jumps back to the Fiesta Bowl Parade. Youth, flowers, a giant Garfield the cat jiggling majestically along. Harry's internal climate of drugs and their afterwash seems to be undergoing a distant storm, like sunspots or those faint far hurricanes on Jupiter. Along with history, Harry has a superstitious interest in astronomy. Our Father, Who art in Heaven…
"… tons of fat through his system," Dr. Olman is saying, "rivers of it, some of it has to stick. Marbled meats, pork sausage, liverwurst, baloney, hot dogs, peanut butter, salted nuts…"
"He loves all that stuff, he's a terrible nibbler," Janice chimes in, anxious to please, courting, betraying her husband. "He loves nuts."
"Worst thing for him, absolutely the worst," Dr. Olman responds, his voice speeding up, losing its drawl, `full of fat, not to mention sodium, and cashews, macadamia nuts, they're the worst, macadamia nuts, but it's all bad, bad." In his intensity he has begun to crouch above her, as if over a slippery putt. "Anything made with hydrogenated vegetable shortenings, coconut oil, palm oil, butter, lard, egg yolk, whole milk, ice cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, any organ meats, all these frozen TV dinners, commercial baked goods, almost anything you buy in a package, in a waxpaper bag, any of it, ma'am, is poison, bloody poison. I'll give you a list you can take home."
"You can, but my daughter-in-law is studying nutrition. She has a lot of lists already." On cue, Pru appears, hesitantly filling the doorway with her womanly-wide frame in its nappy travelling suit of three-dimensional checks. Unawares, Janice goes on buttering up Dr. Olman. "She's been saying everything you've been saying for years to Harry, but he just won't listen. He think's he's above it all, he thinks he's still a teenager."
The doctor snorts. "Even the teenagers with their supercharged metabolism aren't burning up the fats and sugars this country's food industry is pumping into them. We're having adolescent heart attacks all over" – his voice softens to Southerliness again – "God's green creation."
Pru steps forward, in her three dimensions. ` Janice, I'm sorry," she says, still shy of using her mother-in-law's name, "I know he shouldn't have so many visitors at once but Nelson is getting frantic, he's afraid we're going to miss the plane."
Janice stands, so briskly the wheelchair recoils under her. She staggers but keeps her feet. "I'll leave. You say hello and bring Judy when you come. Harry, I'll drop by on my way back when I've put them on the plane. But there's an origami demonstration tonight at the Village I don't want to miss. The man has come all the way from Japan." She exits, and Judy switches off the television in the middle of an especially amusing slapstick commercial for Midas mufflers, and exits with her.
Dr. Olman shakes Pru's hand fiercely and tells her, baring his shark-white teeth, "Ma'am, teach this stubborn bastard to eat." He turns and punches Harry with a loosened fist on the shoulder. "For half a century, my friend," he says, "you've been pouring sludge through your gut." Then he, too, is gone.
He and Pru, suddenly alone together, feel shy. "That guy," Harry says, "keeps attacking America. If he doesn't like the food here, why doesn't he go back where he came from and eat kangaroos?"
His tall daughter-in-law fiddles with her long red hands, twisting at her wedding ring, yet moves forward, to the foot of the bed. "Harry," she says. "Listen. We're stricken at what's happened to you."