Ravelstein

"But I'm suffocating," I said.

I have my own version of what was happening. There was a doc tor in charge who did not wear a white coat but was in shirt sleeves. Talkative and technical, he had a high color and in a casual manner he described my condition. In such circumstances men and women arise, appear, they materialize. This talkative doctor seemed to be talking about technicalities which had no bearing on my condition. But I misunderstood entirely what was happening. I was sent to cardiac intensive care and there, that same night, I had a heart failure. But I have no memory of this. Nor of the pulmonary intensive care unit to which I was moved. Rosamund tells me that both my lungs were, to use the clinical term, whited out by pneumonia. A machine did my breathing for me-tubes down my throat, up my nose.

I didn't know where I was, nor was I aware that Rosamund slept beside me in a reclining chair. She often spent her nights among the relatives camping in intensive care during the crises of sons or sisters. During the first ten days Rosamund didn't go home. She ate the scraps of food she found on trays. She refused to go to the cafeteria lest I should die while she was eating. When the nurses under stood this they began to feed her.

All this I learned later. I was certainly not aware that I was fighting for life. During these weeks I was heavily dosed with Verset. One effect of this drug is to suspend all mental life. I didn't consider whether I was dead or alive. All appearances (the external world) were canceled. My late brothers, both of them, drew near, once. They wore their customary shirts, neckties, shoes, the suits their tailors made for them. My father was in the background. He didn't come forward. My brothers indicated that they were satisfied with their condition. I didn't call out to my father. He knew what the rules were. I didn't see the point in asking questions. Feeling myself more than halfway there, I was not urgently curious. I wanted in formation, but the answers could wait. Then my brothers with drew, or were withdrawn. I did not think of myself as a dying man. My head was full of delusions, hallucinations, cockeyed causes and effects. Verset is said to deaden the memory. But my memory has always been tenacious. I can remember being turned often. Some nurse or orderly who knew what he was doing pounded me on the back and ordered me to cough.

I had visited Ravelstein and other friends and relatives in the intensive care units of various hospitals and with the natural stupidity of a sound, healthy man had sometimes considered that I might one day be the person strapped down, plugged into the life-supporting machines.

But I was now the dying man. My lungs had failed. A machine did my breathing for me. Unconscious, I had no more idea of death than the dead have. But my head (I assume that it was the head) was full of visions, delusions, hallucinations. These were not dreams or nightmares. Nightmares have an escape hatch…

Mostly I recall that I was wandering about, having a heavy time of it. In one of my visions I am on a city street looking for the place where I am supposed to pass the night. At last I find it. I enter what was long ago, in the twenties, a movie palace. The ticket booth is boarded up. But just behind it, on a tile floor that slopes upward are folding army cots. There is no film being shown. The hundreds of seats are empty. But I understand that the air in here is specially treated and that it will be good for your lungs to breathe it in. You get medical points toward your recovery for spending the night here. So I join half a dozen others and lie down. My wife is supposed to pick me up in the morning. The car is in a parking lot nearby. Nobody here is sleepy. Nor are the men talkative. They get up. They mooch about the lobby or sit on the edge of a cot. The floor hasn't been mopped in fifty years or more. There is no heat. You sleep fully dressed in your buttoned overcoat. Hats, caps, and shoes are not removed.

Even before my release from the intensive care unit, I climbed out of bed thinking that I was in New Hampshire and that one of my granddaughters was skiing around the house. I was annoyed with her parents for not having brought her in to see her grandfather. It was a winter morning, or so I thought. Actually, it must have been the middle of the night, but the sun seemed to be shining on the snow. I climbed over the bedrail without noticing that I was attached by tubes and needles to hanging flasks containing all kinds of intravenous mixtures. I saw as if they were someone else's my bare feet on the sunny floor. They seemed unwilling to bear my weight but I forced them to obey my will. Then I fell, landing on my back. At first I felt no pain. What vexed me was that I couldn't get out of bed and walk to the window. As I lay helpless, an orderly ran up and said, "I heard you were a troublemaker.'

One of the doctors said that my back was so inflamed that it looked like a forest fire seen from the air. The doctors put me through a CAT scan. It seemed to me that I was on a crowded trolley car and that I was being stifled and pushed from behind. I begged to be let out. But nobody was willing to oblige me.

I was then on very heavy doses of blood thinner and my fall was dangerous. I was bleeding internally. The nurses put me into a restraining vest. I asked my grown sons to call a taxi. I said I'd be better off at home, soaking in the bath. "In five minutes I could be there," I said. "It's just around the corner."

Often it seemed to me that I was just underneath Kenmore Square in Boston. The oddity of these hallucinatory surroundings was in a way liberating. I wonder sometimes whether at the threshold of death I may not have been entertaining myself lightheartedly, like any normal person, enjoying these preposterous delusions-fictions which did not have to be invented.

I found myself in a vast cellar. Its brick walls had been painted ages ago. In places they still were as white as cottage cheese. But the cheese had grown soiled. The place was lighted by fluorescent tubes-table after table after table of thrift-shop items, women's clothing, mainly, donated to the hospital for resale: underwear, stockings, sweaters, scarves, skirts. An infinity of tables. The place made me think of Filene's Basement, where customers would soon be pushing and quarreling over bargains. But no one was here to fight. In the far distance were young women who seemed to be volunteers doing charitable work. I was sitting, trapped, among hundreds of leather lounge chairs. Escape from this grimy-cheese corner was out of the question. Behind me, huge pipes came through the ceiling and sank into the ground.

I was painfully preoccupied with the restraining vest or pullover I was forced to wear. This hot khaki vest was constricting-it was killing me, binding me to death. I tried, and failed, to unravel it. I thought, If only I could get one of those Social Registry charity volunteers to bring a knife or a pair of shears! But they were several city blocks away, and they'd never hear me. I was in a far, far corner surrounded by BarcaLoungers.

Another memorable experience was this: A male hospital attendant on a stepladder is hanging Christmas tinsel, mistletoe, and evergreen clippings on the wall fixtures. This attendant doesn't much care for me. He was the one who had called me a troublemaker. But that didn't stop me from taking note of him. Taking note is part of my job description. Existence is-or was-the job. So I watched him on the three-step ladder-his sloping shoulders and wide backside. Then he came down and carried his ladder to the next pillar. More tinsel and prickly evergreen.

Off to the side there was another old fellow, small, nervous, and fretful, going back and forth in carpet slippers. He was my neigh bor. His living quarters opened at the end of my room, but he wouldn't acknowledge me. He had a thinnish beard, his nose was like a plastic pot-scraper, and he wore a beret. He would have to be an artist. But it seemed to me that his features were entirely lacking in interest.

After a time, I recalled that I had seen him on television. He was an artist, much respected. He lectured while drawing. His themes were fashionable-environmentalism, holistic flower essences, and so on. His sketches were vague, suggesting love of and responsibility for our natural surroundings. On a blackboard he first produced a hazy sea surface, and then with the side of his chalk he created the illusion of a lurking face-the wavy hair of a woman, like cooked rhubarb, glimpses of nature that hinted at a human presence-something mythic or, equally likely, a projection. Maybe an undine or a Rhine maiden. You couldn't actually accuse this fellow of mystification or superstition. All you could nail him for was self-importance and self-gratification-_suffisance__, in French. I like _suffisance__ better than smugness, just as I prefer the English suffocating to the French _suffoquant__-_Tout sujfoquant et blкme__. (Verlaine?) If you're choking, why worry about being pale?