"Really, you should hear yourself. I wish I had a tape recorder."
"So do I. Tape me; I'm talking truth. So what's he going to do about the dope?" Even at this hour, going on four, a few men in sneakers and jeans are awake in the park, conferring behind trees, waiting on benches. "Did he promise to give it up?"
"He promised to see a counsellor," Janice says. "He admits he might have a problem. I think that's a good night's work. Pru has all sorts of names and agencies from these Narc-Anon meetings she's been going to."
"Names, agencies, we can't expect society to run our lives for us, to baby us from cradle to grave. That's what the Communists try to do. There comes a point when you got to take responsibility." He fingers his pants pocket to make sure the little hard cylindrical bottle is there. He won't take a pill now, but save it for when they get home. With a small glass of milk in the kitchen. And a Nutter-Butter cookie to dip into the milk. Shaped like a big peanut, a Nutter-Butter is delicious dipped into milk, first up to the peanut waist, and then the rest for a second bite.
Janice says, "I wish my parents were still alive to hear you talk about responsibility. My mother thought you were the most irresponsible person she ever met."
This hurts, slightly. He had liked Ma Springer toward the end, and thought she liked him. Hot nights out on the screened porch, pinochle games up in the Poconos. They both found Janice a bit slow.
Out of the park, he heads the slate-gray Celica down Weiser, through the heart of Brewer. The Sunflower Beer Clock says 3:50, above the great deserted city heart. Something cleansing about being awake at this forsaken hour. It's a new world. A living, crouching shadow – a cat, or can it be a raccoon? – stares with eyes like circular reflectors in his headlights, sitting on the cement stairs of a dry fountain there on the edge of the little woods the city planners have created. At the intersection of Weiser and Sixth, Rabbit has to turn right. In the old days you could drive straight to the bridge. The wild kids in high school liked to drive down the trolley tracks, between the islands where passengers would board.
As his silence lengthens, Janice says placatingly, "Weren't those children dear? Harry, you don't want them to live in one of those sad one-parent households."
Rabbit has always been squeamish about things being put into him – dental drills, tongue depressors, little long knives to clean out earwax, suppositories, the doctor's finger when once a year he sizes up your prostate gland. So the idea of a catheter being inserted at the top of his right leg, and being pushed along steered with a little flexible tip like some eyeless worm you find wriggling out of an apple where you just bit, is deeply repugnant to him, though not as much so as being frozen half to death and sawed open and your blood run through some complicated machine while they sew a slippery warm piece of your leg vein to the surface of your trembling poor cowering heart.
In the hospital in Deleon they gave him some articles to try to read and even showed him a little video: the heart sits in a protective sac, the pericardium, which has to be cut open, snipped the video said cheerfully like it was giving a sewing lesson. It showed it happening: cold narrow scalpels attack the shapeless bloody blob as it lies there in your chest like a live thing in a hot puddle, a cauldron of tangled juicy stew, convulsing, shuddering with a periodic sob, trying to dodge the knives, undressed of the sanitary pod God or whoever never meant human hands to touch. Then when the blood has been detoured to the gleaming pumping machine just like those in those horrible old Frankenstein movies with Boris Karloff the heart stops beating. You see it happen: your heart lies there dead in its soupy puddle. You, the natural you, are technically dead. A machine is living for you while the surgeons' hands in their condomlike latex gloves fiddle and slice and knit away. Harry has trouble believing how his life is tied to all this mechanics – that the me that talks inside him all the time scuttles like a waterstriding bug above this pond of body fluids and their slippery conduits. How could the flame of him ever have ignited out of such wet straw?
