There was a certain Serbian grace note (B-flat A, B-flat C) at the great word "marriage."
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Vela! This is no way to approach the subject of death. To postpone it for a century solves nothing."
I must remind you that I had already died and risen again, and there was a curious distance in my mind between the old way of seeing (false) and the new way (strange but liberating).
English was not Vela's first language, and she couldn't reformulate anything because so much effort had gone into composing the formulations she put forward. All she could do was repeat what had been said. She again stated the facts as she understood them, which didn't advance the discussion.
I told her, "I can't do this."
"Why can't you do this?"
"You're asking me to commit suicide. Suicide is forbidden."
"By who is suicide forbidden?"
"It's against my religion. Jews don't commit suicide unless they lose the siege as they did at Masada, or are about to be hacked to pieces, as in the Crusades. Then they put their children to death before they kill themselves."
"You never fall back on religion except to win an argument," said Vela.
"Suppose you turn around and sue the bank, as soon as I'm frozen," I said. "And then you claim my estate because I'm dead. They can't prove that I might be thawed out and restored to life. Or do you think they'd bring me back just to win the lawsuit? The whole case argued before some judge who couldn't find his ass with both hands?"
When lawsuits were mentioned the bank's representative went pale and in a way I sympathized with him, although I wasn't well, myself, my heart having sunk so low.
"You owe me this," said Vela.
What did she mean? But it is a principle with me not to argue with irrational people. I simply shook my head and repeated, "It can't be done, it can't be, and I won't do it."
"No?"
"You don't understand what you're asking," I said.
"No?"
"You mean by the way you say it that _I __don't know what _I'm__ doing. Fair enough." I was never more out of line than when we stood together in the judge's chambers to be married. An old school friend I had invited to the wedding was greatly taken with Vela. He whispered in my ear, as the judge was looking for the marriage service in his book, "Even if this doesn't last six months, even if it's only a month, it's still worth it-with a bosom and hips and a face like hers."
Resuming the dialogue in the bank with Vela, I could hear myself saying, with the conviction of ultimate seriousness, "I adjusted myself long ago to dying a natural death, like everybody else. I've seen plenty of dying in my time, and I'm prepared for it. Maybe I've been a little too imaginative about the grave-the dampness and the cold. I've pictured it in too much detail and maybe feel a little too much-feel abnormally-for the dead. But there's not a chance in the world of convincing me to put myself in the hands of experimental science. I feel insulted by your proposition. But if you could induce me to marry you, perhaps you feel that I can also be talked into being frozen for a century."
"Yes, I do think you owe me something," said Vela, on top of what I was saying.
One of our difficulties, and a source of much misunderstanding, was that my outlook was incomprehensible to her. Dogs can understand a joke. Cats never, but never, have occasion to laugh. Vela, when others were laughing, would join in. But if cues were lacking ("This is funny"), she didn't smile. And I, when I amused a dinner table, was suspected by her of making her the butt of my jokes.
I may not have been aware, when I believed myself to be in a bank, with a small dime and a huge dollar set in polished marble, that in the real world my life was being saved. Doctors by drugs, nurses by tending me, technicians with their skills, were working to assist me. When or if I was saved, I would go on with my life.
And if it hadn't been for the article about Howard Hughes, Vela would not have suggested that being frozen for a century was a wonderful idea-that she would do lewd things with the Spanish boyfriend (by the way, he never had said so much as good morning to me) while I lay frozen, a block of ice, awaiting resuscitation or resurrection.
And I did not doubt the reality of this bank, these coins, those companions-Vela, her Spanish stud, the investment counselor, and Vela's remarks about the sexual revolution.
"That meeting in the bank you believe in," my wife, Rosamund, the real wife, later said, after I had described the moment to her. "Why would it be always the _worst__ things which appear to you so real? Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to talk you out of being sadistic to yourself."
"Yes," I agreed. "It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real experience. This is what we go through, and it's what existence is like. The brain is a mirror and reflects the world. Of course we see pictures, not the real thing, but the pictures are dear to us, we come to love them even though we are aware how distorting an organ the mirror-brain is. But this is not the moment to turn metaphysical."
I was the sort of intensive care patient the staff would have made book on, if they had been the gambling sort. But these were people too serious to lay bets on whether you would survive. I'd run into some of them later in other departments of the hospital, and they'd say, "Ah, so you made it-wonderful! I wouldn't have guessed you would. Well… that was quite a fight you put up. I wouldn't have given two cents for your life."
And so… _hasta la vista__. We'll see each other in the life to come.
If these encounters had been longer (although I preferred them to be as short as possible) I should have mentioned my wife, given her due credit. Here and there a specialist materialized who had noted her: "What a pretty woman."
"How devoted she was." Often the relatives of the dying are like dazzled birds confused by the lights over center field, flying blind. But that was not the case with Rosamund. To save me she would have done whatever it was necessary to do. That was why, for her, the intensive care staff stretched the rules. They had a wide and complex knowledge of brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands, and wives. In my case survival was not a likely option, and she seemed to be backing a loser. To some others, mainly women, it would have seemed that Rosamund was keeping me on this side of the death-line.
Was love credited among these women with saving lives? If they were answering the questions of a pollster they'd have denied it. As Ravelstein had famously said, American nihilism was nihilism without the abyss. Love should by rights-or by modern lights-be seen today as a discredited passion, but the nurses in intensive care on the front line of death were more open to pure feelings than those who worked in the quieter corridors. And Rosamund, this slender, dark-haired, straight-nosed beauty was paradoxically recognizable as a natural. Although highly educated-a Ph. D., too smart to be taken in-she loved her husband. Love found secret support among these nurses in the end zone, eighty percent of whose cases ended in the morgue. The staff stretched the rules for her-for us. She was allowed to sleep beside the bed, in my cubicle.
When I graduated from the ICU they let Rosamund give a little supper. Dr. Bertolucci brought the pasta marinara from home. I sat up and ate a few forkfuls and lectured on cannibalism in New Guinea, where butchered enemies were roasted beside cliffs where they had tropical flowers dropping hundreds of feet, like waterfalls.
When I was sent down from intensive care, Rosamund was still allowed to come and go, free from all restrictions. After dinner she drove home in the Crown Vic. To reassure me she said, "It's stable, it's dependable. It's the cop car of choice, and I feel safe in it at a stoplight. For all the bad actors know, I'm a plainclothes police officer, and I carry a gun."
Even so, the side window was shattered one night in the parking lot behind our building. Nor did she like nightly to see the rats sit ting in rows where they could see and smell the odors of the restaurant on Beacon Street. "They're in rows like the jury in the jury box," she'd say, "and their eyes pick up all the light there is."