The angioplasty seemed far less deep a violation than the coronary bypass. It was scheduled for a Friday. Youngish-old Dr. Breit, with his painfully fair skin and his plastic-rimmed glasses too big for his button nose, explained the operation – the procedure, he preferred to call it – in the lulling voice of a nightclub singer who has done the same lyrics so often her mind is free to wander as she sings. The cardiologist's real preference was the bypass, Harry could tell. The angioplasty to Breit was just a sop, kid stuff, until the knives could descend. "The rate of restenosis is thirty per cent in three months' time," he warned Harry, there in his office with the framed color photos of a little pale woman who resembled him as one hamster resembles another and of little children arranged in front of their parents like a small stepladder, all with curly fair hair and squints and those tiny pink noses, "and twenty per cent of PTCA patients wind up having a CABG eventually anyway. Sorry -that's percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty versus coronary artery bypass graft."
"I guessed," Harry said. "Still, let's do the balloon first, and save the knives for later." A lot later, he thinks to himself.
"Fair enough," said Dr. Breit, semi-singingly, his tone clipped and grim and even-tempered and resigned. Like a golfer: you lose this match but you'll play again next week. "You think the way ninety per cent of all heart patients do. They love the idea of the PTCA, and no heart specialist can talk them out of it. It's irrational, but so's the human species. Tell you what, Harold." No one had told him Harry was never called Harold, though that was his legal name. Rabbit let it go; it made him feel a child again. His mother used to call him Hassy. "We'll give you a treat. You can watch the whole procedure on TV. You'll be under local anesthetic, it'll help you pass the time."
"Do I have to?"
Dr. Breit seemed momentarily bothered. For so fair a man, he sweated a great deal, his upper lip always dewy. "We screen off the monitor usually, for the patients we think are too excitable or frail. There's always a slight chance of a coronary occlusion and that wouldn't be too good, to be watching it happen. But you, you're not frail. You're no nervous nelly. I've sized you up as a pretty tough-minded guy, Harold, with a fair amount of intellectual curiosity. Was I wrong?"
It was like a ten-dollar press, when you're already thirty dollars down. You can't refuse. "No," he told the young doctor. "That's me all right."
Dr. Breit actually does not perform the procedure: it needs a specialist, a burly menacing man with thick brown forearms, Dr. Raymond. But Breit is there, his face peeping like a moon – big specs glinting, upper lip dewy with nervous perspiration – over the mountainous lime-green shoulders of Dr. Raymond and the surgical caps of the nurses. The operation takes two attending nurses; this is no little "procedure"; Harry's been sandbagged. And it takes two rooms of the hospital, the room where it happens and a monitoring room with several TV screens that translate him into jerking bright lines, vital signs: the Rabbit Angstrom Show, with a fluctuating audience as the circulating nurse and Dr. Breit and some others never named to him, lime-green extras, come and watch a while and leave again. There is even, he has been casually told, a surgical team standing by just in case he needs immediate bypass surgery.
Another double-cross: they shave him, down beside his privates, without warning, where the catheter will go in. They give him a pill to make him light in the head and then when he's helpless on the operating table under all these lights they scrape away at the right half of his groin area and pubic bush; he's never had much body hair and wonders if at his age it will ever grow back. The needle that comes next feels bigger and meaner than the Novocain needle the dentist uses; its "pinch" – Dr. Raymond murmurs, "Now you'll feel a pinch" – doesn't let go as quickly. But then there's no pain, just an agony of mounting urinary pressure as the dyes build up in his system, injected repeatedly with a hot surge like his chest is being cooked in a microwave. Jesus. He closes his eyes a few times to pray but it feels like a wrong occasion, there is too much crowding in, of the actual material world. No old wispy Biblical God would dare interfere. The one religious consolation he clings to through his three-and-a-half-hour ordeal is a belief that Dr. Raymond, with his desert tan and long melancholy nose and bearish pack of fat across his shoulders, is Jewish: Harry has this gentile prejudice that Jews do everything a little better than other people, something about all those generations crouched over the Torah and watch-repair tables, they aren't as distracted as other persuasions, they don't expect to have as much fun. They stay off booze and dope and have a weakness only (if that history of Hollywood he once read can be trusted) for broads.